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![]() ![]() Forcing myself into a different ecosystem so that I can use different software that does the same thing isn't a good tradeoff for me. While I'd like to use Firefox, I don't need to, and the tradeoffs that come with accepting Safari instead are worth it for my specific situation. My argument about adblockers applies to other software too: the Apple ecosystem has some of the basics (like sync, browsers, etc) figured out for me so that I don't need to fiddle with it. So I choose not to be an end user I won't purchase hardware that refuses to respect my wishes. All disallowed by app store policy, and unlike Android which supports sideloading and alternate app stores, on iOS I have no recourse as an end user. I'd also like to be able to run weird media software, background file syncing services that aren't iCloud, and (gasp!) retro game emulators on the devices I own. It's not just Firefox, but that's the example everyone's heard of, so it's what I tend to lead with. All of my other devices do, so it's the odd one out. My iPad basically doesn't have a good browser, just a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Mozilla. The iOS versions of Firefox are heavily gimped, aren't allowed to run the Gecko rendering engine (purely because Apple said so) and can't do the things I need. There are dozens of little accessibility enhancements I run on top of just the content blocker. The ad blocker thing one tiny example what I actually want to run is Real(tm) Firefox and its rich extension ecosystem. But the iOS devices are entirely locked down. That's in the Apple ecosystem and yet respects enough of my freedoms to not be a problem. The irritating thing is that the software I want to run works perfectly fine on my mac mini. I'm sure there's good apple phones out there and our resident apple fanboy assured me I had an outlier, but I can attest that apple does in fact sell you garbage and not all the issues are hardware (I never had a charger or touchscreen break on me before, nor a battery wear so fast, so combined with the unusually low use, I'm pretty sure it's not my particular usage pattern that caused them to break way before due.)Ĭredits where they're due, though: it had a headphone jack and I loved the earphones that came with it! But what a piece of trash otherwise. ![]() A region of the touchscreen broke around the same time as the charging brick stopped charging (2-3 years after purchase the brick was only plugged in when in use), the keyboard didn't support swyping or having a number row or any symbols on its face whatsoever, the browser is ancient and gives me headaches as a developer constantly (and you can't even tell users to install a proper browser - remind me, what did the EC think of that when Microsoft pulled this with MSIE?), the idle battery life was worse than an eight year old Samsung I've got, of course it needed a custom cable, it kept turning on things I had turned off such as Bluetooth (see the recent Bluetooth attack), and my device was the only one that had hard-to-reproduce issues with Wireguard VPN. It laid on my desk most of the time, not even in use so wear and tear are at a minimum. I've had an Apple device from work until ~2 years ago. The standalone USB DAC will fix that, but only if it's externally powered + grounded (or if you get lucky with how your laptop is wired / shielded), but so would bluetooth (which even supports lossless audio as of 2021). These days, if you're getting noticeably bad performance out of your laptop DAC, it's probably a shielding or grounding issue. They use the $9 Apple as the cutoff between "yellow" and "green"): In particular, you can get a USB-C -> headphone dongle from apple that's actually a decent DAC for $9 (look at the THD graph. Apple ended up shipping an iPod with a non-terrible DAC the next year (I think the touch was the first one? Can't remember).Īnyway, now you kind of have to go off the beaten path to find consumer stuff that's perceptibly worse than ideal. However, that was 20 years ago, and it hit -95db of hiss, 20-20khz frequency response, with way more power than is needed for in-ear monitors (which is my use case). (There used to be online comparisons of this thing with the iPod, similar to what you linked.) The iPod basically couldn't output bass because their dac couldn't maintain anything close to a square wave. For example, when the Cowon U2 portable audio player came out: Back in the early days of digital audio, they made a huge difference. I have mixed feelings about standalone USB dac/amps these days. ![]()
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