Linked List: May 3, 2019

Friday, 3 May 2019

This Is Why I Would Never Buy Used AirPods ★

The Daily Mail:

But he went to Kaohsiung Municipal United Hospital where medics confirmed he had swallowed the AirPod. They said it was currently passing through his digestive system, saying it would need surgery to remove if it did not appear naturally. Doctors gave him a laxative and told him to inspect his waste for any sign of the device.

Fortunately for Mr Hsu the AirPod resurfaced when he relieved himself at a railway station the next day. He was forced into a foul-smelling search but was able to pick out the £65 device and found that it was still intact. After washing the AirPod and letting it dry Mr Hsu was amazed to find that it still worked.

It is The Daily Mail, so there’s a good likelihood the story is complete bullshit. But if it’s legit… jiminy.

SEC Charges Sapphire Glass Manufacturer and Former CEO With Fraud ★

The SEC:

The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged a New Hampshire-based company and its former CEO with misleading investors about the company’s ability to supply “sapphire glass” for Apple’s iPhones. The company, GT Advanced Technologies Inc., also is found to have misclassified more than $300 million in debt to Apple that resulted from its repeated failures to meet performance milestones.

Haven’t thought about these guys in a while.

It’s Not Just Dust ★

I’ve gotten a zillion emails and tweets about this Reddit thread from a Mac tech dissecting Apple’s butterfly-switch MacBook keyboards. Like most stuff on Reddit I don’t think it’s very cohesive. It’s like a notebook for an article, not an article. But the author does make one key observation that I don’t think I’ve seen anyone make before, even though it’s obvious to anyone following this saga: If the reliability problem with these keyboards is only about particles getting lodged under the keys, then we should see random keys having problems. But that’s not what we see. What we see are that the most-used keys — vowels (especially “E”) and the space bar — are the keys most likely to get stuck or to start emitting duplicate characters.

I’m sure the dust thing is a real problem, but it’s clearly not the only problem. These keyboards simply aren’t durable.