Linked List: September 25, 2021

Saturday, 25 September 2021

Arun Maini’s Battery Life Stress Test for the New iPhones 13 ★

YouTuber Arun “Mrwhosetheboss” Maini’s full battery life drain test of the iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 11, and iPhone SE. Interesting results that jibe with Apple’s claims about the improvements to battery life in the iPhones 13.

Via Avi Greengart, who observes the most impressive result:

It’s worth watching Arun’s whole video, but the iPhone 13 mini handily beats last year’s full-sized iPhone 12 on battery life, making it an easy recommendation for anyone with human-sized hands. The entire iPhone 13 line has genuinely good to extraordinary battery life.

The iPhone 13 Mini has longer battery life than last year’s regular iPhone 12. That’s a game-changer for those who want the Mini size.

Try Safari 15 Before You Buy, With Safari Technology Preview ★

MacOS 12 Monterey is not out yet — and, I hope, won’t ship until after a few more weeks of much-needed bug fixes — but Safari 15 for MacOS 11 Big Sur shipped last week. I strongly recommend not upgrading, unless you’ve already tried the new tab design and like it, or at least feel ambivalent about it. Updates like this are why I always turn off “Automatically keep my Mac up to date” in System Preferences → Software Update.

The sole reason I recommend not upgrading to Safari 15 is the new tab bar design. You can easily try it out for yourself, though, without upgrading to Safari 15 or installing the MacOS 12 betas. Safari Technology Preview is a separate version of Safari you can easily install next to regular Safari. Typically it’s used by web developers to test in-progress changes to WebKit, but right now it’s more useful as a way to preview the new Safari 15 tab design. It’s easy to install and easy to uninstall. You can even set it as your default web browser while testing in System Preferences: General.