Linked List: August 28, 2022

Sunday, 28 August 2022

Other Than the Too-Hot-to-Touch Underside and Uncomfortably-Hot Keyboard Despite the Annoying Noise From the Fan, How’d You Enjoy the Play, Mrs. Lincoln? 

Scharon Harding, reviewing the HP Spectre x360 13.5-inch laptop for Ars Technica:

Regardless of what I put it through, the Spectre stayed surprisingly cool for its size. After an hour-long stress test, for example, the only part of the chassis that was too hot to touch comfortably was its underside, although the keyboard was borderline.

HP changed the fan design for the 2022 Spectre x360 13.5-inch compared to the 2021 model, and the company claims that the new model delivers up to 10 percent increased airflow and an 8 percent improvement on “acoustic performance.”

The phrase “Stockholm Syndrome” gets overused, but I think PC hardware reviewers are in a deep state of denial as to how high Apple silicon has raised the bar for performance-per-watt, in day-to-day practical terms. To an M-series MacBook user, the above paragraphs sound like they must have been written years ago. Too-hot-for-your-actual-lap laptops and audible cooling systems are dark ages shit.

RevenueCat 

My thanks to RevenueCat for once again sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Look, in-app subscriptions are a pain. The code can be hard to write, time-consuming to maintain, and full of edge cases. RevenueCat makes it simple so you can focus on building features, not a subscription back end.

With RevenueCat, you also get out-of-the-box subscription metrics and charts that you can’t get from App Store Connect. Plus, prebuilt integrations make it easy to sync customer events and revenue data to every tool in your stack.

I know a slew of developers who swear by RevenueCat for their subscriptions. It’s so much better than rolling your own solution. Learn more at revenuecat.com and see why thousands of the world’s best apps trust RevenueCat to power subscriptions on iOS, Android, and the web.

Apple Ships iPadOS 16.1 Beta Ahead of iOS 16 Fall Release 

Brian Heater, last week for TechCrunch:

Apple this morning is rolling out iPadOS 16.1 beta to enrolled developer devices. It’s a break from the standard release cadence, which has tied together the tablet operating system with its smartphone counterpart, iOS, since its first release in 2019.

In a comment to TechCrunch, the company notes, “This is an especially big year for iPadOS. As its own platform with features specifically designed for iPad, we have the flexibility to deliver iPadOS on its own schedule. This Fall, iPadOS will ship after iOS, as version 16.1 in a free software update.”

Mark Gurman reported this delay a few weeks ago, but anyone who’s been using the betas this summer could see the writing on the wall: iOS 16 has been very stable in this month’s betas and seemingly ready to go for September; iPadOS 16 and MacOS 13 have not. In both cases, Stage Manager is buggy.

There is a reason to prioritize iOS 16: new iPhone hardware is launching and new iPhone hardware always requires the new version of iOS. There’s no reason to rush iPadOS or MacOS.

[Interpolation: I will further add that the polished state of iOS 16 betas all summer long — from WWDC onward — stands in contrast to the unpolished state of MacOS 13 Ventura’s new System Settings. This could just be my own projection, but I have the sense that if some component of iOS were getting a complete rewrite like this, and it was still as far away from “pixel perfect” as Ventura’s System Settings remains, Apple would not have unveiled it yet. It just feels like Apple has a lower standard for MacOS fit and finish than for iOS.]