Linked List: October 19, 2022

Wednesday, 19 October 2022

Monica Chin Reviews the New Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga ★

Monica Chin, writing for The Verge:

My unit, currently listed for $2,369, has a Core i7-1260P with eight efficiency cores and four performance cores (as well as 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage). Unfortunately, that new processor doesn’t deliver the kind of performance gains I imagine many X1 Yoga users will care about — but it does lead to a decrease in efficiency that I think harms its outlook overall, especially compared to laptops from Apple. That may be an Intel problem rather than a Lenovo problem, but it is a problem all the same. [...]

For things like document markup, presentations, word processing, and video calls, I never got any heat or heard any fan noise — even on the Battery Saver profile, with 15-ish tabs and apps running in the background.

Unfortunately, I am going to have to say the dreaded sentence: I wasn’t impressed with the battery life. I got an average of six hours and 13 minutes out of this device at medium brightness — and while I sometimes saw the device break seven hours of continuous use with lighter workloads, it died after close to four and a half in other trials.

Intel’s chip offerings are clearly to blame, but that very much is a Lenovo problem. A huge problem, really. ThinkPads are supposed to be top-tier industry-leading laptops. It’s a proud brand with a great history. But now they’ve released a $2,400 notebook that gets crap battery life and only stays cool and quiet when you stick to basic productivity tasks.

Intel’s performance-per-watt problems have been obvious for years, as has Apple’s custom silicon performance-per-watt prowess. None of this is the least bit surprising.

Sidenote in My Continuing Series of Observing PC Hardware Being Graded on a Curve: Chin describes the 14-inch 1920 × 1200 display as “nice” and it goes into the “Good” column. But that’s just 162 pixels per inch. MacBook Air displays are 224 PPI. MacBook Pros: 254 PPI. iPad Pros: 264 PPI. The 2007 original iPhone had a 162 PPI display. This ThinkPad display is “nice” only if you have a time machine and carry it back to before retina displays became the norm.

Apple Card to Soon Offer Interest-Bearing Savings Accounts ★

Apple Newsroom, last week:

Apple today announced a new Savings account for Apple Card that will allow users to save their Daily Cash and grow their rewards in a high-yield Savings account from Goldman Sachs. In the coming months, Apple Card users will be able to open the new high-yield Savings account and have their Daily Cash automatically deposited into it — with no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements. Soon, users can spend, send, and save Daily Cash directly from Wallet.

Apple Card users will be able to easily set up and manage Savings directly in their Apple Card in Wallet. Once users set up their Savings account, all future Daily Cash received will be automatically deposited into it, or they can choose to continue to have it added to an Apple Cash card in Wallet. Users can change their Daily Cash destination at any time.

Apple evolving into a bank is a turn I never would have predicted a decade ago. But so far their offerings are all very consumer-friendly. The annual yield hasn’t been announced yet because interest rates are in such flux. (A lot of you reading this are probably too young to remember when savings accounts accrued meaningful interest; that’s one upside to higher interest rates.)

The Next iPhone SE, Probably Coming in Spring 2024, Will Probably Be Based on the iPhone XR / iPhone 11 Design ★

Hartley Charlton, writing for MacRumors last week:

Now, Young’s revised forecast claims that the device will feature a 6.1-inch display with a notch. Whether the iPhone SE ‘s notch will contain a TrueDepth camera array like other iPhone models to facilitate Face ID is not known. Some rumors indicate that the iPhone SE will not gain Face ID, instead sticking with Touch ID like previous models to keep costs down.

Moving to an all-screen design, there will no longer be space for a capacitive Touch ID Home button in the device’s bottom bezel. Multiple reports, including information from MyDrivers and Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggest that Apple is planning to add a Touch ID Side button to the iPhone SE, much like the iPad Air and iPad mini.

Apple hasn’t yet set a consistent pattern with iPhone SE models, but one thing that has been consistent is that they’ve been based on “old” iPhone hardware designs. The first-gen SE was like an iPhone 5S; the 2020 and 2022 models look like the iPhone 6/7/8. What gets upgraded in the SE models are the A-series chips.

It makes all the sense in the world that the next SE will ship in the spring of 2024, and will be based on the iPhone XR / iPhone 11 (non-pro) design. I had been holding out hope, idly, that the next SE might be based on the iPhone 12/13 Mini design, but the XR/11 makes way more sense. The SE iPhone models are supposed to be popular but low-priced, and as sad as it makes me to say it, the iPhone Mini has not been popular. It’s also the case that the iPhone Minis have nice OLED displays; the XR/11 have LCD displays that aren’t as nice but cost less. That LCD screen technology has “next SE” written all over it.

This is all just rumor and conjecture, of course. But I’d bet a few dollars on it. I’d even bet that this next XR-lookalike SE will come with the A16 chip from last month’s new iPhone 14 Pro models — that’ll be the same chip in next September’s non-pro iPhone 15 models, and then this 4th-gen SE will come out six or so months later.

This would mean that this year’s 3rd-gen SE will be the last iPhone with the classic home button design, and, sadly, we might never see a Mini-sized iPhone again.

Jef Holbrook: ‘Stage Manager on iPadOS 16 Is Multitasking Soup’ ★

Painful-to-watch video of Jef Holbrook — with assistance from his cat — trying to figure out how Stage Manager works on iPadOS 16. Understatement of the year: “A lot of it is very imprecise.”

The design remains muddled and implementation half-baked. But the new iPad hardware is here so it’s time to ship.

Kakao, Korea’s Everything App, Suffers Serious Outage ★

Bryan Pietsch, reporting for The Washington Post:

In South Korea, Kakao is ubiquitous. Nearly everyone, from schoolchildren to the elderly, uses the Korean tech company’s apps for messaging, taxis, navigation and payments. It’s Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Uber, Google Maps and Venmo wrapped into one.

So when a fire broke out this weekend at the building where the company’s servers are run, disabling its apps, people joked that the country would shut down. But the outage forced a serious reckoning over security and monopoly concerns in Korea, where a handful of giant conglomerates hold dominance over the country’s economy. (Hyundai, known for its cars in the United States, operates apartment complexes and department stores here; Samsung, the technology giant, also sells insurance and owns a high-end clothing company.)

It makes no sense to me why ride-hailing, payments, and messaging would fit together in a single app, but once these things get entrenched, it’s easy to see how they stay entrenched thanks to network effects.

With Kakao in particular, there’s a concept of “multi-profiles”, where a single user can have different profiles for different groups within the platform. But as part of a data leak that resulted from their clumsy recovery from the outage, many of these heretofore private profiles were revealed, with predictably disastrous results.