Linked List: October 25, 2023

Wednesday, 25 October 2023

CT Scans Reveal the Complexity of Apple’s $129 Thunderbolt Cable ★

So much complexity. Apple gets a rap for selling overpriced cables, but the problem might be that they do a poor job explaining how good their cables are.

Update: Adam Savage has a video up on YouTube with more details, based on the same CT scans from Lumafield that are in the Twitter thread I’m linking to. Amazing stuff.

The Joy of Tech on Apple and Generative AI ★

I could have just skipped writing Monday’s piece and linked to this comic instead.

Zuckerberg, on Meta’s Earnings Call, Says Threads Now Has Nearly 100 Million Monthly Users ★

Alex Heath and Jay Peters, reporting for The Verge:

Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X has hit “just under” 100 million monthly users since it was released in early July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday during his company’s quarterly earnings call.

“We’re three months in now, and I’m very happy with the trajectory,” he said, echoing the bullish comments he made about how Threads is doing during a recent interview with The Verge. “We’re now getting to the point where we’re going to be focusing on growing the community further. From what we can tell, people love it so far.” [...]

“I’ve thought for a long time there should be a billion-person public conversations app that is a bit more positive,” Zuckerberg said on Wednesday’s call. “I think that if we keep at this for a few more years, then I think we have a good chance of achieving our vision there.”

More and more, my social media attention is split between Mastodon and Threads. I like them both, for different reasons. But the one thing they share is that I enjoy using both of them.

Threads just keeps getting better: more and better features, and more activity. Exceedingly few jerks so far, too. It’s embarrassing how bad those “Turns out Threads is a bust” takes were back in July.

Double Tap Gesture Now Available With WatchOS 10.1 for Series 9 and Ultra 2 Watches ★

Apple Newsroom:

The new double tap gesture for Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 is available today with watchOS 10.1, bringing a fast and convenient new way to interact with Apple Watch.

With the new double tap gesture, users can easily control Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 using just one hand and without touching the display. Users can tap the index finger and thumb of their watch hand together twice to quickly perform many of the most common actions. This new feature complements existing gestures like tap, swipe, raise to wake, and cover to mute that make Apple Watch simple and intuitive to use.

I’ve been testing a Series 9 watch with beta software enabling double tap for the last month or so. It’s a good feature, but it’s not nearly as useful — yet? — as I was hoping. The one thing you have to get used to is that the watch only listens for the double tap gesture when the display is fully-on. You need to tilt your wrist to look at your watch before double tapping. Usually, that’s natural — the reason you want to double tap to do something is because you see the thing you want do or dismiss. But I’ve found times where an alert or something pops up that I want to invoke double tap on, but my wrist is oblique, and double tap doesn’t register until I remember to tilt my wrist to a “looking straight at it” angle.