rikonium @ rikonium @discuss.tchncs.de

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2 yr. ago

Yep, there was the app gap and then also the app support/feature gap too sadly

Neat! Is that in AOSP, Google Messages, one of the OEMs, just an option in whatever third-party app you use?

I’m wondering if breaking major app updates outside of OS updates then means new features are less visible.

I’ve been firmly in iPhone-land quite a while and dabbled only a bit since my phone-switching days so my current perspective will be possibly dated and definitely from someone on the outside, casually following what’s new in Android but I did have a great time bouncing between platforms back in the day. (RIP webOS, BB10 and Windows Phone)

I had a Moto Z Play back in the day (that battery life but like that and the Priv it replaced, a bit big for my taste) and I ditched it when a then-critical feature to me: “Ok Google with Screen Off” was removed around the time Google Assistant and the Pixel 1 was rolling out. It was a Play Services and/or Assistant/Google Now update that removed the option from settings, I uninstalled them to keep it temporarily and when I looked it up, all I could find was a curt official “the feature is not supported” response on some support board. I knew the Snagdragon-whatever chipset it had supported it, and I was using it just fine in the past - it felt like gaslighting, I saw people throwing around the “your battery life would suffer” excuse or that it was never supported despite it being the time when chipset support for hotwords when sleeping like Hey Cortana, Hey Siri were a notable feature and the Z Play had it.

Imagine my reaction when I see that feature being advertised as a Pixel exclusive(? At least it was advertised as a Pixel feature) so that was it.

in hindsight, Google’s shenanigans to promote their own in-house projects over Android as a whole seems pretty in-character now. Even as iOS features aren’t as big like “ooo iOS’s facsimile of multitasking!” there’s still the “that’s neat” or small QoL moments coming out like auto-deleting 2FA texts when they’re used. And I just don’t seem to see any of that in recent releases. I saw “AI color themes!” and a new time layout? and I’m not shortchanging the features already there like holding volume down to mute, but it just feels like they’ve decided base Android is good enough and slowed down or stopped in favor of figuring out whatever exclusive Pixel features and what to keep from the non-Pros.

But with the move of so many things to Play Services, are features still coming out that way outside of the usual point release?

You'd have to check, my personal X1 Extreme Gen 4 has the toggle but my new work T14 Gen 3 does not.

Not weird at all, I loved it's left-turn into generational trauma, nihilism and absurdism (not unlike how I enjoyed Barbie's unhinged nature) but would definitely say a lot of it would resonate more with Millennial/Gen Z children-of-immigrants like Bao, the short.

Countering this is very make-specific and you can have options ranging from calling in (opt-out) to pulling fuses to messing with dash wiring.

Make/Vehicle-specific forums will likely be a good resource to start with but naturally you'll have to deal with the "you have phone, lul" defeatist idiots anywhere.

Considerations include age (Models with 3G radios are disconnected anyway most likely), trim (maybe only certain trim levels got a cellular radio), and features. (Hotspot, OnStar, an SOS button indicate the presence of such a telematics system)

Varies widely, sometimes you can call in and opt-out, boom done. It will naturally take the cellular features like hotspot, app stuff with it. It will be very make/model specific. You can do it on Toyota's by pulling a fuse if calling don't work and you only lose the microphone.

You've done it now, now I'm catching up on Oglaf!

I used iCloud Drive for a while since it was a two-fer with iPhone backups and end-to-end encryption.

But for some reason the Windows Store client is garbage. I've done the reinstall, etc. dance but it keeps hanging while attempting to sync and ballooning logs to hundreds of MB.

So I have no cloud storage. I instead just plug in my phone to iTunes for it's periodic local backup and drag-and-drop whatever files I want to have on my phone then.

I'm sure you tried but the definitive option would be a BIOS switch to change it. Sometimes is says S3, sometimes it says Linux sleep (like my personal ThinkPad)

But if you don't have that toggle at all, the firmware probably dumped S3 entirely - especially if it's a relatively new machine and you'll have to lean much more on Hibernate like my new work ThinkPad.

I would investigate whether an older BIOS version still has the S3 toggle since some BIOS updates have removed S3 I believe but a search of forums would probably turn up enough complaints to hit your radar.

Attacked by the Nut-Devil ma'am!

If y'all remember that Kia Soul that got launched by a wheel, it’s a more dramatic example but a potential downside to what amounts to a spacer. It’s certainly a cool proof-of-concept but I can’t see it taking off since I doubt it’ll be as efficient as a factory hybrid and the upfront cost, labor, troubleshooting, explaining it to a mechanic will eat fuel savings.

My pet theory is that it's to throw a bone to OEMs. They came out saying "oop, 7th-gen and older Intel chips won't work, guess you'll just need to buy a new PC!" until someone over there noticed that their still-for-sale (at the time the requirements went live), few-thousand-dollar PC (the Surface Studio 2) was a 7th-gen chip so they made eventually an exception just for that one. Because "reasons".

Any bets on this Refresh not supporting 8th-gen and below Intel chips except the Surface Studio for “reasons”?

It wasn't killing new versions of Windows, it was the decision to move to more of a rolling release model over the historical point releases which we saw as 10's lifespan went on and still see in 11 with their "moments". Specific Windows version was going to become less emphasized in favor of having a larger install base for the Store and whatever MS wants to do to that install base. And the big buyers of Windows were always volume sales too.

And then something changed, whether OEM's complained, someone decided a change was necessary, etc. and boom, 11.

Results may vary but you can always plug it back in after testing.

Toyota's have no negative effects beyond obviously no cellular functions and the microphone ceasing to work.

I recommend figuring out what the opt-out procedure is too. If I ended up with a Toyota, calling in via the SOS button will start the process of disconnecting the system.

Also note that some may have 3G radios, etc. which are already defunct.

Edit: Fixed typo

All I’ve wanted for a decade is a built-in backup solution to rival Time Machine but noOOoooO…

I had OneDrive randomly dump a chunk of my files into the website Recycle Bin so I never touched it again. (Yes I know user error is the usual thought but I would have known about dragging multiple things from different folders since at the time all my photos, documents, etc were up there.)

File History I still use but that’s janky, occasionally crashes in the Settings (this is on multiple machines with W10, haven’t touched 11) and wouldn’t backup iCloud Drive. (which I’ve since dumped too since I have a glitch support hasn’t been able to fix that results in broken sync in iCloud for Windows and rapidly ballooning logs)

I’m wondering if it’s even backing up files or just saving to cloud which isn’t a backup.

Jesus it’s like when the iPhone showed up and then suddenly every dumbphone with a touchscreen was an “iPhone-killer”

I remember the comparison on TV crowning the LG Voyager a superior.

I’m being a non-article-reading heathen here but of those three bullets I don’t think any is new to the smartphone industry - albeit Apple is cagey with support timelines (and probably slows down on what’s fixed versus the current iOS version) but the 5s technically got a iOS 12 patch this year.

My favorite is that their seeming takeaway from the success of Barbie is to go heads deep into TOY MOVIES.