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The expensive nature of my next iPhone is moar money than I currently has.
Tue Sep 19 2023 07:32:56 EDT from Nurb432Sort of sad when people use terms like 'loan' in relation to a phone... how have we come to this point?
i still buy Chinese stuff direct, cut the middle man that slaps a pretty label and $ added on. I spend ~150, which end up being mid-hi range. I go with xiaomi normally as they are the big consumer electronic manufacturer over there, decent quality and they do *everything*...even electric toothbrushes.. AND no carrier crap AND no NSA tap... ( ya, CCP tap is included for no extra charge, but they dont care about me, i am not even a blip on their radar.. )
Even xiaomi has $2k+ flagship phones that will do night vision, go get your coffee and wipe your butt for you.. but if a 150 dollar phone does all i need, and lasts me until the next required platform update ( 4g to 5g mandate ), why?
Of course if i was really paranoid, id get a pinephone and run Linux..
Right, that is my point. Phones should not be so costly that people have to take out loans. ( really many people do, its just bundled into their contract and they never read the bill close enough to notice. )
Tue Sep 19 2023 11:46:09 EDT from LadySerenaKittyThe expensive nature of my next iPhone is moar money than I currently has.
you could fire up a quick VM with Macos and see what it does, before
you order the hardware.
I could. But I think I'll just wait. When the IT department is ready to begin the roll out, I am on the list, and they will ship me a machine. I only travel with my work machine a couple of times a year.
Any way you slice it, moving from Windoze to Mac is a nice upgrade. Not as nice as moving to a fully open source desktop, but simply being on a "mostly unix" will be nice.
My iPhone Loan is through Apple and backed by Citizen One. My first phone NOT financed through AT&T, because AT&T financing can go fuck a kite for all I care.
Tue Sep 19 2023 11:52:44 EDT from Nurb432Right, that is my point. Phones should not be so costly that people have to take out loans. ( really many people do, its just bundled into their contract and they never read the bill close enough to notice. )
Tue Sep 19 2023 11:46:09 EDT from LadySerenaKittyThe expensive nature of my next iPhone is moar money than I currently has.
There i fixed it for you :)
Sadly tho i agree with this version . Even tho i was a bell-baby. But after the breakup, it all went south. Things changed. In a lot of ways, in a lot of areas.
Tue Sep 19 2023 13:40:53 EDT from LadySerenaKittybecause AT&T can go fuck a kite for all I care.
It bears reminding that the company currently called "AT&T" is not AT&T.
It's actualy SBC, the company that everyone hated so much that they renamed themselves to "AT&T" after they acquired the real AT&T. There used to be a few people here who worked for Prodigy, which SBC also acquired, and they often attested how completely unlikeable SBC was. To everyone.
Let the hate flow. It isn't Ma Bell.
Yes. Ma Bell had issues and was not perfect, but they were not the evil monster that came later.
Somewhere i have a piece of the bell logo ( concrete. HUGE thing ) from the building here when they tore off, after the breakup. They put little pieces in Lucite and gave them to the employees as a remembrance of what was. And what would never be again. Sort of like a funeral, in a way.
I also have a couple of signs off phone booths. ( i think in the attic ) . And a brass bell logo necklace thing. some sort of 'x year employee prize' ( do companies still do that? )
I had 2 of the pens with the little floating bells inside. Lost them when i moved form Florida. One of the boxes of my stuff, left behind. Lost those, all my artwork in kindergarten, several ( now super rare ) matchbox cars in their boxes, original GI Joe, in its box.. I have never even found a picture of those pens to show people.. its sort of like the girl scout cookies with a little blob of mint creme in them back in the 70s, almost a folktale but they really did exist...
Wed Sep 20 2023 22:12:33 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
Let the hate flow. It isn't Ma Bell.
Sort of sad when people use terms like 'loan' in relation to a
phone... how have we come to this point?
I think something similar.
Only expend a lot on phones if you make money with that phone, and even then, chances are you are better off with a cheapo.
Realistically, people with flagship phones rarely do anything with then that I can't do with cheapos.
BTW If you are phone-paranoid, a Pixel flashed with grapheneos is actually quite useful, as long as you don't need Google services. If you need them, you can sandbox them.
2023-09-19 11:46 from LadySerenaKitty
The expensive nature of my next iPhone is moar money than I currently
has.
Unless you are terminally ill or something, the fact above suggests buying that phone instead of a Samsung A1** is a Very Bad Idea TM.
only thing i have found better in 'better' phones is the camera. Saves me from carrying one around with me. ( and the autosync to my server at home )
While doing some other research, decided to picked up a pixel and preemptively ditch my china ( xiaomi ) phone, not due to 'bad' things but cell antenna issues, battery life is slowly fading ( 2 years old now ) suspected coming carrier blocks, and its already harder to find ones i like that support US frequencies. ( But i do like it, and the previous 3 )
Ill have to look at that grapenos thing.
Sun Sep 24 2023 12:47:32 EDT from darknetuserSort of sad when people use terms like 'loan' in relation to a
phone... how have we come to this point?
I think something similar.
Only expend a lot on phones if you make money with that phone, and even then, chances are you are better off with a cheapo.
Realistically, people with flagship phones rarely do anything with then that I can't do with cheapos.
BTW If you are phone-paranoid, a Pixel flashed with grapheneos is actually quite useful, as long as you don't need Google services. If you need them, you can sandbox them.
I went and did work with my shiny new iPhone 15 Pro Max. Soooo much better! With the iPhone 11, I would sometimes get dropped frames when rendering the Uber maps on my CarPlay screen in the 2023 Ford Escape. With my shiny new iPhone 15 Pro Max, maps were consistently rendering at 60fps and the phone never got anywhere near as hot as the old one did. I guess the moar powerful GPU means map rendering isn't sending the GPU full-tilt.
Realistically, people with flagship phones rarely do anything with
then that I can't do with cheapos.
To some extent they're funding the eventual development of cheapos :)
I'm ok with a midrange phone but in the end you get what you like!
Ya. same here.
Went flagship once with a Note3. Used the stylus perhaps 2x. "this is dumb on a phone"
Tue Sep 26 2023 09:05:16 EDT from IGnatius T FoobarI'm ok with a midrange phone but in the end you get what you like!
Realistically, people with flagship phones rarely do anything with
then that I can't do with cheapos.
HDR Photos.
I don't know a damned thing about the Android ecosystem, but for Apple users, you can only shoot RAW if you have the "Pro" phone.
There's a stopgap HDR solution for HEIF compressed photos that uses a gain-map, but it's not a standardized part of the HEIF/HEIC spec, so although they give you some sample code for how to decode it, I haven't seen any open-source software that can display it (yet.)
I might be getting to the point where I almost have the know-how to write said software, but who knows if Krita would accept the PR, and I don't have time.
By the way, when I say "HDR Photos" I am not talking about HDR tone-mapped down to an 8-bit SDR output file. I am talking about true HDR rendered on a compatible HDR10 or HDR12 display.
All of my mid-range china android phones can do that.
it appears my new pixel has that option too, in the native camera app at least. I dont see it in open camera now ( what i normally use ), which seems odd. but whatever, i only spent 30 seconds looking.
Tue Sep 26 2023 14:28:19 EDT from LoanSharkI don't know a damned thing about the Android ecosystem, but for Apple users, you can only shoot RAW if you have the "Pro" phone.
Are people who want to shoot at that high-end range really using their phones to do it?
Seems like if you care about the kind of fidelity HEIF/HEIC delivers, you'd be shooting with a "real" camera.
For me its "practical convenience factor".
Don't want to carry around a bulky camera during every day life. A quick unplanned "ooh, that is cool" or "look, its my dog" pictures dont really need a 'real' camera. But its nice to at least reach a threshold of quality. Which for me cheap phones dont do. But the mid-range ones i normally buy, do.
Thu Sep 28 2023 11:26:58 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
Are people who want to shoot at that high-end range really using their phones to do it?
Seems like if you care about the kind of fidelity HEIF/HEIC delivers, you'd be shooting with a "real" camera.
Seems like if you care about the kind of fidelity HEIF/HEIC
delivers, you'd be shooting with a "real" camera.
I believe this is only half right.
What HDR10 does is it allows you to set the monitor brigter than the old SDR "paper white" level. If you did this in SDR mode in a legacy SDR-only operating system, white would be too bright and it would cause eyestrain.
Whereas, with a 600-nit HDR10 monitor, you can set it brighter and the OS is smart enough to render SDR-white UI widgets at a reasonable brightness level between 80 and 200 nits (configurable) and use the monitor's remaining dynamic range to render specular highlights.
I have some stunning photos of the Grand Teton in winter that I am able to render much more spectacularly on my HDR monitor. The white snowfields really pop, and they render in at brightness levels that simply did not exist on legacy monitors. I have whole sections of photos that render at a bland, featureless white in SDR mode where you can actually see detail in HDR mode. The difference is huge, and it's more a limitation of the output device than of the input device.
The camera's sensor could capture that detail. Even the iPhone. Until recently, your screen wasn't capable of displaying it. Once you've seen it in your own photos, you really appreciate it.