☕ Good morning! It's Wednesday, March 25th. I felt like I had to say that just to remind myself. Anyway, today's a good day for anyone who already owns an iPad, and I'm thinking of one friend in particular who bought the 2018 iPad Pro just a few weeks ago and had whiplash regret when Apple announced the 2020 models...
Apple iPad Pro 2020 reviews are out
And those reviews are faint with praise. The new iPad Pro is not a smash hit but with trackpad support for it and all iPads that can update to iPadOS 13.4, the world of tablets is much more interesting again.
Reviews:
- The general vibe from reviews is that while the iPad Pro 2020 is the best yet, and the new trackpad is interesting if expensive (and not available yet), other iPads remain very good and much cheaper.
- The Verge says the hardware is overkill given the software can’t make the most of it: “Unless you’re quite sure what you are going to do with these cameras, that LIDAR, or the faster processor, chances are you’d be equally served by the much-less expensive iPad Air — or even the base iPad.”
- CNET agrees and notes the best new feature is trackpad support which is coming to other iPads anyway.
- WIRED sums it up by saying: “The best iPad you can get… [but] you can get an earlier iPad, and a Pretty Darn Good one, for a lot less.”
- All reviews agreed that the inclusion of Lidar didn’t really seem to be useful, and you’re paying for it now but it’s something for the future. You might like to have a future-proof device, or you might like to only buy something when it’s useful.
- And most said if you have the 2018 iPad Pro, unless you’re doing AR for a living, it’s not worth upgrading.
But the more important thing is in the just released iPadOS 13.4, and includes trackpad and cursor support for all iPads. And those who’ve already had a few days with it seem to hugely enthusiastic:
- John Gruber over at Daring Fireball linked to Wired’s piece ‘Who Would Have Thought an iPad Cursor Could Be So Much Fun?’ and noted: “Best piece I’ve seen on the joy and utility of iPadOS’s new pointer support. Five days in and I can’t imagine doing without it.”
- That sort of statement has an effect. I’m excited to try it.
- I’ve downloaded iPadOS 13.4 on my partner’s iPad and will hook in a Bluetooth mouse just as soon as this newsletter is sent.
- More on new software: Apple releases macOS 10.15.4, watchOS 6.2, and iOS, iPadOS and tvOS 13.4 (Ars Technica). (I wonder if this impacted internet servers?)
Round Up:
📉 YouTube cuts SD quality by default worldwide to tame bandwidth surge - users can still choose higher-quality streams, but streams will start at 480p (TechCrunch).
📸 Samsung Galaxy S10 and Note 10 to get Galaxy S20 camera features with an update due soon (Android Authority).
🔜 Huawei P40, P40 Pro full specs leak a day before official reveal (Android Authority).
📂 Royole reveals FlexPai 2 next-gen foldable display, says it’s tougher and more vibrant (Engadget).
📈 Facebook has put out details on how its platforms are holding up under strain, noting messaging is up 50% and voice and video calling have more than doubled on Messenger and WhatsApp, and investors be warned, admits it isn’t making money from those tools.
🗞 Adding to that is a Times piece detailing how Facebook’s own staff are struggling to keep things going while working remotely: from being told to stop chatting on work message boards, to building their own video conferencing tools as the likes of BlueJeans struggled to cope (NYTimes).
😎 As Half-Life: Alyx launches, Valve talks about what happened to Half-Life 3(Ars Technica).
🧻 A consumer behavior researcher explains why toilet paper shelves are bare: This is why everyone is hoarding toilet paper (Ars Technica).
🎧 With the rise of true wireless, is there a place for wireless earbuds? (Just to be clear: “Wireless” earbuds retain a wire connecting the pieces in your ears, but no wires to the audio source. “True wireless” have no wires at all) (SoundGuys)
📚 The Internet Archive has opened 1.4m free books and has removed the waitlist to borrow books. Free and open globally: the National Emergency Library (archive.org).
🚽 The US Navy's big beautiful new carrier has hilariously messed up toilets (Jalopnik).
👽 NASA explains why wheel-like blip in space images is not a UFO (CNET).
🤖 I got my file from Clearview AI (OneZero).
🗣Personal voice assistants struggle with black voices, new study shows (The Verge). (Please use ethnically diverse training data.)
😷 Why the COVID-19 related drop in air travel could make weather forecasts less accurate: less data being gathered (Gizmodo). (Worth it.)
🎮 What is a good starter video game for a middle aged man who has never really played before? (r/askreddit).
Wednesday Weirdness
Remember that the Smithsonian opened up some 2.8 million artifacts to the public for use in the Smithsonian Open Access initiative?
- Part of the fun of digging through that many items is discovering the weird and not always wonderful.
- Like, this dog automaton from the 1600s which is stretching what I can call a good boy
- Atlas Obscura is keen to get some help digging through the items to find the weirdest stuff, but the Smithsonian already has a helpful list, titled: Things That Scare Us. And yep, that's accurate.
- Although things like this PCR Robot (seen above) are wonderful: this is a machine used to analyze DNA samples, and in the 1980s they were both hard to come by and very expensive. So, Dr. Bert Vogelstein’s lab team at Johns Hopkins made their own to aid their cancer research.
- But perhaps this Mobile Quarantine Facility built by NASA for astronauts returning from the Moon is one of the least weird for this current era?
Cheers,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.
