Rene Ritchie

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All phones will have to use UBC-C plugs for charging beginning in 2024, the European Union has decided.

And by that, they mean iPhones. Because every other brand of phone has been using USB-C since the Jurassic, basically. Park, not World!

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I used to leak. Well, not leak. A lot of people get that wrong. Leakers aren’t the people reporting the leaks to you. Those are… reporters. Leakers are the ones actually leaking the information TO the reporters. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally. We’ll get to that in a minute.

But it was a huge high. A huge, stressful, anxious, exhilarating, ego-boosting, soul-crushing high that I loved and hated every time. Which is pretty much how I'm feeling about the iPhone 14 and Apple Watch Ultra leaks from last year, and the iPhone 15, Pixel, and Samsung leaks for next year already!

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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My always advice is: Wait as long as you possible can to upgrade, then buy the best possible upgrade you can, and keep it as long as you can — enjoy the hell out of it — because there’ll always be something new and something next

And that’s truer now for phones than it’s ever been before. Because phones just aren’t rapidly changing, always experimenting, bleeding edge nerd-bait sci-fi any more. They’re fully matured and mainstream.

Just look at all the hotter-than-hot takes that have been pouring in lately, from the Galaxy Fold 4 to the iPhone 14 to the Pixel 7 — spec bumps and a few new features aside, this years models are nigh-indistinguishable from last year’s. I mean, forget S-models, they’re basically being called rev B hardware.

The designs have reached a point where they’re platonic, if not always iconic. Like a Porsche or Rolex or Mont Blanc… or, you get the idea.

So... should you upgrade now or should you wait for next?

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Whether it's the brand new iPhone 14 Pro or the just-shipped Galaxy Fold 4 or the upcoming Pixel 7 Pro, you don’t have to micromanage your phone's charging. You just don’t. And not because your time is worth so much more than the dozens of dollars it might save you over the life of your phone, but because modern phones use machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage charging in ways stranger and more sophisticated than almost any human could ever match.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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You can tell it’s really iPhone 14 season because we nerds are angrier than Star Wars stans following Book of Boba. And the reason… this time? I mean, same song, new verse. Apple’s deleted another port, this time the SIM card slot. Moving from a traditional, card-based Subscriber Identity Module to a new-fangled ee-lec-tronic version that’s no longer swappable at the hands-to-hardware level, only software. At least in the U.S. For now.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Should our phones have the right to remain silent? To plead the 5th?

There’s doctor-patient privilege, attorney-client privilege, clergy-penitent privilege, and spousal privilege. 

To the best of my understanding, and with all the appropriate caveats and limits of scope, in many jurisdictions, our doctors, therapists, lawyers, priests, pastors, husbands, and wives, cannot be compelled to testify or provide evidence against us.

But our phones, which nowadays contain health, legal, location, and deeply personal data — beyond any of our real-world relationships — our phones, which have pretty much become extensions of our memory, our knowledge, our senses, to the point where they’re indistinguishable from external cybernetics… Our phones have no such protection. There’s just no digital device equivalent to that privilege. No right for our phones to remain silent.

They can and will be used against us. But as the external cybernetics become internal, as the computers move from our phones and watches and earbuds to our bodies and brains... does that need to change?s

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Timelines vs algorithms. Chronology vs. discovery. FIGHT!

Everyone is super hopping mad that the people they care about, the friends, the family, the creators, the celebrities, the ones that they chose specifically to follow, that you chose to see, the ones that used to appear so orderly-like on your screens for you to scroll through, every day and every night, are being disrupted, *corrupted*, replaced, rejected — Injected! — whatever you want to call it — by what the machine, the network, the platforms thinks you would really rather see

Of course, I’m talking about Twitter, which took the simple, beautiful, reverse-chronological timeline that I and maybe many of you signed up for, and turned it into this mess of recommended tweets by… who knows who and who cares!

Kidding, totally kidding. We all know I’m actually talking about YouTube, which de-emphasized the clean, clear, crisp subscriber feed, populated by every video published by every creator we all chose to smash the button for… going back… forever… basically, and now has all of us just clicking on whatever shows up on our home page, whether we smashed a button ever or not!

Still kidding! TikTok. Sorry! I swear! I’m obviously talking about Instagram, where they’ve taken the immaculate, photo-centric feed of our internet youth and Frankensteined it up with so many, so thirsty, video recs that the Queens of the Jenner-Kardashian Empire are now calling for it to burn hotter than… King’s Landing in the very worst season.

And yeah, if you’re sensing a pattern here, that’s because there absolutely is one.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Apple, the company that’s been building literal bill-boards to privacy and preaching about not using their customers as products

Apple, the company that’s been standing between Facebook and third-party ad tracking, demanding informed consent

Apple, the company that keeps setting themselves up to be hammered by regulators over pretty much everything they’re doing these days — except for, oh yeah, any of their actual current core products

Apple is rumored to be going… if not all-in on ads, certainly more… inner? And that’s causing everything from complete cognitive dissonance to… renewed accusations of unfair competition

So… why? 

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Apple hasn’t shipped an iPhone Fold… yet. There’s no flipping Google Pixel phone yet either. But Samsung has just hit deadly number 4 — Galaxies Flip and Fold the next, next, next generation.

So, why? What does Samsung know — and other companies that refuse to sell their folders any place I can buy them — what do they know that Apple and Google don’t? Or vice versa?

Are flips and folds… the next big… bigger… smaller to bigger… Samsung thing? Or still just… extremely expensive… excessively compromised tech nerd thirst-traps — that’ll be superseded by glasses or whatever — before Apple and Google even begin?

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know what I’m talking about. A new phone or laptop or camera or whatever hits, and suddenly your feed is filled with… like… 3000 blog posts or podcasts or videos about it. It’s like the red wedding but for every other bit of content coming out that day.

And there are some very specific reasons for that...

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.