Rene Ritchie

Daily news analysis and insight into the cultural and personal impact of Apple and related technologies, with weekly bonus reviews and deep-dives into the products and stories that matter most.

This tech changed my life/work

šŸš€ Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!I've recently gotten a new full-time job, which means needing both work and personal gear, accounts, and apps ā€” and I've started traveling again. A lot. This is the tech that's helping me not only get everything done, but keep my work and life organized and in balance.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

01-12
06:14

The True Danger of Artificial Intelligence

šŸŽ— https://givewell.org/rene Get your $100 donation matched with Givewell!A.I. Artificial intelligence. Machine Learning. Generative Adversarial Networks. Neural Engines. Dall-E. Midjourney. ChatGPT...Itā€™s the rise of the machines. Judgment day. Humanity deleted, as we become nothing more than an organic boot-loader for an indifferent hive of nanites thatā€™ll crack our world for fuel on their way to dispassionately conquering the stars.Ā Oh, whoops. Whoopsie.Itā€™s the singularity. The great enlightenment. The golden age of humanity, sundered from all labor and toil as ambient world-computing erases all creative limitations, enabling us to literally go where no one has gone before.Sorry. My bad. Again.Itā€™sā€¦ a tool. On an ever-escalating scale.Ā Neither angel nor demon but we use it so, able to pre-viz a movie or deep-fake propaganda, chat-out an email response or cheat-up an essay, potentially the biggest board with the biggest nail yet, for building or bludgeoning alike.Here are three stories...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

01-03
09:59

Apple Data Protection ā€” The ugly truth

šŸš€ Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!Up until now, Apple kept an encryption key for things like your personal photos and messages stored on their iCloud servers. That meant, if you ever forgot your passcode or otherwise locked yourself out, Apple could recover that data for you. But, side effect, that also meant a government could subpoena them, or a super-villain could theoretically break in and steal them.Now, in the US, and in more places over the course of the next year, weā€™ll have the option to turn on Advanced Data Protection for iCloud. In other words, turn off Appleā€™s ability to access almost everything on iCloud. literally make them throw their key away. Then, just like our health data and passwords have been, our photos and messages will be utterly, completely locked down.But should they be? Should we actually turn advanced data protection on?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

12-29
09:05

Health tech hot takes with @DoctorMike

Are the Apple Watch, Pixel Watch, Samsung Watch, Garmin, Fitbit and all the other smart wearables functional or just a fad? Can they help connect you, protect you, and keep you from harm, or just overwhelm you with numbers and cause some alarm?Doctor Mike, noted YouTube creator, family physician, and pro boxer joins me to talk about about health in the age of tech!Ā See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

12-16
13:44

Apple vs Intel vs Qualcomm ā€” Who wins 2023!

Does Intel's future lie in foundry? Can AMD ever grow its market share? Will MediaTek compete at the higher end? Is custom back at Qualcomm? And will anyone catch up to Apple? Here's where silicon is heading in 2023!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

12-16
17:22

The End of Big Silicon ā€” Apple, Intel, Qualcomm

Both desktop and mobile silicon are hitting the limits of physics. Power draw keeps increasing while enclosures only get smaller. Process shrinks are becoming more expensive and time-consuming. And foundries are facing geopolitical and competitive concerns. So what can Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, and all the rest do to keep improving performance?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

12-16
17:44

The Elon Phone

Is Elon Musk actually going to make a phone? Thatā€™s what approximately 42,069 headlines in my feed are saying right now. Not a Tesla phone, Space X Starlink phone, or Neuralink phone, though thatā€™d be kinda hella cool. Not even a Boring phone, despite a lot of people saying phones have gotten at least a little bit boring lately. But a Twitter phone. Why?Ā See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

12-16
10:08

How (NOT) to save a company

Twitter vs. Apple. Elon vs. Steve Jobs. I mean, kinda, weā€™ll get to that in a minute. Point being, Twitter is what everyone is talking about right now. Especially on Twitter. More than FTX imploding ā€” and exploding ā€” at least at time of recording. More than Mark Zuckerberg laying off 11,000 people. More than Apple momentarily junking up the App Store with gambling ads. More than the FBI allegedly test-driving Pegasus spyware a couple or few years back.Elon Musk speedrunning social network leadership fantasy campĀ is whatā€™s dominating the hearts and drama-stems of every doom-scroller and tech media thirst trapper in the 1218 universe.Ā So, what's going on?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

12-16
10:47

Elon v Twitter ā€” Endgame

Iā€™ve been trying to make this video about Twitter and Elon Musk for days but every time I open the app, the story has taken on a new and hilarious twist, which I'll cover here, but finally, I thought ā€” forget it, letā€™s just go!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

11-08
10:05

Ruining the iPad

šŸš€ Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!A friend of the family asked me to look at their iPad recently because something wasnā€™t working right and I noticed they had like 30 instances of the Mail all over the place. Iā€™m exaggerating, of course, but this is a person whoā€™s super smart, taught at university, but just never got computers never understood them. Avoided command lines entirely, struggled with graphical interfaces, but when the iPad came out, that was it, the perfect computer for them. Finally.Ā Something simple. Intuitive. Full screen. Focused.Ā But year after every couple or few years, layers and layers of capabilities have been added, but with complexities to match, and many of the same problems they had with graphical interfaces, the ones the iPad initially solved for them, are coming back. With a hefty helping of near-constant gesture collisions on top.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

10-30
07:21

USB-C regulation ā€” the BIG problem

šŸš€ Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!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.

10-13
10:12

iPhone 15 ā€” The Big Leak Lie

šŸš€ Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!I used to leak. Well, not leak. A lot of people get that wrong. Leakers arenā€™t the people reporting the leaks to you. Those areā€¦ reporters. Leakers are the ones actually leaking the information TO the reporters. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally. Weā€™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.

10-02
07:54

iPhone 14 ā€” Buy now or wait for 15?

šŸ”„ Go to https://bit.ly/37su9oh and use code reneritchie to get a free 100 pack of blades when you purchase your Henson Razor ā€” Make sure you add both the 100 blade pack and the razor for the discount to apply!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 ā€” enjoy the hell out of it ā€” because thereā€™ll always be something new and something nextAnd thatā€™s truer now for phones than itā€™s ever been before. Because phones just arenā€™t rapidly changing, always experimenting, bleeding edge nerd-bait sci-fi any more. Theyā€™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 ā€” spec bumps and a few new features aside, this years models are nigh-indistinguishable from last yearā€™s. I mean, forget S-models, theyā€™re basically being called rev B hardware.The designs have reached a point where theyā€™re platonic, if not always iconic. Like a Porsche or Rolex or Mont Blancā€¦ 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.

09-25
07:19

iPhone 14 Pro ā€” You're charging it wrong

šŸš€ Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!Whether it's the brand new iPhone 14 Pro or the just-shipped Galaxy Fold 4 or the upcoming Pixel 7 Pro, you donā€™t have to micromanage your phone's charging. You just donā€™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.

09-18
10:31

eSIM & iPhone 14 ā€” The uglier truth

ā˜•ļø https://morningbrewdaily.com/reneritchieĀ Sign up to Morning Brew for FREE today!You can tell itā€™s really iPhone 14 season because we nerds are angrier than Star Wars stans following Book of Boba. And the reasonā€¦ this time? I mean, same song, new verse. Appleā€™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 thatā€™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.

09-13
08:25

Why can't your iPhone take the 5th?

Should our phones have the right to remain silent? To plead the 5th?Thereā€™s doctor-patient privilege, attorney-client privilege, clergy-penitent privilege, and spousal privilege.Ā 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 ā€” beyond any of our real-world relationships ā€” our phones, which have pretty much become extensions of our memory, our knowledge, our senses, to the point where theyā€™re indistinguishable from external cyberneticsā€¦Ā Our phones have no such protection. Thereā€™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?sSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

09-07
06:05

Why Instagram is self-destructing

šŸš€ Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!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 ā€” Injected! ā€” whatever you want to call it ā€” by what the machine, the network, the platforms thinks you would really rather seeOf course, Iā€™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 byā€¦ who knows who and who cares!Kidding, totally kidding. We all know Iā€™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 forā€¦ going backā€¦ foreverā€¦ 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! Iā€™m obviously talking about Instagram, where theyā€™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 thanā€¦ Kingā€™s Landing in the very worst season.And yeah, if youā€™re sensing a pattern here, thatā€™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.

08-28
10:19

Apple and ads ā€” the ugly truth

šŸš€ Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!Apple, the company thatā€™s been building literal bill-boards to privacy and preaching about not using their customers as productsApple, the company thatā€™s been standing between Facebook and third-party ad tracking, demanding informed consentApple, the company that keeps setting themselves up to be hammered by regulators over pretty much everything theyā€™re doing these days ā€” except for, oh yeah, any of their actual current core productsApple is rumored to be goingā€¦ if not all-in on ads, certainly moreā€¦ inner? And thatā€™s causing everything from complete cognitive dissonance toā€¦ renewed accusations of unfair competitionSoā€¦ why?Ā See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

08-21
10:54

Fold & Flip 4 ā€” But where are Apple and Google?

ā˜•ļø Sign up to Morning Brew for FREE today! https://morningbrewdaily.com/reneritchieApple hasnā€™t shipped an iPhone Foldā€¦ yet. Thereā€™s no flipping Google Pixel phone yet either. But Samsung has just hit deadly number 4 ā€” Galaxies Flip and Fold the next, next, next generation.So, why? What does Samsung know ā€” and other companies that refuse to sell their folders any place I can buy them ā€” what do they know that Apple and Google donā€™t? Or vice versa?Are flips and foldsā€¦ the next bigā€¦ biggerā€¦ smaller to biggerā€¦ Samsung thing? Or still justā€¦ extremely expensiveā€¦ excessively compromised tech nerd thirst-traps ā€” thatā€™ll be superseded by glasses or whatever ā€” 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.

08-14
07:48

Tech reviews are broken

You know what Iā€™m talking about. A new phone or laptop or camera or whatever hits, and suddenly your feed is filled withā€¦ likeā€¦ 3000 blog posts or podcasts or videos about it. Itā€™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.

08-07
09:01

Crazysoda23

Take it from a die hard Android fan. The switch decision is a hard one but while Google doesnā€™t have a plan, road map, etc I will not have a Android phone again. Aside from the lack of OS support, the lack of a purpose with hardware and software to just be able to say ā€œfirstā€ is pointless.

05-14 Reply

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