And by requiring an Apple Developer Account and associated tooling, they've made them just hard enough to develop that the long tail won't bother porting.
Network-level blockers are very crude and tend to cause errors that are hard to debug and fix. I get it if you have no other option and they work well enough with a very conservative blocklist, but in my experience a dedicated extension will block more ads, block them better (no blank spots in pages), break legitimate content less often and when it does be far easier to temporarily bypass.
Sure but the point is a browser level adblockers can separate the tracker content from the legitimate content while a network level blocker can either block both or neither.
So many large sites have started serving ads through the hostnames that serve their applications. It feels like a losing battle to keep only blocking at the DNS level.
Unless you’re also automating a VPN connection to your home network when you leave it, which can be very helpful if you’re running something like pihole
I'm on Safari, with the occasional testing and account segregations with Chrome. The combination of AdGuard[1] (found via SetApp[2]) and NextDNS[3] works for me well on Safari.
I use the AdGuard extension too, with a Raspberry Pi running AdGuard Home which in turn uses NextDNS. I highly recommend every part of this setup, it's maintenance free, extremely reliable and I can't remember the last time an ad or tracker got through it.
The adblocker Wipr has recently added something beyond the Content Blocker API with Wipr Extra. I only found it because I had forgotten to switch to AdGuard on my office Mac, and Wipr Extra showed up in an update. Lots of restrictions and caveats though about what it can and can't do. Some details at
I also prefer Lightning. The central pin of USB-C being in the device's port rather than the charger seems like a bad idea to me. Lightning is the opposite.
I think it helps against dust getting stuck inside though.
Also, more ports on USB-C make for better "alternate mode" functionality, where some data lanes are re-purposed (with an analog mux) for another use, like displayport, or audio DAC.
The valuable part of the charger and the cable is not actually plastic. The point is that replaced chargers account for ~ 1_000_000 kg of e-waste per year.
Cable is 30% copper, 24% stainless steel, 16% other non-plastic materials. EPS is 13% copper and copper alloys, 7% aluminium, 6% steel, 37% other non-plastic components.
According to EU studies, 31% of the EPS and cables are incorrectly disposed.
Entirely agree with your point. However, i would point out that there's many other sources of waste that can be easily avoided:
- food waste and related food wrapping waste
- planned obsolescence (TVs, cars, washing machines, and just about every product out there)
- car-oriented architecture in the cities, where public transportation is an afterthought
- energy waste due to personal infrastructure/tooling (cooking/washing/heating infra, personal TV vs shared screening rooms, etc)
- war and social control: what's the environmental cost (transportation, manufacture of mechanical/chemical weapons) of repression (of, say an environmental protest like the anti-COP21 movement)? what about an outright war on a foreign nation?
These are just examples, but environmental concerns are rather "easy" to tackle given proper political will. The problem is people concerned with the coming ecological apocalypse are either ignored, silenced, bullied, mutilated or murdered by Nation States and multinationals.
The EU is also tackling all those points you mentioned. Many single-use plastics are already banned in the EU, the EU wants smartphone manufacturers to support their hardware for at least 5 years, many EU members give out incentives to improve house insulation, EV will become the norm in a few years and energy standard get stricter every few years.
It's not like the whole EU legislative body is now pushing with all their might to ban phone chargers, it's just a single working group of many.
The EU can tackle more than one issue at once. In fact, the EU has already put out mandates and regulations to reduce food packagin waste and a directive to combat planned obsolescence in TVs and Kitch Appliances.
Well USB cables use some copper and some have gold-plated contacts. In any case, the EU has been complaining about cables for who knows how long, so I guess they have their own reasons, backed by data, to argue for their standardisation.
It surely doesn't make that much sense to let Apple do its own hypocrite thing where they spew out platitudes about the environment while clearly the only driving force behind their decisions is how they suit their financial targets.
Agree. given that USB-C has an insane bandwidth and can power even laptops, there is absolutely no need for different standards. Let's all agree on one and move on. Apple's stance is ridiculous and justifies only some more profit.
Is this something yet to come into law? I find it very hard to buy the vegetables I want at German supermarkets because they so often come wrapped in plastic sets of three. Even bananas have a substantial amount of sticky tape around them.
Digging up rare earth and metals to use them a coupe of years and then throw them in a landfill is insane. I'm happy the EU has stepped in for this kind of regulation.
As for the supermarket, vote with your wallet and buy the less plastic you can.
I think the biggest benefit is that you won't need a charger if basically every train/plane/hotel/school etc can have charging bases for all phones. Just like we don't need to carry a power plug adapter wherever we go
They really have to. Android wasn't a serious competitor with the iphone but the phones running Linux are pretty rapidly improving. At this point they're actually usable and since the users themselves are able to fix core problems with the OS it won't be long before Apple will be forced by the market to actually behave.
It was Cramer back in 2013 who coined the term. It was a term for stocks, although on HN and around the engineer-verse I always took it to mean "big tech" companies that pay really well.
There are people who periodically propose this - so you could say your observation has been seconded. In fact there's already an acronym for that (which I've heard once or twice), FAMGA.
