I bought the AirPods 4 with ANC in large part due to the Wireless Charging Case.

> If Ted had actually made it into Hollywood

Well, he had to have at least some passing knowledge of the film industry. From Wikipedia: "Nelson is the son of Emmy Award–winning director Ralph Nelson and Academy Award – winning actress Celeste Holm."

Cool, let me know when I can order your ring.

> people are beginning to feel emoji fatigue

Are they? News to me. I like them. Do they show up in Lynx or whatever terminal-based browser the hip kids are using these day are using?

Lynx won't render the page. Links doesn't show them.

> Discourse has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices.

The phones that can't upgrade past iOS 15 are over ten years old. What is the current iOS 15 user base? It's probably more cost-effective for Discourse to gift affected users a compatible device than to keep old code in place.

I hope most Intel Mac users avoided macOS 26. I kept my remaining Intel Mac on macOS 15, even though it supports macOS 26. It's not as bad as those poor folks who got stuck on OS X Lion many years ago, but it just felt wrong to move to a new (and somewhat broken) OS knowing the machine would likely never get the eventual fixes.

I did the same, my Intel MacBook Pro will stick to macOS 15 forever. I won't update to Tahoe which is clearly a botched beta with no further updates.

They have on occasion, when it makes sense to unveil OS changes and hardware simultaneously. Apple Vision Pro, move to new architecture, 2019 Mac Pro tower – that sort of thing. Most years they don't announce new hardware, though.

This is a reductive and frankly insulting response. People want to be able to communicate with other people they will use the tools that allow them to do it. Sometimes the person I want is on Instagram, that’s how I can reach out to them. I believe privacy ought to be a human right. I don’t just limit myself to tools used by a very narrow swath of arrogant nerds. Instead, we fight for privacy.

I do not understand why a numpad is considered a necessity by some. I never used it when I had them. Do you work in data entry?

Because it's way more convenient to type numbers, and no, you don't need to work in data entry to enter data / appreciate this convenience

I've been a Mac user for 30+ years, but I love Raymond Chen's historical posts.

I'm aware of folklore.org, but I wish there were something equivalent within Apple itself. Sadly, it's not part of Apple's culture.

I can't do anything about Apple's culture, but it's been long enough that I doubt anyone would mind if I shared a story.

It was 1992. I was a summer intern on the System Software team. One of my projects was to improve a Disk Initialization Package feature to mark bad blocks found during disk init. The existing feature worked, but it was super slow, it didn't show progress, and it wasn't cancellable.

The UI was the trickiest part. I'd improved the speed a lot, but we still couldn't know how long the whole process would take, so every heuristic I used to show remaining time was awful.

I noticed this guy a few cubicles down had a "User Interface" title, so I wondered whether he'd be able to help. I asked him if he had a minute, and sat down and hashed it out with Apple employee #4, Bill Fernandez, the person who introduced the two Steves to each other.

He was truly the nicest person I met that summer, other than my manager. He completely understood the problem instantly and came up with a great solution: ditch the time estimate and replace it with an indeterminate progress bar that advanced as each disk track was tested. It worked, people liked it, and it shipped with the point release after 7.1.

Not quite as gee-whiz as any of Raymond's articles, but it's a start!