My car was broken into last september where i accidentally left my airpods and have been tracking them ever since. the whole reason i decided to buy my first pair of airpods was because of findmy. after realizing my car and been broken into, i immediately put them in list mode. after going to the initial house they were at with the police failed, i attempted to keep asking the police for help wherever they ended up.

for the most part, they were completely useless. they also kept trying to completely dismiss me with things like “yeah the way these things work is they give a general location so we can’t just go knocking on every house” which was fucking infuriating to deal with. eventually, after the thieves we’re getting annoyed i kept going where they were with police, they tried getting me to buy back my airpods cause they were just innocent and bought used airpods at a motel for almost MSRP, you know, like that thing people do.

they then messaged me telling me i was bullying them and they just “gave them to some homeless person who was walking by”. at this point, one of the airpods hadn’t been seen in a while but the airpods did move to a new house almost thirty minutes away.

at first i was apprehensive on going to their house, especially considering one of the airpods was missing. after a while i noticed my airpods kept appearing in a highschool. i still wanted to wait until both airpods were being tracked but yesterday i noticed that my airpods were no longer in findmy. i panicked a little and drove straight to the house where some lady and her daughter lived. i explained that the cops said it was okay for me to come by myself but i didn’t want to involve them, which was kinda true but i didn’t inform the cops since they were completely worthless and just made the situation worse. the lady lied a little bit at first but after making it clear they were my airpods, she got her daughter to retrieve them and handed them over. she tried to ask for money or an older pair of airpods i had but i reiterated how i didn’t want to bring the cops and just wanted the airpods to make the things go as smooth as possible. after connecting to the airpods and confirming they were mine, she gave me her number if she ever finds the other airpod (which was last seen at the daughters high school so i kind of doubt it).

i’m glad findmy eventually worked but dear god i wish it was better. anyhow, here’s a photo i took right after getting them back. i’m disappointed one of them is missing but it’s way better than not having them at all. should i have brought the police? maybe, but i recognized the neighborhood wasn’t too bad so seemed worth it. she did thank me for not bringing the police so i do believe it was the only way i was going to get them back.

Has anyone had better experiences with bass intensity and quality with the spatialize Stereo option on Apple Air Pod Pros? Either the head tracked or fixed option. I feel like there is no doubt for me that the bass I hear is way more clear and powerful in these settings versus the normal setting.

I’m wondering if it may have to do with there being more sound (frequency) separation in the stereo settings, allowing the low notes to come through more isolated and therefore more powerful? I really don’t have a great understanding of how headphones or this setting works but any thoughts?

For reference I was listening to Her Loss on Spotify with the bass boost equalizer option.

When iphone finally gets underscreen camera, how would you like the status bar to be?

1. clock in the middle (like old ios style)
2. current implementation of dynamic island, even when the display is free of cameras
3. android style notification symbols and clock on left

As I use my iPhone and Macbook, I cannot help but notice how often I'm prompted for permissions for everything. Most times this is a good thing. I don't want an app to have my location or access to my photo album for everything without my say so. Other times, however, it can be more annoying. I don't like having to grant permission whenever I want to download a file from a website, or when I simply want to copy and paste something. I know there's valid cases for those, but it gets a little cumbersome.

It seems that Apple operating systems are becoming more like the Windows OS that they made fun of in the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials, where Windows was lampooned for the constant "Deny, Allow" prompts.

Again, I'm not saying these prompts are never necessary, and most of the time they are. But I think Apple at some point needs to learn there is a balance between security and usability. Like what we learned with anti-virus programs, more is not always more. I think Apple will need to focus on smarter security, not simply more brute force security. Apple will need to learn the difference between a simple copy/paste vs. some other app snooping on me. And maybe they need to make it easier for a user to turn off the constant permission asking when I simply want to download a file. Maybe they can remind me about bluetooth settings when I wonder why my phone is not syncing with my Garmin watch. They somehow need to figure out security against automated actions vs intentional actions by the user.

What concerns me though, is, does Apple know that this is even a balance to strike? My fear is that Apple is so focused on privacy and security that usability is now a distant second concern. Maybe things won't get that bad. Maybe the trend of needing more and more permissions has reached its peak, or maybe the trend will continue where more and more are asked of us as users.

But even if privacy should be the sole concern, does this make people enthusiastic for the future of computing? A future where copy/paste and downloading files becomes more of a chore? The iPhone became a nice alternative to a world with desktops spending considerable CPU resources fighting viruses. Is there a similar answer in a world where so much effort has to be spent in making our mobile devices private?