I got my Clicks Power Keyboard today and i have to admit, i am whelmed. I preordered it on a whim back in January and I am not sure what I thought (I blame the grief!). I didn’t even remember preordering it until I received the shipping notification two weeks ago.

It all feels a bit flimsy. The angle of the keyboard is all wrong – I think the keyboard cases are much better in that regard. I am also realizing that my geriatric-millennial eyes are getting a bit too old for the small font on the keys. That goes hand in hand (haha!) with the buttons themselves – with my ginormous paws, they are right on the edge of bearable. Last but not least, there is the layout: QWERTY only. As a native German, I keep hitting Y when I mean Z, and my umlauts have gone into exile.

After years and years I finally pulled the trigger and bought a soundbar! I went with the Klipsch Flexus Core 300 . Besides the stupid name, it has already made quite the difference in my living room – even without the optional subwoofer and satellite speakers. I am quite happy with it, even though it was a bit expensive. I still have to resolve a couple of HDMI CEC issues, but I am sure I will find a solution soon.

Christina Warren and Marco Arment are spot-on about the current situation of the Apple Vision Pro.

Marco Arment on Mastodon:

The challenge Apple faces with AVP is getting enough people to buy (and keep using) a device type that they weren’t already buying (headsets), which is VERY expensive and limited, to accumulate enough customers for the content and software ecosystem to develop.

Christina Warren puts an even finer point on it:

Spot on. And I’ll add: It’s also a dev kit positioned as a consumer product, priced as an enterprise/industrial tool but without any of the features that enterprise/industry can use. The whole thing remains a mess and no amount of “whataboutism” or iPhone comparisons, as if we aren’t living in a different time, will change the fact that this thing is DOA in its current form and positioning.

To me, at this point, it is a nice piece of “tech porn”. A remarkable device that shows a certain direction - but nothing more.

Very interesting thread by Hector Martin, where he goes into more detail about the performance of Apple’s NVMe drivers, explains how they work and what challenges he is facing under Asahi Linux .

From the looks of it, under macOS, you can either have fast write speeds or data integrity when it comes to NVMe storage:

As it turns out, macOS cheats. On Linux, fsync() will both flush writes to the drive, and ask it to flush its write cache to stable storage.

So, effectively, Apple’s drive is faster than all the others without cache flushes, but it is more than 3 times slower than a lowly SATA SSD at flushing its cache. Even if all you wrote is a couple of sectors. You pay a huge flush penalty if you do any writes.

[…]

macOS doesn’t even seem to try to proactively issue syncs; you can write a file on macOS, fsync() it, wait 5 seconds, issue a hard reboot (e.g. via USB-PD command), and the data is gone. That’s pretty bad.

[…]

Not flushing means we cannot guarantee ordering of writes, which means you could end up with actual data corruption in e.g. a database, not just data loss. There’s no good way around this other than doing full flushes.

[…]

It is a very long thread , but its worth the read.

Die neuen AirPod Pro hielten leider nicht lange 😕. Ich habe auch die bei Heise beschriebenen Probleme. Wenigstens ist das Melden und der Austausch bei Apple relativ problemlos.