Setting aside debates about which is “better”, this article appears to be based on crap. The link to the supporting analysis uses the words “through the roof”, but here’s what it says:
“ wired headphones rebounded in 2025, growing 3% (about $15M).”
So now a 3% growth in sales is “exploding” and “through the roof”? No, I don’t think so…
This is the BBC. I've been reading their site every day for many years now. They're mostly good, but at times they have a way of steering their audience towards an agenda through bunk articles like this. It was especially evident with the remote work hit-pieces they published regularly during the RTO movement a couple of years ago. It was clear someone was pulling strings at the BBC to generate negative headlines about remote work, but when you dug into their sources, you'd see data to suggest the complete opposite.
I'm not sure what the agenda would be in this case and maybe there is no agenda, but it's something to be aware of. It could be simply one of their contributors has a bone to pick with manufacturers over the lack of reliability in Bluetooth audio technology.
And a 30% increase in sales across a cherrypicked 6wk time window. This is one of those articles that's more wishful thinking than real news, even though I have the same wish.
> only one wireless option -Bluetooth- and it is a terrible product from a user experience perspective
That’s an implementation problem, not a technology problem. iPhone with AirPods here - your scenario just does not happen. There’s even an option for “yes be stupid and connect to my car even when I’m in the middle of a phone call” if you really want to use it…
I have two iPhones and a MBP. I have to keep Bluetooth disabled on the MacBook otherwise it randomly triggers while I'm between podcasts or whatever and squeeze the AirPods to resume, instead it launches Apple Music, or some browser tab starts playing audio.
This is far from solved if you have more than one Apple device.
There is no option for me to say: never use AirPods for anything but podcasts, and absolutely never automatically select them as an audio source for zoom/teams. AirPods microphones just don't work for my vocal range, they sound horrible and underwater. The microphone on my MBP works great, the mic on my iPhones works great.
AirPods are fine if you only ever use one device at a time. If you use more than one at the same time, it becomes extremely annoying.
Let's not even get into the annoying ways which it becomes hard to manage when you have multiple AirPods, multiple iPhones, and multiple MacBooks.
My partner is on a conference call, I hop in the car to go run an errand. Suddenly I'm on a conference call.
My partner is in the kitchen listening to a podcast, I hop in our other car and suddenly I'm listening to a podcast.
My partner is sitting in the car having a driveway moment, I arrive home with the other car and now I'm having her driveway moment.
My partner is on a conference call at her desk and picks up her phone to respond to a message and then you hear "shit shit shit, hold on a moment!" and then frantic typing and clicking.
The point is it doesn’t take giant tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz to move this volume. It could be handled by tanker trucks going to Suez….
You should be able to make a killing placing commodity bets right now, because you have such crystal clear vision for the causal chain currently underway
What are your top positions? You will never need to work again!
So frustrating when every conversation leads to R vs D. Doubly so in this situation since both bills that got us to where we are today had overwhelming BIPARTISAN support and were signed into law by presidents Clinton and Obama…
If individual party members voted against the party line more often there would be less of this kind of discourse. But the reality is that we have a deeply entrenched deeply divided two-party system. There are very few politicians who don't toe one line or the other and endure. But in this case it's a core tenet of the republican party platform to eliminate the administrative state, including strategic investment and reserves.
> And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM...
The Unified Memory Architecture is why these Macs are so fast—no wasted cycles moving data between RAM and GPU. And the data is compressed in real-time so less data has to be transferred and there's less ware and tear on the SSD, which is directly to SoC [1].
UMAs aren't made for speed, but for power savings. You are ignoring the fact that a discrete GPU accesses VRAM and caches at much higher bandwidths (and power) than an iGPU does RAM. Shared mem also comes at the cost of keeping it coherent between CPU/GPU. So you can't just look at one part of the system and then claim that UMAs must be faster because there are no data transfers.
And by the way, even on UMAs, the iGPU can still have a dedicated segment of memory not readable by the CPU. Therefore UMA does not imply there won't be data transfers.
That's not really a thing with Apple Silicon. The A series chips and the M series have the same CPU and GPU core designs.
Because you don't need to support Thunderbolt 4/5 controllers, PCIe lanes for NVMe storage, ProRes encode/decode engines (on Pro/Max/Ultra tiers) and multiple external displays in a device like a phone, Apple TV, or a HomePod these features are absent from A series chips.
The A17 Pro corresponds to the M3, the A18/A18 Pro corresponds to the M4 and the A19/A19 Pro corresponds to the M5. Same core design, different implementations.
It's not like Intel where there are many server processors, desktop processors and mobile processors. Apple uses the same core design they scale up or down as needed, for example the S series chips in the Apple Watch. The S9 is a scaled down A13 or A15.
I ah e not seen this play out in practice at all. In 25 years I’ve been at 8 tech companies, all of which came through connections.
None of those have had an insular bubble - typically you know a few people, and they each have worked with a few others, but unless you go all “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon” on it, none of these jobs look like what you’re describing.
100% of the jobs I’ve gotten in the past 25 years have been through current or former coworkers. Some have become friends, yes - but some were merely work acquaintances who knew first hand what I was capable of and wanted me on their team / in their company.
Don’t overthink this - I’m sure you’re great at what you do, and the people you work with and have worked with in the past know that you are.
>Telling an LLM to "refine" your writing is just lazy and it doesn't help you learn to express yourself better. Asking it for various ways of conveying something, and picking one that suits you when writing a comment is OK in my book.
To me those are the same thing excepting the number of options given to the human...
> Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts
That’s… well, that’s just not how tcp/ip works. Your phone number has nothing to do with your device IP…
reply