My work Mac is not signed into iCloud and the writing tools popup appeared when selecting text on it after updating to macOS 27. I disabled that in the Screen Time settings.

Seems like they think turning it off is only for kids’ devices. Perhaps they are missing the fact that many adults don’t want it either.

I’m curious what “many” means across billions of people.

Because I’d guess nearly everyone wants the new Siri to just be there and working.

I’m not sure. If given the choice in isolation, perhaps most people would be happy to sign up for the new Siri. When it’s a trade-off that requires 25 GB of storage for Apple Intelligence and sticks various unhelpful buttons on the keyboard, maybe fewer people want it.

And there is certainly also a contingent of young people (especially) who dislike generative AI on ideological/moral/environmental grounds. That group may be overrepresented online, but it does exist.

What have you found to be effective for you? I recently heard of this (basically Brick but open source and with any NFC tag or barcode), but I haven’t gotten a chance to test it out yet: https://www.foqos.app/

It would probably work on T-Mobile and maybe on Verizon, but it’s missing b14, b30, and b29 which are definitely required for AT&T (not to mention AT&T’s whitelist). Also weird that it doesn’t have any 5G FDD bands other than n71.

Edit: Verizon would also benefit from b48, although that may be optional.

The majority of the people in your address book probably store their contacts in iCloud but do not have Advanced Data Protection enabled, so their entire address books are held by Apple unencrypted. I wouldn't be surprised if most of my friends allow social media apps to read all their contacts, also.

I got the same feeling from the scene about the new Apple Watch features in the media event on Wednesday. Having a device listen to your conversations for you, so that you can avoid the hassle of having to ask someone to repeat themselves when you zone out, seems a little depressing to me. It makes Apple seem a little out of touch as well. (Are AI note taking "pins" and hardware devices really something people want? Why emulate them?)

In business it is very useful, especially when you have to do lots of context switches.

Yeah and maybe you can replay your own requests to Siri if it doesn't catch it the first time?

Yeah, few hours/days after the meeting about a minor detail... In a business settings meetings are routinely recorded and transcribed because everybody is just lazy.

In my experience in a Subaru, a Toyota, and a Volvo, it seems to be connected to the car's light sensor (so it triggers at the same time as the automatic headlights). A third-party head unit I've tried was just always light.

It's true that it's all packet-switched rather than circuit-switched, but IMS traffic is still handled differently than regular data traffic. (The most user-visible implication of this is the QCI difference: cellular phone calls are much more reliable at poor signal strength and high congestion than over-the-top VoIP calls).

Isn't that just basic QoS?

It's a totally parallel IP stack that's handled differently on the device and the base station hardware. Being on a call will affect what frequency bands your phone uses, handoff behavior, carrier aggregation, and other things that over the top calls like WhatsApp audio wouldn't.

Yes, circuit switched fallback was possible for a time (LTE data and circuit-switched 2G or 3G voice). I think 3GPP shouldn't have written that into the spec in the first place, but you know what they say about hindsight....

The whole saga with VoLTE was really quite entertaining: https://nickvsnetworking.com/background-to-the-volte-mess/

I’ve been looking for an MVNO cell phone plan in the U.S. that offers data at a max speed of 512 kbps (or something similar that is fast enough for most legitimate uses, but a little painful), and I haven’t found anything. Seems like an opportunity. However, I can waste plenty of time on sites like this one, and it is functional on a 16 kbps connection.