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I’ve been quite busy of late – hence the lack of new posts – but you’re about to see why. Let’s start off with a joke, one that I found whilst doing a bit of research and made me laugh like a drain:

“I thought Screwfix was a dating agency.”

I’ve always found online dating to be a massive pain in the arse. It really is a massive, massive pain in the rear end. It’s incredibly expensive, it’s potentially dodgy as hell, and the level of satisfaction is incredibly low.

These sites are rarely well managed by the site owners, who will be more than happy to take your money but provide a substandard service in return. You’re likely to be scammed left, right and centre, and you’ll encounter many, many, many, many time wasters. And when you do encounter somebody, their messaging skills are dire or they just don’t want to be bothered to respond even with a simple, “thanks, but no thanks”.

My main advice would be to check out rating services such as Trustpilot and Money Saving Expert before you even think of handing over any money for a subscription since almost all of these services will force you into a contract and will make you pay some or all of that contract in the form value compensation even if you cancel for ANY reason within 14 days. Yet, these sites make the free tier almost impossible to use without a subscription. There’s no point in it being free. You can’t do anything. I got caught out by eHarmony (as have many, many, many others) – but the other sites were very reasonable all things considered. Check those terms and conditions like a hawk.

Online dating is not the faint of heart. But I have tried many of the UK’s most popular brands over a three week period to find out which one would likely to attract a long term subscription from me. The answer to that is none of them. These are my notes:

Match.com

Given how prolific this service is, it probably hosts the most comprehensive number of profiles of any service (with the exception of Plenty of Fish), but it’s definitely not without a good number of scammers either.  Within hours, had to report at least one possible scammer.  Can’t stop people outside the UK looking at your profile.  Honoured 14-day refund period.  Problems include uploading photos.  

One thing to note: they really do want you to upload recent photographs, and one way they will check and enforce this is by scanning the EXIF metadata of any photo being uploaded.  They do this to make sure that the creation date of the photograph falls within a one or two year period of whatever today’s date is.  As I don’t take too many selfies and my appearance tends to remain the same, I tend to use a photo I had taken at work a while back which is a couple of years old,.  So when the photo was initially rejected, I manipulated the EXIF data and fixed the date so that it appeared to have been taken the same day as the upload.  I re-uploaded and it was accepted.  I’m not suggesting everybody should do this, but it’s one way of getting around the automated moderation if you really, really want to use a particular photo.

Tinder

Super expensive, especially when “boosting” your profile.  More catered for the younger crowd – too many “pouting” pictures alongside boob shots and women in their underwear – something that wouldn’t be allowed on other services.  User interface is a pain in the arse and unfriendly.  Apple honoured refund.

Plenty of Fish

A very comprehensive number of profiles – possibly more so than Match.com.  But it’s super expensive, especially when you have to pay extra for profile boosts.  But even worse is the user interface which is extremely buggy on the web version, with messages being mixed up with Plenty of Fish’s own mailbox at times – refreshing the page fixes it.  A lot more scamming going on.  Twice I encountered (quite possible the same scammer) with a profile containing photos of a nice lady – except the profile claims to be a 49-year-old man who is blonde (the lady in the pictures was dark-haired).  Plenty of Fish honoured the refund request.

eHarmony

Can’t stop people from outside the UK looking at your profile (though you can stop them contacting you).  Attempted to fix grammar mistake with profile (apostrophes out of place) which was rejected by “customer service” (no additional content was added, and previous edit was absolutely fine.  Absolutely bloody useless customer service as a result.  That said, they have the most stable and better designed UI than the other dating sites.  One doesn’t “boost” the profile to as far and wide, rather you use their algorithm for match compatibility which seems to work pretty well and gets a decent number of views.  Messaging is relatively straight forward – and well designed.  However,  giving “compliments” on parts of a profile are a lot more complex than it seems – what generally should start conversations usually is a massive non-starter.  

The 14-day statutory right to a refund is essentially negated if you pay for Premium Membership which pretty much the only thing you can do to make ANY sense or use of the service (which applies to pretty much any dating service – the free membership is useless).  Even then, they will deduct a further fee for “value compensation” (which is mentioned in the terms and conditions) due to your use of the Premium Membership – essentially charging £130 for the “scientific” match report.  But, at the goodness of their hearts. they will half the fee and deduct the first month’s fee from that.  I ended up paying £65 for a service which did not live up to expectations.  On the other hand, I am no longer tied to the contract.  

The report fee is not mentioned in the terms and conditions which is publicly available on the site and is sent as a PDF to you after you placed the order (which brings down your subscription costs too).  They claim the £130 *is* mentioned prior to placing the order, but I do not recall this, and when pushed to prove that it’s there, I got no response.  I’ve filed a complaint with the CMA (Competition Markets Authority) over eHarmony’s lack of transparency.  Visiting Trustpilot will show many, many, many people have been caught out by this fee, and even eHarmony’s very own Facebook page has scores of people following up their own posts complaining about the value compensation fee.  This suggests to me either the company is deliberately hiding behind it, or are completely bloody useless and doesn’t give a toss.  eHarmony were forced to pay a $1.2 million fee and $1 million in restitution after a variety of renewal related chaos:

Dating site slapped with big fine for automatic renewals, denied refunds

and here in the UK, eHarmony got in a lot of trouble with the UK Advertising Standards Agency for their adverts:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/03/online-dating-ad-banned-scientific-claims-dismissed-fake-news/

Encounters Dating

This one is very much up front about refunds – you pay and use the service immediately, you remain in contract.  No refunds.  So I signed up for one month only to get a feel, then can let the thing run out.  I feel it’s fine to compensate a dating site for at least one month’s of service if they really insist on it.  

Problems included one “fan”‘s subscription running out and not being able to contact me, but would write when she renewed her subscription – either it was a scheme for me to “gift” a subscription to her, or just to tell me to bugger off (which would have been simpler).  Another fan, I’m sure, was merely a mistake.   Then there was another that had locked her profile down so much there were too many non-negotiable elements that it made it impossible for me to contact her.  All pictures were hidden and you’d have to ask.  So she was immediately blocked – why waste somebody’s time like that?  There’s no method of boosting a profile, but they seem more relaxed with photographs and profile statements versus others.  

I  noticed that Encounters Dating seem to cater for the more mature side – given its association with the Telegraph you can expect plenty of people 45 years and up and with a more conservative view.

Overall / Conclusion

Each site needs to introduce stricter verification processes to deter fraud and scamming.  If this means a credit check against the account owner, alongside manual verification of ID, so be it.  A few of these sites offer a phone verification which is displayed alongside a user’s profile, but not everybody does this – it’s entirely optional.

The cost of subscriptions is pretty damn outrageous with the likes of Tinder. Match and Plenty of Fish charging eye popping fees to pimp (maybe the wrong choice of word there) your profile to everybody.  To give some context, I pay Google £15.30 a month to access their *Enterprise* email and workspace (Docs, Drive and Presentation) product.  I have 24/7 round the clock support for business critical outages or problems.  I also pay £11.99/month for YouTube Premium which does away with adverts and provides downloads via the YouTube app for offline viewing.

£15.30 + £11.99 = £27.29

This is still CONSIDERABLY cheaper than any of the monthly (or even of the many other quarterly, bi-annually or annual) subscription costs for dating sites.  The support will be considerably worse off.  You’ll more than likely get scammers.  And if you don’t like it – especially after 14 days – you’ll either to pay off the remainder of your subscription or a hefty value compensation fee.

My general thinking is maybe we need to stop with all this algorithm nonsense and go back to the old fashioned match making systems of old – e.g. humans behind the matching process.  I was amazed when watching an unlikely dating show, The Undateables, just how *nice* it would be to have that human contact when setting up a profile and throughout the whole process.   Plus it gives a sense of security and verification to the proceedings.  But this would come with even high costs than what is on offer now (I estimate around £600+ a year) – and, of course, trying to deal with hundreds of thousands of profiles would be impossible.  

Another issue I have with these online dating services is that most of the women I have some conversation with just can’t go beyond the length of simple text messaging.  I’m fine with talking of course, but I need to engage and get a sense of the person through their writing first.  I was complimented once, long in the distant past, by somebody who said that I had at least taken the time to compose my messages which weren’t along the lines of “ugg, urgh, yes, no. or want to see my dick pics?” (Nobody EVER wants to see my photos of Dick Van Dyke or Dick Strawbridge – they’re very good!  Similarly, I never get to see photos of their tits.  Blue Tits, Bearded Tits, Crested Tits, Great Tits, etc. Definitely no beaver pictures either. They’re nature’s greatest construction workers. 

Well, with jokes like that, no wonder I’m still single. I think all this dating malarky has driven me mad.

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Thanks to a very kind poster in this MacRumours forum, you can get the three month’s free Fitness+ trial (rather than the one month offered despite having bought a new Apple Watch after September 15th) simply by unpairing your Apple Watch after upgrading to iOS 14.3 and WatchOS 7.2 and re-pairing them again. Then go to the Fitness app on the iPhone and click the Fitness+ tab – you’ll then get the 3-month offer.

This does mean that you’ll have to do some setting up of the Watch again, but I tried this myself after spending over an hour on the phone to Apple Support trying to fix this thing and getting nowhere with them. Thankfully it worked, and I’m now going to put it through its paces over the next few months because I bloody need to get into shape.

The whole experience of trying to get this trial was incredibly frustrating. Apple demanded I give them proof of purchase despite this being a Series 6 watch which only launched after September 15th. It was activated by me on the 17th September and I bought AppleCare+ for it on the 19th. Besides which, this is a Watch provided by a carrier so I don’t have proof of purchase as such – but EE weren’t helping by not updating the plan page with the correct device – they seem to think I still have an Apple Watch Series 4.

Honestly, Apple’s quality control is slipping again.

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.. because Apple has introduced what appears to be a bug whereby you can’t change refresh rates. My BenQ EX2780Q monitor has been working absolutely fine with my MacBook Pro 16″ Core i9 since I bought both earlier this year. It worked fine with Catalina, and it worked fine with version 11.01 of Big Sur (the first full public release of Big Sur).

ALAS!

After updating to 11.1, I was in full resolution with the external monitor, but I couldn’t set the refresh and it enabled HDR mode. Rebooted. Couldn’t get full resolution no matter what I tried. Rebooted again. Bingo. It worked, but subsequent reboots only ever bring the display down to 60Hz – way down from 144Hz. Unplugging the monitor and plugging it back in again seems to fix the issue, but this isn’t a very elegant solution.

This appears to be a bug brought forward from the 11.1 betas.

One thing I’ve found that helps – start the MacBook Pro without the monitor turned on. When the system boots into Finder, switch the monitor on and close the MacBook Pro lid. As this bug seems to randomly change resolutions, you may be in a much lower resolution than expected – but you should find that you can change the resolution and the refresh rate.

However, if you leave you MacBook Pro on and switch the monitor off to have a bit of a break, you’ll come back to find that the monitor has changed resolution and refresh rate again, possibly requiring a reboot.

You’ll also find that it takes much longer for the MBP or monitor to switch resolution versus Big Sur 11.01 or even Catalina.

This is by far one of the worst bugs I’ve encountered with macOS in over a year – and I sincerely hope that Apple fixes it soon. I’ve already filed a report with them via Apple Support and if you’re experiencing this same issue, I strongly suggest doing the same.

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Oh, they look nice.

Poddy? Perhaps. But to the Max? Definitely.

*Clicks on the buy button to see how much they are*

Nope.

I remember when you could buy an entire Hi-Fi unit + more for that price

I take my headphones very seriously, but even for Apple, this is a spicy meatball of price tag. I’m glad it features their Spatial Audio technology which really does work extremely well with the AirPods Pro (we have a naming convention problem here, I feel). But the biggest concern I have with Spatial Audio is that it only currently works with iPhone and iPads. Not Macs, not Apple TVs.

I recently watched a video the other day of a headphone system that provides full Dolby Atmos surround sound:

Looking up the price, it’s around £1,000. And you’re limited to the equipment it’s connected to. Apple has the chance here to give JVC a big massive headache and implement its Spatial Audio (which is Dolby Atmos compatible) on the Apple TV and Mac – so that people can enjoy music and video content in comfort rather than watching something on their iPhones up close, or on their iPads. You’re not getting the best experience there. A big TV is where it should be.

What I also like about Apple’s approach to their own headphones – removable earpads/cushions. Their Beats 3 products were utter crap, with the earpads deteriorating over time. I also had to replace one set of headphones after it stopped charging – all the way in Edinburgh. So much for portability and reliability!

Beats 3 Solo Wireless (white) and Beats 3 Wired (blue) headphones and the lacklustre earpads. Lousy 2-year warranty too.

I’d want to see at least a 3 – 4 year warranty with the AirPods Max, but alas the buggers only provide a 2-year warranty – but it’s likely to be better than their Beats branded crap. The same applies to iPhones – Apple only allows for an extended two-year warranty on a device that should last much longer than that. Even more outrageous when you consider the self-repairability factor with these devices. Well, let’s hope that any replacement cushions are reasonably priced because if not, *slaps Apple firmly around the Cox’s Pippin*.

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Just look at it – all smug and trying to be useful. But it has other plans..

Apple are well known for being stingy buggers under the guise for doing their bit for the world, but their new MagSafe Duo is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY taking the Michael. Extraordinary so.

It can also charge a wireless AirPods/AirPods Pro case too.

Not only is this an expensive accessory, but for a charger, you don’t even get the charging brick included. Just a cable. AND THAT FRIGGING CABLE IS TOO SHORT. I can’t run the thing from my desk because the desk height is greater than the pathetic 1-metre cable supplied by Apple. So you had better make sure that your desk comes with built-in power sockets, or use a third-party USB-C to Lightning that’s the right length. Apple does sell a 2 metre Lightning to USB-C cable, but that’ll cost you £35. They can seriously go and do something unmentionable. If Apple weren’t so frigging up its own arse about Lightning, I could have used a spare USB-C to USB-C cable from an old Apple laptop (at least I’m trying to recycle), but I have no Lightning to USB-C cables that are longer than 1 metre.

Apple, you’ve mucked this up.

There be magnets, but they’re still weak so it’s a still a pain to find the right position, negating any benefit of MagSafe.

In terms of charging and overall use, I found it rather difficult aligning my iPhone 12 Pro Max with Apple silicone case against the MagSafe charging coils. The magnets aren’t very strong, but even so, I did find it a bit of a challenge removing the phone FROM the base when I needed to pick it up. You do kind of need to touch the charger unit itself to gently pry from the charger.

But I have also discovered that my Deep Navy Apple silicone case is getting a touch of the MagSafe burn-in on the back; a circle matching the charging coils that surround the Apple logo. Apple has gone on record to say that this is normal if you leave the phone in a case. Why wouldn’t I keep it in the case while charging? Who the hell is product managing this crap?

Well, as I’ve just found out, wiping the case with a microfibre cloth reduces the visibility of the circle – but it’s still present, albeit it very faintly.

Ring-a-ring o’ MagSafe, a pocket full of Mysterons..

Will it be useful when travelling? Oh yes, undoubtedly. As a desktop charger, without a longer USB-C to Lightning cable included, it’s a seriously taking liberties. Even more, so is the lack of the charging brick.

My score: 3.5/10

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As somebody whose responsibilities including looking after the work laptop fleet, I must occasionally risk boldly going forward to find out how well a brand new operating system fares within our ecosystem. In this case, I’m using my own MacBook Pro 16″ which shipped with macOS Catalina.

Catalina was a buggy mess, but it was well supported. It was the last of the macOS X line of operating systems. We’re now on macOS 11, and Big Sur is the first of its kind to support both Intel and Apple Silicon M1 processors. Which is just as well as I expect to use this Intel MacBook Pro for another three to four years at least. But with a major new operating system release comes a tonne of problems, and macOS Big Sur is no exception.

I had to fire my firewall, Little Snitch. It’s a very useful application for determining what network traffic is coming in and out of my Mac, as well as being able to block any suspicious traffic from potentially rogue applications. I had been using version 4, but because of architectural changes within Big Sur, it wouldn’t work. So it’s a paid upgrade to version 5. But there is no trial. I’d have liked to have had a trial to be able to get used to Big Sur and ensure the effectiveness of Little Snitch, but it’s an all or nothing approach. So I kicked Little Snitch to the curb, for now, and rely on Big Sur’s own internal firewall.

Then there was anti-virus software. As this is my own machine, I’ve been using Sophos Home Premium for a while. It’s very effective, doesn’t use up many system resources – though I thoroughly dislike the need for a web UI – makes it difficult to keep multiple users separate/private and a pain in the arse if you’ve offline. At work, we use the commercial Sophos Intercept-X product. In both cases, at the launch of Big Sur, they were not compatible. But at the time of installing Big Sur (a few weeks after the launch), Home Premium had announced a compatible, but feature-reduced version. Alas, I found problems with it and had to uninstall. Intercept-X has only just opened an Early Access Program, but I’m going to wait until they release a supported build which should be sometime early 2021.

I tried Norton 360 Premium, which seems good value for £50 to support 10 devices and has very good anti-virus test scores. It is Big Sur compatible, but (a) there is no Mac support for the 75Gb cloud storage that comes with the package (that I could see) and (b) the scanning component uses significant resources – it completely froze my machine several times and took up 90% of overall system resources, causing the fans on the MacBook Pro to spin up to full power. It also wanted to install 20 billion Chrome extensions which caused quite a few problems. So that had to go.

I have an active BitDefender Total Security subscription for Mac and PC, but my problem with BitDefender has been that the UI hasn’t been updated in years and still requires Chrome and Safari extensions to be effective when browsing the web – with the changes to Chrome, everything looks horrible when searching with Google. BitDefender is much better under Windows, and I often feel the Mac version is a bit of an afterthought.

I finally settled on a temporary solution until Sophos Home Premium is fully supported – Malwarebytes Premium for the Mac. It provides realtime malware and ransomware protection and doesn’t use any significant resources at all. It’s Big Sur compliant too. There’s a decent Chrome extension which helps stop trackers and adverts along with any other malicious web malarky. It’s definitely a step up from BitDefender’s extension, I must say. Best of all it cost me just £12.49 for a year of protection thanks to a Black Friday promotion.

Then we have VMWare Fusion Pro 12. I use this to run both Windows and Linux. Linux especially because we have a number of scripts which FreeBSD’s built-in shell commands decide to interpret a little differently. Things were running initially fine until I installed VMWare Fusion Pro 12.1, then I suffered a number of network-related issues with the NAT configuration. I could use the Linux VM just fine if I didn’t connect to the company VPN, but if I was connected, I was unable to do several things which are vital for my role. I had to switch to Parallels Desktop 16 which works flawlessly with or without the company VPN being connected. Networking architecture has changed with Big Sur, and it looks like Parallels managed to figure it out before VMware.

In more general areas, I’ve found macOS Big Sur to have problems with image thumbnails. Thumbnails from other images cropped up from time to time, confusing the heck out of me. It’s as if Big Sur is being too aggressive caching system files. I thought that one possible solution to this is would be to delete the .DS_Store file in the directory and let the OS regenerate the thumbnails again. But this doesn’t seem to last long before the problem comes back. This tends to occur when using encrypted APFS-formatted DMG files.

Bluetooth seems to be another problem. I tend to leave my Mac running throughout the day, and on the occasion when I leave it to nap, returning to the machine is fine – but randomly the £150 Apple wireless “Magic” keyboard will stop responding (and occasionally the Logitech MX Master 3 mouse too). The mouse tends to recover fairly quickly, but the keyboard doesn’t. It means that I have to restart the Mac to get the keyboard working again – turning the keyboard on and off doesn’t work, neither does the Bluetooth Control Centre controls.

I’ve also experienced major internet connectivity slowdowns. My MacBook Pro is wired up to the router directly and yesterday I found I was getting only 150Mbs max via the Mac, and 500Mbs with the iPhone 12 Pro Max. I restarted the Mac and everything was fine again.

I’m also not keen on the new menu bar fonts – and spacing between the menu bar icons either. It feels too much like a Linux distribution (I’ve always disliked Linux on the desktop, and fonts have always been a problem for me as part of that) rather than a high-scale Mac desktop.

Do I recommend people start using macOS Big Sur now? Absolutely not. Hold off for a month or two, because this is a very unpolished OS and is absolutely not ready for the prime time if you’re a sysadmin or developer.

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Yesterday a friendly DPD driver dropped off this year’s new Apple flagship iPhone, the iPhone 12 Pro Max. As mentioned previously, I had intended on only going for the smaller iPhone 12 Pro, but while I was waiting I was thinking about if I really wanted a smaller phone given that for the past goodness knows how many years I’ve always gone big. That, and there was stock available during launch day, whereas the iPhone 12 Pro stock was still very much depleted. Still, I was prepared to wait even if there was a delay.

But now I have the phone in my hands (waiting on the MagSafe case to arrive today – despite how lovely this thing feels without a case, I want some kind of protection against potential knocks and drops), it is, of course, Apple’s best iPhone ever. And it will be until the iPhone 13 next year.

The new (yet old), iPhone 5-like design of the unit makes for a better grip, with the display sitting flush with the unit. This makes the display look even better than the previous generation, with an increased resolution and brightness (when viewing HDR content) over the iPhone 11 Pro Max giving it a much nicer display to work with than the previous model. The resolution to scale ratio is just right – with text clean and crisp and everything easy to read. The side buttons are clickier, providing better feedback than before.

The camera unit on the back of the phone is a little bigger than the 12 Pro. This is likely to accommodate the sensor-shift stabilisation unit along with the bigger image sensor. As many reviewers have noted, even with the bigger sensor and sensor-shift, there is a negligible improvement over the 12 Pro, but the differences are there. The biggest improvement over the 11 Pro Max is that, according to Apple’s claim, is that low-light photography is improved 87% over the previous generation iPhone. That certainly seems to be the case on photos that I’ve seen, but I need to do my own testing to really be sure. As for Dolby Vision video recording – that stays off since apart from the iPhone 12 Pro Max and the 2020 iPad Pro, I have no other compatible displays (my monitor can only handle HDR10 content).

Starting the iPhone 12 Pro Max, with its new A14 Bionic processor/SoC is considerably faster than than the previous generation. I was surprised how fast it was, actually, having switched the thing on and put the phone down to give it enough time to boot – I hadn’t bothered – it booted so fast that it had finished by the time I’d put the phone down. This generation of iPhone 12 Pro (and Max) come with 2Gb of extra RAM, bringing it up to 6Gb in total. This should help with app switching – which for me, whenever I start commuting again, is going to be a big help.

The Qualcomm X55 modem in this unit which replaces the Intel modems that Apple have been using up until this point is a nippy little bugger. I’ve definitely noticed improvements on home Wi-Fi (802.11ac) and some improvements to 4G. Alas, I’m not in an area where we have 5G coverage, but hopefully I should be able to test over the Christmas period. All I can say right now, is that even without 5G, thank goodness Apple and Qualcomm kissed and made up. Never fight again!

The only issues I’ve encountered with the phone at this time have been trying to sync up with Google Workspace account to use its contacts list. For some stupid reason – either Google or Apple let me authenticate and then it just throws me back to picking a service provider again. I suspect this may be an iOS 14.2 bug – but in the mean time, I’ve exported all my contacts from Google to iCloud and that works well enough – though if you have custom fields you may need to recreate the contact.

EE’s Full Works plan is rather nice – unlimited, full speed data each month including personal hotspot allowance which is unlimited, but fair use rules apply – for example, EE consider 1Tb to be beyond fair use, naturally, which is never going to be a problem for me – I only use hotspot when I can’t get a decent Wi-Fi signal and it’s only going to be into the two-digit figures at most. Additionally, I get Apple Music, Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade for free for 24 months. I’m still waiting to see if Apple gives me a free year Apple TV+ for “purchasing” the iPhone 12 Pro Max. They certainly extended the Apple Arcade subscription by an extra three months on top of the 24 month, so I’ve got a fair old amount of time with it.

So far so good with the new phone. Transferring authentication apps across has been better than it used to be, but was still a massive pain in the rear end. A more detailed report may follow, especially regarding the camera system.

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If there is one thing that can be said about the modern internet is that it’s really reduced people’s tolerance levels. Once, long ago, these people had the patience of saints. Now? “Offence, offence, offence! Cancel this, cancel that! I am truly offended by what you say!” Or, “I want this thing yesterday, and I want you to tell me exactly where it is at all times, down to the microsecond, or I’ll cancel the order and will go elsewhere! You’re a bunch of useless bastards, I hate all of you, you incompetent Schweinehunds!” (Said person subsequently orders elsewhere and the same problem occurs – repeats outrage until they get a heart attack or achieve spontaneous human combustion).

WHERE’S MY GADGET? WHERE IS IT? GIVE IT TO ME, YOU BUGGERS!
GLOBAL PANDEMIC? LOCKDOWNS? JOB LOSSES? WHAT ARE THEY THEN?

To put it simply – people have about as much tolerance as a poodle has for a cement mixer.

The latest outrage is people buying iPhone 12 (Pro)s. Given that we’re still in a global pandemic and that manufacturing has been affected as a result – it’s not any great surprise to anyone that there are maybe fewer units available at launch day/week/month than usual. A supply constraint. Add to that fewer stores open, add to that fewer employees working (both online and in-store), and add to that we’re about to enter a second national lockdown.

And yet people are raging about delivery times, orders going wrong and being sent back to the DPD/EE warehouse and having to wait again as their phone is allocated to somebody else.

There’s me, trying to arrange a delivery slot with a major supermarket for basics such as food and toiletries, and finding practically all the slots full for the coming week.

I too have ordered an iPhone 12 Pro from EE, but unlike most people, I am waiting patiently – occasionally checking the order, but otherwise willing to wait however long it takes to receive the phone ( a week, two weeks, a month – whatever). I already have a terrifically decent phone to be getting on with until it does. If I find it gets sent back – no problem, mistakes are made – just you try working out logistics at this scale in this challenging environment – and we can resolve it and carry on. Patiently.

If we’re going to have any more World Wars (or more even deadlier global pandemics), it’ll be thanks to the internet, social media companies and the press that gets people killed. Maybe it’s about time that we disconnect a little more and spend more time looking at what’s more important than TikToks, YouTubes and what Kayne West is saying now on Twitter.

Introducing the iPhone 12.5 – a brick. It’s quite literally a brick (but in multiple colours). Can be used with other iPhone 12.5’s to make a house, or any other kind of building. Can’t be used to make calls, take photographs or video, connect to the internet or even play music or video. It’s a brick. Environmentally friendly because it doesn’t need charging. (Cue 20,000 YouTube videos covering the iPhone 12.5, determining how strong a brick actually is – and building houses with it.)

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So, I’ve just placed my order with EE for the iPhone 12 Pro. Not the iPhone 12 Pro Max, but the regular 6.1″ iPhone 12 Pro.

Over the past few years when I’ve been on EE’s Annual Upgrade plan, I’ve always gone for the bigger phone which usually (but not always) had the better camera system, along with the bigger screen and battery. It’s fine, but the unit is always a bit bulky and there have been times when I’ve nearly dropped the darn thing. But with the iPhone X, that was a good size.

So I’m opting for the smaller size this year. But this also means I’m going to be missing out on better camera features such as a 47% bigger image sensor, bigger camera pixels and sensor-shift stabilisation. These are only available on the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

In this time of Covid, with all these lockdowns, I don’t need them. I’m not going on holiday, I generally stay indoors. If I go out it’s to run errands. What am I going to need a 47% bigger image sensor and a wider aperture for? When we all enter tier 2, tier 3 and maybe even a national lockdown – none of that extra stuff is going to matter.

The iPhone 12 Pro already has an incredible camera system bolstered by the A14 system-on-a-chip. The machine learning/neural processing unit has seen a substantial upgrade which gives computational photography a major boost. There’s the ability to record video in Dolby Vision HDR, but as I don’t have a Dolby Vision TV or monitor – that’s completely useless to me, and besides which, even if I had a compatible TV, it’s unlikely to be compatible because Apple is using the very latest specification of Dolby Vision which many TVs won’t be using – and may not be upgradeable to – they’ve overshot themselves here – if you display DV content on a non-compatible device, it’ll look washed out unless you were to do some major manual colour grading.

Just take a look at what can be achieved using the video capabilities of the iPhone 12 Pro (not Max). This is playlist with some incredible footage taken by the phone:

Then there is the photography aspect. So many reviews – and almost all of them extremely positive. Austin Mann’s review is of particular interest.

So I’m happy with everything this is for now. Maybe next year when the iPhone 13 Pro Max is released with even more features I’d be tempted to move back to the bigger size – hopefully by then we’ll have made some progress with regards to a vaccine and being able to move about a bit more freely.

Full review as and when I get the unit. I’ve opted for the Pacific Blue colour, and the Dark Navy MagSafe case. The EE Plan I’ve gone for this year is the Full Works which includes Apple Music, Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade bundled (saving me a bit of money each month), unlimited data (was previously 100Gb) and, of course, 5G coverage (which isn’t available here in Woking as yet).