Apple killed the headphone jack. The iPhone 7 has no 3.5mm port — a 138-year-old connector, deprecated on stage, and the marketing chief actually used the word “COURAGE,” which the internet will never, ever let die. The replacement bet is AirPods: $159 wireless earbuds that look like cigarette butts and, per everyone who’s tried them, work like actual magic (the W1 pairing chip is the real product). My take, on the record: in two years the jack outrage will be forgotten and every phone will copy this, because Apple doesn’t remove ports first so much as remove them LOUDEST. (See: floppy, CD drive, every port on the MacBook. The obituary is always premature and always eventually true.)
Samsung, meanwhile, is living the opposite launch: Galaxy Note 7 units are CATCHING FIRE — battery defect, global recall of 2.5 million phones, airlines making announcements about a PHONE MODEL by name. A hardware bug with no hotfix, no rollback, only reverse logistics. Every ounce of my sympathy for hardware engineers, who live without my favorite luxury: the redeploy.
EPL is back; Pep Guardiola vs Jose Mourinho in the Manchester derby is the story around the story, and the tactical discourse has fully left the sports page. Fantasy PL draft complete: Null Pointer Exception, year four, one goalkeeper, all business.
TIL: lithium-ion failure modes — dendrites, separator defects, thermal runaway. “Battery fire” is a cascade failure (#037) at the electrochemical layer. Everything is systems.