NEWS
iPhone 7 is on sale now (if you can find one)
iPhone 7 went on sale today and there was fuck all stock of the iPhone Plus. I went to the shithole Melton Telstra store which had none, then went to then went to the even bigger dump that is Melton JB Hi-Fi where the treacherous, vile and pathetic manager of the store lied to me that "there's plenty of iPhones mate" and when asked if he's sure they're iPhone Plus he said they are, but when the telco bloke came in he said there's no iPhone Plus and never was. Bastards, the lot of em. Anyways, this happened to the people first in line at the Sydney Apple Store and also this poor guy who slept out in a tent in Rundle Mall outside Adelaide's Apple Store. This is the first year I do not have an iPhone on launch day and it is upsetting. Looking at this currently in progress iFixit tear down will have to suffice.
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Senator Conroy quits parliament
Senator Stephen Conroy, the man who tried to filter Australia's internet access so kiddies don't see naked people, then kinda redeemed himself by spearheading the NBN before it was gimped by the awful Liberal government, has decided to retire. Adios mate. Bloke was in the Senate for 20 years. I'll miss his NBN Senate Inquiries, where when given the chance and some hard facts, he'd rip the incompetent and hapless NBN staff the Libs installed, new arseholes.
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Details on Mobileye leaving Tesla & Tesla install 80mWh of grid batteries in SoCal
Tesla's been in the news again, for two very different reasons. The main headline is that more details about their acrimonious split with Mobileye has come to light - via Mobileye's salty CTO. Basically, Mobileye were worried Tesla was using their tech irresponsibly in Autopilot, in ways it wasn't designed, and didn't want to be responsible for the inevitable deaths. The other news is that Tesla won a contract to supply the with 80mWh of batteries to Southern California Edison, to help with preventing blackouts in a certain part of SoCal due to the decommissioning of a leaky gas powerplant. Tesla will be able to hook all those batteries up in just 3 months, one of the main reasons it won the contract.
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Pandora introduces new subscription option & HBO Now comes to the PlayStation
Pandora has introduced a $5/m subscription called Pandora Plus. It'll let you skip more songs per hour than before, listen to songs again and support offline listening. Pandora Plus replaces Pandora One, which just removed ads. Now ads are gone and you get more flexibility to listen. Pandora fans will dig it. It'll also be releasing a $10/m option that will have on-demand music, like Spotify or Apple Music.. Also, HBO announced that it's popular Now service will roll out to the PS3 and PS4 soon. Fire up the VPN/smart DNS proxy thingo!
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Samsung struggling with Note 7 recall in the USA
While Apple is knocking this smartphone thing out of the park, Samsung is still struggling to recall all its Note 7 phones. The American boss of Samsung has made a "if you're watching this, I have been assassinated" style video to implore people to send in their ticking time bomb phones, whilst reassuring those with good phones that theirs won't spontaneously combust near their crotch. Meanwhile, only 130,000 out of the one million or so impacted by the dodgy batteries in the USA, have been returned to Samsung. It might help that only today, has Samsung made the US recall official. Very bad optics, even if the problem itself isn't that huge or serious, if it was handled properly and quickly. Note how quiet Apple is about this, versus Samsung when Apple has an widespread issue with the iPhone...
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COOL SHIT
$799 Aldi TV vs. $9000 LG OLED TV
Old mate Campbell over at GizAU has put one of those $799 Aldi 4K TVs that go on sale tomorrow side by side with an LG OLED $9000 unit. Out of the box it was a bit shite, but after some tweaking, it managed to look pretty damn good, right next to a TV that costs over 9 times the price. I fucken love Aldi. If you need a new TV get on it tomorrow morning and grab a carton of milk or some toilet paper whilst you're there. Hopefully Aldi has a few of the teles in stock so there aren't any riots.
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Touch disease is killing heaps of iPhone 6 Plusses
I've heard of this before, but haven't seen an article as good as this one explaining "Touch Disease" on the iPhone 6 Plus. Apparently there's a design flaw in the 6 Plus that puts the chips responsible for detecting your fingers on the screen, in a bad spot that is prone to flexing and over time, destroying those chips. When the chips that detect touch stop working, your phone is essentially a brick. Apple hasn't been assisting out of warranty 6 Plus owners with this, despite rumors of about 11% of all 6 Plus phones coming into their stores having this issue. Looks like it's been a boon for independent repair joints though, as they've been able to fix the issue cheaper than what Apple can. It'll be interesting to see if Apple do a recall on this like they did with the shitty series of MacBook Pros with stuffed Nvidia graphics cards.
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Camera news from Leica and Canon
A little bit of camera news for ya. Leica has made a cute little camera with a built in printer, much like a Polaroid. It's probably just a re-badged Fuji Instax, but it's a Leica! It'll be US$299 and be out in November, so look for it on the neck of your local cashed up hipster soon enough (though I think it is cool and I would like one too). Canon have made a new mirror-less camera, the EOS M5, that's basically a Canon 80D without the SLR bits to compete with the Sony a6300. And for some weekend reading for pixel peepers, there's a classic big ol' review on DP Review of the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. It looks like a ball-tearer of an SLR.
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Here endeth the sizzle (until Monday! Go Doggies, fuck those Hawks up!)
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Today's subject line is from The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right), by The Smashing Pumpkins. Like The Sizzle? Tell your friends!