Yeah I bought a Magic Mouse 2 earlier this year and regretted it instantly. Apple need to stop thinking outside of the box when it comes to mice.

You’re right about the positioning as well. If you have a full size Apple keyboard the trackpad is too far away always. If you have the compact layout Apple keyboard it’s too much of a compromise with keys.

Best outcome for me was turfing the lot and the Mac and getting a Logitech mouse and a TKL layout cherry MX red based keyboard. So much better.

I’m sorry but the Apple input devices are inferior even to the lowest grade no brand stuff from Aliexpress at this point.

I'm happy with the compact Apple keyboards in general, but when I got an iMac Pro at work I wanted to try out its full-sized keyboard since it is nice to have all of those extra keys. To keep the trackpad closer, I decided to put it on the left.

I normally use my right, so it took a few days to get used to it, but I quickly became fluent and the arrangement works much better. I also like it since it balances out my hands a bit more instead of doing absolutely everything with my right.

The standard Model M layout is a left-handed keyboard layout. It was a right-handed keyboard layout when the Model M came out in 1984 and very few PC users had a mouse or any kind of pointing device. But for over 25 years it's been a left-handed layout and no-one has done anything in response, because so much of computing is now a cargo cult.

Yes. Similar experiences. Basically the position I ended up in was mandatorily selling out to Oracle with no other choice on the table. The key purchasing decision was whether Sun or HP got to bugger us for hardware. This was loudly shouted out to drown out the “why do we need oracle” question. This took months of noise and pretendering (pretend tendering) and all sorts of meetings where no one knew anything about anything that was being required. But everyone was doing Six Sigma of course do the cargo culting was justified by process. Eventually HP was pulled out of the hat because someone saw a nice shiny sales brochure.

In the end, £1m down the shitter, 9 web pages written in JSP backed with a full 42U rack HP/UX crate running oracle was seen as a success. The whole platform was scrap in three years. each http request made cost £83 in the end ($100ish).

And that’s defence spending in a nutshell.

No one says a thing to stop this happening.

This is the thinly veiled next round of Trump vs Bezos by the sounds.

Hint: There are no winners.

Correct. Although it’s possible on older handsets with 3.5 jack that the audio amplifier in the handset itself is possible to receive. I’m not sure about lightning.

But I very much doubt at the stated range. The EMC guys would be all over that.

I suspect that’s unlikely from my own experiences on this stuff. Perhaps 20-40cm is more likely.

If you are disregarding that detail of the story, why not dismiss the author outright?

I am disregarding the whole thing. The author knows nothing of EMC. This is expected at close quarters.

Why would you assume that his experiences and yours are the same?

It’s physics. There is EMC testing done on these devices. There is little opinion involved in such matters.

You've clearly never done EMC testing, if you think there's no opinion involved in such matters.

You might as well say "It's software engineering. There's no opinion involved..."

I have, in defence sector.

Interesting. I've never done defense. What was it like?

In the real world (non-defense), I did this once in my life. We went to and independent testing laboratory (actually the premier / highest-regarded one) with our device. They put it outside, pointed a big antenna at it, and it didn't pass. We made some random changes (adding shielding of some kind somewhere; the lab had it on-hand). Things ... changed. Sometimes they got better. Sometimes they got worse. We didn't know whether we were changing, or simply the radiation patterns to better match the test setup.

We kept making tweaks like that until it passed, and that was our final, independently lab-certified product design.

If we had tested at a slightly different angle, I'm pretty sure we would not have passed. Or in a different lab. It was deep voodoo. From what the lab guys said, EMC testing almost always looks like that.

I believed them. We can't really solve Maxwell's Equations in our head, and we know so little about antenna design that predicting the radiation from a complex device is not really possible. You just tweak, adding a gasket here or ferrite bead or whatever, and pray it works. Most of the small tweaks we did at the lab, but I do recall we did some larger design change (making a signal differential or something) which necessitated going to the lab a second time with a device with a new PCB.

That’s about it for commercial stuff. The trick is really managing it pre-compliance which amounts to renting a signal analyser / SA / measurement receiver and going at it with a near field probe to avoid having to pay for it more than once. Rigol do some adequate kit for less than your mugging from a leasing company now. As for the lab guys they don’t have a tight loop with the design engineers when you are going for compliance testing.

We used stuff in defence sector I can’t talk about even today past saying they have specially designed facilities that rival the commercial sector and fairly capable high end 3D field mapping equipment that cost more than my house did. It was based on commercial kit from Agilent with their own software and hardware.

As for antennas, they’re not really that voodoo. I’ve built quite a few even up to 2.4GHz. I played with 10GHz as well but not successfully yet. Same for radiation. PCB traces are antennas and transmission lines. Impedance control is fun IMHO.

There are design patterns and crib sheets at most large companies that avoid such pitfalls though. Spinning another board is expensive so avoiding this sort of stuff is where your design engineers should be leveraged. Some stuff is indeed tweaking but that’s getting less these days with some of the CAD software around. But it costs real money.

That's interesting!

I'll clarify my comment on the antenna end: If you do a standard pattern (a yagi, a quarter-length dipole, or whatnot), it's well-understood. What's deep voodoo are the radiation patterns from complex shapes. I've seen research projects where this is basically just done numerically -- a computer tries a bunch of shapes, computes their radiation patterns, and you get bizarre antennas.

EMC looks a lot more like the latter than the former. Our design had a PCB with several daughterboards, and a whole bunch of cables going in and out. That was voodoo. We'd add shielding. Emissions would go up. Or down. There was little rhyme or reason.

But in the end, we didn't break the bank. We went to the test facility twice, I think. We didn't have any sensible kit in-house, but we did have a scope with an FFT function, and we could make loops our of wire. We couldn't measure in real units, but we got a sense of when things went up and when they went down. And, I think, we had a healthy dose of luck.

I totally believe your equipment was superior than commercial. For defense, you want things like stealth and rad-hard. For us, we just want basic compliance.

This is not surprising. We’ve been using AM and FM radios to debug circuits for decades. They can pick up oscillations and instabilities.

But the range is centimetres at best. So much so the antenna gets used as a fairly directional probe.

In a later tweet he says the signal is pretty strong and that he could detect it from 6 feet away

Going to have to call bullshit on this. If it was detectable at that range then he has a faulty phone. The iPhone is classified as an emitter and so it needs to undergo rather strict FCC testing to ensure that it does not emit outside of certain frequencies and at specific power levels. The device would NEVER have been approved if it emitted at this level into bands licensed to other uses.

6 meters is near field in that frequency range. The emission power is possibly well below FCC limits.

He said 20 feet away https://twitter.com/doctorcube/status/1301146339561164800

I doubt it. That probably wouldn’t pass the EMC testing. Exaggerating I suspect to back up the claim.

Really why is this a surprise when you can hear the phone blips and buzzes from the RF induced pickup on shitty hifi equipment.

>10Gb - Stick it on a bitlocker encrypted USB stick and chuck it in the post. Next day download if you send it 1st class here.

<10Gb - chuck it on S3 and send a link to the other person.

I just get poked on slack. Question answered. Life carries on.

The advantage there is I can choose when to respond which is never the case in shoulder tapping office environments and meeting schedule negotiations both of which are disruptive.

Email is even better than meetings and disruptions!

At Automattic, p2 is even better than email. For example, I’m subscribed to projects that I am interested in or have some expertise in. I’m also subscribed to a few keywords that I get notified if anyone in the company mentions publicly. You get the benefits of everything you mentioned without the exclusivity of email.

You want to hear some of the crap I hear on 2m in London UK. I dumped my HT in the end so I don’t get annoyed.

CW and FT8 are generally best if you don’t want to deal with that sort. CW is much harder to put the effort in to be a dick and FT8 doesn’t have being a dick built into the protocol.

I love FT8/FT4. It's a safe place for introverts and those turned off by the vitriol on phone to experiment with propagation and get awards. But I want phone to be a safe place, too.

Completely agree. Perhaps we should get on air and outnumber them :)

That’ll be also because the local club usual incompetence can’t get in the way with social distancing. I had so much trouble even going back a few years getting my license because most folk can’t organise a piss up in a brewery. RSGB were little help.

Eventually ML&S came through on this front with their training and examination courses which were excellent.