I switched from a HP MicroServer with TrueNAS (the BSD one) to a Synology 8-bay system because of convenience, mostly (DIY 8-bay with hot swap, low idle power and all seems hard to come by).

Hopefully it’ll last for years to come but if I ever need to replace/upgrade it it’s not gonna be another Synology with this type of extreme vendor lock-in.

Keep in mind that the 569,-€ is for the DIY edition and does not include RAM, SSD (2230 form factor) or expansion cards. So assuming you’re starting with nothing the cheapest price would be about this:

• Framework Laptop 12 569,-€
• 8 GB DDR5-5600 22,-€
• 256 GB M.2 2230 SSD 34,-€
• 4 expansion cards, ex. 2 USB-C, 2 USB-A 40,-€ (other cards are more expensive)

So about 665,-€ at current pricing from Germany, not including individual shipping costs of the RAM and SSD. If you require/want Windows then that would need to be factored in as well.

Obviously quite a bit cheaper compared to the 13, but I doubt this will impact the education market that this is supposed to target (unless edu gets steep discounts).

Nope, I enabled it weeks ago. YMMV of course but from everything I read, heard and experienced, the software quality is abysmal relative to what I could expect from an iPhone (or other Apple device) before.

Maps was them underestimating how much work it is to create good map material. The functionality was fine from the beginning if I recall correctly.

Apple Intelligence is them panicking because the rest of the industry started putting more ML/AI features on their smartphones and they weren’t just late to the party, they apparently barely even started working on it.

They put their own twist on it with “Private Cloud Compute” (make of that what you will, the theoretical tech behind it is an interesting read though), and they also want to process many features entirely on-device (again in the name of privacy, but to be fair Gemini Nano also runs on-device).

Then they realized that running somewhat complex ML models on device requires memory and that’s where they always cheaped out on their products, so when they announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC in summer (with new iPhones only being announced in September) they had ONE iPhone model that could even run Apple Intelligence: the iPhone 15 Pro. So you could’ve bought an iPhone 15 (non “Pro”) the day before and every single feature they announced aside from tinted home screen icons or whatever wouldn’t work on your brand new device.

They announced a whole bunch of features, the biggest one probably being a new Siri that has a “deep understanding” of the appointments, email, photos, messages etc. on device. This has now been delayed to iOS 19 or whatever.

The other (smaller) features have been drip-fed over the iOS 18.x releases. Also, Apple Intelligence works in the EU starting with the iOS 18.4 beta. They said that it was delayed because of EU regulations but I think it was just a convenient alibi and it just wasn’t ready earlier on their part.

I live in the EU, own a 16 Pro (so the “latest and greatest” iPhone) and installed the 18.4 beta to check Apple Intelligence out. And let me tell you “beta” is an understatement. I enabled Apple Intelligence and it said it needed to download models and that the phone should be connected to a charger. I did that and monitored network traffic in my router. Once major network activity stopped I checked but nothing. Waited for another 1-2 hours, nothing. Disconnected from the charger and then several hours later my phone shows a notification that Apple Intelligence was now ready.

So, what’s there? Hard to say exactly but it summarizes emails but only some of them and I can’t make out a pattern. The quality of the summaries has been okay for me, but often times not much more useful than the subject line.

You can hold down the camera button to open something resembling Google Lens, but the functionality seems to be limited to “send what I see to Google Images” or “ask ChatGPT about this image”.

I’m not sure if notification summaries are in Apple Intelligence already because I never got any summaries (I also think it’s pretty useless as most notifications are already a summary of something).

Then there’s an image generator (“Playground”) but it’s very limited. It is kind of neat to quickly put a portrait of yourself in a couple of different settings though.

There’s also an emoji generator called “Genmoji” and sure it kind of produces okay results, but my iPhone tends to completely shit itself when I use it, slowing to a crawl and killing background apps presumably because it’s running out of memory. They (pretend to) want to do the most ML stuff locally out of everyone but but the least amount of RAM in their devices (8 GB in the 16 Pro, 16 GB in the Pixel 9 Pro).

I switched to iPhone (from an Android device) in 2016 with the original iPhone SE (with A9 SoC), had an 8, 11 Pro, 13 Pro and now 16 Pro. They’ve all been a good to great experience including the latest software features, but iOS 18 on the 16 Pro isn’t it. Even if I turn off Apple Intelligence completely, iOS 18 is pretty messy: the icon tinting sometimes gets stuck so when switching light/dark mode some icons stay in the other mode, only fixed by restarting the device; Igot more random resprings than with any other iOS version; the front camera sometimes takes 10+ seconds to start working and then has a 1 second shutter lag from time to time, etc.

There is no definitive roadmap.

What, sending bitcoin? That’s not really a feature of Proton Mail, rather it’s a feature of the wallet that happens to be able to send bitcoin via email (I suppose so that the recipient can then transfer the funds to a bitcoin address of their choice unless their email address is already linked to Proton Wallet).

Even if you’d consider this a feature of Proton Mail, how does this have higher priority than a proper iPad/tablet app, or the ability to add a .ics attachment directly to my (default, non-Proton) calendar without having to manually download the .ics file, open it with a file manager and then add it to the calendar? Filtered views (for example: view unread and starred messages but nothing else in one list)? A somewhat usable offline mode? The list goes on, and that’s just Proton Mail. Proton Drive still lacks a native Linux app (I know there’s “support” for Proton Drive in rclone, but that’s hacked together because Proton doesn’t even provide official API documentation and stability commitments).

I’d rather pay for the individual services that I can actually (somewhat) use, like Mail (even though it’s not great), but their Mail only tier severely lacks in features (only 1 custom email domain is my main problem). If they’d then commit the financial resources towards improving the service being paid for, that’d be great.

They should stop adding more and more services and instead focus on making existing services better or - in some cases - feature complete first.