I bought a 2DS on AliExpress. It was fine, original shell but a little scratched up. JP model. One dead pixel.

$211CAD so about $150USD. I’d do it again, I didn’t end up using it much as I had plans for it that didn’t pan out but I had no issues with it.

Looks awesome! 7 boards too, which I think ties for most ever?

I said the complaints you listed had fixed in the new one. I didn’t say it was suddenly as good as a dedicated calculator app.

Doesn’t have much appeal if you pay for YT Premium. I also used to sideload Cercube so I get the appeal, but yeah. I would count that in the category of “++” apps that pretty much exist to circumvent ads or avoid paying for subscriptions.

I don’t have anything against them but it doesn’t help the image of open access being only useful for piracy or avoiding paying for stuff.

That’s true I suppose, but there pretty much isn’t anything I’m like “damn I wish that was on iOS but Apple’s rules won’t allow it” anymore.

I can think of a few examples that I have on my Android phone. TouchHLE, Mario 64 decompiled and Yuzu come to mind. But those are just fun to play with and not exactly things I care deeply about.

Just to be clear, this didn’t used to be the case. I used to jailbreak & sideload for years. But I just… don’t need to anymore. It’s all there. I figured it was worth asking if there was something I didn’t know I was missing.

Not only that, there is an upside too. The fact that IPAs can’t be easily installed on iOS drastically reduces piracy, and companies are more apt to release non-ad-supported, premium titles on the platform.

I have RE Village, RE4 and Death Stranding on my phone right now. I don’t see those coming to Android any time soon. So I would say it’s a double-edged sword.

I think there was an internal rule change a while back because there are a few others as well. Ruddarr is shaping up every well, and LunaSea has been there for years now.

All of that has been fixed in the iOS 18 calculator, they just didn’t talk about it in the keynote. It has history, multi-line, and your can place the cursor anywhere and edit expressions.

Give it a shot, you might be pleasantly surprised.

What IPAs do you want to install? This is a real question, I know there are a handful of apps that you need to install from outside the App Store but over the years as restrictions have loosened that has dropped to almost nothing for me.

I used to install nzbUnity which has been fully replaced by LunaSea at this point, and with the rule change allowing emulators they really took a ton of wind out of the sails of the 3rd party App Store push.

Apple Intelligence. The image generation and bullshit text generator aspects I’m over (although Genmoji looks cute), but the ability to process complex natural language requests using an on-device LLM so I can perform tasks via voice without laborious specificity?

I’m in. If they nail this it will be the biggest leap forward in human-computer interaction since the GUI.

The other features I already like in DB1 aren’t on this feature slide either:

• The new Calendar app with a proper multi-day view is great and has already replaced the “list” view I’ve used since 2009. I like “list” but it makes every day look busy visually, and makes it difficult to see gaps in your day.
• New Calculator app finally has most features people would like. Multi line, easy editing of mistakes, a history, etc. They only talked about the handwritten stuff for iPad in the keynote but the whole thing is vastly improved across all iOS platforms.
• This one is on the slide but the new Photos app is great, although some don’t like it I found most features in Photos were buried and people never used the tabs in the app, just scrolling down to see everything actually works quite well. Most users seem to think that the first tab is the only one you need to use and everything else is just settings and whatnot so it’s best to just adapt to that at this point.

Oh I guess I was wrong too. Delta is already launched on the App Store.

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/delta-game-emulator/id1048524688

Yeah MacRumors reached out and apparently Apple clarified that it was pulled for the GBA4iOS copyright issue and not anything to do with ROMs.

Agreed, it’ll be a long journey. But this is a step in the right direction, and I’m sure it will be an ebb and flow rather than just a flood of existing iOS emulation projects coming to the App Store.

For example; we won’t see Delta because of Riley’s competing store, and we probably won’t see Provenance because of all of the JIT stuff they built that will have to be removed for an App Store approved build.

I will be pretty upset if they just end up reversing their position. Google Play has had tons of emulators for years with no issues, with the exception of yuzu which is hardly surprising considering that’s a current gen console. I think the pressure at this point is more imagined.

ScummVM is not an emulator. It’s a reimplementation of game engines, but nothing is being emulated. It appeared in the App Store before this rule change.

Two emulators have launched and they both can open arbitrary ROM files as expected.

I think that’s fair, I basically agree with the first comment on that Ars article:

App Review guidelines are always so vague and open to interpretation. We need a brave developer to submit a retro console emulator that can load arbitrary files to App Review and see what happens.

That’s not how I interpret that. I think they’re just saying that if your app does offer digital goods, you have to use IAP. Not that any app in this category has to include IAP to be accepted.

Apple is protecting its bottom line here. In other words if Nintendo was to release a classic arcade, they don’t just get to circumvent IAP rules in non-DMA countries because of this change. But I don’t see any wording that says apps cannot forgo offering any IAPs and just allow you to add content via Files like all other apps do.

If they intended your definition, they wouldn’t leave it vague. There would be a specific provision that says “Apps cannot access files or software from the system, or offer an in-app browser or other online resource to add files to the app.”

Moreover, this change is specifically targeted at Riley Testut and AltStore, which was founded so he could distribute his emulator, Delta. Your interpretation would fully prevent that app from being offered, so I really don’t think that is what Apple was intending.

Lack of JIT is crippling though, hopefully that will change soon.

They’ve opened a door that basically nobody could walk through and the people who could walk through it wouldn’t need to because they could just distribute the ROMs with the emulator to begin with, it’s business as usual for Apple.

Actually this also isn’t true, emulators were banned period. This was partially to avoid legal issues and also because if they didn’t, the App Store would be flooded with emulators in wrappers distributing single titles.

So technically, this does allow the use case of a classic developer offering all their old titles in a a single arcade app, which was not the case before.

The Magic Mouse thing is also about the battery, a battery kept plugged in all the time is more likely to swell.

One more tip: this probably applies to Android as well, I’m not sure as I haven’t used it extensively. But iOS has very good, deep, system-wide autofill.

Make sure you have a contact card in your contacts marked as you (“My Card” at the top of your contacts list) and populate it with all the phone numbers, emails, and addresses you can think of. Tag them all properly (work, home, secondary, etc) and even add usernames and whatnot, go all out.

iOS will use those details to autofill signup flows in many apps and services, as well as autocompleting stuff like “my address is” and “my phone number is”. Saves a lot of time.

It also has deep password manager autofill integration. So you can enable your favourite 3rd party password manager as the system autofill and you can call it up even in apps to create new logins or retrieve saved ones.

The best advice I can give is: don’t immediately abandon the stock apps. I see tons of people who get an iPhone, immediately install Chrome and Gmail and all I can think is, what’s the point?

AdGuard or a similar adblocker for Safari will give you the results you got from Firefox. Safari on iOS also supports full desktop extensions if the developer chooses to make them available. So things like 1Password work great on it.

Same with the Mail app, Calendars, etc. Try setting up your accounts and services in the stock apps and see if you like them. Besides that, there isn’t much to tweak, that’s kind of the point.

If you want app recommendations, it depends on what services you use. Some of my favourite apps are:

Weather - CARROT Mastodon - Ivory Lemmy - Bean or Voyager Package Tracking - Parcel RSS - Reeder Password Manager - 1Password Remote Management - Remotix Home Server Management (Sonarr/Radarr/SabNZBd) - LunaSea

USB 2.0 I would buy, I’m sure they have the telemetry to tell them that like less than 1% of iPhones are ever plugged into a computer or data accessory at this point. USB 3 would be nice but it’s not a dealbreaker for almost anyone.

MFI certification I don’t. They didn’t do it with iPads or MacBooks, why with iPhones? It just doesn’t pass the smell test. Just one product that shares the same connector with all their other products has an MFI program but all the others don’t? Even though when it was Lightning, MFI applied to all of them?

It’s possible they will launch a program, but it will just be one that allows you to put the little “MFI” icon on your box. It won’t be one that will limit charging speeds. I get the uncertainty if this was the first Apple product to switch to USB, but it’s the last major one. Just wouldn’t make sense.

A soldiered SSD is not designed to be interoperable, shocking. Because they don’t want you futzing about inside the machine does not mean they will proprietarily extend or restrict external ports. I’m not making excuses for the first one, I’m saying they aren’t the same thing.

I’m just being realistic and using the information in front of me. Apple has been using USB-C for years, and hasn’t done anything nefarious with it. They will do the same with the iPhone 15. It’ll just be a standard USB port. Feel free to spread FUD if you wish, but it’s obvious for anyone following along that this is what will happen. I will happily eat my words if it turns out not to be true.