iOS 18

[Nycturne]

18.1 has the “fix my handwriting” stuff.

Works in notes with the 18.0 release for me?

 

[Cmaier]

Works in notes with the 18.0 release for me?

oh! i thought that was in the A.I. bundle coming later. I never tried it with 18.0 since I have 18.1 on my ipad.

 

[Cmaier]

Apparently some M4 iPad Pro’s have been bricked during installation of iPadOS 18. There may be some correlation to people first installing iPadOS 17.7. Apple pulled the update.

 

[Eric]

New iPhone 16

 

[Herdfan]

Bad Verizon.

They got me. Had to go to Phoenix today and the wife called and told me I had a box from Verizon. Got all excited because I have gotten a phone ordered from the carrier before the actual release date before.

Nope, just the new case. That I only had to buy because they changed the dimensions by a fraction of a MM.

 

[Eric]

Bad Verizon.

They got me. Had to go to Phoenix today and the wife called and told me I had a box from Verizon. Got all excited because I have gotten a phone ordered from the carrier before the actual release date before.

Nope, just the new case. That I only had to buy because they changed the dimensions by a fraction of a MM.

I've had that happen, the letdown is real.

 

[Eric]

I've mapped the side button to do not disturb and it's been the greatest thing since sliced bread to me. Overall this has been a really decent upgrade by Apple IMO.

 

[Alli]

I've mapped the side button to do not disturb and it's been the greatest thing since sliced bread to me. Overall this has been a really decent upgrade by Apple IMO.

That’s a brilliant idea!

 

[Yoused]

iPadOS: the new calculator – meh. I have not tried the handwriting part yet. But I am disappointed that they could not be arsed to include RPN. How hard is that, come on.

 

[Cmaier]

iPadOS: the new calculator – meh. I have not tried the handwriting part yet. But I am disappointed that they could not be arsed to include RPN. How hard is that, come on.

RPN ship has largely sailed. I’m a huge RPN guy - I have a closet full of HP 28s and 48s that got me through engineering school. I got one when I interviewed for the PA RISC team and was the happiest guy ever just to get another calculator. But RPN is an afterthought even on the HP Prime.

At this point your best bet is running an HP emulator on iPhone, probably. (it’s what I do).

I wish it weren’t so, but there we are.

 

[Citysnaps]

At this point your best bet is running an HP emulator on iPhone, probably. (it’s what I do).

Pcalc, a $10 RPN calc app, has a pretty sweet (and very configurable) RPN calculator for iPhone. Been using it for many years.

Works on iPad as well - but taking up the whole screen, it's huge.

Also... Apple's calc on iPhone switches to RPN automatically when the phone is held horizontally.

 

[Cmaier]

Pcalc, a $10 RPN calc app, has a pretty sweet (and very configurable) RPN calculator for iPhone. Been using it for many years.

Works on iPad as well - but taking up the whole screen, it's huge.

Also... Apple's calc on iPhone switches to RPN automatically when the phone is held horizontally.

i also use pcalc on occasion, but it’s a different flavor of RPN than HP, so it always feels a bit off to me.

Also, rotating iphone switches to scientific mode, but i haven’t seen any RPN support?

 

[Yoused]

RPN ship has largely sailed.

The built-in macOS calculator has a RPN mode.

 

[Citysnaps]

i also use pcalc on occasion, but it’s a different flavor of RPN than HP, so it always feels a bit off to me.

Also, rotating iphone switches to scientific mode, but i haven’t seen any RPN support?

Yikes... my bad on Apple's calc. indeed it's just scientific.


Re pCalc RPN... I haven't noticed it being different. Seems to work the same as my HP calc. But maybe I'm not hitting all aspects of what it offers.

 

[Cmaier]

The built-in macOS calculator has a RPN mode.

it also has chess. mac has a lot of stuff that wouldn’t be there if they introduced it today,

I just checked the hp museum forums, and looks like we’re down to very few RPN calculators still being manufactured. A couple HPs, and some swiss micro clones, mostly.

 

[mr_roboto]

it also has chess. mac has a lot of stuff that wouldn’t be there if they introduced it today,

I just checked the hp museum forums, and looks like we’re down to very few RPN calculators still being manufactured. A couple HPs, and some swiss micro clones, mostly.

Was going to mention SwissMicro and you beat me to it. I don't have any experience with their products but have heard that they're good. They use an Arm microcontroller running open source HP emulation, so they behave exactly like a real HP RPN.

The problem with them is they're a tiny company in Switzerland, so you're gonna pay a hefty price for a modern HP 42/41/1x series, and I remember them having supply issues for a while too. They might get me as a customer if they ever do the HP48.

 

[mr_roboto]

pCalc is almost good, but is quite disappointing in practice. For me, anyways. Its programmer mode tops out at 48-bit values and I frequently need 64-bit. I suspect they're pulling the Javascript trick of only using IEEE doubles, which means integers are capped at the 52-bit mantissa size instead of being able to use the whole 64-bit word.

Only supporting doubles also means you can't get as much FP precision as the HP calculators typically had - iirc they used BCD FP with a rather large mantissa and exponent range.

 

[Cmaier]

Was going to mention SwissMicro and you beat me to it. I don't have any experience with their products but have heard that they're good. They use an Arm microcontroller running open source HP emulation, so they behave exactly like a real HP RPN.

The problem with them is they're a tiny company in Switzerland, so you're gonna pay a hefty price for a modern HP 42/41/1x series, and I remember them having supply issues for a while too. They might get me as a customer if they ever do the HP48.

I blame textbook companies for all this. My kid has to use a TI-84 because that’s what they teach, and the teachers only know how to use those. An entire generation growing up not quite understanding order-of-operations…

 

[Cmaier]

Little heads up - if you’ve been using Sequoia’s iphone mirroring and you get a new phone, you may need to go into settings and choose which phone to use for mirroring:

 

[Eric]

Anyone else notice significant battery drain since upgrading to iOS 18? With average use I would make it most of the day, now I can't even make it 6 hours, and that's with light use.