On September 20, 2019, Apple Inc. released its new iPhone 11 series of mobile phones, an important and impressive update. The three new phones from Apple — the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max — vary in size and capabilities, but all feature the bezel-free, all-screen design introduced two years ago in the slightly disappointing iPhone X.

Apple’s iPhone 11 models boast a number of improvements, including faster chipsets, higher-resolution screens, better waterproofing, and superior cameras (especially in the “Pro” models, which boast an impressive three-camera array), and do so at lower price points than last…

The digital media revolution has been a game changer for movie watchers. Physical media like Blu-Ray discs still exist, of course, but digital media, whether streamed or downloaded, is the future.

The benefits of digital media are plentiful. Digital streaming services like the subscription-based Netflix grant anyone with an Internet connection access to thousands of high-definition movies. Digital movies are typically cheaper to buy than the same films on Blu-Ray, while the quality and content (extras and outtakes) is often identical.

Digital movies can be rented for a short time period, but for cinephiles who prefer to own films outright…

Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee shop chain, may not have invented free Wi-Fi, but they sure did popularize it. Starbucks rolled out the service back in 2010, and since then so many restaurants have followed suit it feels at times that the U.S. is blanketed in Wi-Fi (it’s not).

Starbucks’ influence extended to a subsequent and related innovation, but it’s of little benefit to their customers, and often produces problems rather than solves them. It is the public Wi-Fi login page. Starbucks’ version is shown below.

Until fairly recently, the 3.5 mm headphone jack was ubiquitous, a nearly-universal standard in portable audio equipment. It had been that way for decades, until September 2016, when Apple announced that none of its phones going forward — starting with the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus — would include an audio headphone port.

With space in new iPhone models at a premium, and additional components being added with each iteration, it no longer made sense for Apple to include a dedicated audio port when its lightning port could do double duty, while producing arguably higher quality sound at the same…

We’ve all heard it said before: Mac users and PC users are just different. But is it true?

Before we get to the crux of the argument, let’s get some housekeeping out of the way: we’ll define a “PC” as a computer manufactured by any of a dozen companies that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system, and a “Mac” as a computer manufactured by Apple Inc. that runs on Apple’s macOS operating system.

The question as to the difference between PC and Mac users should be easy to answer. …

It’s no coincidence that the opening credits of the Netflix series The Rain are reminiscent of AMC’s The Walking Dead. The two shows are strikingly similar.

Both are post-apocalyptic character-driven dramas in which humankind has been decimated by a virus. Both center on a group of disparate strangers struggling to coalesce into a functional group. Both have themes about the difficulty of retaining one’s humanity in an amoral world. I could go on.

For all of these shows’ similarities, however, they differ in one crucial aspect: zombies, or rather the lack thereof. The Rain contains no flesh-eating re-animated human…