Thanks for mentioning that. I have one hearing aid so I've had to take it out so I can wear both AirPods when I want noise cancellation at all with AirPods. (I can also stream to the hearing aid but it is very tinny, completely lacking bass.)
Pretty cool, would be great if it could detect accented speech and have a different normalized speed for that. I listen to most people at 2x or more, but I can't usually understand accented English quite that fast.
Well, all English belongs to a dialect (British, American, subgroups thereof), but I wouldn't say that all English is accented. I'm usually OK with British and Australian, but would need to slow it down a bit for Irish or Scottish. I definitely need to slow it down for people with accented English, depending on how noticeable their accent is.
Right, but if you were Irish, you wouldn’t have to slow it down when listening to English in an Irish accent. Your distinction to what is accented or not seems personal to you.
Accent is a subset of dialect, referring to pronunciation, where dialect also refers to vocabulary and grammar. It follows that if all English belongs to a dialect, all English has an accent.
Of course, some accents are more readily understood across the world; I imagine you are from the US, and there is the American English featured in film and TV (that I imagine synthesises different regional accents), that has a huge cultural reach, so people who learned English through media might find this particularly easy to understand.
However, outside the US, if you speak like this, you will always turn be regarded as the person with an accent, because you don’t speak like the locals. And people are going to find their local accent easier to understand.
I'm not disagreeing with your suggestion that a mechanism would be needed to set the "preferred accent/dialect" for a listener. My point is that when I was referring to accented English, I was referring to people for whom English is not their native language, for example a native French speaker. I know that people speak English in different ways in different countries, and that there isn't one "correct" English. But I was referring to people who speak English with a foreign-language accent in particular, who are the most difficult for me to understand at high speed.
I think it's harder to spoof toll free numbers. For example, you can't block caller ID in the same way. I'm sure it's still possible to spoof, but just might be a little harder.
I don't care much about MagSafe, but it is sometimes annoying to have to plug everything on the left. If given the option, I might pick the extra USB (which could also be used for data/monitor/etc. when not being used for charging, of course.
Academic pricing also applies to individual purchases by students, staff, and faculty. In-store, they ask for an ID. But they don't use any mechanism for online purchases, aside from attestation.
I think they used to use edu email addresses to confirm, but now that so many people have alumni emails, that would be useless (and not capture k12 students, whose email addresses typically cannot receive outside emails).
Not if their goal is to make money on repairs/upgrades!
Kidding aside, I think this is one of their key differentiators from the MBA line. It's partly the MagSafe itself, and partly that you have an extra USB port open even when charging.
I don't understand why Apple does this. It's like the "allow ANC with one AirPod" setting, which is also inexplicably an accessibility option.
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