iOS 9, thoroughly reviewed

Apple gives the iPad a lot of love as iOS goes back into spit-and-polish mode.

Read the whole story

 

[Rich C.]

The PDF download link (Ars Premiere subscription) seems to be broken for me. It's timing out.

Will Ars be posting an ePub version? That's my favorite way to read these long-form reviews.

 

[Rich C.]

kriket011[/url]":3ixpbkk0]I just don't like the new San Francisco typeface. Everytime I read about it here on Ars, the typeface change is downplayed, like it's a minor difference, it's a bit less round, less soft, marginally more legible on non-retina devices etc. But nowhere does it say it looks uglier.

Gotta say I agree with you, it looks uglier and kind of blocky as an iPad UI font to me. But I'll give it some time to see if it grows on me. Not that I have a choice.

I like it on the watch, though. Maybe it's a just better font for tiny text.

 

[Rich C.]

binki[/url]":1k7zpzoi]Ok guys, let's talk about that ad-blocking!

So, how much exactly do you make off ads for a single user who browses your site daily and reads, say, 5-7 articles per day? I'm asking because I would be more than willing to pay you monthly subscription fees to get rid of ads entirely! A German tech site (golem.de) introduced a monthly ad-free subscription program last year and while I don't read that site, I would totally pay monthly to read ArsTechnica ad-free!

Get an Ars Premier subscription, it's well worth the $50 a year / $5 a month. No ads, articles load instantly and take up the whole page, you can download PDFs for offline reading, plus the full-text RSS feeds alone would justify the cost. I get more mileage from this than my New York Times iPhone subscription.

 

[Rich C.]

The ads are only part of the problem. The other side of the issue is the tracking/analytics that all the sites are conducting. When you sign up for the Premier subscription do they stop those too, or do they simply remove the ads? A lot of the ad-blockers offer filters for the additional tracking, so those content blockers might be worth it even if you are a premier subscriber.

The most onerous tracking is through those same ad networks, so that's gone. I don't know offhand what other analytics they get, but I myself am fine with the anonymized Google Analytics type stuff.

If you read full-text articles in an RSS reader (also part Premier), almost everything gets preloaded and there's no JavaScript-based tracking whatsoever. They could conceivably track article views with encoded images URLs, but no idea if they do.

When I get home later I'll fire up a browser console and see what exactly they're running.