71–80 of 169 posts
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Anyone can become a FaceTime-calling Apple user for a mere $199. https://www.apple.com/ipod-touch/
Anyone can become a Telegram (or Signal) user. For $0, infinitely less than $199.
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I wish other statistics about connections were more public, since there is much more to a connection than just bandwidth.
With that kind of information publicly available, they'd have a hard time getting people to join the network!
For home, you chose fiber if you’re lucky to have fiber. Most people only have access to coaxial cable internet. If you’re unlucky, you do not even have that.
For mobile, you have Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile so it is not so bad there.
FaceTime is amazing. I keep in touch with my entire family using FaceTime video, often across thousands of kilometers. It's also such an equalizer, allowing even the non-computer literate to use it and focus on the actual conversations. In fact, my 103 year old grandmother is able to do video calls with me, which is great because I rarely see her in person these days. I don't think there exists an alternative she wou…
Semi-related question since I'm looking to get my grandma setup. Waffling between an iPhone and iPad, maybe an iPad mini but don't know if the air would be better (lighter I think). What device does your grandma use to FaceTime? Do you know does she do anything else with it?
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Unfortunately, calls with more than two people seem to fall apart quickly if the network connection isn't perfect, even where Meets, Zoom, etc. work flawlessly.
This substantially the opposite of my experience so I’d bet there is some factor for proximity to CDNs or traffic shaping done by your ISP. FaceTime is rock-solid; Zoom is also good but has noticeably lower video quality (but good noise handling). Meet’s native apps are good but their browser UI is coded to break Firefox so I don’t use it much.
> They in fact do, a service called IDS or Apple Identity Service. Reminds me of > The four F's: fighting fleeing feeding and mating
We used to use Skype with my wife's parents and it sucked: there were delays, freezes, low quality video, etc. It worked great with my mother, but she had far better internet than my wife's parents. The alternatives were even worse: Telegram, whatsapp, jitsi. Then we tried FaceTime: the difference was night and day. Everything was smooth, the sound was better, no stuttering, we could actually read things they held to…
macOS Monterey will include screen sharing for FaceTime! It should be released in a month or so.
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Is there anything that sets FaceTime apart from cheaper competitors like WhatsApp / Signal video calling in this aspect of ease of use? (I say cheaper because you don't need to buy an iDevice to use those)
Don't you also need to buy a phone/computer/tablet to use whatsapp or signal? How does whatsapp is cheaper than facetime? But anyway, yeah, I noticed Facetime's both video and audio calls have better quality, in my personal experience. Also, most if not all my friends and family use iDevices, so I dont need to convince them to install signal/whatsapp/telegram etc... But YMMV.
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WhatsApp does a decent job
WhatsApp is usable but nowhere near the video and audio quality of FaceTime. It's also only on mobile where the screen is rather small and audio quality is never great - not very important since they seem to use very high audio compression anyway.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/04/whatsapp-rolls-out-voice-a...
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Is there anything that sets FaceTime apart from cheaper competitors like WhatsApp / Signal video calling in this aspect of ease of use? (I say cheaper because you don't need to buy an iDevice to use those)
You can take the call on a computer?