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Airfoil reviews8/18/2023 ![]() The airfoil may be his best work yet in this regard, as the watch feels inevitable, given, and “just right.” The more I learn about design, the more understand that it boils down to proportions, materials, and colors. Marvin Menke, who founded Hemel after a career as a freelance branding and graphic designer in New York City, is an exceptional designer. At 42mm across, you’d think these watches would feel huge, but the stout lugs and impressive 13.4mm thick case make the Airfoil feel distinctly like a 40mm watch on my wrist. The Design of The Hemel Airfoilġ970s British Military chronographs provide the template for the Airfoil. Quietly and slowly, brands like Hemel are showing us the world as it really is: diverse, complex, and vastly interconnected. I’ll go a step further and suggest that Vintage Nationalism and single-origin myths about watchmaking rely on (and perhaps bolster) a backward-looking xenophobia. That isn’t snappy Euro-centric marketing, but it’s the truth. As such, the Airfoil is a American-designed 21st Century interpretation of a 1970s British pilot’s chronograph, built around a Chinese movement that’s based on the Swiss Venus Cal 175 from the 1940s which China imported until the 1960s when SeaGull licensed and started making the same exact movement in Chinese plants, where it is still made today. Instead of forcing some Vintage Nationalism into the brand, with Hemel we just get the facts, and the facts spell out a far more accurate – and, frankly, inspiring – picture of today’s globalized, interlocking, collaborative, international industries. Hemels’ marketing materials and watch dials are refreshingly bereft of these shaky claims of single-origin manufacturing, which I’ve dubbed “Vintage Nationalism.” Like all of Hemel’s watches, the Airfoil foregoes superfluous – and often dubious – claims to being “Swiss Made,” or “Assembled in America,” or whatever Euro-centric claim so many smaller watch brands feel they can get away with. SeaGull ST1901 Mechanical Hand-Wound Column Wheel Chronographįor $499 US, Hemel is offering their new Air Foil chronograph that houses the well regarded Seagull ST1901 mechanical column wheel chronograph movement from China.We hope those who used Airfoil for Windows can find other solutions for streaming audio. Nevertheless, the time has now come for us to move on. We did good work on Airfoil for Windows, and we're proud to have served our Windows users well for over a decade. This was not a capricious decision, and after more than thirteen years of development, we are sad to leave users behind. In recent years, sales of Airfoil for Windows have fallen below an acceptable threshold. While Airfoil for Mac still enjoys heavy usage, Airfoil for Windows is now less essential to users than it has been in the past, and that's a trend that’s not likely to reverse. Sales had slowed substantially in recent years, in no small part due to a move by Windows users to stream audio via mobile devices, rather than from their desktops or laptops. There were several factors which led to this decision, but the most important was the drop in sales we'd seen on the Windows platform. At the end of 2019, however, the time came to retire Airfoil for Windows. Over the next 13 years, across dozens of updates, we made it possible to stream from PCs to the AirPort Express, Apple TV, third-party AirPlay hardware, Bluetooth outputs, and Chromecast devices. We thus worked hard to create a high-quality Windows version of Airfoil, and the first version shipped in May 2006, a little over a year later. Though Rogue Amoeba has always been a Mac-focused software company, it was clear that we were uniquely suited to help folks on Windows stream audio around the home. The first version of Airfoil for Mac was released in 2005, and we quickly heard from many Windows users requesting a version for their platform as well. Users who previously purchased may download the last version of Airfoil for Windows from our Legacy page. ![]() We regretfully recommend that users find alternate solutions for streaming audio from their Windows PCs. While Airfoil for Windows will likely continue to work for some time to come, it is now officially unsupported. The product is no longer in development, nor available for purchase. On December 23, 2019, Airfoil for Windows was retired.
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