Recent submissions

Comment · 7 days ago
I agree. The only issue with the touch bar was its placement. It should have been put above the function keys and not close to where accidental touch could reach it. If they can manage a bezel-free screen they should just figure out how to wedge it in that gap somehow. But then I think they should do a MacBook Magic version where they slap screens on every key, the trackpad, and the Apple on the back just to see what people do with it.
Comment · 11 days ago
Continuous retention is a huge issue that needs to be solved, but it is not insoluble. I would not be surprised if most kids are losing their childhood photos from services being shut down, tinkering with quality, or altering terms.

However the rest of the points are wrong as the photo album step was there originally. Film acquisition time, album acquisition time, labeling time, sorting time, sharing time, shelf space creation and cleaning time have all improved by orders of magnitude and all of that impacted accessibility.

Comment · 2 months ago
I want to say I’ve broken every headphone jack I ever had. Yanking on them, debris getting in the switch, debris triggering the optical if it had one. 3.5 was never a great design. Too many physical ways for it to break, from static from a loose connection, debris stuck inside like pebbles getting jammed, debris stuck under the switch preventing recognition. False positive or accidental triggers that take a while to track down why the speakers are muted.

Of all the parts on electronics I have owned i would put headphone jack just behind power supply for least reliable and that it was set to override digital settings when something was connected felt like a loss of control.

I am very forgetful, wireless has been a godsend by comparison and I don’t get hurt with cable snags. I’d pay extra to remove it before shipping if it were an option.

Comment · 6 months ago
Agreed. I agree with the iOS lockdown as I do most of my financial and medical there. I can see it for iPad as a sort of locked down computer you can’t break typing random things into terminal some website said to.

Vision Pro, however, should have been a full computer the way the Mac is as it was never going to appeal to non geeks.

The introductory video of this cyborg recording spatial video at birthday parties seemed pure fiction as there would not be smiles at the weird masked guy with the eyes flashing whenever he wanted to take a picture especially as glasses that record video are slammed so hard. I could only imagine such a thing maybe at a wedding.

Flip phones with apps were around a long time before the iPhone and people knew what to do with them.

Vision Pro really was a whole new thing and they biffed it not allowing people to vibe code and play on it directly instead forcing to dig through complicated X-code on a connected Mac. It needed a 3D Quartz Composer type thing at the very least that just isn’t there.

Comment · 6 months ago
There may be one or two good examples of companies who do not depend on dark patterns to keep subscriptions, but plenty of the big names are associated with absolute horror stories of numerous hour long phone calls fighting retention specialists to get a service canceled.

For me the ease of seeing what subscriptions I have in one place with easy cancellation options avoids the stress of trusting companies with PII and credit card info and ever needing to deal with anything over the phone.

That said… making it impossible to sell your product with less than a 30% margin does not seem in line with today’s software and streaming economics. I am not sure the model Apple should adopt, but the current one lacks artistry.

Comment · 6 months ago
I presume you mean how you can upload CSV or XLSX spreadsheets but not view them? It does seem an oversight they do not have conversion on the website or the ability to import into a spreadsheet. More interesting is how Pages gives a nice red exclamation saying not a supported file while Numbers gaslights you letting you share something you can’t use.
Comment · 6 months ago
Yet they completely failed to do so for Mac 32-bit apps. There is a huge library of apps that have not been updated to 64-bit to this day and it is a travesty they never released a virtual classic mode to run 32-bit and even OS 9 apps. It is the one place Microsoft shines in comparison, and the only excuse they give is “deal with it”.

I am certain the reason Wine never tried Mac emulators is fear of Apple legal and consequently you far more easily run ancient Windows programs on Mac then you can even fairly recent Mac Applications.

Comment · 6 months ago
Because Apple dropped 10 billion on car research which was an apparent fail.

Far simpler and cheaper to snipe startups where you know you are getting a proven product. That comes with a fresh batch of engineers in most cases who specialize in the tech so you skip a lot of the hiring/training steps.

If I had an R&D request it would be they train some machine models on their developer feedback and public feedback databases to give some guidance on where the real holes are and what people are actually hoping for.

I certainly never wanted a car from them… the whole Apple business model is reducing the moving parts to reduce product failures and a car would be a huge regression.

Comment · 6 months ago
I will admit they change and depreciate APIs like crazy, but do you have any examples of features or AppleScript being jettisoned that were not fixed? The issue that stands out to me was the once in 17 year 2019 cut-off for 32 bit apps with a lacking Quicktime X and Final Cut X, but even then the plan then was to get everything back up to snuff quickly.

I read a Gruber article recently that when Messages went Catalyst he had no issues with his AppleScript at all.

Comment · 6 months ago
Disagree. Trump is 100% willing and apparently able to crush American businesses unless they kneel. If watching a movie and giving him a gold toilet seat bought off that extortionist it was probably the cheapest any tech firm got off. Cook made the right call not to let Apple get destroyed by our whimsical overlord.
Comment · 6 months ago
They were touting ultralight ultra light thin metals for a while there, but never really followed up past the SIM ejection tools.

The main reason I haven’t purchased a Vision Pro is they have all sorts of glass on the front. I live alone and don’t need to share my eyes with an empty room, and even I did I would rather have a screen I could control to make a funny mask with. That screen is a step too far with not giving users control.

Comment · 6 months ago
Abandonware at this point I enjoyed Microsoft Pandora's Box as plain old jigsaw fun. It seems to scream for multi-touch support and higher resolution but it was left to rot.
Comment · 7 months ago
I think it falls under the article yesterday about male German citizens having restrictions on their travel. Electronic ID is a step toward “papers please”.

Germany at least seems to feel international war is only a few steps away and from how militant the Chinese and Russians have been treating their “territory” I am not sure it is a bad call.

America has likewise turned bad preferring violence over dialogue and loves tracking “hostile influences on the American way of life”. Those influences being anyone who would call out the toxic culprits making America into a cesspit.

Tying to Apple and Google? It is a terrible idea. Both are prone to freeze devices for financial or social issues.

However, a fix I would accept is to force the device makers to support multiple accounts out of box on every device to keep separate what the corporations have proven time and again they cannot be trusted to combine. Also for those companies to be forced to make a cheap credit card sized device which must be held to power on for the few that truly hate the ecosystems.

Comment · 9 months ago
I am sure prosecutors have AI expert witnesses on speed dial. Would probably testify under oath they ran it through their own AI analysis and it came back as not AI.

Even public defenders don’t bother with their own expert witnesses, much less a guy representing himself.

Comment · 9 months ago
There is just too much money being burned in AI for Apple to keep researchers. Also models have no respect for original art which leads to a branding issue of being a platform for artists.

Apple is competent at timing when to step into a market and I would guess they are waiting for AI to evolve beyond being considered untrustworthy slop.

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