minimeow

It's clearly not the Mobile-First Design Archive ;)

Sadly it's a reflection of why Nokia failed - Mobile Safari on iOS pretty much nailed the coffin for the Nokia approach to mobile browsing.

I think what's interesting is how looking back at the Nokia nostalgia is compelling because iOS and Android have become such overlords over our digital lives.

Yes the lack of transparency on ARM architecture and the obfuscation of the RAM capacity with just the slot information is annoying. Not sure if it is deliberate to sell this at a premium to "mainframe" customers or whether its just their marketing folk not being on the ball. Fascinated by the fact Japan has a 2nm process node but I suspect that too is marketing. Perhaps the 2nm portion of the chip is done at TSMC and the rest of the package done in Japan or something like that. It's not like there's a plethora of 2nm Fabs around the planet to choose from.

This is what happens when more than half the company is away attending the Salesforce cult-indoctrination stuff while spending all their bandwidth making customers/partners feel good.... The stuff that matters to keep the lights on gets overlooked.

I always wanted to know how physics and kinematics came together and could be worked on with code. Your blog post was enlightening. Thanks.

The tech is workable. The issue is the AVP is heavy and big. So I'd say we're still at the Motorola brick phone not even the Nokia stage yet. Shrink the AVP down to glasses size and I'll agree on the Nokia analogy.

Valid except for the issue that the live authenticity was part what Apple's culture and cult following attractive to many of the power-users and creatives that made the brand gain enormous value.

Playing it safe with media-trained MBA-centric thinking to avoid volatility works on one level if that's the KPI you're monitoring but it doesn't track the invisible damage done to the brand. Apple is at real risk of becoming a stagnant, Microsoft-like behemoth to the very users that made it cool and that can turn into an exodus that pummels the stock by more than 5-15% for a few weeks and would be much harder to fix.

Ternus hasn't impressed me so far - he's a safe choice and the iPhone Duo is a safe level of innovation alongside the predictable spec bumps to the regular phones and watches. Macbook Neo devalued the brand permanently despite its popularity it kills hardware margins and shows Apple is looking to move all its customers to recurring revenue models using the cloud such that low margin hardware is no longer a problem as it provides a ramp for more customers to the cloud. However that model is now being pushed by Apple like cocaine yet the tech-savvy creatives and heavy weight tech users want something not that. Apple's success or failure medium to long term depends on them not losing relevance to those demographics or the brand value will drop way way way more than 15% for way longer.

I'd say a big part of the problem too is the culture that developed at Apple after they moved into their new Giant Ivory Sphincter HQ building. It's isolated the company from users and allows their internal culture to disconnect from the real world. Such a shame as the HQ could have really been awesome.

Yeah I was never the biggest fan of Craig Federighi previously but contrasted against the new generation of usual suspects being fielded by Apple, he actually stands out as having character.

But yes the format of the Apple Event was formulaic and way too scripted/produced. Sure there's a place for some scripted content but losing the live unscripted element makes it like a corporate event from Microsoft or IBM. In fact those guys probably do more live unscripted stuff nowadays.

The iPhone Duo is a nice change from formulaic iPhone designs but it's long overdue and is at best a sideways step not a forward step by an Apple that seems increasingly out of touch and driven by cloud service KPI-targets over all other metrics. I wonder how long it will be before the customer revolt manifests, not because I dislike Apple (I loved their products for years) but because I believe that their current business focus leads them to erode trust and play it safe which ultimately alienates the very demographics that made Apple cool and then persuaded all those wanting to emulate that demographic to join the Apple bandwagon. Many of those power users are increasingly moving to Linux or using Mac/Apple ecosystems tactically. It won't be many release cycles for Apple to become the new Microsoft - something you have to use for certain tasks in certain industries but increasingly something you would choose to avoid.

Statistically you are very correct.

Now I'm curious. What is the better mapping and streetview tool at this point?

The author makes an excellent point. There are too many poor Terminal UIs created just for the sake of having a TUI. Often these are not well constructed or lack sufficient thought to be effective/productive.

But the broader trend in GUI apps has been to target marketshare not deliver productivity for keyboard users. Back in the 80s and 90s Photoshop, Illustrator etc. became the powerhouses they are today because they focused on allowing professionals to be extremely efficient using their array of powerful keyboard shortcuts. In 2026 when software companies are dying of KPItis scoring their product management on creating compelling subscription models to hook customers, attention to actually delivering productivity for keyboard users is often an after thought. Mobile apps don't have keyboard shortcuts and desktop apps seem to increasingly be treated as as the narrow "edge case" with only a few hundred million target users versus the billions available on mobile devices. It's an opportunity for those who get serious about delivering value by leveraging the power of keyboard shortcuts to make their GUIs highly productive and comprehensively usable from the keyboard. For all their faults, Microsoft got this right with VSCode.

My trust in Flatpak diminished after installing the book reader Calibre and finding that despite the sandboxing Calibre was given blanket access to my drive. Apparently a quirk of the developer behind Calibre insisting upon it. No warnings or communication of the exception were given. All trust I had in Flatpak was eroded from that moment on. Curious about the podman options or similar. Having desktop apps in a container with selective access to system resources seems like it would be more secure and configurable if configured correctly. Flatpak as it stands seems to be a legacy solution to what should be a container and namespacing solution.