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An entire generation of non developers are being onboarded to products built for developers because of AI. Exampl: a very non technical friend has built a bunch of business automations with Claude and a few days ago he just dropped in the conversation that he is using Cloudflare. “For what?” I asked because usually Claude will recommend Cercel before Cloudflare. But in this case, it recommended Cloudflare because of the Tunnels feature. Now he is using it for a lot more than Tunnels. Mostly just lets Claude use it whenever it makes sense.

“To what end?” was the default reaction when Amazon launched S3 in mid 2000s :)

He was talking about Excel. Google Sheets with a tiny fraction of Excel features destroyed Excel except for a tiny minority of hardcore finance and Windows users.

Fair enough. But tides do shift. A lot of today’s terrible patterns (like flat design) were born in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The current generation of UI and UX folks—for simplicity, designers in their 20s—who are empowered to make both big and small decisions at Big Tech are largely riding that inherited wave. There’s still time for their taste to evolve as their confidence and seniority grow.

The problem is that CSS continues to be a pain in the ass, even as it evolves. There is no other reason why something like tailwind should have the traction it has.

40% (and growing) of Apple’s profits are from services. Margins on services are 3x of hardware.

Apple doesn’t make money directly when you doom scroll but a lot of App Store revenue is a by product of people simply using their device in unlocked state.

No. I don’t want Apple to make LLM Siri. I do wish they would become the company unlocking creativity instead of shackling it. I will give you one specific example: iOS has extreme limitations on what it allows app developers to display on the Lock Screen. The area each app gets is limited. What gets displayed and how is very limited. How often the data gets displayed is limited.

This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.

It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?

The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.

Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.

iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!

I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.

It’s not JavaScript if you can’t make an html page locally and open it in your browser without things like an http server or need to transpile.

Dumb question: why do news websites have such a hard time keeping users logged in? Like I can go an entire year without getting logged out of gmail. But can't go more than a few days before getting logged out of news websites.

I have subscribed to news sites and still use something like archive.is because it is faster than my paid experience.

I've been stunned by how many smart people talk so casually about LLMs becoming better at math. Do they just forget that a calculator that is wrong 1% of the time is a de facto calculator that doesn't work and should not be used?

Good luck. I lost access to my Facebook account of 18 years a few years ago due to some 2fa bug (it tells me to enter a code from the fb app which doesn’t have that code.) Despite sending copies of my passport, license etc, the automated systems are of no help.

>I think the real question is if someone other than Steve Jobs was running Apple, would they have gone the same way the companies you listed go as well?

John Sculley already answered this, no?

Hi, just responded to Jérôme's email. I originally sent a twitter DM and will continue over email now that we are connected.