I don’t think Apple fundamental issues are that hard to fix. First, you need to fire whoever is leading the UX on the OS side. Hardware design is still pretty good. Then we can argue about their lack of innovation and missing the AI train, which btw is still not proven to be a bad (lack of) strategy. But until they don’t get the fundamentals right at the OS UX experience nothing else matters. I hate iOS with passion, both on my phone and Apple Watch, it feels like a Beta version most of the time.
Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
291–300 of 519 posts
Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is the analysis?
What’s the average price of a laptop? Hint: it’s much less than $1000. Do you think that people are going to start buying more expensive laptops? For the iPad, how have the convertible Windows Surfaces been doing? You really don’t see a problem with creating a “token router”? He also wants to create a distributed CDN where every computer is a node - ignoring the fact that most people have asymmetric internet access w…
I do think that people will buy more expensive laptops if they are higher quality. People spend multiple thousands of dollars on laptops, especially if they are powerful.
I own a Windows Surface. I personally find it very convenient, although I'll concede this point if you say the economics aren't working out.
I don't see the problem with creating a token router. Openrouter exists and seems to be doing fine. I'd love if you could actually elaborate on your concerns.
I agree that the CDN idea is pretty weak, but you could make it a bit better by rewarding users based on uptime. Rather than basing the rewards on total time opted in, base it off of total successful requests.
Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special People made fun of me for continuing to hoard physical media all these years. I predicted this hellscape might come one day. Man I love being right.
I appreciate the attempt, but have never seen the point personally. That is, many physical media collectors do it to have nice box sets to display, or in an attempt to have off-line copies of media, but I have never met anyone who goes to the effort of ensuring long-term readability - which is understandable, it is a huge hassle. Unless you are copying the content to new physical media every so often it will eventual…
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Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worst part of it is that despite all this, Apple still has the least frustrating desktop experience overall, at least for the casual user who needs things to "just work", because the bar is plummeting that fast. Especially when looking at Windows.
AI will soon make this difference (if it even exists) irrelevant.
How will AI change this situation? I don't catch your drift.
Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worst part of it is that despite all this, Apple still has the least frustrating desktop experience overall, at least for the casual user who needs things to "just work", because the bar is plummeting that fast. Especially when looking at Windows.
AI will soon make this difference (if it even exists) irrelevant.
In that both Windows and Mac will be equally shit?
Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience. But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.
Or how the iphone 4 antenna was obstructed by normal holding of the phone (including poses in apple marketing materials), and then steve just told everyone they were holding their phones wrong.
Yeah. The phone was faulty from a hardware design standpoint, and the manner Steve Jobs handled it was bad. But he was correct on one point:
Every other manufacturer at the time had a paragraph and illustration in their manual telling people not to hold their phone in a certain manner.
I think much of his bad attitude came from this fact that he felt Apple was unfailingly singled out.
Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner. And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way searc…
> This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner. This happened with (amazon owned) audible now too. When you try to search your own library instead it shows you books for sale. Even if you search…
I pirated a lot when I was younger.
Downloaded movies, books especially. Back then, ebooks were barely a thing(early 2000s), and scanned/OCR copies were the only way to get most books to read on a device.
I even contacted a few authors and sent them money directly via paypal.
But then the market matured. I bought what I could on Amazon. Exported to epub to read as I pleased.
Then the Kindle app became horrendous. Now exporting is not a thing. So I just pirate books again.
It's too much effort otherwise.
And on top of that, if people will only lease me a book, and not sell it (Amazon), I'm not paying either.
Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
#298I ran a reverse image search on the image of Steve Jobs, and couldn't come up with anything, so it does appear that it might be AI generated, which I don't approve of.
Honestly, there should be laws against gen AI models creating fake media with real individuals. We're going to end up with a massive mess on our hands once the video starts looking more realistic
How to you expect those laws to be enforced?
It's impossible to determine with 100% confidence whether or not an image/video was AI generated. If the AI-generated image of Steve Jobs had been copied a bunch on the web, a reverse image search would have turned up lots of sources. Watermarks are imperfect and can be removed. There will always be ambiguity.
So either you're underzealous and if there's ambiguity, you err on the side of treating potentially AI-generated images as real. So now you only catch some deepfakes. This is extra bad because by cracking down on AI-generated content, you condition people to believe any image they see. "If it was AI generated, they would have taken it down by now. It must be real".
The alternative is being overzealous and erring on the side of treating potentially genuine images as AI-generated. Now if a journalist takes a photo of a politician doing something scandalous, the politician can just claim it was AI-generated and have it taken down.
It's a no-win situation. I don't believe that the answer is regulation. It'd be great if we could put the genie back in the bottle, but lots of gen-AI tools are local and open-source, so they will always exist and there's nothing to do be done about it. The best thing is to just treat images and videos with a healthy amount of skepticism.
Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special People made fun of me for continuing to hoard physical media all these years. I predicted this hellscape might come one day. Man I love being right.
I appreciate the attempt, but have never seen the point personally. That is, many physical media collectors do it to have nice box sets to display, or in an attempt to have off-line copies of media, but I have never met anyone who goes to the effort of ensuring long-term readability - which is understandable, it is a huge hassle. Unless you are copying the content to new physical media every so often it will eventual…
You're citing a report about recordable CD and DVDs. Movie DVDs should be expected to last much longer than that.
Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
#300The ending of the article is such a low quality..
> Whatever his reason, Tim Cook is not as protective of the user experience as his predecessor was. If we were to ask Tim why it’s okay to bring ads into Apple products now, but wasn’t okay during Steve’s reign, the best (only?) answer would probably be, “Today’s Apple is very different from Steve’s Apple.”
> Quite true. And that is exactly the problem.
So Ken Segall first admits he doesn't know the reason, then speculates the answer Tim Cook would give if they were asked the question, then ends the article by contemplating on that speculative answer.
And the thumbnail is quite obviously AI generated. Just low quality all around. The point could be driven home without resorting to either of these two things.