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Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

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Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#411

Post by bigyabai »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #405
torben-friis wrote: post #15

I don’t care about whatever Jobs thought, but honestly I do care about apple forgetting that the walled garden’s walls are tolerated only because the experience inside is better. Their hardware is still amazing, but I’ve had enough issues with software quality and Cook’s penny pinching philosophy that I’ve bought a second hand laptop to explore moving to Linux. So far, the experience is making me question whether my…

The main thing it’d take me to start considering switching to Linux is a laptop vendor taking battery life, power states, and sleep under Linux as seriously as Valve has with the Steam Deck. Once you’ve had real life 15h+ battery life, zero performance drop when unplugging, sleep that works correctly without “vampire” power drain, and cooling that’s effective and inaudible 80-90% of the time it’s hard to go back. I a…

> it’s going to take either a colossal screwup on Apple’s part

How hot does the water have to be before the frogs admit it's boiling? I feel like everyone forgot the macOS OCSP outage where your desktop apps wouldn't launch because of broken DRM. Or Ron Wyden's Push Notification whistleblowing. Or that gold statue Tim Cook gave out a few months ago - were those not real mistakes, yet?

I'm not opposed to a good Linux ARM laptop. I just can't tolerate Asahi-level driver support, nor can I live with macOS while running my workflow in UTM. The main thing stopping me from dailying Apple Silicon is Apple's complete neglect of macOS as a computing platform. macOS isn't just "bad like Windows" anymore, it's not even certain if Apple will support it in 10 years.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#413

Post by wredcoll »

jerojero wrote: post #365
b112 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

its incredible how much easier and convenient pirating ebooks is to buying them. when you pirate them versus buying them: 1a. searching for them has become incredibly easy 1b. searching for them is easy as well 2a. putting them on multiple devices is incredibly easy 2b. depending on the store, then you're going to be restricted to a particular device or app 3a. ten years from now, you'll have the same copy you bought…

We really have completely forgotten the whole napster/itunes lessons.

I'm old now, I've got disposable income, I'm morally inclined to pay book authors but the stores and systems make the experience so completely unpleasant that I rarely use them.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#414

Post by pwg »

seec wrote: post #232
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it. Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.) Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized. I ended up having to break the DRM becau…

Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal software for a while now. Which is absolutely brain dead because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are going to run some shitty cloud software anyway. For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost c…

It sounds like they are well on their way down the "Enshittification" [1] path. Eventually they will enshittify sufficiently that the illusion will shatter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#415

Post by Obscurity4340 »

shantara wrote: post #360
DarKraD wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iBooks one situation is the worst for me. Underneaths it’s actually a really good epub reader with the infinite scroll set up. Perfect for one hand reading. The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.

One huge downside of iBooks is that it would happily deauthorize access to the (DRM free) epub files you’ve added to the app manually after a couple of days without internet connection. I made a mistake of going on a long distance hiking trip and thinking can read some books in the tent before falling asleep. Nope, eBooks refused me until I returned to the mobile coverage area and resynced my library with their cloud…

You're better off with a local first reader/ebook /library manager like Yomu or Marvin.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#416

Post by solatic »

marcosdumay wrote: post #376
solatic wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Society changes It's rather disingenuous to claim, in context, that society has changed to enjoy advertisements. Indeed, I would make the argument that society will never , ever , get to the place where we enjoy advertising. Advertising is like the value-added tax: horrific for everybody involved, and society would have killed it a long time ago for that reason, if it wasn't for how much money it makes.

VAT is great, society worked a lot towards inventing it, and most countries are still trying hard to adopt some version of it while people entrenched in power resist the change. Ads can be done right too, and have been done right plenty of times. If you want to nitpick the GP, do not create such a glass ceiling.

VAT is horrible. It's a regressive tax on consumption, so it's doubly economically inefficient and is the worst offender for reducing quality of life for the most people. Reductions in VAT rates are always populist, but governments refuse to pass them because they can't give up the revenue stream.

Citation very much needed on your part.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#417

Post by zeagle »

b112 wrote: post #297
randycupertino wrote: post #247

Earlier 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. 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…

I feel like about the only thing not worth pirating these days due to enshitification is games and podcasts. Steam still makes it easy, questions about licensing aside.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#418

Post by ryandrake »

com2kid wrote: post #176
Pamar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About non-replaceable batteries: from what I understand, if a battery can be replaced by any random device owner you must design it with a robust cell to avoid risk of it being punctured, breaking, being crushed. And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and therefore it lasts less. This does not mean that I believe this was done exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will result in a slight…

I've worked in consumer electronics, batteries are built in because reviewers will endlessly trash a product that is just 1mm thicker than anything apple puts out, and they fawn over apple because the products are so thin. If anyone releases a product that is just a tiny bit thicker than last year, except headlines like "new super-thick phone doesn't fit in pockets, causes back problems". A small exaggeration? Not by…

We need to stop making products for reviewers.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#419

Post by robotresearcher »

jmyeet wrote: post #125
gwd wrote: post #75

> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on t…

I have to rant about search in the App Store. Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app. Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are pr…

> The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.

I just tried Things, Excel, Photoshop Elements, and Grand Theft Auto. Each was the first result.

So I guess YMMV on this.

Like you, I hate it when ads trump organic results.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#420

Post by cosmic_cheese »

bigyabai wrote: post #411
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing it’d take me to start considering switching to Linux is a laptop vendor taking battery life, power states, and sleep under Linux as seriously as Valve has with the Steam Deck. Once you’ve had real life 15h+ battery life, zero performance drop when unplugging, sleep that works correctly without “vampire” power drain, and cooling that’s effective and inaudible 80-90% of the time it’s hard to go back. I a…

> it’s going to take either a colossal screwup on Apple’s part How hot does the water have to be before the frogs admit it's boiling? I feel like everyone forgot the macOS OCSP outage where your desktop apps wouldn't launch because of broken DRM. Or Ron Wyden's Push Notification whistleblowing. Or that gold statue Tim Cook gave out a few months ago - were those not real mistakes, yet? I'm not opposed to a good Linux…

> How hot does the water have to be before the frogs admit it's boiling?

It's on its way, but it's not there yet. The extent to which other laptop manufacturers have been dropping the ball on building laptops that are excellent at being laptops cannot be understated, and that's without holding them to the standard that Apple has achieved where their laptops accomplish that while also blurring the lines between laptop and desktop in terms of power. Add in issues relating to build quality, Linux compatibility, etc and you're left with a tiny handful of machines that still aren't true peers to their counterpart MacBooks. Frankly, it's absurd.

Even formerly good manufacturers have been goofing around, like Lenovo's attempt to frog-boil its ThinkPad buyers until they're convinced that features like trackpoints and quality keyboards can be excluded or Dell faceplanting into the exact same follies that Apple did with the Touch Bar MacBooks.

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