Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

kensegall.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 519 posts

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#431

Post by StackRanker3000 »

kakacik wrote: post #390
jerojero wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> its incredible how much easier and convenient pirating ebooks is to buying them. Pirating everything is easier than buying, copyright owners have firmly adopted this mindset. It keeps swinging across the line of comfort up and down over the decades and these days its mostly back down. Games don't have OS Ring 0 level denuvo style crap making your computer more vulnerable and slower, and these days all big ones have…

Spotify offers lossless now. But before that the highest quality was 320 kbps AAC, and if you’re able to differentiate between that and lossless even on state of the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast majority of songs, you’re an extreme outlier (and in that case, sure - go for the lossless option)

You can also download up to 10,000 songs per device for offline use, which should be enough for a plane ride

I can see other issues one might have with Spotify, but I don’t really think those are among them. I’ve had it for about 15 years, and I’ve been consistently happy with it for my own use

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#432

Post by torben-friis »

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…

Honestly, the XPS I bought second hand works close enough with kubuntu that I might not mind.

So far I get enough unplugged gas for a worrylesss morning/evening session, with lid movement causing instant sleep/wake and night battery drain of ~6%. Fans stay silent 90% of time, there is sometimes a weird sound on usage like a hdd read but it’s very subtle.

As a plus beyond the software, I get a touchscreen 4k display, larger storage, and disks/battery that can be replaced if it shits the bed. Considering that the device cost me less than one third of the price it’s not a bad deal at all.

Important to say, I tried 5 distros and only Ubuntu managed this. Fedora put fans on full blast, couldn’t wake from lid down and refused to talk to my external monitor, arch had weird scaling issues and popos desktop was working weirdly.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#433

Post by jasomill »

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…

As a Disney+ subscriber, I occasionally pirate content because the Web app acts up and refuses to play content I'm entitled to, even at degraded resolution.

I do this even though my desktop display is a smart TV that's perfectly capable of streaming 4K content, because side-by-side display of app and HDMI content is not an option.

Speaking of which, how do Disney and other streaming providers benefit from blocking 4K streaming in browsers once the 4K version is readily available to torrent, often at higher Blu-ray bitrates? Is this part of some backroom deal with TV and streaming device vendors?

As for e-books, I only buy them if they're either DRM-free or DRM is easily strippable.

I also check out physical books, CDs, and Blu-ray discs from libraries when possible, not because I believe DRM on borrowed library materials is unfair per se, but because I don't agree with the business models it has enabled.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#434

Post by georgeecollins »

someguyiguess wrote: post #345
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…

They’re stealing from us. It’s only fair we steal from them.

I don't think you should rationalize theft.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#435

Post by davidwritesbugs »

sandworm101 wrote: post #342
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #177

Earlier 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 would still make fun of you for hoarding physical media. Mine now lives on my NAS, a black box of spinning HHDs sitting in my living room, to which i have saved copies of everything i care about. My music exists as files which i coppy to my phone's music folder, my movies as files that i can stream to my tablet without any mention of clouds. With recent improvements in storage tech, short of a raging fire, "my" med…

I did the same: tended to use Apple services then when I hit poverty I was able to use my NAS copies of music and videos after cancelling subscriptions. Had a "so why was I paying for years?" moment especially with all the enshitification issues

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#436

Post by marcosdumay »

solatic wrote: post #416
marcosdumay wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only problem on VAT is that it's regressive. People studied sales taxes until they solved every single of their problems, except for this, that in inherent to the activity. It's also the least regressive form of commerce taxes around, and the easiest one to mess with and so the government can take the worst impacts away.

And if you pair it with a capital movement tax, you can make it proportional. But we don't have anything equivalently good for capital movement, so most governments refrain from it.

Either way, if you want to argue that VATs are bad because they only tax one part of economical activity, that's an incredibly bad argument.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#438

Post by dangus »

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…

Apple’s services pull in more revenue than Macs and iPads combined.

The expectation that they won’t advertise them is, unfortunately, not a reasonable one.

You can turn off Apple Music the service entirely from the music app. If you stick to the library tab in books you’ll never see an ad. It’s really not anywhere close to the worst offender in the industry.

Is it a great thing? No.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#439

Post by cosmic_cheese »

torben-friis wrote: post #432
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…

Honestly, the XPS I bought second hand works close enough with kubuntu that I might not mind. So far I get enough unplugged gas for a worrylesss morning/evening session, with lid movement causing instant sleep/wake and night battery drain of ~6%. Fans stay silent 90% of time, there is sometimes a weird sound on usage like a hdd read but it’s very subtle. As a plus beyond the software, I get a touchscreen 4k display,…

> Important to say, I tried 5 distros and only Ubuntu managed this. Fedora put fans on full blast, couldn’t wake from lid down and refused to talk to my external monitor, arch had weird scaling issues and popos desktop was working weirdly.

That is one of the offputting aspects of the experience, in my opinion. Some machines work better out of the box with Ubuntu (or derivatives), some work better with Fedora, some with Arch, etc. Of course it's possible to isolate what the distro that works best for a machine is doing that makes it that way so it can be applied to your preferred distro, but frankly who has the time for that?

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#440

Post by musicale »

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…

> uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience

As Jobs understood (per TFA), pushing ads degrades the user experience - the prime differentiating factor for Apple products in the first place, and what attracted many people to the platform.

It's bad, and it's probably going to get worse as Apple's services businesses increase their share of revenue and exert expanding influence over product design within the company.

Banning Apple from leveraging its platform for advertising Apple services might help, but the fact that we have arrived at the point where we have to rely on antitrust enforcement to make Apple products less intrusive and user-hostile shows that the company has lost its way.

> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store

Unfortunately, requirements that Apple provide a choice to install Spotify rather than Apple Music, or Kindle rather than Apple Books, on a new iPhone doesn't fix the problem.

Post reply on HN