Bad Dye Job

Last week I was driving and a popup from apple music to accept more terms and conditions showed up on top of Maps.

It was a tense 25 minutes of interchanges without nav before traffic was clear enough to deny the terms, and I purged the app and cancelled the subscription afterward.

This is like a Man United fan discussing a player who just left for a rival team. You sort of expect a large amount of bitterness.

Indeed!

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/570584/it-raises-the-iq...

I think Apple have jumped the shark, personally. Sure, trillion-dollar business and all that - but at the folk level, they have become the very thing they were always resisting: a tired old monopoly enforcing principles on their customers which are not in the customers' best interests.

OS vendors have lost the plot. Where a company decides to try to build an operating system for mass acceptance at scale these days, they build an ad delivery platform - not an operating system. The interests of far too many third parties have been elevated at the kernel-extension layer, and lower, and this is as troubling as it ever was.

Its the 21st century and people still don't understand how to manage the filesystem, having given all agency to the task to the backend/cloud, which harvests their data instead of granting the user more agency. In fact, most people have less agency over their data - and simply do not care about it - because they have been lulled into accepting the state of affairs by OS vendors who simply don't want to write a better Finder/File Explorer for the end user - choosing instead, to write an operating system for ad agencies to harvest user eyeballs.

Apple have traditionally avoided the usual pretence of 'ads in the start bar' by leveraging their platforms, and this is starting to fall apart at the seams. Convergence is going to be a joke, and will turn off a lot of computer users until a generation is raised, who will just accept the doctrine of their masters, and in so doing, lose knowledge to the generations.

I yearn for an OS vendor to build an operating system that really makes the user control over their computer and their data, a number one priority. Apple isn't it. Microsoft certainly isn't it. There are multiple Linux OS vendors who could be it, if only they'd get their hardware act into shape. There are hardware vendors struggling to attain this goal, too.

My next laptop won't be an Apple, after 30+ years of adoption of the platform. I fear the future that Apple is laying out ahead of us - just as I feared that of Microsoft and Oracle and IBM too, through the decades.

If there is hope, it lays with the (low-end open source hardware/software-agency-protecting) proles.

I’m excited for the new energy this will bring to UI design at Apple. The same way that Jony Ive leaving opened up the opportunity for thicker more functional machines. Never underestimate the power of a group of passionate people who’ve been repressed and now get a chance to set things right.