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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#681

Post by mzmzmzm »

Daneel_ wrote: post #506
canpan wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently also looking at Framework+AMD. I want Mac hardware but Linux software. The other makers build quality is horrendous. Especially in the 13inch segment which is my favorite. Using a pretty old laptop because there is no replacement right now. The new Ryzen AI looks really interesting! Sadly there is no Framework shop for me to look at it and they not ship to Japan..

Thinkpad line from Lenovo. Amazing build quality, and you can order them with Linux. I have a P1 Gen 7 and it’s fantastic. It feels premium, and it’s thin, light, powerful, has good connectivity and 4K OLED touch screen. I’d take it over Mac hardware any day.

Aren't the only Thinkpads with displays in the 4k neighborhood 16-inches? The 14-inch Macbooks are 3024*1964 and have all been like that for a while. I don't know why the PC world (and Linux ready by extension) undervalues high DPI so much, because it makes it hard to consider going back.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#682

Post by wyclif »

asimovDev wrote: post #393
wyclif wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotlight was bad back in the day, so I installed Alfred and started using that. Then Spotlight suddenly improved a lot, enough that it was usable for me, and I deleted Alfred. Then about five years ago something happened internally at Apple to the Spotlight team and it just got worse and worse and more difficult to use, making me regret deleting Alfred. I wish Apple would just fix Spotlight. They don't seem to think…

I wonder if Apple has internal metrics that most people just stick everything in the dock and on desktop and don't use Spotlight

That is a good question. I like my dock uncluttered. I have it placed vertically on the left side, with only the apps I use every single day: Alacritty, Brave, Cursor, and Zoom. With Finder and Launchpad included, that's only six docked apps. Everything else I use Spotlight to open, so I feel the pain when the usability gets degraded or buggy.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#683

Post by ksec »

If we look at OSX Releases [1] ; from OS X 10.10 Yosemite in 2014. The only useful feature for me was Universal Clipboard. That is 10 years of macOS and that was about the only user features.

While the 10 years have some security, performance, drivers, file system, refactoring going on. Most of the user features were useless.

And I spend 90% of my time inside Safari, and yet Desktop Safari is still shit after all these years.

I am not excited about 99% of new macOS user features. Most of them are features for features sake. Just continue the macOS engineering work, and for once pour more resources into Safari and allow Safari support on older Mac system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#684

Post by ben_w »

greener_grass wrote: post #614
yunwal wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that’s a huge part of the reason why the Vision Pro will never take off.

I disagree - if the Vision Pro had some strong use-cases then developers would hold their nose and make apps for it. The platforms that get apps are the ones where businesses see value in delivering for them. Of course businesses prefer it when making apps is easier (read: cheaper) but this is not a primary driver.

I think the potential high-return use-cases for VR and AR are (1) games, (2) telepresence robot control, (3) smart assistants that label (a) people and (b) stuff in front of you.

Unfortunately:

1) AVP is about 10x too pricy for games.

2) It's not clear if it can beat even the cheapest headsets for anything important for telepresence (higher resolution isn't always important, but can be sometimes).

Irregardless, you need the associated telepresence robot, and despite the obvious name, the closest Apple gets to iRobot is if someone bought a vaccum cleaner because Apple doesn't even have the trademark.

3) (a) is creepy, and modern AI assistants are the SOTA for (b) and yet still only "neat" rather than actually achieving the AR vision since at least Microsoft's Hololens, and because AI assistants are free apps on your phone, they can't justify a €4k headset — someone would need a fantastic proprieraty AI breakthrough to justify it.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#685

Post by ethbr1 »

gzer0 wrote: post #593
api wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iron law of bureaucracy happens because humans have a finite amount of time to spend doing things. Those dedicated to bureaucratic politics spend their time doing that, so they excel at that, while those dedicated to doing the work have no time for bureaucratic politics. It's related to why companies with great marketing and fund raising but mediocre or off-the-shelf technology often win over companies with deepe…

Great insight—thanks for sharing. It strikes me that bureaucracy is inherently self-perpetuating- once established, it rewards compliance over creativity, steadily shifting the culture until innovation becomes the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps the real challenge isn't balancing innovation and marketing—it's creating a culture that genuinely rewards bold ideas and meaningful risk-taking.

> [Bureaucracy] rewards compliance over creativity

Imho, this is the wrong takeaway from parent's point.

Bureaucracy rewards many things that are actual work and take time. (Networking, politicking, min/max'ing OKRs)

Creativity and innovation are rarely part of the list, because by definition they're less tangible and riskier.

A couple effective methods I've seen to fight the overall trend are (a) instill a culture where people succeed but processes fail (if a risky bet fails then the process goes under the spotlight, not the person) and (b) tie rewards to results that are less min/maxable (10x vs +5%).

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#686

Post by ben_w »

rollcat wrote: post #664
whompyjaw wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.

Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter failure that even Gruber has been calling it out. It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless. TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsub…

> I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.

I have almost the opposite problem this year. I tell the HomePod to turn the office lights on, it sometimes interprets this as a request to play music even though my library is actually empty, and the response is therefore to tell me that rather than turn on the lights.

Back in the pandemic, same problem with Alexa. Except it was in the kichen, so it said (the German equivalent of) "I can't find 'Kitchen' in your Spotify playlist" even though we didn't even have Spotify.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#687

Post by ethbr1 »

rollcat wrote: post #664
whompyjaw wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.

Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter failure that even Gruber has been calling it out. It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless. TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsub…

The decreasing effectiveness of machine-local search is just developers fucking up integrations and indexing.

This is a solved problem since ~1970 -- they're just not spending enough time on it.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#688

Post by ninkendo »

silvr wrote: post #45

Agree. Apple needs to clean up shop - MacOS has been egregiously worsening year over year. Some features like Universal Control and Continuity Camera are legitimately awesome, but they do not make up for the INSANELY slow System Settings app that gets harder to navigate with each release and which has >2s wait times for the right pane to respond to a change in the left pane. Steve Jobs would have fired the person res…

> Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up for fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!

Oh but you forgot about the “catch up” button they added 2 releases ago that takes you to the last unread message! …

… but only if said last message is within the N most recent messages, in the messages which are already “fetched” from local storage. If it’s more unread messages than that, the button is nowhere to be found.

Like they said “ok we can implement a catch up button but it’ll be hard to solve due to how we do paging.” “Ok we just won’t put the button on screen if we have to page then. Save the hard problem for the next release.” Then they just forgot about it.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#689

Post by ethbr1 »

ben_w wrote: post #501
yyyk wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last two decades? They don't seem to care about this.

App Store was a big improvement for developers when it was new, relative to the alternatives. The things it does may not seem important today, but back then even just my bandwidth costs were a significant percentage of my shareware revenue. ObjC with manual reference counting wasn't much fun either; while we can blame Apple for choosing ObjC in the first place, they definitely improved things.

Apple was incentivized to deliver a polished App Store DX when it first released, because it meant apps which meant iPhone sales.

Now that the platform is cemented, they don't have an incentive to cater to developers.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#690

Post by jasonjayr »

hkpack wrote: post #679
jasonjayr wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it's trivial, but it is tacit acceptance that you need permission to make a program on their platform. Permission that needs to be renewed year over year. Permission to earn a living on this platform. Permission that can be revoked for any reason, including being compelled by someone with more power than Apple.

It is permission to _distribute to others_, you can build and run on your own computer without a problem. Once signed, binary will work forever, you only need active subscription when you need to re-sign / re-notarise.

They can revoke a signature too.
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