bigglywiggler

So many comments here by western people clinging to the only thing that they have left. The idea that somewhere in the world there is 'injustice' and a 'lack of freedom' and 'dictatorship' makes their absolute dystopian hellscape seem somewhat barely tolerable in their addled minds because they can at least imagine that elsewhere there is some big bad dictator and therefore they are comparatively free. No matter that they are poor and getting poorer or that their governments and companies are all sold out to billionaires and wrecked by private equity. No matter that their freedom begins and ends at consumerism and the vague idea that the police won't arrest them for posting something online. Apparently freedom to have a strong government that actually funds things for the public and doesn't suck billionaire cocks is not as important as having the opportunity to get into debt and spaff shite on the internet. If these people actually went to China and saw it with their own eyes then they would realise that they have been lied to. It's extremely sad to see.

I managed to break it...

Input was an explicit verse from WTF Collective, a Jon LaJoie parody song: I'm MC Public Urination waddup, I took a fucking piss on the fucking sidewalk. Anytime anyplace I just whip out my cock and empty my bladder while you motherfuckers watch. Yall other MCs can't handle this shit, you're just a lil bitch fraid to pee in public. You run into a toilet everytime you have to piss, fuck that shit, I just whip out my dick.

Output was decidedly not linkedin: I’m the Disruptor of Public Spaces, and I’m here to challenge the status quo by taking a fucking piss right on the sidewalk. Anytime, anyplace, I’m ready to whip out my cock and empty my bladder while you motherfuckers watch. Most professionals in this space can’t handle this level of transparency; you’re all just little bitches afraid to embrace public urination. While you’re running to a restroom every time you have to piss, I’m out here scaling my impact by just whipping out my dick. Fuck that traditional mindset.

In: I had a spirited wank. Out: I just completed a high-intensity personal wellness session to optimize my focus and recharge my creative energy. It's all about prioritizing self-care to maintain peak professional performance. #SelfCare #ProductivityHack #WorkLifeBalance

The US is really turning to shit.

I am a qualified mechanic. I no longer work in the field but I did for many years. Typically, when people 'trust their instincts as a user' they are fantastically wrong. Off by a mile. They have little to no idea how a car works besides youtube videos and forum posts which are full of inaccuracies or outright nonsense and they don't want to pay for diagnosis.

So when they would come in asking for a specific part to be replaced with no context I used to tell them that we wouldn't do that until we did a diagnosis. This is because if we did do as they asked and, like in most cases, it turned out that they were wrong they would then become indignant and ask why we didn't do diagnosis for free to tell them that they were wrong.

Diagnosis takes time and, therefore, costs money. If the user was capable of it then they would also be capable enough to carry out the repair. If they're capable of carrying out the diagnosis and the repair then they wouldn't be coming to me. This has proved to be true over many years for everyone from kids with their first car to accountants and even electrical engineers working on complex systems for large corporations as their occupation. That last one is particularly surprising considering that an engineer should know the bounds of their knowledge and understand how maintenance, diagnosis and repair work on a conceptual level.

Don't trust your instincts in areas where you have no understanding. Either learn and gain the understanding or accept that paying an expert is part of owning something that requires maintenance and repair.

This is the best thing that I've seen all day.

I mean, it's Apple's whole strategy to create an ecosystem of devices that all work really well with each other. Having had some insight about how chinese manufacturing operates on the low end it's much simpler than that, they just don't really care about things like not draining battery life. Their products are built to a price point and they are aware of that. If it could be built to the same price point without heavily draining battery life then it would be.

These types of games are only a small part of gaming, I use a macbook for my main machine and I play games on my console. The majority of gaming has nothing to do with buying skins and we should all be rejecting this nonsense anyway.

I guess he didn't have enough knowledge

I'm not sure that you have any sources for that percentage. Appstore links are definitely how iOS works.

I get what you're saying but anyone who falls for that one is beyond help. There are many red flags. I know that some people out there are not 'savvy' but this one is really obvious. The developer name is a strong red flag. If I was going to get LastPass I'd go on their website direct and click their appstore link from there.

The positives far outweigh the negatives.

This is a consequence of the fact that nobody actualy searches through a desktop appstore for an option to solve their software needs. If you do find new software it's not by searching the appstore. You go there to find a specific app which you discovered elsewhere at best. Sadly, Apple's barriers to entry have failed in the case of ChatBPP.

Sure, but how many other products have a feature like that? I live in a very remote area. I NEED Starlink because it's my only choice for internet. I NEED a big 4x4 because if there's some particularly bad rain I'd be trapped in my home. If a tree falls in the nearby forest and nobody is there to hear it our power still goes out because it fell on a powerline and we NEED solar panels with battery backup or we can't flush the crapper because the water pump doesn't work without power. If my wife has a breakdown of her car or, god forbid, an accident on her way home from grocery shopping there is no cell service. No way to call me or the breakdown company or the police or an ambulance. I'm also not the only person who lives here. There are a few hundred people spread out across the general area and they all have these issues too. Apple's atellite communication could literally save my life as I go about normal, non-adventurous humdrum day-to-day tasks. Informing consumers of an actually useful standout feature unique to your products is good marketing and they're doing it at a marketing event they host to market their products. This guy's whole article was just the same tired applebashing that has actually become quite annoying. We get it - you don't think Apple products are good value for money in your use case and you don't understand the people who buy them.

This is it, the grass is not greener on the other side unless you're moving over here. I don't understand why people who live on those less green pastures continuously wish for the greener pasture to be more like what they have now.

This is a perfectly HN style misunderstanding of what Apple actually is and does.

An iPhone doesn't need replaceable battery or an easier to replace screen, there are other phones that have these features and anyone is very welcome to buy them. Moreover, the screen is really not that hard to replace and you can charge any phone off a powerbank, you can even have a special magsafe powerbank that you carry in a bag. A 3rd gen SE (relatively crappy for an iPhone) can charge up to 50% in half an hour if your wall block outputs more than 20w. The point of an iPhone is that it's powerful enough to do pretty much anything that anyone needs and has software that's good enough to the point that it doesn't need some shitty skin over it. It's also supposed to be consistent with your other apple devices and supported for absurd amounts of time in comparison to the competition.

Touchscreen on laptops is shit, I'm not interested in fatiguing my shoulders while I work for a 0.01% usability benefit in some niche scenarios. It's a gimmick, nobody actually needs it. My current gen MBAir lasts literally days on battery. If you want a touchscreen Apple product with a keyboard then iPads are right there. They exist. The trackpad on any macbook virtually eliminates the need for a touchscreen and that's why they're the best trackpads on any laptop.

Airpods are the breakthrough product that they are because they aren't neckband style, they're literally the seashells that Ray Bradbury describes in Farenheit 451. For better or worse. They've been around for a long time now and we've forgotten that nothing like them existed in. the mainstream before they did. All the initial criticisms about them have evaporated, they have become normal as has their form factor. No neckbands or wires, the charge case juices them up and the battery on them definitely lasts all day, I've tried. If they had wires or a neckband then they simply wouldn't be what they are. If you want neckband style earbuds like you've descriibed there are plenty of options out there that existed before AirPods did.

Why would Apple make a TV when Samsung has that market fully cornered? In every way. What would be the point of competing with the company that makes the actual display panels that literally everyone uses? Apple can offer it's excellent software and they've done that, you can plug an Apple TV into any TV or, if your TV is 'smart' like all TVs nowadays, you can use the Apple TV app on your best in class TV. As well as the Youtube App, or the Netflix app, or the Prime app, or pretty much any service you want has a smart TV app really. What would anyone gain from Apple making a best in class TV?

None of these devices would cannibalize sales of any of Apple's products because they're all a terrible idea. If you want non-apple products then just buy them. They exist. All that stuff exists, just not made by Apple because those are inherently non-Apple ideas. Apple makes their devices for people who want their devices and everything that comes with their devices.

Your argument seems a little bad faith. Sure, random devices aren't able to connect to my phone without my consent but Apple devices only need that consent once. After they're on my apple account they can connect with my other apple devices seamlessly, no companion apps at any stage.

My AirPods move from my phone to my macbook all by themselves based on which device needs audio and my macbook can ask for my iphone's camera and mic at will. My Apple devices can do this because they have hardware level security to allow for this. The EU wants the same capabilities to be extended to non-apple devices.

This would mean that Apple would have to let devices connect without a companion app and possibly make a backdoor in their hardware security layer or worse allow anyone to incorporate their hardware security into any device.

If some aliexpress buds were able to do that then this would definitely pose a problem. Bad actors should not get access to Apple's proprietary security tech and that tech is one of the reasons that Apple devices have capabilities which non-apple devices do not.

edit: Your original comment makes a couple of good points re: the cost of lockin for consumers. However, I would like to point out that this cost isn't a problem when the locked in devices are as good as they are. Apple's devices routinely either come near to the top or sit at the top of the list of best X devices from many different review sources. If their locked in devices were worse this would make sense but often they are much better than all of their competition. I wouldn't buy any AirPod competitors because they genuinely don't actually represent better value even when they are cheaper than AirPods. Similarly with other devices, I've tried almost everything at one point or another. The first time I used Android I installed it myself on an HTC HD2. When I ditched windows I went with linux before I went with Apple. I've had powerful self built windows machines and Asus gaming laptops and a google pixel and a pebble and tried many more devices without actually owning them myself. Nothing has ever come close to my apple silicon macbook, my old iphone which I'm still using, my 2nd hand cheap ipad mini or my apple watch. I don't buy apple devices because I'm locked in and have no other choice, I buy them because they actually represent good value for me and my use case.

It wasn't that long and it didn't meander much. It's clear that you didn't realy understand what I was saying. Sure, Pebbles weren't cheap garbage but mine literally died the second that I tried to use it the way that it was used in their ads. I didn't care about the less developed functionality at all. You still don't address the fact that the vast majority of tech out there right now is e-waste.

The point which I was making is that Eric and the pebble team complained about Apple instead of competing in the space that they themselves had created. They were first to market with a smart watch and instead of just finding the consumer base which exists for what they had built and catering to them they tried to appeal to literally everyone and lost. They lost to literally better devices, better screens, better hardware, better software and better capabilities across all ecosystems. Cheap devices using Google's watch OS wiped the floor with Pebble. They had a loyal fanbase who liked the watch for what it was. I was part of that fanbase.

I suggest that if they had just did what they could for apple users and moved on to focus on the nerdy, first adopter types who actually liked their product and are somehow still coming back for it now then they'd have succeeded. It's hard to understand why they spent so much time and money focusing on ios notifications when Android also has a much higher market share and the majority of their customers were/are there anyway. They could have continued to develop their device in that direction and probably still been around today. they could have made better e-ink screens, better colour, better battery life, better charging hardware, better build quality, better waterproofing, built-in GPS, a real attempt at fostering a developer ecosystem for their OS or any number of other great features but they spent gorillions on ios notifications?

I'd also like to take a second to point out that they sold out to fitbit at the behest of their VC overlords because they were insolvent and ditched their userbase hard. Fitbit absolutely bought them out in order to take their IP and kill them as competitors for good. Complaining about Apple on the relaunch and relying on a community of enthusiasts to maintain an opensource codebase for their OS after Google bought out fitbit isn't really very customer focused of them.

Myreply to your question is why should they be able to have that functionality? Why should Apple allow other companies to compete with them within it's walled garden whch they made effort building and have the features that they designed and spent money developing? Why can't other companies develp their own cool features and their own ecosystems? It may benefit some people who want to use non-Apple stuff with Apple stuff but how does this actually benefit Apple and it's customers?

It does when a company has spent R&D to create a closed platform specifically for their customers. The closed platform is Apple's USP, their features are better because they only have to develop and support them for their devices.

We didn't. There has been constant innovation from then up until now.

I replied to someone else in the same vein but having had a garmin watch in the home there was nothing that it would have done better if it was able to work with Apple's proprietary stuff. If random devices of unknown provenance were able to freely connect with Apple devices then the security of Apple's ecosystem would take a hit. This would be bad.

I don't feel like Apple abuses my intellect. It's well known that Apple doesn't really care about people who want things that they don't offer, they market their devices to owners of their other devices. There are more expensive devices out there but none of them deliver the same value that Apple's devices do. They use standard methods and they have standard functionality and that's fine but if you want Apple then you buy Apple. Everyone is talking as if users are forced to buy and use Apple devices. The fact is that if you want a pebble or a garmin watch then you can just buy an Android phone and use that as the center of your tech and be happy with your non-apple devices. Why would someone want a Garmin watch that's compatible with their iphone? What possible real, non theoretical, reason is there to have one over an Apple watch? My wife had one and it's features were fairly pedestrian. There is nothing it did better than an Apple watch and that wouldn't have changed if it was able to work with Apple's proprietary technology. The existence of a comfortable walled garden alongside an open forest is not impossible by any stretch.

I just provided the credible excuse, these same obsoleted devices continued to receive software support from Apple for a long time after other devices that came out in the same year stopped receiving software updates. That's not really what i would call obsolescence. Every company makes mistakes including apple., my point is that in terms of consumer devices Apple makes fewer mistakes than anyone else.

I used to have a pebble time, it worked fine for me with my iphone that I had at the time. It died when I swam with it the first time. I loved that thing, was really bummed when it died. My Apple Watch SE2 blows literally everything it could do out of the water. Even not including the apple proprietary walkie talkie feature which I use more than anything else on my watch because me and my wife love it. Except the battery life but I can't sleep with a watch on so it doesn't really matter. It still gives me 2-3 solid days. It's a shame that they had/have difficulty making it work but the reality is that I never ever used it to do any of the things that they couldn't get it to do. And I don't use my current apple watch for any of that either. I never cared about sending texts with it, I didn't do much with the watchfaces and I'd never have paid for one. I used it to control music, count steps and see notifications without going in my pocket. If it lived up to it's waterproofing claims I'd probably still be using it today. It certainly wasn't trash and I want to see them succeed but if they had these features then [URL for first google result for aliexpress smartwatch removed] would also have these features and that would not be what anyone wants. Least of all the repebble team who wouldn't have any edge over the dollar or so price new user welcome deal on that particular piece of ewaste. IMO pebble should focus more on the things that people actually care about like the cool e-ink screen, distraction-lowered functionality, battery life and making sure it doesn't die the first time you swim with it like in the ads than bashing Apple for making their stuff more secure than everyone else and raising the barrier to entry for manufacturers of slop. Pebbles worked great on Android but 40% of their current customer base uses an iphone and they still want the pebble. Maybe the 'less developed' functionality wasn't so bad? Maybe, like me, they wanted a smart-lite watch as opposed to a smartwatch? If I had known that they were actually making watches again then I'd have actually bought one instead of my apple watch and I'd live happily never knowing about walkietalkie. I do marketing, if by some chance Eric Migicovsky reads this then I'd be honored to quit my current job and go sell pebbles for him.

Right, but they have to do R&D for their cool stuff because the standardized way doesn't allow for their features. Then other manufacturers get salty because they didn't do any of their own expensive R&D to make things work properly and the EU makes laws to force Apple to open up their R&D and support iit so that other companies don't have to do their own. The EU is definitely saying that it should be Apple's responsibility to maintain support of it's proprietary features for 3rd party products. If you don't want Apple products then don't buy them? In fact, what is the objective reason that other manufacturers should be able to make interoperable products?

Right? Why spend money and effort to R&D actually interesting devices if you can just make cheapo compatible slop instead?

So the throttling was because they found that the old hardware and batteries weren't keeping up and so, instead of letting the devices become completely useless they throttled them.

Butterfly keyboard isn't great but it works better without being crammed full of cheeto dust.

Play store has no barrier to entry and it's a slop filled garbage shithole. There's garbage slop on Apple's Appstore too but nowhere near as much.

The flipside to the 3rd party parts that nobody talks about is that if there was a sudden flood of apple devices repaired poorly with sheapo shit parts then buying used apple devices would be a terrible experience. I bought a lot of my Apple stuff 2nd hand and it all works great. Nobody said that anything had to be cheap, you want cheap go buy something else. Price is what you pay but value is what you get.

The planned obsolescence is not even a thing, they have by far the best record for supporting their old devices. I have an '09 Macbook Pro that is able to run El Capitan and the last security update for that was 2018. Iphone 6s is STILL receiving security updates. If you want to easily upgrade your components then don't buy apple devices, if you don't want to maintain winblows but still want serious applications to be able to run natively then buy apple. Older devices slow down because literally nobody cares about writing software that's lightweight and only uses actually necessary system resources.

Again with the Appstore and the 'user choice' you have choices, dont buy Apple products if you want the freedom to bloat your stuff with crap software. There's a massive market of winblows and android devices with all the pointless unsupported-open-source-with-the-last-update-to-the-project-made-in-1234BCE software your heart desires out there for your slop and e-waste buying pleasure. What security do you gain from installing random shit beyond the security that Apple builds in by default?

ALL tech currently sucks massive donkey cock but at least if you buy an iphone then you know that it'll reliably perform the duties of a small pocket based social media based computer/car audio brain until such a time as you choose to replace it. If you buy a macbook then you know that it'll do the job of portable computing for you as long as your needs don't esceed what 99% of people actually use a computer for besides playing videogames (just get a console for those, seriously how the fuck is a weird RGB chair in an RGB room better than a couch with your cat/dog/friends/family) for over a decade of your life. At least when you buy Apple products you know that you're paying out your ass for something that will 100% deliver on all the promises it makes.

If this competition is only competing on price then it's not really competition, it's a race to the bottom. If you genuinely think that because two pairs of earbuds make noise and connect via bluetooth that makes them the same thing then you are welcome to buy slop and have it work rubbishly with your other slop.

What I don't want is for the protocols that allow for apple's seamlesness to be opened to cheap trash. If Apple is forced to make it open to manufacturers of cheap trash and support it for manfacturers of cheap trash then it won't be economical for them to make cool stuff anymore and we won't have cool stuff anymore. I also dont want it to be easier to make devices that could maliciously take advantage of the friction removal capabilities that Apple builds into their devices. Customers already have a choice, e-waste slop garbage or apple products. The idea that they should be able to have both is quite ridiculous.

I made an account just to jump in here because this debate infuriates me every time I see it. So basically all the stuff that makes apple devices actually measurably better has to be opened up so that some rando can make a half hacked together attempt at compatibility? For what? So that people have even more rubbish e-waste to choose from?

Apple's main strength is their flawless ecosystem, everything made by apple works perfectly with everything else made by apple.

My airpods switch seamlessly between my apple devices, my watch unlocks all my stuff, my phone can be used as a camera and mic for my macbook, all of my devices besides my earbuds can be used to pay for things. All of it works completely seamlessly, no annoying popups, no dialog boxes, no asking for permission ten million times, no random disconnects. Literally no friction at all, once a new device is set up it's done. This frictionless-ness needs Apple's proprietary modifications to standards to function and it needs Apple's devices to be individually secure and all of these seamless connections need to also be secure.

If users want that then they buy apple.

If users want the spam ridden garbage hole that is Google's Play Store, or the terrible jamming of Android into poor quality cheap devices or the rubbish quality of most consumer tech in general then they can buy whatever they want but I don't want $10 aliexpress smartwatches to be able to seamlessly connect to my phone. I don't want random bluetooth earbuds from the petrol station to be able to access an API that lets them send transcripts of my calls anywhere they like and I definitely don't want a low barrier to entry for devices that can airdrop me stuff or paste to my macbook if I'm out and about.

Mybe Apple should just lock it's devices down so that they only work with other Apple devices full stop. Then there wouldn't be a market for compatible devices to compete in. I'd be happy because I have never once bought a non-apple device that I care about connecting to my phone. I'd have to buy a new monitor but that's ok.

All consumer tech right now is literally rebadges or mild modificatioins of stuff from AliExpress and I don't want that in my nice clean ecosystem. If these competitors want to actually compete then how about they make something that's actually better in some way instead of just hamfistedly copying whatever Apple comes up with? Live translation exists on google devices, if you want non-apple accessories and live translation then just buy a pixel and pixel buds? Nobody forces anyone to buy into apple's ecosystem.

I have switched between ecosystems multiple times and every single time I ended up back with Apple since I bought my first iPhone 5 back when they were new. The issues that android and windows devices have far outweigh the cost of Apple lockin. Especially for someone who just wants their devices to work as what they are and doesn't care about tinkering with them.