HN user
My go to example (that unfortunately wasn’t mentioned in the article) is the removal of a game called Oxenfree from everyone who bought a permanent license for it on Itch.io. This is the most egregious example I’m aware of, as the game wasn’t merely made unavoidable for new purchases, but removed from the players’ libraries. It’s not a theoretical example of what could possibly happen, but an actual precedent.
The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.
Apple dropping 32-bit support resulted in me losing access to 3/4 of my Mac Steam library. Not every piece of software is built with an endless update treadmill in mind, no matter how much Apple would like to force the developers into one with their breaking changes and developer program subscription.
This would result in people losing access to a bunch of software just so Apple could shrug and shift the blame elsewhere. Because in the mind of an Apple fan, nothing is ever Apple’s fault.
I gifted my mom a Xiaomi phone a few years ago. Even after removing all the unnecessary apps and permissions, disabling all the privacy invasive settings and replacing the launcher with the stock Android, I was shocked when I checked the PiHole dashboard. The phone was constantly trying to communicate with dozens of different domains and endpoints, even when idle. None of these attempts had any sort of backoff, so they kept retrying every 30 seconds, draining the battery. Ultimately it generated several times more blocked requests than every other device on my network combined.
This was the first and only Xiaomi device I ever bought, no matter how attractive they might seem.
Try to set the lights to turn on 10 minutes before your alarm goes off
I had a very similar use case: turn on my espresso machine (via smart plug) 20 minutes before I wake up. It should have been simple, as I already have a sleep schedule with a wake up alarm in the system. It turned out to be such a complicated hassle, that it put me off from using HomeKit for anything more complicated than “press a button to turn on a lamp”.
The quality of Apple maps is highly dependent on where you live. Every time I check their release notes, I see “we’ve added a custom 3d model for this one landmark in a random US city”, which has zero impact on me or 99.99% of their users. Meanwhile, in my home city it took more than 3 months for a newly opened gym to appear of Apple maps, way way slower than on Google or OSM maps.
Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago…
…and yet SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.
Not sure why would I preorder a laptop of all things. It looks interesting, but I’d rather wait until the reviews are out.
Interesting how different both the tone and the structure of the articles are compared to the modern texts.
Take the article about Copenhagen as an example: https://britannica11.org/article/07-0111-copenhagen/copenhag... The geography and key points of interest are described very accurately, but the authors aren’t shy about inserting emotionally charged adjectives and personal options on what they consider interesting or curious. Also, the huge portion about the Battle of Copenhagen in the bottom is a complete departure and shifts the genre from a geographical description to the shot-per-shot narration of a naval battle.
One of the worst cases happens immediately after logging into a fresh Mac, or after upgrading one. You’re instantly hit with a barrage of requests from all the installed apps and their various permissions. It makes for such a terrible initial user experience, it’s utterly baffling someone at Apple has signed it off. They used to poke fun at Windows in their ads, but UAC has never been that terrible in my experience.
Sorry, the “recommended” was a bad wording on my part. The recommendation comes from the 404 Media article who did the expose on this incident, not Signal itself.
I’ve checked the Signal documentation page, and there’s no mention of the privacy implications of the setting: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360043273491-In...
iOS stores the previously displayed notifications in an internal database, which was used to access the data. It’s outside of Signal’s control, they recommend disabling showing notification content in their settings to prevent this attack vector
Partition Magic was among the first utilities recommended to me by my more experienced water I got my first PC. It served me well for many years since!
Connecting new AirPods to an iPhone for the first time now shows Apple Music subscription ad right on the pairing screen
With the widespread move to OLED across the TV and monitor manufacturers, this might not be the case for much longer. They look and perform great, but are ultimately a consumable product.
This is a topic that frequently comes up in our multicultural Danish company. In many countries people have adversarial relationship with their government, which is completely unlike Denmark. This mindset requires time and effort to change for the newcomers, and is also difficult to understand for people who haven’t lived outside of Denmark.
I have experienced the same privacy culture shock in Denmark. Generally, I think the people’s trust in their government is the greatest social asset of the danish society, as well as their biggest blind spot.
Another example from Denmark: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/28/europe/us-embassy-copenha...
Was it Apple, or community driven projects?
I used Miranda. Beautiful app with lots of plugins, and lot of settings and themes to customize it for yourself.
FWIW Organic Maps are aware of this issue. In the poll on their mastodon account, lack of public transit information was voted as number one missing feature. As far as I’m aware, they are looking into integrating the public APIs for it wherever possible.
I still had Slashdot in my RSS feed, purely out of inertia. I don’t even interact with it much other than occasionally marking it as read. This was the push I needed to unsubscribe from it.
Already being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949
That’s an interesting interpretation, but I’m not so sure how much of it was international, and how much it was a result of the developers calibrating the narrative flow for people who aren’t that familiar with sci-fi mind uploading tropes. I do agree that the protagonist had some perceptual blocks due to his “condition”.
If you recall, the difficulty of the gameplay focused portions of Soma has also received a radically different perception by more experienced gamers, and people who were in just for the story. Leading to the eventual release of a story mode patch.
Eric Berger space coverage still remains Ars’ strong suit.
Babylon 5 was my childhood defining TV series, the one that left an impact for the rest of my life. TNG is “merely” a great show.
This was certainly the most annoying aspect of the game for me. The logic of mind uploading has been explained to the protagonist several times during the playthrough, yet he couldn’t understand or accept it until the very end.
Available for: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation
Meanwhile Apple made a choice to leave iOS 18 vulnerable on the devices that receive updates to iOS 26. If you want security, be ready to sacrifice UI usability.
I am not blaming you or the Ars article for Apple's stance on this issue. Just feeling a little frustrated about the whole situation.