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Arturia does that, and Korg did as well (making controller keyboards specific for emulating a synth, with the software running on a Mac or PC.
Downsides: - if the software doesn’t get updated, you’re stuck running an old OS an old Mac that supports it. - you can’t just turn on the synth and use it, you need to find a cable, connect it to the Mac, launch the software, etc
Love the product, love that you don’t need a cloud account. Congrats! I’m in the same situation where I seem to improvise better when I haven’t hit the record button.
I wonder what would be the alternative, though? Other companies/universities would eventually have made the same breakthroughs, and I don’t think the answer to the innovators dilemma is to do less ambitious innovation?
In the case of Google there’s a lot of internal reasons why they didn’t leverage this opportunity, but if they had done that they might have ended up making their main product even more sticky.
I think what you say is true, yet some base research takes time. If you have a “ship it” attitude, you might push teams towards taking smaller bets that they know are within reach? I don’t know how the transformer breakthroughs at Google/DeepMind happened, and it’s likely they were “shipping” things internally, but it seems clear that the people on those teams were working in a very different environment than what the author is describing.
If you look at all the defining products of Apple, they also took years from the “germ of an idea” until they could be launched, and though they might have “shipped” internally, they gained a lot by not having pressure to ship things piecemeal to customers.
I'm usually hesitant to give advice since I'm never in someone elses shoes, but here's some thoughts:
A lot of community building comes down to trust, whether you are developing a commercial or open source platform. As a customer and integrator/consultant/developer, I want to know that the platform is going to be around and supported. The bigger my company the higher the risk is.
Open sourcing your software sends signals to your customers and partners. Some will see it as a last ditch effort to make it successful, with the flip side being that if it doesn't happen, you're won't be maintaining it anymore. Will that make them more or less likely to use your software/help build your community?
So in your messaging you should be very clear in what you want to achieve, and how you plan to build a successful business around an open source or open core model, and how the others companies fit into this. How will you respond if another company takes your code and does the exact same thing you're trying to monetize, only better? Etc.
You should also be careful about positive feedback. Most people like to be nice and supportive, and won't say negative things. The only way to know whether you'll have success there is to see actual commitment (in money or work spent) with your product.
Finally as others have said, you shouldn't expect automatic success/community by open sourcing the code. You might end up attracting the sort of customers / developers that have the least incentive to contribute or pay for additional services, unless you go find those yourself.
Apple was able to manage this with a much bigger market and a lot more apps (when transitioning to OS X), so while it would be hard, I think Palm could have been able to do that as well.
But as you say, the company structure, market position and a lot more worked against them (same thing with Nokia and Symbian).
Does Apple require an Apple ID/iCloud account to set up a Mac? I thought that was a difference with windows 11?
Granted, I have iCloud turned on (for syncing notes and calendar) but I have it turned off for everything else. I’ve never had it ask me to turn on any of the other iCloud features like iCloud backup or drive / desktop sync. (And I’d guess if it synced things without my knowledge it would show up in my iCloud storage usage?)
There’s 12 cameras and 3 screens to drive, how many lanes would you need for that through the cable? How chunky would the cable be after adding necessary shielding?
Why assume it's a greenfield project? I would think most open source software that comes out of companies have lived internally for a while before going public?
Lots of processor types are programmable, not just GPUs. Apple is well known for making purpose built chips for their hardware. Main point is that they reuse the cores across different chips. A chip with 12 camera interfaces doesn’t sound like a general purpose GPU to me.
Apple likes mentioning whatever is a competitive advantage. M2 has 100GB/s, M2 Pro 200GB/s. They put in the bandwidth they think is needed for the purpose. Likewise with the 12 camera interfaces. It’s a safe bet that there’s some sort of GPU on board but there’s zero indication that this is Apples first discrete GPU. If anything you would expect such a chip to appear first in a desktop product. The R1 is likely programmable as well.
The article does nothing to back up the claim in the title, that Prusa is actually floundering. Presumably if somone writes a post tomorrow about how the Hare programming language is floundering, and that ends up trending in various forums with the language dying being taken as matter of fact, then Drew would have liked whoever wrote it to have done a bit more research.
The company I worked for had our office renovated/redecorated. As part of that, we moved offices temporarily, and one of the larger meeting rooms was relocated to a remote building. We didn't have a way of wiring up that meeting room to the rest of our office network, but building management were able to give us internet access in the room.
I wanted our employees to be able to roam to that meeting room transparently without any hassle. I knew that OpenVPN had a layer 2 tunneling mode, that could bridge two ethernet networks over VPN. With two leftover workstations, I set up an OpenVPN server in the main office, and an OpenVPN client at the meeting room. By bridging the OpenVPN interface to the ethernet interface on the client, I was able to connect a switch, WiFi access point and videoconferencing equipment. Everything worked perfectly, with even DHCP requests going over the VPN.
Our startup needed to automate our invoicing process. Back in the day there were only a couple of reasonably priced, web based ERP systems in our country.
The one we picked had good API docs, but we didn't read the fine print - API access was a high yearly fee, costing almost as much as the regular subscription fee.
Their web interface functionality for importing orders/invoices from a CSV file, and looking at the browser requests I could see they were simply using the API in their frontend. A couple of hours later, and we had our invoice import job doing POST requests to their login page, getting the right cookies back and uploading invoice files.
Worked fine for years, only requiring a couple of updates when they changed their login page.
Are they forcing people to the cloud services? (I'm still running without cloud enabled.)
You can run your Dream Machine without cloud access, though?
Hue is spun out of Philips and is only using the Philips trademark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signify_N.V.
(Last time I checked, iPhone doesn't _require_ an iCloud account to work, although it still needs to "phone home" to be activated on setup.)
Do you have a link to any of those adapters? Have a 600SE and a 3D printer, would be nice to give a new life to the camera.
The closest to what you describe would actually be Bluetooth, but that's also a kitchen sink standard that tried to do everything and ended up with a lot of compatibility and connectivity issues that we still live with today.
I have a hard time thinking of how terraform as a piece of software can do to much more than it already does to fix things?
When terraform fails, it's typically because of a an API error or a configuration issue that is beyond its control?
Not handling state rollback is a design decision that, having dealt with the fun of CloudFormation, I'm pretty happy that they made.
My thinking was simply that they had millions of loyal, happy iPod users that would be replacing their iPods at some point in time, and iPhone would be a natural upgrade path for them. And they had retail outlets where they could push the iPhone. But I was skeptical about them being able to deal with the mobile operators, and I underestimated how slow competitors would be to catch up.
Calling it a dumb phone with a gimmicky interface doesn't add up to me. Yes, it had a 2G modem, but it was still running OS X under the hood just like all the following models and had a suite of apps that worked way better than existing smartphones.
Apple went with the operator that would allow them control over the device. This was at a time where Nokia sold specific versions of their smartphones with WiFi disabled in the US. And the situation was similar elsewhere. So in many of the countries they entered, they often started with a smaller operator. They bet that the bigger operators would change their mind after seeing iPhones success (and how many subscribers they had lost), and they turned out to be right. In hindsight, they managed to upend the whole telecom industry (or at least accelerate that process), which is now more or less reduced to "dumb data pipes" that you use when you're outside of WiFi coverage.
Agreed. IMO, a naysayer that did their research should have watched the original iPhone intro and would not miss the slide where Steve Jobs says "iPhone runs OS X", with a list of all the features they "got for free". You wouldn't have to know much about Apple to also realize the amount of software they'd already written that could be adapted to a mobile format and the advantage they would have over the competitors (Nokia, Blackberry and Microsoft with their existing Windows Mobile OS).
I think most of the "iPhone is doomed" people fundamentally misunderstood what the iPhone was and what it did compared to existing phones. And of course, they judged Apples future on the first device, which they considered flaws in a bunch of ways that didn't matter (I recall how many people laughed about it missing MMS and multitasking, which turned out to not matter (it could multitask for the features people used), and something they added later.
Maybe them halting production is because they _are_ good at supply chain management and predicting macroeconomic trends?
I think the whole anecdote sounds like a story that's been told a few too many times (including variations of Toshibas helpless product department making stuff they didn't know how to sell), because finding "that one thing" that made a difference" makes for a good story.
Rubinstein saw the drive and realized that the price level and size was perfect for their product idea. And he had buy-in from the higher ups so they could negotiate a certain volume and price that made the project feasible.
That doesn't mean another company couldn't have been successful with a smaller 1GB drive (seeing the success of the smaller iPods later on) or a physically bigger 5GB drive (people were still carrying around walkmans and CD players).
What Apple managed to pull off was making a device that was easy to get music into (with iTunes) and easy to use (with the clickwheel) and, yes, compact and with good design and marketing.
The Zune came quite a while later, though (2006 vs iPod in 2001). The main competitors at the time was Creative (Nomad) and frin 2003 (IIRC) iRiver, and they typically had slow USB ports at the time and were more bulky.
My wife doesn’t care about CPU architectures, but she was astonished that her new MacBook Pro didn’t get hot on her lap, and how she could work through the day on one charge. Then she was astonished by the sound quality of the speakers. It’s not a revolution but people care about the end result of those incremental innovations.