A lot, they _can_ do almost whatever they want with their own AppStore and own business model. Including making good on the anti-trust lawsuit they've got for a decade around the world and let go of their monopoly.
We shouldn't make it sound like they _have to be_ the bad guys. Even from a business standpoint they're slowly losing the grip on their market and getting back some goodwill wouldn't be a bad thing.
> The same way you do not really understand how the Linux kernel works, nor do you know how assembly really works
Thing is we don't write kernel code nor assembly.
It would be an issue if for every API request handler we write we'd also ship a kernel patch or some kernel level helper. That's the situation we're stuck in with agents, they produce a bunch of low level code that we have to either trust or thoroughly review, even as our goal is at a higher level.
IMHO we really need high level and proven solid frameworks that the agents can rely on, and get in exchange high level code that is succinct, simple and readable enough to be properly understood.
There are things parents will not want teens to do that teens will want to do. They will not want to feel pressure to even explain themselves after the fact.
That sounds orthogonal to device management to me. It will happen either way, and not having GPS tracking won't stop parents from catching their kids doing stuff they don't want them to (at least if it's a recurring thing)
People here seem to completely overlook that parents have been managing the whole life of their kid for more than a decade and teenagers are really bad at hiding things in general. Perhaps it's different if the parents are working three jobs and never talk to their kid, but I don't see that as a general case.
The point being made is that if you put tracking in, you are creating an incentive for the teen to get rid of the phone when doing things parents may not approve of. Even if parents find out anyway, the incentive is still there.
> most people just talk it out and find some convenient balance
That is decidedly not the way I've seen most people handle the convenience/privacy tradeoffs we all face every hour of every day. So I'll put a question mark on that..
Really ? Kids in family plans will have their devices bound to an admin, and that admin has a lot of rights on their devices, purchases etc (that's the whole point)
I can't imagine every family setting up the admin features to be in psychological crisis.
On top of dabinat's point on consent, there is the resource use and accuracy part.
I can't imagine how much sleuthing is needed to infer who would be someone's divorced mother if it wasn't explicitely labelled, but it's completely unneeded until the day they actually try to use that info through some Apple service. Then, they'll be in for a surprise the day it infers it's their boss instead.
We already got past that with search engine's auto suggestions for instance. If you Google "Australia is" you'll get a list of suggestions that could be construed as coming from Google, but most people understand it's just from statistics, and those still making a fuss about usually get ignored (political corruption aside).
Sure your client could want to be ultra sure, but I'd argue the censorship coming from a marketing concern doesn't make it specifically better. If I actually use swear words all the time for instance your software would be constantly penalizing me.
That's a tradeoff they're willing to make, but if I was a user it would be totally fair for me to be pissed and hold it against them.
> Have we forgotten that all of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the gigabytes?
Everything you listed worked for decades with a lot less RAM, but was also more limited and potentially different in substance in critical ways. It's the "Mom I want X ! -> We already have X at home" meme, where the "X at home" is some poor version of what was requested.
I understand some people could still enjoy a retro style experience, but I wouldn't give up on my HDPI displays for instance. Or touch support. Or keeping 40 tabs open instead of hand managing my tabs or rely on some dumb auto-close algo.
Spreadsheets can now have dozens of thousands of line and still be snappy to manipulate, we can play high def videos while doing actual work without freezing the whole system. Photoshop and Lightroom used to be crash junkies for even basic operations and people would baby the settings to aleviate that; with the RAM we have now it has become a somewhat decent situation (still crashes, just way less)
I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.
PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy. Nowadays phones will be enough for most of that, and people will mostly avoid doing them if it requires opening a computer. That's where we have so many budget management apps for instance.
So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.
I agree with you on HDPI, which is why I mentioned it. That's a tangible benefit for all users, which would be impossible without the increase in RAM.
40 tabs open at once? That doesn't need a lot of RAM if websites were programmed to do what they actually do: Display text and images.
I don't think touch needs any special amount of RAM, would it differ for the operating system than a mouse?
Photoshop and Lightroom <- These I think fall into the category of special use cases for professionals, which absolutely need more RAM than a home user. For somebody who only occasionally wants or needs to do a bit of advanced photo editing, it's okay to wait a bit longer for operations.
> I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.
Are you sure about that? If you actually sat down to only work, without having YouTube videos open or other things going on in the background? If you close your Amazon Black Friday tab you already liberate 500 megabytes of RAM.
> PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy.
No, in this case it is you who didn't understand or didn't want to understand. Nowhere did I say only. But the things I listed are what normal people do mostly. And nobody would want to type a long report or do spreadsheets on their phone.
> So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.
Not at all. Most computers are used by office workers at their job, and I'd bet that most home computers are also used for non-intensive purposes. But I think you're right in what direction things are moving.
> websites were programmed to do what they actually do: Display text and images.
Technology should be allowed to evolve as needed. Smartphones were also supposed to be phones, and I'm sure I'm not the only to basically ignore the phone app unless forced to.
I'm totally fine with progressive web apps for instance, or how Figma is pushing the boundaries to bypass the whole native Store requirements.
> Lightroom
Photography is a mildly popular hobby. Even as phones are king, around 10 million dedicated cameras were sold last year [0], so having Lightroom as a home user isn't as exotic as you make it sound like.
The issue is not really the wait time, it's the instability and crashes, which are aliviated by less back and forth between the disc and the RAM. It's totally Adobe's fault, but I also think it wasn't a simple problem to begin with.
> only work, without having YouTube videos
I need YouTube and I suspect many do. Currently all of last year's WWDC sessions are on Youtube, as do most video tutorials, business presentations etc. Also work BGMs, podcasts, live streams etc. are resources people also use to keep focus or stay awake through their working day.
People used to listen to their own sound on dedicated devices, IMHO it mostly moved to their computers, especially as bluetooth gives more flexibility to move around.
> office workers at their job
I'd wager most of these workers job involves more than what you're giving them credit for. I've followed CS agents dealing with user requests for instance, one of the lowest job level in our org, and that involved a lot of multitasking, juggling with the ticketing system, and keeping stuff at hand. In particular the agent I was shadowing had a discord call going on about a third of the time, with me in a Meet session. Sure, 20 years ago we would have done it a different way. But nowadays that's just how they're doing it.
Traditional data entry jobs might be different, but how many of them still exist as of now ?
> Technology should be allowed to evolve as needed.
Certainly, you say it yourself: as needed. There is no need for giant amounts of RAM for most productive and entertaining computing tasks.
> The issue is not really the wait time, it's the instability and crashes, which are aliviated by less back and forth between the disc and the RAM.
Very good point! I don't completely recognize this problem, because in the long time I've used Photoshop and such, I haven't noticed a lot of crashes.
> People used to listen to their own sound on dedicated devices, IMHO it mostly moved to their computers, especially as bluetooth gives more flexibility to move around.
Sure, but audio doesn't need a lot of system resources, and neither should video. A feature length film is a couple of gigabytes, and can't take up more RAM than its entire content.
> I'd wager most of these workers job involves more than what you're giving them credit for.
You could do a lot of multitasking between well coded work apps in a well coded operating system. I remember doing that. But if the ticketing system takes a gig of RAM in the browser when it should take a 100 megabytes if made properly...
I remember having video calling fully functioning in Skype with 2 gigs of RAM.
The best outcome of all would be that memory hungry people like Mr Altman started paying home computer users for renting part of their RAM for their AIs to munch on. In the meanwhile, the home user could have the same performance for their computing as before while only using half of their RAM.
And it's already been proven: My Macbook with 8 gigs of RAM is radically faster and more performant than any PC with 16 or 32 gigs of RAM for any kind of task thrown at it.
A lot, they _can_ do almost whatever they want with their own AppStore and own business model. Including making good on the anti-trust lawsuit they've got for a decade around the world and let go of their monopoly.
We shouldn't make it sound like they _have to be_ the bad guys. Even from a business standpoint they're slowly losing the grip on their market and getting back some goodwill wouldn't be a bad thing.
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