10.5 Leopard was my peak. 10.6 Snow Leopard improved on its stability but had a touch of visible regretion (in my opinion). After that, I haven't really been happy with any release. Obviously some things have improved but... 10.5 was branded Unix, the UI was beautiful. It felt solid.
It sure does feel that way. But I've often maintained that Apple took a look at how people were using features like this on other operating systems and said, "NO! We're gonna 'think different'!" And no one liked their way of "thinking different". But they keep doubling down, believing that once we see the genius, we'll all come around.
I haven't yet come around. Unix had it figured out back in CDE days. i3 was my happy place... now it's Niri. As long as I can get to my workspace with a key combo THAT I DEFINE, I'm probably okay.
I don't know -- my conspiracy theory for many years has been that Apple isn't really very interested in multiple desktops at all, and there's just this one engineer who's made it his life's mission to bring the idea to the masses. But the masses also aren't really very interested in multiple desktops. So every two or three versions, he screws around with the UX and says "surely this time everyone will see the genius!" And they do not.
Personally, I almost never use more than two virtual desktops on macOS, which means most of the changes and bad decisions sail over my head. I don't think I really seriously used more than two virtual desktops on any OS later than BeOS, though -- which IIRC did it really well! -- which I suspect is less a function of macOS doing it badly than a simple function of rarely feeling like I'm cramped on a 27" 5K monitor. (Yes, I know half of you are like "I have three 24-inch monitors and each one needs nine virtual desktops to accommodate all of my windows." That's fine. You do you.)
I mean... I have a 34" widescreen, and yet, I spend most of my time on my laptop screen. So having multiple workspaces is pretty helpful for focus. I think your theory is a sound one. Once they realized their main business is a single screen with ONE APP focused at a time (yes I know, iPad can do more, Duo will also do more), they stopped caring about anything else.
Oh man, I LOVED newsgroups back when they were being used for their intended purpose! I got a lot of help on the Delphi programming group back in the day. Every day was a new adventure of posts - and even some valuable flame-wars. I'm sure some of that still exists but most folks moved to PHP bulletin boards, and then on to other platforms like Discord/Telegram.
I have prompted a LOT of Go in the past few months. While LLMs do indeed know Go very well, the amount of over-abstraction I'm seeing is awful. It's not at all indicative of code that I'd write myself. The whole point of Go is to have a language that is immediately approachable by juniors. And I've tried to keep my code in that lane. The reason I won't prompt Rust at all, is that I know it'll output working code... that I likely will not understand. (that's not the LLM's fault)
I've had not a single "quality issue" with my Model 3 other than the cabin air filter. The car interior stinks worse than any other car I've owned, if it isn't replaced on time! I too have heard a ton of bad things on Reddit. Then I went on the subreddits where people actually owned them. Those folks really seemed to like their cars. I can't say I LOVE the car... removing turn signals, wiper controls and ability to physically shift into reverse seem like brain-dead moves. Otherwise though? It's a lovely care to drive.
Lol the cabin air filter issue is legit but you just need to learn how to change it and it'd an easy fix.
It is funny how bad it gets when it starts stinking though, I was scared of changing it so I tried to ride it out for awhile and it was not a good idea
Yeah, I'm actually pretty mechanically inclined but for some reason, I just don't want to bring any tools near this thing.... it feels like an appliance!
> can't say I LOVE the car... removing turn signals, wiper controls and ability to physically shift into reverse seem like brain-dead moves. Otherwise though? It's a lovely care to drive.
I feel similarly. When I use the touchscreen to reverse direction, I grimace every time at the silly design. Or when the wipers do a dry wipe on a bright sunny day. But when I drive, it's all smiles, especially when I punch it (I have an M3P, and while it is no Plaid, it is fast enough to make people giggle).
The launch is exactly what convinced me to get one. My brother-in-law had a Model S that he took me on a ride in. From a dead stop, he floored it and I was sold. The Model 3 has a pretty decent ride too (the Highland refresh).
Yup, same story for me. Father-in-law owned a consulting business on the side. (CS Professor was his day job) His apps were CA Clipper, DB3, VB4-6, FoxPro, Turbo Pascal, Delphi. I worked for him for years in college. Doctors offices, dentist offices and an oil company. What a time to be in the programming gig! I migrated Novell servers and moved customers from Btrieve to PervasiveSQL. We got into open source pretty early (1998 - which one might argue wasn't THAT early). Some of our "next-gen" stuff used Perl:DBI, Python + MySQL, PHP3. I got such a crash course in cool tech.
The one thing I learned early on. MS-JET is NOT something you want to share from a server! Dbase dbf on the other hand, seemed to work fine.
I mean, I can't remember the last time they DIDN'T say that. Variable aperture is kinda cool I guess. 256Gigs of storage basically means everyone's going to have to upgrade their iCloud storage monthly spend just to back this thing up. I've stopped sending my camera roll to iCloud just to save on space.
Apple events are full of these meaningless statements, which always drive me crazy. Of course it's the "best iPhone Apple has ever made." If it wasn't, then wouldn't I be better off buying an older model?
Agreed. The photo backup is so seamless. I’ve been documenting my electronics and other possessions for insurance purposes and in anticipation of a move. It’s been so easy to go around the house taking photos of serial numbers and such with the better camera on my phone. Then I grab my iPad and update the spreadsheet. Nothing needed to happen on my end, the photos are just there for my iPad to access and as later proof if I ever need it.
> Oh I back them up to Immich self-hosted. I just stopped paying Apple.
Which means this original comment is somewhat disingenuous: "256Gigs of storage basically means everyone's going to have to upgrade their iCloud storage monthly spend just to back this thing up."
Clearly there is another option (as evidenced by your own behavior). But let's not pretend that option is free, either.
>I've stopped sending my camera roll to iCloud just to save on space.
how do you backup your photos when the phone gets full. I dont have a mac and the process is excruciating. Also the formats get messed up so some photos become unusable. I stopped taking 'live' photos because of this.
Not the parent, but Google Photos has been decent as a secondary backup. They even backup Live Photos now.
The two formats I've found that they don't back up accurately are rotated photos (if one's a stickler for "originals") and cropped screenshots (JPEG instead of PNG). Possibly the sidecar files for edits too.
There’s this MacOS native application called Image Capture, use it to backup 100GB of photos. I then partitioned the photo by year and 7zipped them with encryption.
This is not even close to true. I took a bunch of photos side by side with the iphone 13 pro and the 17 pro. The 17 pro was unmistakably much better, particularly on the telephoto, it wasn't even close. There was a very clear improvement in detail and sharpness, and not in a crunchy post processing way, the sensor is simply larger and higher resolution.
Now I think all the iphone cameras still suck compared to an actual camera, but the improvement over the last 10 years has been dramatic.
You say that, but I've bought the non-pro iphones the last few generations (13, 15 currently) and consistently wanted a better camera, so this upgrade cycle I'll probably shell out for the 18 pro.
I'm not sure I'd call that "meaningful" in the sense of "trillions of dollars and datacenters built all over the place" meaningful. Yes, I can now tell Claude to build a feature and it often does an okay job. I can ship faster. I can't tell you that it's worth spending the true cost of AI for that however. What'll be nice is 5 years of data showing that companies are raking in more money because they shipped more features. We haven't seen that yet.
Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.
there's a popular misconception that AI is so extremely costly that when the world finally comes to terms with it, we will stop using AI and things will die down. i'm sorry to burst your bubble: this won't happen.
the inference cost of AI has been dropping ~5x over every 6 months. AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.
That doesn't cause the amount that's already been spent to simply disappear. To recoup, they're going to need to sell a LOT of subscriptions. In about 3 years, we'll need to upgrade the GPUs that we use - if we're still chasing frontier models. That cost remains to be seen. There's a ton of unknowns here.
I mean, yes, that might get more folks working on a single project - which _might_ lead to shipping more quickly (might - more devs doesn't always equal speed). But I think what we'd end up with is Gnome; something that works fairly well, yet the committee won't allow simple things that the community wants. So we have the whole, "fine, I'll fork this project and add it myself" followed by, "why don't you spend your time HELPING the project instead of creating your own". It sounds a bit like a doom-loop.
I'm kinda on the opposite end of the spectrum. I love this world where 45 people try to race toward the same goal. Sometimes the best ideas win. Sometimes the fastest to the first goal wins. Sometimes everyone gives up. Sometimes we have competing standards we have to sift through. It's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess.
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