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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I've read a lot of very critical reviews of Pixel Buds, but I'm not sure this rises to the level of "Silicon Valley Arrogance."

But you know what does?

- iPod headphones with wires that get brittle in the cold, so they pop out of your ears during a Chicago winter. - iPhones that go into emergency thermal shutdown from being in your pocket on a spring/summer day in Arizona. - An iMessage applet ecosystem that assumes that every iPhone user lives his life like a 20-year-old San Francisco metrosexual. (Launch day was Uber, OpenTable, and bill splitting. Yay.)

How about Silicon Valley offer some apps and accessories for the 99.99999% of the world that doesn't live in your climate? Or doesn't live your lifestyle? Stop patting yourselves on the back for staring at your own bellybutton.

(This isn't meant to be an Apple-specific rant; that's just the ecosystem I'm most familiar with.)

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I live in Arizona and I can tell you that iPhones don't go into thermal shutdown while in your pocket. They will go into thermal shutdown if you leave them in the sun while you're outside working on a car on a >105* or so day, and even then they will start working once you get them out of the sun for a couple minutes.

It's happened to me in both Arizona and Nevada, just from being in my pocket while walking around at an outdoor public event.

Take out the phone to take a pictures -- Nope. Warning message.

I've had my iPhone go into thermal shutdown in the Bay Area, so this is not SV arrogance, it's a physics problem. When I lived in colder climates with snow I never had a problem with their headphones falling out, or even using the capacitive touch screen (I just took my gloves off).

It sounds like you need the ToughBook equivalent of a smartphone, which is fine, but most users are fine working within the limitations.

I shouldn't need a ToughBook to commute on mass transit in a major city.

I don't think it's "most users are fine working within the limitations." It's "most users don't have a choice but to work within Silicon Valley's imposed limitations."

Weirdly enough, I feel like Google Maps and anything Yelp-like has the opposite problem in New York. When I search for something nearby, "two miles away" isn't remotely relevant when it's across the Hudson, in another state.

They tried to build a single system that works for everyone, and it works kind of okay unless you're on the edge of a bell curve, geographically speaking.

For some reason, Google maps tends to be horrible at getting subway transit right:

They frequently list delays when there are none and don't list them when the subway is running very behind. I wonder if it's just hard to get this kind of real-time data from MTA.

It's probably just whatever transit delay system your area is letting Google use. The delays are almost always accurate for me in San Diego

The problem is the subways misuse their delay systems. A few months ago BART was using their delay feed to warn about a shutdown that would occur over a long 3-day weekend. Sure it's a "delay", but it's not an active delay that impacts riders now. Google Maps doesn't seem smart enough to figure that out. But honestly the operators should find better ways to alert riders about upcoming planned delays.

It depends on the line. Numbered ones have more accurate data, for example, as they rely on rail sensors to track trains. MTA recently pushed new Bluetooth-based technology to get location estimates on all the other lines. They're just estimates, still.

It's really an MTA problem, though. You can tell because they now have screens with arrival times everywhere. Even if the screen says that a E train is coming in 11 minutes, one moment later the same train (another E train?) is just two minutes away, if not approaching the platform. Perhaps they only need to recalibrate the code that comes up with the estimates, since the beacon system is fairly recent.

Conversely Google Maps trying to reduce their marker density produces terrible results in the Scottish Highlands - I know there are markers there, but at reasonable zoom levels the map is just blank.

It's not you, it's them. :)

Compared to paper maps, Google Maps also looks like shit in the USA.

And in Atlanta I experience the opposite problem. Google Maps will limit searches to things close by, suggest alternates instead of exact matches, and routinely fails to find locations that I know exist forcing me to manually select them on the map.

Unlike NY, in Atlanta everything is a 30 minute drive so convenience is less about distance.

Preach, fellow Atlantan!

I hadn't put it into words before, but the problem you describe hits home. I want a 20-30 minute radius of search results, not things limited to the nearest mile. That's worthless in Atlanta.

If you adjust the zoom, doesn't it suggest a new search and then find the correct place? Seems to work for me.

If you adjust zoom you're given the option to search that area but it doesn't do it by default and by default it zooms into a narrow radius around your current location.

I moved to ATL (midtown) in '07 and a car was a basic necessity.

But today? I think I could easily live in the midtown area and not need my car. I mean, I'd walk to Whole Foods from 10th and Piedmont regularly (there's a shortcut at the TJs ;P)

Why isn't that relevant? I live in a place with a similar geography, and I definitively find the results across the river helpful.

Odd that this is downvoted?

Maybe I'm just an old fart, but "usability" of apps seems to be going down everywhere. For example, making "near" user-definable would be an easy fix, and I don't think it would cause any implementation problems on the mapping side, would it?

I notice feature after feature like this these days, where something has been implemented, but it isn't useful due to lack of attention to detail.

Think the downvotes are in response to the entitlement and complaining about the 'wrong sort' of pandering.

It doesn't look downvoted to me. And I don't feel like it's an entitlement issue - eight million people live in NYC. That's more than the whole state of Arizona.

It's not unreasonable to expect a map to behave differently in the middle of a major city than a more rural area.

The complaint is the apps pander to Bay-Area expectations rather than NYC. Neither are rural.

You could always walk the GW, or take the ferry.

Tangent: I used to walk on the weekends from my apartment on 123 & Lex, to the 125 street A, take it up to 175th, walk a block over, get on the GW, walk across, then hike down to Hoboken, PATH back to Manhattan, and walk back up town until my legs gave out. Depending on where I stopped , I would either subway or lyft back to my apartment.

It allowed me to experience NJ which I would never have done. And I found places to get my hair cut for < $30, which was more than half off from my local barber, and clothes were tax free, which was TONS better than tax free under $100, etc. I learned so much traveling into NJ regularly, and eventually moved there.

If you'd kept walking north from 125th, you could go to Hamilton Heights where I get a haircut for twenty bucks. That's ten bucks left over for a beer or two across the street :)

I now live upstate where my barber charges $12 for a cut and shave.

You only had to walk 5-10 blocks south into Spanish Harlem to get a ~13 dollar haircut but totally agree on the taxes for purchases.

I always found NYC specific travel funny. For example, it can take an hour an a half to get from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn but a bus ride from NYC to somewhere like Philly is often under 2 hours.

... and brooklyn to philly is probably 3.0 hours (1h to midtown bus, same 2 hrs from there), sooo...

>" An iMessage applet ecosystem that assumes that every iPhone user lives his life like a 20-year-old San Francisco metrosexual. (Launch day was Uber, OpenTable, and bill splitting. Yay.)"

Can you elaborate on this? What do you mean by "An iMessage applet ecosystem"? What Launch day are you referring to?

iMessage launched app integrations a bit ago.

Ah OK. I missed that, now your comments makes sense. Thanks.

My iPhone will go into thermal shutdown on a hot New England July day. I got a waterproof case for it and throw it in the water until it cools off. Works great.

Hah, I don't know a single person who has ever told me about using an imessage app. The lifestyle thing feels real to me.

Not to mention the headphone jack.

Why is this arrogance instead of ignorance?

Maybe because SV, at least from my outside SV vantage point, projects itself as working on life changing, world altering, every day simplifying products. From their ignorance of life outside SV, their self image is arrogant.

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