3,712 karma · joined October 31, 2018
What will it take for more companies to truly understand their risks with Windows and being locked into Microsoft’s platforms?
The lists, drive shares and libraries on Infuse are more than enough for me. I didn’t have an interest in adding Plex or Jellyfin (or Emby?) to the mix.
> The first time I did these calculations, I felt an intense appreciation for biology. And now, I want everyone else to feel the same. We ought to teach students of biology to think as mathematicians: to carefully quantify biology, to think in absolute units, and to develop a feeling for the organism.
It was interesting to read this article, but I think I would’ve understood a lot more if this entire piece had been (or were) an animated video that described it. Text and a few animations don’t do enough justice for the passion, knowledge and detail that’s in this article, IMO.
As I said in another comment here, when things just work, it seems magical and awesome. But the same areas where deep integration creates the magic is often riddled with a lot of bugs. I report many issues to Apple and follow up those reports with updated information, but most of them don’t get any attention. I don’t have a mental model for where all the feedback and issues go to and who looks at them or takes ownership of them.
I report a lot of nagging issues to Apple through Feedback Assistant. I keep updating the same issues and provide instructions as well as the device diagnostics and any photos/videos. But almost all of them don’t see any kind of action at Apple. They just linger on for years. Only if it’s an OS crash or an important Apple app crashing, it may get some attention.
There are many instances when “things just work” and it seems magical, but in those same areas, there are often too many bugs and issues where one has to do this whole dance of restart, re-pair devices and so on. It used to be that Windows was the butt of frequent jokes on restarting, but Apple’s software has gotten closer to that in many aspects.
I personally suspect that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated and good QA in place. There doesn’t seem to be a push from the top down for software quality. That attention to detail that Apple was famous for is missing on software quality.
That’s a huge assumption unless you exclude several countries where people have a phone number but not really an email address (or even if they do, they may not know what an email address is) and exclude many very old (say, 70+) people who wouldn’t know what email is or what their email address is.
Moving on, I assumed the title meant the launch of a new consumer email service or platform. Reading the announcement, it’s not. That was disappointing to me.
‘Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.’
- Cory Doctorow
Double hyphens —
Triple hyphens —-
Actual em dash (typed with more effort, but HN changes it) —
The triple hyphens has a gap in it separating the autocorrected en dash and the hyphen.
A lot of menu options don’t seem to have keyboard shortcuts. I know I can assign them, but defaults should be better.
But the second one hits harder for me: “Or is your issue that Numbers has different keyboard shortcuts from the ones you're used to in Excel?” Considering that Numbers came much later than Excel, some of the common ones could’ve been directly adapted with Mac specific substitutions (like using Cmd instead of Ctrl).
As do I.
> In the three years since I filed the bug report, I received no response whatsoever from Apple… until a couple of weeks ago, when Apple asked me to “verify” the issue with macOS 26.4 beta 4 and update my bug report.
The author is extremely lucky to even get a response. I’ve filed several issue reports (as an end user, not as a developer) on Feedback Assistant over the years. Not only do the issues not get fixed, but there’s nary a response or any indication that anyone has looked or is planning to look at it. Apple does not even bother to close my issue reports. They just stay open.
Sometimes, some issues may get fixed. But no notice of the fix being done. I’d never know at all.
So yes, I certainly do plead insanity.
I’ve written many comments criticizing this. Do you use a lot of keyboard shortcuts when you use Numbers or Pages or Keynote or do you use the trackpad/mouse a lot? I generally find these apps and others lacking on the keyboard front, by which I mean that it’s almost impossible to use them without a trackpad or a mouse. I can completely live with just a keyboard on Excel or LibreOffice Calc.
BTW, I hate all the MS Office applications (and find them quite buggy and annoying) except for Excel. Maybe I’m just a lot more used to using Excel.
It seems certain that they use iPhones for everything. They can’t even subject themselves to using an iPad. They just copy things from iOS straight into iPadOS and macOS and let others (end users) deal with the fallout. Craig Federighi doesn’t seem to pay any attention to software anymore.
> Suddenly, the globe key on the iPad and the hybrid globe/Fn key on the Mac were equipped with a million Windows-like tasks
It seems like Apple has been in a bind to make the iPad a better Mac and the Mac a better iPad while at the same time insisting that the iPad is its own device with its own purpose and that the Mac is its own device with its own purpose. IIRC, it took a long time to bring a keyboard and mouse to the iPad. Despite Apple’s repeated claims that it doesn’t see value in a touchscreen Mac, rumors point to one being launched next year (albeit with limitations).
Apple used to be good at cannibalizing its own product lines. But now it seems stuck with the desire to sell more iPads and more Macs without one cannibalizing or destroying another.
One point on macOS is that it’s very weak on keyboard based navigation and shortcuts for apps by default (compared to Windows). Even Apple doesn’t bother with keyboard based navigation in its own apps. One look at any app “ported” from iOS is enough. Apple hasn’t even spent time to check what the Tab key does in these apps. It’s a shame.
In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn that this reporter was fired and yet Ars Technica doesn’t publish a snippet of an article about it.
There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues and being forthright with actions and consequences. In this age of indignation and fear of being perceived as weak or vulnerable due to honesty, I would’ve thought that Ars would be or could’ve been a beacon for how things should be talked about.
It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level.
[1]: https://saagarjha.com/blog/2019/04/26/thoughts-on-macos-pack...
Thanks a lot, Eddy Cue, for all that you do to bring Apple down to its knees!
It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.
What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?!