redial

I was talking about the royal you: we. But more importantly, "when" the question was first asked doesn't change the nature of the question. Sure, you (we) can ask it, but it is no more insightful that the myriad of other metaphysical questions that have been asked through history that will never be answered because they lack a fundamental grounding in the shared experience we call "reality". Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it.

> I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things.

No one knows that it is not measurable. Is love measurable? is hunger? happiness? they seem to be as measurable as consciousness, that is to say we can at least measure them in binary as either present or not.

> Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born?

If you are inventing mysteries out of thin air why stop there? What if you will yourself into existence? What if it is you that is making "time" perceivable for the rest of us? Do your half-existing-yet-unborn-brother dies every time you are reborn into this plane but not if you will yourself to be born into another parallel universe?

> Or my favorite “Remind me again later” Because who would ever want the ability to say “no”

Can't you just change your settings on preferences?

The "TSA Problem" is not that they master-key manufacturer is incompetent...quite the contrary.

Apple is not the owner of the devices, they just manufacture them.

Everyone is worried about video and rightly so, or maybe is just being used as an example, but my question is: Could ISPs prevent in any way Software Updates? Could they block (for example) a patch that would fix a bug allowing them to mim web requests to inject lets say, ads?

I think the downvotes most of all reflect the fact you didn't bother to read the article.

The discussion is about soccer, not american football.

I picked the biggest category of apps just to show you having a watch app is irrelevant when picking an iPhone app for everything in the app store but a very narrow set of categories, and you just demonstrated that. Yes, fitness is great, messaging somewhat ok, but what about the other millions of apps in the app store? what about a writing app? or a video editor? or a measuring app? or Dropbox?

Right now there is no reason for Youtube to make a watch app, and no reason for you to pick Vimeo over Youtube because it has a watch app.

That is all well and good, but that is not the point. The point is the App Store is bleeding watch apps every day, and Apple needs to convince developers that the watch is worth it. Even you admit that the only reason for a developer to have a watch app is as a defensive move, and that is what needs to change.

That is what in theory you think happens. What actually happens is that in very few app categories that is the case. For example, not a single game is losing market share to a competitor because they do not have a watch app.

Any potential the Watch has is clearly not enough for a strong app market to develop.

> Which developer wants to miss out on serving potentially millions of users?

You are forgetting that most developers already have millions of potential users on the iPhone with a market at least 30x bigger than the Watch's, and iOS has none of the limitations the Watch has.

Right now a Watch app requires an iPhone app, is hard to monetize, it cannot be sold on its own, it's slow and frustrate your users, etc. The only upsides are for Apple. It might sell really well because the core functionality provides enough value, but developers need to see a clear return for their efforts and right now is not there.

It matters for Apple, for developers? not so much. Millions of users and not a single third party "killer" app.

> To give some context, in Chinese culture, asking a family member or a close friend to advise on the naming of a child is normal.

In all cultures.

To the downvoters: In all cultures happens and is considered normal, that doesn't mean everybody does it. I'm glad your family/circle of friends has a different tradition. This just means that when someone does it no one finds it weird. What is weird, is asking the president of another country for advice. That is weird in all cultures.

Sure, but I think about it this way: every cent you can take away from Facebook is a cent they can't spend on more spying.

They left and now Facebook is gonna do it anyways and is gonna cost them 400 million less.

Considering the value Apple has extracted from NeXTSTEP, they certainly underpaid for it.

They killed Nokia twice! First by forcing them to use Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone, or whatever it was called) when it was clear to all they needed to go with Android, and then by actually buying it and killing it when even Microsoft couldn't refuse Windows Mobile was going nowhere.

Even more American? make it a tax deduction.

> I see the MBP as a hybrid use-case device, much like the Nintendo Switch: it throttles when freestanding (because it has nowhere to dissipate its heat to), but it runs more quickly when "docked." So you can use it for light things portably, and for heavy things at a desk.

MacBook Pros throttle even on "docks". They can't magically dissipate more heat when stationary on a desk.

> New companies need render-nodes, right? But they aren't, because these apps are only for these "legacy" media companies that already have render-farms and don't need Apple selling them render-nodes.

Companies need lots of things. One of them is a Pro Apple laptop. Apple has no problems charging Pro prices, they should in return give a Pro machine.

> No, but a keyboard that'll keep working when you spill bacon grease on it, or a computer that won't choke in a sandstorm, is pretty damn ruggedized.

You are being unreasonably extreme. No one is asking for anything more than what we already had. A keyboard that is defeated by dust particles, dust!, is a failed product at any price and in any category, let alone in the luxury non-pro market where you want Apple to focus on. You should be even more outraged than the rest of us! Which Rolex dies when you eat a sandwich wearing it?

> See, this is what I was getting at with the difference in perspectives here. A ruggedized workstation would work just sitting around outside in the heat and dust and light of the savannah. Whereas a professional workstation is—like a server, or (in previous decades) a news crew's satellite uplink—something that exists in a designated editing-room in a designated trailer you're hauling around with the crew.

You should tell all the pros carrying their laptops into war zones that they've been doing it wrong all these years. No, wait, they have been working fine even in the dust and in sunlight, despite not having armor.

Everything you said is right, but you are missing the point.

Thinner means more luggable, but if it restricts a workhorse machine from having more than the 16gb of ram the base model can also have because they can't fit enough battery to power it, then why not go all the way and shrink it to the size of the 12" MacBook? Well, because of the other components you might say! But, if the CPU throttles, the GPU throttles, the keyboard stops working and the anti-reflective coating peels off, all because of the thermal stress the machine is under when used as a workhorse, then is not much of a workhorse is it? Besides, no one is asking for an aircraft carrier, the thickness of the 2015 version was good enough for nearly everybody, specially when you do have laptops like the MacBook that do make those compromises.

Apple is sort of a luxury brand but the problem is they want it both ways. They want to be seen as an aspirational brand and as a workhorse brand. That is why they keep releasing FinalCut, Logic, and XCode. At some point those two ambitions are going to collide; most people think they already did.

No one is asking for a tank, you are presenting a false dichotomy as no one is confusing professional with ruggedized. Every serious complain about the MacBook Pro is about specs, ports and reliability, not unbreakability. In fact, based on your previous point about luxury machines I say you are the one that is confused. Are MacBook Pros professional machines or not? If they are luxury items as you claim then by all means don't make them waterproof but if they want to aim it at people editing 8K video on-site in Africa, which happens by the way, then ffs make the screen less reflective.

> Find me and put me in jail for something they cannot prove even happened?

Yes. It happens more than you think.

Your attitude is inhibiting progress. Everybody knows the technology is not ready and everyone is fine with it and willing to face the consequences of refining it. Everyone except Tesla that is, which insists their self-driving tech is so advanced they even call it autopilot encouraging people to treat it as such and refuse to admit any fault in this mess.

It is as interesting as any other vague creation myth that can be made to fit with whatever you want.

As much as I want it to happen, and as much as I agree with you that in the near future is going to happen, I think you are missing the context. You seem to be forgetting we already have cars. Not only that, we already have planes, bullet trains, spaceships, etc. We even have the bicycle; transport has been "free" for a long time. The only thing equivalent to the steam engine in impact would be teleportation. That is the jump from the horse to a train, or from a train to an airplane. Self driving cars are cool, they are not steam-engine-in-the-1800s cool.

Of course is short sighted, but those are not the only two options. You can think the idea will change the world without drinking the cool-aid that it already has.

> crime- Is strongly correlated with poverty, which has been rapidly reduced globally thanks to technological innovation

Small scale crime might be. White collar crime is adversely correlated, strongly, with poverty. And it sinks entire nations.

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

- Nikola Tesla, 1926.

https://kottke.org/18/04/nikola-tesla-predicted-the-smartpho...

> Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it?

Are you being ironic? The steam engine literally reshaped the world. I think you express exactly what the author is talking about: Acting as if just by announcing it, it has already succeeded.

That is not his point. His point is that big flashy introductions never (almost) materialize in something truly world-changing. When was the sharing economy introduced? No one knows, it just happened organically.

Most revolutions have been silent revolutions. The only one that was an instant world event was the iPhone launch. All the technologies named in the article; Wifi, Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, even YouTube and Wikipedia were not introduced to millions of people at once in a Silicon Valley event. AI will change the world, but it'll be slow, like how the internet changed the world little by little replacing retail, letters, phone calls, and now maybe 40 years later, TV. AI is a process revolution, not a product revolution. So he's right, big tech products have been mostly useless, specially compared to their promises.