spideymans

>Bikes and scotters move you more quickly though certain routes than cars, as you tend to get through each light in just one clycle.

These small micromobility devices will come to dominate urban city streets over the next decade. These devices typically cost less than $1,500 (a tiny fraction of an automobile), and are significantly faster than driving in city centres. A lot of people will still choose cars for comfort, but the travel time and cost savings of e-mobility are tough to compete against.

It’ll take a major paradigm shift. Something so radically innovative and different, that it cannot possibly be cloned by current industry players.

Think of what the iPhone did to the mobile market. That’s the kind of disruption needed in the social space.

Anyone saying it’s impossible isn’t think creatively enough.

iPads and Chromebooks are rapidly taking over education. Both K-12 and in college.

I think the pandemic really accelerated things. A lot more students are using iPads, rather than paper notebooks.

A lot of apps have cached experiences that they'll only show you if you have no network connection. If the app detects a very weak LTE connection, it'll try to load data over the network. That means that on a weak connection, I often end up being served nothing, rather than the data that's already cached on device.

As a tangent, I feel that a lot of these problems are fundamentally because engineers don't understand how poorly their software performs on unstable networks. Unless you live in a large metropolitan area with a well used underground transit network (in the USA, I suppose NYC would be the only qualifying city... sigh), you'd likely never experience these symptoms on a daily basis.

My most frequent use of the airplane mode, is when I go underground on metro systems, which I find pretty ironic.

(Without Airplane Mode, the phone will keep trying to connect to cellular towers, which just makes the network experience unstable)

Perhaps "Underground Mode" would be more suitable in a modern context /s

On the contrary, I’d say access to user data is a liability for Apple.

Apple saw how damaging the iCloud privacy scandal and Cambridge Analytica were. They responded by fully hitching Apple’s brand to the privacy train.

If Apple were to be caught intentionally violating user privacy now, the damage to the brand would be immense.

Apple makes their money primarily by selling cool stuff to people. If they tarnish their brand by violating people’s privacy like Google or Meta, end users have far less incentive to buy Apple’s products.

> Perhaps the biggest advantage of the iPhone, aside from Apple making most of their money selling real products not your data

This is the reason why I have a certain degree of confidence in Apple’s privacy aspirations. Apple makes their money primarily by selling cool stuff to end users. Their business model heavily disincentives mass tracking.

Google and Meta couldn’t ever be as privacy-friendly as Apple, due to their business models.

I don’t see what the issue is, unless Apple is violating my privacy to serve their ads.

(I’m not a fan of ads, but don’t see how this is necessarily a privacy issue)

When you setup a new Apple device, Apple asks users whether they want to share Siri recordings with Apple.

>Does Firefox have a future?

Well, mobile is the future of computing. Does Firefox have a future on mobile? I think the answer is clearly no.

Firefox will be relevant only until the Desktop PC paradigm fades into obscurity.

Eventually Chrome and Safari will join Firefox in obscurity, as more content moves behind apps and walled gardens, and as the desktop paradigm falls into disuse.

Give it 10 years.

>The real goal

Rather bold of you to assume that you understand the motivations behind any of the decisions within the Apple organization.

>Life-safety? Seriously? It's gun control and law enforcement problem, not the one of easy salvaging. Y'know, it's hard to imagine that someone in Europe or most of the Asia would be robbing at gunpoint for the smartphone.

Yeah, instead you’d be robbed at knifepoint. And if not at knifepoint, then by using any serious of improvised weapons.

This is just nonsensical speculating, unless we understand the internal motivations of Apple’s decision makers. Maybe they’re evil and view this as a tool to dominate the world. Maybe they think these are genuinely beneficial decisions for their customers. Who knows.

Apple’s Activation Lock lead to a substantial drop in smartphone theft worldwide. That’s something worthy of consideration. Apple must not re-incentivize phone theft to harvest parts.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...

I can assure you there are plenty of people within the Apple organization that genuinely care about security and privacy. And if Apple happens to profit due to those efforts, all the better. Not everything is some evil nefarious ploy.

> or that the UI technologies available to web developers are a "hack"

In the year 2022, multitouch gestures on the web still feel janky and wierd and just don’t work all that well.

>What happened? I thought computers were supposed to be empowering?

Computers are empowering.

> even Windows is very "unix-like" in ways people don't even realize.

WSL is a tacit acceptance of UNIX dominance.

The fact that Apple is the only FAANG (MAANG?) company that primarily makes it’s money by producing cool products for people to buy is a terrible indictment on the state of our industry.

Software publishers should not be allowed to get away with this with impunity.

We’re not just pattern matchers. We’re active participants in this world.

I find Windows to be a very noisy and obstructive operating system. It keeps putting roadblocks in my ways. It often feels like it’s making my job several times more complicated than it should be.

Because they don't know what AI is.

Breaking new: capitalistic companies are capitalistic. I don’t give a shit as long as their corporate interests reasonably align with my own

The permission and security systems will be circumvented by malware authors and unscrupulous developers, just like they are on macOS. Given the enormous amount of personal information on our mobile devices, this represents a particularly concerning potential regression in end user privacy and security.

Like on Windows, macOS and Android it’ll be crucial for users to avoid installing executables from the web. and like Android, users also have to be trained to only install apps from ethical software repositories that respect user privacy and security. This is the best case scenario for privacy/security, and essentially the status quo for Android.

For better or for worse, the days of iOS users installing any and all available applications without worrying about malware is over. Users will get more freedom, but they’ll have to take more responsibility when vetting and running third party apps. I don’t know how a notoriously novice user base will react to that, but we shall see.

Apple can’t stop malware on macOS

Google can’t stop malware on android

Microsoft can’t stop malware on android

What makes you think Apple will be able to stop malware on iOS?

There might be potential for this chaord idea in telecommunications and utilities.

Nothing I’ve seen from the major players in this industry (Meta, Epic, etc…), has convinced me that they’re capable of doing better. I do hope I’m wrong though.

> The children may have loved KidPix, but it was nearly impossible to teach with since they were fixated with the animated effects.

KidsPix was the greatest :)

Users have been complaining about Google Search being awful for a while now. It’s only a matter of time before a radical incumbent totally changes the game.

TikTok’s search solves the SEO spam problem, and the content feels more organic. If you want to find things like how to cook a recipe, or how to build a bike, nowhere is better than TikTok. There’s a lot of good, educational content on this app, and their search does an amazing job surfacing it.

I hope Google can compete with this, but I’m not optimistic.