thoughtsimple

If you aren’t excited by the Apple Watch then this makes sense. The only major new success has been the watch. AirPods are also a huge success but it is hard to see it as a separate product category like the watch.

But how many successful new product categories did the Jobs Apple produce per decade? One or two at most. I personally didn’t get excited over the Bondi Blue iMac but it was Jobs first success but not a new category. That was the iPod. It took years for a new product after that.

Who ships a phone with the 7nm chip first? I’ll have to get the exact quote but I think Apple said first 7nm chip in a phone. When is Huawei’s phone shipping? Apple’s is here in 2 weeks.

If you didn't develop in that timeframe you might not get the difference between then and today. It takes forever to look things up so you end up memorizing instead. And it isn't a big deal because the number of things needed to be a successful software developer wasn't that great. To be successful and finish projects more or less on time, memorization was needed.

Edit: For example, for a different project I knew the hex codes for every 8051 instruction. This was necessary to be successful debugging using a logic analyzer. Looking up each op-code would be prohibitively slow.

I used to be a "rock star" programmer. I could run rings around my coworkers. I wrote an embedded OS for running machine tools (I had help.) Back then, you read books and memorized everything. I knew x86 assembly and could use a logic analyzer to debug my code. This was in the 80's.

Now the amount of knowledge required to do even mundane tasks is an order of magnitude more. No one can memorize all the APIs and frameworks needed to do their jobs programming. I couldn't work without search. I don't memorize anything anymore. I work on dozens of different technologies.

Basically, I've become a mediocre programmer at a large number of different programming tasks where once I was expert at a very few. I'm the same person but the meaning of what is a programmer has changed over time. I'm OK with that.

He is already Canadian. He said so during the interview but the accent is a dead give away.

I tried to delete it but you were too quick to answer so deletion was blocked. The question was clearly answered in the article.

Nevermind. Should have read the article. I thought it was the same as the one I saw over the weekend.

Didn't work for me on today's release of macOS High Sierra.

Interesting that neither Kay nor the interviewer seemed aware of Swift Playgrounds. I would have loved to hear his criticisms of that environment as a teaching tool for kids. It seems to be targeted at 8-12 year olds given the graphics. I would be curious as to how closely Swift Playgrounds follows Papert’s ideas.

This approach has a problem. Not everything can be relegated to a fixed schedule. For example, I have a friend taking next week off to go eclipse watching. How is that accommodated with a mandatory week off every 8.

Wow. I can close my eyes and picture the two different speech patterns and hear different results. Bizarre.

Are these the same Chinese battery companies that lost out on the hoverboard gold rush because the quality of their batteries was so low that would spontaneously explode. If so, I don't think Tesla has that much to worry about.

Probably already done since this was fixed in April/May by Intel. There has been at least one update since then.

I have a very old one. I was working on a embedded system using an Intel 80186. The ‘186 had a memory mapped IO system that was very unusual for Intel x86 CPUs. The code that I started with was originally written by a bunch of Motorola 68000 guys so they used this mode. I had to modify the interrupt structure so I rewrote the interrupt service routines. Since it was memory mapped and ANDs were documented to be atomic, I assumed that I could just AND bits into the interrupt mask register. Big mistake. It turned out that ANDs to the IO registers were not atomic. And could be interrupted in the middle of the write after read. I took me about a month to realize that this was a hardware “bug” and not in my interrupt code. Drove me nuts.

And they got the reason why manufacturers are going to move to PCIe 4 wrong. It has nothing to do with bottlenecks to video cards and everything to do with freeing up lanes. Pretty awful article.

I always love quotes like this: "All jewellery had a magical meaning for ancient people. Bracelets and neck adornments were to protect people from evil spirits, for instance."

And we know this how? Maybe it was just made to be pretty. A rich person giving their partner a gift etc. No one could possibly be able to make any further inferences from a species of human we know almost nothing about.

The ergonomics of the AirPods are definitely worth a lot to many people. When used in conjunction with the Apple Watch, you never have to reach for your iPhone for audio. It works great and the sound is adequate when I'm exercising or doing some other outdoor activity. The AirPods are not audiophile quality but they are not horrible either.

With a 98% satisfaction rating, I would think that most people who own them are going to say approximately the same things.

100's of millions of people use Apple's wired earbuds. These sound somewhat better. Not surprising that for most uses of mobile audio, they are better than good enough.

I asked politely to not be tracked by using the opt-in switch in my browsers. Advertisers literally laughed at that and said they wouldn't honor it.

So now ads are blocked on my browser. All of them. The advertising industry and the people who use it to monetize are at fault. They did nothing to prevent the awful privacy mess that was made of the web without ad-blocking.

There are several of those types of comments here where we are discussing Apple's record quarter. You really think people weren't saying Apple is doomed after what HN thought was a weak release of new MacBook Pros?

Worse shape? Apple had a record number of phones sold. Mac sales are important but not that important.

How many other companies sold 18,455,000 PCs and tablets last quarter? Sales of PCs and tablets are declining everywhere, not just at Apple. These results look pretty good in that environment. Microsoft Surface revenue was actually down 2% last quarter YOY.

Did you know that Microsoft's Surface line declined in revenue last quarter YOY?

If you are you making a prediction that Apple's total revenues are about to collapse, these results really don't support that idea. PC sales have been declining for years overall.

Mac unit sales increases were negligible but revenue was up significantly showing that it was likely MacBook Pros that contributed to the growth. Unit growth was 1.2% while revenue was up 7.4%.

I have an Apple TV and Sling subscription. It is mostly useless because of the restrictions placed on watching on-demand content.

You can't fast forward even to the spot where you left off watching. So you start an episode, decide to go make dinner, you come back and you have to start watching from the beginning again. Who thought this was OK? Did they ever actually try to use the product? There is a long way to go.

Contrast this with Netflix which is just about perfect on the Apple TV. There are no noticeable restrictions and it all just works as expected.

Pretty awful choices on everything but breakfast. Where are the whole foods. The only fresh fruit was blueberries with low fat yogurt and an apple listed twice.

The good thing about bringing back the 17" MBP would be all the objections over battery life and low power GPUs would be moot. Even a thin 17" is going to be huge. The last one looked like 4 cafeteria trays stacked up.

I'm just not sure that there is much of a market for it. It's fun to imagine though. Mobile Xeon, ECC memory, 32 or 64 GB DDR4-2400 RAM, RAID NVMe SSDs. Priced like a Mac Pro :)

Who cares how thick it is, what matters it what does it weigh? Not seeing that information.

This is almost certainly going to rarely happen. Almost no server feels empowered enough to insist on this. And restaurant owners will start insisting on collecting and counting cash tips so they can fully account for the wages. No server wants their boss counting their cash tips. At least in Massachusetts, declared tips is self reported.

Make sure to read the conclusion. This could do with a little editing to reduce the number of descriptions of less than sane protestors and to reach the important conclusions faster.