vmarks

DanielEran said:

firelock said:

Great article. Having run an imaging and design studio for a major ad agency during the mid-90s, I’ll add that another factor in Apple’s near collapse was its inability to deliver on building a major update to its OS. The biggest issue with the legacy Mac operating system was its lack of dynamic memory management. Raise your hand if you remember having to get info on an app and manually adjust its memory allocation. As a pro it was certainly frustrating to have to be constantly adjusting memory allocation on Photoshop and Quark, and closing one app to free up enough memory to run another. Apps would just crash and sometimes corrupt files because they ran out of memory. But as pros, most (some?) of us at least understood the problem and how to deal with it, but consumers were completely at a loss. I don’t know how many friends and family I had phone calls with trying to explain to them how to manage the memory on their Macs. Worse yet they would run off and take their Mac to get “repaired” because their apps were constantly crashing. What they needed to do was increase the memory allocation for the apps, but the shops would instead sell them more RAM which not only cost them hundreds of dollars, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem was so bad that I stopped recommending Macs to non-professionals in my circle.

Apple had promised year after year to come out with a modern OS that could manage memory dynamically, but they failed to do so year after year and instead just kept issuing minor updates that made small improvements to the user interface (Mac OS 8 & 9). I was very close to switching my entire studio over to PCs over this one issue when the return of Jobs and the promise of OS X convinced me to stick it out. Obviously this paid off and I’m glad because OS X and now iOS are light years ahead of the competition.

Yes - and iOS employed not just NeXT/MacOS X's modern memory management but added new mobile-ready conservative memory use and liberal recycling of unused memory, something that Android is rather bad at, with a kernel coming from Linux PCs. So that's another example of Google facing an Old Apple problem. Users are left wondering how to diddle with utilities to kill apps in order to get things to run, and Android devices demand far more RAM to work well at all.  

Soli said:

vmarks said:

randomthot2 said:

I find Mike Lazardis' comment very revealing. If you can't figure out how Steve "squeezed a Mac" into a phone when everything is right there in front of you, how do you expect to understand what it is capable of and where the future is headed? 

They were convinced they'd be fine. They had all of US Congress on Blackberry, and a number of other government contracts besides. They believed it was a fad, because real keyboards made them what they were.

I seem to recall that the co-CEOs of Blackberry nee Research in Motion also didn't believe that Steve Jobs' January 2007 demo was authentic because they couldn't believe that the OS could be that responsive to mobile HW.

zimmie said:

This is the testing organizations' fault, because they need to tell the user when something didn't work!

The absolute minimum responsibility of any software is to tell the user about failures so the user can then try to correct the problem. If the user has limited time to correct it, not only are error notifications required, they must be timely.

Problems like this never have just one cause. Apple attempting to send an HEIF file by default is bad. The application should support HEIF, as it's hardly a new format. Still, the site not telling the user the upload or processing failed is worse, without question.

hodar said:

How I wish that Tim Cook had not killed the Apple router business unit.

I have had several routers (Linksys, Linksys, Asus, Netgear, etc) that work great out of the box; then about a year later, they start exhibiting what I call "Router Rot".  They work, then slow down and require a reset to restore full functionality.  This continues to degrade where the router needs to be reset weekly, then every other day, and finally daily.  Not sure if this is a sign of thermal, as in the thermal paste has dried out - or degradation of capacitors, or a combination of both.

But, when I finally was sick of it, that I listened to my buddy, and paid the extra for an Apple - this annual trip to the electronics store ended.  My old 802.11n router works just fantastic, never needs to be reset- it's a frickin' rock.  I now use this as an extension to my Air Port Extreme tower, which is 802.11ac.  I am lucky enough to be connected to fiber, so my home has 150-250 mbps (I could boost this to 1 Gbps for another $15/month - but at the present speeds - seriously, why bother).

If Apple made a router, that supported whatever is beyond 802.11ac - I would be among the first to say "take my money".

flydog said:

The Ecobee thermostat itself is nice, but the app has never worked properly since I bought my Ecobee two years ago, and I've lost all hope that it will ever work properly. The HomeKit integration is useless, since it overrides the built-in Ecobee functionality.

CloudTalkin said:

dk49 said:

If Hyundai decides to Ditch Apple, and Apple doesn't find another car manufacturer ready to assemble their cars, it will become really tough for Apple. They will have to build their own factories which will further delay the project. Though I wonder why Magna didn't say yes to it. They are basically the Foxconn for car manufacturers. And I am sure Apple must have approached them earlier.

Like you, I think Apple contacted Magna early in the process.  Probably one of the first companies Apple contacted.  I think 2 things made Magna an unacceptable partner. 
1. Location - I really think Apple desires a US assembly location.  The infrastructure for manufacturing and assembling their general tech (phones, computers, tablets, etc) is concentrated in Asia.  That's not the case for cars, and assembly in the US could even be cheaper.   Magna has no N. American plants.  It's rumored (again) they're looking to open a N. American plant, but that rumor has surfaced many times over the past couple of decades.
2. Capacity - I've no doubt Magna could handle Apple's initial assembly and volume.  Apple's thinking long term.  Scale and capacity would be Magna's issue.  Magna doesn't have an advantage in ether of those factors that could compete with Hyundai's capacity.  Hyundai/Kia has the ability scale their production to meet any capacity Apple may need.  Magna doesn't have that ability.  They already contract manufacture Jaguar's I-Pace and E-Pace, Toyota's Supra, BMW's 5-Series and Z4, and MB's G-Class.  

When this story initially broke, I said Apple was looking for an OEM/contract manufacturer, not a brand partner.  Some people are still incorrectly looking at this from a brand partner perspective.  Not really sure why.  Questions like, "why Hyundai and not BMW, MB, Porsche, or [insert luxury brand here]" still abound.  None of those brands would ever consider being an OEM manufacturer.  They would have the same concerns that Hyundai is expressing about brand erosion, 'cept their concerns would be magnified because their brands are waaaaaaay more valuable and influential than Hyundai's.  That's not a knock on Hyundai.  That's just reality.

Gaby said:

I’d be interested to know that if when you manually lock the phone down with a long press on sleep/wake + volume - which locks biometrics and necessitates password Re entry, if this is considered BFU or AFU. Technically it is AFU, but from what I remember Apple execs discussing, that is supposed to lock down the phone. In which case it is still feasible to lock people out without a power down. Hmmm.... 

randomthot2 said:

I find Mike Lazardis' comment very revealing. If you can't figure out how Steve "squeezed a Mac" into a phone when everything is right there in front of you, how do you expect to understand what it is capable of and where the future is headed? 

charlesn said:

Reviewing routers in a meaningful way that measures throughput performance in various networking scenarios is not for the casual reviewer. You can't approach it the same way you would for the newest iOS game-of-the-minute. Yet that is the approach taken here. In the super competitive field of routers, how do you "review" a newcomer to the market--and award it a perfect score no less--without a single measurement of performance and how that stacks up against the competition? All you've provided is an overview of the software package that accompanies a hardware product, with a generic summary of hardware performance ("rivals mesh systems") that's based on who knows what because you appear to have done none of the throughput performance measurement work that goes into a comprehensive and useful router review. This is one of the most disappointing and useless reviews I've read on AI.

In response to the question from Jsh56 above: if the WfFi performance you're getting out of your AE Extreme is not causing you any issues--i.e., sluggish performance and/or weak signal areas--then sticking with your AE Extreme may be fine. Some of that answer will depend on how many devices are on your network and the distance your WfFi signal has to cover. I switched from an AE Extreme Tower w/Time Capsule to a new router back in June and I noticed an immediate and significant difference is throughput speed and the elimination of weak signal areas in my apartment. And I'm continuing to use my Extreme Tower as the storage device for Time Machine backups--I simply shut off the radios on the AE Extreme and connected it via Ethernet to the new router. My iMac and MacBook still back up to it automatically with no problems.