dysamoria

All these statements of how awful Gates was, sold his soul, was kinky, etc... where is any of this coming from?

Sellout? Who thinks he was at some point a wonderful person, motivated by the will to do good? He was known to be an aggressive money-seeking dick from day one. He was also a spoiled & privileged teenager, and has a famous smarmy-ass mug shot from an arrest. Then there’s his jerky performance in front of the senate... The personality has always been there.

On the side of “devil’s advocate”, let’s address the so-called nude parties and relationship stuff:

Are you so afraid of human sexuality & the human body that nudity in someone’s own private space bothers you? You’ve heard that there are entire swaths of people who join nudist groups, right? How many of you guys are usually worshipping wealthy tech bros for “winning” and being able to throw pool parties with “hot chicks” & strippers?

Then there’s a thing called ethical non-monogamy, and things called open marriages. Yes, people consent to these types of arrangements. Such a thing might be relevant to the current marriage issues, or might NOT be. Where’s the info and why is it our business?

I see zero citations of source here on anything. All I see is gossip, which Apple fanatics are happy to engage because Bill Gates is “the original enemy” (well, IBM was THE original enemy, but Gates was the smarmy face of the longer-standing, and more obnoxious rival corporation for decades).

I do not care about the sex lives of consenting adults (assuming it’s informed consent, and that distinction matters). I only care that people engage with the world ethically, and are ALLOWED the agency to live their lives as they wish to, so long as they’re not actively or passively harming others.

If Gates had a relationship with an employee, then there’s a question of conflict of interest in the workplace, and potentially worse things like the employee feeling pressured to engage in said relationship because of the imbalanced power dynamic. That stuff matters. That should be analyzed & discussed, because workplaces should be safe from bullying, sexual abuse, etc., and it’s long past the time for workplaces to ACTUALLY BE safe and for corporations to be held accountable for being anything BUT.

But the other crap brought up here... Is just weird.

fumi said:

Lots of woke Snowflakes at Apple and all these tech companies. They need to see what other people have to endure to make a living.

FFS, stop throwing around the word “woke” when it has absolutely no contextual relevance (or meaning) to the subject matter.

The anti-worker hostility shown here is callous, presumptuous, and generally appalling. None of you have any idea what any of these employees’ lives are like.

The reason Apple wants to force every worker into being on site for a certain percentage of time probably has a lot more to do with making sure their insanely expensive building/campus isn’t sitting empty, because that would be embarrassing for a company that cares a lot about their image.

It’s been noted that people don’t like working there. Open floor plans and glass walls/doors suck for actual humans and productivity. The main building is like the Powermac G4 cube and the trashcan Mac Pro: all form; poorly-considered function.

Then there’s the basic fact that the 40-hour workweek and officespace culture is just plain unhealthy.

Instead of being bitter about what you see as “entitled” employees who should get shit on just the same as you do, maybe think about trying to raise the bar for EVERYONE (which includes yourselves). Stop licking the corporate boot and acting like you’re living vicariously through the boot wearers.

lkrupp said:

Only stupid people install malware. 

Only arrogant, callous, and utterly antipathetic tech geeks act like the above quoted comment.

You don’t know what you think you know about people who use computers. There’s more to it than “willfully installing malware”. And yet, you think everyone else should know what you know from being a tech-oriented person.

Develop some empathy for your fellow beings. In helps in many places in life.

EsquireCats said:

I think the difference between Apple then and Apple now (and this problem was shared by many failed companies/services) – these were all companies that weren't actually using their typical hardware and software in their day to day tasks. AKA "Eating your own dog food."

Anyone with a long enough memory will recall that the Macintosh "Macintrash" lineup from the mid 90s was vast and garbage. Crashes were frequent, the default configurations were underpowered for the software of the day and the products were far more expensive than very similar competition. Apple had relatively little control over many of these factors, and certainly having most of their IP near-duplicated by Microsoft was a huge blow to the company's value proposition. The result was inevitable.

Since then Apple has had a major re-focus on the end user experience of their devices and services - this helped the company significantly, and it's something Jobs was notoriously demanding about. While Apple doesn't sell cheap hardware, what they do sell is dollar-for-dollar competitive and they are making serious efforts to take control of their supply chain and owning the technologies which their devices depend upon. The A-series is the most obvious of this, with the expectation of switching away from Intel as performance gains continue to flow.

Even in recent history: Look at all the companies that were making smartphones (e.g. Microsoft), yet the staff kept using iPhones. Companies like these don't make smartphones anymore despite their massive budgets - if their own staff won't use them, how do they expect people to keep buying them.

But that’s just it: look at Apple’s data centers and you’ll find all PC servers running Linux. Apple are NOT eating their own dog food.

Apple executives clearly don’t use their own iOS much, because there are still, after more than six major revisions, major usability bugs in Safari (text handling in edit fields on websites is rife with autocorrect/spelling, and selection/editing bugs introduced in iOS 7) and actually entirely BROKEN features (like the multiple-item-select mode in several places such as Reminders and Safari’s website saved data/settings tool, where the multi-select feature was clearly *not even designed to operate correctly* by whoever wrote the code there, and the partially broken version in the Messages app which works somewhat but has two distinct bugs that sabotage selections on the user after marking multiple screens of messages for deletion).

These are just a SMALL sampling of the MANY tens of bugs I’ve been reporting for over SIX YEARS that have not been fixed (and the bug that inappropriately clears the selection of multiple screens of messages in the Messages app is actually new as of iOS 12.2). The only UI bugs I’ve seen addressed in all these years years are the recently broken misspelling indicators in Safari that just started working again, and the Safari tab previews. Nothing else I’ve reported in over six years has been addressed. Some of this is so egregious that it’s obvious that no one at Apple even uses them (or no one understands what the feature is supposed to do, which is worse because it shows how much expertise has been lost over the years since iOS 7’s redesign was taken out of the hands of the UI designers and handed to the print design marketing people by Jony Ive).

I could list bugs for pages worth of examples. Not using this stuff, not *knowing* it’s so broken, is the only explanation I can accept, because the other explanation (that developers are explicitly barred from fixing existing bugs unless some executive needs it done for PR reasons) is so much worse in terms of leadership.

22july2013 said:

I had to Google why AI might say "[sic]" for this:

"There are a myriad of [sic]

and I found this:

Another hot debate is whether it is correct to say, “Disneyland has myriad delights" or “Disneyland has a myriad of delights." You commonly hear "a myriad of" and just as commonly hear people railing that it should be simply "myriad" because the word is an adjective and essentially equivalent to a number. The argument goes like this: You wouldn't say, "There are a ten thousand of delights," so you shouldn't say, "There are a myriad of delights.”

Believe it or not, most language experts say that either way is fine. “Myriad” was actually used as a noun in English long before it was used as an adjective, and Merriam-Webster says the criticism the word gets as a noun is “recent.” Further, Garner’s Modern English Usage says “a myriad of” is fine even though it’s less efficient than “myriad.” Language is about more than efficiency, after all!  

Today, “myriad” is used as both a noun and an adjective, which means it can be used with an “a” before it (as a noun, “a myriad” just as you would say “a mouse”) or without an “a” before it (as an adjective, “myriad delights” just as you would say “delicious treats”).

Nevertheless, if you choose to say or write "a myriad of," I have to warn you that you'll encounter occasional but vehement resistance. And in fact, the AP Stylebook says not to use it. So if you’re following AP style, it doesn’t matter what Merriam-Webster or Garner says is fine. (The Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t comment on “a myriad of” directly, but in a Q&A refers people to Merriam-Webster.)

I guess AI doesn't approve of certain styles even when those styles are technically correct.

I’ve given up trying to encourage Apple Insider to proofread and use generally-approved English grammar after being smacked down for it. It’s literally in the terms of use here that we don’t critique their typos and whatnot.

This is how it’s operated (which we saw in the keynote), plus some requirements; not “how it works”.

I assume they’re struggling to make it work, which is why it’s not even going to be available in the first release. Or is it only missing in the first beta, but planned for a first release?

Nothing to argue against in there, aside from the length and the compulsion to do free marketing for the company who’s products are the core news topic of this site.

One thing that is absent from the article is the statement of fact about dominant-positioned companies becoming complacent ALSO includes Apple. Apple was complacent and slow to advance Classic Mac OS, which handed the win to Microsoft (it wasn’t just their anticompetitive business practices).

Once again, Apple is behaving the same way: several products are priced continuously higher without an actual value proposition to match, some products that were staples of consumer satisfaction are gutted or dropped (iWork was gutted, Aperture and AirPort discontinued, and I’d offer the argument that iPhone’s usability was gutted at iOS 7’s GUI reskin, but the majority of Apple fanatics would rather support anti-intellectualism and slam GUI design specialists as “arrogant know it alls” than accept that there’s actual science to GUI design).

Some products are having their market potential reduced to a tiny fraction of their original scope by being priced into the realm of impossible access for most of the customers who used to buy them (Mac Pro). The iPhone isn’t far behind. Aiming for luxury sales is self destructive when luxury is far more fad driven than value driven. 

Worst of all is the complacency with iOS releases, where pushing out questionable-value new bullet-point features is prioritized over fixing existing bugs (while introducing new ones). I’ve listed the bugs here on countless occasions, most of which were introduced by iOS 7 and still not fixed as of iOS 12 (I’m still waiting on 13, but I have zero trust in it “being the one”). iOS developers are continuing to be pushed around by iOS API changes at excessive speed, causing 3rd-party apps to be abandoned because it apparently costs them too much to maintain existing apps.

iOS isn’t quite as flaky as Droid variants that I still witness here and there, but it’s also not as accessible or consistent (or reliable) as it used to be. iCloud-relying cross-platform services don’t work half the time (Reminder statuses are never synched any more between my devices, and Universal Clipboard has not worked for me beyond the first few months of the feature being extant).

Compared to when iPhone won its dominance via being the superior product, it has lost considerable ground in these areas, and Apple seem utterly unaware or to not care at all (as to be expected under an MBA-type leadership, focusing on Wall Street, rather than excellence). iPhones aren’t superior any more; they’re simply the less irritating choice compared to the competition.

Mac OS isn’t exactly doing brilliantly either. Each release causes regressions in daily functionality (I see this with Finder and Quicklook all the time, as well as basic performance decreases). The last time it was properly optimized was Snow Leopard, which was really just a positive side-effect of optimizing the core OS to run on the then-new (and extremely constrained hardware) iPhone. That needs to be done again, on all of Apple’s now fragmented platforms.

The biggest threat to any dominant company is its own success.

I’m absolutely with the developer here, on this issue.

9secondkox2 said:

1.  Yes it probably was political as was much of the COVID-19 response. Government authoritarianism people’s private lives is not something to support. 

2. Apple is not a monopoly. They are a large successful company with a very nice cohesive platform that has taken a long time to get right. And it is right. 

3. The irresponsible trend of developers who’ve got an axe to grind jumping on Epic “Apple is a monopoly!” Bandwagon has got to stop. It’s false, potentially harmful, and doesn’t help the disgruntled like they would hope. It’s just lashing out. Like a child does. 

Grow up and learn to make your own case. 

1. What was political? Trying to reduce the spread of a disease with high lethality?

2. Apple may not be a monopoly, but they absolutely do have a lot of influence and power, as a multi-billion-dollar entity. They engage in laissez-faire capitalism just as aggressively as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. Their business model is fundamentally different from Google & Facebook, but not so different from Microsoft, and it’s long been believed in the Apple fanatic community that Microsoft is “the great enemy” (after they defeated IBM, who was the previous “great enemy”). Do not show loyalty to corporations; they have no loyalty to citizens or countries.

3. I agree, but we should not paint everything with the same brush. Apple deserves some criticism, though THIS story is NOT one of those cases where they’re in the wrong. Acting for the public good is a wise & ethical choice, even if the corporate motivator is company public image (gotta pick our battles; corporations doing good for others as a consequence of doing good for themselves is better than ONLY serving their interests, which is more often the case).