firelock

It’s still Android. Last year I began managing an app for our company and I had to buy Android test devices and learn the OS. I’ve always been an Apple person and honestly I assumed that Android was probably about as good as iOS, but boy was I wrong. The UX of Android is horrible, and it is different on each device made by different manufacturers. The much-heralded better “customization” of Android is really just a cover for a lack of basic features. And talk about a nightmare for development. I’ll give you a good example: video.

On iOS, all I have to do is make sure our video works on the latest and last version of iOS and I’m good to go. That is because iOS has a built-in video player that can be used natively by all apps. Seamless. Not so on Android. There is no video player native to the operating system. Therefore each manufacturer, in conjunction with your carrier, bundles a different video player with each device. Usually this is some cheap video player that has problems with all manner of video encoding. We have four testing devices and when we first tested video in our app, it played fine on one device, audio didn’t play on another, video played on another but no audio, and on the last the video didn’t work at all. No, not a joke, really. We then downloaded another third-party video player (VLC, considered to be best in class) onto each device and, yes, video worked on all at that point.

This is the much ballyhooed “customization,” you get to/have to download different third party apps to do basic functions like play video. What a nightmare for developers! This causes so many problems you wouldn’t believe it. Even if you have a good player downloaded, when the video plays it jumps out to the different app to play, and then back to your app if everything works properly, which of course it frequently doesn’t. Our app has 4.8 stars on iOS, but just 3.8 on Android mostly because of the video playback issues. I’d say 90% of our help desk tickets on the app are for Android, and probably 50% of those are for video playback problems, of which most are entirely related to the cheap player that they have installed or some unknown bug that is preventing the video player from performing correctly. I could go on but you get the idea.

eriamjh said:

I think the article says if Apple doesn't make money doing it, they're gonna stop doing it.  

Maybe be that's why the Mac Pro hasn't been updated?  

IPhones help sell iMacs, not Mac Pros.  

The problem with the Mac Pro sales is that their sales have been cannibalized by sales of high-end iMacs. I've been managing photoretouching and graphic design studios for almost 25 years. For most of that history I bought the highest end Mac that I could in order to work more efficiently. About five years ago it was time to upgrade our old tower Mac Pros and for the first time I said, you know, a high-end iMac will do just fine for the kind of work that we do (mostly Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc.) and also save us a lot of money and desktop space. If we were doing video production or 3D rendering I would have been able to justify the additional expense for a Mac Pro, and indeed our video team has one of the "trash can" Mac Pros. I also know from talking to other studio directors that this change has happened across the industry. Retouching studios that used to exclusively buy Pro towers are now perfectly content with maxed out iMacs.

What AI is pointing out is the classic non-doer critic's response to the doers. Whether or not Apple succeeds at everything it is trying to do right now in services is an open question, that they are making the attempt is what is more important. And if something fails Apple has shown its willingness to let go of what is not working (Ping, AirPower, Newstand, trashcan Mac Pro) and try something else rather than cling desperately to failing business model until it is too late. To quote Theodore Roosevelt: 

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” 

Having your news on Facebook can only help most online publishers who depend on traffic to drive their advertising revenues. Those that don't primarily depend on ads will have paywalls that will prevent users from getting free content. Thus the notion that news outlets are somehow being "ripped off" by Facebook is absurd.

With that context, it's obvious that this is a play from publishers to get additional revenue from a company that has deep pockets. Nothing wrong with that, its free enterprise, but in this kind of power play you better make sure that the company that you are trying to put the squeeze on needs you more than you need them.

I was on a trip to Europe recently and noticed my iPhone 12 was getting hot and draining battery quickly. A check of the battery settings quickly showed the culprit: Instagram, despite the fact it was in the background and not being actively used. And this was before I had updated to iOS 17.

If Apple offers this it will be essentially a “desktop” iPad aimed at artist studios, designers, architects, etc.

There is nothing wrong with employees expressing their opinions to management. I know our team nearly universally desires to continue to WFH. As their manager I know that they are more productive and happier, why is this a bad thing? I think businesses who ignore WFH will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the future. You can fight the future, but the future will always win.

I use Time Machine with two backup drives. I keep one at the office for “disaster recovery” and the other stays hooked up to my Mac doing TM’s regular backups. On the first Monday of every month I swap the drives out. That way I have the convenience of a local time machine backup, with an off-site disaster recovery drive that is never more than 30 days old.

cincytee said:

The immediate effect might be the loss of $20 billion in payments to Apple, but Apple would clearly then institute its own search engine, which would generate billions in revenue, much like Google, so the overall impact would be much smaller financially and also put Apple in charge of its own search revenues. The question then would be whether that in itself would raise regulatory scrutiny.   

I agree. Google’s payments are about incentivizing Apple not to make their own search engine as much as anything else.

I resisted buying a 12.9” iPad Pro because I was worried that it would be too big and lose the portability and convenience factor that I like. However last year I finally decided to switch to the larger size and I’m glad that I did. The biggest advantage to the larger screen size is multitasking is finally practical. And it turns out that the larger size was nothing to fear as it is still very portable; in fact, I can’t imagine now how I used to get by with the smaller sized tablet.