FileMakerFeller

goofy1958 said:

mikethemartian said:

ericthehalfbee said:

Amazing how entitled the EU thinks they are where they can pass a law for themselves, but feel they should be allowed to take 20% of a companies global revenues for any infraction that only exists within their market.

It’s no different than Apple or Google making their developers pay a hefty fee. They have the bargaining power to get their developers to pay on their terms and the EU has the bargaining power to get Apple and Google to pay on its terms. Entitlement and fairness have nothing to do with it. It is just business.

The $99 fee to be a developer is “hefty”? And then if I develop a free app, Apple gets nothing. How is that hefty at all?

I think mtm is including the 30% commission in that statement.

And if one's perspective is that the 30% is just a fee that doesn't bring any benefits, then that's reasonable: losing a third of one's revenue to a third party for no perceived benefit is a bad deal.

However, that 30% pays for a lot. It removes the friction from the buying process; users know that they can easily delete an app they don't want and that Apple is going to side with them if they request a refund from the developer. It's hard to measure just how much this has affected the market for mobile software and digital services in a manner that everyone will agree with, but as a rough estimate we can just look at the reported revenues - and I don't have figures to hand, but I'm guessing it's now more than 100x what it was in 2008. This is, of course, a communal benefit rather than an individual benefit, so there is very little recognition of its value by those viewing the landscape through the lens of the software developer.

The 30% fee also pays for hosting, data transfer, payment processing, reporting services, malware scanning and a bunch of other annoying little things that lots of people think they can do by themselves for less money. This is where I have some sympathy for the arguments being put forth but respectfully point out that not everyone shares that viewpoint. Still, if there is competition for those services that a significant portion of the developer community would like to take advantage of, that's probably worth promoting and Apple should not be restricting developers from seeking alternatives.

Then again, part of the 30% fee also goes to the app review and code signing process. Digitally signing the application bundle would be worthless without the review, so those cannot be separated. Code signing is a security measure enforced at the OS level; it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to do that but it comes with the cost of added complexity and trust issues. Paying for it via the store's commission is an efficient approach. App review feels like a process that should be a per-app fee but that could mean several hours of a reviewer's time at something in the region of US$150 per hour... I think rolling that into the 30% commission is reasonable.

It's worth remembering that Apple is operating at a huge scale with the App Store. By aggregating their costs and apportioning them over a very large number of developers Apple is able to massively reduce the per-developer cost of those services and spread their risk; in return they make a significant profit. AWS does the same thing; purportedly the margins are in the 60% range for Amazon and yet developers love the service because they think they're getting a bargain.

I think developers need to be reminded that setting up a business is an expensive process and that all those costs used to be payable up front; the trade-off for being able to start the business at a lower up-front cost is that you have to pay more later on.

"Provision" is a term with special meaning in accounting. Basically, if you expect something to happen in future financial years you can formally recognise it in the current financial year; the aim is to document prudent management and alert (prospective) company owners to the potential for events that will meaningfully impact the financial state of the company in the medium term. If the expectation turns out to be incorrect, the provision can be unwound by another formal process. You can think of it as something like a lien, or a hedge: just in case this future event comes to pass, the company has allocated resources to deal with that eventuality.

However, as other commenters have pointed out, in large firms provisions can be utilised to reduce the tax burden in the current financial year for reasons that bear very little relation to prudent management.

tht said:

My 2013 iMac 27 is still humming along. It's the family computer. It's unsupported now, and it's probably one problem away from total replacement.

To replace it, I would like to have a ~30" display, 8 TB of storage, and capability to add more storage years down the road. When you keep every single picture and video taken, it adds up! A small headless desktop where I can add 2 3.5" HDD would be great on top of the builtin storage. Yes, I probably need to invest in a little computer as a file server one of these days.

The Apple Silicon iMac better come quick!

My main problem with laptops is that they can get hot. I hate the feeling of typing on hot keys, and my work issued MBP15 gets hot while attached to an external monitor. I want this problem to go away, so if Apple puts the SoC in the back of the laptop display, it would be so worth it for me. As the M1 models show. Well, really, as the iPad Pro shows, Apple can put a lot of computing power in a very small and thin package, 6 mm thick only. Do it, Apple. As a plus, it would let them play around with the keyboard, add more battery, etc.

A laptop with a low profile hot swappable mechanical keyboard would be interesting. They'll have prestige things like a folding display laptop, but just your simple and functional laptop that has a keyboard that is always cool to the touch and noiseless has its attractions too.

You can get very cheap external storage via USB 3.0 or USB-C now. There's another article on AI showing a WD 10TB drive on sale at Amazon for < US$155 - a smidge over US$15 per TB! It is separately powered, so you can keep it turned on all the time or power it up only when you need it. It's slower than an internal drive would be, but not by much - and if you want to watch a video then it's plenty fast enough. The only time drive speed matters to me is when I'm copying files, and even then it's only for multi-gigabyte files like videos or those rare occasions when I need to do a full backup of my internal drive. I've been very happy relying on external drives for at least five years now - they have the added benefit of being easy to store in a different location than my main machine, just in case.

It depends on your use case and your habits, but my recommendation is to use external drives rather than trying to mount them inside the case of the computer you use. With rare exceptions, you simply don't have the time to work with everything stored on your internal drive every day - you can't watch more than about 7.5TB of video (at 4k resolution) in a day, and that's assuming you do nothing else in a 24-hour period! So move the bulk of it to external storage and save the internal drive for what you're working on right now. Think of it like clothing - you can only wear one outfit at a time, so you maintain external storage for everything you like to wear and choose from that as needed. They key is that if you want something, it needs to be readily available; I've found that external drives are just as convenient as a dedicated server and minimal extra hassle over internal drives.

entropys said:

badmonk said:

India seems more problematic than other countries in working with manufacturers…intrusive, meddlesome and way too bureaucratic.

It doesn’t matter the political or economic philosophy underpinning the organisation of government, it is the size. Let government do too. Many things, hand over too much responsibility to government, and you end up with all sorts of boondoggles, ear marking and overt oppression, even down to consumer choices, all designed to line the pockets of the political class and their friends.
let government  be responsible for too much, and you get Big Brother.

Let government be responsible for too little and you get incidents like the Union Carbide disaster in the 1980s, or this more recent one. It is a difficult and never-ending process to find the right balance. My own preference is to follow the path that leads to increased safety.

12TB of cloud storage, fully backed up, is NOT CHEAP.

I compare it to a 12TB WD desktop drive which Amazon is selling for US$229 - you'd want two of them so that you have a local backup, so that's US$458, plus for an off-site backup I think Backblaze is the best value at US$130 for two years (unlimited data, but you can't connect a huge number of external drives to your computer, so there's a practical limit). Electricity costs for the drives is a maximum US$4 per year each (as estimated here) but more likely to be negligible because they spin down while not in use.

Over the estimated 5 year lifespan of the drives, you'd pay a total of US$783 but you wouldn't have the ease of access that the iCloud storage provides. Backblaze has a web administration interface that's workable, plus iOS and Android apps for direct download to a smartphone or tablet, but it doesn't really have the integration of iCloud.

Five years of 12TB storage on iCloud is 60 months x US$60 pm for a total of US$3600. Interestingly, Backblaze has another product for storing data ("B2") that is priced at US$5 per TB per month, with an extra fee for downloading the data. It's designed for storage where you don't want to reserve any space up front, so you're charged only for what you use, but it's noteworthy that the pricing per TB is the same as iCloud (which doesn't charge for downloads).

For that amount of money it could well be worth building your own SSD-based NAS (Jeff Geerling has a great post here for a 40TB, dual 10Gbps networking NAS with a materials cost of US$4330; you can RAID that for 24TB of storage with 16TB of redundancy plus back up the NAS to Backblaze for the US$130/2yr mentioned above). 8TB SSDs are around US$400 for SATA drives and around US$750 for NVMe drives on Amazon, so you can modify the build cost according to your needs since the drives are the most expensive part.

It seems odd that updating the Spotlight index database is not reserved for times when the battery is being charged.

chasm said:

noelos said:

I'm sorry - but the excuses about Siri being crap because of privacy concerns just doesn't hold water.

"Hey Siri - play Scarborough Fair". Now I have "Scarborough Fair" by Simon & Garfunkel in my library, and I'd guess this is the version that 99.9% of people would want 99.9% of the time and it's a track I've also asked Siri to play literally hundreds of times because it helps my toddler get to sleep.

And yet, every time it is a gamble if she will play this, or some other rando version, or some other rando song completely. Siri learns NOTHING and doesn't even use the contextual knowledge available to make a reasonable guess of what you want.

Or what about a simple query while I'm driving and I idly ask what year some actor died. "I can't answer that while you're driving". Is that to preserve my privacy or is it just because they haven't put in the work to make Siri be able to answer simple queries in natural language?

Okay, let’s go over this:

As I mentioned, if you issue requests poorly, you can get bad results. Your S&G request is a good example of this. If you want a specific artist’s version of a song, you need to include the artists’ name in the request. A thousand acts (at least) have covered this song, so saying “Hey Siri, play Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel” will probably get you the right version, though I admit there’s a possibility you might get a live version by them — but if you add the phrase “from my library” I think you’d hit 100 percent accuracy.

As for your driving and asking questions query, I’ll remind you that Siri is not a chat bot. It is MUCH more restricted by Apple while you’re driving so that you don’t get distracted, and this is by design. Apple does not want you asking Siri random questions while you are driving, because that indicates that you are distracted or want to be distracted.

You may find that too restrictive, and I think you have something of a case, but when it comes to driver distraction I’d rather Apple err on the side of being over cautious and thus more limited. When I’m NOT in motion, suddenly Siri can answer a question like that handily. I just asked it “what year did actor John Wayne die,” when I was at home, and it gave me a very full answer, including his age and location when he died as well as the date.

I am certainly NOT saying there isn’t any room for improvement in Siri; quite the opposite! I’m just explaining why it behaves in some of the ways it behaves.

This is a situation where the good intentions result in a worse outcome. What's more distracting, listening to an informative answer or being told you can't have the answer? My frustration level certainly grows with the latter.

I would further argue that the decision about whether or not I have the capacity to make the query and accept the response is a matter for me the human and not the decision trees implemented by the software. The motion sensors can certainly tell if I'm gridlocked in traffic; in my opinion that should be a factor in the algorithm. Plus, Siri has no problem reading me the latest text message from a person - which is a similar level of cognitive effort to absorb.

Even if I'm wrong in my perceptions of my ability in a given situation (and, let's face it, that's a common mistake we humans make), a better response would be "It's not appropriate for me to answer that while you're driving. Would you like me to: 1. Remind you of this query once you stop driving, 2. Tell you the answer anyway, or 3. Put the answer in a note that you can review later?" - since people generally only remember the first and last thing they hear from you, burying the "problematic" option in the middle of the list is a subtle "force" to the "better" options.

Can't organise the world's information if you don't have all of the world's information, after all...

darkvader said:

They need to do a LOT more than fine Apple.  A fine will be treated as the cost of doing business.

Ban iPhone imports unless Apple allows users to install software from any source of their choosing.  It's time for governments to do their job and shut down Apple's monopoly.

[emphasis added]

I for one will not rest until I can install the software from my car's ECU onto my iPhone.

Once again: it is possible to install your own software on your own phone without paying Apple any money. You sign up for the free tier of Apple's Developer program, use the free Xcode IDE to write your app, digitally sign it and install it on your phone. There are restrictions: you have to reinstall the app every seven days and you cannot submit it to the app store to share it with other people. But there is nothing to stop you from sharing the source code and other app resources and allowing others to compile and sign the app themselves.

40domi said:

Apple should make an example of them, let them strike, bring in staff from other stores (or shut it down) we'll see how they feel after a couple of months without pay (probably too stupid to realise they won't get paid)
As far as retail is concerned, probably the best job going and they get 40% discounts, so can make money on the side, by buying and selling stuff!
100 years ago, even 50 years ago, workers generally were poorly paid and treated, now with all the laws, Unions just scam workers 😡

I'm not 100% certain that it's the same in the US, but I would be surprised if there is any substantial difference to the benefits I'm aware of for Apple employees in Australia: the maximum discount for a hardware product is 25% and only one product from each category (e.g. Mac, iPad, headphones) may be purchased with that discount in a given calendar year - plus, the device cannot be sold for a minimum of 12 months (difficult to police, but not impossible). Note that there is zero discount available on iPhones. A limited number of 10% discounts on hardware are also available, with the same caveat on resale.

Employees also have the opportunity to purchase Apple stock at a small discount; I am unaware of any resale caveats there.

Labour laws differ between countries but I'm pretty sure that firing a unionised employee for going on strike is illegal no matter where you are. So is bringing in replacement workers, except in clearly defined situations that form part of the agreement between the union and the employer.

Apple is powerful enough and has the money to pay the penalty for any illegal activity it might engage in relating to its employees, and the company has certainly been found guilty of illegal behaviour in the past (e.g. Steve Jobs' wage-fixing and anti-poaching agreements with other tech giants back in the day), so I think the collective strength of a union is a justifiable consideration for all employees of the company.

But the company also goes to great lengths to treat employees well. Nobody in retail was laid off during COVID despite the stores being closed, there is ongoing training and, yes, the employee discounts. In return it wants maximum effort and maximum obedience from its workforce.

This is going to be a long and protracted fight and we may never know the full truth. But I'm willing to bet that both sides are asking for more than is reasonable and that the courts are going to get involved.