mpantone

Macocalypse said:

My gods it's so fraking hilarious seeing you chucklefcks complain about something so stupid and mundane and completely irrelevant to how a Mac works as finder icons. 

This attitude will not get you anywhere important. Being mediocre won't help you achieve excellence or greatness.

The people who worry about the details (after getting the basics correct) are the ones who have a chance of creating something truly great: the Mona Lisa, a Michelin 3-star restaurant, haute couture, even something as commonplace as a videogame (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild comes to mind).

As Mies van der Rohr said, "God is in the details." If you don't understand why it is used in this discussion's context, you don't know anything about Apple, Steve Jobs or probably anything about consumer goods.

There's a reason why entry level Toyotas and Hondas seemingly run forever. Someone has to care about the details, even in a mass market vehicle like a Corolla or Civic. And what about the companies that didn't care about the details in sub-compacts? GM, Ford, Chrysler all basically gave up this entire market segment to exports in the Seventies.

You probably have never left your mother's basement but there are places on this planet where even modest workers care about doing something a little better, worrying about the details. 

If you don't care about the details, you get American public transit. If you care about the details, you get Swiss and Japanese public transit. There's no surprise that McDonald's in Japan blows doors on McDonald's stateside, even on identical menu items.

Steve Jobs -- perhaps more than any American CEO since WWII -- cared about the details. When Apple loses sight of this, you know the company culture has changed. Perhaps you think it is for the better but I assure you that quality doesn't come from a "satisfactory is sufficient" attitude.

Remember that this is not exclusive to PC operating systems or consumer electronics. It pertains to everything humans do and make.

This ham-fisted drive icon might seem unimportant. But in fact it's one of the things you will see every single time you log into your Mac. Like I wrote before, Steve NEVER would have let this get approved. Let's just hope that this was a one-off mistake and not the beginning of a trend.

MacSince1987 said:

What crap. F1 has the world's biggest TV audience of any sport, and is truly global - even though most of the cars are built in England. Of course there's overtaking, and what's that about a 'paywall'? You've heard of streaming? It's not free.  In The UK, Sky owns the broadcast rights but so what? You expect to watch a global sport for nothing? Naive and ridiculous. You continue to watch tiddlywinks. F1 is for adults.

First of all, football (a.k.a. soccer for Yanks) has the biggest TV audience and dwarfs the F1 by a lightyear.

And yes, here in the USA, it's easy to catch the FIFA Club World Cup, it streams for free on DAZN. The regular World Cup competition has quite a few matches broadcast OTA ("rabbit ear antennae"). Having to pay to watch a sport does not make it "for adults" [sic].

As for Formula 1, it was a far more interesting sport in the Seventies. Today's cars are stretch limousines in comparison and make passing very, very difficult. It's really just a computer model competition today, whoever has the most powerful computers and skilled programmers running the best CFD simulations basically wins. 98% of the competition happens before the car is even assembled which is why mid-season improvements are extremely modest. That's one of the reasons why Verstappen is thinking about bolting from Red Bull.

Worse, today's F1 doesn't offer good race visuals. The drivers are doing A LOT of interaction with the car's various systems and almost none of these actions translate into something appealingly watchable on television. The drivers are some of the most skilled motorsports competitors on the planet but it's not translating into an entertaining television product. If you watch 2-3 F1 races, it's easy to see 6-8 major issues that hinders this sport in 2025.

With the individual races becoming so boring it's no surprise that the attention drifts to the off-track activities which have veered toward high-end lifestyle marketing, much like America's Cup yacht racing (also the domain of supercomputers and high-end CFD model simulations).

There's no way that Apple could afford to become the exclusive streaming rightsholder for Formula 1. And with the way today's competition is being held I don't think it would be worth it anyhow as it has become so untelegenic.

ATLMacFan1 said:

Why does it look like it shifts perspective midway?

It's because Apple didn't depict the "drive" realistically. There are a couple of problems with the new icon.

The Apple logo is presented as though it is on a flat two-dimensional surface with no foreshortening. If you look at the traditional hard drive icon on the left, the circular spindle bulge is an oval.

Worse the "drive" on the right has parallel sides. The old HDD icon on the left has tapering sides, more properly depicted using vanishing perspective. Apple could have gotten away with the "flat" logo had they used proper perspective on the actual silver enclosure itself (like all the icons in the IconFactory window grab provided by theralsadurns.

The new and "improved" icon is an example of really poor draughtsmanship. Plus there's nothing that really says "I am a disk drive." It looks like it could be a (inept) sketch of the unreleased iPod shuffle 3.

Let's hope the rest of macOS 26 isn't full of equally bad design. Somewhere on this planet Jony Ive is silently smirking. And Steve never would have let this happen on his watch.

Yes, best to avoid using this feature until Apple gets some brains and figures out how to exclude items from the recommendation algorithm. In the long run, they need to figure this out without user intervention. Joe Consumer isn't going to spend the time flagging content. And Apple is making their data collection less valuable by weighting this stuff normally. In fact, it should be the opposite. For certain kinds of content (like white noise), it should be opt-in. By default it should be excluded from the recommendation algorithm. Same with things that you rarely listen to. If I listen to one or two country songs in a row whereas I've listened to none in the past six months, those should be kept out.

Until Apple can figure this out thoughtfully I'll stick with a third party app for white noise. White noise apps were amongst some of the earliest apps on the iOS App Store (2008). Surprisingly a couple of those early apps have been maintained by their developers and run on both older hardware and recent devices. I still have TMSOFT's White Noise and White Noise Lite apps that I originally downloaded in 2008 (App Store). Another benefit: no Internet connection necessary to run these old-school standalone legacy white noise apps, they're just looped sound files.

dewme said:

Wesley_Hilliard said:

bobonet said:

Wesley_Hilliard said:

Stabitha_Christie said:

I love a good rumor as much as the next person but can we not normalize this kind of behavior? While it isn't illegal to take someone's photo in public is still an invasion of privacy and promoting this kind of thing will only lead to more instances of this kind of thing. 

Sorry to say, but the law is quite clear, when in public, it is fair game. While I can't take a photo of someone and use it commercially, there's nothing stopping anyone from taking photos, recording video, or capturing audio of anyone in public.

Would this article count as commercial use?

I didn't take the photo, so no. This was posted to a public forum. And even then, the photo wasn't used to promote a product or make us money as a direct result of taking the photo. Commercial use being, if I went to a public space, took a picture of a person wearing a jacket, then used that photo to sell that jacket, then I'd be violating something.

I immediately took note of the jacket. And the long sleeve shirt.

To be able to wear a long sleeve shirt and a jacket outside in late July in the northern hemisphere ... I wish I could do that right now rather than suffering in the brutal heat and humidity. I suppose I could buy one of those jackets and take it with me into the beer cave at the local gas station and hang out for a few hours.

Any insights into the brand of the jacket? We are talking jackets here, aren't we?

Not every place in the Northern Hemisphere has weather like your place.

I noticed the guy's clothes in the photo too and thought immediately "Well, this wasn't taken in Cupertino or the South Bay." Reading the article, it mentioned Union Square in San Francisco and thought "okay, that makes sense." San Francisco's weather in the summer months is notoriously cold (so much so that a famous quote has been erroneously attributed to Mark Twain) due to the marine layer which any SF Bay Area resident is familiar with.

Anyhow, Apple -- like all cellphone manufacturers -- needs to do some real-world testing of their devices. Note that they have done this for a long time. It's even more important today than it was when an iPhone prototype was accidentally left behind in a Redwood City beer hall in 2010. The cellular reception testing is more stringent, there are other technologies like satellite communications, GPS, etc. It's not just whether or not the device will get a wifi connection or latch onto the nearest cellular tower (Apple has long had some cellular transmitters on campus to test connectivity).

Does noise cancellation work during a call? Well, there's no way you can test that in the center of Apple Park where the closest person might be a sole passerby 20 meters away. Does it expose for fireworks correctly? How's the audio capturing the band's sound at some outdoor music festival?

You need to test these devices where they will be used. Ski slopes, on boat on the Bay, at the ballpark, in a nightclub, a hospital, schools, a mountain bike trail, the grocery store, stuck in 101 traffic, etc.

Because not everyone lives in their mom's basement.

M68000 said:

mpantone said:

At last it looks like I'll finally be upgrading from iOS 17 to iOS 18 in the next few days. Same with migrating from iPadOS 17 to iPadOS 18 as well as macOS Sonoma to macOS Sequoia.

As usual I will wait until at least June 2026 to install iOS 26/iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 Tahoe.

Totally up to you. But I have no idea what you are waiting for. 

I'm waiting for Apple to clean up their Cupertino dogchow.

Apple's software QA has markedly and steadily declined over the years. Ten years ago, yes, I would install the newest release the same week it came out (September usually). But as their release quality noticeably worsened, I started delaying this to a point release. Over years, this just drifted to later point releases until a few years ago I just waited until the week of WWDC in June to date. For sure Apple would not be adding any features, it would all be bug fixes by the time they previewed the next gen OSes.

But now most of Apple's operating systems still have significant bugs in the x.5 releases. Hence, waiting until this year's x.6 releases. This ensures a smoother user experience since I simply don't see nine months worth of bugs (typically the most serious ones). I just don't have the interest/energy to deal with that garbage anymore. I will wait for the features when the software is fully baked: July or August.

Note that I have skipped some releases altogether like macOS Crapalina (I upgraded directly from Mojave to Big Sur sometime in the spring of 2021, six months after that latter's release).

Note that Apple themselves are aware that their software quality is going downhill. They even took a week pause in December 2023 to tackle bugs which delayed a point release. And yes, Siri with Apple Intelligence is another example of how Apple determined that a particular feature wasn't ready for primetime. They have also removed and reintroduced some features like AI-powered summary notifications.

Note that since Apple releases security patches for the previous two operating systems, my devices are still safe and well supported.

Note that I do the same thing with Windows. I'm running Windows 11 23H2 on several machines with one system upgraded to 24H2 in the past month. Redmond dogchow certainly isn't better than Cupertino dogchow.

Guys, you know that Roku already has higher priced ad-free subscription plans?

This new $2.99 plan slots somewhere in between. The free offering has very limited VOD content choices and of course has ads as well. The $2.99 monthly fee gives access to an expanded VOD library. If you don't want ads, they offer premium subs.

It's apparent that some people here don't realize that service providers can offer multiple tiers of service. This is what Roku is doing, adding another tier.

Airlines do this. Cellular carriers do this. Credit card companies. Cable companies. Banks. Even your (US) healthcare insurance provider does this.

jeffharris said:

That’s kind of a nondescript icon. Apple could do better. Way better.

I still have a zillion icons in my old CandyBar (Panic software icon application) collection, which miraculously still runs in Sequoia!

Icon Factory had great icons!

Well everyone using the beta is free to fill out the feedback form and complain about it.

That said, the world has changed including Apple hardware. Apple generally doesn't use discrete drive components like the 2.5" and 3.5" HDDs of yesteryear. Their SSDs today are largely NAND chips soldered to the motherboard, not even m.2 sticks. The best representation of an Apple internal SSD is really just a chip (or a group of them) rather than some silver, white, or black enclosure.

Curiously Apple's longtime external drive icon is typically yellow. I have never owned a metallic yellow drive enclosure nor do I recall Apple ever marketing any of them. 

But yes the Icon Factory had great icons!

blastdoor said:

mpantone said:

For anyone who thinks that AI is a passing fad, you are completely out of touch with reality.

AI is here to stay. It's doing some amazing things in the enterprise markets and if it can eke out 100 basis points in net profit for some Fortune 500 company, guess what? They're gonna use it.

I bet 99.9% of people on these tech news site discussion forums who say they don't use AI are over 30 years old. That's right. There's a generational gap in AI usage.

Just yesterday, the AP reported on this:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-companion-generative-teens-mental-health-9ce59a2b250f3bd0187a717ffa2ad21f

That's right pre-teens are using this stuff and some older teenagers even see the danger in young children using AI.

And the consumer AI industry is largely a lawless frontier right now, it needs heavy government regulation from world governments, not just your state's governor or 1600 Pennsylvania.

And many of today's consumer AI companies are really no better than tobacco companies. They are creating AI chatbots that look and behave like anime characters (Grok's assistants, SpicyChat AI, Character.AI, et cetera) to attract youngsters into interacting with them. It's the digital equivalent of adding candy flavors to vaping products.

Look at the way Grok started rolling out their AI anime-skinned assistants like Ani. They debuted on iPhones first, still not available on many Android devices. Why? Probably because iPhone is the platform of choice for young people (the under 25 market), especially teens.

If you care about the future of today's youngsters, the ones who will be tasked with fixing many of the world's problems, you need to pay attention to what AI is today, where it is going, who is using it, for what reasons, etc.

There's one oldtimer here who continually gripes about AI, fearing it will displace him from his job as a writer. AI's potential effects are far, Far, FAR greater than that.

Just sticking your head in the sand or plugging your ears and saying "I'm not using AI so nyah!" like a little brat throwing a tantrum isn't going to stop AI from proliferating. That much is clear in the 3+ years I've been closely following AI.

I think you’re mostly right that the AI naysayers are old. BUT — I think the old timers who do embrace AI have a potentially huge advantage over everyone else, because for them the AI replaces some of the junior colleagues who they previously would have delegated to. AI used by a seasoned veteran who has a deep understanding of their business can be much more powerful than AI used by a kiddo who knows very little about the real world.

You are one of a small minority of people here who seem to get it.

AI is a tool, a very powerful one in the hands of a skilled and experienced worker. It's a lousy and possibly dangerous tool for someone inexperienced, foolish, naive, etc. In many ways, AI is no different than a tool like a circular saw, a chainsaw, or a pneumatic drill.

Look at the whole Replit debacle from this past weekend. It happened to some venture capitalist guy who attempted to use the tool to write and deploy an app, i.e., not a professional coder.

Can a 15-year old use a table saw and create something useful? Back when I was in high school, there was a shop class. And yes, it was taught by someone with decades of experience who showed the students how to use the tools safely and effectively.

At some point the governments of this world will start regulating AI with increasing restrictions over time. Do you really believe that septuagenarian career politicians are the best people to be writing these guidelines? Older people really need to start taking some responsibility here and take some steps in educating themselves about AI.

Old people (including me) need to start exploring these tools and understand how they can used effectively as well as understand what their weaknesses are. The technology is evolving at a very rapid rate so just dabbling with one for a few minutes once or twice a year is not enough. But it's okay to try these out on small projects, something that's not going to cost you your life, your career, your family/friends, your bank account, etc.

One thing is pretty much guaranteed: some of these AI tools will get better, some of them will get worse.

We already have dullards recommending certain AI tools because they "sound human". Not the brightest method of selection. That would be like recommending a chainsaw because it has a cool stripe on the housing.

At last it looks like I'll finally be upgrading from iOS 17 to iOS 18 in the next few days. Same with migrating from iPadOS 17 to iPadOS 18 as well as macOS Sonoma to macOS Sequoia.

As usual I will wait until at least June 2026 to install iOS 26/iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 Tahoe.