dewme

Eventually most every professional level app will need to follow a subscription model. Developing and maintaining software is a very expensive proposition. There is never a one-size-fits-all version because some features take much more time, money, ongoing effort, and access to developers with a very deep knowledge and understanding of the intricacies of the application domain the product serves. This means there will often be tiered subscription pricing tied to the type and number of features and collateral content. The better of the subscription models have a free tier that's suitable for those with fewer or modest needs. As long as all of the user created artifacts and acquired skills of lower tier versions are transferable to higher tier versions I'd say it's a reasonable approach. 

Subscriptions are here stay and will only become more pervasive. In fact, I think we'll start to see more micro subscription models where the duration of the subscription is much shorter, as in days, weeks, and months (less than a year's worth). Again, as long as all of the user created artifacts can be retained and reapplied as-needed this should not be a big deal for a lot of users, but not all. Applications like Turbo Tax are effectively a one-time only or limited duration app for most users. You use it for a very short period of time, put it away, and wait for next year's version to upgrade or repurchase the app again. It does store the data you create from one year's version version to the next, which is essential and very helpful. 

Will happy trees be coming to the Vision Pro soon?

I’m with Phil on this. Great success should bring great rewards. How many of the ecosystem detractors would be happy spending their entire career building something up only to have it picked apart by those who have never achieved great things? If you want to knock Apple off of its high perch you’re going to have to build and deliver something that’s much better than what Apple has already delivered. Who’s up for the challenge? Any takers? I suppose that destroying what others have built is so much easier than putting your own resourcefulness, perseverance, and competency to the test. It takes millions of dollars and man hours to put up a beautiful building but any a-hole with a few hundred dollars worth of dynamite to bring it all down.

There’s a name for people who don’t admit and learn from their mistakes: idiots.

If Apple can get something like this working in a smart glasses form factor it would be a massive improvement in optometry. 

Marvin said:

AppleInsider said:

Apple users facing such an attack have a few opportunities to ward off the attack. But, at this time, the notifications cannot be stopped from coming through. 

iOS should really have a feature to stop notification bombing. Even for incoming emails, it can be overwhelming. It should have an option to do aggregate notifications every few minutes and an option to suspend notifications from a particular source. Not to mention Apple's password reset mechanism shouldn't be able to be abused like this, nobody spams resets to themselves over and over so Apple should block the service for the spammer when it's being used like this.

I don’t know why all messaging systems (excluding some VPNs and private links), including emails, texts, phone calls, FTP connections, P2P connections, update services, etc., don’t use some form of a certificate based authentication system to verify the sender’s authenticity. Yeah, this would put a big demand on authentication servers, certificate management (everyone would need a unique PKI certificate), and introduce a small delay in the communication process, but we’ve gone too far with the primitive systems currently in place. The performance of most communication systems has improved significantly in the past few years. Even if you’re still stuck with a slower connectivity service, the extra delay of receiving a message is nothing compared to the massive suckfest you’ll encounter when you’ve been hacked. I’m sure they can find ways to optimize the process, perhaps modeling the certificate processing using a distributed model like DNS.  

On a similar topic, I’ve been struggling to find a way to filter out Apple mail messages based on spoofed sender identifiers that follow a similar pattern, like “PayPal ©”. I’ve been getting numerous emails that follow this pattern, mostly for subscriptions I don’t even have but some I do. Using Apple Mail’s filtering feature is of no avail since the “From” filter doesn’t interpret the spoofed identifier but uses the hidden sender address, which is a randomized address. Sure, I can simply Block each one individually, but I’d like to have a bigger hammer to crush all emails that follow a pattern in the spoofed identifier. I already have hundreds of Blocked senders. To add insult to injury the message content in these phishing emails is one big image that contains a single link to the phisherman’s nefarious website. These images all contain what looks like text, but it’s just an image of text so you can’t filter based on the text either. I know Apple can pull text out of images, but that functionality isn’t part of Apple Mail or the filtering mechanism.

This never ending game of whack-a-mole is getting tiresome.