stompy

AppleInsider said:

"Former Disney CEO Bog Iger says that he never spoke with Steve Jobs about a potential merger of Apple and Disney, but he believes ...."

The ultimate "if Steve were alive..." 

rmoo said:

stompy said:

The whole report is blissfully ignorant of how the software development community actually works.

Remember that Apple at one point also was a huge advocate of cross-platform web apps (when there was still a huge threat of Microsoft shifting their PC dominance to mobile leading to developers following along ... this would have been a way to get developers to make apps that would run on both Windows CE/Mobile and iOS). It wasn't until iOS and its app store became so dominant so fast - which absolutely no one at the time expected - that Apple shifted positions. 

Schiller, Levinson, others within Apple had been pressing Jobs to allow third party native apps, even before the January 2007 iPhone announcement. And Jobs -- according to the Isaacson biography -- was initially against it, and also wanted to focus on the iPhone launch first. 

So I think you're referring to Steve Jobs' "very sweet solution" presented to developers in June 2007?

The iPhone SDK was announced in October 2007, released March 2008. A lot went into that SDK release, the steps leading up to the March release -- 9 months after iPhone launched -- are more than we saw in public.

hammeroftruth said:

rmoo said:

...that Apple shifted positions. 

Except that some apps reverted back to web apps and now there is canned code to take your desktop website and convert it to a smartphone compatible web app. 

It’s all now dependent on the company who wants an online presence.  Some don’t want to hire app developers and also don’t want to deal with Apple and Google every time they need to update their app. 

The more fronts developers have to address, the easier it is to justify cross-platform.

MplsP said:

....
Ultimately, with things like smartphones, within reason I think a duopoly is better - there's still competition, but the limited number of platforms mean developers are not spread too thin trying to create and support apps for 10 different systems. If you look at the number of apps available on the App Store, it's hard to argue that there's no competition.

Agree with everything you said. And to expand a bit: ultimately the more platforms the are, the more likely app developers are to abandon native apps for a single, cross-platform app. How does that create more "... competition and meaningful choice for customers."

The whole report is blissfully ignorant of how the software development community actually works.

9secondkox2 said:

Good 

the whole thing is wrong. 

“Oh. There’s a new disease. So we must track you. And we need to know your movements as well as those of your contacts.” RIIIIGHT… that’s going to end well… 

Forget HIPAA. Forget privacy. Not to mention potential abuse of something like this. 

This kind of thing did not happen with HIV/AIDS, note the flu, nor pneumonia, nor anything. All of a sudden, a née deadly disease is out and we are supposed to happily forget our humanity so that people who tell us a different story every day can monitor us like lab rats. 

No thanks. 

The Apple / Google exposure notification includes nothing like you describe. You may be confusing the APIs built by Apple / Google with specific app implementations; some of these did have privacy issues.

...looks like I answered this late, JBSlough and others already noted that the iMac's depth isn't a great match for conventional power cords. As for USB-C, the M1 supports 2 USB/Thunderbolt ports. It sure looks like spending one of those on a permanently connected power cord was unacceptable.