mpantone

My hunch is that Apple's board of directors discreetly employs a high-level government relations consultant who provides suitable guidance in how Apple handles the current administration. I doubt if Tim himself (or anyone else in the senior management team) came up with the idea of this particular plaque and presentation.

It's worth noting that two board directors were former CEOs of aerospace/military industry corporations who would be well versed in dealing with senior Washington D.C. officials to score big government contracts. There are also two directors from the healthcare/biotech industry. And there is another director from BlackRock.

For sure the BOD would have to be in general agreement in how/what Tim interacts with the White House, Congress, etc. He would definitely need their backing in his actions with POTUS 47. Tim Cook is not acting rogue or blindly shooting from the hip.

In a similar way I'm sure Apple engages the services of diplomatic relations consultants when Tim meets with foreign dignitaries.

Tim is smart enough to know this is how Tim Apple has to play the game for the next 3.5 years.

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.

rhbellmor said:

I’m all for updating the hard drive icon… but this new one does not have an appealing look.  At least to my appeal.  

You are free to change it.

There have been desktop icon packages, etc. for macOS/OS X for decades and for earlier Apple operating systems before that. I'm using some disk icon for my Macintosh HD boot drive that I found in 2011 when I yanked the factory Hitachi 2.5" HDD spinner from my Mac mini 2010 server and replaced it with a 120GB SSD from OCZ.

I think I found the one I'm currently using via an Internet search (yeah, I know many people online have seemed to have forgotten how to use search engines):

https://www.deviantart.com/sebster456/art/Apple-SSD-Icon-308840969

I just searched for "macos ssd icon" and switched to image results.

If you find a compatible icon, all you need to do is cut and paste via the Get Info window for that particular object rather than try to hack the entire operating system. It's way easier than the bad old days when mucking around with ResEdit was often required.

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 are over 35, guess what? You are not the target audience of consumer AI companies. I'm way beyond that but at least I know that I am not who AI companies crave as a user.

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.

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.