OutdoorAppDeveloper

iPhones would be extremely cool if Apple could find a way to allow creativity back into the app ecosystem. The iPhone was exciting in the first few years because every day there would be new amazing apps that did things no one had expected a smart device to do. There were apps that could listen to music and tell you what song it was. Another app looked at signs in different languages and turned them into English. There were highly addictive new games to play. Now all of that creative explosion is pretty much dead. The reason is that as soon as some new and exciting app becomes popular, like iDos for example, Apple kills it. Never mind that it had been in the App Store for years and got popular because it could run an extremely early version of Windows, it had violated the rules that Apple made up out of thin air and so had to die. Who is going to risk wasting years of their lives to produce an exciting new app in an ecosystem like that? No one that's who.

If Apple could carve out a space on the iPhone for risky apps to do risky things without access to the rest of the phone's data or iCloud, excitement could return to iOS. Oculus does this with the Quest. It has a separate app store for apps that are not quite ready to appear on the main app store or do things that Facebook is not yet comfortable with. The user takes the risk but the apps are there and some of them are wonderful. This will not happen on the iPhone because Apple's rules have very little to do with user safety. They are almost all about preserving Apple's control over the iPhone. The need for control is a kind of addiction for Apple's executives. Like other addictions, they are very harmful for both the addict and anyone around them. In this case, it is systematically killing the iPhone platform. Yes the new iPhones have nice new hardware features but when was the last time you bought an iPhone to get access to some amazing new app?

mknelson said:

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

What invite? Did anyone get one via email? Speaking of regular customers not members of the press.
Apple has a mailing list. Mine has the Announcements section checked. It is described as follows "Get announcements, recommendations, and updates about Apple products, services, and software."
Nope.

They typically send out the detailed product announcement emails after the event, but not the event announcements before the event.

Here's a picture of the baby, you didn't get an invite to the shower!

Is it a secret? You would think that Apple would tell customers who opted in for announcement e-mails about their new product announcement, right?
Hey Apple: Product marketing opportunity: Tell customers about your product announcements before they happen, hmm kay?

What invite? Did anyone get one via email? Speaking of regular customers not members of the press.
Apple has a mailing list. Mine has the Announcements section checked. It is described as follows "Get announcements, recommendations, and updates about Apple products, services, and software."
Nope.

If you watch the various computer hardware/PC builder channels on YouTube, you will see an entire industry in denial. They are trying to squeeze every last drop of precious performance out of their x86 CPUs by water cooling them, immersing them in liquid nitrogen or using fans usually reserved for Boeing 747s. Meanwhile, the M1 Mac Mini is quietly getting better single core performance than most of them. Whenever a Geekbench score is mentioned comparing the latest AMD to Intel, I have to ask "but what about the Apple M1?" I am ignored of course because that's not something they want to consider. In truth the entire PC industry is about to be turned upside down by the M1X, M2 and then, perhaps, the next generation of ARM processors in about two years when NVIDIA has had a chance to catch up with Apple. Microsoft appears to be well aware of this fact. They got that little memo from Apple saying that Windows ARM emulation speed is a Microsoft problem to solve. Recent build of Windows 11 for Arm are working quite well. Seeing GTA V playing at decent frame rates on the Mac Mini in Parallels is quite literally a game changer.

Siri says more about the astonishing lack of vision in Apple's management than any other product. Siri could have been the answer to problem of how to access the vast number of options and features in the operating system and apps without wading through many levels of menus and screens. Siri could have been a way to easily converse with your devices to get your work done. It could have run from your home hub while you are at home to keep everything you say private. It could have been the solution Apple was looking for to make everything fully accessible to the deaf and anyone else who could not look at or touch a screen such as people who are driving. Siri could have been the center of your home control making it easy to adjust the thermostat, brew your morning coffee or turn off the lights.

Siri is none of those things because of Apple management's total lack of imagination and need for absolute control over everything. This is why Siri's voice recognition has to phone back to Apple's own servers exposing everything you say potential security threats. This is why there is no open standard for home control that Apple's products can use. It is why you can't access vital hardware and software features of your iPhone with a simple voice command. The creative, surprising, amazing Apple vision died with Steve Jobs. What's left is a greedy husk of a company that is only interested in short term profit.