Apple has really gone to shit. I am confronted by Apple performance and bug pain every hour of my life. I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
Everything is such trash I could go on for hours.
I realized a long time ago that if the person at the top doesn’t care then no one will. It seems hard to believe but it makes sense when you consider individual incentives, politics, and the complexity of software. Everyone wants a safe promotion and doesn’t want to take the risk to push things forwards.
Apple Silicon seems great but the Intel MacBook was the worst piece of shit ever so they kind of had to. I have a 2019 that was the top of the line but can’t do anything without overheating. It’s barely usable for any second laptop tasks.
> I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
The same Steve Jobs that was at Apple when it made the puck mouse? The overheating Intel laptops of the mid 2000s? The "you're holding it wrong" iPhone? The "unusably slow after two years" 11in MBA? The Cube?
My mate Tim, professional graphic designer, used it for years. Loved it. He might still have it for all I know.
> The "you're holding it wrong" iPhone?
Was always nonsense. None of the Apple team used 'the bumper' and neither did I.
> The "unusably slow after two years" 11in MBA?
Are you seriously here criticising one of the most revolutionary hardware products of the last 20 years?
FWIW I used mine for years and had a corporate Windows image running under Parallels. Everyone was massively envious. (I was a Domain Admin, I could add my own machine to the network.)
Also good to know the iPhone 4 thing was people lying instead of holding it wrong, I guess.
What exactly was revolutionary about the 11" MBA? Looking better than an equally performant netbook?
The notion that things were so much better under Jobs is just revisionist history.
Saying "Steve Jobs wouldn't have let today's Apple be this way" while ignoring what Apple was like in his day is just rose tinted glasses (or worse, cult of personality nonsense).
Steve Jobs shipped a cordless mouse with a charger port on the bottom, the infamous hockey puck mouse, and a laptop that visibly discolored in the shape of handprints where your wrist rests. iTunes happened under Jobs watch and was unwound in the Cook era.
I'm a huge critic of the mouse with the charger port on bottom, but that was the 2nd gen magic mouse released in 2015. Is there another mouse that had charger port on bottom?
They just released the Magic Mouse (USB-C) with the port on the bottom.
It is weird that stuck with bottom port for so long. It would be smarter to put it on the front then it could be used as wired mouse, but I guess that wrecks the design.
I don’t know man. I got an Intel 7700K when it first came out, and six years later it was struggling with modern day workloads. I didn’t blame Intel or Microsoft, I just upgraded and my performance problems went away. Not sure why Apple is held to different standards.
I had a 13 Pro and I thought it was too out-dated which was why my Safari was ridiculously slow, so I bought the 16 Pro...noticed literally zero improvement. Overheats, bugs galore, search for apps is slow and still doesn't work.
I am seriously looking at Android now, first time in my life.
Person probably issued Apple laptops from work, which, funny enough is probably why they get performance issues, as work is going to drop in the usual CPU killing anti-virus and other corporate tooling.
Even without buying Apple, many jobs issue mandatory MacBooks. I can understand the frustration of having to deal with these. In my case, it's mostly the window management aspect of MacOS that infuriates me. I even spent $30 of my own money to buy uBar to make it a bit more usable. But uBar itself is buggy so it's not a perfect solution.
their software is not great but they literally make the best hardware on the planet right now. you don't get to being a 4 trillion dollar market cap by being trash. they must be doing something right.
It's not great, just everything else is worse. Windows is unbearably broken and loaded with adverts. Linux has been fairly neglected for desktops with few corporate sponsors.
Second-best, according to the stock market. They must be getting something wrong if 4.5 trillion in market cap is sitting around waiting to be eaten. By Apple's arch-enemy, no less.
There is no light at the end of the tunnel, Apple's shareholders are using this process to manipulate the stock price. If the next quarter performs poorly then the move up the timeline, if they do well then Cook's leash gets longer. Tim needs to be gone yesterday, not in a few months.
If people are willing to buy my product for $100 at most, I will earn $83 pre VAT (20%).
If my product costs $73 to make, then I make $10 profit, and the government earns $17.
The government then spends this $17 to the benefit of the citizens of that country.
The tax burden either falls on the producer or the consumer depending on price elasticity of demand.
High elasticity would result in the producer needing to absorb the VAT.
But high elasticity for individual products usually results from increased competition.
But if there is not much competition, and elasticity is still high, then the company's profit margins are being eroded by the tax, with a greater share going to the government.
If the average price elasticity of demand for imports is higher than domestic production, then one could argue this is not fair.
Also, each EU country has certain discretion over how to charge VAT for groups of products so there is the potential for unfairness and tariff like impacts.
But I will admit that it is a difficult case to make that a consumption tax is discriminatory.
There is a big opportunity for someone to make a all encompassing blocker. I am yet to find one. I think everyone is struggling with this in some way.
Anytime I get setup with a blocker it helps heaps. But I always slip back in. Every source of useful information (Reddit, YouTube) comes with toxic clickbait that you cannot disable.
I realized that my addiction is to the point that I cannot reason my way out of it. There needs to be a physical barrier.
A tangible example is sitting eating breakfast and the phone is sitting there and I so badly want to check cnn.com to see what is kicking off in politics.
Today I decided not to check it, and my imagination ran wild and I got really motivated about work. If I checked the phone though this wouldn't have happened and I would have ruined my whole morning searching for little dopamine hits.
Social media kills your imagination and injects someone else thoughts into your head. You want to let yourself think about things that you enjoy and motivate you INTRINSICALLY, not someone else because then you just keep needed to rely on their enthusiasm.
Almost every night I want to learn some stuff I've been trying to study, and I read unrelated stuff online instead. It's REALLY hard to battle this. The double-edged sword of "the world is at your fingertips"... how can I settle on just one thing? >_<
> You want to let yourself think about things that you enjoy and motivate you INTRINSICALLY, not someone else because then you just keep needed to rely on their enthusiasm.
Legitimate question for debate: how does this differ for social media vs other media? Apart from social media being more addictive, all media is pushing someone else's thoughts on you, in some way. I can imagine old folks would've made similar arguments against TV and books.
(I ask this but still 100% agree social media sucks)
But it makes me wonder how people have time to invent all this shit when they need to move fast. Learning a new stack every 2 years doesn't seem like moving as fast as you could.
You don't have to pick an exact moment, but there are several clear moments of fraud. The biggest moment of fraud was whenever alameda's FTX account was allowed to have a riskier position than a normal account, including holding a negative balance. This is something FTX specifically allowed and publicly lied about (SBF on twitter said they were treated as a regular account, which we now know is false).
This fraud became worse the more negative the balance became since it became more and more misleading to users to continue to present themselves as a financially healthy business.
What they should have done instead is to not allow alameda to have an account with special rules and negative balances, and to actually operate their business as they claimed. They likely would have grown less quickly or even gone out of business, but sometimes the way you avoid fraud is indeed by going bankrupt instead of lying.
They also could have not lied to users, both about the status of alameda's account, and about the status of FTX's liquidity. Each time they made a statement about their exchange that excluded that materially relevant information was also fraud.
I do say all of this with full awareness that a large fraction of YC startups also "fake it until they make it", i.e. lie about what their product can do, lie about their financials, etc. Most YC startups are also committing fraud on a much smaller scale, and just manage to keep the scale small enough that no one goes to prison.
Hold your horses! What startups are lying about what they do? I don’t get the impression this is the case at all. MVP and move fast tactics are not fraud. Saying your SOC2 compliant or something when you are not probably is.
I know first hand of YC founders lying to (corporate) customers on their business size, revenue, etc in order to secure business. Is that fraud? At best its an unethical and dubious business practice.
It is only fraud if a jury of your peers would think it is fraud, which is probably a higher bar than you think.
Most of the fraud you are talking about also wouldn’t have the explicit benefit directly to the founders the way it did with FTX. SBF took money that wasn’t his and spent it on private planes and luxury apartments and hundred million dollar investments _in his name_.
The average startup founder who is trying to close a sale by exaggerating their business a little bit is not going to have that kind of clear gain, because most founders do not use their companies as piggy banks.
> Most of the fraud you are talking about also wouldn’t have the explicit benefit directly to the founders
The "Frank" startup that sold to JPMC because they lied about active users [1] directly contradicts your conclusion. It happens, probably more than we realize, and founders have an incentive to do it so they can reach a liquidity event to cash out.
There's not necessarily an "exact moment" that they can pinpoint, nor is that their job to do so.
FTX was promising customers it would hold onto their funds and keep them safe, much like a bank. Then they did not. That's the short of it, tat is what they uncovered. The date it "began" was not in scope of the case, just the end result, and the end result was that there was fraud.
> What should he have done instead?
Again, the short of it is: He should have delivered what he promised to customers, or not make those promises to begin with.
1. Sam Bankman-Fried SHOULD NOT HAVE STOLEN CUSTOMER MONEY.
2. Sam Bankman-Fried should have been honest.
3. FTX should have kept excellent records. FTX was notorious for its bad record keeping. Also, its poor record keeping meant it was not sure how much money it had and it was not sure which money it owned and which money its customers owned.
I'm sure there was a long slippery slope to more and more brazen fraud, but for what he should have done instead that's a very very simple question to answer. He shouldn't have committed fraud. All the illegal stuff he did with comingling funds and stuff? Just - don't do that.
When he used customer funds deposited into FTX to gamble through Alameda.
Since customer deposits into 'FTX' went straight to Alameda's bank account, it began pretty much the moment Alameda executed a trade. Everything after that was just more fraud to cover up the consequences of the original fraud.
> What should he have done instead?
Not treat customer deposits like a personal piggy-bank.
When Alameda, before FTX existed, gave investors leaflets saying Alameda had guaranteed 20% returns and it could sustain 20% profits on as many billions as they would get. This was a lie and criminally defrauding investors already.
SBF never did the Kimchi trade (i.e. arbitraging the US/Asia Bitcoin price differences) at scale (it's not even clear if he even managed to do it at all: he claims he did, but he's a pathological liar who kept lying in court).
So Alameda was already a scam. Then FTX was a bigger scam, to keep the Alameda scam going.
Everyone bought into "immutable" "no side-effects" "one way data flow" as this ultimate goal. But never thought what the tradeoff is.
And people get FOMO that they need to use a big thing that they couldn't write themselves.
Whereas if you throw out everything and just build only what you need, you get something infinitely more understandable and simpler, probably with some hand-rolled data-binding thing that you actually understand.
Most people don't understand how their frameworks are working under the hood. They are just relying on a nicely documented API...until anything goes wrong.
Trying to debug React for example is insane. And if you build your own custom store it re-renders 6 times when in dev. When I saw this...I knew React's days were numbered.
Yeah that’s the ultimate interview question from Facebook: “explain why this component calls render() 46 times” and the answer is “it doesn’t, it renders 47 times” and they have to bring in one of the core developers to stop all the head scratching.
Yeah, the last paragraph is the clincher. When it's going wrong, on fire, lagging out your browser, and you're adding console logs in effects to chase what is driving changes you've lost.
> the first, MVP-style, attempt will be using Electron.
Good choice.
If you want to stick to HTML...WebView2 is suppose to replace it, but it assumes your backend code is .NET or C++, instead of JS/Node.js. Microsoft Teams is using it.
If you want to use native Windows UI components from JS code, then React Native for Windows is recommended. Facebook Messenger is using it.
All approaches require C# or C++ modules to be used to interact with the Windows Platform. Or there is: https://github.com/tjanczuk/edge.
The recommended approach is WinUI 3 which would involve C#/C++ and XAML.
The biggest issue for Mac users is the placement of the `command` key on the US ANSI keyboards - which is the layout for pretty much all mechanical keyboards. And the missing left `fn` key.
It requires you to curl your thumb awkwardly when resting on the home row or WASD.
It is between the Z and X, but on MacBook keyboard it is directly under the X so your thumb can rest straight.
The only keyboard I have found that has a similar MacBook layout is the Niz Plum Micro84[1] with dome switches.
There was also the discontinued NuPhy F1 that had a fn key but still had a terrible command placement.
I don't know why more Mac users don't complain about this.
Apple has really gone to shit. I am confronted by Apple performance and bug pain every hour of my life. I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
Everything is such trash I could go on for hours.
I realized a long time ago that if the person at the top doesn’t care then no one will. It seems hard to believe but it makes sense when you consider individual incentives, politics, and the complexity of software. Everyone wants a safe promotion and doesn’t want to take the risk to push things forwards.
Apple Silicon seems great but the Intel MacBook was the worst piece of shit ever so they kind of had to. I have a 2019 that was the top of the line but can’t do anything without overheating. It’s barely usable for any second laptop tasks.