I want to say I’ve broken every headphone jack I ever had. Yanking on them, debris getting in the switch, debris triggering the optical if it had one. 3.5 was never a great design. Too many physical ways for it to break, from static from a loose connection, debris stuck inside like pebbles getting jammed, debris stuck under the switch preventing recognition. False positive or accidental triggers that take a while to track down why the speakers are muted.
Of all the parts on electronics I have owned i would put headphone jack just behind power supply for least reliable and that it was set to override digital settings when something was connected felt like a loss of control.
I am very forgetful, wireless has been a godsend by comparison and I don’t get hurt with cable snags. I’d pay extra to remove it before shipping if it were an option.
I have aeen usb-c bent but I have never seen 3.5 break in decades of use. Walkmans then discmans falling. Shooting back out of my chair and snagging it such that the whole tower spins unplugging ps/2 mouse. But the headphones are fine. What do you do to those poor things? The only time I have seen one fail it was on a custom pcb and the solder joint broke. A couple minutes with an iron and it was back.
And every set of headphones I’ve ever had either has an incredibly thick cable or the cable has failed due to repeated wear.
I bought a pair of AirPods and have never looked back. If you have a pair of wired studio headphones, there are a million USB-C adapters you can buy to have this functionality. Or migrate eventually to a set of USB-C native headphones. This is such a non-issue.
How many times has a next-door neighbor accidentally plugged their headphones into your system? How many times did you try to plug your headphones into your wife’s jack? How many times did the cord fall out because you or your neighbor microwaved popcorn? Is it physically impossible to send an authentic stereo signal into your two earpieces? Every time you open your drawer, do you sift through 2 dozen earphones, speakers, phones and blood pressure cuffs that don’t belong to you? Is the NSA/CIA/FBI/ICE/USDA listening to your Spotify from the Starbucks parking lot? Everywhere you walk/drive/travel, are your earphones shouting, “Beats! Beats by Dr Dre! We are Beats! By Dr Dre!” five times per second?
Agreed. I agree with the iOS lockdown as I do most of my financial and medical there. I can see it for iPad as a sort of locked down computer you can’t break typing random things into terminal some website said to.
Vision Pro, however, should have been a full computer the way the Mac is as it was never going to appeal to non geeks.
The introductory video of this cyborg recording spatial video at birthday parties seemed pure fiction as there would not be smiles at the weird masked guy with the eyes flashing whenever he wanted to take a picture especially as glasses that record video are slammed so hard. I could only imagine such a thing maybe at a wedding.
Flip phones with apps were around a long time before the iPhone and people knew what to do with them.
Vision Pro really was a whole new thing and they biffed it not allowing people to vibe code and play on it directly instead forcing to dig through complicated X-code on a connected Mac. It needed a 3D Quartz Composer type thing at the very least that just isn’t there.
There may be one or two good examples of companies who do not depend on dark patterns to keep subscriptions, but plenty of the big names are associated with absolute horror stories of numerous hour long phone calls fighting retention specialists to get a service canceled.
For me the ease of seeing what subscriptions I have in one place with easy cancellation options avoids the stress of trusting companies with PII and credit card info and ever needing to deal with anything over the phone.
That said… making it impossible to sell your product with less than a 30% margin does not seem in line with today’s software and streaming economics. I am not sure the model Apple should adopt, but the current one lacks artistry.
I presume you mean how you can upload CSV or XLSX spreadsheets but not view them? It does seem an oversight they do not have conversion on the website or the ability to import into a spreadsheet. More interesting is how Pages gives a nice red exclamation saying not a supported file while Numbers gaslights you letting you share something you can’t use.
Yet they completely failed to do so for Mac 32-bit apps. There is a huge library of apps that have not been updated to 64-bit to this day and it is a travesty they never released a virtual classic mode to run 32-bit and even OS 9 apps. It is the one place Microsoft shines in comparison, and the only excuse they give is “deal with it”.
I am certain the reason Wine never tried Mac emulators is fear of Apple legal and consequently you far more easily run ancient Windows programs on Mac then you can even fairly recent Mac Applications.
I can see Apple's position: The Mac has been through four major ISAs and the value to most users of maintaining that entire stack indefinitely in the current macOS is nil.
A number of digital preservation standards are emerging (Wasm, MAME/MESS, EaaSI, Olive, ...) and I would like to see a legal requirement on OS vendors that platforms that are no longer supported must be made available to archivists.
Because Apple dropped 10 billion on car research which was an apparent fail.
Far simpler and cheaper to snipe startups where you know you are getting a proven product. That comes with a fresh batch of engineers in most cases who specialize in the tech so you skip a lot of the hiring/training steps.
If I had an R&D request it would be they train some machine models on their developer feedback and public feedback databases to give some guidance on where the real holes are and what people are actually hoping for.
I certainly never wanted a car from them… the whole Apple business model is reducing the moving parts to reduce product failures and a car would be a huge regression.
I will admit they change and depreciate APIs like crazy, but do you have any examples of features or AppleScript being jettisoned that were not fixed? The issue that stands out to me was the once in 17 year 2019 cut-off for 32 bit apps with a lacking Quicktime X and Final Cut X, but even then the plan then was to get everything back up to snuff quickly.
I read a Gruber article recently that when Messages went Catalyst he had no issues with his AppleScript at all.
Disagree. Trump is 100% willing and apparently able to crush American businesses unless they kneel. If watching a movie and giving him a gold toilet seat bought off that extortionist it was probably the cheapest any tech firm got off. Cook made the right call not to let Apple get destroyed by our whimsical overlord.
Yet he keeps going to his parties and schmoozing with his cronies. I don't recall Pichai or Nadella giving Trump a gold trinket to save their businesses.
They were touting ultralight ultra light thin metals for a while there, but never really followed up past the SIM ejection tools.
The main reason I haven’t purchased a Vision Pro is they have all sorts of glass on the front. I live alone and don’t need to share my eyes with an empty room, and even I did I would rather have a screen I could control to make a funny mask with. That screen is a step too far with not giving users control.
Abandonware at this point I enjoyed Microsoft Pandora's Box as plain old jigsaw fun. It seems to scream for multi-touch support and higher resolution but it was left to rot.
Of all the parts on electronics I have owned i would put headphone jack just behind power supply for least reliable and that it was set to override digital settings when something was connected felt like a loss of control.
I am very forgetful, wireless has been a godsend by comparison and I don’t get hurt with cable snags. I’d pay extra to remove it before shipping if it were an option.