Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple's hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation. I'm glad to hear this.
Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
Reportedly, Forstall wasn’t liked by the other senior execs but was kept “safe” as Jobs’ protégé, they thought alike and shared the love for skeuomorphism design. Ive in particular disliked Forstall, and Tim Cook made a choice.
He produces Broadway shows these days. Never say never but that kind of thing screams an “I’ve got all the cash I need, now I’m following my passions” mindset. You certainly don’t do it for the money…
The more abstract the “wealth” becomes the less it means in practical terms. The class dynamics around money mostly has to do with the State actively preserving and protecting claims over assets. If that same wealth becomes sufficiently concentrated with an overclass that it leeches away the competence and legitimacy of the State, then the underclass has other means of correcting the gap and establishing a more sustainable equilibrium.
you hit the nail on the head. the less wealthy a government the more poor its poorest citizens are because it doesn’t have the money to invest in their wellbeing. the solution has and always will be taxes
The traditional means of reestablishing equilibrium are becoming more and more infeasible as state defenses and tactics improve. We are rapidly approaching a time when the asymmetric attacks on state protections traditionally used are less effective than the information asymmetry that the state can enforce. Hong Kong is a great example of these defenses leveraged effectively.
It’s possible, but I know people felt the same during prior technological revolutions like the advent of broadcast media (which fascist movements took too with great enthusiasm). I think people are clever, we learn from every failure and adapt.
> Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat".
Absolutely.
Was the choice to release way way way too early the right choice in the end? Needed telemetry, or even more time, to beat Google? Also taking the data from Google must have had significant ramifications.
Perhaps that is the case in the US, but in Poland, I haven't had a single app guide me into the literal bushes as many times as Apple Maps does. The straw that broke the camel's back was when, I shit you not, the navigation aspect literally expected me to drive through a lake.
The interface and the direction instructions on Apple Maps are way ahead of Google Maps. The app performance is also much smoother / snappier, it connects to the car instantly and reliably, where with Android Auto it’been always waiting and pain. But the accuracy of maps is indeed worse.
However my biggest gripe with Apple Maps in Poland is that Siri does not understand Polish and cannot be told to navigate to a Polish address. It just can’t understand the street and city names :(
Btw: I haven’t counted the times Google Maps wanted me to go through the worst possible traffic jam (where the traffic jam was not visible on the map) or a closed road. I guess it just happens with every navigation system that errors happen.
I have my iPhone set up in a way where I have "Apple Intelligence" and that, somehow, manages to pick up Polish VERY well. Might want to try it. Never have expected "play "Oddałbym" by Slums Attack from Spotify" to work - and yet it did first try, way better than any attempt I made on Google Assistant in the past decade.
The pronounciations, though, are indeed something that leaves no other option but to laugh. Expect "Rogozińska" (ruh-goh-tzeen-ska?), recieve something I fail to comprehend :-)
This may just be my bubble, but even among my iPhone-owning friends, I haven't seen a single person use Apple Maps in Europe, so I wouldn't be surprised if the efforts to improve the map data have been more focused on the US.
German here and me and my wife almost exclusively use Apple Maps, mainly because it looks and feels nicer. The differences in navigation are miniscule, but if we want to really check the traffic before we start we do a quick glance at Google maps.
One difference in navigation we noticed is, that Apple Maps gives some small local streets - those just one revel above "Feldwege" (agricultural/forestry roads) - more weight than they should have. They are not really "single track" (almost unheard of in Germany) but come close, with no lane delineation dashes, etc.
Really depends on where you are in Europe. Out here in the boonies of Portugal, it’s excellent if you’re driving a 4x4 pickup truck, which is the only vehicle of mine I use it with, as it picks very direct routes, which often involve ridiculously steep muddy dirt tracks, very narrow bridges, and generally just very underused farm tracks.
I tried using it in Bosnia, once, and it decided to use an abandoned airfield landing strip as a shortcut. Wild stuff.
This is my exact experience, but with Google Maps. Constantly suggesting gravel (or worse) side roads instead of highways and hallucinating multiple turn lanes etc on a country road about 1 car wide. It's been a few years, but I still remember the time I was in Berlin and buses didn't run due to bad weather, but I had a flight to catch so I had to walk to the Tegel airport and the route Google maps recommended ended up being quite an adventure, having to crawl through a hole in a linked fence on an unlit dead-end road next to the airport.
No, and as far as I know, they don't say. But a lot of their not-direct-from-OSM map data comes from TomTom, which also ingests OSM. There's a lot of OSM in Apple Maps, as there is in most other non-Googly mapping apps.
Apple Maps is absolutely very late to the game when it comes to road closures. Google Maps somehow always knows which roads are closed, even if for a few minutes.
Apple Maps does have the ability to make the same reports, but its super buried so I doubt many people even know its possible, let alone where to go to do it.
I changed to it for car navigation. It's a less cluttered interface and integrates better with voice control than Google maps. I still use Google to find out what's around me in a city, which is probably where the money is.
I'm from Europe and I use it 99% of the time. I find the UI in satnav mode much better (cleaner and readable) than the one Google Maps has. The only time I use Google Maps is when I really want to find something that's not in Apple Maps or when I want to read reviews without fumbling with the web browser.
The reason is that Google are highly commercialized first on thier maps, while Apple focused on major markets. E.g. I can remember the times like 2017, when Apple maps was as rocky as possible, but they were working fine in Shenzhen with matching chines to transcriptions, while Google maps sucked at scale there.
I've used it quite a lot in Europe - specifically for walking directions in cities. I prefer Apple Maps for walking directions, especially paired with the watch - the data is good and the UX with the watch is excellent.
I believe Apple Maps uses Open Street Map data for the mapping, which it augments with its own data collection. So it shouldn’t be worse than other vendors, like TomTom, who use the same dataset. Google has its own map data that’s probably better than OSM, but I think it probably has the same bias of USA + large international metros focus as Apple.
Google Maps is definitely still a little better but I find the delta is nowhere near as wide as it used to be. The main problem with Apple Maps I find today is that their data on business listings and locations tends to be a little older than Google’s, sometimes even a year or more out of date. So if a business or meeting place you’re trying to get to has moved recently you can wind up in the wrong spot.
Here in the north east of Scotland, I have to switch back and forth between Google Maps and Apple Maps. Apple Maps provides vastly superior residential navigation (it understands that many houses only have names, not numbers, and knows what those names are), but commercial information (where to find a café, are they open, etc.) is often incomplete or outright missing. It seems like Apple have coughed up for POI licensing from OS Maps or similar, but they're limited to whatever business information they can get from Yelp.
yeah, Apple maps isnt so good for tourist info, at least once you leave the big cities. I just use the web version of google maps if Im out travelling somewhere remote
I want to use Apple Maps instead of Google's apps, I'm in Canada.
Apple have been promising bicycle support in Canada since iOS 14. Bike paths and itineraries still aren't there.
It's the same with public transit, which is unsynchronized or unavailable depending on the city.
Apple Maps will show business informations and schedules, but only pull information from Yelp, which no one here uses. The app will guide you to businesses that have closed or moved out, and will show you photos and menus that date 5+ years.
It's not an issue of software quality unfortunately, but one of negligence on the service side.
My wife used Apple Maps for a while here in the UK and driving in Europe. The results varied between amusing and traumatic. No issues ever with Google Maps since she swapped (but I know from experience it's not perfect). Apple maps would send her over tertiary roads through mountain passes that were snowed out, instead of salted/gritted primary roads, would show major highway junctions wildly (dangerously) inaccurately and showed areas that had lots of properly mettled roads as open countryside with no thoroughfares at all.
I can’t reply to sibling comment, but the Apple Maps native integration in the Apple ecosystem is far far ahead of Google’s. Their CarPlay, Watch, notifications, island etc integration shows how all apps should feel, but not even Google can be bothered to have the integration right.
to be frank, I have a feeling that Google has more / better data.
Well, back in the days, it took Apple 3 years to fix umlauts in PDF documents with VoiceOver. It is pretty much normal that you're being treated as a second-class user if you are not residing in the US. It is a form of digital colonialism. Learn english, move to the US, or suffer the death of a thausand cuts.
Ireland, on Apple Maps for the past decade more or less. Works fine. Once it led me to the wrong place because someone “contributed” that information to the map.
The source was my experience living with Japanese friends in Japan for around a month. This was, however, quite a few years ago. I believe that the complexity of the Japanese street naming system may have had something to do with it.
I use it all the time, because its driving directions interface is so much better than Google, it's not even funny. But it is overall worse than Google Maps.
And they are planning to make it even worse with ads, so.
I have had the odd issue with Apple Maps, and I wish there were better ways to do things that other apps have features for (like indicate a hazard or road closure), but I have never had a good experience with Google Maps. Just the other day it told me to drive east, then north, then west, in a winding path through my neighborhood, just to exit onto the road 200m west of my house, at an intersection slightly north. It would have added 5 minutes to my drive and it wasn’t even one of those “alternate routes” that sometimes appear during a drive. This was my only navigation choice according to the app!
So does my father - but then again, it is important to remember the context. It's not going to be an issue if you only drive in big cities or on main roads. The only time I really need to use GPS to navigate is going out into the complete boonies, and Waze does that expertly. Apple Maps, meanwhile, helps me remember my Mercedes' stock navigation, which is forever locked in 2011 and runs in 256 colors. :-)
I kind of have the opposite experience, and really only use maps to find streets within the city limits. The country is easy to navigate with the road signs you see along the way, and it's more enjoyable to navigate that way than following a nagging app.
We might be kind of lucky in New Zealand with the yellow AA signposts at every intersection in the country telling you the nearest towns/communities and their distances in every direction.
I made the mistake of trusting Google Maps with driving directions in Sicily, and it always sent me down tiny single lane (but two way) roads because they were "better" by the algorithm. That taught me to trust my gut and follow the highways/main roads rather than use any shortcuts that an algorithm can conjure up. (I'm sure this has relevance in the age of LLMs).
Well, even generally much better Google maps sometimes tries to force me through unpaved field roads with unavoidable damage to normal cars. Or create absolutely ridiculous 'shortcuts' that save 5 metres but I should exit busy main road to join it again 100m later, spending few minutes trying to join back. Or lead me through forbidden/one way roads from wrong direction that are like that permanently since forever.
Generally they are fine, but not literally in every aspect in every place, Europe or not.
Years ago I went to WWDC, to the sessions where you could talk to specialists from their different libraries. I talked to someone high up in maps and location services, reporting an issue we were consistently seeing in geolocation at a particular spot in the world. They effectively told me they didn’t believe me and that it works fine for them.
Around here (Long Island, New York, USA), it’s better than Google Maps. I get to compare a lot, because I have a friend that uses GM, and constantly sends me Google Maps universal links.
I hear that it is a lot less effective in rural areas, though, and I think Google Street View is better than the Apple variant.
Apple Maps only works well in North America, possibly just the US. The same way a lot of happy paths in Apple products are designed for California/Single Culture/Single Language/Single Residence.
I’m sure it’s amazing in California or the US. So often I think how much better products would be if the people responsible would have to use them for a week outside of the happy path.
Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.
Another huge exemple : in most big cities in Europe you have special parking lots around big public transit hubs outside of the city where you can park for free as long as you continue your journey by public transit.
In a lot of cities, that’s either the fastest or the most comfortable way to go somewhere in the city when you come from the outside.
Not any single navigation app support this (tbf, the few European ones don’t support it either)
There was a Not Just Bikes video about how Google Maps is optimised for driving where it pretty much actively hides the biggest walking routes and promotes roads for driving by making them bigger. Useful in the USA for sure but actively harmful in Europe, given that you're more likely to plan a route by which roads you can see, and unless you know what to look for you're not going to find them easily.
Yes. Unfortunately transit between public transit is always walking. No options to take a first part by bike or car, or folding bikes for intermediate hops.
The long tail of user desires is loooong. For example "I want to take transit, but please exclude transit options where I cannot take my non-folding bicycle". Or "I don't have a raincoat, suggest only bus stops with a roof, oh and by the way I don't like the uncomfortable seats on the purple line but will take it if there is no other way".
I think LLM's with access to lots of personal data and the ability to scout the web might solve all these use cases in one fell swoop, rather than trying to design a user interface with buttons, algorithms and data sources for every obscure use case.
Is it that long tail? Biking and riding are supported in most planners already. Park and ride, or kiss and ride, are well known concepts around the world. It seems like a straightforward extension of what already exists.
In Germany it's often not IN cities, but around. Example for Frankfurt:
The's a metro ("S-Bahn") going north up to Friedberg/Hessen. Friedberg is the capital of the country. But there's no free "Park & Ride" there. Two stations towards Frankfurt you are in village called Wöllstadt. And there you have a free Park & Ride. More south some other village, no P&R. But then again in Bad Vilbel you have one.
Is however P&R + public tansport the fastest way to Frankfurt? That depends.
First, the Wöllstadt P&R isn't easily accessible from the Autobahn, or not even from the B3, which goes around Wöllstadt. And even when it went through it some years ago, it was several turn-left turn-rights through small streets.
And then the S6 only drives every 30 minutes to Frankfurt. It's supposed to change once they double the train tracks, but that will change. On top of it: metro lines don't have precedence, the quick trains like ICE have. So the S-Bahn more often than not waits until a faster train passes.
If it isn't between 7-9 in the morning, you're actually faster by car in Frankfurt than by public transport ... So the P&R is quite helpful for people living in the neighboring villages: they go by car to Wöllstadt, park there for free, commute to Frankfurt by metro. And that traffic jam free ... but not necessarily fast. And since parking in Frankfurt usually comes with a price tag, it's also a bit cheaper.
Well at least on NRW, I can say that there are enough P&R around here.
However compared with European countries like Portugal, this is a complete different reality.
This was my main point, because there are these "in Europe public transport is so great" remarks, yes it is, provided one is lucky to be on the right parts of Europe, as you also kind of refer to by your no all roses scenario.
To get to my home you take an exit off a toll road and where the exit splits continuing straight or going to the right you continue straight to a stop light where you take a left and in 1/4 mile take a right into my neighborhood. Apple Maps will tell you to go to the right instead of going straight merging on the road and continuing through 2 stop lights, taking a u-turn at a 3rd light and then backtracking to take the right into my neighborhood. Google Maps gives the correct directions.
In the closest major city Apple Maps will give directions instructing you to perform u-turns on streets where u-turns are legal but practically impossible. Google Maps will instead correctly direct you so such risky u-turns are not needed and you actually arrive quicker.
That is just two examples. I have many more I could provide.
My favorite Apple example of this is that when the Apple Watch notices that you're walking/running/biking and asks if you want to start a workout, for some reason you cannot accept it with the double-tap-your-fingers gesture. Which is fine if it's warm outside...but when it's winter in Minnesota, if I want to activate it I have to take one of my gloves off, pull up my sleeves, and put the gloves back on, while bitching about how nobody designing the watch lives in a cold climate. (Especially when I'm on a bike. Riding no-hands in the snow is not a smart idea.)
Another example: When taking HOV and the map asks you if you want HOV enabled, there are no options I can force the navigation to take me to the nearest HOV lane.
If it happens to be there, it will say to use it, but I can't say "Route me to the nearest HOV entrance" because I prefer it even if it's 1 minute slower.
You’re right. But your statement was that no product worth using is bug free. I said that no software exists that is without bugs. Your statement uses the presence of bugs to indicate a product is worth using. But since all software has bugs, that applies to every product ever made. It doesn’t have any discriminating power. So it’s not fallacious on its face but it’s not useful either, and that’s what I was trying to point out.
> Your statement uses the presence of bugs to indicate a product is worth using.
This is not correct; "If a product is worth using, then it has bugs." (P→Q) does not imply its converse "If a product has bugs, then it is worth using." (Q→P). Buginess is presented as a necessary condition of being worth using, not a sufficient one.
It does, however, imply "If a product has no bugs, then it is not worth using.".
To be clear, my statement is that "No product worth using is bug free" (which is what dpark said) does not mean the same as "all bug free products are worth using" (which is what your response to dpark implied).
That was exactly my point. The presence of bugs in a product (in this case Apple Maps) does not mean it should not ship. “No open bugs” cannot be the criteria for whether a product is ready to ship.
That has not been my experience, I've got a Honda CB125F which uses Apple Maps for their on screen navigation.
I live in Lisbon and I wanted to Almada which is directly South from Lisbon. For reasons beyond me, Apple Maps kept telling me to go North and North and North, I tried restarting the navigation multiple times, but in the end I had to switch to Google Maps which did mean that I didn't have on screen navigation, only the audio ones, but at least it immediately told me to go South.
It’s gotten a lot better, but I still find the address database better in Google Maps, which helps when you have only a fragment of an address. I also find that the Apple Maps database has a lot of roads that read the same. For instance, in Texas where I live, we have a lot of “Ranch Roads” that are numbered. Think of them like state highways in other state (which we also have; don’t ask). For whatever reason, most of the Ranch Roads are spoken by Maps as “Ranch Road,” not with the number. So, if you have a spot where multiple Ranch Roads intersect, Maps will just say “turn left on Ranch Road” instead of “turn left on Ranch Road 123.” It’s tremendous annoying. In another state, imagine it saying “turn left on Interstate,” without a number. Anyway, Google Maps does better.
I used to work to resolve addressing disputes and google just doesn't expose (maybe even store) the relevant information for a lot of parcels of land.
It’s all available freely from the government in simple formats but for Joe Public they don’t know that much less how to access it and it’s the case that technicians on the ground don’t always have it in their SOP either. Google has a level of market dominance that means their errors can be, for a small individual or over an aggregation of small individuals, costly.
Yep, they all have flaws. I just fine that when I want to drive somewhere, Google does better for me than Apple, though certainly Apple has improved a lot recently.
actually a sign of our times that we can gripe about this. i remember how annoying it was to rent a car on a business trip without anything other than a road atlas. you had to dedicate a fair bit of cognitive load you really didnt want to use.
Indeed. I remember flying to Atlanta and arriving at midnight. I rented a car and had to try to find my hotel in the dark with one of those one-page maps the rental car company had. So, yea, we’ve come a long way for the better.
In the 80s I rented a car from the Minneapolis airport. Drove to my hotel visually navigating with respect to the tall buildings of downtown. Eventually realizing I was in St Paul.
I was at a small conference north of San Diego and thought I could find my way back to the airport for an early flight. I did but not before making a U-turn at the Mexican border. My excuse is the darkness (and of course no gps at the time).
Google Maps often picks the non-idiomatic thing. It'll say the road name when no sign uses that, and it's a US highway that you have been following for a while. Or it will tell you the state highway number when it is a major named artery, and nobody knows that it is a state highway at that point or uses the highway number. This makes it hard to know if it is carrying you along on the same route or if it has come up with one of its weird shortcuts to save 1 minute.
It has absolutely no clue about roundabouts. On a journey in England or France on a road that has a roundabout every mile it will constantly spam you with "take the second exit onto wailing street" every minute, when a human would say "go straight at the next 20 roundabouts staying on the A38".
I once printed out a directions from an online map that contained "pass straight over the next fourteen roundabouts" (I think it was on the way into Reading). Lose count, and you are stuffed. I much prefer a turn-by-turn approach.
You're not wrong that it does that, but that's kinda what I'd expect. Maybe because I'm used to it, but if there's a potential turn it'll say "keep right" or "keep left". So it makes sense to me that it says "second exit".
"Straight" can be ambiguous, second exit isn't. Maybe it's because I'm terrible with directions and hate driving, but I like the constant feedback that I'm going the right way.
Here in Australia Apple Maps names everywhere by local council, which isn’t used at all, we use localities. I have reported this as a bug repeatedly but they just keep at it.
It just means nothing here except who you pay to collect the bins.
I hate how Google scrapes business addresses so you get like "There's a grocery store X here" but actually that's just their corporate office building. I see that all the time. Machines just don't know.
On macOS there are so many basic things you’d want to do - share itineraries, annotate places, keep lists of things, but there’s not even a document concept. With the exception of guides, anything you do is ephemeral. It’s excellent at planning a route, but doing anything with that route, including getting back to it later is useless.
I primarily use Apple maps and bounce back to google sometimes because I think the browser experience is so much better and it is faster to just type my terms right into ironically safari. Every time I do I think it is still simpler and snappier. Especially true if I have recently tried to use the MacOS maps app… that never behaves how I would imagine it should if I go beyond a simple location search. There are things about the ios app that make me crazy too. No qualms about the maps themselves these days.
Just a week ago I could still create a Google Docs "map" document, add spots, share it with friends who could collaborate from any (incl. non-Apple) device... It's just a pain to do this with Apple Maps compared to how easy and straightforward it is with Google Maps. You can also still import desktop Google Earth bookmark files.
Oh I remember this quote. I thought it was quite a good one because he’s right. At least in the US, apple maps is better than google maps for most purposes.
Apple software is unusable in india, no one uses it coz it has terrible data and thus the data never gets changed coz no one uses it.
i have gotten wrong timings for gyms, wrong routes, it won't detect my home address from my contacts etc etc
always find it funny when americans say "it's good now", no brother they fixed all the glitches in states it's still launch apple maps trash in india
What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.
As a software dev that started at a hardware focused company... I don't think it need be in jest, nor need be offensive? Hardware and software are different disciplines, even when they do overlap in embedded. It just seems to me - having been at a hardware company that failed to pivot to software, and went out of business (while a new competitor, software first, became Zoom), that the mindset is too different. Hardware requires far more planning; software far faster iteration. In software too much planning is a death sentence. In hardware insufficient planning is a death sentence. I think a single person absolutely could do both well but in my relatively basic estimation, I don't see it being a common trait. Hardware is cool and impressive, but I could never do it. And in my experience, many of the hardware folks I know don't seem to like how software development works either.
I don't think it means anything for this particular move; good leaders know what they know and what they don't know; they know how to motivate and select the right people, they know what to delegate and what to control. Having a track record of success of any kind is IMHO always the best start. I'm excited to see what kind of changes the transition from an operations person to a more technical leader may bring. Especially given how awesome Apple's hardware has consistently been.
Generally speaking, I think both are true. Most people seem to have an affinity for either hardware or software, but rarely for both. Those who do are extremely unique. I don't mean that as an insult to anyone, just as an observatin having worked in both (and personally am much better at software than hardware, even though I enjoy both).
And then there is IC versus leadership. They're opposites. Lead times and supply chains are a headache in hardware, but tangible deadlines are great for keeping the project grounded. In software you have to invent your own discipline to keep the team on pace and bend over backwards to explain to physical-minded stakeholders why you can't build something with no lead times overnight.
Hardware and software have VERY different deployment cost functions and lifecycles. Having "affinity" for one requires a mindset not really suitable for the other and being able to juggle mindsets, especially short vs long term focus is rare in itself.
My experience studying 'Computing and Electronics' - a combined degree - was that we could get practically any extensions or leniency we wanted by blaming the other specialism. To each the other was mistrusted and magic.
I agree - at university there were software people and hardware people and a small number who studied mechatronics (hardware and software). But even the mechatronic people were really hardware people who just tolerated software.
I find both interesting but have been working in software for over a decade now.
Honestly, the thing that pushed me into software dev was the fact that hardware tools were absolutely garbage. Verilog felt like a joke of a language designed to torment rather than help the user.
Verilog is not the best and that’s not even the worst part - tools like ISE/Vivado and Quartus are even worse!
It’s really amazing that at least there are some fully open flows for FPGAs these days, unfortunately they don’t support system Verilog. (I think this is still the case?)
Yeah at university we had to do some hardware stuff in our software course. I know there were better debug tools available as some students purchased them but playing with microprocessors was no fun.
I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).
Ternus is foremost a manager though. Maybe he is also a hardware guy and that's the secret behind the success he had with Apple's hardware team, but I hope it's transferable to getting the most out of the software teams too.
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
I find that the code AI likes to write actually checks for “errors” too often when often you wouldn’t even want to do that. You don’t need to check every dictionary access and come up with a default value for example
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is code reviewing might start producing better software.
I really hope they fire whoever is in charge of Liquid Glass. Whoever is leading Apple software has run out of ideas. Of all the countless things they could be doing in software, we got the useless Liquid Glass refactor.
i was getting annoyed at the state of shadcn/daisyui/the other six trillion ui patterns that have spawned since the abomination known as materialui and i actually realized liquid glass is the only meaningful step away from that we've seen in quite a long time.
it's still not quite my tempo, looks downright silly in many places, but it has grown on me just a smidge, and i think i'd receive it a little better if it wasn't fundamentally more intensive to render. i think that's a line i can't respect and it feels like a step backwards.
i don't want to wax nostalgic about windows 98 era ui's or the design patterns i see with a lot of qt apps either, like they are imo kind of ugly to me too. but i appreciated the consistency back in the 98 era, and i think a ui that restored 3d beveled looking components, were somewhat expressive but consistent is what i want.
but the world is different now. things like flutter that give people a canvas and let them ground up their entire design language undoubtedly mean consistency can only exist within an entity's control, there likely will never be a unified agreed-upon set of ui standards that span industries and personal computing and different stacks anymore. kinda amusing that improved tooling and frameworks has just resulted in a wild west of user interface design.
Regardless of your opinion of its present iteration, the whole push is for their AR/VR layered UI/UX shift - not just another random redesign they threw at the wall.
Yes, the idea seems to be to force app developers to support transparency so that any future iGlasses device has a good supply of apps from day one (contrary to what happened with Vision Pro).
Apple used to insist that different types of devices require different UI principles. This seems all the more true for a transparent device that you wear on your face while moving around trying not to bump into physical objects.
But we'll see. Perhaps the right level of transparency is situational. If you sit down with iGlasses using them as a screen you might want to reduce transparency while increasing it when you're moving around outdoors. Adjusting transparency could become as routine as adjusting audio volume.
AR will be extremely useful for real world jobs where people deal with physical reality. As opposed to office jobs, where people deal with computers and communication.
Having blueprints and 3D models and info overlayed onto what you see in the real world can be very useful for farming, construction, infrastructure, and much more. Not to mention military application.
My only hope, however unlikely, is that Apple will recognise that power users, engineers and gamers would really really appreciate running Linux on Macs and they write some drivers for it.
There are literally no PC laptops with the quality or hardware offered by even the cheapest MacBook - the software, while fine for general consumers, creators, and some developer workloads, tragically holds back its potential something fierce.
I doubt we'll see it, but one thing I'd really like is for them to release cleaner drivers or specs for the hardware in Intel Macs. Now that they're committed to removing Intel support from the OS, it would be really nice not to consign all of that functional, high-performing hardware to the bin.
At the moment, I have a 2018 Mac Mini with a 12-core i7 and 64GB of RAM that is more limited in OS choice and hardware support than the 2012 Mac Mini sitting next to it, because the inner workings of the T2 chipset in particular and various other components have to be reverse-engineered bit by bit.
Why would Apple writing some Linux drivers wipe billions from its share price? You can already install Linux on a Mac if you really want to. Back in the day, you used to be able to install Windows on an (Intel) Mac, and that didn’t seem to have any such effect.
No, but I think it’s unlikely that Apple actually has this information in a format that it could easily publicly release. They aren’t going to make any special effort to make Linux on Mac easier, but they also aren’t actively blocking it.
Well, I was more talking about the fact that you can still install Windows 11 on an Intel Mac right now; the drivers are still there for those few Intel macs still supported.
As for Windows on ARM, I'd bet that if Microsoft had managed to figure out their own product, Apple might have been tempted to support it. I mean why go through all the trouble of developing the most advanced firmware on the planet to support a fully secure macOS next to an unsecured OS if you do nothing with it?
Why would it wipe billions from their share price? Both Linux and Windows were available on Mac hardware prior to Apple Silicon.
If I play devil's advocate, the only reason I could think of is that supporting Linux signals to investors that Apple is offering a key to bypass their API moat, perhaps sacrificing a longer term vision of vendor lock-in.
By contrast, I can imagine investors would get upset if the iPhone had an unlocked bootloader and allowed Android to be installed - but that's because the App Store is a significant revenue stream for Apple. I don't think there is a parallel on MacOS that investors could point to as being upsetting.
If anything, optional support for Linux would lift the market cap for Mac hardware as it would close the only pull that other laptop vendors previously enjoyed.
In reality though, just like is historically true, 99% of people would continue to use MacOS. Only SWEs, enthusiasts, gamers and some number of Windows refugees would pick Linux.
Though I am 100% behind legislating Linux support - EU are you listening?
Apple went out of its way to make Linux on Mac a reality. They did a lot to allow third-party OSes when Apple Silicon came out, it's up to the Linux community to do the rest.
There were a couple of people (the Asahi team) that made this work for M1, but as I understand it, the effort has stalled since. This just goes to show how few people truly care.
Apple helped by not locking the bootloader. I'd don't know if I'd call that going out of their way to make Linux a reality.
If they wanted to go out of their way, they could spend a weekend writing Linux drivers - Apple have written Windows drivers in the past, so it's not unprecedented.
I believe the real hurdle is that Linux doesn't do well with modular (closed source) drivers. Unlike Windows, drivers can't practically be added to a kernel, they must be compiled into it.
Apple would not want to make their drivers open source or so they would want to distribute their drivers as binary blobs.
That would necessitate either maintaining an Apple-fork of the Linux kernel with their drivers hidden within it, or contributing shims to upstream Linux + binary blob drivers.
If they wanted to help, the bare minimum would be to publish documentation on their hardware so drivers could be written without reverse engineering from schematics and microscope photos.
> This just goes to show how few people truly care.
Most people just want to sit down and eat a nice meal. They don't want to go through all the difficult back breaking work of farming, animal husbandry or fishing/hunting to eat.
That is how I look at people writing OS drivers and core components. It's boring back breaking work no one wants to think about. People pine for it, even romanticize about it. But the fact is that it's dirty annoying work and I have never heard anyone thanking the farmer for the meal they just ate. Yet we still have farmers. Few, yet they exist.
Why would it? Shareholders of the major stocks are generally vibes-based, and I'm sure that if Apple undertook that, they would find a way to build hype around it.
The Mac has never been more popular in its 40 year history than it is now. The recently released MacBook Neo broke all previous Mac sales records. Needing to sell more Macs isn't an issue these days.
i can think of absolutely zero publicly traded company boards of this size that would opt for "we're already selling enough devices, we know there's more demand we can't meet, let's not scale up we're really happy with these numbers"
Due to the RAM shortages, Apple isn't able to meet demand as it is.
Apple's Mac revenue last fiscal year was $33.7 billion. I suspect the number of Linux users that might buy a Mac if it could run Linux natively is probably in rounding error territory.
Apple has been around for 50 years and has a market-cap of around $4 trillion. All without supporting Linux. I think they're okay with that.
Linux on Mac is absolutely a reality [1], and Apple specifically supported it by deliberately leaving a documented/supported mechanism for another OS kernel to be loaded.
I don't want to take away from the hard work put in by the Asahi project because it is amazing.
Linux on Apple Silicon is not a reality on my M5 Pro. I run Asahi on my M1 Pro, but I cannot use my USB-C dock with it and, while amazing, cannot practically use the GPU for gaming or local LLMs.
This limits my ability to practically use it for work and play.
the bulk of their sales is, in fact, hardware sales. there is a strong case to be made that such developments wouldn't land people in squarely linux-as-the-only-OS-on-the-device territory either, but rather dual boot ie those users also participate in the walled garden on the mac os side. we've seen this before in the intel mac era.
I also hope they recognize power users it’s very limited customization they offer unlike Linux and windows . The only thing holding them back is their software . If they could try make games compatible or introduce more customization options and more options other than Xcode for swift it would be the most amazing OS
ha, i use both. i don't even need to write any platitudes on if linux came to mac, utm or parallels has linux going at near native speed actually happier than it runs on my thinkpad t. i get to enjoy all worlds on my mac and its probably the best multi-target development environment ive ever had, and the hardware is still leagues above literally anything else on the market. dont get me wrong i want more options, im still just waiting for options that deserve to be in this convo. i have zero allegiances to who made it, whoever comes forward with the best hardware gets my money. and my orgs money since i pick the teams hardware.
I also have a Thinkpad, but an X1. I'd trade it and my first-born child to get to run Linux on a modern MacBook.
No offense to Lenovo, it's a great laptop. But Apples build quality is on another level, plus if I want to run local LLMs, AFAIK there is no better option.
There's no way I'm going back to macOS though, that shit was bad 5 years ago when I switched and it sounds like it's gotten way worse.
Same here. I've had two generations of X1, my latest one (laptop, not child) is almost 5 years old and I honestly don't know which hardware to pick next in order to run Linux.
At work I have an M4Max 128G, and it's hard to beat that amount of compute, with that build quality.
When I bought a Macbook M1 years ago, then was forced to switch back to a PC and wanted to have something similar in quality - I realized there's NOTHING that compares at ANY price point, let alone $1000.
I've got the smallest version of the m1 macbook air when they came out. It's still my daily driver when I'm not on my corporate T14 gen 6 I7 with 32gb of ram, and while it no longer outperforms my corporate computer it keeps up well enough while being cold to the touch and noiseless. It's also significantly lighter and has better battery life despite being old, though corporate does kill a lot of that on the pc.
Not being able to feel that it's turned on is basically the primary feature of a laptop for me. I've wanted to switch my personal device to linux for a while, but there just... isn't... one. I know I could run linux on the macbook, but the point here is that there is nothing which compares, not even at higher prices.
I switched from M1 MBP to Asus Zenbook S16 with Ryzen HX370. A bit better performance, better screen, design, comparable battery, ok keyboard... I switched mostly because I was missing my previous Linux setup. But that was only possible several years afterwards, and if you try to compare it to the M5 Pro...
I'm hoping that they'll finally ditch the sleazy anti-consumer tactics, and just focus on providing real value through real quality. They're definitely in a position where they can do so.
Right to repair with aftermarket parts and app installs from any source without Apple's permission. Then I'll consider using an iPhone.
What technological advance is there for high quality complex software?
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
This. I just want Freeform usable on iPadOS again.
Since 26 upgrade it is unusable with 100+ notes. It looks like they merged iOS variant with Macos one. Constant freezes, random unsaves, device gets boiling hot. No fix with factory reset. I love the HW but SW needs more love.
I don' really understand where people's enthusiasm for the hardware comes from (aside from the chips).
They have corrected many of the functional compromises of the Ive era, but it seems otherwise unambitous.
The recent Pro iPhones have a certain unflattering chunkiness.
MacBooks have also grown to an uncomfortable weight and lost some of the elegance of prior design.
They also suffer from an unnecessarily huge notch.
On top of that there are a number of products whose usability concerns never got addressed. AirPods Max and Vision Pro are too heavy to wear for a long time and the ergonomic travesty of using and ridiculousness of charging the Magic Mouse remain unaddressed. Apple Watches got a tenth of the standby time of Garmin and other sport watches.
It's not that the hardware is horrible, but I think if it weren't for the ecosystem and chips most Apple products would seem quite unremarkable.
Short-term, I'm just hoping this means the AirPods Max (and Vision Pro too, I guess) get a redesign that ditches all the uncomfortably heavy metal shells.
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.
I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
They are leaps and bounds ahead for people who want their specific formula or don't really care about computers.
Apple has always been a "our way or the highway" brand, we can at least keep in mind that 3 laptop formulas only differenciated by size and thickness won't cut it for everyone on the planet.
A sports motorcycle from 2026 is made for people who don't really care about motorcycles. The engine is super tight, performant, doesn't leak oil, doesn't give you any problems, doesn't need tuning or maintenance outside of regular check-ups. You get on it and go. And it's much safer because of automatic safety systems.
Sports motorcycles used to be for people who care about motorcycles. Breakdowns, unsafe, finicky, tuning the carburetor if you went between mountains and sea level. You didn't just get on it and go. You had to know about motorcycles if you were an owner. And each individual model had their individual quirks.
I am with you, but I similarly as the earlier sibling comment disagree Macs are like option 2, and not because of lack of do-it-all quality: just that their choices are suboptimal.
Glossy screens, crappy keyboards, sharp edges, large weight are all single, terrible choices that one has to accept, manage or tune (there was recently a blog post shared where someone files edges on their MacBook; you constantly need to position yourself so light sources are not pointing at the screen...).
They have their good sides, but I am disagreeing that they are the ultimate laptops when they so clearly aren't.
A sports bike doesn't work for every task nor is it ideal for every task neither. A diesel truck has more horse power and is more customizable, if that's what you need.
> their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
You might be sleeping on trackpoint. I don't remember the last time I used a trackpad once I onboarded on trackpoint - all that hand waving is so tiring when you can achieve the same action even faster by just moving two fingers couple of milimeters. You just move your index from H to trackpoint and thumb from space to mouse buttons which is basically the smallest movement you can do on your keyboard.
> You just move your index from H to trackpoint and thumb from space to mouse buttons which is basically the smallest movement you can do on your keyboard.
What about gestures, like two-finger scroll, or two-finger hold+click right click?
Systems that have trackpoints have physical mouse buttons, so you can just do real right clicks. Scrolling typically has its own input combo: hold the middle mouse button plus push the trackpoint to scroll in whatever direction you're pushing.
If there's a trackpad as well (usually there is), you can still do all the multi-finger gestures on it unless you choose to disable the trackpad altogether.
Fwiw, I don't find the trackpoint faster or more precise than the giant MacBook trackpads. Its main advantages are being closer to your index fingers' likely resting position on the keyboard, physical mouse buttons, and requiring less vertical space than a giant trackpad.
I haven't used a touchpad in recent years that wasn't "good enough", I really don't obsess about those (but I acknowledge that many do here), but I profoundly dislike MacBooks' keyboards. Anyhow, let's not pretend that it matters as much as the broken mess of a desktop environment/windows manager that the OS sitting on top is.
> I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
I was never a trackpad person until I finally got a Mac at work maybe 10 years ago. But since the trackpads stopped really clicking in favor of haptics, they're a lot worse than they used to be. I get false/double clicks and inconsistent feedback.
ThinkPads have nicer keyboards, but they stopped doing the more traditional IBM layout several years ago, which is really unfortunate. I'd be willing to pay for a more traditional keyboard layout with a slightly smaller trackpad and/or a sizeable bottom bezel (which is actually preferable for me because of my posture when I use a laptop most of the time).
Always makes me wonder how people use their machine when I read comments like this
I’ve worked in big tech and fast growing startups, side by side at one point or another next to hundreds of nerds that love talking about hardware and software
The touchpad is almost universally loved - I have never ever once her anyone complain about the click - most people didn’t even notice the switch
It has 3D Touch and all that and I’ve never gotten a false click - ever - not exaggerating, in however long they’ve been out
The only complaint I’ve ever heard more than once is that sometimes it takes a second to respond
So I ask you: how do you use your laptop? If no one else complains about this, it’s at least worth asking the question: what do you think you’re doing differently than everybody else?
Sure, I can tell you one thing that's different right now: I use third-party software to get a three-finger middle click. If Apple's operating system weren't missing basic features like the ability to middle click via the trackpad, I wouldn't have to do that and maybe wouldn't have this problem.
> I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
Out of curiosity, what are you developing? While regular usage stuff such as HDR is indeed lacking, and general UX leaves a lot to be desired, Linux was always best for me in any software development discipline that I took on, and macOS was a "death by a thousand cuts" instead.
With Linux, it is really multiple UX ecosystems: you can be in one (eg. Gtk+/Gnome and/or Qt/KDE) and consistency will be there. Not perfect, but MacOS is not much better.
OTOH, I want subpixel rendering on my big screens, and you can't have it with a Mac.
I was sooo in your boat just a while ago. Recently (15 days) switched to an Asus NUC pro (mini pc) with intel 225h. I kid you not, I am running Almalinux 10, KDE on it, not even the latest/greatest. I have HDR, VRR, 120Hz, media acceleration, with dual monitors with different settings you name it. Everything works!!
did you tried nix home-manager for linux software setup? i never was able to use linux until nix.
hardware - afaik only lenovo(some say asus is worth to try - but no official linux support, framework is sturdy but feels cheap) is well know for quality hardware - others are questionable.
unfortunately AMD AI Max 390/2/5+ nor Qualcomm Elite 2 Lenovos are not here.
if you use nixos you end up feeling like you need to spend more time developing your personal computer's configuration than developing your actual projects, ime.
it kind of 'just works' if someone already wrote the nix code to do what you want it to do and put it in nixpkgs and you manage to find it and figure out how to use it. but if that isn't the case, good luck. i once spent almost a week trying to get a program to build and run properly under nix that could probably be installed in around 20 seconds on a osx/windows machine.
This might have been the case a couple of years ago, but it is certainly not true any more, if you use AI [even occasionally] to manage some of your default.nix and flake.nix files. I learn by getting AI to edit it (default.nix for example), and then study what it did. It helps.
The quality of the managed / packages software, however, is still a bit subpar compared to Debian and Redhat.
NixOS people are kinda like Jehovah's Witnesses of Hacker News. Every time someone mentions Linux problems there is that one guy asking "But have you tried Nix?". No offense I just find it funny.
2. nix is just package manager and configurator of sh which forces to write idempotent sh code with explicit dependencies(just good practices right? check guidelines of any non nix solutions and you will find out that 90% of these rules are just nix). nixos, nix darwin, nix home manager final artifacts are just just idiomatic dotfiles, so nix does not exist.
They're pretty good, but you can find other good trackpads too. The main thing about Apple is that their trackpads are consistently pretty good, while with other brands it can be hard to figure out what you'll be getting until you try it yourself.
There's also software component. It has improved by now, but early libinput was giving some good trackpads bad rep.
Interesting, I feel like Apple's palm (I guess thumb?) rejection has been working pretty good for me. In fact I am pretty sure as you type the cursor is completely disabled?
Agree, Microsoft needs to be next in my eyes. They have really degraded Windows. I do not know how Bill Gates uses a computer and doesnt lose his colossal shit at how garbage it is on high end Microsoft made devices.
For context, I have been a Microsoft fanboy for years, a .NET Developer for over a decade, my one Windows machine (I also love Linux ;) is a Microsoft made product, with all factory defaults, because Windows in the past has always been very stable for me if I don't go around tweaking things. For some reason however, my Windows copy on an official Microsoft device has been slowed to a crawl for like 3 years now, which is a bit concerning because I had it for a good 2 years before that. None of my Linux devices have this problem, and when I install Linux on any formerly Windows device, it brings new life to the device, and they last way longer than if I had just kept Windows.
I really think Craig needs to go. I can't remember a single software decision under his tenure that is good. Having said that I don't know who can replace him.
Bertrand Serlet, Avie Tevanian, Scott Forstall were all great with software directions.
Craig feels like a people pleaser. Which may be great for modern or current Silicon Valley where everything has a softer approach. But pleasing everyone means there is no unity and direction. Software stack that is less cohesive.
I still to this day do not believe Swift is the right path, in both technical and philosophical approach.
ChatGPT recommended me some good hard drives for price per TB, and one particularly cheap one had direct checkout with Walmart, so I tried it, because why not? It let me get all the way to the payment step before it told me it was out of stock. Walmart's website told me it was out of stock when I decided to click on the link. This is probably part of why it doesn't convert.
On a related note, I think that's a good monetization vector for chatbots. Long back I asked ChatGPT to recommend a few USB hard drives with very specific requirements -- including a small size and weight ("can be duct-taped to a tablet form-factor device without being obtrusive and constantly falling off"), low cost, and speed fast enough to boot an OS from. After a pretty technical conversation, it came up with 3 very specific products, one which ended up being the start point of the one I actually purchased on Amazon.
I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated links, that conversation could have been monetized in a mutually beneficial way.
I keep thinking of that interaction whenever the discussion of ads on chatbots crops up. In an ideal world, model providers could better capture the value they provide. Unfortunately, I suspect such conversations are too rare, and often harder to monetize. (Like that time free tier ChatGPT helped me recover $500 in compensation for an airline delay. Great value for me, but no upside for OpenAI.)
Unfortunately given the amounts and timelines of returns that investors expect from OpenAI, and their scale, and with ChatGPT constrained to its “Free Consumer-facing Internet App” form factor, they are doomed to have to trade in the reserve currency of the web: ads.
>I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated links, that conversation could have been monetized in a mutually beneficial way.
I also ask LLMs for product recomendations. But the moment I suspect they are hidding the best items (not paying for the ad) to push the second best (not even talking about pushing shit as good products because they pay more) is the moment the LLM loses its value as recomender.
The trouble is that monetization and usefulness tend to be in conflict. It starts out as, show affiliate links if there are any. Then it turns into, prefer targets that we have affiliate agreements for. Then, don't show products unless we have affiliate agreements. Then, prioritize ones that give us more money. And on and on.
If they want to capture some of the value they provide, they should do it the standard fashion where they directly capture value from me by having me pay.
Yes unfortunately, the forces of enshittification will be at play with any model provider that has had billions invested in it.
> If they want to capture some of the value they provide, they should do it the standard fashion where they directly capture value from me by having me pay.
That would be ideal, and that's what their subscription products are for, but even their free versions provide so much value that is hard to capture. That's what I meant by chatbots being constrained by their "Free Internet app" form-factor... Consumers on the Internet largely just are not willing to pay, nobody managed to get micro-payments to work, and so the reserve currency of the web is ads.
It doesn't have to be the most really, but it's fair that they get some monetary returns commensurate with the value provided. All human society is based on an exchange of value, after all.
But realistically speaking, billions of investor money means that nothing short of the "most money" will be good enough.
My AI agents recommended RAM, GPU, and CPU upgrades, but deemed the prices were still pre-their-existence, when I went to the links they sent they were often 2x more expensive.
That's typical of my experience with all of these stock-aggregator sites. Either the best price is some dodgy or outright fake storefront, the item's OOS from the real vendor, or the price is out of date.
Trying to buy things like GPUs or SSDs are a joke. I really wish even one vendor would just implement an actual waiting list, locked to an account with a verified address and purchase history. I'm fine to wait for my purchase, but having to race bots for a lottery ticket purchase is a pain.
meta-search sites in travel (Skyscanner, etc) have the same problem of out of date cached information from the merchant. not solvable in practice because there's so much traffic volume and low rate of conversion that you must cache for cost reasons.
Those typically have a list of vendors from lowest to highest (cached) price. IME the prices are correct more often than not but if the best deal has expired you can still check out the next best one.
Well, my point is that there is always a certain level of incorrectness and that can never be fixed because of the cost of retrieving up to date pricing and availability.
I had the opposite, but it was for a SSD for a raspberry pi 5. I asked it to look online for good price. It found a place, and I ordered it. It was not a well known site like Walmart, but I got what I needed.
I'm currently using a fully vibe-coded, personal River window manager that works just how I want it to. I switched to it after I realized I couldn't do everything I wanted in Hyprland (e.g. tile windows to equal areas instead of BSP by default).
Simple example of how impactful this separation has been for me.
I encountered similar setbacks with hyprland (https://github.com/ArikRahman/hydenix), and I eventually wound up preferring scrollable tiling managers. I restarted from scratch with niri, and have found it to be a stable platform to develop against. Here's my current dotfiles (https://github.com/ArikRahman/dotfiles)
Much like Android, Chromebooks are considered a different target even though they use the Linux kernel. This release will be for a generic Linux desktop binary rather than specific 1st party systems.
Sure, and when I worked at Google on Chromecast there was also that build of Chromium.
All of that is very different from The G actually providing a packaged official Chrome build, though. Which for some reason they couldn't be bothered to do before (Firefox exists though)
"Prediction" markets were supposed to be great because of insiders: they make the probabilities much more accurate and actually useful for forecasting.
But they ended up just being for gamblers and there is no more signal.
Prediction markets are a great idea, but in practice their users (and eventually their owners) only want sports gambling. The addiction overrides everything.
We're sooo screwing over an entire generation of men.
Essentially the argument is that more dumb money in a prediction market provides an even stronger incentive for smart money to join, moving the price back to an accurate probability.
I regularly check geopolitical markets to see if a breaking news story is substantial or not, and find it useful. It can help distinguish between propaganda and intelligence there.
It does seem like there could be a distinction between markets which require genuinely knowledge and analysis (geopolitics), versus pure gambling (sports, crypto up/down 5 minutes, etc), but I'm not sure who's going to bother making it.
A good recycling program sounds like a tall order. I'm seeing Silver nanoparticles (heavy metal) and multiple things that react violently with water.
I'm always skeptical of any idea that ends with a bespoke industrial-scale recycling process. People tend to massively underestimate the complexity of recycling, especially at scale.
In general, bespoke recycling processes can make sense, especially if you manage to design the items to recycle with the recycling process in mind. There are several types of goods where this is put into practice (paper, compounds like TetraPak packages, various polymer plastics). Not sure about all the differrent types of batteries, though.
We struggle to recycle normal batteries without injuring or killing people. Lead-acid batteries contain literal plates of lead oxides, and we can't manage to keep that out of the water supply! I don't see how we'd do any better with silver nanoparticles.
Nothing I'm saying is meant to condemn recycling as a concept, by the way. Only to condemn technologies where disposal is dismissed with a shrug and a "idk just recycle it."
> we can't manage to keep that out of the water supply!
AFAIK, the lead in the water supply doesn't come from batteries. It mostly comes from lead pipes. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the more efficient recycling programs out there.
"efficient" and "clean" aren't the same thing, and they never have been.
Recycling lead-acid batteries is extremely efficient. Nearly the entire battery by mass is recovered.
But, it also causes severe lead pollution around recycling sites. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the leading causes of lead poisoning around the world [1]. Estimations vary, but all generally agree that millions of human-years of life have been lost due to lead pollution caused specifically by lead-acid battery recycling. [2]
Returning to the original point, recycling anything involving heavy metals is extremely difficult to do without poisoning people. If we can't avoid it with one of the simplest, dumbest battery technologies in regular use today, I don't see how we're going to avoid it with a battery technology involving heavy metal nanoparticles.
My reading of both those reports isn't that lead can't be safely recycled without contamination, but rather that countries with low regulations and oversight aren't recycling lead batteries in a safe manor.
In fact, the second link is more about the problem with using smelting to recycle lead. That requires a lot of power and thus emits a lot of CO2.
Is it the case that lead acid batteries are being primarily recycled through exports?
I saw a video on the CATL sodium batteries the other day and the deal is that they’ve found a way to reinforce the material in a way that brings up the slope of the back half of the discharge curve so it’s almost as good as lithium down to about 20% state of charge before falling off the cliff. Lithium is more like 10% but that’s something you can manage with charge circuitry and overprovisioning.
So yeah I’d like to know the answer to your question too.
That's only a valid concept in some embedded engineering case, where a certain capacity is required, and double that amount is provisioned to account for degradation.
Few consumers think this way. Something doesn't have double the capacity that it has; the capacity is the capacity, and the decline looks bad.
The whole idea of the embedded part is that you make the degredation invisible to the consumer for as long as possible. From the factory, only charge up to ~4.07 Volts or thereabouts. Every N cycles, add 0.01 V to the threshold. Your phone probably already does something like this.
But yeah, 20% degredation in 100 cycles is atrocious. No amount of firmware shenanigans will be able to paper over that, not in any regular consumer product at least.
I can still think of use cases, though. Reserve power sources that aren't meant to be cycled daily, where smallness is valuable. Those little car jumper packs, for example. If there was a UPS close to the size of a regular power strip, I'd buy a few.
Engineering is compromise though. If you can make a hybrid that loses 5% at 100 but still retains 500wh/l you’re in good shape.
There was someone working on a membrane a while back that’s pretty good at diffusing the lithium transfer in a way that reduces dendrite formation substantially, for instance. That’ll drop your volumetric advantage and likely your max discharge and charge rate a bit but would fix a lot of other problems in the bargain.
I’m not saying that the solution, but there is a palette of tools you can mix and match and that may be one of them.
> Your phone probably already does something like this.
It most certainly does not. Most devices track battery health % (last full capacity divided by design capacity) and the gauge just presents state of charge (current capacity/lastfull)
The better phone charge threshold systems measure usage and keep the phone in the 30-80% soc range as often as possible.
Voltage drops faster on old cells as they age so you need a coulomb counter. Only extremely shit designs guess soc based on voltage alone.
Not if your application requires 2X the energy. Aircraft, drones, etc. There's always trade-offs in battery design. As an old saying goes: you can have high specific energy, low degradation, or low cost... pick two!
Charge cycle capacity drops are generally not linear. If we start with 2x capacity and drop to 1.6x after 100 cycles, then we might end up with 1.2x after 1000 cycles. Some smartphone manufacturers would love that as you start with extremely superior energy density and then have a built-in obsolescence.
Ok, but something like Zed is almost as snappy as native GUI frameworks AND has a consistent user experience. It doesn't seem like they are making any tradeoffs there.
