I HATE APPLE

A further symptom of our exponential hangover is bloat. As soon as a system shows signs of performance, developers will add enough abstraction to make it borderline unusable. Software forever remains at the limits of what people will put up with. Developers and designers together create overweight systems in hopes that the hardware will catch up in time and cover their mistakes.

We complained for years that browsers couldn’t do layout and javascript consistently. As soon as that got fixed, we got busy writing libraries that reimplemented the browser within itself, only slower.

It’s 2014, and consider one hot blogging site, Medium. On a late-model computer it takes me ten seconds for a Medium page (which is literally a formatted text file) to load and render. This experience was faster in the sixties.

The web is full of these abuses, extravagant animations and so on, forever a step ahead of the hardware, waiting for it to catch up.

I'm not arguing that Apple should support their old ipads indefinitely. A better alternative would be to force them to open up the older hardware that they no longer support. Allow some sort of lightweight variant of linux to run on these machines. I am certain there are enough people out there willing to work on this stuff to make something very usable and secure.

xxp

Yeah, I guess that would be a nice solution.

Are there any tablets on sale that are seriously upgradable, like being able to add RAM or even a new CPU? I realise they'd have to be a lot bulkier.

it is frustrating being unable to revert to earlier versions of apps

Spotify also takes about 15 seconds to launch grrr.

― Alba, Tuesday, February 6, 2018 10:19 AM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i fire up spotify and usually let it sit for about 90 seconds now while it sorts out my playlists and such. not good

I’m going to send each of you $5 to start an upgrade fun.

it is frustrating being unable to revert to earlier versions of apps

― mookieproof, Tuesday, February 6, 2018 11:29 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And this. I've still got an eMac stored away somewhere that obviously hasn't been updated in awhile. At least I can go back and see my 2008 Quicken tax returns if I want to.

lol apps

slow down yr life to my speed

Morbs otm tbh, nothing needs to be fast

the slow phone movement

I was reading this David Hockney quote about how artists can humanize technology and it seems like apple could use more artists if that's true

*runs to code app that makes images slow-render on your phone late 90s AOL style*

The thing that really lags is end user-facing software development as a mature practice. Part of it's the evolution of APIs and the loss of compatibility, part of it is having server-side resources that eschew versioning and compatibility for having a single maintained version of an API live at any time.

Imagine every new software revision is a new take on the highway system. I decide that the way forward is small electric cars, so I redesign every road, stop light, parking lot to be the absolute best choice for my new car. I also design the car to work exactly on these roads -- I don't even need half the legacy features, because it'll never drive on a road that predated my new car's existence.

That's how a lot of software design works, and it's completely insane.

It’s 2014, and consider one hot blogging site, Medium. On a late-model computer it takes me ten seconds for a Medium page (which is literally a formatted text file) to load and render. This experience was faster in the sixties.

this is so otm. just send yr link to a .txt file. i just want the information i don't need the presentation.

this is precisely my experience, right down to the age of my ipad

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/magazine/what-i-learned-from-watching-my-ipads-slow-death.html

― mookieproof, Wednesday, 7 February 2018 02:59 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

me too, and it's the sole reason i have never bought another ipad

You should be able to install an old OS which was designed for the processors and RAM of older ipads. There should be laws for this kind of stuff so that a lot of very usable electronic equipment doesn't just end up in landfills.

― silverfish, Wednesday, 7 February 2018 03:59 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i find it interesting that apple pushed the ipad 2 & 3 all the way to ios 9, which utterly crippled those models, and then decided to abandon them

repurpose old ipads as digital picture frames. imo

I used to have a nicely jailbroken ipad air. Then one day I made the fatal mistake of letting it update to 10.2.1, at which point the jailbreak era has really gone to shit - I tried Meridian, COf3, Saigon and none of them work. I'd love it if some hotshot found a crack for rolling back to any older IOS systems, that would stick it to them. But I suppose anyone that good probably ends up working for them.

alba your argument about security is pretty convincing. herrman's piece is pretty good but he could have gone farther. as caek says it's not just hardware that gets abandoned, it's the entire macos that feels that way. frankly even ios feels behind the times, has felt behind the times, for years. why is itunes syncing so janky? it's not because of security. it does feel like people are having their ways of doing things deliberately sabotaged (gaslighted??)

is windows or android « ahead of the times » ? I have to use both for my kids and they seem at least as shitty. is there a with the times alternative ?

artisanal DOS

i dunno i've never used them. i just feel like such a mook trying to like, copy two words from one app and paste them into another app

oh uh i HAVE used windows and yes it feels ahead of the times a little! or it at least feels actively paid attention to. macos increasingly feels like some desolate, empty conference centre after everyone's gone home

there are consumer televisions with slicker UIs than macos at this point

I wish someone had paid attention to how to get my daughter’s calculator to sync w windows 8 tonight. peripherals like that are always a crapshoot and I don’t know if it’d have been easier on Mac OS. but this sucked tonight.

are you just talking about like YouTube now? my orange livebox would be a shitty place to write an article.

We just got a ps4 and the ui is so frustrating. i keep having to google how to do things.

Nintendo Switch is my favorite computer, would use for email

Facebook on desktop looks really janky too. i know nobody cares about desktop anymore but man. it's like looking at your previous orders page on Amazon or something.

I care greatly about desktop and yes, it's a shambles.

YES!! THERE’S A NEW YOUTUBE APP FOR THE APPLE TV!! I BET THEY’VE FIXED ALL THE PROBLEMS!! LET’S SEE HOW MUCH BETTER IT oh

On the MacRumors forums, upcoming HomePod owners have also listed some songs they'll be using to test out the HomePod's capabilities when it arrives, including "Hotel California" from The Eagles, "Prelude and Kiara" from Bonobo, "Hits and Exit Wounds" from Alabama 3, "Core" from Stone Temple Pilots, "Your Latest Trick" by Dire Straits, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen.

no Sting??

It only plays U2

for some reason there's a part of my brain hard-wired to play Sting's single from 1999, "Desert Rose", any time I see his name on its own

now I'm imagining that coming out of a homepod

cool that the base of apple's massively overpriced speaker is also etching circles into the furniture of users around the world, good job guys

the solution is simple, simply restore your furniture after each use

lol thx apple

the good news i guess is that it only seems to be affecting people with more expensive furniture - yr shitty ikea mdf desk is unlikely to be affected

omg

The speaker requires a flat and solid surface in order to function correctly. Placing it on a coaster or mat negatively affects the audio quality, diminishing the bass response of the speaker – one of its key selling points.

I want one so bad. I don’t have nice furniture.

apple aiming for that demographic sweet spot of 'affluent enough to want a homepod, not affluent enough to have nice furniture'

I’m so annoyed by the ecosystem capture this apparently extremely nice powered speaker requires that I am probably going to buy something else I don’t really need out of pure spite

great opportunity for u to invest in a luge imo

2nd gen crap usually big improvement over 1st gen. Hold out for a year

“I never wanted a home speaker until Apple told me I did”

I already have four amazon surveillance devices, I just want to make sure all the big tech companies have equal access to spy on me.

Jeff’s introducing all that extra data to the system to help wreck any spying initiative

2nd gen crap usually big improvement over 1st gen. Hold out for a year

― calstars, Friday, February 16, 2018 8:42 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark

sometimes there isn't a 2nd gen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Hi-Fi

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-16/apple-s-new-spaceship-campus-has-one-flaw-and-it-hurts lol

I forgot about the hi fi! Anyone here own one?

Everyone needs to chill and buy a 20 dollar HomePod coaster

http://www.macrumors.com/2018/02/15/pad-and-quill-homepod-coaster/

And besides it’s not only Apple designers that clearly, like my grandfather, cover every wooden surface with glass.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/sonos-one-white-stains-wood-homepod-3396911