New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

i have an emate in my room

anyone remember the PowerCD?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Apple_PowerCD.jpg/220px-Apple_PowerCD.jpg

yes, Apple had a standalone digital music player before the iPod, a portable CD player/CD-ROM drive. Now Apple wants optical discs to go away completely.

afaik iCloud is a blend of Azure, AWS, and Apple-owned infra, depending on the region etc.

seems kinda pathetic. like, google and facebook don't do that, do they?

no, but google and facebook are primarily providers of services on the internet. apple definitely has a lot of traffic as far as the store goes, but bootstrapping new stuff off of existing infrastructure makes sense.

if icloud services were their main profit center, then sure it'd be dumb to host externally

how surprised would you be if they eventually took it solo? i wouldn't be

sure, right after they open up the iTunes store to other clients

you're being sarcastic, but apple does not like to rely on others. all that "own and control the primary technology" stuff

yes yes yes they may not consider this stuff a "primary technology"

and they don't compete much with microsoft or amazon

MUCH I SAID MUCH

wait, took what solo?

stopped relying on amazon and microsoft

yeah, I thought you meant took iCloud solo as in spun it off into its own business

that's in-housing, not solo!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ESdn0MuJWQ

yeah i mean of course they want to take this stuff in house. linkedin does a better job of this than apple.

i don't know anyone in architecture/data who would choose to work for apple if they could help it though so...

why are they so bad though?

esp. since they've been at it in small ways for over a decade

my theory is that google, linkedin, yahoo, etc. have all agressively open sourced their network/data stuff (hadoop, hive, pig, kafka, etc.) and created an ecosystem of talent to draw from. apple obviously do this in some areas, and have benefited correspondingly (ios, etc.), but not in this one.

like there is no one not already at apple who is an expert in apple's technology in this area, which is not at all true of google or even MS

Some of it they're pretty good at - the iTunes Store shifts some bits and the App Store is surprisingly robust for what is basically an iTunes hack. But it's all WebObjects and yeah there are like 25 people on a mailing list who could work on that outside Apple. None of that is hosted externally, apart from the CDN bits

it's just fucking wild to me that apple is a hardware/software/services company, knows that's who it is, yet doesn't put a hell of a lot more effort into the services part of that formulation

xpost

it's in their long term interest to get better at services. keeping that in mind, why wouldn't they do whatever they have to do so that ten years from now their shit is killer, even if that means using something other than webobjects or whatever? even if that means rewriting massive amounts of stuff and fucking with hardware in their data centers

make it a goal to get google-caliber at services

not that that'd even be achievable

but try to get there -- set the bar high

not, "we can't even get our notes app to sync properly"

With the exception of pro- and semi-pro software, they've given up nearly completely on selling much software.

It's pretty much hardware >
operating systems for hardware >
media ecosystem (iTunes store, etc) that builds their media ecosystem >
base applications that make people buy other hardware (iTunes & such linking hardware to iPad/iPhone/iPod) >
pro applications they sell for a few bucks that drive hardware sales >
services that keep hardware afloat w/back-ups and keeping up to minimal expected standards for 2014

so, them operating the services out of a completely rag-tag bunch of servers that they can cut loose at any time makes some sense

btw I meant "media stores to feed their device ecosystem"

apple can't even get its podcasts app to work right

what's wrong?

i use it on my ipad mini

lol nice try

. . .

slocki, i'd like to hear from you about that if you see my post instead of hearing from this asshole

podcasts app works much better than it used to ime and I use it a lot (iPhone 5)

Podcast app just updated (along with 10.9.3 and iTunes 11.2) just now. Now it seems worse again.

it has improved in some ways but it still does insane stuff like: i listen to part of a podcast, then stop. come back later, and it's assumed i've finished with it deleted the file from my iphone so i have to re-dl it or waste cellular data.

sometimes it dls new eps, sometimes it doesn't. sometimes it syncs with itunes, sometimes it doesn't. its hysterically bad.

thanks. i use it but just put up with however it works

The podcast app has basically made listening to podcasts on my iphone 4 impossible.

markers i assumed you were joking. seems impossible to read as much apple stuff as you do and not be aware that podcasts is literally the worst software apple have produced since 9/11.

apologies. and hah. i literally *use* podcasts, and i guess i just don't notice it or work around its flaws? idk for sure what's going on there.

Try using Pocket Casts, Downcast or Instacast... they are all better than the Apple app. You'll see the difference.

Downcast has 30-second skip.

I believe in Pocket Casts you can set both the backward and forward skip rates. I also like that you can change the playback rate by 10ths. 1.3x is my sweet spot.

Downcast is flipping great. It lets you do the 30-second skip with a double click of your middle headphone button – makes its so easy to skip adverts/boring bits on podcasts when you're walking about.