Isn't the checkbox already ticked though? I'd say that's opt-out. The user must take direct action to avoid telemetry.

The iPad was launched in 2010 and seen as a device to play around with - a big ipod. Two years later they were in the midst of the big push for using iPads for business, in hospitals, in cafes to replace PoS, in factories, etc. So you say the CEO of Apple uses it for work, if it's good enough for him it's good enough for you. I highly doubt he doesn't use an actual computer.

I also use your product. Pretty good!

Example: Bill Gates and the weird keyboard shortcuts that Exchange had.

> I don't know how you even come to that kind of conclusion at all actually.

Because most products, including iOS/macOS now, have glaring annoyances or shortcomings that have gone unfixed for a long time.

If Tim Cook or even Craig Federighi etc. actually used iOS/macOS in their day to day lives, they would have run into those issues sooner or later and they'd be fixed in a day.

(Hyperbole is a thing but the point stands)

> If you think Tim Cook is pulling a Samsung Galaxy out of his pocket, I don't know what to tell you.

He should. He should literally be using competitors for real work, at least half of the time, deep in their ecosystem, to understand where Apple products need to improve.

What's funny is I was doing online shopping from a national chain and got so frustrated by the UX that I gave up.

I thought : If only the CEO would dogfood this instead of farming it out to their lackeys/gofers/personal assistants, etc...

Instead these poor people deal with stuff like that (if they're doing online shit).

"Privatize the profit, socialize the (pain in the ass enshittification, or whatever)."

“feeling the need to replace it because a better one is available” is not a product reliability or longevity issue!

“Pretty much bricked” sounds a lot like “didn’t brick”

The difference was “hang on let me pull over” to “just do it live!”.

With 4G, you could actually do something quickly.

I had a 12 mini for 5 years, it was a really lucky year to buy one because of MagSafe. The lightning ports just don’t hold up as well as the rest of it.

Apple says they stopped producing minis because they didn't sell. It seems they sold relatively better than the Air, and pretty much everyone I know who still uses a device of "13" or earlier generation, is on a mini. That's about 5 people just in my social circle still on a 13 Mini, and 0 people on any other non-Mini 13th or older generation. I reckon that's the real reason they stopped making them, people who use them, are willing to stay with their phones for much longer periods. Could also be that they break less due to being smaller.

I have the 22 SE and I suspect I’ll get 3 more years out of it before they EOL it. I would have bought the 16e if it wasn’t such a blatant money grab. Touch ID is going to be hard to give up

Its a threesome! (cringe) Yes, our iPhones really get pounded on and end up with so much street credibility as they look like they were shot with bullets but they keep working.

What you describe as pro-consumer is only pro to some consumers, because they come with extra weight, size, and case compromises that every consumer would non-optionally be stuck with. I’d agree with you if we were in some no-compromise world or if there there was significant evidence that Apple wasn’t designing these phones within an inch of their pan-dimensional budget (size, weight, durability, hardware, battery life, etc) and leaving a bunch of room on the table, but that’s an unfounded and easily disproven theory.

The issue with batteries on older iPhones isn't even replacing the battery. Apple will do it for like $80 bucks or so out of warranty. That's WAY cheaper than a new phone.

But every new OS version manages to use more CPU and GPU and burn down that battery faster even if it's brand new, since the older chips have to work harder to run them than they had to work to run the older OSes.

I replaced my battery which was showing around 83% of original capacity last year, in a 3-4 year old phone. I was skeptical of the 83% reported number. Nope. The new battery didn't last much longer, nowhere close to how long it lasted on the OS it shipped with.

(This software-cpu-bloat is not unique to Apple. My Pixel, after 4 years or so, was practically unusable just from the amount of background shit the CPU was doing, compared to when it was new.)

He had a much more treatable and slowly growing variety of pancreatic cancer - it was a neuroendocrine cancer in his pancreas (an islet cell tumor). The 5-yr survival rate for stage 1/2 is something like 95%, and even stage 4 is still around a 25%. The more common and deadly pancreatic cancer you’re thinking of has a 5yr survival rate of under 15% and under 3% if it’s advanced to stage 4.

If he had received real care immediately after diagnosis, he’d almost certainly be alive and cancer free today.

My go-to example for this is Turing. The genius of our field, and apparently duped into credulity about telepathy (probably based on faulty/fraudulent results by people at then-respected institutions)

Especially when it comes to life threatening illnesses like cancer. I've seen more than one entirely normal, rational person start grasping at off the wall solutions when faced with the imminent end of their life.

Stupid decisions that result in fatalities deserve extra judgement.

That lecture is by a doctor who had widely discredited views on cancer, often cited as an example of quack, pseudoscientific claims on the topic.

His claims, specifically on cancer, were widely and roundly rejected by the scientific and medical community. This is not a controversial statement, either - his supporters proudly proclaim that his views are rejected by the vast majority of experts which, in my opinion, pretty much sums it up.

I highly recommend people avoid falling into this dangerous rabbit hole.

> How many people can name the chairman of the board at Apple today off the top of their head (Arthur Levinson)? And how much does Arthur Levinson steer the broader direction of the company? That's just not what the role is about.

Jobs in that role would likely take a much more occasionally-active role w.r.t. future product direction since that was kind of his bread-and-butter and the company was his long-time passion project. Not because that's the regular purpose of that role, but because that's what he'd probably want to keep doing.

Steve Jobs would not have been defined by or limited by his title.

Draw the line for Apple silicon? With Jobs. I'm not sure what was unclear about my previous post. Jobs introduced Apple silicon. That's my logic. Jobs began the SoC design for iPhones and he began the high performance CPU initiative with the purchase of PA Semi. That's my logic.

Putting their CPUs in laptops wasn't an incredible initiative from Cook either, it was basically an inevitability that mobile class cores would eventually intercept high end CPUs for performance after Dennard scaling ended, and it was widely predicted by many Apple watchers even before their own core came out, but particularly after the first ones came out.

Some thought it would be sooner, some later. If Intel hadn't shat the bed for a decade, and/or if the PA Semi team and subsequent Apple CPU team turned out to be in the Samsung or Annapurna tier, then it might have taken many more years, or they might have switched over to an ARM Ltd core IP. But the trajectory for how things turned out was set in motion squarely by Jobs. Who brought up the CPU group and introduced the first high performance Apple CPU silicon.

Maybe they tried and didn’t find that they could be competitive with the hundreds of Chinese EV producers. The market was crowded, and they didn’t see what special value they could add? I mean, it’s already cliche that xiaomi decides to release one, but they released a heat pump as well, their stores in the mall are pretty confusing.

What a difference 20 years makes, I suppose. Apple laptops do seem to have solid hinges now. ;-)

Apple Silicon definitely transformed expectations for laptop performance and battery life, especially in a fanless design like the MacBook Air.

I do wish my M1 MacBook Pro weren't bulkier and heavier than my old intel model. I went all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt so I would have liked 4 ports (or more). But the battery life and performance are probably worth it. And the MacBook Air 15" is lighter and thinner than the 15" intel models, but still has good battery life.

Why not? Other than "because they're old"?

Tiger and Snow Leopard in particular were very solid releases.

Heck, the aluminum Macbooks from that era are still the foundation of Apple's laptop design. And they didn't have the butterfly keyboard fiasco!

But this is a bit of a irrelevant distraction. Apple under Jobs wasn't loved for quality of hardware, it was loved for telling a better story of progress of personal computing. From the iMac "make it simpler by going back to basics, but future-looking basics" to "easier to manage, funner to use music players" through showing how smartphones and then tablets could be far more functional and usable than MS', Palm's, or Nokia's visions. The watch is the next best category-definer since then, and the iCloud cross-device stuff generally feels better-done than competitors still, but otherwise... refine, refine, refine, and slowly add more ads and upsells. Microsoft or anyone else could run that playbook, in a way that they never could match the Apple playbook from 1997 to 2011.

(One side question here is "are there new segments out there waiting to be invented?" which I don't know the answer to. But even so, "becoming just another upsell-pushing, ad-driven, software-subscription-service provider" wasn't a necessary path.)

Apple's classic Mac GUIs were beautiful and discoverable, with clear, visible controls/affordances.

Running Apple's "Macintosh" screen saver reminds me that Apple used to care about every pixel. Now even basic user interface elements like the menu bar are clunky, with things like the Window menu not aligning properly (even on a wide display where there is more than enough space.) Menus getting lost behind the notch is another annoying problem.

It seems like Microsoft learned from Apple's original approach somewhat, at least for Windows 95 through Windows 7 (though I think for a while there was a dead zone below the start menu, a fairly obvious mistake), but Apple seems to have strayed from the path with an invisible, gestural interface.

From a UI standpoint, I agree. There’s nothing like the classic Mac interface and its associated Apple Human Interface Guidelines for GUI software. I love Jobs-era Mac OS X, but the classic Mac and its ecosystem of applications were something special.

However, when it comes to UX, stability is a major component, and this is where Mac OS X is vastly superior to cooperative multitasking, lack-of-memory-protection Mac OS 9 and below. I prefer the classic Mac UI, but Mac OS X had a better UX.

On the other hand, the low-point was MacOS 7.6.1 Update 2 or whatever.

It used to be a case of, always avoid the first generation of a product as they would only get it right the second time around.

They were brilliant at pushing for new stuff but it came with the issues of pushing a little to fast at times.

Tesla announced they are adding it this week. Ford’s CEO expressed glee at GM removing it. There isn’t a CarPlay App Store nor downloads to get 30% from (or if there were, they’d appreciably be enabled by Apple’s platform as we aren’t in the habit of subscribing to or buying apps for our car today), and while we don’t know the licensing terms from the GM removal it sounded like privacy violations and extra subscription revenue are their motivations for dropping CarPlay. That doesn’t sound consumer friendly on the carmakers part at all. I think this field doesn’t line up with the overall thesis, squint as we might.

Huh? Apple does not charge for CarPlay. Some automakers are trying to give them the boot, but that has nothing to do with Apple's greed and everything to do with the automakers' greed. They want their own ecosystem of apps.

> for very good reason.

The reasons are subscription revenue and user data. Not sure which of those you consider very good.