I don’t hate the C language. I hate the C compiler (and the rest of the toolchain). Anything that helps me not interact with the C compiler is a huge win.
I’m currently working on a browser targeting the T-deck in pure Rust. It’s effectively a text mode command line browser good for reading pages with links and nothing else. There just isn’t the ram for anything more. Interestingly, The slowest part is actually SSL connections.
To do everything onboard, maybe, just maybe, you could parse basic HTML/CSS and images. But the majority of pages would of course fail anyway without full support for every modern feature.
Incidentally the size of sockets and screws (including the Allen wrench) is very much a technology. William Sellers pushed standards in the mid 1800s specifically to benefit American industry through interoperability. Standards we still use today.
And the gauges are just as important. Obligatory ref to Brad Cox seminal 1990 paper, Planning the Software Industrial Revolution, and it's compelling analogy with Eli Whitney.
Not really. This stuff is heavily NDA and patent encumbered. You’d be better off setting up a local wifi network and using an IP based audio call system.
I'm not sure if this applies to all carriers but with many carriers if you are on wifi you can send/receive text messages and sometimes even make calls. Certainly you could use WhatsApp or similar in that case.
I would really like to see some historical analysis of McKinsey reports. These things always seem like breathless marketing for their clients. They are wildly over optimistic and I don’t think hold up well when measured against reality. Ex: where are we with the smart home revolution?
In one sense this is logical. A HomePod with a screen and an iOS variant. On the other hand, what is this for? What uses do these smart home devices serve? We are a decade plus into the “smart home” era and most of these things are more trouble than they are worth.
Apple has on a few occasions in the past come in after people have spent a lot of time and energy developing things and making a small market, figuring out how it should actually work, making a nice version 1.0 of how it should actually work, making that market explode 100-fold and taking all the money.
That smart homes are more trouble than they are worth currently sounds to me like ripe territory for Apple to poach.
However not sure if without Jobs and Ive if they can actually do anything like what they used to.
I use HomePod Minis solely as Thread/Matter routers, as my home is set up very heavily with HomeKit. I have 2 in areas where I have a bunch of devices but no Apple TVs nearby. So fully invested. But yeah...
The problem isn't that Vision Pro is a bad product. The problem is that it's built for a bad thesis. People don't want VR/AR goggles very much, or at least not many people do, and I think eventually we will stop trying to make this happen.
VR/AR has niche applications: gaming, industrial and military AR uses, assistive uses with people who are mobility challenged, education. These are niche uses. Even gaming is a niche-- most gamers have demonstrated that a big-ass monitor is preferred over goggles. Making the goggles better may push this a little but I doubt it's going to lead to a landslide of gaming demand.
VR/AR was largely a feature of dystopian sci-fi for a reason, too. Everyone jacking into goggles is dystopian. It's something that would appeal to people if the world got so shitty that you just don't even want to see what's in front of you, but I'd rather us spend our engineering effort making the world not get like that by solving some of our real world problems. I don't think I'm alone here.
It might be a good idea for long duration space flight, but personally if I were on a ship on the way to Mars I'd rather read books or hang with my ship mates and talk about the problems we're going to face when we land. If I decided to go into space I'd rather experience life in space -- including the boring parts and the hard parts -- than jack into some kind of VR escape world. I could do that at home.
At in terms of glasses would be quite different to goggles, a significant percentage of the population already need eyesight correction, having glasses with a hud getting good adoption doesn’t seem like a stretch
He was a great designer with low business acumen (without Jobs).
His realm at Apple began crumbling when he executed a flawed strategy for the Apple watch launch as a fashion item, instead of a technology product geared toward health (Fitbit was 1st). It costed Apple 25M, and seemed like buying advertising from influencers (similar to 23andme launch).
Not really. There was a way of slab typed smart phones with capacitance touch screen windows mobile devices and they were more capable than the iPhone with on board GPS, etc. but they didn’t have an integrated App Store, which was the key to customer retention. The first iPhones didn’t have GPS and so the map app wasn’t quiet as capable as the other high end smart phones in the market as it couldn’t do directions properly. It had the best web browser, though.
Every other model of high end smart phones quickly adopted the App Store model since it was such an obviously thing to install application directly to the device, but up until it was a major missing feature. All phones at the time required a computer tethered to do the purchase and installation.
With the App Store the age of phones needing full general purpose computers was coming to an end. It was a whole cultural shift in software
Later they started the iCloud sync so backups could be done ‘in the field’ as well.
It was inevitable in the sense the hardware was already available on the wholesale market. People tend to lionize these companies like they forged the phone out of the living earth themselves. Really they just contract with factories that assemble products out of components available on the wholesale market.
Sexy OS? You can argue that came mostly from within since that is how that software was developed, in house. But the hardware stack they ordered and had assembled for you? I’m not so sure.
I feel like Apple has historical been good at taking things that are "good ideas but everyone is doing the execution so badly they haven't really caught on" into the "everyone uses it all the time" category (eg ipod, iphone, airpods). Certainly smart home stuff is kinda in the first category right now, like you said. Perhaps they believe they can give them the same treatment? It seems kinda plausible to me: there's no reason smart home stuff couldn't be a really good, seamless experience.
Is it actually a good idea, though? It's crystal clear why companies would want to make and sell smart home devices which get customers locked into proprietary web services, but the problems these gadgets are meant to solve for the user have always struck me as... trivial. The last thing I want in my house are more fussy, flaky widgets to manage; they'd better have a really good reason to exist.
That would certainly remove a significant obstacle, but my question is really more about whether the problems smart-home devices purport to solve actually matter enough to be worth inventing and buying this much new technology.
Something’s are pretty handy, like I go on vacation and forgot to turn off the heater/light. Open an app, click „off“, done. Yes, it might be an inconvenience if they are on for two weeks, but it could be also dangerous. Certain electronic devices still plugged in can cause fires.
And yes, this might not count as „smart“ in the sense that it’s more „connected“.
Other scenario what would be nice is restocking. Fridge/kitchen cabinet „notice“ that something is running low and reminds me if I wanna put it on a shopping list. And again, yes it’s a small inconvenience if I return from the grocery store after work and open the fridge to see that I forgot milk. But I think that’s what’s technology is about: taking away inconveniences so we can focus on more important things.
The example with going on vacation is something I really enjoy because it’s removing some friction to „just go“ for me. Before I always took pictures of rooms, heater, power sockets etc before leaving because evertime I arrived a the hotel I thought „did I turnoff x? Did I locked the door?“. Now I just open an app and see if everything is fine and don’t worry the whole vacation.
My vote is no. I can imagine no smart device that is easier and less troublesome than simple wall switches for my lights and a simple thermostat for my heating and cooling. The less technology the better in one’s home. It’s not conducive to a serene environment.
Anything more than air, water, shelter, food, and companionship is trivial.
I want to live like I'm in Star Trek. The good Trek, not the new stuff.
So when I wake up to pee in the middle of the night because I'm an old man my bathroom light turns on, dimmed to its lowest level, upon detecting my presence in the bathroom. I do my business and stumble back to bed and the light turns itself off.
When I leave home my front door locks, and when I pull into the driveway it unlocks. Also if the sun has set, the driveway, front porch, and foyer lights turn on.
When I say "hey Siri, it's movie time" my projector turns on, the lights dim, and if music is playing elsewhere it stops.
One day I was on the road for work and a package was unexpectedly delivered. I texted my neighbor to put it in my garage and opened my garage door from 2,700 miles away. When they replied that it was safe from the rain, I closed it.
agree with this completely. the goal (and maybe this is what Apple can do) is make this possible for everyone, not just clever motivated people. I think it takes more leadership than the industry has mustered.
(And maybe their successors can also make it cheap...)
We tried the, "One company makes everything in your house," thing in the mid-century, and it didn't work. A home is an ecosystem - not the corpo buzzword that actually means "walled garden", but an actual ecosystem, with a diverse set of (often competing) "organisms" coexisting. An average room needs seating, storage, entertainment, and its contents are highly influenced by culture, lifestyle, memory, family, desire/ambition. Smart home products have become better over time as manufacturers realized that any given room is going to be a chaotic mix of other manufacturers' products, including those of competitors, and that the only way for the entire ecosystem to succeed is for all of the parts to play as nice together with each other as possible.
I feel like this is one of Apple's weaknesses. The AVP was a massive indication that they're not ready for that kind of paradigm, because even within their own product, apps (organisms) that should have been able to exist as complete digital "objects" and interact with others were instead siloed off experiences that took over the whole device.
We do so much on phones now and sometimes it’s easier on a big display.
This sounds like it would be a quick home hub to add stuff to the calendar, check that email about soccer game carpool, buy plane tickets or pay a bill you got in the mail.
I personally like to not carry my phone around the house, and in kitchen having recipes displayed or an interactive reader would be great. We have a Google home but it doesn’t have a proper browser or search other than voice so it’s very kludgy. Recipes on phone are annoying because the screen timeout.
I would recommend a laser display keyboard or maybe onscreen for somewhat more sophisticated actions, but maybe an LLM will suffice
Multi-user support is possibly something deserving of a larger rewrite to iOS. It's been a pretty big assumption in all of the devices outside Macos, right?
On the iPad and iOS front, I feel like the real driver of support for multiuser is families. I just can’t see it being a big desirable ask beyond families with kids because the devices form factors. If I am Apple, I am wondering if that subset market is big enough to add the feature. I love my wife and she loves me, but a single shared phone or iPad among us would create more problems than a coke bottle amid the bush people of the Kalahari.
I wonder if it might be useful if you had a phone, a tablet and one or two other form factors - but when you rub your finger on the detector, it loads your environment.
but I can't imagine having to wait to use my phone or tablet. maybe the living room TV or the kitchen assistant.
I don't know if this is still the case but the last time I saw this discussion, someone with experience using the "shared iPad" education feature said it seemed like a massive hack, and switching users was seemingly implemented by "seamlessly" doing a full reset of the iPad to the new user, taking a bunch of time to backup the old user and restore the new one, nothing like a quick user switch on macOS, and nothing you'd want to use as a family handing an iPad back and forth.
I’m a sort of reluctant/embarrassed user of smart home technology. I understand your pause, but the opportunity is so clearly there, it’s just that no one has executed well enough on it yet.
I’m not sure that a new OS is really the way to get there, but hey maybe, I’m not an expert on the internal workings.
I agree. The only “smart home” features I use are turning of lights and some one off electrical outlets. Wake me up when we have humanoid robots in the home that I can ask to vacuum the house, do the dishes and fold the laundry. There’s some progress in that space and I would love to see it happen.
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