I was hoping to see more paradigm shifting user interface ideas. I think those exist inside Apple Park, but are waiting for their time. It's telling that this was announced at the developers conference. The focus now is on the platform, and I think mind-blowing user experiences will come later. (At least I hope)
Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda is the closest, modern look inside Apple's product development that I've found. Focus is on the development of the software for the original iPhone and is a great book.
Yes! this book is a first-person account of product development at Apple, showing how both the design and the features of a system tool keep progressing under the selective pressure of iterative review sessions, with creative and specific challenges provided by managers at multiple levels, all the way to the top (Steve Jobs at the time of the book's tales). It's a great book, very well written, the only one I've read that provides insight into (some of) Apple's creative process. When they say that Steve's DNA has profoundly shaped the company, I imagine this is one aspect of what they mean.
15 minutes of randomized phrases. There are better tools for malicious voice cloning. Seems pretty safe. And Apple has put more tools into AirTags to prevent malicious uses than any other tracking devices. And to your last point, Apple is concerned, they are running it all on device and trying to make it as safe as possible while still being useful.
I can understand to some degree only manufacturing one physical product and limiting it to create multiple retail products. And once you do that it only makes sense to allow people to "upgrade" after delivery. But I am really not sure why they'd want to do a subscription rather than a one-time purchase? Is it just to get better conversions? Is it because they want a recurring revenue stream (it can't be _that_ big for their business)?
Cars should be the exception rather than the rule. We have spent so long catering to them that we have ruined our downtowns and public transit systems. We have diverted funding that should have been spent on transportation for everyone to individual transportation. This has left North American elderly, disabled, and youth trapped and unable to move around our hostile and ugly cities.
A farm truck or tractor makes a lot of sense in the middle of a farming community to do work. The same truck or tractor in an urban downtown will kill children and crowd out transit.
3. Allow mixed use in neighborhoods. Japan is really great at this. Allow families to turn garages into small bodegas. Allow small businesses to flourish by not forcing them into isolated strip malls surrounded by pedestrian hostile parking lots.
https://www.archdaily.com/search/projects/categories/mixed-u...
4. Narrow roads and eliminate on-street parking to create additional pedestrian and cycle infrastructure.
And so on... There are hundreds of plans that are extremely well thought out and just need to be implemented.
They were some of our coolest trams too, going through beautiful forests and countryside. They also didn't kill wildlife wholesale like the highways do now. Rural trains were wonderful. There are a lot of rural train stations in Minnesota that have beautiful little towns built around them. Most of the towns are dying now because all the sources of income died out with automation of large scale farming, utter isolation, and the loss of public transit.
Suburbs can support great public transit, and it would be cheaper than cars for everyone.
Suburbs cannot support the bad public transport options they get though. The lack of density makes it harder to design a great network (network is critical here!), you cannot make mistakes as there is no density to save you from mistakes.
> Suburbs can support great public transit, and it would be cheaper than cars for everyone.
While I agree... there is no way Americans will forgo cars. Americans love our rural and public and wild lands too much to not be able to simply visit at moment's notice.
Having lived in Europe, I understand how this works there. Europeans don't have the same relationship with nature that Americans often do. The ones that do usually have cars.
The point is not about eliminating cars. Cars are, and will continue to remain, an important form of transportation, especially in rural or remote areas.
Public transit and alternative forms of transportation such as bikes, are about
1. Reducing traffic, less people driving means less traffic for those that need to drive.
2. Improving safety within cities and suburbs, a car is far more dangerous than a bike or public transit
3. Reducing the cost of infrastructure maintenance, cars are heavy, especially EVs, a reduction in the number of cars on the road would lead to massive savings in the cost of maintaining our roads.
4. Removing the car burden, cars are a expensive depreciating asset, and for low-income folks they are a massive tax just to be able to travel to work. So folks who don't want to, or don't have the means to own a car, they should be able to travel without paying a huge time penalty.
5. Health benefits, less cars on the road means people who prefer to walk, bike can do so safely and gain some health benefits.
6. Cars are noisy, noise pollution is linked to bad health outcomes, less cars = less noise on public areas.
Americans do not have to forgo their cars. They just need to forgo a single car. Most families I know have a car per adult, and often a spare in case one breaks. However they could easily drop down to one truck (not car, though maybe a SUV or minivan) for those rural/wildlands trips and other things that need a truck. All we need to do is give them a good option for the 90% of trips that are not those things: getting to work, getting groceries, running to schools, going to church, the game, the bar...
Just because we can't eliminate all cars doesn't mean we can't/shouldn't have great transit. Focus on make a system that is useful for people for the 90% of trips at less cost than the one car they are getting rid of to pay for it.
Absolutely, and if you eliminated all of that... most americans would still want a car, because it lets them get out.
Look... I live in the inner city. Realistically, I walk everywhere most of the week. However, I keep a car so I can get to the mountains 50 miles away. That is the main reason I keep a car and my main usage of it (and to also visit family and friends who live more rurally).
Imagine if you could get to those same mountains without needing to worry about parking or traffic. When you get there, you don't have to dodge cars constantly or walk 10 miles into the back country to get away from road noise. It's silent aside from the sounds of birds and the wind in the trees.
When I go to the mountains in America I hear the constant drone of cars and generators...
The other problem (that Europeans often don't understand) is just how big America is. Texas alone is twice as big as the UK and Ireland combined.
My point is that covering America with train tracks would cost $trillions. Yes, there was a time when we built something on that scale: The interstate highway system. But those days are long over. American politics is now far too gridlocked to build a public bathroom, much less a trillion-dollar public transit system. Even if it ended up saving money and the planet.
Don't let big become an excuse. Sure the US is too big to go NYC->LA via train. However DC->Boston is still a great route to run a train, a high speed train on that route should decimate plane and car travel on the route. Connecting everything east of the Mississippi via train (and possibly just a little west) makes perfect sense. There is also a great north-south route along the west coast.
Yes building those trains would cost a lot. It shouldn't be trillions (that it will be is a problem we should fix!). Lets not be defeatist: lets demand better of our politicians. We have good ideas of where things are going wrong, but politicians see transit as a way to throw money at union labor and consultants (democrats); or a complete waste (the Republicans). Both sides need to do better.
>> The best EV is an electric bus with trolley lines or a tram
>Or a train. Massive numbers of passengers.
>cars seem useful in low-density, very spread out regions.
Well, while I'm here already . . .
Urban trains can be counter-productive in unintended ways.
The electric "mass-transit" Metrorail in Houston runs at street-level on many streets that were originally designed for horse & carriage.
Taking up space that was previously available for freer movement of buses, but worse with the rail crossings which almost always require more passengers in cars to idle much longer while waiting than there are passengers on the trains at the time.
Electric buses would have been much better and less wasteful of finite resources.
The light rail was originally intended for ambitious people who could not afford cars to have a quick commute to downtown jobs, reach Texas Medical Center & Astrodome area to the south, and higher education to the north.
"Massive" numbers of passengers outside of rush hours mainly only occur during Rodeo time or other special events where massive numbers of visitors come from out-of-town.
The rest of the time passengers are quite sparse, somewhat divided between workers & students versus those carless and/or on the streets whose ambitions do not include either. Some of these passengers can be quite predatory on ordinary citizens, and this gives them more efficient ways to travel or gather in places where prospective victims can more likely be found at different times, and a quick way to escape after a crime has been committed:
I still ride it weekly but never would bring my laptop or even cellphone outside of rush hours since there are always at least one or two questionable characters and that's the only time they are usually well outnumbered by ordinary riders.
But the collisions are quite common and these could have been more amenable to better engineering planning:
3 MAY 2023 "Video of the crash". Notice how the bystander throws up his hands knowingly right after the 1 minute mark:
https://abc13.com/houston-news-ambulance-turns-in-front-of-m...
>On Tuesday, METRO said the investigation is over, and no one is being cited for the crash that resulted in multiple people being hurt. ABC13 also called HFD on Tuesday to ask, specifically, if the ambulance driver is still operating ambulances. But they are still citing an open investigation, an investigation we know is closed.
For both of these parties this time liability is limited, same range as for buses:
>Why METRO bus crash victim has to pay up - despite being innocent
https://abc13.com/metro-bus-crash-houston-tort-claims-act/62...
>Even if everything goes his way, Leger will still be out hundreds of thousands of dollars because he was hit by a bus.
>That's because METRO's buses and the rail is protected by the Texas Tort Claims Act.
>It caps their expenses regardless of if the victim dies or is severely maimed at $100,000 per person or $300,000 total.
>"If a negligent METRO bus driver runs a red light and hits a van that has 14 children from a daycare and kills them, the most that METRO would ever be responsible for is $300,000," said Matt Willis, Leger's attorney.
If the full monetary damages of every incident were to have been recoverable, Metrorail might have been bankrupt long ago. But they still have money to burn going forward:
A while ago there was an article posted on HN about an old Japanese rail line that still maintained an end-of-the line terminal which was now only used by one passenger. This seemed to be a benevolent gesture. I was thinking how much more benevolent could it be in Houston where they built new rail lines for almost nobody to use very much?
>So how should Metro redeploy that $2.45 billion light rail budget instead?
Sometimes (or even with some currencies) there can be more environmental emissions earning the money to begin with compared to spending it wisely later. Depends on the scale and how wisely:
>For future planning purposes and MetroNext, it really does not matter if autonomous vehicles become available in 5 years or decades in the future. Anything built in the MetroNext plan can be expected to be in service to the year 2100 and beyond. MetroNext needs to be ready for autonomous transit, if and when it comes. The plan also needs to maximize mobility benefits of transit investments if autonomous transit is slow to develop or has a minimal impact. Practically, that means concrete guideways with rubber-tired vehicles than can evolve as the technology does.
IIRC rubber tires are a more modern & versatile technology than rail.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2017/12/2...
>Some drivers said Metro should turn its efforts internally instead of policing drivers.
>“Why don’t they ticket their own drivers for blocking intersections or not blowing the horn?” said Salvadore Martin, who drives downtown daily.
>Other drivers said Houston should have anticipated safety problems with a street-level rail system from the beginning.
Engineers are usually aware of things like this more so than bureaucrats, but you can't fix stupid either way.
>“This is why you build a subway,” said Georgine McDonald, another driver in the area.
Not in downtown Houston, 20,000 leagues under the bayou floodwaters ring any bells?
Naturally Houston has the most light rail collisions under a number of terms, averaging about 90 per year in recent times:
>"Everyday people go in front of that train thinking they can beat it,"
>Those near misses happen all the time.
>If anyone should know better, it's Jim Robinson, the chairman of METRO's public safety committee.
>"I was thinking about something else and almost stepped off in front of a train," Robinson said. "It got my attention when he blew his whistle."
>"There's still work to do," Robinson said.
If you are holding up Houston of all places as to why trains are not a solution to transportation, you may want to look into other areas. Houston and Texas in general is actively hostile to public transit projects. Anything which even remotely impacts driving is opposed by huge lobbies. There is a reason that car manufacturers and distributors have moved there over the past few decades.
As for flooding and subways. The Dutch are literally 6 feet below sea level and seem to manage just fine.
Existing AR apps lack stereoscopic support and lack interaction model needed for this. But wouldn't be hard to add support for this. Basically just a presentation and UI level change.
I find this product fascinating. The design looks ugly, but I can see how they got there. Mixing the real world and iPhone display in the way they are is super interesting. As is the decision to leave the edge of iPhone for touch input. Also interesting to see them leveraging Apple technologies so heavily. I can't really see this gaining any real market, but I like some of these design choices.
Agreed. Looks like they're using a half silvered mirror for the real world pass-through which was a technique used by early arcade games like Space Invaders that projected black and white graphics over a painted background.
It would be really interesting if 1Password or another could have an "email client" that just looks for these codes/links the same way iOS/macOS look for messages 2FA codes
