I agree. My parents should enjoy life to the fullest all the way to the end. Wasting their golden years cleaning up, planning for death, and likely emotionally parting with a lifetime of possessions is not something I'd like to foist on them. It will be time-consuming and painful for me to do, but so what.
Having cleared out 3 parents and a grandparents house, it gives a very stark vision of the destiny of my "stuff". Simply, the bulk of it is going into a landfill.
I have no children, I don't think anyone is really going to be interested much in the pictures of my cats. Or my family. Or my parents. Or any of it.
So, long term, it's all for naught. No museum for us, no trust to maintain an estate for strangers to pay tickets and walk through to take photos for their homes.
But that doesn't mean tossing it away now. Or ever. I'd like to hope I pass surrounded by my home and memories, rather than a sterile empty box already conveniently cleaned out for whoever becomes my estate administrator (whether it's a friend, or some complete stranger).
That said, if you have a collection of anything you deem of value, and you care that it does not end up in a landfill, you'd be wise to distribute it yourself while you can. Otherwise those years of Slurpee cups, Pez dispensers, collectible cereal boxes, etc. will not be cared for properly.
I see this all the time on vintage computer forums. Someone with an estate of stuff they "think" is "worth something" and want to dispose of. Meanwhile, there's always some young Indy posting "that belongs in a museum!" and "don't sell it to those vultures on eBay, they'll just part it out!".
"Well, perhaps, but if it's not out of the house by Friday, it's going to a landfill."
When clearing out an estate house, most people don't have a lot of time to do it, much less deal with it properly. It's one thing if your loved one is nearby, but quite different if you live far away. I had to clear out my fathers house. I live on the West Coast, he lived on the East Coast. There were a lot of mementos in there, things that have been part of my entire life. I even found the TRS-80 that I cut my teeth on in high school, but boxing it up, shipping it home, just wasn't practical.
I had a service come in, we cleared it out, I took the important papers and a few nicknacks. The rest they hauled off to auction, and that was that. I was done in 2 days and on a plane home. Just a stark reality.
So, anyway, keep your stuff. Enjoy it. Get more stuff if that suits you. Clutter is its own thing, and thats different. Just know that at some point, someone is going to come along and most of those things will be meaningless to them, and they'll treat it that way.
Another example. There is a house in Pasadena, the Gamble House. Craftsman home to nth degree, very well preserved. Visitors look upon it in wonder today (I certainly did). The key point is that it's not like this was the only house done like this. Several houses were done, by "important figures" in the field: architects, artisans, etc.
But, in the end, those houses were sold to...people who wanted a house. A roof, kitchen, bed and bathrooms. They weren't looking for a museum, or an art piece. Many of those houses were torn down, remodeled, etc. "OH NO!" some may exclaim, but, that's just the truth of it. Like movie makers crashing classic cars, people view things differently.
I have some things like a fairly big laserdisc collection and some vintage (1980s era) computers and probably various other things that are presumably worth something to someone. But it's honestly not worth my time to pay matchmaker between the stuff and that someone.
This does jump out to me is a surprisingly profound. I was a freshman in college when the iPod first came out. I was a huge Apple fan, but didn't get their move into consumer electronics. It was so expensive. Why weren't they building more cool Macs instead? 10 years later I was putting serious time toward learning how to develop for the App Store. Another 10 years later and that path has had a profound effect on my career and life. Thinking back to the moment my friend Peter showed me the gen 1 iPod he bought on launch day, the vision, progression, and brilliance you can tie back to that product is astounding.
There is also an interesting omission in this exchange. Steve asks for revenue and last valuation, but gets back number of users and last valuation. It appears the author dodged a direct and critical question in this exchange. Steve almost certainly caught this, but still gave a clear and direct answer. Additionally, Steve said Eddy Cue would be responsible for working out the details, but the author chose to press Steve to stay and talk money. It doesn't seem crazy that Steve was annoyed with the author by the time the "I know" statement was made.
Apple One really feels like a great deal. I was already paying $10 a month for 2 TB of data storage. Now I pay $30 for their full package of services. It's amazing to have access to all of these.
Apple Music is the only thing holding it back for me right now. It's still a long way behind Spotify at the same price point. I have tried to switch multiple times but keep coming back.
For many of us, Apple Music is good enough. I just don’t care enough to bother with Spotify. If it matters to you that’s great. I’m just pointing out that a lot of us will go with the default if there is no compelling reason to add something else.
Does anyone have any familiarity with Compass platform? At first it seemed like the plan was to cut out a huge amount of busy work from agents' load and ultimately reduce the need to keep so many employed. Shaving away the cut paid out to agents would make a lot of sense. However, the story for the last year or so has been that they are simply spending a fortune buying up smaller companies and paying out higher-than-standard commissions.
Was the notion that their technology is their secret sauce abandoned? Did the platform just not meet the stated goals? The promise of their software seems gone and they look like a plain old real estate company trying to buy their way to market share with investment money.
I agree after a year or so with my 16" MBP. My first attitude was that it was useless after hearing years of complaints. This machine has the physical escape key and I believe that combination really works.
I'm not using the Touch Bar constantly, even when typing on the built-in keyboard. Discovery is slow because you have to become familiar with which options are available in specific applications and for specific contexts. This is a legitimate problem. Over time I've built up a decent number of uses that I know are there and make life better.
The negativity is unreasonable to me. It would be very interesting to know how much a Touch Bar increases the cost of each MacBook. To me it seems Apple took a section of the keyboard very, very few users used and replaced it with something that probably can be helpful to most users at least some of the time.
Yes, and this is a really shame. Several years ago I was able to become an iOS developer almost completely by reading through Apple's docs and then building a couple of projects on my own. I had a checklist of the programming guides to work my way through from Objective-C, to App Programming, to view controllers, and on. Over the years I found it more and more frustrating to truly understand new frameworks as the documentation changed. iOS development is now a small portion of my job and the lack of good resources is making it hard to stay up to date.
