Here’s the thing, until they can put out a value better than a $400 PS5, I don’t feel like it matters what they do. They’re stuck in an extraordinarily thin price niche where on one end you’ve got lower-priced consoles that blow Macs out of the water in gaming, and on the other end you’ve got similarly-priced traditional gaming PCs and laptops which also blow Macs out of the water for gaming. The “not having games” problem is entirely secondary here, Macs aren’t competing as gaming machines. They’re doing all this work to make it easier for developers to put their games on the platform, but not a single thought has gone into attracting consumers. The magic mouse completely blows for gaming, that’s not even a question, so why does Apple still handicap the experience for people using third-party mice? Why hold something like smooth scrolling ransom if they want people to take the platform seriously? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say maybe they’re just wanting to focus on controller players, great, so then consider that a controller doesn’t come with a Mac and that the same DualSense controller that Apple sells comes stock with that PS5.
It’s like they’ve got a small group of software engineers that want gaming on Mac to be viable but everyone else at the company missed the memo.
I have a difficult time believing this. While I agree that Windows has definitely shit the bed and has been on a consistent downward spiral ever since they moved past Windows 7, I am also aware of the fact that organizations have a I can't think of the specific word for it they just have this organizational slothiness, an inability to innovate or change that is deeply ingrained into their structure.
Organizations treat software like concrete. You set it in place and then you never ever change it again until it completely crumbles and has to be drilled out with a jackhammer.
Even if every single person in the organization can you use Apple products or Linux products with perfect alacrity and competence, there are people who will not change unless they are forced to change and the force needed to make that change is just as large as the force needed for them to quit their current positions and go and work for someone else that is not changing.
The only way for this level of change to happen will be for an entirely new system to come into place that is easier to implement than maintaining the current system, and being as that many large industries still use 50 year old software I don't see that happening.
Bräsigkeit is the word you’re looking for. Being unjustifiably content with whatever you’re having and hostile to every form of change.
Problem is, modern software stacks are extremely fragile. Corporations run on IT, there’s literally nothing happening without a networked device doing something. Changing just a single part of this mess can bring the entire rats nest down. So businesses decide to rather pay for stability.
That’s actually oracle’s business model. It’s not the fastest, user friendliest or cheapest system. But it’s reliable and you can throw money at someone to make it do things. That’s very attractive to businesses. Known expenses are better than unknown risks.
End Users will be more supportive of MacOS over any flavor of Linux since the learning curve will be lower, and the general public is already supportive of Apple due to the market saturation of iPhones, whereas Linux is that thing that only hardcore nerd hackers can use.
Financing will be way more supportive of Linux over Macs because they can deploy it to the hardware they’ve already purchased, and a comparable PC device will be cheaper than the Apple alternative.
IT will just keep screaming no matter what option is chosen.
So unless Microsoft becomes really incompetent and abusive to Enterprise for a prolonged period, I doubt we’ll see the needle shift very much over the next decade.
I think the trend the JAMF CEO is seeing are enterprises who finally have a good way to incorporate Apple devices into their environment, and is confusing that for a trend of Enterprise shifting away from Microsoft.
This takes it to an extreme, but most of the image from any modern phone camera is largely simulated. The sensor data only acts as a rough template for an image that gets generated. A good video on the subject www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY8OFp0-UZw
What? All of the photo is real. It’s just taken like 50 frames over a second or two and chosen the best. Since it sees 3 “people” it chooses the best for each “person” which leads to those 3 not being from the exact same, but still close enough.
I can’t imagine very many photos in evidence being like “well we can see you were holding the knife , actively stabbing toward them and also that they were stabbed to death by the knife, but I mean who knows WHAT could’ve happened in the one second the phone took the picture it stitched together to create this.”
edit: since it wasn’t obvious to readers, this is a hypothetical of a techno-distopian future…
Imagine taking a selfie only to see an image of you holding a knife. But there are no knives in your hands. Another snap. Same image displays on the screen, but there’s a person of particular importance in the background. You turn your head but are all alone. Nobody is around. You’re starting to freak out. Are you being pranked, maybe your phone has been hacked. Another shutter sound effect and you see an image of yourself over a victim. You frantically open your camera’s gallery, thinking your eyes are fooling you, but the photos are the same. And are sent to the cloud. Deleting isn’t allowed, AI detected felonious imagery. You’ve been reported to multiple agencies. You are alone. There are no knives in your hands.
What? Again, the images are real. They just take 50 shots and use the best frame and thus movement can happen in between. They’re not using AI to make it into what they think the image should be. They’re just stitching together a bunch of frames taken from basically the same time (1-2 seconds) into one picture.
I was taking the comment thread (about how dangerous this could be in photographic evidence) a step further by imagining a hypothetical techno-distopian future where corporate controlled AI alters photos to make them look better, but in reality, it creates a back door where incriminating evidence can be created.
So, more broadly, want to express the sense that there is a bigger issue around ‘unspoken market collusion’ that I dont know fits under the existing terms of monopoly, price fixing, or conspiracy, but is very very very clearly evident in a wide range of markets. Three great examples of this are oil prices, food prices during and post pandemic (coffee being one that goes far further back in time; 16 ounce coffee bags used to be standard), and digital services (ie, the enshitification of all things; a ‘conspiracy’ to make all things ‘worse’ because their is no where else to go).
The free market idealism, a worship of the supposed power of competition, is so obviously horse shit that only 8th grade level MBAs and their sycophants truly believe that shit. Its so obviously not how things work at scale, but because of field effects of many players whose are incentives are aligned (around capture and deregulation), we seem to have lost any real mechanisms for addressing the fact that so many industries are in a silent form of conspiracy to fix prices and monopolize market spaces.
Its frustrating that its happening, but its equally frustrating to not have people calling it out for what it is. Each of these story lines is but a thread in a broader narrative around these examples (Apple and Amazon), consistently happening over time, repeatedly fucking over consumers who are effectively operated on by both governments and corporations to become perfect consumers (tools to destroy the yields of production to justify endless production).
We need a way to push back against the kinds of capture that we don’t seem to currently have the ability to address. Specifically (at least in the US) Citizens United, and corporate lobbying. I’m tired of pretending that markets solve anything. I’m tired of pretending that ‘good guy capitalism’ is anything other than a half cycle of a corporate mechanism to enslave the world.
As someone who has worked in retail for decades, I can attest to this Amazon-Apple relationship basically being the norm for 50 years. It really took off in the 80’s in the brick and mortar world. Stores started to realize that they could strike deals around product placement in order to make additional revenue or to woo particular manufacturers, CPGs, etc.
Makes me think that Samsung is going to have an uphill battle with this case. From grocery stores, electronic stores, big box stores, online stores. Everyone does this and there is a fair chunk of legal precedent around this.
Free market capitalism inevitably leads to monopolies. Political economists wrote about this in the early 20th century; have a read of “Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism” sections 1-5 are most relevant but the rest is also.
You left out the part where searching for Apple products was returning results of counterfeit products because Amazon loves their scummy cheap junk. Apple got sick of this and told Amazon that if they wanted to be a reseller of actual Apple merchandise, they would need to agree to clean things up or Apple would stop selling on Amazon.
There’s nothing stopping Samsung and other brands from demanding the same thing. And they should.
I wonder if Apple has more pull on Amazon’s marketplace. Apple might have a bigger slice of the pie and fewer alternatives in the counties that Amazon operates in / dominates in.
This seems like it’s going to be a tough case to win. Or, if they did win it, it could be a big change to the retail world. This has been happening in grocery stores, electronic stores, big box stores, etc. for 50+ years. It’s really common for retailers / suppliers to strike deals for special placements or spots that are away from competing products. Best Buy or your local grocery store is a prime example of this.
I was in a serious car accident in 2008 in my BMW ($30k in car damage, $185k in medical bills) and when I got out of the car and called 911, they told me that the car had already called them and they were on the way. It’s 15 years later and most cars STILL don’t have this feature, so it’s great to have something that does. It will and has saved lives.
I really hope they keep tuning it to fix the false positives but this is a really amazing feature. Same with fall detection (both amazing and a little false triggering).
These are the sorts of features that I am always wholeheartedly on-board with. Ones that work in the background with little to no input that work when required to improve the user’s everyday lives.
After recently finding out that my mother knocked herself unconscious some time ago while she was alone and woke up after almost half an hour had past I’m tempted to buy her an Apple Watch for some peace of mind. To be clear, it’s not a small purchase for me just as a gift but she’s recently had a couple of falls as well so it’s getting concerning.
Thankyou for your concern ☺️ she’s a nurse and has visited doctors on each occasion. Definitely feels like there’s something underlying there but that may just be me being paranoid.
Assuming she bothers to wear the damn thing. My grandmother on my father’s side once had a fall incident that led to a hospitalization, so the family chipped in to buy her an Apple Watch because it has fall detection. But she’s too embarrassed to wear it, so it lives permanently on her nightstand, even though so many of us have smart watches of our own.
I did this for my dad and my mother in-law. They love their watch and all of us feel a little better with them wearing it. Inlaw has fallen twice while gardening (tripped) and we got notified. Really happy with them
Had to be pretty hot. I was recording almost an hour long video 4k60 fps in direct sunlight on a hot summer day with my 12 pro max. Phone was super hot, hard to hold, screen brightness went completely off but it didnt stop recording.
Removing the charger from the box does have an environmental benefit. It’s less plastic and manufacturing, and makes the packaging smaller meaning they can ship more products causing fewer transportation emissions.
That it also saves them money is just a massive boon to them.
For what it’s worth, the organization is reportedly well regarded as a climate-focused NPO. But their claim of “climate-washing” (which is a new term to me; I’ve only ever heard “green-washing” before) is pretty weak at the moment. They don’t provide any actual evidence of wrongdoing, just a lack of proof of rightdoing (see I can do it too). The issue they cite is simply that Apple doesn’t require carbon emissions reporting from all of the associated factories, so it’s hard to substantiate the lofty claim of carbon neutrality.
So it’s like claiming you lied about donating to charity because you aren’t showing receipts; it’s certainly much more likely that you’re lying about it, but it’s not proof at all.
They’re claiming apple was greenwashing when they removed the charger. It removed cost and waste, it can be both green and good business.
I thought they were arguing that the move to usb c was also greenwashing, when it was the EU regulations, again to reduce waste. It is green, not greenwashing.
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