The other thing that really can't be discounted here is that a lot of the HN crowd are likely the default go-to people in their circle of family and friends for this sort of stuff, and in many cases they may also have major purchasing influence and technical decision making power in their respective businesses. Turning off one of them may be inconsequential on its own in the short term, but it could seriously add up to a lot more destroyed mindshare and significantly more "lost" sales over time.

I used to think it didn't matter what tools I chose as a lone developer making consumer tech products and DSP audio applications. But over time, I saw that consumers rely on frontier-makers for fast-moving tech choices more than you’d think, even if they lag a few years behind.

When enough people make a choice, a tipping point forms in the future. Paul Graham wrote about this in "The Return of the Mac", and I believe a tipping point is forming: http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

If Apple wants to ride on privacy, then it will fall on privacy.

I'm experimenting with Linux these days. There are some minor annoyances with using an outdated version of macOS. Unfortunately those apply to not just one or two apps, but every part of the OS when using Linux. Basic things like WiFi drivers or sleep support. I'm encouraged by the trackpad driver project, but it's not there yet. So I'm still hanging on to my 2014 Retina MacBook Pro using 10.13, until some Linux distro catches up. I feel like that will happen soon though.

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/05/26/how-to-make-time-machine...

They mop it up and move on.

Relative to my community in South Africa, I have spent more money on Apple products than anyone I know. And here I am saying that if these privacy issues are not resolved, I am willing to vote with my wallet as soon as I can find an alternative.

I only mention that I've de-Googled my life so that those who doubt my intent will know it's not an idle threat. These things take time to change, but they can and do change if you make your voice as a customer heard.

When you want to enact change at a Big Co:

1.) Communicate why you are forced into a buying position and ideally how to resolve it.

2.) Be willing to walk away, or you can't negotiate.

3.) Actively seek alternatives.

Big Co.'s must be allowed to fail. Don't hinder new contenders from rising to replace them.

The vast majority of people here couldn't program a linked list given an hour and full access to the Internet.

The impact is just different and sometimes causes big issues if ignored

I really don’t think the HN community is at all representative of what the masses think about. Just like in any online community, it is easy to think that the thoughts of that community somewhat resemble that of most people when that simply isn’t true. HN’s base consists highly of developers who are up to date with most things in the technology industry.

The rest of the world doesn’t really care enough to compromise the comfort and reliability of Google’s suite, which lets be honest, outperforms its competition by a size-able margin, and does so with a “free” price tag.

People on HN have talked about de-googling for years and I have yet to see someone outside of the computer development scene do it (or even talk about it for that manner).

A surprisingly handful of non-tech people have asked me, "Hey, I see you use DuckDuckGo. Why not Google?" And then we have the conversation - it's a short conversation:

Well, you cannot prosper in an environment if you operate on inaccurate or censored information. Google & YouTube censor information and track everything you search for or watch. Today your views align, tomorrow they may not.

Secondly, you must insure yourself against tail risks, and having your Gmail account "cancelled" is a yuuuge tail risk. Therefore, avoid bundled Google products.

Then a few months will go buy, and I'll see they are now using Firefox and DDG.

When you have these conversations, it's important that it not be about your identity (open source! Linux!), but about risk-aversion.

I was also hit by this outage today, at work, on my work laptop, while I was working. Apple literally cost me time and my employer money today, because their lack of foresight or inadequate provisioning of servers or whatever the fuck it was, fucked up my laptop. No good reason. They just fucked up, and it cost something.

Apple iphones seems even worse than Android, honestly.

I would have bought a Linux phone, but seeing that a few months ago they had trouble making calls on a Librem 5, I chose not to take the risk.

I wish there was a phone ecosystem I could invest in that ran Clojure near the metal. Some kind of Lisp machine would be awesome and make it more palatable to endure missing libraries and apps.

Actually it looks like it's possible : https://github.com/clojure-android

Myself I'm learning Flutter to be able to develop my own apps when I can't find what I need on FDroid.

They have burnt a lot of good faith post Steve Jobs. But judging from current Apple management, they wont act until Sales numbers decline. As shown by the MacBook Pro Keyboard fiasco. And to make it worst, they seems to think most of these problem as PR and Marketing problem and dial up the marketing instead of actually fixing it.

( You can see that with Apple's marketing, especially with recent iPhone 12, with VPs explaining in podcast )

Keyboard sucks. Is it a tablet trying to be a laptop? Or a laptop moonlighting as a tablet?

Stylus sucks. It doesn’t have the accuracy of the iPad. And it always had a weird parallax feeling, so I gave up on using it. And the software was just mediocre.

I gave up and bought a Lenovo T4xx series laptop. Installed a dual boot Linux Ubuntu on it. Best. Computer. Laptop. Ever.

Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2 is what I use and I'm very happy with it. My requirements were a moderately high-performance laptop, hybrid/discrete graphics, not excessively bulky and good Linux support. I can't fault my choice. The only issue I had with hardware compatibility under Linux was due to me receiving it a couple days after launch and the drivers for the wifi card not yet being in the kernel used by Debian or Ubuntu (no longer an issue iirc). Happy to answer any specific questions you have.

The point is, things like this should never happen in the first place.

They are probably checking how far they can go, before it affects their bottom line.

There was a time I remember when various things with Linux installations were often quirky or troublesome to get working well with certain laptop hardware, but I'm convinced now that this situation has improved tremendously since then...at least from my recent experience and hearing other good things about the Dell XPS and various ThinkPad models, and of course System76 (although I haven't had a chance to try one of those myself yet).

So if the dev edition fits your need consider buying this one

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SmartScreen#Windows

(also I should know, I worked on a tiny part of this feature in IE9 and Windows 8)

But overall I am pretty happy with Windows being my daily driver now that they have WSL.

Try to install an apk without internet connection, and then try over a slow 3G connection to see the several(!) minutes it takes.

If your phone has the old style data arrows, you will see the upload one all the time while you stare at the "installing" screen.

It has some design flaws („hybrid power“) but what is really messed up is the QC: I have ProSupport and already had 4 technicians over and am currently awaiting my third full replacement.

Issues are all over the place: faulty trackpad, extreme coil whine, broken display, etc. Perfect device for me if they could figure out their QC. If the next one is bot perfect, I am getting a G14 which is the best performance/watt, performance/notebook volume and one of the best performing notebooks in general.

Also everyone developing applications in the cloud was eventually targeting Linux as the production OS, which is a pain if your development OS is pretty much hostile do anything command line.

MS then put a lot of money into getting a Linux like command line and support into Windows with WSL.

They also got a bunch of influencers and devs do their thing with improving that kind of developer's experience.

Apple, however, has been sitting on their hands in this regard. They are moving exactly the opposite direction with this crowd.

I have no idea what rationale is behind that. Did they come to a different conclusion than Microsoft or are they just failing to execute on the strategy?

Apple sells silicon. They don't really care about developers; as long as they can pull enough users through the iPhone->iPad->Mac funnel, they have done their job of selling as much hardware as they can. In their view, developers bitch and moan but in the end will have to go where users go - at which point, Apple can tax them for access to the walled garden.

You'll keep buying Apple stuff. I know it, you know it and Apple knows it. If all of their past transgressions hadn't changed your mind you'll keep doing it. Cut the shit.

The Singles Day ad on the landing page made me think it was a domain squatting ad page.

Look into what state law protections you have. High ticket mail order items can usually be returned for a full refund for a fairly long time.

Finding out that it's phoning home about every binary you run is absolutely a good justification to return it. I would sooner throw out a computer that did that rather than use it.

I am short Google and have been trying to figure out how to short their stock from ZA without losing opportunity on growth of other, better stocks.