It was both magical and instantly obvious, the best kind of change.

Sorry, but that one is 4x at best.

Maybe if you're only counting brain cycles saved, but brain cycles of pure joy and amazement are worth more than ones spent doing pointless tasks.

4x? 1x at best - saves my brain from memorizing a small thing very infrequently. Might be detrimental to my brain over the long run.:)

Ha yes, my point was just that it is hard to quantify most of these and that 10x ends up meaning so awesome you buy it, which is almost a tautology.

(Thiel actually quantifies it in the examples he offers in the original text, if I remember correctly)

When I took driver's ed many years ago, the official state written material had it as fact that highway driving is "3 times easier" than city driving. It was actually on my written test. Multiple choice, and the other answers were different numbers to chose from... but no: "3 times" is the correct answer.

I take this one for granted. I can't wait until they add the same thing for emails.

Android apps did this first, but by having an all-or-nothing permission to read your texts. Making it part of the keyboard under user control was so much nicer.

Yeah, this was phenomenal the first time I experienced it. I wish it also came with a "don't use SMS for 2-factor authentication" warning though. ;)

What 2FA method is preferred instead of SMS these days?

TOTP, I guess.

Hardware keys. If you can't use those, HOTP (push notification-based - OTP with an HMAC and a counter).

Users aren’t always in control of that though.

Yes but not being able to copy and paste the code in iMessage by right clicking on it if you're on MacOS reverts this back to 1x. In MacOS right clicking on any word shows the copy menu with that word selected but in iMessage for some the entire message gets selected. You first need to highlight the word you're interested in before right clicking, major pain.