I’m surprised that Apple, as a company that had been carbon neutral since 2020 and had pledged to protect the environment hadn’t banned any use of Bitcoins from their platform altogether.

Crypto carbon footprint is mind-boggling, estimates are 200 million tonnes of CO2 since the launch, not including the CO2 emitted to manufacture the hardware.

Coinbase, that popularised all that mining to the general public should be considered as evil as other large CO2 emitters. And worse, all of these carbon emissions are for nothing, crypto seem only to be contributing to more exchanges crashes, fraud, money laundering and crime. With nothing to show on the positive side.

You are confusing Bitcoin with crypto. Ethereum uses drastically less energy after it transitioned to proof of stake. Many other cryptocurrencies are similar.

https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

Nor do I agree with your assessment of banning Bitcoin because its power usage doesn’t match what we would like. I assume we all somewhat believe in the free market and the free market is solving this problem. Bitcoin price appreciation has been anemic at best and is only about 2% over the SP500 in the past five years. Both about +56% Ethereum is quite a different story. +177%. Innovation is working.

How much power and materials are wasted when Apple releases incremental changes with a new number each year to resell the same thing to materialistic buyers annually?

Crypto is bound to bitcoin. There is nothing that is holding that house of cards besides the bitcoins. As Ethereum and other coins do not have the cap. And near any investment into crypto contributes to the environmental damage from bitcoins.

You can read Apple’s environmental report. And read the recent publications that analyse the environmental impact of crypto. And one of the biggest moves that Apple and Google can do as companies, to lessen the environmental impact is actually banning bitcoins and crypto.

As someone who cares about the environment, I advocate for it. I don’t have any investments to Apple or Google or Bitcoins. Please, disclose any crypto investments, should you advocate for these.

I would recommend banning Netflix first while you are at it:

    data centers providing Netflix streaming services would consume around 370 TWh per year (Kamiya 2020) [1]

That's not counting all the client devices power consumption while watching it.

While BTC uses 87 TWh. [2]

1. https://blogs.salleurl.edu/en/energy-consumption-data-center....

2. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index

Link 1 only references that claim to debunk it, mentioning that estimated energy usage from all datacenters in the world is less than 370 TWh.

True, it says "this value is 1.8 times larger than the 205 TWh estimated for all of the world’s data centers combined, which provide society with myriad other information services beyond just streaming Netflix videos."

If you are going down this route, you can also consider the environmental impact of electronics and aluminum production, which takes a lot of energy (and pollutes too).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting#Environment...

True. Apple has at least been making efforts to use recycled aluminum - 59% last year.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apple-expands-the-use...

What are the actual positives from crypto? Had any been demonstrated? I see a lot of positives in having an iPhone. Say, my children can video-call their mom when she is travelling. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that worth the environmental impact, especially considering that Apple is carbon-neutral?

What are the positives of crypto? I haven’t noticed any for 10 years it had been around. Only exchange crashes and hacks like MtGox, Fed investigators having to fight Silk Road and the crazy near-fraud exuberance of FTX and alike.

I mean maybe the software is less quality than it used to be but so is it everywhere else. Software is more complex than it was.

In OSes.. Windows, Android, Linux GUI are all jankier. Apple Music’s closest competitors are all electron-based resource hogs? Safari is still the best mobile browser

> Safari is still the best mobile browser

Ha. https://caniuse.com/?compare=ios_saf+16.1&compareCats=all#re...

This might sound odd, but there is an entirely different axis by which to evaluate the quality of a browser than the web developer axis. If you look at the omissions, while there are some things I would prefer Apple to support (e.g. AV1 decoding), there’s also plenty in there whose omission of I consider a feature (basically anything on there that can be used for fingerprinting).

There is also two completely different axis for 'feature support' and 'security', neither of which need to be mutually exclusive. WebKit is really not the 'best mobile browser' any more than Microsoft Edge is the best Xbox browser.

It's not only about features, there's a lot of bugs on Safari mobile you don't really see because basically web devs takes enough time to solve them. I've experienced SVG bugs, z-index bugs, form bugs and even a few dom events bugs to name a few.

Fortunately nowadays I don't need to support this browser anymore on my new company.

>Safari is still the best mobile browser

I think it only appears that way on an iPhone. I've long believed that there are extremely subtle problems with Chrome and Firefox on iPhone devices that somehow magically don't appear on their Safari browser. Slow scrolling, strange micro lag... somehow on Safari it's better. Yet on my Android phones Chrome and Firefox work smoothly with no issues whatsoever. Also Safari objectively lacks browser features.

This is likely because Apple makes all browsers use Safari under the hood, so Firefox is a skinned Safari on iOS. They do a great job of making it behave similarly to 'real' firefox on other platforms, but where there are holes and weirdness, it's likely down to this.

Is the Apple Music app honestly much better? The web interface was pretty garbage last time I tried too, constantly stopping for no reason.

And I'd say Firefox for Android has Safari for iOS beat by mile. I can use add-ons like Ublock Origin and no script, plus stuff like background video fixer to play YouTube videos in the background. And I can't think of a single thing it lacks over Safari.

Honestly the only thing it lacks for me is iCloud Keychain but even on macOS. I'd love to have that support + shared history so I can use it properly on desktop and mobile. I know about FF Sync but still I do prefer the iCloud sync.

That being said FF has made some stupid decisions - like the lack of homepage on Android. Like... WAT?!?!

> Software is more complex than it was.

In some cases software quality suffers not because of the inherent complexity but because it's changed for the sake of change.

One example is the Books app that was updated in iOS 16. The update brought some new features but also changed the UI/UX for no reason, making it unpleasant to use. There's no dearth of similar examples with Google's apps too.

> Safari is still the best mobile browser

I don't really mind having switched to an iPhone when I got one provided because for all the discussion, ios and Android are nearly identical but I miss both Chrome and especially Firefox. Android Firefox has actual uBlock. The experience is miles better than Safari.

I haven't use iOS in a while. What is better about Safari than other browsers?

I hated upvoting this but you’re right. I don’t use the App Store much anymore, nor Apple News that much even with an Apple One subscription and I just keep coming back to the fact that the only adware installed on my phone—and I’ve checked—is basically the system software itself.

This is a premium phone at a premium price paired up with a range of premium-priced accessories. I know I get more than the value out of these devices than I’m putting in but damn does it feel like Apple isn’t just double-dipping, they’re like quadruple-dipping at least.

There’s the money I paid, there’s the money I pay to Apple for services that I do actually want, which, fair, some things have an upkeep cost, there’s the money I pay to 3rd party developers which Apple takes a cut of, and then there’s the money they’re charging developers to put ads in my face when I do open the App Store. There is such a thing as a value-add, and your example of the 5GB iCloud storage? The fact that this is the base level no matter what model phone you purchase just feels downright cheap, and that’s theoretically shared with a Mac or an iPad or both. Actually gutter-dwelling penny-pinching coupon-clipping lentil-dieting cheap.

The total addressable market is saturated now. Gains from Android are slow and difficult. So continued growth depends on more money from existing customers.

No. That’s the line, that’s the word on Wall Street, but it’s also complete crap. Apple spent a decade and a half as the iPhone company and for a long time that was exactly the right call.

They have other product lines with more than enough room to grow in the market, but they have to hunger for it, like they did from 1998 to 2008 with the Mac, and 2007 through the current day with the iPhone. Almost anything Apple puts out will sell in quantity as long as it doesn’t have exactly a voice-controlled UI, and while Microsoft and Intel are busy shitting the Wintel bed Apple is putting out top-tier high margin computer hardware with obvious gaps on the low-end, the middle and the ultra high-end and the thing keeping Apple from fully capitalizing on that is they’re shitting the bed with their own OS and tunneled in on nickel-and-diming their existing install base.

The global music industry was $26B in 2021: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-60837880

The global movie industry in 2021 was $90.2B: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/movies-e...

The global TV industry in 2021 was $259.16B: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/televisi...

Grand total: $375.36B

Apple’s revenue in 2021 was $394.3B, and some portion of that is already accounted for in the Music, Movies and Television revenue for 2021 but if they really want to grow, then they need to go back to their roots: hardware running software of quality. Services will only be a segment and most of their “services” revenue depends substantially on the size of their hardware’s install base. They can still offer those, but if you build good products, the profit will follow. Apple was the one that built their business on that philosophy.

Either that or become a bank.

I have been saying for quite some time now that apple could probably just buy greece or some other indebted frist world state.

Appleonia and Facebookistan. Even though the latter may turn out to be just a parking lot with a MCDondalds

Market share is the wrong thing to look at, yes Apple has a small desktop/laptop market share, but they utterly dominate the profit share.

This is the real question: How is Apple going to fill the gaps you see in the low end PC market, where there are very small profits to be found, without cannibalising it's own high end profit margins?

For the wintel PC makers market share is all that matters because they are all trapped in the commodity sector, so volume is the only way to grow profits. Apple isn't, it's a premium brand, so the economics it lives by are completely different. Analysts have been getting this wrong about Apple for decades, in fact pretty much my entire adult life, and I'm in my 50s.

Commodity companies can afford to stagnate their products, Cocacola makes the same sugar water they did before I was born. Premium product companies cannot afford to do that, they have to constantly invest in renewing and updating their products. Apple has been doing that for almost their entire existence (modulo a period of stagnation in the 90s when the execs didn't understand their own business).

On the software side I don't really agree, yes they have quality issues, but so does all software and they have incredibly complex stacks these days. They're constantly pushing forward with new software features, that's part of the problem, new features means new bugs.

> They're constantly pushing forward with new software features, that's part of the problem, new features means new bugs.

Only if you don't invest in testing - and Apple sadly has fallen to the trap of "bananaware" (ripens at the customer) as well as everyone else. "We ship it once it is good quality" has been replaced by "we ship it as soon as it can survive the presentation at WWDC and fix the bugs later on". For commodity manufacturers this can be excused by low profit margins (even though I don't like it), but Apple could literally double their developer headcount and they wouldn't feel it in their bottom line.

Am I the only one who keeps having problems with iPhones backround music/video play and resume? It's linux level bad. I play something I stop it and I never know what might be playing.

For PiP videos I have to play, lock the phone then press on play and then it might either continue the background video or play music from my library which I never really use.

The other day my iPhone would just reload and I still have no idea why? Did it run out of memory? Screen would freeze and it would stop on a black screen and then reload.

I don't remember these bugs from when I used to use an iPhone, but maybe I just didn't pay attention to them. When I travel and use a travel SIM it keeps asking me to switch everything to the new SIM. Default calls, iCloud, default messages. I say no to all of them but it still switches some of them.

Using apps from two different countries is a nightmare as well.

I do appreciate the speed of this device but ALL of these things are non-issues on Android. Something is off IMHO

Ha, I have that exact problem with Android, and I've been considering switching to an iPhone. It's crazy that it's also happening in Apple's ecosystem.

Weird. I had Android until Android 10, but I don't remember it being an issue. Who triages these bugs? Why are not considered worth fixing?

Interestingly, I started getting them after turning on Digital Wellness. The web browser will play audio in the background and even about 10 seconds after closing. It's crazy and drives me nuts.

On my last Android excursion I left because I was continuously plagued by audio issues. I’d cycle 11km to work every day and listen to podcast. With Android I had to stop at least once every day to fix audio issues. I switched back to an iPhone and it has been smooth sailing since then?

I think your phone might be defective. The only time I've experienced random restarts was when my battery on an old 6S was dying. Battery got replaced and all was fine.

Not sure what's going on with the music. I sometimes have it play random Apple Music when first connecting to CarPlay. Outside of that itt fairly reliably removes music when paused from the lock screen after a few minutes which honestly can be annoying, but keeping it on there forever isn't great either.

I have random issues with music too so can confirm the GPs experiences there.

Their point about restarts does feel like a defect though.

Are they still using a battery that's too small, just to keep the phone thin, and prevent you from replacing the battery yourself, then when the battery wears out prematurely they throttle the CPU to stretch battery life, which makes the phone slow, making you think the phone is dying, so you just buy a whole new $1000 phone instead, when all you really needed was a $30 battery?

I literally never understood this problem. Yes the battery isn't easily replacable by the user, but literally just pop into any nearby apple store, it's £69 and you get a new battery fitted in about 30 minutes. Are people who say that the only option is to buy a brand new phone just......uninformed? Unable to do this for some reason? I just don't get it. I wouldn't be able to swap the battery in my car either, but I don't go around saying that the only option is to buy a brand new car when the battery dies - I go to a workshop and they replace it. How is a phone any different?

Before they got caught Geniuses weren't recommending $100 battery replacements. They were recommending new phones because the old one was "too slow". And that "nearby" Apple store can literally be hours away.

And the problem is that Apple was considerably undersizing the battery compared to rivals and then compensating by throttling the CPU once it aged.

I've never not had an extremely disappointing experience with Apple Geniuses. Absolutely horrendous support. Completely incompetent people running down a script.

That said, I've had two trusted Apple Premium Partners that I would go to when I was still an Apple user and they were an absolute delight. Unfortunately back then I was living in a major city in Germany with tons of Premium partners, so nowadays that I don't really have a homebase and only have an iPhone I don't really know where to go for competent support.

Not everyone has the privilege of having an apple store at walking distance.

Sure, in which case at least here in UK Apple will send you a prepaid shipment label and you get the phone back within few days. It still doesn't sound to me like "buy a new iphone" is the better and/or only choice.

Hmm, are you using BT headphones or speakers? AirPods are the biggest annoyance for me with auto-switching as I'll usually have a mac, iPad and iPhone at my desk, be listening via iPad to something then opening a random app on my iPhone will request audio and stop the iPad from playing as the airpods swap devices. I know - it can be switched off, but it has to be done on every Apple device they connect to.

My new problem is with Apple TV and the Dynamic Island. Now by default when I walk into a room where my wife is watching TV, the phone will pick up the proximity and show me the remote as a live activity (Which is great, usually.) Then I use my phone for something and have no sound as my volume is down and the buttons aren't responding at all (seemingly.) It turns out if ATV is in the dynamic island, your hardware volume buttons now exclusively control the TV volume, and the only way to change the phone volume is to go into control center and swipe around.

Apple news is also very quietly very politically biased. When you watch CNN or Fox News, you know what side you're getting at least.

How? They are just links to original work in other places. Now if you look over all media there is a bias in the US Republicans will see all non Fox as left wing in the UK all the papers are right wing.

I think News looks at what you choose and offers more of the same.

They are biased in the work that they choose to present. Curation is a way to introduce bias as well. Doubly so when you consider that they post the headline as a notification, and most people stop there.

I don't have specific examples, I'm just going off the several times in the past year where I've seen a news story covered in five different ways, then I see an incredibly slanted headline notification from apple news that is woefully inaccurate.

Also, Fox is just the other side of the same coin- left or right wing, when it matters, Fox is no different from CNN. It's all fake garbage. Just wait until you're belief systems or personal experiences don't exist within the mainstream collection of proffered views, and you'll see how fake all of it is.

I think App Store Search Ads were really the start of this trend. Think from a benefit perspective - do these ad placements help users? No, they lead them to apps they weren't looking for. Do these placements help good developers? No, they cost them money to ensure their own top placement isn't stolen in search. Does this benefit Apple? Of course - now every large developer on the platform is spending boatloads of cash to ensure they get the top result wherever possible. Essentially taxing developers to buy their own app name slot so that some other random company doesn't do it first. And it has the follow on problem of now allowing spam apps to have a voice on the platform - get your garbage ad-ridden, weekly subscription app approved, then just boost it up with search ads. The real problem is Apple still makes a boatload of cash from those scenarios, so they aren't incentivized to stop them.

iAd came before that - but it had a goal of benefiting everyone - users, developers and advertisers. "High quality" ads, privacy focused targeting, developers get a cut and as a result they remove other more invasive ad networks. Unfortunately it didn't work out, and with Tim Cook now at the helm the numbers for search ads spoke a little more loudly than before.

I hate upvoting this too but it's pretty clear that:

1) advertising does not belong in Settings

2) notifications - especially system notifications - should not be abused for pushing ads

With regard to iCloud - 5 gigs is stingy compared to Google drive etc., but it's more than enough for the most essential parts: iCloud keychain, continuity, and storage for non-media apps like contacts/calendar/reminders (if you use them). The part I object to is using the OS for advertising.

Would it belong as a separate app to configure if it wasn't in settings? Or maybe opt out when you setup the phone?

The issue is that a large number of their users have had iPhones for close to a decade now. 5GB worth of photos is absolutely nothing.

I pay the $0.99/mo for extra storage but every time I do it, I wince a little and it costs them literally pennies to avoid giving me a bad taste in my mouth. I wish there was a way to self-host iCloud backups.

The problem is each photo is 5MB. It’s insane. We should have different levels of compression depending on the album it’s in; My meme folder should only contain 200KB images, my parents souvenirs should be 5MB each indeed.

iCloud backups of photos is possible without using iCloud. I use a photo syncing app on my phone that is paired with a SMB server in my home. It just dumps new photos whenever I’m on my home network. But I don’t get iCloud syncing photos to my Mac instantly.

iCloud backups of device backups requires a Mac, then setting to sync via Wi-Fi.

does this work in the background or do you need to run the backup task? I'm setting up a home server atm and curious about this for iCloud

Mine runs in the background when I get home. It uses an iBeacon device to determine when it is home. It starts the photo sync in the background. If I take photos and want to sync immediately I do that by starting the sync in the app. Remotely is a two part process —- enable vpn, then sync.

Google Photos will also backup your iPhone photos.

And the back ups regularly lose data, a good percentage of the images are simply not to be found. Must me my fault, certainly.

No more macs and iphones for me, that and the app "numbers" have been the very last straws.

I think it's definitely a you problem. I don't know of anyone who has had this issue with missing photos.

Yeah, I can’t say that I’ve run into your issue.

I have the same problem. When I contacted support I didn't get anywhere and nothing seemed wrong on their side.

>Hmm apple still makes great hardware but I think software wise quality has suffered and this quote applies…

I'm of the opinion that nobody makes a really nice user experience. My #1 complaint on every platform, website, device, OS, and software can be summed up as "Stop doing what you're doing, and do what I want." Computers and software should be tools that serve the user. They need to know their place!

>These are just ads disguised as systems alerts … hurts the experience and comes off as cheap.

Devil's advocate: I think a lot of users are idiots. Anyone who's been in software for a while will discover this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*zffZ0ysfR4BokVvSxo...

I think you're not wrong that they're disguising these ads as alerts. But if it helps the user who doesn't care, or more importantly - doesn't understand - backup their photos for when they drop their phone in the lake will be better off, and overall happier with the whole experience. Save someone's irreplaceable photos one single time and you'll likely have a customer for life. Apple is very good at this kind of thing. People make fun of apple fans as idiots, but... it's hard to argue apple doesn't know their customers.

It's true, but Windows is worse in these adware respects (I have both systems).

We don't usually carry Windows everywhere we go, though and look at it at 3am.

Apple makes me sad these days.

The ads are super irritating, I can't believe a phone by the company that supposedly cares about user experience is pushing a fucking credit card offer. But that really shouldn't be surprising, considering...

After the casino ads took over the App Store, it became apparent that they're just bullshitting about safety and trustworthy computing. Because why not, if you care about those things, where are you going to go, Android?

Today's Apple is a mercenary bucket of quarterly-reporting driven MBAs. Any brand loyalty or trust I used to feel is gone. I stay logged out of Icloud, because if I don't, things keep uploading... stuff... to them, which absolutely should not happen, but does.

So, Apple is qualitatively no better than MSFT at this point, worse in some ways. At least Redmond does't affect a smirky superior shithead attitude in their software.

> After the casino ads took over the App Store, it became apparent that they're just bullshitting about safety and trustworthy computing. Because why not, if you care about those things, where are you going to go, Android? Ha-ha.

Hopefully they’re at least vetting the casino apps. The only thing worse than shady casino ads are ads for shady casinos.

> software wise quality has suffered and this quote applies…

I agree but Apple had lot of software issues when Jobs was CEO. Software can get incredibly complex and subjective to the user using it.

It’s also a different epoch. 1990 was all the rage about C. But now that a ReactJS dev can get paid 6 figures and move jobs easily in every big city, it’s much harder to find people who are passionate to build APFS or desktop apps for one vendor based in Cupertino.

I would be surprised if there was much overlap between those type of programmers.

The ReactJS type is doing fancy thin gs on screens and does it for the money and for all sorts of places. The APFS builders are more likely to be passionate and look for specific work. But 30 years ago the ReactJS types would be working for corporations using VB but the system programmers would be doing similar to now.

System programmers have always been rare and I suspectr less motivated by money more by having interesting work that affects many people.

Apple music is so obnoxious on mac that you can't delete it and it would popup by itself a lots

I agree on the software. I used to love using iTunes and used it for playing all my music. Then they released the "Music" app on the desktop that just removed almost all the features I loved about iTunes and made the user interface drastically worse.

Not just the upsells, the software is declining in quality in terms of features as well. Both of these features used to work and now don't.

- They removed iPhone sync from Music (nee iTunes), which makes sense, but the replacement in Finder doesn't support directories in file transfer. It shows them, you cannot expand them, placing files in a directory is possible and results in the files becoming inaccessible. Doubly stupid that the working file sync was in the Music app and not in the file management app.

- AirDrop on macOS just hangs all the time. I am completely unable to send files from my laptop and the interface is just a beach ball.

It really gives me hope that Apple is letting Linux play catch-up; I'd love to see a Linux experience that targeted the low-level usability of macOS 10! I'm talking OS-wide support for bundles, proxy icons, unified notifications interface... The target isn't moving any more, so it's reachable.

this.

Also, apple tries to lock with hardware so might, I find it too much frustrating. For example copy paste feature from iphone and mac os won't work if we don't login. And, 2fa is compulsory

Apple hardware is top notch but software is ewwww...

Apple software isn't perfect, but so are alternatives. IMO it's just better.