naravara

I always thought the ideal version of that technology would have been as an overlay on top of the trackpad that can be invoked by pressing or holding a button. They’d have even been able to fake button presses with the haptics in there so you could do things like fake a num pad, set up a macro pad, or use it like a stream deck.

If you can special plead away the unavoidable materials science and engineering downsides there’s lots of ideas that can sound great. Alas that’s not the world we live in.

The only touchscreen laptop I ever understood the appeal of was that one Lenovo one where you can fold the bottom back to make it a literal tablet or prop up as a kickstand.

The value of “tablet mode” would mainly be if I want to do content consumption, like watch video or read a book, while on the couch or in bed since it allows a wider range of postures you can sit or lay in when you don’t have to rest it on a flat surface.

If you can’t fold it back I just don’t get the appeal.

It’s the storage prices that tend to give people sticker shock. Though for just being a media server you can get away with a spinning disc rather than an SSD. But they’re still kind of insane right now.

The copy on this page doesn’t feel “Apple” to me.

“Apple HomeView is designed to bring more joy and convenience to everyone in your household. Siri AI comes built in for personalized AI assistance that’s truly useful in your everyday life. And with a vibrant display and powerful acoustics, your music, videos, and calls look and sound amazing. Meet the new heart of your home.”

Is “designed to” lacks confidence. Does it do it or not? I don’t care what your intention was. And the Siri AI sentence is vacuous, including the pointless modifiers (truly useful in your everyday life). You can’t convince me you care or put effort into the little things when your ad copy is slop. Apple used to put more thought into this sort of thing.

My original mortgage lender has a very functioning web portal to set up autopay and check my account.

They sold my mortgage to a big bank whose web portal and app are pure garbage. Constantly crashing, the autopay frequently just doesn’t autopay, and getting a statement history requires delving through a bunch of random menus.

It’s really obnoxious that I just get no say unless I refinance.

I’d argue the fact that the hardware is still big and clunky means the tech isn’t workable. If it was about as light and easy to get on and off as a chunky pair of ski-goggles I think they’d have been onto something, but big and heavy with no “killer app” or feature makes it a tough sell.

VR gaming is a niche even among hardcore gamers. There’s some value in spatial computing for just being a more ergonomic way to do computer stuff (i.e. not being in a fixed position all day, being able to walk around while you work) but it’d need to be able to hit everything a Mac can do with no compromises to be worth it at that price (and at the cost of making you look goofy). So far it seems like it’s only found real utility in some very specific industrial and scientific research contexts, which is very cool but probably isn’t the lane a mass market consumer products manufacturer wants as their play long-term.

NICE! You should buy a lottery ticket!

These things have usable lifespans of about 2-4 years before the batteries start to go (depending on how low a capacity you can tolerate). It’s more like you buy the one available at the time when your old ones wear out.

I really miss the BeatsX headphones where it’s 2 earbuds attached to each other with a flexible cable that drapes over the back of your neck. It was nice to be able to take my headphones out without needing to hold them and they just fall over my shoulders like a necklace. Also means not having to keep track of a third item since there’s no charging case. And the whole thing is soft and flexible so you can put it more easily in your pocket without it bulging like the AirPods in a case do.

I find the “true wireless” form factor finnicky and comically easy to lose and easy to drop. I don’t really see much utility in it either aside from the cool technology flex. If they’d put the modern audio quality and noise cancelling on the BeatsX (and the more neutral AirPods response curve) I’d be first in line.

This was a style thing that tended to ebb and flow. The trend in the 2000s was to have really big watch faces but by the 2010s people were calling them “dinner plates” and it started to be viewed as kind of tacky and ostentatious. Smart watches ended up recalibrating people’s expectations but, if they hadn’t shaken things up, I think we’d be leaning towards smaller faces by now.

In fact, fashionable youths these days are wearing those vintage Casios which come in at 35mm to 39mm.

The Vision Pro (and the folding iPhone Duo) involve developing a lot of underlying technologies that will be useful in currently popular or potential future product lines, even if the market they serve themselves is niche.

If you went back in time to 2006 and showed a cellular Apple Watch and an iPhone (with no apps for either) side by side I think a lot of people would assume the former would be the ubiquitous consumer product and the latter would be a niche product for wealthy executives.

The cellular Apple Watch would be a great cell phone if all you want is to use your phone as a phone + iPod. But it’s hamstrung by its software and being forced to be anchored to an iPhone to be activated just makes it unsuitable as a primary device. We’d probably all be healthier as a society if we didn’t have the black rectangle of doom in our pockets all the time.

I’d love a cellular Apple Watch that’s elongated enough to have a headphone jack (lol) and all day battery life. It’d be fine even if it was meant to stay in my pocket instead of on the wrist.

Regulations do prevent murder, you just put consequences on doing murder to deter people from doing it.

A slot machine that rolls sentences based on statistical weights isn’t a “messenger” and it’s output isn’t a “message.”

Yeah as soon as I hit the gaucho section my clanker alarm started going off like crazy.

I don’t think there’s inherent virtue in zagging just because everyone else zags if zigging is better.

There’s trade-offs, but in most cases the Apple call has tended to err on the side of ease of use and ease of access to the mass market at the expense of flexibility and versatility for tinkerers. It’s good for a market to have companies willing to make different sets of trade-offs to please different segments of the market rather than all herding around the preferences of a cluster of nerds.

The real problem is that the rest of the industry has “Apple envy” and just copies everything they think they can get away with instead of making their own sets of trade-offs.

Co-sign. This is one of the reasons I’ve always loved NetNewsWire as my RSS reader and few things have been able to displace it. Everything is doable by keyboard, and the keyboard commands are extremely logical and intuitive. You can FLY through your backlog.

Excel is the same way. I’ve been an excel power user as well as a Sheets power user and the latter just never managed to enable the level of speedy keyboard navigation Excel could. I can almost work blindfolded in Excel.

I feel like video game logic would be useful here where a view like this would replace the main view and the “macro view” would be a minimap in the corner.

I think where the actual distraction is comes from the level of detail. It would actually benefit from just having silhouettes or lower resolution “suggestions” of what’s there. It’s maybe just the buildings on the corners of turns or specific landmarks you’d want rendered so people could follow ambiguous directions like “Turn left at church, but not the Methodist church the Episcopal one!”

Stay-at-home moms/housewives were the load bearing pillar for that whole lifestyle.

My best situation was a commute to work that was about 45 minutes door to door and involved a 30 minute bus ride. I mostly got to read novels on the bus. It was nice.

I was childless and petless then though. The thought of squeezing everything in between school drop-offs, pick-ups, after-school scheduled activities, and dog walks is when things get really annoying.

I will say I dislike remote work in terms of how much I enjoy work or how effective I am at my job. But having a 100% remote job has made me far more able to maintain my house and be present for my children when they’re still very young. So if we were weighting overall life satisfaction that outweighs the extent to which it alienates me from my job.

Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem. He has the equivalent of an F-150 that he only ever uses to commute to the office. People seem to be into that.

I’ve long believed that making companies liable for paying damages if PII is leaked in a data breach would be the best way to stop excessive tracking. If you force them to have to manage user data like they’re handling radioactive waste then the expense and overhead involved is a natural drag on the business logic that drives the bottomless appetite for data collection. They’ll collect it if they actually need it, and they’ll take great pains to secure it.

How nice of the EU to have determined for the rest of the world that the “cultural expectation” should be that every business do the design equivalent of wearing clown makeup.

There are, like, two countries where TFR is even close to 6. And there’s about 20 where it’s higher than 4. And since those countries also tend to have sky high infant-mortality rates, the global average population growth rate is somewhere like 1-1.2% and dropping fast.

Killing USAID probably put a drag on that slowdown by reducing access to family planning resources, but we’ll have to see exactly how much in the coming years.

I didn’t mean home schooling specifically but the assertion, and the general sentiment, that parental input is the only determinant that matters when it comes to the development of children into healthy and well-socialized adults. The family isn’t an island it’s something that exists within its society. The people in it also have communities outside the family—including complicated social groups, people coming from different cultural and subcultural norms, and complicated bureaucratic systems and institutions—that they have to learn to interact with an thrive under. School is a critical part of teaching and socializing them to navigate that even beyond the specific curricular stuff. And beyond school lots of other stuff kids interact with is having a hand in teaching them what to expect of society and what society expects of them.

Back when smoking was more normal we basically did leave it up to Big Tobacco to determine how best to tackle underage smoking and they would literally say insane things like “Oh course we’re not targeting elementary school kids! We’re not monsters! Our advertising doesn’t hit them until they’re in 8th grade at least!”

Expecting platform monopolists and dopamine dealers to design for this is folly. They are wired to try to normalize an unhealthy level of dependence on them. Their business model is addiction.

You’re trying to engineer a social interaction. Stop that!

People remembering your handle is persistent, and people remembering if they had good or annoying interactions with you is persistent reputation that exists in the minds and interactions between different people. These are things people naturally do. If people don’t recognize your name and see it come in a trusted spot they just don’t trust you.

How tech breaks this is deprioritizes the people in the interactions. Instead of sending messages you use a “like” button to be intelligible to the platform. You don’t see the people putting stuff on your feed, it gets fed to a timeline that cuts it off from all context and atomizes it for your consumption. It’s the UI/UX that drives this. Even compare Reddit and HN with old forums. On forums like 25% of every post is just static bits of self-expression. There’s a PFP, the username is bigger, there’s often a big signature block. All of this makes the peoples’ posts feel like a person talking to you rather than text blocks that happen to have a tiny username and timestamp on it.

Just put your kids in a bubble so not a single adult is the slightest bit inconvenienced by having to exercise any social responsibility for their well being. Easy.

I feel like you must have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes “raising” kids if we’re omitting the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours and the people most of their social universe is based in.

We’ve had a live experiment with this during COVID and it’s pretty clear that kids raised solely at home by their parents fared way worse. Not just on academic metrics, but basic conflict resolution or social skills.