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> Why it has worked flawlessly since the first iPod with a monochrome screen and quarter of computing power of modern watch, but can’t be done in a flagship pro

• Obscurity4340 3y ago
  I just wish everybody and all the shareholders could freaking understand this. Cut the infinite exponential growth bullshit, they should be expected to slowly and carefull craft quality products and systems and release like a new generation whatever like no sooner than like 3-4 years. I hate this new year, new phone/laptop/whatver crap. Its wasteful and sloppy ultimately and makes it hard to be familiar with their actual range of products in tangible way
  • CJefferson 3y ago
    What do you mean by “understand”? Do you think this would increase profits? Or at least keep them the same?
  • neysofu 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure Apple shareholders are doing just fine.
    • johnnyworker 3y ago
      Maybe they think they are. But they still have to live in the world full of products that are worse than they need to be. In a world that is spiraling into derpification all you can buy is crap that you have to then fix with more crap.
      • Gibbon1 3y ago
        Economists: The shareholders only care about return on their investments. Shareholders: I would prefer to not watch my kid die of leukemia. And it would be nice not to have to replace my dishwasher every three years. And while we are at it...
        • johnnyworker 3y ago
          Exactly! I so often think about this. I don't know anything about sociology or economics or statistics to even have the words to meaningfully phrase my concern, but can give examples. First, to make it easier to reason about, assume that with any given thing, what you go along with becomes commonplace and is done by everyone, all the time -- and if you resist, it is not done by anyone. (On smaller scales, especially 1-on-1 relationships, this might be literally true, so) So, for example, you can increase profits a bit by making your website take 2 seconds longer to load for the benefit of JavaScript fuckery. Never mind privacy, just load times. Now, in the universe where everyone mirrors your actions, now every website you load takes 2 seconds longer to load. In some cases that means going from 20 seconds to 22, so no big deal... but HN goes from 0.1s to 2.1s, hah. Can you imagine how much time that would take up, for maybe not even that big amount money, that can't buy you time? Or advertising, propaganda, etc. Yeah, you can sell your thing for more, or to people who don't really need it or would be better off without it... but unless you have a huge corporation, you don't even have that many products, yet now you live in a world full of advertising, and the pollution, waste of energy, and bad choices of people you love, or maybe people who end up hurting you because of the shit choices they made based on propaganda. You can make "sponsored content", sure. But now philosophy and deep thought are dead, because everybody else is lacing whatever they say with a nod to some sponsor. I really wish I could describe what feels like this hugely important thing that is kind of invisible to us, because we have nothing to compare it to, or the time or resources to carve out a large enough space in which to be different and then compare the results. If we only could see (I can't, it's more like a hunch, something I can't put my finger on but also not shake off) how all these things add up, with a kind of bird's eye view... I imagine it would look like a local optimum, right next to a HUGE optimum. Like thirsty people fighting over a stone to suck on, next to a lake with clear, fresh water, unbeknownst to them. I just cannot fucking prove it and that hurts :/
  • titzer 3y ago
    I just wish they would stop moving around the UI deck chairs. Seriously. In Ventura (or the previous release, who knows, I don't keep track, why should I, it's a waste, I honestly care zero), they completely reorganized how System Settings is laid out. Like why in tarnation is that even necessary? There absolutely NO WAY that some UI study or UX principles led to the redesign of this thing. It was just done on a whim (well, a corporate whim, some PM and their little team got a big boost to their egos to make some kind of impact). Stop taking away my skills. I have to relearn everything all the time, for no damn reason. And get off my lawn.
    • threeseed 3y ago
      Settings was re-designed to align macOS to iOS, ipadOS and visionOS. So that people who have bought an iPhone and buying a Mac for the first time can change their computer settings in the same way they are used to on their phone.
      • sotix 3y ago
        That’s a good point, yet one I find disappointing. I believe settings is one of the biggest pain points of iOS. It’s extraordinarily unintuitive, which can be seen comparing it to settings on Android. I find the Android settings a lot easier to navigate. This would have been a great time to rewrite the iOS settings rather than adopting its style elsewhere. It’s as if knowing how to use Apple products efficiently has developed into requiring a very specific domain knowledge, and Apple continues to develop for these pseudo experts that know the quirks rather than improving the intuitiveness and usability for those less familiar.
        • Obscurity4340 3y ago
          This is interesting all the same but are you seriously arguing they should have designed iOS Settings in the likeness of MacOS Settings? Do you know if there's any like artist renderings or something that could help visually/graphically represent that? Just can't see it but I'm open to entertain it if there's something to demonstrate its validity...
  • afavour 3y ago
    > Its wasteful and sloppy ultimately And it makes a ton of money! I agree with all the complaints about the state of a lot of software today but users don’t care enough to start boycotting companies that make apps in Electron. Until they do shareholders won’t give a toss.
    • wredue 3y ago
      Users don’t know any better. Most people in the public have just accepted that their computers get slower over time as hardware degradation or something and then go buy another one. If the average person understood how shit tier software is today, they would care.
      • afavour 3y ago
        But my point is this: they don’t.
        • layer8 3y ago
          They do care, there’s just no better available alternative.
        • wredue 3y ago
          I think people care when things beyond their control force them to needlessly spend thousands of dollars. Nobody likes dropping a couple Gs on a new laptop because the software has become so utterly shitty that their 2 year old I7 and GTX 3090 with 32 gigs of ram can no longer run a web browser. I think if the general public knew that their stuff getting super slow super fast was a product of software rather than hardware degradation, theyd definitely care.
          • afavour 3y ago
            > I think if the general public knew that their stuff getting super slow super fast was a product of software rather than hardware degradation, theyd definitely care. But my point is this: they don’t.
  • omginternets 3y ago
    "Are the bean-counters and ad-men at the helm" has unfortunately become a very good heuristic for predicting a downward turn in virtually anything.
    • phone8675309 3y ago
      RIP HP
      • Obscurity4340 3y ago
        Nah, good riddance
        • SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
          HP is Keysight now. The current business with the HP name is a totally different industry from where Hewlett & Packard started (test equipment).
        • phone8675309 3y ago
          I'm glad they're (mostly) dead now, but their death came from "the bean-counters and ad-men at the helm"
  • spacecadet 3y ago
    There is no requirement to upgrade every year. While I agree with you, companies are dumb machines that respond very slowly to customers. Sure, they even started this by suggesting these quick release cycles in the first place, but consumers bought right in.
    • Obscurity4340 3y ago
      I might not have been super clear that I was referring to the production/marketing cycle, like, yes, I believe it in the personal context as well but my main focus is the actual cycle in which Apple designs/produces/markets "new" products (turnaround)
  • User23 3y ago
    Nobody ever got promoted for saying "hey, this is good enough, let's just leave it alone and coast." The incentives for changing things that work go far beyond just management.
  • incahoots 3y ago
    >Cut the infinite exponential growth bullshit This a byproduct of a much larger issue that affects all faculties, not just the tech sector. This won't change unless we as a nation choose a different economic model.
    • kelseyfrog 3y ago
      This is synonymous with the end of the world.
      • Obscurity4340 3y ago
        Isn't like the collective world economy essentially a Ponzi scheme or something?
    • imtringued 3y ago
      Umm. The line between compound interest and simple interest is both larger and smaller than one would expect. The thing that capitalists get wrong is to simply project the present into the future, forever. Let's say you get 30% returns in 10 years, that is 2.65% interest. But we might be talking about a one time investment that only existed for those ten years. What happens before and after can diverge arbitrarily. Meanwhile a capitalist would just keep projecting 2.65% interest into all eternity, giving ridiculous numbers within 1000 years. The thing about simple interest is that it gets consumed. No exponential growth necessary.
  • commandar 3y ago
    >Cut the infinite exponential growth bullshit, they should be expected to slowly and carefull craft quality products and systems and release like a new generation whatever like no sooner than like 3-4 years. I hate this new year, new phone/laptop/whatver crap. It's interesting that Orwell got this one wrong: turns out that endless war isn't necessary as a sink for meaningless production after all. We can do that just fine on our own.
    • imtringued 3y ago
      To be fair this was the case all the way until world war 2 which was ended on the Japanese side by nuclear weapons. Since the age of nuclear, it is no longer possible to have minor conflicts between super powers, only mutually assured destruction. Meanwhile Russia can't generate domestic demand. They got their GDP growth from their war industry.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Since the age of nuclear, it is no longer possible to have minor conflicts between super powers, only mutually assured destruction. Its not only possible, its happened multiple times, but downplaying it (Syria recently) or outright pretending it wasn't happening when both sides were fully aware (Korean war air combat) have been part of managing escalation risk.
      • ivlad 3y ago
        Korea and Afghanistan are obvious counter-examples.
      • secondary_op 3y ago
        WW2 "not ended on the Japanese side by nuclear weapons", it ended when U.S. bombed out of existence 2 whole Japanese cities with nuclear weapons and with subsequent defeat and subordination of Japan witch to this day is puppet of U.S. Since then U.S. waging wars and launder money out of pockets of tax payers into conflict zones it created and back into its own industrial military complex. Here is some punchy whataboutism for your, deal with it.
    • 3y ago
  • xtiansimon 3y ago
    Funny take. I generally have a punk attitude towards marketing. As a man, the fashion world (the most fickle consumer industry) doesn’t prey too strongly on my buying habits. But given all that, I was still hit with a fugue state when I had to replace my iPhone 5s—in 2020. Haha. I’m still on that replacement, an iPhone SE. But Oh Man was I struggling with the top of the line envy. Making up scenarios where I _needed_ these products. With all that said, I think the corps are happy to have both. All the appearances of new New NEW and for anyone who’s paying attention, we will upgrade when necessary. But in between are a bunch of people who can scrape up 2k for a new phone every year. Like buying a Cadillac when you can’t afford a house.
    • Obscurity4340 3y ago
      Don't even get me started about how ridiculously big (phabletized) the standard is quickly becoming. Its like these people are all begging for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and have kangaroo pouches for pockets. Also the camera fixtures are beyond inelegant and annoying even on a solely practical basis. I literally have nothing good to say about most phones nowadays. How much cpmputing and camera power does the average person truly need and should it start at like $1500-2000 for the "pleasure"?
      • xtiansimon 3y ago
        LOL. It was not size (I was happy to keep using the iPhone 5’s 4” screen). Nope, it was the three camera lenses. Oooh. I liked me some photography.
• mkl95 3y ago
  Also, the FAANG obsession with efficiency, layoffs, etc. will potentially make it much worse in the next decade. It's been evident with Google products for quite some time.
  • yayitswei 3y ago
    I thought Google doesn't do layoffs? It's even a Silicon Valley meme ("rest and vest").
    • leoc 3y ago
      I'm not sure to what extent that was really true before, but it definitely became false in 2023: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/20/tech/google-layoffs-employee-culture/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/20/tech/google-layoffs-emplo... . And it seems as if the cause was the sudden vibe shift to "kick the lazy bums" in the tech-chief locker room—apparently sparked by Musk's Twitter firings, of all things, as if that looked like a smart model to emulate.
  • leoc 3y ago
    To be fair, I think Google's software looked just as bloated, half-baked, directionless and so on its fat and happy low-layoffs era. The firing spasm certainly doesn't seem to have brought any improvements, though ...
• finnthehuman 3y ago
  > Because of the mythical man-month. > But hey that answer is only a paragraph and not a provocative answer about society collapsing, men getting weaker or some other incoherent nonsense. But The Mythical Man Month is about communication/knowledge transfer, just like the linked article and it’s video. You also said a some regular stuff about teams and schedule pressure that weren’t novel at the time of The Mythical Man Month. e: I understand not liking the style of blow’s doomsaying, or titling a blog post with a reference to a meme that gets some people salty. But those aren’t the thesis of either piece.
  • marcosdumay 3y ago
    The GP is probably referring to the second system effect, that is there too. The Mythical Man-Month has more than 1 theme.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • lolinder 3y ago
    If the title bears no relation to the thesis, that's the author's fault, not the readers' for misinterpreting. And this article isn't about communication and knowledge transfer, it's about the evils of abstraction. I'm not sold on the idea that layers of abstraction are always going to be problematic—most of civilization is built on layers upon layers of abstraction, with different people specializing in different layers. That makes things less simple than they were before the layers were added, sure, but it doesn't inherently make everything worse.
• the__alchemist 3y ago
  This sounds like an excuse sloppy architecture.
  • Someone1234 3y ago
    Explaining why something is the way it is, isn't the same as "excusing" it.
• gmerc 3y ago
  True entire world has this failure mode - we pretend that infinite growth exists and expect large successful companies to do the same or better every year, ignoring the diminishing returns and exponential R&D costs involved with almost everything. After 100 years, a 0.5% efficiency or emissions reduction gain on the internal combustion engine costs likely as much as the first 20-50 years of exponential gains made. And so Volkswagen cheats. Moores law is strained so we do wild branch prediction to meet the expectations and eventually roll back entire processor generations with mitigations. But executives got their bonus already at that point The enshittification is built into our world as a result.
• raydev 3y ago
  > migrating a lot of older Objective-C code to multi-platform SwiftUI which explains why Music.app in particular has seen so many regressions Sorry, but this is objectively not true, having been subscribed to Apple Music for years prior to SwiftUI. It was always extremely bad relative to Spotify and the first regressions started when Apple dropped the standard iTunes UI in favor of embedded webviews. And to be clear, the issue wasn't "web tech is bad", it was that Apple Music design team has been rudderless and disorganized for years.