They should name them more like cars where you can always expect there to be the latest revision each year, but you never expect it to be something completely new that you need to upgrade to.
We need the iPhone (2023) and the Pixel (2023). You would just say you have "an iPhone" and if for whatever reason it is necessary you could say it is a 2023 model.
They tried this with the iPad 3 IIRC. Was just "The New iPad" but they then reverted back the next year.
It's a phone. It does phone things.
It's likely the tech industry copied them.
I think the fact that they are in those high numbers already shows that they "stopped pretending like it is going to be an exciting brand new product every single year". The numbering there is pretty straightforward compared to e.g. the Macbook namings, or the convoluted naming of other brands with stacked variation signifiers, like the "Xiaomi 11 lite 5G NE".
I'm confused, while Apple has silly naming conventions for their operating system, the Macbook line doesn't have that at all. It's just the Macbook (and the Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air), Apple doesn't even give them different names or years.
Am I missing something that isn't incredibly straightforward about the Macbook naming?
Just that it isn't. The "(new) MacBook" (without any addition) most recently existed 2015-2019, and I personally found it very confusing, as it was thinner than a MacBook Air and with that breaking the previous expectations that were set up by the product line naming.
Placing all the blame on the naming of the MacBooks is probably overblown, but I feel like the individual lines of MacBooks have had a expectation/consistency problem for 10+ years now and throwing in the "new MacBook" into the mix for some time didn't help it.
I like the version number being explicit and visible. You know what you’re getting. Pretending versions don’t exist just reminds me of OEMs swapping out components but keeping the same model number, making it impossible to know whether you are buying one built to the original design or to a cheaper design.
When Google IO started it was a nice fun tech presentation with a lot of side classes showing devs how to work with these new google technologies.
Now, it's mostly just google introducing new products to the press.
Most people are bad. Really. Sorry to be blunt, but it is what it is. A bit of training and a bit of rehearsal would go a long way. I am shocked that big events like this one do not try to invest more in preparing the speakers. It wouldn't take much.
Look at Elon's keynotes, they are TERRIBLE from a public speaking perspective, but excellent content that generally is interesting. Also no one perceives them as inauthentic, just off-hand-ish. It works.
That would be a "wannabe" professional speaker, not an actual one, imho.
the pros are cheesy as hell.
As long as Chrome and the NDK stay around, I am good and don't care anymore whatever version I can only use 5 years from now with already deprecated APIs.
Yes. I haven't yet watched talks from this IO, but it was exactly my impression from last year's IO and Chrome Dev Summit. There are some speakers, mostly dev rels, who clearly love speaking and are great at it; but most of the speakers were just woodenly reading from the screen. As if they are unaware that written language is different from spoken language, and it takes rare skills to write a speech and then read it back to the audience in such a way that would sound natural and engaging.
The only exception is the last announcement which is them trying to re-enter the race for AR/XR glasses which again some thought they gave up.
This acquisition is the reason why they are trying again: [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmen...
Is "XR" a typo for VR, or is there another new R that I should learn about?
What went wrong?
There's a popular and cynical meme that people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are just marketing bullshitters that don't actually do anything useful. It's laughably false and easily disproved. And yet it seems to comfort cynical/pessimistic/unhappy/ignorant people, of which many exist, and so it prevails.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496?ref_...
With great power comes great responsibility.
I find him genuine, funny, atypical and giving a hard time to people that want him to conform.
Progressives hate him. I’ve never seen any logic behind it. It is just that Elon doesn’t share their vision of scarcity driven, alarmist, stagnant, crime ridden, woke, depopulating, unionized and equal-outcomes based society.
The entire progressive platform has been hijacked, not the Obama era left-wing. Obama was pro-Elon Musk and privatization of Space industry.
IMO there are no leaders that inspire more than Elon and late Steve Jobs.
So here… I laid out the entire problem in plain words why people hate Elon. 100% political.
Provided you with reasons why I find him inspiring and others don’t.
While Apple has achieved some moderately useful advances you have to divide the amount of progress given by the amount of money captured. Apple has an almost negligible ratio in that regard. Musk has achieved even less.
What kind of evidence would convince you? Wikipedia has summaries. Of course, they necessarily lack the context required to deeply understand the topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Innovations_and_des...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Business_career
> Apple has an almost negligible ratio in that regard. Musk has achieved even less.
I challenge you to give evidence for these assertions. I would be convinced if you explained how you came to this conclusion and explained how you calculated the terms of this ratio.
> It's laughably false and easily disproved.
Then disprove it, instead of relying on an ad hominem assumption of what's going on inside someone else's brain. As it stands all you've done is claim that a criticism exists and that the people who state that criticism have moral failings, which does not make them wrong.
That would presume we're talking about people with approximately equivalent knowledge that simply come to different, but reasonable, conclusions.
But this is not the case. What I see in this meme is people betraying their ignorance and motivated reasoning at every turn. There's nothing knowledgeable or reasonable about their assertions. It's always highly vitriolic and dismissive toxicity. It's not that they're simply mistaken about certain facts, and can be corrected, it's that they're transparently ignorant and/or acting in bad faith.
For example, it's extremely uncommon, maybe even unheard of, for someone with a deep knowledge of technology history to agree with these kinds of dismissals of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I've never seen someone able to discuss the topic at a high level that won't readily acknowledge their contributions, even if they can be very critical of them in certain ways. As one example among many: historian and professor Walter Isaacson wrote well respected books about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. He is currently writing one about Elon Musk.
But c'mon. You're really just playing dumb. We all know what SpaceX/Tesla and Apple have done, and (I think) we all know the role Musk and Jobs played in their success. And the reason we all know these things is precisely because of how important what they've done is. It's self-evident.
So, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that you're not acting in good faith. And that's why I answered indirectly.
But, okay, what "proof" would you find convincing?
Until then, it’s like the stuff Boeing, Lockheed, ULA etc. have spent even longer developing and have also not reached orbit with.
I doubt you or anyone else would bet significant money that Starship won't reach orbit. If so, I'd be happy to accept.
For the record, I don't think you can point to any project even remotely equivalent in terms of capability or progress from Boeing, Lockheed, or ULA. I'd be happy if they were doing nearly as well as SpaceX.
My other examples: Starlink, Tesla, and Dragon have clearly been "built" and shipped. Starlink is the hands of consumers, is actively helping Ukraine for military and humanitarian purposes, Tesla has shipped millions of vehicles, and Dragon Crew had another successful rendezvous with ISS days ago.
I could spend a lot more time providing examples but consider these to be more than sufficient to disprove the claim that Elon Musk's companies haven't "actually built anything he announces" in "years".
True, but it isn't as if SpaceX doesn't have a track record for hiring some pretty ambitious targets with their progression of Falcon 1 →Falcon 9 →Falcon Heavy. Admittedly, Starship's planned use of the new Raptor engines seems risky, but the DOD did fund a prototype-and-test contract that presumably concluded successfully a few years ago. While the results of those tests aren't public, there have been no leaks to the contrary, at any rate, and no changes in the planned use of Raptor have been announced (and SpaceX hasn't generally been at all shy about announcing changes to their plans).
I think it's a pretty safe bet right now that Starship will launch and that they will get it working reliably, and that they will have to blow up a few along the way to make those things happen.
Now since they have run out of problems to solve they are inventing problems so they can solve them.
I don't watch the Google presentations, but I'm an avid consumer of Apple's.
That said, even I'm disappointed with the state of technology today. There's still plenty of fruit to be harvested at all levels.
But all I ever see from Apple and Google is variations on "How do I get together with a bunch of people I already know for Thai food in an area that I can walk to?" Or "How do I get through my morning, which is completely predictable and never varies in even the slightest way from one day to the next?"
Here's a softball for both of them:
Using their maps app, allow me to choose a starting point, a destination, and a departure time. Then show me all of the coffee shops within x distance of that route that will still be open for one hour when I pass that location.
(Spoiler alert: it's not)
And a lot of the seemingly groundbreaking announcements then don't go on to pan out either (I'm thinking of Magic Leap here). If you don't care about realism/follow-through, then you have very exciting announcements; just don't expect anything announced to ever pan out.