> I'll try not to be too casually dismissive but let me start by saying your gushing reads nearly content-free. You asked to let you know if you're over-blowing it and yes I believe you are. I'm a millennial and don't see anything that blows me away by this keynote.
Appreciate it! Yeah, I figured maybe I'm just not used to enough WWDCs -- but surely they can't be this feature packed every time.
There are some seriously good consumer-facing features in here, that I find it easy to not be cycnical about.
> Should they be broken up? Yes, together with the other tech giants. Are they doing something that's particularly amazing compared to what Google is doing with the Pixel? Not really. Google was doing magic eraser before iOS 16.
But this isn't really about just one feature in particular -- the combination of these features under Apple just seems more cohesive than when Google puts them together. When I see Google Pay, I don't think it's going to kill Venmo -- when I see Apple doing peer to peer payments, I worry for Venmo.
There's also an implicit trust (their continued emphasis on "privacy", they're leaning into it hard), and Apple has built a reputation on having things be easy to use for the end user -- even if it's at the expense of control and power users.
Google has less of that golden UX reputation, and a lot of people get really turned off by the proliferation of low price and also low quality devices that are full of bloat/spyware and end up sacrificing user time. Low price does not imply low quality, and I prefer the relative openness of the Android, but I have to admit that Apple does UX pretty well.
> They're "just" a tech company, if a monolithic one. They're not meaningfully improving the lives of humans in a way that lifts millions out of mental illness. Emoji wallpapers are nothing more than distractive features to our inevitable suffering.
This is interesting... uhh that's one of the biggest companies in the world. Not one of the biggest tech companies, one of the biggest companies period, by revenue.
I'd argue they're doing a lot for improving lives of humans, though not necessarily related to mental illness -- that you have to lay at the feet of some of the social media companies and other things.
Emoji wallpapers are distracting features, but what about the people who organize local protests or use their iPhones to look up vital information? Gotta take the good with the bad here -- most of the examples were also pictures of people who were important (i.e. presenters' family members).
For example one of the presentations that really hit me was the easy of parental controls/time limits for devices -- in my mind they've just become the default correct choice for parents who have to grapple with how to control their childrens' exposure to the internet/content. It's a bit of a first world problem, but still it's one that parents the world over will have to deal with and they've chosen to spend time making it easy.
Apple is somewhat sheltered from the bread-and-circus promoters designation in my mind because they really do produce tooling -- iDevices have stayed tools and for the most part are not as surveillance heavy as other similar tools.
> Let's try and temper our praise of what tech companies are actually doing for humans so we can focus on what's important in life: the reduction of human suffering globally, improving outcomes in welfare holistically for all people everywhere.
I agree with this sentiment, but it seems little weirdly moralistic -- the world is actually doing massively better, human suffering is trending downwards. It's not all gone obviously but most of human life is getting better -- Apple can do more to help move that along, but doesn't seem like a reason to downplay their accomplishments either.
Again, I just want to state I'm not a diehard Apple fan, but I think I can reserve the right to be impressed!