Apple is intentionally hostile to sharing files and makes it very hard. Improved slightly in recent IOS versions, but still super hard. You can’t just email yourself mp3s and Play them like normal music on your phone, you have to use a third party app or a PC or something to transfer them to iTunes.

in all seriousness, there really are very few reasons for sharing audio files these days. The only ones I can think of are:

- finding a work that is not online (like a specific live record or like 85% of early 80s hardcore that hasn't been remastered),

- pirating (which music streaming services has made ubiquitous for 99.95% of people who consume music; thanks, Sean Parker!), or

- audiophiles buying $10,000 balanced headphone cables with gold TRS jacks (because mics don't belong in headphones, _obviously_)who only listen to test tracks in FLAC format (who don't have newer iPhones anyway)

as far as i remember, iPhones were able to play loose audio files, but you couldn't catalogue them into iTunes, which was annoying given that iPhoneOS (only 2010's kids remember this) didn't have a built-in file manager. moreover, most of those files came compressed (_Mediafire's anger intensifies_), and iPhones didn't have a publically-usable extraction utility, which made working with them a huge chore.

I think the MP3 player in its earliest form was a concession that we lived with (because it was easier than dealing with jackets of CDs and anti-skip sucking) that was absolutely destined for a streaming-only world (because my gut says that MOST people never wanted to get into the audio collection business; they only want to listen to their favorite songs from their glory days in college)

I also question this whenever I see that "people mostly use locked-down devices now". But I don't have any numbers; honestly it wouldn't surprise me to be wrong.

> Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement

Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer.

To me, the people interested in the home lab movement are those who already were interested in doing "more" with computers, as opposed to just "consuming recommended content".

I know it's my case and I do it now because computers are cheaper, and it's easier to find quiet ones.

And yeah I know you can unlock Android but it's really really fringey. Most people don't. And that's like 95% most.

It used to be that the designed feature or function would be very close to the implementation, but that really hasn't been the case for a very long time. People aren't buying "a large bank of memory addresses" but rather "a device that contains pictures", for lack of a better example.

With the watch a customer isn't actually buying a package of sensors, ARM-cores, BMS, Lithium-Ion battery, and display, but they are buying the experience of having a device that tells the time, notifies them if something happens and can track some aspects of their life so they have an overview of it later (be it for turning their life into a game or simply tracking their energy use/consumption). And then all of that for at least an entire day.

Why would the implementation of the feature result in a sensor that can be polled at a high frequency but is actually only pushed at a lower frequency? It's anyone's guess but here is my guess:

The sensor has its own specs but those are set in isolation and might differ based on implementation inside a casing, so they only way to get true data would be to have some form of calibration or offset where a low-power CPU core for sensor tasks just gets the raw values and applies the offset/calibration. Next, there is power consumption where they might have found the perfect balanced duty-cycle between data that has had enough time to cool down and be useful as well as power requirements for the sensor core and the sensor itself. So they have some sort of RT OS doing reading, processing etc. on a low-power core at a lower interval to get a 1% battery life increase. Do that for 10 sensors and suddenly it's worth it. It's quite an investment to have a team of people dive into the hardware, firmware and application development to do all that, so it's likely not a matter of "how can we spend a multi-million R&D chunk on making the hardware less useful", but rather some "how do we make millions of mass produced devices use a little bit less power" concept.

This is also where the push vs. pull comes from, instead of having every application do some interrupt or scheduling, you just ask to be part of a list of observers and when the data changes you get notified. Much more efficient, and if everyone has to do that, there is a much smaller chance of the user experience suddenly changing and support personnel (phone, in-store) getting complaints about something they can't fix because some third party app did it.

My hot water kettle heats water, why can't I wire it up to be my whole house heater?

If that paraphrase is true then Joel Spolsky has no idea what he's talking about on this subject.

Without a doubt the key feature of Napster was that students could download-- not stream-- music. For free. Students would consequently fill their harddrives with everything they thought they'd want to listen to in their lifetime, often buying 2nd harddrives to populate with more mp3s. (Well, that and pron.) Keep in mind many dorms were still using dialup connections during this period-- thus there was a pattern of students running to the library computer lab to download a few mp3 albums to zip disk (yes, zip disks) then bring them back to the dorms.

What facilitated immediate listening/viewing was sharing directories in Windows with the rest of the LAN on college campuses.

Quick digression to argue against the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect-- while your paraphrase of Joel Spolsky expresses an idea that is indeed false, I reserve judgement on anything else Spolsky has ever written (and frankly on whatever his verbatim words were on this same topic). I mean what kind of pathetic, impulsive nimrod would I become if I simply through out an entire body of someone's work on a single passing impression?

Edit: Just to cover my bases-- in every case I can remember, students who were playing music in their dorms or a shared space had winamp or some other such player loaded up with a playlist selected from thousands from their own collection. Napster was the place to download songs for your collection, not the place to build an ad-hoc playlist in realtime. Maybe there are cases where people were doing this. But the overwhelming supermajority of Napster users were using it because they could replicate a subset of the whole to build their own lifetime library of music. For free.

2nd edit: I almost forgot-- nearly everyone in the dorms would share a directory when they hooked up to the LAN. The process of finding immediately playable content was to browse the various shared directories in windows, or use Windows search on them which IIRC worked incredibly slow or not at all. This was a common practice because again, most people were still on dial-up and couldn't download anything from Napster nearly as fast as you could on the computer lab networks.

Later, Youtube made both music and video files immediately playable. Around that same time, torrent tech started to improve to the point where you could stream while downloading as well as do keyword searches with vastly improved results. This is all to say that Napster kicked off a pattern of college kids grabbing free content, and this proliferation of content caused the development of realtime playback of discoverable content.

So what you paraphrased above isn't exactly "wet streets caused rain." It's more like "the issue isn't the rain-- it's the wet streets." I'm honestly not sure which is worse. :)