One day the eu will yell at them to do things normally and then Cook will go on stage to showcase what an awesome idea they had that nobody thought of before: “standards!”. Wait no, that’s usb c.
Side-rant over.
Unless of course you stick to pure alcohol or distilled water…
I'll give you that keyboards are hard but my thinkpad had a good keyboard with a drip tray and drainage hole.
Here's one on Amazon with good reviews https://www.amazon.co.uk/Keyboard-Waterproof-Ultra-Compact-P...
In general if you can wash it once (meaning components that cannot handle water are not used in this), the screws rusting out will be the next thing that gets you from washing.
See the drainage holes at the bottom: https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_IMG_...
If it cost an extra $100 to make my laptop keyboard water proof, I think it'd be a hard sell for me.
Problem is, then they sell 40% less keyboards.
If instead they thin down the metal in the switches ever so slightly, then they break 2 months after the warranty expires and they sell 40% more...
The old model M's also had easy to replace keycaps so you could take them off and wash as often as you want. Only downside is the need to put them back on in the right place each time, which is tedious.
Not all electronic components are water safe, but most are. I have no idea how you figure out if your device is or not without taking it apart. If you do this "often" expect that screws will rust, or minerals will build up - each causing problems. However if you just wash once a year you can get a lot of junk out.
Plug the ending of the usb somehow (3d printed part?) and it would work?
Lenovo definitely has splash resistant laptops, and most semi-rugged devices are spill-safe, but spilling coffee is still a service event as the cream ruins the keyboard.
Iphones have glass backs for a reason. Sales boost
Although a premium brand could do it.
My guy have you use a water bottle? There's plenty of experience in making waterproof containers although maybe not by SWEs.
I don't know whether I have a Microsoft account or not.
I didn't want to have one, obviously. But at some point I wanted to use Visual Studio and setting that up required me to create a Microsoft account. I continued not to use that account as an account on my computer, because why on earth would I do that.
So, other than using Visual Studio, that account never did anything at all, sort of like you'd expect from an account that you forced someone to create under duress.
One day I opened Visual Studio and a popup message displayed, telling me that because of what appeared to be fraudulent behavior by my Microsoft account, it was being revoked or disabled or whatever. (But I was still free to continue using Visual Studio.)
OK.
And that's the core problem. We stopped making tech and started making walled-garden "ecosystems." Apple is the most egregious, but everyone else is doing it too.
What ever happened to open standards, cross-platform, interoperability?
I never wanted a world where I have to choose all Apple tech, or all Google tech, or All Microsoft, or whatever just to get devices and software that integrate and play nicely together. When I was younger I remember being relatively platform agnostic. I had windows and Linux PCs, they dual booted without Windows killing grub every update, I didn't need to have my kernel signed with Microsoft's key. I had a macbook, an Android phone, wired headphones. My music was local on a network share and I used it with local music players across all my computers.
None of those ever pestered me for an account, or tried to push me to buy more of their "ecosystem," or sell me a subscription to use basic features.
Now everything is a sales funnel. Every app or service wants your email, every device wants an account, everybody is always trying to upsell you on something. We stopped making great tech products a long time ago and are now just extracting rent.
I used to be optimistic about tech. I dreamed of a world of openness and interoperability, not lock-in and ecosystems.
The only problem here is apple, I don't think it seems fair to include MS and Google, they're much less walled than apple is. Maybe they could do better too, but apple is much worse.
Apple ID, on the other hand - if you use an Apple device then a whole lot of (safety) features are literally tied to an Apple a/c and don't even exist without it. I can't remember I ever had a MSFT ID.
I dream of a day when device makers are forced to expose APIs where one can add a device account provider a/c or device id provider a/c which offers various features like theft protection, remote lock et cetera or a self hosted solution. Yeah, that's just a dream.
[0] I do use one for work/testing and there's a throwaway Google a/c added on that created using a disposable email from SimpleLogin.
Walled gardeners be gardening
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_le...
And Apple being Apple, they designed their own solution. I actually like having a Secure Enclave on my device with easy biometric authentication across all of my devices
Calling for standards is a great thing usually but to be perfectly honest, the current ecosystem of FIDO, webauthn, TOTP, etc is a nightmare. I have three yubikeys and three or four protocols to manage on them.
People won’t adopt that, but they will adopt Apple’s.
Ever since the Great iCloud Hack of 2014, Apple dialed up their end user auth to the max. [1]
It was after that hack when bad actors from around the world realized getting into someone's Apple account could be as lucrative (or more) than their bank or email, and so here we are today.
I'm not sure what else Apple can do here. People have made it a habit to store their most sensitive and private secrets in iCloud, stuff which can't be refunded or bought back. I think having such an annoying, stringent, and walled-in auth system is probably the only way Apple PMs are able to move past the disaster of 2014.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/tim-cook-says-apple-to-add-secu...
Totally absurd to blame anyone but apple for that. Apple pushes features, like iCloud, so they can do show and tell every year and make their stock go up. More a stock go up business than anything else. Features, like iCloud, are the problem. People who like that stuff are also the loudest fanboys and often the least technologically literate too.
I’m not even sure if it’s absurd, frankly.
Mind elaborating on this? I used a Mac without an iPhone for years when the M1 came out. SMS 2FA, and then later enrolling two Yubikeys, worked just fine for 2FA, as did using the Mac itself as a passkey.
That never happened.
Wasn’t Tim, I guess it’d have been too embarrassing…
I’m pretty sure they almost spent more time talking about the colours of the phone.