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kleiba

It's amazing how seemingly trivial things turn out to be really hard to be in practice. Like:

- sharing files between two phones

- printing a page on that printer over there

- getting the projector to display my screen (correctly, or at all)

- getting my wife not to click on a link in a random email

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For the first 3, that's mostly because technology has stopped being a productivity tool and became an ad delivery vehicle with some vestigial (and deteriorating) productivity features.

Except Apple is the one making file sharing hard between non-Apple devices and they aren't making most of their money on ads

- sharing files between two phones when Apple's monopolistic tendencies are involved

I've been using Quick Share to send files between different makes of Android phone for ages. This is entirely on Apple.

I wish that would work when you don't have internet.

Had to fall back to old school bluetooth, and like 1 MB/s to share a video with a friend.

It does, and it works to windows machines too

Does it use internet to open up the connection? Because I vividly remember the share screen not even finding the other device (and vice versa). Could also be extremely slow internet being worse than no connection at all

I’ve been using AirDrop to send files between different mames of iOS phone and tablet for ages.

The fact that you are impressed that different products from the same brand are interoperable between them says volumes about Apple and Apple users.

Android didn't have a way to share files between them for the longest time. Initially there was Beam but it never worked. The first semi-reliable way to exchange files between two android phones, without using a third party utility, was Nearby Share dates from 2020.

So yeah, it's a low bar, but one that only Apple bothered to clear from the get go apparently.

Ah, uneducated smugness, another Apple trait. It's been possible to share files between any android since 2009, via Bluetooth.

I am still think that transfering state between devices is the next big thing(tm) waiting to happen. I am working on a file on my macbook, now I want to seamslessly move the whole application working on it to my nearby Windows machine and just continue. Seems impossible right now.

Apple has been iterating on Handover and Continuity for many years and it’s still not perfect (maybe it’s better on a newer stable of devices, I couldn’t say). But it’s clearly challenging even within a tightly coordinated ecosystem; I suspect crossing the platform divide reliably would be extremely hard.

Seems like that would be pretty huge.

Even expecting state on a single device to remain is a pretty tall order. Something randomly happens at least once a week which forces me to close all my browser tabs, either the OS or the browser restarts. Often while I'm working.

I suspect that just having a single device for everything is more likely.

> It's amazing how seemingly trivial things turn out to be really hard to be in practice

There is nothing "amazing" there, just big tech trying to lock you up in their ecosystem and make your use of "other" devices as difficult as it can be.

And of course deny it along the way.

Though I think it is important to point out, that the reasons are very different ones. It is not due to some technological difficulties. It is more. about ruthless companies throwing logs between our legs in some cases, then just lack of skill and quality in some cases, and people not being very high on the computer literacy scale.

I don’t understand why printing is still so difficult in 2025

It’s not if you pay the price. I have a Brother printer (inkjet) and it literally just works. I can go months without printing anything, then I just print a document from my phone or laptop and it just works.

This is something that should be normal but I’m still amazed every time I use it because I had an Epson before and the experience was… not the same.

+1 for Brother. Works flawlessly without any drivers. The only pain point is the setup - I have the cheapo laser one without any screen, and AFAIK you need Windows software for the initial WiFi setup. After this, it's not needed anymore.

Yeah, my Brother printer just works too. No other brands seem to.

Another +1 for Brother. They even manage to continue printing sanely after paper jams. Linux, Mac, Android, iPhone, all print with zero effort.

Printer manufacturers make it difficult. There are standard printing protocols but printer manufacturers will disable those until you've installed their ad-filled, subscription-filled app. If it weren't for the industrial sabotage, just plugging a USB printer into a computer or clicking "add printer" from a network browser would just work out of the box.

Mopria pretty much universally fixes printing on all competent printers by smoothing over the rough edges of IPP.

If you're on a Linux or Mac computer which uses CUPS, its pretty easy.

> getting my wife not to click on a link in a random email

Hot take: MUAs should simply not make links clickable/copyable on render, or even strip any URI away completely.

Just tell your MUA to only display the plaintext version. You should do that anyways.

I mean that to protect the proverbial technology-challenged grandma it should be the default.

And that it should even s,http://.*,,g them out.

> I mean that to protect the proverbial technology-challenged grandma it should be the default.

Yes, I agree.

> And that it should even s,http://.*,,g them out.

No. Links are very useful and constantly present in conversation and manually written into messages. Do you seriously propose to basically ban them by default? Also I don't want the MUA to censor messages, that would also lead to a lot of confusion.

If anything, they could not render them as hyperlinks by default, but stripping them out, no.

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