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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.

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The iphone is so useful they can probably ride it for a couple more decades at least. I would still buy it.

From a technology or engineering perspective, I have no idea how to work with Apple.

MacOS (or whatever they're calling it now) for all its faults is still probably the best desktop OS for getting things done without having to fiddle around much. ChromeOS is close but still so far in many ways.

And for audio production - I'm just a dabbler, really, but I've been able to do some really impressive things with just GarageBand and a Fender Mustang Micro amp-plug over USB-C. It "just works" unlike my experience on Linux recently, where there are lots of little bits that are genius, but I couldn't manage to figure out how to get a basic midi synth working with a DAW that had a UI that was designed for humans. (Jack is amazing, though - being able to do arbitrary audio filter chains with random pieces of software is seriously cool.)

> ChromeOS is close but still so far in many ways.

I continue to be impressed by ChromeOS. With the Linux development environment (Debian VM), it is a brilliant work environment.

Add Android apps as well and ChromeOS is an awesome convergence platform. There are Chromebooks that are high enough quality that I don't miss anything about Apple OS or Microsoft Windows.

> And for audio production

For specialty use-cases, driver support will favour Windows and Apple OS.

And gaming is still Windows-first, although Linux is improving.

Yep, Chromebook are basically a sufficient information appliance for most people. I think this is why Apple is going to try a cheaper MacBook.

The MacBook Air is nice but it still too expensive for most people that only want to browser the web, use social media and edit a few documents once in a while. Their advantage in chip power and efficiency is not enough because people buying this won't make use of the power anyway and will rarely use it long enough at once for battery life to matter that much.

It's not driver support for audio stuff. Drivers are great; haven't had any issues at all. The UI for the software, especially DAWs, is just plain garbage. It shouldn't be this bad; I'm halfway tempted to start my own project to put together a fork of one of these DAWs with a UX that doesn't suck.

Technically a lot of stuff for linux audio is amazing; it just lacks the level of polish to enable someone to actually just use it out of the box.

macOS, iPadOS and watchOS are all still the best at what they do.

Me installing an app to transfer a movie to my girlfriend's iPhone, but we don't have a cable for it. You need a third party app called LocalSend, but that can't work, because the only WiFi we have access to is a complicated university gateway that won't support LocalSend, so I open up a mobile hotspot, but somehow iPhones can't connect to that. So we give up.

Airdrop?

Airdrop on Android?

Indeed, the UI designers are 100% transferable to AI R&D.

I really want to be quite harsh, but instead I’ll try to constructively explain it; if you spend time, resources, focus and money on making your product worse like Apple are and actively not make your AI assistant better for 15 years then there’s a problem. You as Apple can obviously hire some AI R&D and software engineers to improve your options. My comments about transparent UI are the tip of a much larger iceberg.

It's ironic because Microsoft took their eye off smart phones to make Windows 8 transparent aqua interface

I don’t remember Windows 8 being particularly transparent. Windows 8 is remembered for the start screen with the modern tiles.

Right, I was thinking of Windows Vista before it

Now that you mention it, liquid glass does resemble windows vista.

Everyone is struggling to create AI tools. And just because you don't approve of how they spend time to make their UI look "fancy", doesn't really mean much. You are not a normal user/customer.

This sounds like you take slights toward Apple weirdly personally.

Not really. It more seems that you’re trying to make it personal.

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