owenwil

Yeah, exactly this. The original comment misses a key point: speakers have been the same for decades, but Sonos did add magic sauce that builds on top of that legacy... multi-room audio. I'd argue that's worth the investment, and it's a really great improvement to the audio experience. That's hard to achieve without re-wiring your entire house, and arguably worth the risk/bet on Sonos, which has had a historically really good track record with these things.

The problem is a little more complex, given that Sonos continued to sell the old Play:5 alongside the new one at a steep discount for a number of years. I purchased one in 2016, sold as new by the company, which gave me a good 3 years, but if you don't pay attention to such things as when it was originally released, would be infuriating news...

Google actually had a program that addressed this head-on a few years back, where it retailed 'Google Play Edition' versions of flagship phones like the Galaxy 7, updated directly from Google, with their own factory image and no bloatware. For whatever reason, they killed the program without it really going far or being marketed well, which was a real shame:

https://www.xda-developers.com/discontinued-a-look-at-google...

Google actually had a program that addressed this head-on, where it retailed 'Google Play Edition' versions of flagship phones like the Galaxy S7, updated directly from Google, with their own factory image and no bloatware:

https://www.xda-developers.com/discontinued-a-look-at-google...

We have very different experiences of the global banking system, it seems. To me, US banks are archaic, slow, and backward—and the UK has to be in for close second so it isn't a fair comparison at all.

I have lived/banked in New Zealand, Canada and The Netherlands, all of which are delightfully eons ahead of the US banks almost across the board. For example:

- P2P or bill payments in Canada can be made to any email address and received within 60 minutes for free.

- Splitting a bill or requesting payment in Netherlands is trivial, because the banks all allow you to generate a URL and send it to anyone for instant payment.

- Transfers in NZ are realtime, instant, and validated before you send to ensure its the right person. You can also create accounts online with your government login. Touch to pay exists everywhere since at least 2010.

Meanwhile in the US, checks exist and people go crazy when Apple Pay is accepted at a single chain store. I've never touched a check, and I hope I never need to—and the examples of hoops to jump through are likely because you're new! KYC regulations tend to relax over time, and it can be painful at first almost everywhere. The fintech revolution in Europe between N26, Revolut and the dizzying array of others is evidence we don't need, or want, US banks to do anything. It won't help.

I've been using Windows 10 as my daily driver for web (PHP/Node/JS) development for over two years without the need to recover/format/reinstall at all. This is the exception, rather than the rule, at this point: https://char.gd/blog/2019/the-state-of-switching-to-windows-...

The 'phones home' argument doesn't really add up—there's plenty of control over this at this point, and every OS is calling home, macOS included, to some degree. The advertisements thing happens out of the box, and is trivial to remove (if my memory is correct, Safari harasses you about being the default browser, too, if you try to change it). The updates to add features thing.... isn't an issue for me, but YMMV.

The UX is incrementally improving in every release. Through just the last few major releases, you've gotten Airdrop-style sharing (the new Share menu), full system-wide indexing and instant search, a unified control panel and a ton of other things. They're moving fast, but incrementally enough that it may not be noticable—but I vastly prefer the fast-follow improvements over the 1-3 yearly 'big bang' releases Apple has done with macOS.

You can automate things with Bash now, too, if you like ;)

Sure, it's Windows 10 without any of the cruft—but also, none of the good bits. Believe it or not, but the Windows Store is great; managed updates of everything from Slack to Spotify, without individual updater components. Photos app, with support for HEIC files and so on, built in. These things are actually useful!

Oh man, I'll tell you—Windows 8 was a beast of its own. I think that is how people remember Windows, and assume that Windows 10 is the same. But god, don't remind me of that awful full-screen server start menu..............I remember that's when we actively started to try and go full headless with Windows Server, but it was also half-baked back then.

I was historically a Windows user and started my career as a Windows sysadmin for a few years—I switched to macOS for a few years and came back as it became increasingly buggy and Microsoft's development story changed.

The complaints seem to come from heavily technical folks that think LTSB branches are reasonable things for normal people to run. I wouldn't want to run one on my own machine.

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from.

Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WSL2 and the other developer-focused improvements in tow, most of these are a shitlist of nitpicks, than things you'll run into every day. I switched from macOS about two years back, and couldn't see myself going the other way anymore ever again. But, that said, I can see why people want to stay there! That's the beauty of choice.

These types of posts are based on historical grudges, rather than modern experiences with Windows. Sure, there's going to be annoying things to change out of the box, but every machine, with any OS, has that.

I think they've gotten "engineering" confused with "engineer"—plenty of people are in the engineering org that aren't engineers.

Not only did he not mention PiHole (or the similar, but better, Adguard Home), he didn't seem to be aware that network adblocking is a thing—but who can blame him? It's not exactly trivial unless you're comfortable with a terminal. Is there any sort of commercialized solution for this? I'd love to see Adguard/Pihole devices available off the shelf; with a little marketing I think they could really appeal to a lot of people.

(I looked around and the only 'built in' solution I could find for adblocking is in Eero WiFi's paid subscription, which blocks ads on their wifi router)

I would expect contextual search, rather than "everywhere" search if I was filtering...

Huh, I thought it was getting better across the board, and significantly faster. 1P is actually investing in proper cross-platform support, rather than only macOS, so perhaps it's just less attention to detail? The Windows client has become fantastic.

Wait until you see what Magento plugins are like

And this is the difference between building a brand and trying your fate blindly to a platform's whims. One of these is impossibly hard, but if you win, you control your destiny. The other means your business dies when someone over there decides the "pivot to video" is over, as we have seen repeatedly with Facebook. I know I wouldn't want to be in the latter boat.

As someone who was running tech at an e-commerce/hardware startup with $xxM+ in annual online sales, and ran on top of Magento 2, it is an unmitigated disaster that will sink any business that doesn't have endless money to throw at it.

We had great Magento developers working on it and could barely keep it stable under even moderate load. To scale up, if you're a heavily trafficked store, you need to pay a six figure annual license fee, or you can't shard/load balance your database. Without the Enterprise plan, your site can't easily do zero-downtime deploys, and deploys take about 30 minutes of full outages to get out the door. Editing anything took about 36 clicks, which carried the risk of corrupting a language you weren't editing. Deploying a language pack requires an outage. Deploying new CSS requires an outage. There were ways around this, which we used, but the extensions and ecosystem are so poor that I wouldn't encourage anyone to use them—we ran into one instance where installing an extension would bring the site to it's knees, at random, because the developer had hand-rolled an image-resizer for some reason to build thumbnails.

I'm an infrastructure engineer/developer originally, and I figure, how bad can it be? We'll ignore the snake oil and scale up with good developers and cloud hosting, along with best practices.

I can list how incredibly poorly built Magento 2 is for hours, but I've never seen anything like it. We made it work, but it cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it to "doesn't break" level of stability.

It's outrageous particularly because the entire ecosystem is designed to shunt you toward expensive licensing that requires NDAs to be signed, certified developers to be used, and ever-escalatingly ridiculous hosting fees (at one point, I was quoted a $1500/month virtual machine to properly handle our environment).

Meanwhile, when we wanted to do a flash sale, Magento was so complicated and slow to deal with, we made the call to literally create a second store, using Shopify, to run our limited time sale. Not only did it take maybe 1-2 days to get it set up and working, we ran 1M in sales through it within the first 8 hours of it being online, without any outages, stability issues or anything else, without ever needing to do a payment gateway's time consuming PCI compliance security audit, either. We got paid out within a few days of even first signing up.

I think people underestimate, often, how expensive open source can be, and one red flag, in the case of Magento should be that anyone that isn't a "Magento developer" is terrified of touching it. (I have stories about how hard it is to even develop on your own machine, and how literally all roads lead to their Enterprise plan, with no way out, but that's for another day)

I dunno...the story is that Apple killed two machines today: - The non-touchbar MacBook Pro (RIP, function row)

- The 12" "MacBook" (which I adored, largely because it was so tiny)

What's strange is that it appears that this was a streamlining effort—but if you get into the weeds and look at the "base" model 13" MacBook Pro, it's not the same machine: it has two Thunderbolt ports, rather than four, despite sharing the same moniker as the higher-end MacBook Pro. Go up a model, and you get four for more money along with the better processor, which isn't immediately clear, either.

That means it's got fewer thunderbolt lanes, as well, which is a classic nickel and dime move that's going to make it even more confusing given most people just buy the base model.

Now, my question is: are they clearing the decks at the low-end 12" for a clamshell/ARM laptop? It seems incredibly obvious that it'll start at the bottom to avoid disrupting the pros.

...all of which is because the drivers/config are proprietary

This isn't the actual story—the story is that Apple killed two machines today:

- The non-touchbar MacBook Pro (RIP, function row)

- The 12" "MacBook" (which I adored, largely because it was so tiny)

What's strange is that it appears that this was a streamlining effort—but if you get into the weeds and look at the "base" model 13" MacBook Pro, it's not the same machine: it has two Thunderbolt ports, rather than four, despite sharing the same moniker as the higher-end MacBook Pro. Go up a model, and you get four for more money along with the better processor, which isn't immediately clear, either.

That means it's got fewer thunderbolt lanes, as well, which is a classic nickel and dime move that's going to make it even more confusing given most people just buy the base model.

This isn't the story—the story is that Apple killed two machines today:

- The non-touchbar MacBook Pro (RIP, function row)

- The 12" "MacBook" (which I adored, largely because it was so tiny)

What's strange is that it appears that this was a streamlining effort—but if you get into the weeds and look at the "base" model 13" MacBook Pro, it's not the same machine: it has two Thunderbolt ports, rather than four, despite sharing the same moniker as the higher-end MacBook Pro. Go up a model, and you get four for more money along with the better processor, which isn't immediately clear, either.

That means it's got fewer thunderbolt lanes, as well, which is a classic nickel and dime move that's going to make it even more confusing given most people just buy the base model.

Uh, Apple has less than 8% of the market[1]. Why do you think it has the "vast majority" of sales? I'm assuming there's confirmation bias here but the vast majority of laptop sales are definitely not Apple, and not even at the high end—even if we exclude corporate sales.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/21/mac-market-share/

This seems like an incredibly good place for a data center, particularly given it already even comes with multiple fibre uplinks...and incredibly low temperatures.

But "just plugging in one USB device" wasn't even what happened in this post. The amount of steps described inside literally were 10x what it takes to just build a PC, boot it, install games and play ️

I swore off Sony when my TV got an update to add advertising to the volume slider on the screen, which was the last straw. Weirdly enough, I replaced it with a Samsung, which appears to have ads if configured into any North American country, but if you select any GDPR-included territory, the ads don't appear at all

Huh, Paper was the first time I thought Dropbox might actually be able to go beyond files. It's one of their best products since their original, simple tooling was released.

iCloud has been on Windows for years and this is the same unusable, out of date app...they just listed it in the Microsoft store.