182 karma · joined May 29, 2022
A lot of people will disagree that Apple had great attention to detail before because of the things they choose not to focus on. But I think what was counter arguable before is that they were meeting their own internal vision with a high expectation for quality, and that that vision covered every part of the experience. The counter argument doesn't feel as valid today.
Visual customizations get upstreamed into the system accessibility settings. Extra functions are exposed exclusively in Shortcuts for you to hack together an automation feature yourself. For a fully feature supported app Apple would probably say go pay for an app (and them through fee) on the App Store.
For example with your future alarm.. you could get another app or you could create a 'Time of Day' Shortcut automation which checks everyday to see if the date is the date you want the alarm on; if it is the day create the alarm. Delete the alarm on the next day. A (not so) fun fact about automating Alarms before iOS 17: you could only delete alarms through Siri and not Shortcuts lol...
I do think autonomous delivery services will be the more important use case. I expect people without personal vehicles to use delivery services much more ubiquitously, and will end up travelling themselves personally much less.
There will likely be a period where some of these commuters will actually loan out their vehicle for taxiing people or products for people while they work. I just imagine eventually we'd see stripped down for product delivery only vehicles, removing a lot of the demand for personal loaning.
If we put someone in jail, as in to disable their ability to interface with society, we would have the expectation to feed and shelter them decently for that duration. Removing access to funds under the emergency act has no baseline duty of care expected from the government, despite government action disabling them from acquiring food or shelter independently in modern society for a number of days beyond which someone could starve. The number of days is unpredictably constrained by popular sentiment in a heated moment not a pre-encoded ethical baseline.
I don't think this hypothetical and the potential grave consequences is going to be often likely, yet i don't see why it need be a possibility to entertain.
Though I think there's another perspective to entertain here that isn't just about the industrial design style of the phone or display. Instead, think about how many discrete products general computing devices have subsumed. The disappointment comes across to me less that a slab is consumer computers dominate form, it's that the slab has made the rest of environment more sparse and now a slab is the sole focus point.
Industrial development only requires a single road connected residential tile to grow off the full city's industrial demand. The same goes for Commercial. Residential will fully develop with just a single commercial tile on its road network.
It is broken in a realistic sense definitely, but it's also why I'll always play it regardless of which realistic transportation city game i'm also playing. I could never abstractly brush-in a city like I can in SC2k.
This is sort of true but the full truth is less straight forward.
On unfocused apps you can still send through scrolling and (mostly) perform single clicks with command + click... you can also without focus send single clicks to certain controls the developer has ad hoc allowed 'click through' on...
For mouse oriented users I'd recommend trying a focus follows mouse experience like AutoRaise [1]. But I mean, it's not like this solution existing absolves Apple of the broader criticism here about what they prioritize and deprioritize for the default user interface experience.
It's just odd to me that despite its price it feels closer to a superthin upscaled e, rather than a superthin upscaled 17 or instead being extralight. Now I imagine they didn't have a lot of weight to lose given how optimized for weight phone components were already. The Air branding just had me hoping they had a bigger engineering statement to make than what they did.
Which makes the marketing feel a bit incongruent with what we've gotten here. It's not noticeably more lightweight than what is currently offered, it's less featureful than the 17, but more expensive than the 17 (albeit perhaps prettier).
It seems like engineering failed to make a true superlight in its class despite narratively trying to re-evoke what we really did experience with the original MacBook Air. Instead we got an elegant up sized 16e priced like a Pro.
You are comparing two things that aren't always equal as if they are. For example, if someone tries not to fit in, thus resulting in not fitting in, they would also not be considered authentic.
Authenticity is graded on why you are trying to be, not on the result you achieve. If you see authenticity in the way you describe you will be lead astray in finding it in people
It would seem to me because user browsers are user-modifiable open source, there really shouldn't be any deep expectation by any web content producer that the generated code into DOM will be displayed in any user consistent manner. But I suppose if that was accepted rational, that means ad blockers should sit deeper in the browser (or at the network level) to avoid problems with countries that view personal modification as digital copyright infringement if the license doesn't allow it. That should secure ad blocking — until legislation specifically bans ad blockers as a function completely...
It feels like it would be a big step to move from gatekeeping personal modification, to compelling code generation by the user from the framework of copyright.
Lightweight markups in most basic usage are essentially punctuation extensions to natural language. It enables the UX in that what feels and looks like punctuation doubles as the effective key command you'd want to know for changing formatting modes anyways. This is why you'll find people like writers who like it.
Nonetheless I do still believe humans will continue to be the more cost efficient way to come up with and guide new ideas. Many human performed services will remain desirable because of its virtue and our sense of emotion and taste for a moment that other humans are feeling too. But how much of the populous does that engage? I couldn't guess right now. Though if I was to imagine what might make things turn out better it would be that AI is personally ownable, and that everyone owns, at least in title, some energy production which they can do things with.
That's not to say I disagree with the criticism to reuse free will. I don't feel things like coercion-less actions regardless of a casual environment is best represented by 'free'+'will' even if the original definition didn't pre-exist; even if it might present an argument for responsibility on a specific person to still apply.
Annoying? Perhaps. But personally I just don't believe most people see philosophy through such a monolithic lens that they would be like, "compatiblists did something annoying so Kant on another topic will have to go unread".
I'd be more interested in getting AI companies training with publicly scraped datasets to have them available to other AI trainers for free. The load scrapers put on the web is out of control.
At a basic level i just want the interface to have good voice to text recognition. if it's a question ask an LLM, if it's a special recognized command run it instead.
At a dev/pro-user level let me define statement patterns (regex or semantics) where i can trigger a shortcut and parse some input from a single statement.
By all means, regen the custom responses devs and users setup with the Siri personality LLM so it sounds like Siri all the time. Just set the interface free already.
Work surfaces like the desk as an idea has existed and had been refined for millennias as human interactive spaces before being borrowed and codified to work on computers.
it's not bad to look into but i don't think its surprising to find that human physiology hasn't changed, and so the interface environment ideas are still useful for similar situations
For example, in my opinion Trump seems distinct in recent world politics. Instead of power being expressed through relationships, cultural exports and economics, Trump's notion of power is expressed through the property you have, how it looks, and that it is used or how it is used.
That example would be a theory that explains why the approach of "51st state" or "Rivera of the Middle East" is chosen.
(Though there is more you could theorize here: from ego, urgency, or trolling, to things like strategically preemptively folding on competing in a multipolar economic world and settling for simply western hemisphere sole influence and control)
I think he'll continue to be the main cause of constraints to realizing his visions maximally.
For this reason, once we can look back on this time in retrospect, there's a way this plays out where he may just be a horse that ran away. [0]
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse
Although perhaps emergency purposes aren't the only reason to have reserve assets..
I do think broadly we're probably oversaturated with the flavor of high definition and 'realness' in the mainstream. But I don't think this is the end of taste evolution. Recently I've been looking back on movie posters from past decades. I think movie posters and advertisements are decent to examine here as they play to the mass taste of their time. In isolation of their moment and market there was a uniformity in style, yet over time it still progresses despite keeping it's core features.
Globalism is perhaps disappointing here because it means we have few equally sized parallel 'mainstreams' taking place. But at least with the internet, you can still just as rapidly find many actively diverging styles that are otherwise relatively niche to the mainstream.[1]