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It does seem like a confusing lineup, in terms of current gen models you've got, in ascending order of price

iPad ($349) iPad Mini ($499) iPad Air 11" ($599) iPad Air 13" ($799) iPad Pro 11" ($999) iPad Pro 13" ($1299)

So from a pricing perspective, it does kind of make sense. The naming is all over the place though.

The iPad Mini is more expensive and better specced than the iPad. And then the Air sounds like it should be a light version of the iPad, but is actually better specced than the iPad.

My guess is that non technical people don't care about things like names and spec, but buy iPads based on pricing. And if people are buying the entry level iPad, why drop it?

Awesome idea, some suggestions (to fit my use case)

My annual leave resets on April 1st, so being able to change the year would be handy.

I worked compressed hours (I have every Friday off)

I can carry over 5 unused days to the next year, and buy 5 more days. This might impact what days I take off.

Surely the specific use case could be achieved in some privacy respecting way?

For example, you could send hashes of the user's contacts, they could be compared to each other, but not reverse engineered?

It is really difficult to do, a few thoughts from previous places I've worked at...

I don't know anything about your technical stack, but I'm going to assume they're all solved for. The easiest is if your codebase is all in a monorepo and all uses the same stack.

It gets a lot harder if you have lots of projects, and you have to build a library that all the other teams have to import.

One way to make this easier, is to make your component library code public, so that a whole class of permissions based issues are avoided.

The rest of the problems, I think are cutural, not technical.

Find an "anchor tenant", that is a fairly big team that own an important product, get that team on board and build something for them. Having a big, high profile team use your library will give smaller teams the confidence to use your library. This is basically using conway's law to your advantage.

Geography plays an interesting role, a place I worked at had 2 major engineering offices in different cities. Each office had developed its own framework, and teams used the framework in the city that they were based in.

Graduates played a valuable role, our grads rotated teams every 6 months for 2 years. They played a huge role in encouraging adoption of libraries, as they'd take learned knowledge from one team to another.

My experience of driving in the US is that stop signs are used a lot, so people get numb and treat them as Give Way/Yield signs (where you don't need to come to a dead stop, but must give way to any oncoming traffic).

In the UK, Stop signs are only used when there is limited visibility/blind corners, so if you see one, you know that you definitely need to stop. Once you step and creep forward, you'll realise why a stop sign was needed.

> I think most teachers would agree that, for pupils without a significant attendance problem, a week away (particularly if it's towards the end of a term) is not going to make a realistic difference when it comes to attainment for most students.

I generally agree with this, but discretion doesn't scale. If you allow teachers to use discretion to approve absences, it will create the opportunity unfair system, where people who the teacher likes more may get preferential treatment. And even if the system isn't actually unfair, it'll create the perception of unfairness (Joe was allowed to go early, why can't my son?).

It's also way easier for a school to say "no early absences, that's the national policy", and not have to get into constant arguments with parents.

Allegedly, Apple have built in privacy features so they can't associate individual users with routes, or know what the entire route is[1]. Apple does show traffic data in the app, so they obviously do collect the data somehow.

When Apple built maps, the car project was still alive, so it would have been a factor in deciding on the investment. They could still partner with a car manufacturer and use the data.

I do suspect that my first point was key in green lighting Apple Maps. Google could have asked for more and more money to provide maps for Apple, or they could pull out completely, and force users to use the App Store app, which would have left the product direction of Maps completely out of Apple's hands.

[1] https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/03/13/apple-maps-navigati...

Maps is table stakes for a smartphone, and having such a key feature provided by your main competitor is a huge risk. So purely on that basis, it could be worth it.

Then, on top of that, there is value in the data you're able to collect. Traffic data is really valuable. Tracking the movement of vehicles and pedestrians lets you create very accurate maps based on "real world" data, you could use it to figure out really specific things like traffic light timings, diversions, pedestrian crossings, parking space, layout of private roads...

At one point, Apple was working on a car, if you were making a self driving car, all that data would be useful for you, and beacuse of the value of it, competitors may not even sell it to you. So your only option is to generate it yourself.

As for transit data, that is fairly simple, most transit agencies will publish their timetables in GTFS format, there are tools to automatically export this in scheduling software. That will probably get your 90% of the way there, so you might have a few on the groud people in major cities to tweak and make it more accurate, which is nothing for a company on the scale of Apple.

The most interesting thing for me was the Iconian Fonts website. One guy who is a "commercial transaction attorney for a global software and service company", that makes fonts as a hobby.

On his commerical use page, he just asks for a $20 donation if you use a font commercially. I wonder if he realised that his fonts would be used in billion dollar movie franchises.

These feature phones didn't have (many) third party apps. Smartphones are all rectangular touch screens, so creating an app that works on different devices doesn't require huge amounts of work (technical and design).

If manufacturers come out with phones that stray too far from the rectangular touchscreen paradigm, the majority of app developers aren't going to customise their app for the phone, unless it's really succesful.

I used to make apps for Smart TVs, when Samsung release their "Sero" rotating TV, supporting portrait orientation AND the orientation changing whilst in the app was too much work, so we just ran it in a letterbox mode.

The article says it only shows the message if your end destination supports contactless

They also employ what I call the "slow drip"...

An aircraft is out of position, so the flight is definitely going to be cancelled, but instead of cancelling the flight, every 10 minutes, they'll announce a further 10 minute delay to the flight.

If you get frustrated and leave before its officially cancelled, there's no compensation to pay.

The moment it hits 3 hours, and compensation will have to be paid, the flight is suddenly cancelled.

I often think about my partner's pregnancy journey, when she was pregnant she was given a folder which had all sorts of forms in. For every appointment she went to, she'd bring the folder in and the staff would read the existing pages, and add their own (results of scans etc...)

Due to some minor complications, her book ended up being quite full, and we went to lots of places, some hospitals, some GPs (which are private companies), and they could all read and add to this book.

In the UK, you can rock up to any hospital with maternity facilities when you're in labour, and have your baby there. You bring your folder with you, and they can read the notes from previous doctors. Once the baby is born, you hand the notes in, and they are collated together and put on your NHS record.

I often think about making a digital version of that. How difficult it'd be to build something that worked across all the systems that different healthcare providers use, is reliable, and secure.

Sometimes, analog is best.

What country was this? If it was a European subsidiary, then would you have not have been subject to the employment protection of the country's laws?

I genuinely think that Windows 2000 was the perfect aesthetic.

It had just the right amount of skeuomorphism, without going overboard; probably because of hardware limitations.

What I think happened is that as computers and phones got more and more powerful, developers and designers wanted to use the UI to show off a bit. Culuminating in mad animations like a shredder destroying your old boarding pass in Apple Wallet.

Then there was a complete rejection of skeuomorphic design with iOS7, and it's just got more and more extreme since then.

Do you live in a city with a grid based road system? In a country with more organic road networks, that wouldn't work

I once paid for a car with Apple Pay (it was far over the £100 limit)

Unless your business model is to get acquired by one of the supermarkets

There is an app in the UK called Lollipop, which works like Hello Fresh and the likes, except instead of delivering the ingredients to your house, it just adds the ingredients to the basket of your supermarket shop (and takes a commission).

To me, that seems like the logical evolution of meal kit services; zero marginal costs by outsourcing the logistics to companies that already do it at scale.

https://www.lollipopai.com/

Starlink is being used by the Ukraine military, so presumably that horse has bolted?

- Interchange fees (Monzo take ~1% of every card transaction)

- Packaged account fees (Monzo Plus, Premium and business Pro)

- Lending (Overdrafts, Personal Loans, Credit Card)

- Interest on bank deposits

“Once we get electric planes” is such a handwavy statement. We are so far off getting anything close to an electric commercial passenger plane.

The environmental cost Of train infrastructure is also amortised over the lifetime of the infrastructure.

There are tunnels and bridges in the UK built in the 1800s which are still transporting trains in it today.

Set a monthly budget for non essential subscriptions, whatever you think you can afford. If you hit the budget, and you want a new subscription, then that means you have to cancel something else.

I often think to be succesful, you need a combination of

a) A good environment to grow up in b) A lot of hard work c) Luck

If you're missing one of them, you need to make it up in the other categories.

I think of "tech" companies as companies where you've got large fixed costs to build out and maintain the product, but the marginal cost of your product is very close to zero.

So Facebook and JCDecaux are both advertising companies, but only Facebook is a "tech" company.

Lockheed Martin is a tech company, but Google is a "tech" company.

I don't think it's a great term for that kind of company.

Uber, Netflix and Epic may not need the channel. But Apple/Google are betting that for the long tail of developers, the benefits of the App stores outweigh the costs.

Personally, I am far more likely to try out a subscription if I can do it through the app store, as I don't have to hand over my credit card details, and I know I'll be able to easily cancel.

When my partner was pregnant, I found some of the snippets downright dangerous.

One time in particular, my partner was worried about abdominal seperation (something quite common during pregnancy), she was searching about how long it takes to heal.

The snippet answer said that it usually doesn't heal without surgery. She was really upset by this, until I pointed out that Google had sourced that answer from a private plastic surgery clinic. Our country's public health website said it usually heals within 8 weeks.

I don't think anyone was being malicious here, but using machine learning to source answers from website, and present them as fact, is surely a disaster waiting to happen? Especially when it comes to medical advice.

There's also times when the information is contextual, searching "can you drink during pregnancy" shows me the advice from the CDC, but that guidance is different in my country.

At the very least, Google turn off snippets for medical questions, or should only show answers extracted from government health bodies in the country the user is in.

Skin cancer typically hits way after the age that most people have kids

YouTube used to select the preview image by taking a freeze frame at a certain point in the video.

Older YouTubers used to manipulate this by putting the suggestive part of the video at the right time.

Here's a blast from the past doing just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8tXjJL3xcM

When they work well, they're really good, but when they work badly, they're _really_ bad.

The other week, I went for dinner at a place that had a online ordering system. My experience was as follows...

Arrive at the table, scan the QR code

No phone signal in the restaurant, so I need to connect to the wifi.

Connect to the wifi, get a captive portal

Need to put my phone number in to connect to the wifi; there is no signal, so I need to go outside, to receieve the confirmation code.

Connected to the wifi, scan the code again, choose my food.

Go to pay, need to register an account

Put my email address in, I already have an account on this food ordering service!?

Do a password reset

Put in my credit card details (why not use apple pay?).

This whole time, we're sat at a table, in theory to meet friends, but we've spent the first 15 minutes all glued to our phones!