wklauss

That is what you get when you start working on an article looking for a headline instead of digging in the facts.

Apple Pay (or Google Pay or Samsung Pay) are far from being a mainstream phenomenon but I see a lot of pretty happy users once they discover them. It will take time, but I don't think the situation is as dire as the headline implies.

Reading this interview is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

That's the problem, there are not many (some fridges designed to be operated from car plugs, camping gear, things like that) and often is just an appliance that has a converter inside, so it is as inefficient as you'd expect. Not sure if there's a way to design stoves, fridges, ovens and washing machines powerful enough just using DC, though.

I have long wanted to fully switch to DC in my life and would love to see common appliances designed for a DC world. It's a shame that the opportunity to discuss this is lost in this post because of the pedantic tone of the author.

Phrases like "I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it" or "I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber" are ridiculous, even if you really try hard to see them as an attempt of making a joke. The continuous references about how many books he has and reads also threw me off.

The best part, so far, is the first Discus comment at the bottom.

True. Let's say first was "personal computers"

Simple hydrophobic coating. It wears out eventually, but by the time it does your device is already gathering dust in a drawer.

Define victory.

Yeah, iPad sales are shrinking but more than 20 million devices in one quarter is still a pretty impressive number.

Lenovo (largest PC manufacturer) sold only 16 million "general purpose computers" in the same period.

They have always lived and died by one product. First it was the Mac, then the iPod, now the iPhone. At the current scale, yes, the iPhone sustains 70% of the company. If the iPhone fails maybe the Mac will be the one product to sustain a smaller Apple. Maybe the iPad will rally and do the job.

It's not that weird of a predicament. Not all big companies are diversified. Microsoft has sustained itself for decades with only two products (Windows + office). Google is sustained basically by advertisement on search results. They have other revenue lines but not as important.

If these lines fall companies do the same any other complex organisms do. They adapt to survive, find new businesses, reinvigorate old ones... Or they die. It's really not that exceptional.

What makes Apple exceptional is the scale of it all.

You are mixing market share dominance with market dominance. Two very different concepts.

> They have been much slower adopting features than the competition.

It's not a matter of speed. This seems to be using WebRTC for handling communications between the phone app and the browser. Safari has chosen not to implement WebRTC and so far it is still not a proper standard so I can see why. Google, as the developer of WebRTC, will obviously support it right away. Note that no browser other than Chrome can be used as well.

I think there are far better ways to do this on a small object of limited lifespan like a smartphone, not to mention that metal is not an ideal way to make a smartphone. You can use it some surfaces, but at some point you'll need plastic and glass.

A lot of bad ideas happen in between humanity's greatest inventions. When you look at the past, you are only looking to the successful stories. Maybe a lot of people with unrealistic or bad ideas would have benefited from HN.

Seems like a really good new path to explore. Lots of really poor solutions to manage payroll for small companies out there.

> Because they are selling magic and brands, not concrete features.

And because it's completely pointless to sell concrete features for certain components. If they boast the Ghz number it will be relatively easy for competitors to produce higher figures. Ghz don't mean anything unless you take into account all kind of details (architecture, throttling...) that no one except really detail-oriented reviewers will go through and that will bore 90% of the users. Hence the bragging on the name.

He is using compressed air to run them.

Ethics are a nicety, not an obligation.

> not all companies that break bad laws are good.

This to me, is the key of the problem. Yes, the taxi medallion system was broken in many cities and Uber is forcing to at least acknowledge that regulation in it's current form it's not longer useful. But I think that as a company Uber it's not a positive force on the public transportation market. Quite the opposite. I love tu use it when I'm in San Francisco but cannot shake the feeling that we are screwing ourselves long term by supporting it.

It's not the end of the world. I'm sure Android version will be developed faster than Instagram for Android was. My guess it this has to do with a lot of Camera API tuning since it uses the gyros on the phone to stabilize. Easier to do it on iOS and get to market with a decent user base, then start figuring out Android devices one by one.

I don't understand where you and I disagree. That "no" seems confusing.

Computers are fitting humans, thats why they are now a thin slate you can easily carry around.

And there is a feedback when you touch a glass surface, it's just it doesn't give you a non-visual clue that you have pressed a letter and that you have grown accustomed to.

I don't think that's a dealbreaker for the generation that is growing with tablets. I certainly don't see my teeneage cousins or nephews/nieces worried at all about using keyboards. If they have them around they might use them but they type fast on the screens as well. Most of them no longer have a laptop or desktop anyway. I've seen them writing whole essays on the phone while lying on the bed.

Talking about lost feedback, think about what a huge step back was for our grandfathers generation to abandon handwriting and switch to pressing keys on a typewriter. I'm pretty sure we could have argue back then about how little feedback you get from a key vs. the flow of the hand and the friction of the paper when you write. And somehow we adjusted so well that most of us are probably incapable of writing a handwritten letter nowadays. We are not "less human" because of this.

We will survive.

And note I'm not trying to say that this is the new status quo and we should all accept it and move along. I'm sure we will see a lot of different approaches to solve the issue in the future. What I'm saying is that the pool of users these solutions speak to is diminishing. We see this ideas and think that they'll appeal to everybody who uses a tablet. Most likely they'll be only used by a niche market. Nothing wrong with that but definitely something to take into account when trying to launch a company around them.

Neither. Truth is we are a generation that grew up using keyboards. The one coming after us will consider normal to use an onscreen keyboard or voice recognition. This is a problem that will solve itself.

You could say the same about any current mobile OS. I think that having this kind of apps is better than not having them at all. Nothing in this life is 100% secure.

Well, in defense of NYC, it has a lot of industries, not just media and finance. There's advertising, fashion, entertainment, art, food... This makes the city much more diverse than San Francisco, IMHO.

It breaks my heart to say it. I loved San Francisco for many, many years -and lived there briefly-. But every time I go back now I can't help but realize everybody looks the same and have the same interest and goals and take on life. This makes the city much less interesting.

Of course this is a generalization. I'm sure there are fantastic different kinds of people around, but as a casual observer, the valley has become a very homogeneous area.

> On a semi-related note: incredibly glad that HN auto-kills Valleywag links.

I think censorship is a terrible idea, even when the censored articles come from places you don't hold in very high esteem.

I think we should strive for not repeating the Microsoft situation with a different brand. Like someone else commented, a Raspberry Pi seems like a better solution. Chromebooks are extremely tied to Google services.

This specific case might only apply to Apple (I don't know, haven't read about it before) but the quirks of ARM's 32-bit instruction set surely apply to everyone else.

The transition could have happen later, maybe, with not too much repercussion, but why not make the jump now, especially when you have a whole new OS engineered to take advantage of it?

There are other benefits in the transition, like a new and more efficient set of instructions, and iOS 7 is taking advantage of that.

No to mention that it might not be an Apple problem, but an industry-wide problem. I've tried to replicate this on a brand new Sony Xperia Z1. It marks -2 degrees on a flat surface. Never occurred to me to test these things before.

I'm not sure current benchmarks can really measure the A7 correctly, or if they are at all ready to deal with OpenGL ES 3.0.

Desktops are modular because the high price components used to have. Look at manufacturers now and you'll see a trend towards non-modular designs (iMac, Vaios,…)

This is not a scheme to take your money, BTW. Most of the consumers wont upgrade any part of the PC during their lifetime, so you are being held back in design and build quality by a feature only a fraction os the population demands. By held back I don't just mean design wise, although is one of the main advantages. You have to support legacy ports, slower buses, etc...

By going to non-modular designs, you can make better use of the space. The tradeoffs are big, especially on laptops (increased battery life), and more so in mobile.