I think for a long time Apple could grow by introducing new hardware categories, growing the average spend on hardware (by e.g. moving from upgradable to soldered memory/disks), and additional services.
It has been a while since they introduced category-changing new devices and people hold on to their iPhones/iPads/Apple Watches longer due to smaller changes between generations and long software support periods.
So, the primary way that they see how they could grow is by introducing more ads and more subscriptions. Slowly they make Apple's platforms more gross:
- When searching in the app store, nearly half the page is ads now.
- Pushing F1 movie advertisements through Apple Wallet.
- Ads in maps.
- Pushing subscriptions by putting ads for Apple Creator Studio in iWork apps (Pages, Keynote, Numbers).
- Pushing subscriptions by putting Apple Fitness+ ads in the system setting on iOS (!).
This might work for a while, but eventually, Apple will lose a key differentiator.
Some Western European democracies have a well-functioning democracy. The people voting are still humans, a substantial portion votes for racist parties that economically only benefit big corporations and not them, but the damage is limited because there is no winner-takes-all. Everyone has to accept compromises.
Shoutout to fairphone who actually updated the firmware themselves, surely a loss leading project, but a very respectable dedication to end users.
I am not sure how much of a shout-out they deserve. For example, Fairphone 4 is still supported until this year. They ship with firmware from 2023 and with a kernel patch release from 2024. Every one of their phones is full of holes because their software lags so much.
Even on their most recent model, they are frequently more than a half year behind firmware updates, ship 1-2 year old kernels, and are late with major Android releases (meaning you miss out on security patches not classified high/critical).
Good examples of software longevity are iPhone, Google Pixel, GrapheneOS, and to a lesser extend Samsung flagships.
Hash of a normalization of the derivation, so this roughly means source, dependencies and the ‘build recipe’. The exception are fixed-output derivations, which are typically content-hashed.
That said, a lot of work is done in content-addressed hashing, but AFAIK it’s not the default yet.
I also block all AI crawlers. I am not sure why I should give them my content for them to rip it off and make money from it through training or agents. Sadly, a lot of AI companies are trying to make requests indistinguishable from regular browsers from residential connections, so unfortunately I have to use Cloudflare to block them.
Ideally I'd make the content available to crawlers for training open models, but that seems to be nearly impossible. It would be possible if other AI companies behaved.
VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"
I have no idea what you are talking about. I think all recent VW cars (since 2018) support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. CarPlay works great with our VW ID.3.
Also, since a refresh a few years ago, the in-car system has had great UX/UI. We are perfectly happy with it and this is after almost two decades of iOS + having tried the systems of various different cars (including NIO).
We do not have anything to complain about, except more physical buttons would be nice, but the latest generation is bringing them back (e.g. the new ID.3 NEO). We are considering upgrading to the ID.3 NEO soon (or maybe Hyundai).
The facelift/software that was introduced with the ID.7 is really good (especially the navigation system with AR HUD), but you kinda have to consider that the HN user population is extremely US-centric and IDs aren't really available in the US, so I don't think it's surprising that the opinions on HN lag behind reality by a couple years there.
https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/115973178893109987
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