My biggest design peeve of the examples posted is the inconsistent indentation of each section of the menu. Where if any single item in the section has an icon it gets indented, but if none do it doesn't, and seeing them next to each other is jarring. I feel this is especially inconsistent design because if a menu item has a check mark it indents all menu items in the whole menu. I would have thought Apple would have the taste to keep things more consistent across the whole menu than that, as it seems sloppy.
Intel specifically exited the general-purpose ARM market back about 20 years ago when it sold its XScale division to Marvell. I believe it kept making the ARM chips for use in network controllers and other specific purpose chips.
Intel failed to anticipate the smartphone revolution despite RIM being a customer of XScale. To be fair, they only entered because they got StrongARM from a law suit settlement with DEC in 1997 and they sold to refocus on more strategic segments which turned out to be actually a lot less interesting. I don’t think Intel can really be seen as a model of good strategic thinking.
But all of this is a decade before what we are discussing here. I didn’t even remember XScale existed at Intel while writing my first comment.
When the Microelectronics Group was transferred to Intel,
that included the StrongARM Group. A month later, everybody
in the StrongARM Group had pretty much quit.
Cue the old adage that if you're not paying for something you're the product not the customer...
Though in this case the biggest danger is being the training material creator used to train its models for its paid generative AI offering. I would assume people are monitoring the privacy policy and terms of use to know when such a change would happen - if it isn't so already, I haven't checked those documents.
As for me I'm happy to stick with v2 for as long as it can function on computers I own and use.
There is a big difference between buying a perpetual licence with extra yearly support packages versus leasing the software with on a subscription model. While the two options may appear to be the same thing, the first one doesn't remove your ability to run the software once you stop paying for support.
The best way that I have to describe it is in the first option you're buying a version of the software and then paying for updates and bug fixes in a flexible manner, while in the second option you're leasing use of the software for as long as you continue to pay.
You can remain in control and continue to make good quality software, but that means staying small, very small, like a handful of people small. There are numerous software providers like that still making niche software.
They offer it for free to gain more people with a Canva account, where they can sell their other products and services, not just limited to the AI integrations for Affinity Suite.
The main benefit that I see it of having the source code to the software running on the devices you own is that you can always fix or modify it if and when you want to. Lots of things can happen such as the law changing, the company going out of business, the company stopping support for your device, or you just wanting to make some changes to how it works to better suit your lifestyle.
This doesn't mean that everyone will dive right in and make the code changes by themselves, but it does allow for paying someone knowledgeable to come in and make the changes for you. The same kind of way that you can (or used to be able to) get someone knowledgeable in cars to come in to fix or change things for you.
Think of it as having access to the device's schematics so that you (or someone knowledgable) can make repairs to the device when you need to.
This brings me to another point, that in addition to having the source code for the device available, there way to build and deploy the code to the device also has to be made available, otherwise it's only a shadow of a solution.
These days banking is one of the things for which a phone is required for. It is used as the primary banking device for most people, and for the rest it is required for two factor authentication when logging in on a PC or to verify online transactions.
Maybe some bank would allow you to use some third party two factor authentication device to log in sometimes, but most (if not all) would require you to use their "app".
It's because phones are not single devices these days they're a (restricted) general purpose computer, that fits into your pocket, and does not use physical input devices. The software is geared towards it being this way rather than it being a communications device where you use for calls and text messages.
It doesn't help that the user interface changes every year or two so every time there's an "upgrade" you get confused and need to re-learn how it should be used. Or that on every update there's a slew or dark patterns designed to cost you money or privacy, or both. (This applies to computer operating systems as well which further reinforces the fact that a phone is a computer and not a dedicated device.)
It's also unfortunate that you cannot ever decide to stop using a mobile phone, as many essential services like banking and government require you to have one. So you're stuck using one for the rest of your life wether you like it or not.
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