"People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed."
Independent software development was an absolute wasteland. It was extremely hard to get a user to give you money outside of a few extremely fortified ghettos (Steam, for instance, which takes a 30% cut as well). Begware was the most common tactic.
Even now with multiple options, while everyone piles on Apple, we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms. Apple did more to liberate payments from a user than any other platform. Through trust, through standardization and normalization, and even through things like the wide availability of App Store gift cards (which are often heavily discounted - $85 for $100 of App Store gift cards at Costco many times through the year).
Elsewhere people are arguing that Windows is a wonderful platform because look, it's so open. Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is. Unless your name is Microsoft or Adobe, you are in for a really, really rough time of it. You'll get 100% of nothing.
As always, of course this is downvoted. Anyone looking to HN for rational, reality-based discussion might find it a bit disappointing. Here apparently the Windows ISV market is a vibrant, lucrative market. Everyone here is profiting from it, right? (LOL -- close to none of you are). This is farce.
> Independent software development was an absolute wasteland.
I had a 10 year career in that "wasteland".
> we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms
Citation? From what I've seen, that's not actually true.
> Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is.
For a time, the Windows version of our product was my company's biggest money-maker. It seems that in recent years though Microsoft as a company has pivoted away from Windows as their primary product. Away from desktop, toward "the cloud". I personally find that unfortunate, but I'm not a stockholder.
> The whole torch mob anti-Apple angle seems entirely detached from actual reality.
Thanks for having been a part of this golden age of computing.
There's not a day that goes by where I don't reminiscent about the time when companies like "rogue amoeba", "made by sofa", "monster", or "Strange Flavour" and people like Alexander Repty, Austin Sarner and Brian Ball made really great mac software.
There was so much community, and such an optimistic mood with things like the Appsterdam movement.
And then it all crashed and burned, because Apple decided to get greedy, and that 99cents was going to be the default App price, with 30cents going to Apple.
Those are scraps, and nobody who wants to make an artisanal niche app to scratch their own itch, and maybe sell it, can live from that money. It was either win the lottery, or starve.
Apple killed its own ecosystem, most app store apps suck nowadays. It's ironic that they were the ones with an ad saying "we mistake abundance with choice".
I wish all the old mac devs would get together and collaboratively write a good GUI-toolkit for linux and a new Userland. Right now there is not a single good operating system. Having all those apps on linux would be a dream come true. But a dream it is...
> Epic doesn't release these numbers, yet from third party analysis in the 30 days before being kicked from the respective stores, Fortnite made $43M on iOS, and a paltry $3.3M on Android, worldwide.
Fortnite total revenue was $2.4 billion in 2018, $1.8 billion in 2019. Not sure we have figures to date for 2020, but assuming it's approximately $1 billion, then iOS would be ~23% of total Fortnite revenue. Is that the largest platform? Maybe, maybe not.
> Independent software development was an absolute wasteland. It was extremely hard to get a user to give you money outside of a few extremely fortified ghettos
Utter nonsense. Shrink-wrapped and downloadable software in the Windows world was all over the place using activation/serial codes either thru email or on a CD.
> It is rare to find someone who has paid a penny for anything else.
Citation needed. Who are all those people attending the Microsoft developers conference every year? Who were all the people in the audience for Ballmer's infamous "Developers, developers, developers" chant?
You're claiming the nonexistence of something that clearly exists.
> You have become incredibly insincere in your arguments, or you are seriously misunderstanding this discussion.
Please refrain from personal attacks.
As you noted in another comment, I'm primarily a Mac developer, and in my experience, the extent of the third-party Mac software market has often been vastly underestimated. Maybe it's just because people aren't familiar with it.
There are of course large numbers of users who never buy third-party software, but with any large platform, such as Mac or Windows, all it takes is a significant % of users to buy software for the market to really add up. Doesn't even have to be a majority of users.
I haven't been a regular Windows users for many years, but back when I was, there was a thriving consumer software market on Windows. Again, it doesn't even have to include the majority of users, because those who do buy software are willing to pay good money for it.
"You have become incredibly insincere in your arguments"
> Tiny, micro-boutiques that are a little sliver of marginal prosperity in a desolate wasteland of failure.
I would rephrase this to say you're talking about small businesses, which are not sexy or well known, but are both widespread and crucial to the entire economic foundation of the United States.
Unfortunately, App Store revenue is very top-heavy. A few big players, such as Epic, do extremely well on the App Store, but small businesses tend to suffer in the App Store. The total software revenue may be higher now, but the distribution of revenue matters a lot. If the rich get richer, and the rest are stagnant or get poorer, that's only good for the rich, and I wouldn't call it a healthy market, regardless of the totals.
In the App Store era, it's "easier" than before to become a wild success, like Epic. But it's a lot harder for indie developers to make a living. You can't "make it up in volume", and you don't have a huge marketing budget to get to the top of the App Store charts, so you need to charge sustainable prices for software. The App Store "race to the bottom", as well as other business and technical limitations, have really hurt smaller developers. I'm not sure we can, or want to live in a world with only BigCos.
I would also say, since you mentioned developers making internal corporate apps, that the App Store doesn't really help them at all, and in fact makes their life more difficult, especially on a locked down software platform such as iOS, where you have to jump through all of Apple's hoops just to get your software from one computer to another.
Remember how Apple temporarily shut down a lot of Facebook by revoking their enterprise certificate? We can quibble about whether Facebook "deserved" it, but why is internal software even subject to those restrictions in the first place. I certainly wouldn't call that "liberation".
It seems like the unavoidable conclusion is that there are no longer any good places to make or find decent consumer software without having a corporate entity get their undeserving cut.
Orthogonal complaint, but it was a huge loss when the Civilization catalog was removed from GeForce Now.
I loved playing Civ while developing on my laptops, without it spooling up my fans, burning my lap or impeding my other processes. Playing it in the cloud was the perfect solution, and it has the perfect "lag doesn't matter" gameplay where a bit of latency doesn't diminish the enjoyment.
Whatever their pissing match is, after playing Civ in the cloud I just could never get back to playing it locally. I was spoiled, and as a result I haven't bought two of the most recent Civ expansion packs.
Apple's GPUs achieve "integrated" level performance and it would be a large step for them to achieve AMD or nvidia performance levels. Maybe they can scale it up sufficiently, or put it on a separate die with its own heat dissipation, but that seems like biting off too mcuh.
My MBP has the intel integrated graphics, and AMD discrete graphics. I imagine as Apple moves to Apple silicon it will be the same arrangement at tiers that currently have discrete graphics, with the intel integrated just being swapped out for Apple integrated, leveraging the discrete graphics when appropriate.
You should demand a refund. Vote with your wallet.
Of course that was a bit trenchant, however you're complaining about a promise that was never made. No one ever promised that you could setup a old certbot instance and it was out of sight and mind for perpetuity. There are any number of issues that can occur, and honestly if one expected certbot to run without issue, having it automatically updating as well seems to be a base minimum.
Also worth noting that LE was early with ACMEv1, but a lot of alternatives started with ACMEv2. ACMEv2 became the common standard.
She was asked by CNN, given that she's running on the Biden-Harris ticket. No one particularly cares whether you care or not, but she is clearly a rather important person right now and was asked this question given that public health has marched to political drums rather than safety drums lately.
You seem to be trying to say something but trail off into weak points all the time. Why would you not talk to the opposition about a politically motivated issue made by the President?
Funny.. the article doesn't seem to have any quotes from politicians supporting Trumps view point. Had there been one, I would have called it out as well, but their isn't.. is there?
How is an expedited vaccine political? It’s the author that’s asserting political motivation with assumptive logic at best and borderline anti-vaxer at worst. People are smarter than you think and they can pick up on subtle cues of bias. I know i’ll get downvoted for this because that’s how people on this website are, but the democrats have completely botched the covid/blm crisis as of late and their credibility is tanking. Just talk to people but pretend you’re a trump supporter and I think you might be shocked what you hear
I mean come on. Is anyone buying it’s just a coincidence? If you really do I’d take a critical look at what they want from you. Votes for Trump. I’d also be extremely wary of anecdotal chats as widespread evidence of anything.
Are you buying that it's just a coincidence that the author quoted the opinion of the vice president of the Democratic party in an article that's clearly in opposition of the view point of the leader of the Republican party? What's that you said about taking a critical look again?
You could have simply given your opinion, but leading off with a dismissive "ignore the haters" (where haters are apparently people who didn't enjoy it) made your comment carry zero weight.
Well, didn’t you do the same thing with your last statement?
“Ignore the haters” to me isn’t dismissive as much as a way of conveying that something is rather polarizing so the reader should check it out themselves before forming an opinion. I do concede that others may have a different interpretation, though.
Their comment addresses the fundamental substance of the submission. It's as if someone started their sunscreen door to door business in January: The fundamental timing is broken.
Except if you started the sunscreen door to door business development in peak selling months you wouldn't have a company built to actually supply the sunscreen.
The submission is about trying to draw in users for a meat-world social application during a pandemic.
In the sunscreen example, someone could absolutely be designing packaging, securing suppliers, building a workforce, etc, during the winter, but if they went to the door to door phase at the same time it would be a completely disastrous exercise. It was the door to door phase that I was comparing to.
Let’s not get lost in a terrible metaphor that has nothing to do with scientific reality
What’s wrong with demanding tech addicted randos check their privilege given a scientific reality of both a pandemic and the ease at which these gadgets can influence decisions?
Is that not offering alternatives? Oh sure maybe the most cynical, but it’s nonetheless an alternative option.
Why is avoiding a blunt conversation so taboo? In a forum where open debate of all ideas is supposedly allowable, in a community largely built originally by a nation where free speech is supposedly the holiest of holies? Would the open web have worked in China or much of the rest of the world in the prior decades?
What is the goal with the rhetorical circles and shallow emotional boosting except to continually exist in Saturday morning cartoon levels of concern and maturity for reality outside of ones own immediate attention?
Startup types are a statistical minority of the human doer market. Take it on the chin that mathematically you’re ultimately as important as the child political prisoners we ignore.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
"supporting a brand as team sports is a thing like supporting a political party as team sports is"
This may be true at times, but the assumption of the same is the root of a lot of the toxic behavior. You cannot be neutral or even in agreement with Apple's position without being a "fanboy", or giving into the "cult of Apple", etc.
"I have an Apple TV 4K, which can do 4K Dolby Vision playback and looks ok, but the Apple TV tends to have some jittering when streaming certain shows (very noticeable in panning shots of animation)."
How don't more people complain about this? I avoid streaming on the Apple TV because it does some sort of bizarre framerate thunking that is just brutal for panning. Do so few people use the product that it just goes unnoticed?
My LG 4K TV has fantastic Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ clients. HDR, 4K, etc.
I believe most people just don't notice the judder, and many of the rest don't care. E.g. it took a lot of convincing to get Google to add "use 50p output" to Chromecast settings years ago (and that didn't fix 24p of course, just European 25p/50p which is more severely
affected).
I tested with a high-speed camera that with correct settings my old Samsung UE75H6475 was able to recover the original frame rate perfectly from quite a few framerate mangling combinations. Haven't done similar testing with my current C9, though.
"I believe most people just don't notice the judder, and many of the rest don't care"
This is probably the case. DAZN took over NFL streaming in Canada and for the first two years seemed to use their existing European soccer processing chain (they might still --- I gave it a try to years straight and then gave up). So the 60/30 NFL stream was re-encoded to 25/50, and then on playback on my set would be displayed at 30/60. It was brutal, and even if displayed at 25 or 50 FPS was still brutal because they were seriously corrupting the NFL stream.
I tried it across a number of devices -- AppleTV, Chromecast, different TVs, pads, laptops -- and it was just unbelievably intolerable to me. Every panning pass was the horrendous juddering mess. Yet somehow no one seemed to have a problem with this! In discussions it seemed to be a non-issue.
I had tried it a while back stopped because anytime you go into or out of video streaming it would black out the whole screen for a second or two before starting to buffer the content. It’s particularly annoying if trying to search for a particular episode of something.
That’s probably the ticket for it though. I find the lack of audio pass through to be the more annoying piece though. I have a machine that costs significantly more than the Apple TV and has knowledge of all of the attached speakers to do that decoding.
> I had tried it a while back stopped because anytime you go into or out of video streaming it would black out the whole screen for a second or two before starting to buffer the content. It’s particularly annoying if trying to search for a particular episode of something.
That‘s the correct behavior though and not specific to the Apple TV. Any device that actually does switch and match the content’s frame rate will cause the output display to resync/adjust with a short black screen. The alternative of not adjusting frame rate is much worse and it’s such an underrated problem in video playback in my opinion. The Apple TV handles this better than most devices.
Independent software development was an absolute wasteland. It was extremely hard to get a user to give you money outside of a few extremely fortified ghettos (Steam, for instance, which takes a 30% cut as well). Begware was the most common tactic.
Even now with multiple options, while everyone piles on Apple, we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms. Apple did more to liberate payments from a user than any other platform. Through trust, through standardization and normalization, and even through things like the wide availability of App Store gift cards (which are often heavily discounted - $85 for $100 of App Store gift cards at Costco many times through the year).
Elsewhere people are arguing that Windows is a wonderful platform because look, it's so open. Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is. Unless your name is Microsoft or Adobe, you are in for a really, really rough time of it. You'll get 100% of nothing.
As always, of course this is downvoted. Anyone looking to HN for rational, reality-based discussion might find it a bit disappointing. Here apparently the Windows ISV market is a vibrant, lucrative market. Everyone here is profiting from it, right? (LOL -- close to none of you are). This is farce.