There is another product I use that has a freemium model. They hope to monetize a paid tier for users who use the product a lot.
In order to build trust, they open source their product. I forked it, removed the blocks from the freemium feature in 15 minutes using Claude Code. Never published the code to anyone else, just used it myself
Unfortunately, I think it isn’t going to be tenable for systems to be fully open sourced going forward.
We discovered this change recently because my dad was looking for a file that Dropbox accidentally overwrote which at first we said “no problem. This is why we pay for backblaze”
We had learned that this policy had changed a few months ago, and we were never notified. File was unrecoverable
If anyone at backblaze is reading this, I pay for your product so I can install you on my parents machine and never worry about it again. You decided saving on cloud storage was worth breaking this promise. Bad bad call
I'm going to drop Backblaze for my entire company over this.
I need it to capture local data, even though that local data is getting synced to Google Drive. Where we sync our data really has nothing to do with Backblaze backing up the endpoint. We don't wholly trust sync, that's why we have backup.
On my personal Mac I have iCloud Drive syncing my desktop, and a while back iCloud ate a file I was working on. Backblaze had it captured, thankfully. But if they are going to exclude iCloud Drive synced folders, and sounds like that is their intention, Backblaze is useless to me.
Bidirectional auto file sync is a fundamentally broken pattern and I'm tired of pretending it's not. It's just complete chaos with wrong files constantly getting overridden on both ends.
I have no clue why people still use it and I'd cut my losses if I were you, either backup to the cloud or pull from it, not both at the same time like an absolute tictac.
This is an instance of someone familiar with complex file access patterns not understanding the normal use case for these services.
The people using these bidirectional sync services want last writer wins behavior. The mild and moderately technical people I work with all get it and work with it. They know how to use the UI to look for old versions if someone accidentally overwrites their file.
Your characterization as complete chaos with constant problems does not mesh with the reality of the countless low-tech teams I've seen use Dropbox type services since they were launched.
This would be half OK if it worked, but you can't trust it to. OneDrive, for instance, has an open bug for years now where it will randomly revert some of your files to a revision from several months earlier. You can detect and recover this from the history, but only if you know that it happened and where, which you usually won't because it happens silently. I only noticed because it happened to an append-only text file I use daily.
A specific implementation (OneDrive) doing something dumb doesn't invalidate the entire paradigm though. Things work just fine elsewhere (Dropbox, Google Drive, Nextcloud, and Seafile are all solutions I've had good experiences with).
Agreed, I’ve been using Dropbox for 15 years with minimal issues. The key is to ensure it’s running and syncing with the proper settings on both machines.
What can get things into a weird state is if both machines are editing the same file while only one of them is actively syncing. But for basic backup and sync, this is extremely rare.
Unlimited strings are a problem. People will use it as storage.
No, I'm not joking. We used to allow arbitrary paths in a cloud API I owned. Within about a month someone had figured out that the cost to store a single byte file was effectively zero, and they could encode arbitrary files into the paths of those things. It wasn't too long before there was a library to do it on Github. We had to put limits on it because otherwise people would store their data in the path, not the file.
I remember someone telling me that S3 used to be similarly abused - people were creating empty files and using S3 like a key-value store somehow, so AWS just jacked up the price of S3 head-object API call to push people back to DynamoDB or whatever.
Not sufficient, unfortunately. The strings for file paths are stored in wholly different infrastructure with wholly different optimizations. It probably lives in your database. You really don't want people just stuffing gigabytes into that, payment or no payment. Odds are you didn't plan your control plane around, "what if someone uses our strings as encoded data?"
In the fine print, only to be used against bad actors (w/guarantee that filenames under x chars would never be charged), or that too problematic? building good faith into policy + "hiding" info...
Reason - to not overcomplicate or give appearance of nickel-and-diming
No, just charge for the amount of storage they use on your server. Not the amount of data you think you’re storing. In non-special cases these will be the same number.
Would there be any engineering/management pushback on the customer side? "we have to write a tiny script", "this is non-standard" / "why are you the only ones who charge us for filenames?"
You expect the files to still be accessible using relative paths. What do you expect to happen if your cloud storage file path is 50 characters long and is mounted in a folder which is 4050 characters long when PATH_MAX is 4096?
The sync application itself can handle this using openat(2) or similar and should probably be using that regardless to avoid races.
Ah, I forgot that the maximum path length is usually limited by PATH_MAX, it's the path segment that's usually limited by the filesystem.
Point taken, although I still think it's better for cloud storage services to err on the side of compatibility, i.e. what's the lowest common denominator between Linux, macOS, Android, iOS from 10 years ago and Windows 7?
Oh yeah... I remember Windows behaving weirdly when I tried to copy some files with long names into a deeper directory tree. And it was just weird behaviour - no useful error message.
Windows in particular supports at the API level paths tens of thousands of characters long, much longer than Linux. The problem is applications need to explicitly support such paths using the long path syntax, otherwise they're limited to 255 characters.
Except the GNU stuff, which has as a design principle "no arbitrary limits". Meaning no limits at all, not "no sane limits":
Avoid arbitrary limits on the length or number of any data structure, including filenames, lines, files, and symbols, by allocating all data structures dynamically.
I assume they're relying on the OOM Killer and quotas to prevent DoSes all over the place.
You can build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
1 out of a thousand people might do that, the others will buy the product. That's why people use it, most people don't want to build everything themselves.
But as usual it forgets the "For a Linux user" part.
If we remove the whole linux section and just ask "why not map a folder in Explorer" it's a reasonable question, probably even more reasonable in 2026 than in 2007. The network got faster and more reliable, and the dropbox access got slower.
The equivalent of this is advice from a friend of mine who likes different teas, "just learn to read hanzi like I did and then you can select the ones you like". Apparently there's one called "government tea" (in the original) which he expected to taste of old leather, musty paperwork, and stale cigarette smoke.
It’s kind of wild to read through these comments and realize hn is still riffing on the same ideas. Is it e2ee? Does it run on Linux? Who would pay for something you can slap together in a weekend with a few bash scripts?
Really highlights this community’s values, skills, and blind spots.
Also a bit of a bummer that the privacy and open source situations today are even worse in many ways.
Obvious. Explorer even has support built in for transparent ‘native’ gui support. I’m not even sure why you felt the need to explain it in detail. Next you’ll be explaining how to walk. (/s, I loved it)
It works perfectly fine if you're user that know how it works. I use it with Syncthing and it works coz I know to not edit same file at the same time on 2 devices (my third and fourth device is always on internet so chances propagate reasonably fast even if the 2 devices aren't on on the same time)
I think this is a case of people using bidirectional file sync wrong. The point is to make the most up to date version of a file available across multiple devices, not to act as a backup or for collaboration between multiple users.
It works perfectly fine as long as you keep how it works in mind, and probably most importantly don't have multiple users working directly on the same file at once.
I've been using these systems for over a decade at this point and never had a problem. And if I ever do have one, my real backup solution has me covered.
“Every file is only ever written to from a single client, and will be asynchronously made available to all other clients, and after some period of time has elapsed you can safely switch to always writing to the file from a different client”.
Yep. See e.g. steam cloud saves, which is literally just Dropbox for your video game save files. Bidi sync is a super common pattern if you look for it, I'm surprised at all the hate it's getting here.
> And if I ever do have one, my real backup solution has me covered.
What do you use and how do you test / reconcile to make sure it’s not missing files? I find OneDrive extremely hard to deal with because the backup systems don’t seem to be 100% reliable.
I think there are a lot of solutions these days that error on the side of claiming success.
I agree. I use syncthing for syncing phones and laptops. For data like photos, which aren't really updated. It works very nice. And for documents updated by one user, moving between devices is totally seamless.
That being said i understand how it works at a high level.
Hello, Jim from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders.
It is true that we recently updated how Backblaze Computer Backup handles cloud-synced folders. This decision was driven by a consistent set of technical issues we were seeing at scale, most of them driven by updates created by third-party sync tools, including unreliable backups and incomplete restores when backing up files managed by third-party sync providers.
To give a bit more context on the “why”: these cloud storage providers now rely heavily on OS-level frameworks to manage sync state. On Windows, for example, files are often represented as reparse points via the Cloud Files API. While they can appear local, they are still system-managed placeholders, which makes it difficult to reliably back them up as standard on-disk files.
Moreover, we built our product in a way to not backup reparse points for two reasons:
1. We wanted the backup client to be light on the system and only back up needed user-generated files.
2. We wanted the service to be unlimited, so following reparse points would lead to us backing up tons of data in the cloud
We’ve made targeted investments where we can, for example, adding support for iCloud Drive by working within Apple’s model and supporting Google Drive, but extending that same level of support to third-party providers like Dropbox or OneDrive is more complex and not included in the current version.
We are currently exploring building an add-on that either follows reparse points or backs up the tagged data in another way.
We also hear you clearly on the communication gap. Both the sync providers and Backblaze should have been more proactive in notifying customers about a change with this level of impact. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me or our support team directly if you have any questions. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Same. Specifically I was considering Backblaze for our company’s backups (both products, computers and their bucket for server backups. That is no longer the case as of the news.
Natasha from Backblaze here. Just wanted to let you know that we do backup iCloud data, as long as the files are stored locally on your device (not just in iCloud as “optimize storage” / cloud-only files).
If iCloud is set to keep full copies on disk, Backblaze will treat those like normal files and back them up.
>NOTE:
>iCloud's most recent update prevents Backblaze from backing up files that iCloud synced.
>To back up these files, download them to another local location where Backblaze can read them.
This is very well put, and echoes my sentiments! I had installed Backblaze on my own home machine many, many years ago, and it has saved my bacon a few times. Since then I've also installed it on any family members' machines that required backup and recommended it to friends. And I've been happy to pay for the service.
The deal was that Backblaze backs things up and I don't have to worry about it. Learning that it does not back things up is a punch to the gut. I am familiar with the exclusions and I have a look at that list to make I'm not missing anything from my backups. I had always thought the exclusions list was exhaustive.
Excluding other files and folders without telling me about it breaks the deal. Dropbox is important to several of the users I installed it for. Ignoring .git folders is another one that affects me and I had not known about. Ouch.
I will now have to look for alternatives. It has to be easy to install, run seamlessly on non-technical users' machines and be reliable.
I find it hard to be think of a worse breach of trust for a backup service than not to back up files!
Hello, Jim from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders.
It is true that we recently updated how Backblaze Computer Backup handles cloud-synced folders. This decision was driven by a consistent set of technical issues we were seeing at scale, most of them driven by updates created by third-party sync tools, including unreliable backups and incomplete restores when backing up files managed by third-party sync providers.
To give a bit more context on the “why”: these cloud storage providers now rely heavily on OS-level frameworks to manage sync state. On Windows, for example, files are often represented as reparse points via the Cloud Files API. While they can appear local, they are still system-managed placeholders, which makes it difficult to reliably back them up as standard on-disk files.
Moreover, we built our product in a way to not backup reparse points for two reasons:
1. We wanted the backup client to be light on the system and only back up needed user-generated files.
2. We wanted the service to be unlimited, so following reparse points would lead to us backing up tons of data in the cloud
We’ve made targeted investments where we can, for example, adding support for iCloud Drive by working within Apple’s model and supporting Google Drive, but extending that same level of support to third-party providers like Dropbox or OneDrive is more complex and not included in the current version.
We are currently exploring building an add-on that either follows reparse points or backs up the tagged data in another way.
We also hear you clearly on the communication gap. Both the sync providers and Backblaze should have been more proactive in notifying customers about a change with this level of impact. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me or our support team directly if you have any questions. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
As others have said, this is something that should have been communicated very clearly. The reason for using Backblaze is to have my data backed up, and not to worry about it. You say so yourself on your website.
Could you also provide an exhaustive list of items that are NOT being backed up, e.g. the .git folder? I can't find any reference to that anywhere on your website or in the app. What else is not being backed up? I know about the exclusion list in the app, which I have adjusted to suit my requirements, but you need to be clear, explicit and upfront about what you are not backing up. This is critical information.
Natasha from Backblaze here. Fair criticism. This should have been communicated more directly.
For context, this was driven by changes on the Dropbox side in how synced files are handled, which affects how reliably they can be backed up. But even with that, it should have been surfaced much more clearly.
You should tell your support teams that, because when I asked them if local Google Drive files were excluded they affirmed, and directed me to instructions on how to dissolve my business account.
I'm not surprised that support was wrong, but I was somewhat surprised there was zero attempt at customer retention.
I'm going to join the exodus, though for a different reason. Switched to Orbstack and ever since Backblaze refuses to back up saying "disk full" as Orbstack uses a 8TB sparse disk image. You can exclude it, but if they won't (very easily) fix a known issue by measuring file sizes properly I don't feel confident about the product.
I've also been bitten by the Backblaze/Orbstack combo, and was one of the early communicators with the OrbStack team about it.
While I agree Backblaze is overdue to exclude the sparse image, in fairness to them, no other online backup solution (other than Time Machine itself) handled it correctly either, at the time I was investigating this last year.
(I'm not even sure Apple itself handles it correctly in all cases. I had to migrate to a new macbook recently, and Migration Assistant hung while transferring my files. I deleted the sparse image, tried again, and then it worked. Possibly a coincidence, I admit, but Migration Assistant reliably disappoints me every few years.)
Also taking recommendations for a simple services I can install on my dads windows machine and my moms Mac that will just automatically backup the main drive to the cloud just in case
I've been extremely happy with Arq https://www.arqbackup.com/ for several years as a quiet backup solution, bring your own storage. I've done a few small restores and it's been just fine, and it automatically thins your backups to constrain storage costs.
Managing exclusions is something to keep vaguely on top of (I've accidentally had a few VM disk images get backed up when I don't need/want them) but the default exclusions are all very reasonable.
Second vote for Arq, still on the trial but I have zero issues.
I'm using B2 as the backend, ironically, along with a Hetzner Storage Box. It just runs in the background, has decent defaults for "Don't backup useless crap" etc.
I'm still debating whether to get the single purchase version or pay $60 a year for 5 computers + 1TB of cloud storage.
You will need to set it up for them, then you get an email (from borgbackup, not the client so it works when the client is not running) when a backup hasn't happened for a while.
Installed Carbonite on my parents’ computer something like 15 years ago, and it still works (every now and then my dad tells me he used it to recover from a bug or a mistake).
But I have no idea where the company currently sits on the spectrum from good actor to fully enshittified.
`rclone` with AWS credentials. Go make a bucket and a key that can read/write to it.
Set up your config to exclude common non-file dirs, or say "only `/Applications` and `Home` and that's about it. If it's a file then it's a file, and it will be synced up.
Natasha from Backblaze here. This is a situation people rely on backups for, and I can understand how frustrating it is to run into this when you need a restore.
I also want to be clear, this wasn’t about saving on storage. It came from cases where backing up cloud-synced folders (like Dropbox) was leading to unreliable or incomplete restores because of how those files are managed under the hood.
When Dropbox began using reparse points for synced files, those files no longer behaved like standard local files. Because of that, Backblaze Computer Backup can’t reliably back them up or restore them. The current behavior is focused on ensuring we only back up data we can reliably restore, and we are actively exploring ways to better support Dropbox and data touched by other sync services.
If I can make a product suggestion, Backboard has a part of the interface that shows excluded folders. This should explicitly call out the Dropbox folder as being excluded. The software update that removed support for this should’ve included a pop-up that said “Dropbox is no longer being backed up” (though candidly if this pop-up existed on my dad’s machine and he didn’t see it, my mistake).
My frustration stems from paying hundreds of dollars over several years to pay for backup and then silently learning Dropbox was no longer supported when we went to look for it in our backup. We could’ve made other choices about how to store/bavkup our own files with better communication.
my parents also lost data that was supposed to be backed up on backblaze because they didn't use that computer for a month and when they turned it back on the hard drive was dead. apparently backblaze silently deletes backups more than 30 days old even if they are the newest backup and then happily keeps billing you for not storing your data.
Of course, I wouldn’t use their client anymore. Actually, I would have never used it from the start as it’s not open source. I think for backups there’s no better guarantee than that. I don’t mean because you could look at the source code, I mean because in my experience open source products tend to care more about their users than not. At least for such foundational tools.
This is the same reason I always had Backblaze -- stick it on all my computer-illiterate relatives' PCs and then I know there is a fool-proof backup when something invariably goes wrong.
I have some feedback for Dropbox as well for losing the file, but we don’t pay for that so my expectations aren’t the same.
My dad had a file untouched in Dropbox for 2 years. He overwrote it 2 days prior to me trying to recover it from Dropbox/Backblaze. They said he couldn't access the version that was just overwritten because that was over 30 days old, which is not what the definition of 30-day history is....
Just because files are in bespoke folders, does NOT mean they are being backed up.
Example: I'm 1,016% over my OneDrive limit because I canceled my Microsoft 365 account due to their price hike to cover for AI costs. My laptop still pushes files there upon save thanks to Microsoft defaults (my desktop was moved to CachyOS long ago).
If I had been using Backblaze for backup, those files would not have been backed up.
Luckily, I'm a nerd and I'm way ahead of this (I moved away from OneDrive long ago and never deleted the files). Most folks aren't.
Backblaze should be alerting users when stuff isn't backed up. I've strongly considered their B2 offering for a big project. The fact that they changed this without proper notification has made me decide NOT to move forward.
I thought you said Dropbox overwrote a file, meaning that file was also being synced by Dropbox, and that Dropbox sync was working. So likely the older file version would also have been synced by Dropbox, which it then overwrote. Dropbox itself keeps old versions of files for 30 days. I think you're saying in this situation Dropbox wasn't syncing though?
My comment was pretty orthogonal to all the Backblaze stuff, which I realize now was confusing.
I think they’re saying that Dropbox didn’t have the original (old) copy of the file retained, even though the change was just 2 days ago, because the old version was ‘more than 30 days ago’. Which is bonkers.
I don't think that's how the 30 day timer works. Once a file is replaced by a new one, the old copy should persist for 30 days. So if it was overwrote 2 days ago, should have 28 days to recover it. But don't know about this situation
Hello, Jim from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders.
It is true that we recently updated how Backblaze Computer Backup handles cloud-synced folders. This decision was driven by a consistent set of technical issues we were seeing at scale, most of them driven by updates created by third-party sync tools, including unreliable backups and incomplete restores when backing up files managed by third-party sync providers.
To give a bit more context on the “why”: these cloud storage providers now rely heavily on OS-level frameworks to manage sync state. On Windows, for example, files are often represented as reparse points via the Cloud Files API. While they can appear local, they are still system-managed placeholders, which makes it difficult to reliably back them up as standard on-disk files.
Moreover, we built our product in a way to not backup reparse points for two reasons:
1. We wanted the backup client to be light on the system and only back up needed user-generated files.
2. We wanted the service to be unlimited, so following reparse points would lead to us backing up tons of data in the cloud
We’ve made targeted investments where we can, for example, adding support for iCloud Drive by working within Apple’s model and supporting Google Drive, but extending that same level of support to third-party providers like Dropbox or OneDrive is more complex and not included in the current version.
We are currently exploring building an add-on that either follows reparse points or backs up the tagged data in another way.
We also hear you clearly on the communication gap. Both the sync providers and Backblaze should have been more proactive in notifying customers about a change with this level of impact. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me or our support team directly if you have any questions. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Appreciate the thoughtful response. I recognize the challenge that cloud-synced folders introduce into the file storage ecosystem and the challenges with online/offline files + storage loopholes that could take a cause an engineering challenge.
That being said, we’ve been nearly 6+ years backblaze users and we probably can’t rely on backblaze if it can’t support these tools that are now pretty standard services to have installed. As I mentioned above, the promise for us was “pay for backblazd and never worry about whether our files are backed up”. We’ll be looking for an announcement if you can bring back Dropbox support.
> If a user is signed in with a personal Apple Account and Managed Apple Account, Sign in with Apple automatically uses the Managed Apple Account for managed apps and the personal Apple Account for unmanaged apps.
no, but many apps can independently use a different Apple (nee iCloud) Account specifically for that app.
that said, you can create multiple users per macOS device, and each can have a different Apple Account. that's a nightmare, because some significant areas of device management assume a single Apple Account. So for example you can use a 2nd account to get around Activation Lock in some cases.
Everyone carries their phone. Power users (i.e. nomads who need connectivity in many different places) have lots of unlimited data plans available that are modestly priced (I've travelled asia the last few months and used e-sims for like $10 a month in each country). And that's a niche group, but even they have their phone as a hotspot. Downside is that it burns battery, but if you're sitting somewhere for any length of time that battery would matter, just plugging-in basically resolves that.
The vast majority of us are either at home, work, friends/family or a rotating set of a few local cafe's, all of which are in our wifi auto-connect list, and have their phone hotspot for the rare occasion there is no wifi.
Then for the powerusers you could just buy a mobile hotspot device as well, basically what your phone does but it's just connectivity + battery.
It's not as cheap a part as you'd think, estimates range between $100 and $300 extra per laptop, even though it seems like a niche thing for which alternatives at lower/similar price points (phone/dedicated device) already exist. So I'm not sure we're going to see it anytime soon. Maybe with Apple making its own modems now it'll happen in a few years. Previously it'd just make for a more expensive device for something few users need (and shipping cheap devices to everyone is a priority with their service business of $100b in 2025, more than Tesla with a market cap of 1 trillion)
If "just hotspot your phone" was hunky dory why does Apple sell iPads with cellular modems?
Also, have you ever used an iPad with a cellular modem? It's a far better experience than tethering. One (larger) battery to run down instead of two, lower latency (the extra hop from iPad to phone over Wi-Fi is gonna add at least a few dozen ms to every single web request), and best of all, I don't have to think about it. I don't have to wait, or fumble around with my phone. I take my iPad out on the train, turn cellular data on in the control center, and in half a second I'm connected to 5G. It's a vastly better way to connect on the go. Tethering is a last resort for me.
> If "just hotspot your phone" was hunky dory why does Apple sell iPads with cellular modems?
Because iPads are fundamentally different than laptops. Workers use tablets in the field all the time, often for shorter, quick, one-off checks and such. If you're in a fleet truck or on a job site, having a tablet on the passenger seat to check on work orders is easy. Pulling out a laptop is a much bigger pull, and more awkward.
> The vast majority of us are either at home, work, friends/family or a rotating set of a few local cafe's, all of which are in our wifi auto-connect list, and have their phone hotspot for the rare occasion there is no wifi.
So the minority that goes further than that doesn't matter? Also "rare occasion there is no wifi" is a very city-centric view, and a bit out of touch. We're talking about a trillion dollar hardware company here, asked to add a tiny modem to a laptop. It's a dead simple change.
If I was in the position to buy a premium laptop, work on the go a lot, and enjoy being in nature, I'd 100% want cellular in my laptop. There's zero downsides for someone like that.
Not saying a minority of users doesn't matter, just saying it's bad business to increase the price of an entry-level laptop by $200 for a minority user who has alternative solutions that are free or cheap.
Apple traditionally keeps a simple line-up of 3 or 4 models per product category. And each product has limited simple upgrade options consisting of normal vs expanded ram/storage/cpu.
Could they technically create 300 models with every permutation? From cellular, to touch-screen laptop, oled/led screen, different ports, battery sizes etc.
Sure, but they'd be confusing their customers with a complicated product offering and adding complexity in their supply chain hurting their margins, to pursue ever smaller niches that don't improve their bottom line, while competing with small niche brands that already cater to this demand.
And what's the point? You have cellular on your phone and a $3 usb cable plugs it into electricity, meaning you already have cellular for your laptop. You can buy dedicated cellular hotspots the size of a Airpods case that you can throw into any bag, jean or or jacket pocket.
Now if a cellular modem was a $1 part, sure, throw it in there. But it's not, again if you look at industry prices it adds between $100 and $300 to the retail price.
A $200 price bump makes sense for a common need, not for a niche use for an entry-level laptop model, in fact raising the price of an entry-level laptop by $200 is absolutely nuts for a minority use. Niche users can plug in their phone or buy a dedicated hotspot. You say I have a city-centric view, sorry but I don't know if you're not familiar with the typical macbook air buyer. Southpark did a satirical episode about them and it's not far from the truth.
Macbook Pro would be a different story, but this thread is about the air. I do think they'll introduce it in the next 2 years because Apple started to build its own modems. Previously they'd basically increase their entry-level product by a lot just to offload the majority of that price increase as revenue for Qualcomm, it was an entirely bad business decision and no surprise they didn't take it.
> Could they technically create 300 models with every permutation? From cellular, to touch-screen laptop, oled/led screen, different ports, battery sizes etc.
Nice slippery slope.
All they need is 2-3 higher-end configs to start with (aka people who are already spending more on RAM/storage) with an additonal checkbox for 5G/cellular. It may not be optimal for business, but there's a market for it, I guarantee you.
They literally make $200 ipad keyboards that are extremely unremarkable yet they still sell well.
They make a vision pro, that can't even do a quarter the things a $1000 macbook can do; and still build them to this day, despite the massive complexity of that hardware combined with the tiny target market.
But a cell modem in a computer is too niche? You know the ipad has had modems right? Is a macbook any less deserving of a modem (or any less difficult to add a modem too) than an ipad?
I don't think that would be very popular considering how easy it is to hotspot to your phone. Their watches only offer cellular because they're frequently used away from a phone.
I would love it though if they did, but it would probably require a data-only esim.
Yeah, I'm surprised this request still comes up a lot in techie circles. 15 years ago it made sense. When I packed up and moved to San Francisco with nothing but an AirBnB for a few days, I didn't even have a smartphone, so I bought an iPad with cell data to be able to look for apartments. But these days, it's gotta be a pretty rare scenario to not have a smartphone with a data plan and at least a way to upgrade to enable tethering.
All of the rumors pointed that this time in the refresh cycle is a spec bump and if they ever were going to make a Mac with cellular it would be the end of the year with the Macbook Pro redesign.
Because of the integration between the iPhone and the Mac it is extremely easy to tether your Mac to your phone. Like three clicks easy. Why would anyone want to pay for another data plan?
I have to work for 3 hours in a place with no wifi and no power outlet twice weekly. I physically connect my iphone to the MBA and it works great. The phone stays charged 100% and the laptop drains maybe 20% battery in 3 hours.
To everybody trying to justify apple not offering a wwan option.
On Thinkpad you can add the module later. It's a simple upgrade, open up the laptop and plug in the wwan module. The Thinkpad already comes with a sim tray. Though today presumably you would use an esim.
But hey you can pick a color for your macbook, so that's something.
Extra rant: the hardware quality of modern MacBook is fantastic. The keyboard sucks. The reflective screen sucks. The number of ports is ridiculously small. Soldered ssd and ram etc etc. Fantastic battery life. My thinkpad is a turd in comparison. But at least it doesn't bend when dropped. MacOS is horrible, Linux is the only thing I want. Sleep on modern PC is broken by design. A MacBook sleeping loses 1% of battery per day. A thinkpad loses 100%. Why can't we have nice things god dammit.
Give our personal devices have the ability to verify our age and identity securely and store on device like they do our fingerprint or face data.
Services that need access only verify it cryptographically. So my iPhone can confirm I’m over 21 for my DoorDash app in the same way it stores my biometric data.
The challenge here is the adoption of these encryption services and whether companies can rely on devices for that for compliance without having to cut off service for those without it set up.
The real problem with this is that the ultimate objective isn't age verification, it's complete de-anonymization. I think different groups want this for different reasons, but the simple reality is that minimizing the identify information transferred around is antithetical to their goals.
If we create age verification tools with strong privacy protections that solve the problems they raise, we can can call their bluff.
If we fight every and any solution, we may end up with their solution, becauase they build it. We end up in the position of saying "don't use the thing they built" without offering alternatives. I'd rather be saying "use whatbwe built, ita is better."
Google/Apple already know where you and your mistress live. In case you pay for any service, they've got your identity too. Ever had a single shipment confirmation to your address come to your mail? They know who you are.
The hardware providers already have the information. You only need to make them reveal it to 3rd parties.
We should be banning groups from collecting age related information, and not requiring it. And we definitely should not be forcing companies to share that information with third parties.
I think this is what my German electronic ID card does. The card connects to an app on my phone via NFC, a service can cryptographically verify a claim about my age, and no additional info is leaked to the service provider or the government.
I think this is actually the correct way to move forward.
We should be able to verify facts about people on the internet without compromising personal data. Giving platforms the ability to select specific demographics will, in my view, make the web a better place. It doesn’t just let us age restrict certain platforms, but can also make them more authentic. I think it’s really important to be able to know some things to be true about users, simply to avoid foreign election interference via trolling, preventing scams and so much more.
With this, enforcement would also be increasingly easy: Platforms just have to prove that they’re using this method, e.g. via audit.
And that your iPhone and other devices become more restrictive if this is not implemented.
I presume most devices in the world do not have a solution to this (desktop windows computer for instance).
I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for like every porn website in the world to require a secret enclave to work. But this sounds better to me than storing users photo ids in an s3 bucket
The solution has always been there: Assume everybody is an adult.
The only reasonable way to deal with children on the Internet is to treat Internet access like access to alcohol/drugs. There is no need for children to access the Internet full stop.
Internet is a network in which everything can connect to everything, and every connected machine can run clients, servers, p2p nodes and what not. Controlling every possible endpoint your child might connect to is not feasible. Shutting the entire network down because "won't somebody please think of the children" is not acceptable.
And, don't let them trick you. This is the endgoal. An unprecedented level of control over the flow of information.
So you would deny children the greatest source of knowledge in the history? I have learned math and programming thanks to unlimited access to the web and would not be where I am without it.
First of all, you cannot know that, since plenty of people before you learnt that stuff from libraries.
>So you would deny children the greatest source of knowledge in the history?
Yes, because other sources of knowledge exist and are much more appropriate for children. It is also the greatest source of despicable stuff in history. When you turn 18, have fun exploring the world wide web.
In order to build trust, they open source their product. I forked it, removed the blocks from the freemium feature in 15 minutes using Claude Code. Never published the code to anyone else, just used it myself
Unfortunately, I think it isn’t going to be tenable for systems to be fully open sourced going forward.
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