Apple denies it, but the look is in fact that they would rather iOS running on the Mac.
I'm not sure where this aesthetic comes from — that somehow traditional desktop/laptops are an outmoded way of computing and that touchy, file-manager-less, terminal-less, tool-less computer use is the way we all ought to be doing things.
It comes from the top, it's CEO and executive.
When you don't use a computing platform to do useful stuff, as a "bicycle for the mind" as Steve Jobs said, it becomes much less clear how iOS/iPad OS can be lackluster in so many ways.
Hilariously, even their office suite has limitations on iPad even though Tim Cook supposedly uses it. I'm sure he does but he probably has most of the real work pre-made for him, by people most likely using a Mac.
People will often talk about the disconnection between the elite and the regular people which can also be found in the relation of manager to worker. And this is exactly a reproduction of that.
When you don't really need to use the tools to make useful stuff there is no way to understand how inadequate they can be. Since they know how much they can profit from iOS with the App Store, they try to push it as much as possible, ignoring the fact that even if everybody wanted/agreed to do that it wouldn't even be technically possible, regardless of profits/prices considerations.
There is no worse leader than one that doesn't periodically put himself in the position of the people he is leading. Tim Cook is unable to do that and he has imposed a feminine way of working: collaboration enforced by a pecking order determined by a social construct that doesn't care much about competence/capabilities and the values of ideas/work on their own merit.
Now Apple will keep making good hardware because they have talents that know what they are doing and they have the means to throw money at basically any problem.
But the finer details won't improve anymore, they refuse to properly compete in the open market and they refuse to compete internally because they now work on a model following feminin ideals that is not conductive to improvements.
This is why the state of current Apple offerings is very frustrating: it's not going to improve in a cost matter because they clearly like their profits too much and it's not going to improve in a quality/functionality way because they just don't have the structure to do so anymore.
Things will change, but probably not for the better and if so, it will probably be pure coincidence. Many of their passionate customer are intuitively making this realization which is why even the most diehard fans are starting to be pissed off (new iPads review sentiment is rather grim, even worse than their AVP that didn't do anything new or useful).
The issue is that an interface that's good for a touchscreen often isn't good when using a keyboard/mouse, and vice versa. Touchscreens require significantly larger targets than mice, which reduces the amount of information that a program can convey. For an example, see how much Windows has regressed in keyboard/mouse usability since Microsoft started targeting 2-in-1 convertible laptops in Windows 8.
I’d argue the iOS text interface isn’t even good for a touch screen.
The keyboard works decent but deleting, selecting, spellchecking, editing, undo is an exercise in frustration.
Like I can’t believe we’re over a decade into this and the delete key still does the thing were it goes from painfully deleting letter by letter for far too long, the. Jumping to words for a moment the. Suddenly deleting huge blocks and sometimes this can’t be undone
Patema Inverted is in the league there, graphics wise. It's crazy how nobody had ever tried the idea of the character pov of falling towards the sky. The immersive feeling is real and genius.
Well, yes, rsync to replace scp. Sftp's also regarded a hack anyway imho.
The write-only scp intrigues me. I guess it's not hard to write a program to do that. But, right, that's not easy with standard tools only. The Linux file system was also not designed for that (although it doesn't prohibit such software) I guess.
The blog is flawed. 33MB is likely no problem for the web. It's just that Google Docs devs haven't cared about that size probably because hardly anybody creates a huge doc on their platform. Or maybe his dad created a complicated doc file that G Doc failed to parse.
That's different from us devs losing efficiency from our deployment platform.
This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they? You'd be locked in to whatever cable the local government can afford.
Outside plant cable doesn't really change. Telco copper wires, CATV cables, and optical fiber are pretty much it. They stay in place for decades. OS1 from 2004 is the same quality today. You just swap out the transceivers at the ends for better speeds.
> This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they?
They charge ISPs for use of the infrastructure and that funds maintenance and upgrades. For the sort of core upgrades that occur every few decades, they can do a bond referendum to cover shortfalls.
It's the same setup our private infra does here. They own the fiber in the ground and ISPs pay then to sell services.
It can be harder for a private infra company to get in the ground because they're limited to municipalities that aren't captured by telecom/ISP lobbying orgs - but still have a dense enough population.
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