Similar conclusion - they're "losing" if the goal is marketshare and mindshare dominance. If the goal is just to carve their own niche, they're already there.
But, if you compare the growth into new spaces Apple did in the 2000s, then sure Apple of today hasn't done anything new in a while. Does it need to? Maybe from an investor point of view?
The hardware side is its own thing - some do not challenge their hardware because their goals are different like Facebook going cheap on VR rather than expensive).
While nobody has as complete of a portfolio on what the M-chips have accomplished, the GB10 and Ryzen AI Max Pro seem to be similar in capability, yet late to the party and at this point just one-offs.
But I don't think that really matters. Few people are buying based on deeply researched specs, so whatever is cheap and has battery life will do and there's happily plenty to choose from these days.
Over time I went from 0 doc, 0 automation to putting a lot of thought into both. Projects become a bit of a circus to maintain, and nobody can help you out of it if nothing is documented, and good luck when you forget.
Devs aren't the only problem here. In the few large companies I've been in, the assigned doc writers haven't made a net positive. It always takes me so much effort to walk them through what to write about and how it should be written to match how the users actually read and understand content that I end up writing it myself during such meetings. It's a bit of a living rubber duck exercise at times. I've grown to be a high paid doc writer that writes code too.
> It's meant to compete with the junky little thing you get with your PC that's wired, with who-knows-what DPI and 3 buttons at best.
Of all the strange things Apple decides to compete in, why would Apple be trying to compete with logitech at twice the price? Honestly don't know why Apple bothers with peripherals though, its not like their keyboards are worth writing home about either.
I disagree, but you know having different preferences is fine. I think the trackpad of the macbook is the worst trackpad I've ever used, typing from an m1 mbp right now and wish it had distinct right & left mouse buttons.
But the nice thing is you can buy a variety of form factors that suit your needs. Unless its Apple, in which you get basically one thing take it or leave it.
The US had incredible soft power. You could travel the world and still hear US news, and locals discussing their opinion on the US. US entertainment was inescapable. Now people in other countries are starting to find ways to do without US influence, and the admiration and interest is dwindling.
The loss of soft power will hurt in indirect ways, but they will hurt.
I clicked expecting a list of cool things to self host.
Instead I got a list of ways I would never want to host.
Mankind invented BSD jails so that I do not have to tie myself in a knot of container tooling and abstraction.
I also find it funny that COBOL is treated as the boogeyman. It's just a language. Any programmer by profession should be capable of learning a language decently in a month, and better within the year.
So when people say "all the COBOL programmers are retiring!", they're completely missing the problem. The language isn't the problem.
The problem is the design of the software written in COBOL, z/OS itself, and the operators that defend its design. The software has so much dark matter due to tech debt, partially due to age, partially due to vintage. z/OS has tech debt, due to designs for a different era being carried forward. Manual processes that should have safety guards and technical limitations abound.
But that's not to say DOGE should be trying to rewrite this stuff. Not on their schedule and not with their staff. Because it will create bugs. The same reason this software persists.
I agree with you that most consumers probably do want things that are bad for them. I would at least be cautious of services provided by one of the companies with the most anti-trust lawsuits this century, I really don't think they're your friend.
Yeah, not all hope is lost, but good apps do get delisted for not complying with whatever Google dictates on the Play store, so you have to make good backups of content that only exists there! Which is a really great reason to use f-droid instead of course.
I don't know why you are relating any of what I said to popularity or the merits of closed source. I guess you misunderstand what I mean by "on life support".
Android is unhealthy versus its former self in that it has been increasingly hostile to developers. Your examples of /e/os and lineage are representative of the "look-but-dont-touch" nature of Android.
Not to diminish the hard work of the developers of them, as they are useful, but they do not stray far from what Google provides them for better and worse. As you say, they're alternative builds, primarily to reduce the ties to Google, but they largely adhere to the same APIs, have the same menus, have the same quirks. Perhaps graphene goes above and beyond, I have not used it. I remember Cyanogenmod having more divergence in feature set and appearance from what Google provided versus what Lineage can do for you now. I miss when Android was good, but it's just become the platform I don't want to upgrade and see what I lose next.
I'd love to expand the term actually, because it's been misused to come to mean that something is community oriented, collaborative, even benevolent. Not even open source, but just the word "open". OpenAI for one. It's been abused for public image.
You're example of Linux is a bad one. Its contributions are corporate, but they are collaborative. With Android, Google dictates and others follow. Linux is not this way.
As you say, due to banking, this works more or less depending on which country you live in.
Some countries have tied their banking to their phones, with apps that use SafetyNet to check how Googled you are.
Somehow corporations and nations have given sovereignty away for convenience and so you may need 2 phones: the google one and the good one, to properly be f-droid only.
Android has been bad-faith open source for as long as I can remember.
Android is look-but-dont-touch source.
Its massive codebase that requires immense resources to build is not open for negotiation, its existence is to serve Google's whims.
Android was already a platform on life support. Google has wielded its authority to dictate how apps should behave such that even 3rd party stores do not stray far from Google's rules. Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago, or to roll back a bad update in an era full of bad updates.
I think nobody buys mac desktops because apple devices and desktop use cases barely overlap. Worst OS for gaming, they're not upgradable, and probably half the specialty software that demands something more than a laptop is exclusive to Windows or that the Windows PC is going to be better value for the thrifty professional.
Importantly, if laptop makers stuck to screen size rather than overall dimensions, a 11" with the same bezel today would be smaller than an 11" of the past, and that could be too small for a good keyboard for some.
You can have a win-win combination of high quality components, high performance components, and a low cost device by reuse and iterative upgrades.
- family members of such people
Since they may get the hand me down parts.
Also, it's nice not to have battery fatigue unnecessarily. I'm sure if I used a laptop as if it were a desktop I'd be replacing its battery at least once through its lifecycle.
I'd say the SGX is the "cheapest" only if you're trying to go beyond 96GB.
the AMD system is 96GB max for the GPU. The 128GB allocates a minimum of 32GB to the CPU.
the Nvidia system is designed to be connected to a second if so desired, making it the cheapest way to get 256GB.
If you're just going for something under 96GB, haven't seen something cheaper than the AMD system for anything that can't fit on a traditional GPU. And even then, GPUs are obscene ripoff prices lately. Here's hoping these won't be scalped too.
But, if you compare the growth into new spaces Apple did in the 2000s, then sure Apple of today hasn't done anything new in a while. Does it need to? Maybe from an investor point of view?
The hardware side is its own thing - some do not challenge their hardware because their goals are different like Facebook going cheap on VR rather than expensive). While nobody has as complete of a portfolio on what the M-chips have accomplished, the GB10 and Ryzen AI Max Pro seem to be similar in capability, yet late to the party and at this point just one-offs. But I don't think that really matters. Few people are buying based on deeply researched specs, so whatever is cheap and has battery life will do and there's happily plenty to choose from these days.