> “Do you have an appointment?” No. “Oh, it’ll be about 45 minutes before someone can help you.”
Ah, yes, the Ferrari customer experience. You need to be selected by the manufacturer to be allowed to buy their product. It makes the product feel rare and exclusive, and the customer feel "special", when it's a consumer product made by the same Chinese sweatshop workers that make your other e-waste.
>"inflation has made everyone poorer - get used to it not ask for wage increases"
Which is absolutely horseshit, because the European countries that had the least amount of inflation (besides the super wealthy Switzerland and Luxembourg), were the countries where salaries are automatically indexed with inflation, like Belgium.
So it turns out that forcing companies to increase wages by inflation is a very effective deterrent against price gouging and inflation, yet those in charge try to convince us otherwise, that we should accept lower wages for our own sake lol.
Can you believe the nerve of these people? It's disgusting, but we get what we vote for. You want better, then vote better.
Comparing Apples to oranges. The iPad ran so smooth because Apple spared no dev time expense in optimizing the SW to perfection using budgets of millions and devs with wages in the six figures plus.
Meanwhile automotive software is developed by the lowest paid and most crunched people in the industry, in line with the gaming industry, in bottom of the barrel, race to the bottom of cost cutting.
Especially that in Automotive you often have tons of legacy code that gets carried over because nobody wants to touch the old codebase, so all the crust keeps getting carried over, with new layers added on top because the device can't exist in a vacuum or in a tightly controlled ecosystem of the same manufacturer like the iPad, bust must be compatible to all the the other ECUs in the car developed by other companies and still be backwards compatible with the old platform.
Imagine having the iPad team operate at 10% of their budget and write their SW on top of Symbian OS, and be compatible with the Android ecosystem. Good luck getting a smooth experience there.
Reminds me of Agent Smith's PoV from the Matrix, that humans define their existence through suffering. The first version of the matrix had everyone living in paradise and made the system unstable as humans couldn't accept it and would try to wake up from it, dying in the process. Once they introduced misery, humans accepted the programming. Yeah, it's a fantasy movie, but it has great symbolisms that rings true.
>If you're smart enough to work in BigTech, you're smart enough to understand the programs, unlike Snowden.
There's really no such proof for this kind of casualization. To get in to big tech you mostly need to grind leetcode, a known set of problems that have already been solved and well documented. I met plenty of people who can grind leetcode but aren't really good at many other basic things in life like boiling some pasta or understanding why women's bathrooms have tampons. Just because you can grind leetcode, doesn't make you smart at everything else.
Google is so entrenched they're the default search engine on 3 major browsers and it even became a verb in the English dictionary. Do you think the average members of the public are gonna start Googling stuff on Bing anytime soon?
I think most non-tech people don't even realize if they are or aren't getting meaningful results. They got conditioned that whatever is on the first results page of google is what's relevant for what they're looking for and if it's not there then it must not exist.
I really don't see any major market shift away from Google search any time soon. Maybe if Apple launched their own could change things up a bit.
Meh, if I had a dollar for every time someone said "this time Microsoft is gonna fail for sure", I'd be richer than Elon. People were singing Microsoft's funeral at every new Windows or product launch and assumed it would burry them for good. Turns out, despite many failures, Microsoft is still among us, still growing, buying new companies and IPs, branching in new areas and firing on all cylinders despite all the haters and doomers predicting otherwise for the past 3 decades. Maybe individual products will die, like Windows, but Microsoft as a company will survive, as it grew to be a lot more than the Windows/Office company.
My point is, people are generally bad at making accurate predictions into the future and competent CEOs are good at turning things around.
Google's monopoly over search, email, ads, Android and Youtube will be hard to beat by smaller and nimble competitors. It's far too entrenched and the moat it has built is too tough and impossibly expensive for newcomers to beat. And if newcomers do turn into a threat, they will be swiftly acquired and absorbed into the machine.
If it was possible, it would have happened already. Everyone is waiting for a Youtube competitor, but nobody can afford to build and run one at Youtube's scale.
Same for the likes of Nvidia.
The only real threat to Google is government regulators breaking their products up into separate entities that will have to fund and fend for themselves without Big-daddy G's ad money.
>What you are showing here is a very severe lack of empathy in my opinion
Where did I do that? I wasn't saying that smartphones should be the norm for everything , I was jusy saying how society usually sees smartphone ownership as a necessity in certain countries because they reduce the friction for many communication and organization task that would otherwise be much more difficult. I wasn't saying that's how I want it to be or that this is a good thing, I'm saying how things are in the real world and in which direction they are going.
Like for example in my country, parent-teacher communication regarding school and child matters is done via WhatsApp/Telegram. Is that good? No, obviously not. Ideally we'd have an internal school chat/meesaging system with logins for parents and teachers like how proably things are in Scandinavian countries I imagine. But since my country is poor and schools could never afford to pay market rate devs and sys-admins to implement and maintain such communication systems, the likes of Telegram and WhatsApp took over this role because they're free, convenient, frictionless and since "everyone already has a smartphone" they already know how to use these apps.
So there you go, that's how the likes of WahtsApp have such a huge market share in the lives of all people and businesses, especially in developing countries.
>I don't like being a third class citizen when I want to connect to my bank, to my COVID appointment or, god forbid, interact with the government machine.
I'd be curious where this is the case. There are enough "old-school" banks where you don't need a smartphone, and stuff like government interactions are usually regulated so that they can be accessible for people without smartphones and also for people with disabilities. Even in developing countries. Digitization of government serivices has been implemented to make things more efficient and reduce the need for paperwork, commuting and waiting in lines, not to completely replace the old systems.
The reality kind of contradicts you. Sure, there are people living without smartphones, the same way how there are people living without electricity or running water.
The thing is, in the developing world, smartphones and the various apps have really improved people's lives, mostly by getting ahead in speed and innovation of what the governments, public services and local companies could offer the traditional way.
So it's not like everyone is forced to get a smartphone, but everyone got a smartphone because it now allowed everyone to communicate better, organize better, and sell their services/goods easier.
It's safe to assume that, even in developing nations, everyone has a cheap beat-down Android or iPhone.
Having a smartphone has become as ubiquitous as having electricity or running water now that nobody questions living without one. It's pretty much a must have.
That's why the Apple/Google platform are starting to attract regulators, which is only a good thing.
>I'm not a fan of some standardization of protocols that is going on in Linux desktops
Standardization and Linux desktops are sometimes mutual conflicting terms.
There's doesn't seem to be much standardization on this front but tribes of people saying "new things should be this way" and other tribes saying "n'ah mate, that sucks, we'll keep using our own better way".
Linux desktops don't have the Apple/Microsoft dictatorship powers to actually enforce any kind of GUI standards so we get this constant hassle and even more fragmentation.
Very interesting. A very basic house in Austria is over 500k and not in a hot location, while to my knowledge wages here are not higher than in Finland. How is a house so cheap in Finland? 200k is basically Eastern/Southern European house prices, where wages are lower.
I feel like the insane housing prices here are not just related to nimbyism that restricts supply, but mostly to speculation driven by banking, political greed, realtors, investors, basically any and all large piles of money that have housing constantly going up fast so that their piles of money get even bigger.
Ah, yes, the Ferrari customer experience. You need to be selected by the manufacturer to be allowed to buy their product. It makes the product feel rare and exclusive, and the customer feel "special", when it's a consumer product made by the same Chinese sweatshop workers that make your other e-waste.
Obligatory Futurama "there might be one left":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uASUHbFEhWY