While this is true, there's also a good side to the bigger tech companies leaving, even if it is a lot of them: less wage competition.
If I'm a SV startup I already have problems with office rent, taxes, cost of living, etc. It's expensive to be in the Bay Area. And on top of that, most of the engineers I hire will either be of worse quality than FAANG or I'm going to have to pay them more than FAANG. While this is great for the employees, it's really hard to fit into the budget for many startups and the tradeoff becomes existential when the cost of your engineers starts adding up but you haven't found market fit yet. And the ever-increasing wages being used to draw people from one company to another just keeps making the Bay Area more and more unaffordable so the problem keeps compounding.
It works nicely when there's just one or two big companies to draw employees from, but there's just so many big SV companies now with billions of dollars in their pockets, I don't see how any true startup could possibly compete. If you don't like Google, you go to Uber. Or Facebook. Or Splunk. Or Airbnb. Or Yelp. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Salesforce. Or Workday. Or Juniper. Or Autodesk. Or Nvidia. Or Palo Alto Networks. Or...
There's just too much competition from the billion-dollar companies. Sure innovation and entrepreneurship still happens in SV, but I'd argue it would be better for the area if it were easier for smaller startups to compete.
Which is silly because even most 4G networks (LTE) don’t technically fall within the original standard of 4G. ITU actually lowered the standard of 4G to meet the limitations of LTE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)).
In my experience MagSafe never did that, so it’s likely to be the same on the iPhone as on the Macbooks. Most times when I tripped over the cable, it pulled the cable in a straight line. Unfortunately I can lift my Macbook with the MagSafe cable by pulling in a straight line, so it never actually broke apart the way it was intended. Also unfortunately, it breaks apart very easily if you push up or down, which happens frequently when the laptop is sitting on my lap.
So it would unplug itself constantly in normal use, but still pull the Macbook off the table when I tripped on the cable. It’s still better than nothing, but in my experience MagSafe never worked the way it was advertised. Especially as the Macbooks got lighter.
How so? They release new phones every autumn, with few exceptions. So if you buy an iPhone in the autumn and it’s not the brand new just-announced model, you should expect that you’re going to have a previous-generation phone very quickly.
Apple’s marketing timeline is remarkably consistent with very few exceptions.
I guess it depends on what you need to carry with you. For example, I only carry my medical insurance card if I’m going to the doctor. It’s not an every day carry. Likewise, I only carry my HSA card when I am going to buy something that can be covered by the HSA (not that often). I have a work-issued credit card but I only carry it when I’m on a work trip (and even then I generally leave it in my wallet inside my luggage unless I know I will need it that day).
On 99% of days over the past two years, I’ve left my wallet at home and only carried my phone with only with two cards: my personal credit card and my drivers license.
I'm having a hard time assuming good faith based on your comments so I'm going to bow out of this conversation. I'd suggest you take some time to stop and think about why someone might want to track demographic statistics in a field that is constantly under fire for being dominated by young white men.
Racism and sexism is a constant complaint against the tech industry. But unless someone is actually compiling data on it, no one knows how bad the problem actually is (or if it’s actually even a real problem).
Problems don’t get solved unless they’re being tracked.
As an anecdote, I am not a professional programmer but I was writing some code to solve a problem at work and when it got to the front end stuff I was told not to worry about it because they would just get a cheap contractor to build the front end. The backend needed to be written by an expert who knows the problem and understands the solution but the front end can be spec’d out and outsourced to cheaper contractors.
I don’t usually live in the world of enterprise programming so I’m not sure how normal that is, but it definitely surprised me.
That’s the thing. Mac and Windows both have their major UI failures and both suck in their own shitty ways but at the end of the day Mac is built on a good solid platform while Windows underneath the hood is... Windows.
On that note, with the iPad Pro becoming more like a laptop (mouse support, external drive support, rumors of XCode coming to the iPad soon, etc) why would they bother moving Macs to ARM rather than expanding the iPad lineup and phasing out Macs?
It seems pretty clear that Apple doesn’t care about the Mac market anymore, and they already have a version of OSX running on ARM in the hands of millions of end users: the iPhone and iPad.
I am sympathetic, don’t get me wrong, but this isn’t the only industry and this isn’t the only time this has happened. It happens every day in every industry and has been happening forever and will continue to happen forever. The old example is buggy whips, someone might have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making or collecting whips for horses only to have thar investment disappear when cars came around. Or making/collecting spears just as the Roman army switched to swords. Or medieval turnip farmers when suddenly everyone wanted to eat the newly discovered potato. Or people who bought all their favorite movies on Betamax and can’t easily watch them anymore.
There are very few creators who actually create the things they rely on to create, ultimately we are all consumers even inside our professions. And like any consumer, we are all at the mercy of a market we don’t control. Either you have to accept that everything must come to an end and plan for that eventual end, or you have to dig deeper into your creativity.
Everyone has something they rely on that will disappear before they’re ready to lose it. It’s a reality of life and as much as humankind has experienced that loss for thousands of years, we never seem to get any better at accepting it or planning for it.
Are you saying that iPhones and iPads are bad at Facebook, Netflix, and Microsoft Word? If they are, the end user certainly can’t tell. If they aren’t, then it doesn’t really matter does it?
That's what I don't understand when people criticize frameworks like React Native... "I didn't like that I had to build 15% of the app in native code, so I ditched RN and now have to write 100% of the app in native code, but twice and in two different languages"?
Because there aren’t a lot of stories of businesses struggling to contact Microsoft over a product they’ve paid for. Yet every other month there’s an article on the front page of HN of some paying business struggling to reach Google and the only way to do it is to go viral on social media.
Why does “dismissed” mean so much but “eventually” mean nothing? That makes it sounds like it was a pretty serious conversation where most people up to this point may have been using GCP with the idea that shutting it down was never a real option for Google.
It really depends on how you split the numbers. It's kind of like saying SQL and Excel are the most popular programming languages... yeah, but they've captured a far different market than most people would consider to be the "programming" field.
A service that only exists in China to serve the Chinese audience may be bigger than worldwide services that serve worldwide audiences, but it's kind of irrelevant if you're not a Chinese company doing business exclusively in China.
If I'm a SV startup I already have problems with office rent, taxes, cost of living, etc. It's expensive to be in the Bay Area. And on top of that, most of the engineers I hire will either be of worse quality than FAANG or I'm going to have to pay them more than FAANG. While this is great for the employees, it's really hard to fit into the budget for many startups and the tradeoff becomes existential when the cost of your engineers starts adding up but you haven't found market fit yet. And the ever-increasing wages being used to draw people from one company to another just keeps making the Bay Area more and more unaffordable so the problem keeps compounding.
It works nicely when there's just one or two big companies to draw employees from, but there's just so many big SV companies now with billions of dollars in their pockets, I don't see how any true startup could possibly compete. If you don't like Google, you go to Uber. Or Facebook. Or Splunk. Or Airbnb. Or Yelp. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Salesforce. Or Workday. Or Juniper. Or Autodesk. Or Nvidia. Or Palo Alto Networks. Or...
There's just too much competition from the billion-dollar companies. Sure innovation and entrepreneurship still happens in SV, but I'd argue it would be better for the area if it were easier for smaller startups to compete.