It’s still helpful: even 50-70 Calories per day is 18k-25k Calories per year. At 3500 Calories per pound of fat that’s 5-7 pounds offset each year, but it’s not a panacea for someone with 100 pounds of body fat.
Wow, “can’t work”. That might be the strongest signs of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever seen.
Trivial logic disproves your statement and in 10-20 years it will be proven empirically through disruption from the market (including mini-Apple splinter groups that do exactly what you say is impossible).
SJ’s (awesome, to be admired) reality distortion field was strong and its effects clearly still linger, as evidenced by your leaps here.
Apple is decidedly less innovative than it was in decades past (make sure you don’t misread that as “not innovative”) and others will take the mantle in due time. It’ll just be faster, better for the economy, and better for individual citizens if Apple isn’t allowed to exert undue influence against competitors via monopoly/oligopoly tactics along the way.
Side note: funny enough, your sort of reverence for the status quo is a huge factor in keeping large companies unaware of looming disruption. But nearly every exec that could act on it has a personal time horizon that preserves their legacy and makes it the next guy's problem. This phenomenon, while frustrating to experience on the inside, is one of the most heartening aspects of the situation for would-be competition to take hold.
If you saw, for example, how deals that lock up fabrication resources (and the surrounding global politics) work to prevent competition, you’d see one small example out of many that illustrate how smaller competitors can’t keep up.
As for the rest of your comment, I am actually a HUGE FAN of vertical integration. But your connection is a non sequitur because a $100B company can do everything the way Apple does if and only if there isn’t a $1T company next door locking up every single one of the best chip engineers, industrial designers, worldwide supply of miniature CNC machines, & etc with golden handcuffs, trade deals, capital and etc that only a monopoly could afford.
Our theoretical $100B company would still have some of the greats. But right now, some ridiculous percentage of engineers and infrastructure are controlled by like 5 tech companies. It isn’t healthy for individual citizens, and it misses huge opportunity costs if you compare it to a truly competitive economy with enforced rules against monopolies or oligopolies.
It’s one of the truly rare situations where proper, concise and well-planned government intervention (in other words, laws!) could and should help.
I am actually spending a good chunk of time on the process of extracting myself from the ecosystem, I’m about 50% there. Two problems make your solution a non-solution:
1. Apple is “best of the worst” i.e. the other platforms suck more on a usability basis.
2. It doesn’t matter if only a select few understand the long term impact of trading freedom/competition for shininess – our money is a drop in the bucket compared to regular users who care about usability and have already changed the channel when you talk about anything beyond that.
And so, large companies will roll along with exclusive access to things like TSMC 5nm thanks to capital resources and returns 1000x of any upstart like System76/PinePhone/FairPhone/etc.
Free markets work great, except that monopoly-like things form naturally and suck all of the air out of the room; therefore anti-monopoly laws are one of the very few regulations on capitalism I think we should all support (who wouldn’t benefit? 100 people total?).
There’s probably a way to oust them that isn’t legislation, but it will require coming at them from an angle that doesn’t rely on having access to the world’s largest pile of capital and etc. I.e. entrepreneurs getting real creative and taking huge risks on opportunity cost (it’s easier to build an app and get rich, easier still to pull $500k/year in total comp as a mid level SW engineer at big tech co).
But based on my experience and judgment of the situation, I’d like to see concise and progressive (vs regressive) antitrust/antimonopoly legislation, I think it would be both great for the economy and great for individual citizens.
I have the same problem, and also often people show up twice but only one bubble works (invariably the second one I try).
I tried to get stuff like that fixed, impossible when there’s 35 people who “share responsibility” and can point fingers instead of doing something. Imagine a code base and organization so complex that even fixing a bug takes political capital and months. Much less re-architecting to kill a whole class of bugs...
Steve Jobs woulda (metaphorically) broken their fingers off and fed ‘em to ‘em. Once the pointing can’t happen, useful stuff can happen!
Also, you’d be surprised how many SVPs and CEOs I’ve met in big tech that use IT support to setup and fix their devices. When I ran Dropcam, I insisted on using and operating our product only as a customer could. It’s a point of pride and a critical last-resort way to catch issues.
> The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical.
Read again, I said as much & agree so much that it’s actually a fundamental part of my characterization of Apple.
> I think Apple’s products are better than ever, on the whole
I had to type this quote because my iPad won’t let me copy and paste anymore on this page for some reason. (I didn’t make this up)
> I don’t think we should...
Well, I’m only speaking from my years of experience as both a product executive at Google and Apple and a successful entrepreneur, which is perhaps the exact skeleton key that fits this particular lock. Your idea would not fix my Apple product issues, because they really don’t rely nearly as much on IP protection as they do trade secrets, security through obscurity, and (legal disclaimer: in my subjective opinion only) anti-competitive practices.
But it would greatly hurt some other big companies (not really Apple, Google, Amazon, ...) and small tech companies alike.
You know, I used to think as you do on that topic, but not once I truly understood the ins and outs via relevant experience. Patent trolls suck, but IP law ain’t the biggest problem in tech by a country mile.
I worked for an SVP at Apple as an “entrepreneur in residence” from 2016-2019.
Apple’s best-of-the-worst products now suck in a million subtle ways; and they’ve become so complex that they suck in different ways for each user so we can’t even band together behind a single complaint.
The root cause is the lack of a “fuck no, fix that shit” product CEO who puts customer experience above all else. Without one, it has become a very typical big company bureaucracy. The engine is still firing on all cylinders but nobody is at the wheel anymore.
It’s hard to diagnose from the outside with Apple because 1. there’s a shroud of mystery/secrecy, 2. boatloads of cash keep smart people on hand and create some very genuine technical supremacy (e.g. M1) and 3. even a broken “new product innovation” clock is right twice a day when it sprays $20b into R&D every year (AirPods, maybe AR someday, etc).
But true, earth-shattering category-defining innovation at today’s Apple is incredibly inefficient at best and structurally impossible at worst – not to mention the hardest type of innovation which consists of simplifying software, slashing the complexity of product lines, and thereby fixing whole categories of bugs with a few powerful swings of the sword. (E.g. fucking fix and unify Apple ID/iTunes/FindMy/etc ... today ... not next year).
And, in my opinion, their monopoly/oligopoly/[whatever] status, cash hoarding, and domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating and competing with them.
We should break up any company in the $1T range (inflation adjust by making a rule based on % GDP?) into ten $100B companies, by force of legislation. It won’t fix the problem but it would at least create some sunlight through the canopy for new trees to grow.
Per month?
https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
It’s still helpful: even 50-70 Calories per day is 18k-25k Calories per year. At 3500 Calories per pound of fat that’s 5-7 pounds offset each year, but it’s not a panacea for someone with 100 pounds of body fat.
You can’t out-lift your fork!