Gosh. I hate Apple’s right to repair BS, but to this day Apple remains the only consumer electronics company that has provided a consistently positive technical support experience for me.
It’s so hard to step out the Apple ecosystem when these other manufacturers have consistently screwed me over with repairs.
I’m specifically calling out Dell, Samsung and LG here. All were utterly terrible experiences.
Dell was the absolute worst though. They sold me a $1,700+ XPS notebook that months later had a non-functional trackpad, and they refused to do anything to rectify the situation. With an investment that large I need certainty that I can get support, and thus far Apple is the only PC OEM that has provided that.
If anyone can suggest non-Apple OEMs that at least provide a competitive support experience, I’m all ears.
VR and AR is still in its early adoption phase. It's too early to make any predictions about which VR/AR platforms or products will ultimately have mass market appeal. As an analogy, none of the biggest smartphone manufactures in 2004 really ended up mattering in the long run.
When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accelerates evermore.
Software is very much the same. And the cool thing about software is that the domain of knowledge is effectively infinite. No one person can ever run out of things to know in this field. You can only learn more and get even better.
>JS the language isn't great but it's JS the culture that is the real problem.
I'm happy you bring this up. Us developers have a tendency to blame bad code on poor tooling/languages or on individual developers or organizations. Not enough attention is given to cultural factors within various ecosystems that systemically induce bad coding practices.
>The author isn't claiming to have had an informed opinion of types. They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful. That's a real problem that I think people who understand types forget.
Respectfully, its really hard for me to wrap my head around this mindset.
When I wrote my first line of code, almost 10 years ago, one of the very first concepts I learned was types. You know the basic OOP lessons where they teach that a Dog is a type of Mammal which is a type of Animal, etc. Typing was ingrained in me before I wrote any meaningful code. So from my perspective (and the perspective of anyone who learned similarly), typing is basic, foundational knowledge, and programming without an understanding of types is akin to running before you can walk
I think a lot of the developers learning nowadays are learning to code only on JS. And on JS you can do a lot without ever thinking about types. So they get stuck in the mentality that typing isn't necessary, and don't ever put in the effort to learn types.
Learning about types isn't that hard. But if you've been conditioned into thinking that typing is esoteric (perhaps due to modern coding courses completely glazing over types), then you're likely going to find it very challenging.
>The author isn't claiming to have had an informed opinion of types. They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful. That's a real problem that I think people who understand types forget.
I don't understand how one can be a great (or even half-decent) SWE with such an aversion to learning something so common and foundational as types.
I did one of my internships at a financial services company. Their web applications were responsible for performing transformations on massive JSON datasets, with a huge variety of financial data. This is precisely the kind of project that would benefit most from typing.
I was relieved to find out that they were smart enough to use TS, yet horrified when I looked at the code base and found that the entire codebase was littered with the "any" keyword, making typing damn near useless.
We had so many bugs reports that essentially boiled down to "this data is being transformed in a way it shouldn't be". Almost invariably these bugs were due to the developer thinking that some variable represented one thing, when it really represented something else, and they thus performed an incorrect transformation on it. Typing would've eliminated this entire class of bugs.
Figuring out what any variable represented often involved traversing the huge codebase to find out where the variable originated. On some occasions, I even had to talk to the back-end developers to figure out what the heck was going on. Typing is self-documenting, and would've completely eliminated the need to go on a scavenger hunt to figure out what a variable meant.
Anyways I got sick of this rather quickly, and made sure to add types to any new code that I wrote. I was the only developer on the 20 person team that bothered to do so.
As an intern, I didn't understand why these developers refused to use types. I just assumed that with their years of experience, they must've had a good reason. Now looking back at it, it's clear that they didn't understand types, didn't want to learn how to use types, and thus just chose to completely ignore typing.
As you said, this is utterly horrifying (especially for a financial services company dealing with real money).
Other messaging apps have the same features as iMessage, but not the same user experience. For example, WhatsApp has a pretty massive spam and fake news problem, and Facebook messenger is significantly slower and applies a high degree of compression on media. iMessage offers the best UX, and that’s why, in my experience, iOS users will almost always opt to use iMessage over competitors when communicating with other iOS users.
What's app has a pretty massive spam and fake news problem. It's an unfortunate side effect of WhatsApp's ability to forward message to your contacts. Users will forward fake news to their contacts, those contacts will then forward to their contacts and so on. It's essentially a modern reincarnation of chain emails of the 90s and early 2000s.
I've had discussions with my friends and family on WhatsApp about them forwarding fake news, but they either don't understand (a lot aren't particularly computer literate) or refuse to listen. WhatsApp has tried to fix the problem by restricting the ability to forward messages, but this behaviour is so ingrained in the "culture" of the WhatsApp user base that software fixes are unlikely to resolve the problem. Anecdotally, I know a lot of WhatsApp's younger users refuse to engage with users on the app because of this behaviour. I've personally disabled WhatsApp notifications to control the amount of fake news spam I receive.'
Edit: This behaviour is highly regionalized, so I wouldn't necessarily expect all WhatsApp users to have experienced it
They care because the green bubbles indicate a severely impaired user experience. For example, multimedia may not work, and even if it does, its typically very poor quality.
It's trivial to use software to automate spam on more open web-based platforms, such as Facebook Messenger. This is a lot tricker with iMessage, where only authenticated Apple devices, with a unique identifier, can connect to the service. Buying truckloads of Apple equipment to spam iMessage is obviously uneconomical(and totally ineffective, given that Apple will swiftly ban any spamming devices), and software hacks to be exploited by spammers are either hard to come by or non-existant, and can quickly be patched by Apple
Again, not saying spam on iMessage is impossible, but it's clearly very difficult given the relative lack of spammers on the platform.
Vendor lock is real, but would that not be rendered moot of other players could offer a superior user experience? Especially when you consider that Facebook, Google and others have a far larger base of potential users than iMessage. As far as I understand, the only iMessage feature that competitors couldn't emulate due to first-party entitlements is the SMS fallback functionality, which while nice, is definitely a feature that people could live without.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, every other messaging app I've used just has't lived up to the UX provided by iMessage. Spam is a major issue on all non-iMessage messaging platforms I've used. No messaging app I've used on any platform has performance as fast and fluid as iMessage on iOS. Competing products are often full with ads and useless features that clutter the user interface and degrade performance. And these platforms often have annoying restrictions on media quality. Facebook Messenger, for instance, has garbage quality images and video compression, while iMessage appears to apply no further compression on media files. Using any other messaging app, either on iOS or Android, has consistently been way more of a headache than its worth for me.
> Sidewalk really pushed the technology angle way too hard, and it was a clear overstep– most of it wasn't necessary for any sort of quality of life improvements, but many of the ideas like wooden 'skyscrapers' and de-prioritizing roads were exciting, now lost.
These ideas are not lost.
The City of Toronto has already approved several wooden “skyscrapers”. This idea wasn’t unique to Google by any stretch of the imagination.
De-prioritizing roads also was not unique to this Google development. In fact, just walking distance from Google’s smart-city proposal are two significantly larger developments (Portland’s and Unilever) that lean heavily on the shared streets/woonerf concept.