What Apple is doing now is shipping a device with no native port compatibility with the rest of their product line, and then demanding that people buy dongles that Apple expects to become obsolete after the transition phase from USB-A to USB-C.
Eh, they're shipping a laptop. And they're including a USB-C power supply. A laptop, which in many cases even in professional environments literally never has anything other than that power supply plugged into it.
the market will decide on its own, just as it did when USB-A first came out and a rapid-growing ecosystem of peripherals supported it based on its merits over the old serial port technology
The same market that kept making PS/2 keyboards and mice long after USB came out, until Apple dropped the ports? That market?
Its not the end of the world, and let's stop pretending that it is, mmmkay?
Let's pretend you're a device manufacturer. USB-C is "the future" but many computers don't have it, and any computer that has USB-C also has the old stuff. What do you do?
You stay the fuck away from USB-C of course. Its the same reason that nobody built OS/2 software once they added a Windows compatibility layer.
Want people to build USB-C peripherals? You have to create an environment in which they're needed. Like it or not, Apple has historically held that position (see also PS/2, floppies, CD-ROMs, VGA ports, etc, etc).
Agreed. That's why Apple is wrong with proprietary ports such as Lightning and Dock. They should have used USB-C and micro-USB instead, like everyone else.
Yup. And if USB-C had been out when they came out with Lightning they would probably have gone with it. But it wasn't - and it not unreasonable to provide a few years of value for any given port you use.
Yup. And as we saw when Mac was the first to go from PS/2 to USB, if you don't get rid of the old stuff then everything will continue to use it - for fuckin' ever. Someone has to be "brave" enough to go first, and historically that's been Apple - PS/2, parallel, serial, CD-ROM, etc, etc.
Engineers tend to get a little too concerned about efficiency. It matters and more efficient is better but it's not the most important thing here once a critical threshold has been reached.
Yup. Since people would be unlikely to do half a solar roof, and roofs tend to scale in size with the size of the house beneath them, once its efficient enough price and appearance become far more important. Its the same reason that very few people other than engineers care about whether your new minivan has 260hp or 280hp - both are more than ample.
Sorry, but why would it be cheaper to heat an entire garage, including the car, which includes the internal battery pack, than it would be to use the same garage power to heat only the battery pack?
As a bonus, of course, the car can also heat the interior up to your normal driving temperature before you leave for work in the morning, without needing to fill your garage with carbon monoxide, so its got that going for it too which is nice.
You're welcome to pay for the memory upgrades to the world's routers to hold the routing table full of those/32s (16M per/8 that you've "freed"); the current full routing table is ~620k entries.
And as we all remember, 640k should be enough for everyone!
Still leaves 20k though, as long as we're mixing our units...
Yup, isn't open source grand? Of course, prior to Webkit KHTML was weird and buggy as hell, then became a very strong contender, so much so that Google used it for Chrome. Kinda like CUPS - a good idea with a poor implementation that Apple really helped make work.
But this is coming from your phone. Where that analog signal has been digitized.
Look, moving to a Bluetooth connection for your turntable would be stupid, agreed, but you have to look at the source which in this case is a (probably MP3 or AAC) file on a cellphone, which regardless of the bitrate is unquestionably digital in nature.
That's the part that many people miss (and I say this as someone who's struggled with weight before and lost ~85lb). If you burn less energy (because you have a super-efficient metabolism, or a hovaround, or whatever), that just means that you don't need to take in as much energy. That can get difficult socially, but its certainly not a reason to just "give up and be fat," when you're not happy at that weight.
Well, you could always use a dock that you can leave your headset attached to that already exists and does both charging and audio conversion...
Will the new phone please everybody? No, of course not. But the vast majority of consumers (even the vast majority of complainers) won't have to change a thing. Its like the number of people who complained that there wasn't a removable battery being far greater than the number of people who had traditionally ever purchased a single second cellphone battery.
you will not be getting away with $10 headphones, no the minimum investment will now be in the $150 range because the DAC and amp circuits must now be in the headphones.
The Apple branded adapter dongle is $9 when sold in retail packaging. Pretty sure that they won't cost you $150 from 3rd parties...
I don't actually know if lightning can be made to charge and "be headphones" at the same time other carplay mode. But it seems like any headphones connected via the lightning port should be able to emulate the "carplay" feature anyhow.
Well, the old Apple dock has had both lightning and headphone connections for a while now, so the answer is probably yes.
Audio quality can't improve by replacing 3 feet of wire with a digitized stream of bits, wired or wireless. It can only get worse. So yeah, Apple's complex, expensive, proprietary, user hostile solution doesn't have the quality of a standard headphone jack.
"Doesn't have the quality"? Where do you think the audio stream came from in the first place? There are already existing lightning-port headphones that outperform the same versions with analog connections because they provide their own DACs, a notorious weak-point in non-audiophile gadgets in the first place. I'm assuming that the adapter simply contains similar-quality circuitry to their existing device too, so you're just extending the digital side of the chain by a tiny amount which will do - oh - absolutely nothing to the signal.
2: Bluetooth sucks balls when it comes to audio quality on it. Yes, it might be OK to listen to Coldplay at a coffee shop, but you are not going to be using a set of Bluetooth monitors (as in speakers) for high-end mixing, other than perhaps testing your mix on what people play it on.
But this is your phone. People doing high-end mixing also aren't using their phones as head units - or if they were they'd be using external an DAC since those already exist and are far superior to the ones inside your phone.
Today, with their phones, many people use Bluetooth. Many more use the free headphones that came with the phone. The new iPhone will work for all of those people. Then there are people who'll happily use headphones with a small adapter (either the free one that comes with the phone, or the dock that has had a built-in lightning->headphone adapter for years if they're at their desk). The phone will work for all of those people too.
There are a very few people for whom the phone won't actually work, but not that many.
offer 20$ of rides free as introduction offer, undercut taxis by subsidizing rides
Does this mean, eventually, uber fares == taxi fares, when the subsidizing stops?
No, they'll be far more expensive if everything stays the same. Taxi drivers make very little and most taxi companies are run on shoestring margins (sometimes for a lot of money because of volume, but still very low margins), and they're selling a far lower quality product in most markets.
Don't forget that they're also screwing the city by putting lots of wear and tear on the streets without generally paying any commercial fees/taxes that would otherwise go to offset that damage - street infrastructure is stupid-expensive and they're basically using it for free (individual car fees are generally much lower on the expectation that you're not spending all day driving around downtown).
Yup. Uber's deficits serve purely to push everyone else out of the marketplace by offering well-below-market priced services. Its working in a number of places too.
Its also reasonable though to understand that phone companies don't see "people who buy a phone and keep it for five years," as a market that they should optimize for at the expense of the "people who buy phones ever 12-24 months" crowd.
Guess what? Those $35K robots are also cheaper than paying people $8/hr.
Human beings are incredibly expensive. They're also the economic engine that turns a single business into part of a functional economy, but I digress.
There are very, very few positions that could be automated in a way that makes sense financially at $15/hr that wouldn't also make sense at $5/hr. Either a position is automatable, or it is not, and at 4000-5000 hours per year (plus benefits, etc) that's a lot of money for a single position that could be thrown at a robot if that's the way you wanted to play it. Basically, automating that position will either be super-cheap or super-expensive.
Automation is a very important discussion point. Its disingenuous to tie it to the current debate over moving the minimum wage back up to a living wage.
The other issue appears when two credit cards that you carry both have NFC chips in them - no more tapping the wallet to pay, unless you like randomness in your life.
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What Apple is doing now is shipping a device with no native port compatibility with the rest of their product line, and then demanding that people buy dongles that Apple expects to become obsolete after the transition phase from USB-A to USB-C.
Eh, they're shipping a laptop. And they're including a USB-C power supply. A laptop, which in many cases even in professional environments literally never has anything other than that power supply plugged into it.
the market will decide on its own, just as it did when USB-A first came out and a rapid-growing ecosystem of peripherals supported it based on its merits over the old serial port technology
The same market that kept making PS/2 keyboards and mice long after USB came out, until Apple dropped the ports? That market?
Its not the end of the world, and let's stop pretending that it is, mmmkay?
Let's pretend you're a device manufacturer. USB-C is "the future" but many computers don't have it, and any computer that has USB-C also has the old stuff. What do you do?
You stay the fuck away from USB-C of course. Its the same reason that nobody built OS/2 software once they added a Windows compatibility layer.
Want people to build USB-C peripherals? You have to create an environment in which they're needed. Like it or not, Apple has historically held that position (see also PS/2, floppies, CD-ROMs, VGA ports, etc, etc).
Apple has always taken the role of change agent. If you don't forcefully abandon the past, it drags on.
That's why Firewire is the de facto standard for so many peripherals now.
You mean IEEE 1394? Bash Apple if you want, but that was a case of them going with the standard instead of doing something weird.
Just like PS/2 when USB came out. FFS, my bike trainer used a PS/2 adapter. Sometimes someone has to go first.
Agreed. That's why Apple is wrong with proprietary ports such as Lightning and Dock. They should have used USB-C and micro-USB instead, like everyone else.
Yup. And if USB-C had been out when they came out with Lightning they would probably have gone with it. But it wasn't - and it not unreasonable to provide a few years of value for any given port you use.
Yup. And as we saw when Mac was the first to go from PS/2 to USB, if you don't get rid of the old stuff then everything will continue to use it - for fuckin' ever. Someone has to be "brave" enough to go first, and historically that's been Apple - PS/2, parallel, serial, CD-ROM, etc, etc.
Engineers tend to get a little too concerned about efficiency. It matters and more efficient is better but it's not the most important thing here once a critical threshold has been reached.
Yup. Since people would be unlikely to do half a solar roof, and roofs tend to scale in size with the size of the house beneath them, once its efficient enough price and appearance become far more important. Its the same reason that very few people other than engineers care about whether your new minivan has 260hp or 280hp - both are more than ample.
Sorry, but why would it be cheaper to heat an entire garage, including the car, which includes the internal battery pack, than it would be to use the same garage power to heat only the battery pack?
As a bonus, of course, the car can also heat the interior up to your normal driving temperature before you leave for work in the morning, without needing to fill your garage with carbon monoxide, so its got that going for it too which is nice.
You're welcome to pay for the memory upgrades to the world's routers to hold the routing table full of those /32s (16M per /8 that you've "freed"); the current full routing table is ~620k entries.
And as we all remember, 640k should be enough for everyone!
Still leaves 20k though, as long as we're mixing our units...
Yup, isn't open source grand? Of course, prior to Webkit KHTML was weird and buggy as hell, then became a very strong contender, so much so that Google used it for Chrome. Kinda like CUPS - a good idea with a poor implementation that Apple really helped make work.
The vast majority comes from analog signals.
But this is coming from your phone. Where that analog signal has been digitized.
Look, moving to a Bluetooth connection for your turntable would be stupid, agreed, but you have to look at the source which in this case is a (probably MP3 or AAC) file on a cellphone, which regardless of the bitrate is unquestionably digital in nature.
That's the part that many people miss (and I say this as someone who's struggled with weight before and lost ~85lb). If you burn less energy (because you have a super-efficient metabolism, or a hovaround, or whatever), that just means that you don't need to take in as much energy. That can get difficult socially, but its certainly not a reason to just "give up and be fat," when you're not happy at that weight.
And now the adapter is $9 instead of $5 - if you want the Apple-branded one in retail packaging.
Well, you could always use a dock that you can leave your headset attached to that already exists and does both charging and audio conversion...
Will the new phone please everybody? No, of course not. But the vast majority of consumers (even the vast majority of complainers) won't have to change a thing. Its like the number of people who complained that there wasn't a removable battery being far greater than the number of people who had traditionally ever purchased a single second cellphone battery.
you will not be getting away with $10 headphones, no the minimum investment will now be in the $150 range because the DAC and amp circuits must now be in the headphones.
The Apple branded adapter dongle is $9 when sold in retail packaging. Pretty sure that they won't cost you $150 from 3rd parties...
I don't actually know if lightning can be made to charge and "be headphones" at the same time other carplay mode. But it seems like any headphones connected via the lightning port should be able to emulate the "carplay" feature anyhow.
Well, the old Apple dock has had both lightning and headphone connections for a while now, so the answer is probably yes.
So now its Apple's fault that other people haven't thanked themenough? SMH...
Remember what UNIX printing was like pre-Apple? Or how about Webkit?
Audio quality can't improve by replacing 3 feet of wire with a digitized stream of bits, wired or wireless. It can only get worse. So yeah, Apple's complex, expensive, proprietary, user hostile solution doesn't have the quality of a standard headphone jack.
"Doesn't have the quality"? Where do you think the audio stream came from in the first place? There are already existing lightning-port headphones that outperform the same versions with analog connections because they provide their own DACs, a notorious weak-point in non-audiophile gadgets in the first place. I'm assuming that the adapter simply contains similar-quality circuitry to their existing device too, so you're just extending the digital side of the chain by a tiny amount which will do - oh - absolutely nothing to the signal.
2: Bluetooth sucks balls when it comes to audio quality on it. Yes, it might be OK to listen to Coldplay at a coffee shop, but you are not going to be using a set of Bluetooth monitors (as in speakers) for high-end mixing, other than perhaps testing your mix on what people play it on.
But this is your phone. People doing high-end mixing also aren't using their phones as head units - or if they were they'd be using external an DAC since those already exist and are far superior to the ones inside your phone.
Today, with their phones, many people use Bluetooth. Many more use the free headphones that came with the phone. The new iPhone will work for all of those people. Then there are people who'll happily use headphones with a small adapter (either the free one that comes with the phone, or the dock that has had a built-in lightning->headphone adapter for years if they're at their desk). The phone will work for all of those people too.
There are a very few people for whom the phone won't actually work, but not that many.
offer 20$ of rides free as introduction offer, undercut taxis by subsidizing rides
Does this mean, eventually, uber fares == taxi fares, when the subsidizing stops?
No, they'll be far more expensive if everything stays the same. Taxi drivers make very little and most taxi companies are run on shoestring margins (sometimes for a lot of money because of volume, but still very low margins), and they're selling a far lower quality product in most markets.
Don't forget that they're also screwing the city by putting lots of wear and tear on the streets without generally paying any commercial fees/taxes that would otherwise go to offset that damage - street infrastructure is stupid-expensive and they're basically using it for free (individual car fees are generally much lower on the expectation that you're not spending all day driving around downtown).
Yup. Uber's deficits serve purely to push everyone else out of the marketplace by offering well-below-market priced services. Its working in a number of places too.
Its also reasonable though to understand that phone companies don't see "people who buy a phone and keep it for five years," as a market that they should optimize for at the expense of the "people who buy phones ever 12-24 months" crowd.
Guess what? Those $35K robots are also cheaper than paying people $8/hr.
Human beings are incredibly expensive. They're also the economic engine that turns a single business into part of a functional economy, but I digress.
There are very, very few positions that could be automated in a way that makes sense financially at $15/hr that wouldn't also make sense at $5/hr. Either a position is automatable, or it is not, and at 4000-5000 hours per year (plus benefits, etc) that's a lot of money for a single position that could be thrown at a robot if that's the way you wanted to play it. Basically, automating that position will either be super-cheap or super-expensive.
Automation is a very important discussion point. Its disingenuous to tie it to the current debate over moving the minimum wage back up to a living wage.
The other issue appears when two credit cards that you carry both have NFC chips in them - no more tapping the wallet to pay, unless you like randomness in your life.