Battery throtteling on the iPhone 6s; The sandboxing / sideloading discussion; The no-iCloud experience; The way that regular bluetooth headsets work fine, but AirPods work even better; How unauthorized Apps on MacOS must be opened with a right-click.
Safari suggestions are also a great example: So far, I like them in iOS 17, since they can also provide direct links to useful sites such as Wikipedia. But don't doubt for a second, that taking traffic away from Google was the primary goal here.
Microsoft isn't so smart. Most users, including non-technical, can see through their attempts.
"iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones" -- an actual quote from the SVP of Software Engineering in charge of iOS, revealed in Epic Games v Apple court discovery
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
Of course, if you really cared about green bubbles, you'd switch to Android because there you can adjust outgoing message color to your heart's liking :-)
generally I try to avoid SMS since the photo quality is bad, there’s no delivery guarantee, and it doesn’t work over wifi.
What do you mean by this? I have an iPhone but don't have airpods, just "regular" BT headphones. Under windows, they're hit or miss (sometimes they don't reconnect), but they work pretty well under iOS and mac os. They work best under linux (!), especially since it's the only one to support LDAC (though I understand some non-sony android phones may support this now).
So, if somehow apple came out with a way of making BT headphones work even better (what do they do better?), I don't see why you'd hold that against them. Should they not innovate just so that the competition doesn't get upset?
Airpods automatically try to pair with a nearby iphone when opened, if one of your own devices isn't around. All of this is through a pretty fancy UI, just for Airpods and Beats
So if Apple figured a way of bypassing this limitation, it's really not clear to me why that should be considered "bad", even if it's clearly better than what the competition does. It's on the bluetooth standard to do better.
Or is your point that apple should have standardized the protocol they use to make this happen?
AirPods are always accesible via the AirPlay-menu, which is prominently featured in many media apps.
Again: still fine, but just bad enough to partly influence my next buying decision.
Either way, the user experience is still better than on Windows. Whenever I start up my PC it steals my headphones, even if I’m currently listening on another device (or worse, making a phone call). I’ve searched online and it seems there is no way to switch this off. The only solution seems to be to manually unpair or disable Bluetooth after using it.
But once they're paired, they connect automatically to my iphone, and I can select them easily from a list when e.g making a phone call, though they're usually selected automatically when connected.
https://www.soundguys.com/how-does-apple-h1-chip-work-21049/
That only works if you use two Apple devices together. You don't get those functions with other Bluetooth on a Mac, or using Airpods with an Android. It doesn't really make that big of a difference IMO but it's there.
I argue that they are blatantly anti-consumer, but have created a brand identity association that causes people to pretend (and argue) they are not. Try using an ipad without handing over your credit card details. Even google is better in this area.
This is one of the ways I can tell what preconceived opinion someone has. The only problem with the battery throttling was PR. The engineering solution was correct and objectively better than not throttling. Should they have told users their battery was failing? Sure. But keeping the phone from crashing was better than letting it.
> unauthorized Apps on MacOS must be opened with a right-click
I've never had to do that.
Using OKD (OpenShift Kubernetes Distribution) because I just dealt with this morning:
https://github.com/okd-project/okd/releases - download the MacOS installer and unzip it.
Then try to run it from the command line. Be told that it "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified". This is NOT the "is an app downloaded from the Internet, do you wish to run it?" dialog.
Go to Finder, and double click it. Get the same message.
You have to go to Finder, then right click the app, specifically hit Open (which will open a terminal that will immediately exit), and only now can you run this app in your original terminal.
Again, thanks for the link. That's probably the only time I'll run into that, it clearly isn't my usual use case, but I'm glad you could back up the assertion with something I could see for myself.
I do agree that it should be clearer how you can run the executable if you really do trust it.
Yes, you get the “developer cannot be verified” error if the code isn’t signed. Which is perfectly fine, I don’t see how this is anti-consumer.
It’s $99 for a code signing cert (per developer account) on macOS/iOS, which I believe is less than what they cost on Windows.
No I don’t want to install your shit browser on my phone Google. Kindly frick off.
It is a difference for Google to advertise their browser on their properties (eg Youtube) versus Apple hijacking the search bar of some other browser, and in general not allowing third parties to provide full browsers in the Apple App Store (and not just a shim which mandatorily has to use Safari behind the curtains)
A difference that's moot because it never happened.
and lack of user profiles on ipads so they cannot be easily shared among family.
> the no-iCloud experience
What?
> The way regular Bluetooth headsets work fine, but AirPods work better.
I… I don’t see how this is apple’s fault. Bluetooth, as a standard, is obviously limiting. Apple, making both headphones and the devices that play audio, had an opportunity to offer a better product to their customers if you use other apple devices. That’s fine, and I would argue, eminently reasonable. I just don’t get what you’re driving at here, would love to hear more.
The reason I like apple is that, in vague general terms, their interests as a company often align with my interests as a consumer.
Yes, you can argue that apple has made changes in safari detrimental to google for business reasons. But shit, I’m happy about that. The less data my phone silently sends off to google, the better.
Maybe I’ve just fallen for their ploy, but I do actually really like the apple products I own (and I often try the non-apple alternatives because I love tech). No company is perfect, and I know they aren’t my friend or don’t care about me. But until I feel apples interests diverge from my own significantly, I’ll find alternatives.
People generally want their gadgets to be as lightweight as possible, cheap as possible, last as long as possible, and be reliable. There's tradeoffs in balancing those. eg: overbuilding the battery to make the device run longer in the face of degradation adds weight, size, and cost. Somebody has to make a call on where the balance should be.
What nobody really talks about in the context of device longevity is wear levels in the onboard flash. A battery replacement or three doesn't extend that clock. It's pretty good but it doesn't last forever. This is more of an issue on devices with smaller amounts of flash storage with a lot more storage churn.
Which isn't to say that things like the 30% app store cut is entirely defensible, though you can certainly make some halfway plausible claims in that direction (based mostly on how retail works, especially at the time iPhones were invented). Or sideloading. There are legitimate gripes. But a lot of crap spewed regularly on HN turns out to be exactly that, crap.
Those devices really should have been recalled or offered a generous trade-in value to account for the fundamental design flaw
The throttling feature still exists in iOS. All that’s changed is that you will be made aware that it’s happening and you can switch it off if you prefer a brownout when your battery is degraded.
Other manufacturers are happy to let your handset reboot, it could lead to another sale for them. Some would call that planned obsolescence.
Android does the exact same thing now, but I don't see people boycotting Google over it.
The problem was that Apple didn't communicate this to the user. People didn't know why their phone was slow.
I'd much rather have a slow phone than a phone that doesn't work at all (or worse, bursts into flames in my pocket)
bluetooth headphones work to the best of their ability on Apple devices. Apple invented a better technology for their own headphones to improve problems inherent with bluetooth. I’m struggling to understand how improving upon a flawed technology is anti-consumer? Apple devices still support bluetooth, and Apple headphones work with non-Apple devices over bluetooth.
In the terminal it has a nice "search with Google" option and I can not figure out how to get MacOS to stop opening Safari with that.
Every time I use Apple products I get frustrated at how it blocks me from doing what I want to do.
You can see and configure all available services by going to the app menu in the menu bar and selecting Services -> Services Settings
1. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-services-in-app...
And really Apple should have made a generic service using the default browser, rather than this being a Safari provided thing. I guess the OP's "edge of anti-consumer" theory has some merit.
I think this is one thing a ton of people don't realize. Apple doesn't want to sell you individual devices. They want you to sell an entire electronic ecosystem that serves all of your technology needs and seamlessly integrates all of it for you.
It's why they put effort into things like handoff, copy & paste on iPhone/mac, AirDrop, iCloud photo sharing, et al. Sure there's a profit motive in having you use all their stuff, but they really do make a genuine effort to make things work together better than disparate devices, companies or manufacturers do.
I still have to use a private channel in Signal to share things like pics or links from iOS/OSX/Windows because there just isn't a good cross-ecosystem app that I've found. Discord and slack sort of work, but they're not E2E encrypted like Signal is.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/16/apple-tv-iphone-required/
Or sherlocking stuff without acknowledging anyone, e.g. game porting toolkit.
