• 2 Posts
  • 215 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 14th, 2023

help-circle




  • The fediverse has a built-in search engine?

    I can only comment on my experience searching for communities in lemmy and people to follow on mastadon, but in both cases I am not sure I’d say “works quite well” would describe my experience.

    But also that’s not what I think OP was talking about.

    They want a search engine for a random fact like google. It’s been long true that you need to add “reddit” to the end of any google search to find the info you needed.

    It’d be nice to have a fediverse alternative.




  • I know that Lemmy generally agrees with this guy’s low effort, Apple Bad, opining…

    But come on.

    If you have strongly held opinions about a product you have never tried, maybe you can just not say them.

    But I get it, you all want a space to jeer and throw tomatoes at Apple, and screw anyone who doesn’t.

    Also, I sent at least one of the comments in this chain from my Vision Pro, using the Voyager app while downloading 4k stereo gay porn and a 16k stereo video of a stream.

    Both were awesome!



  • I was late to buying an iPhone because it was a stupid, expensive, product that had no use in my life.

    I was wrong.

    And literally you are saying the same things that I quoted about the Apple Watch, and the same things were said about the iPad.

    Not all three had the devices flying off the shelf in the first year.

    But aside from that, I have a Vision Pro, and I love it.

    It is better than all of the other VR headsets I have used, which is a relatively extensive list. I currently own the Index and PSVR2. And I would rather pay Apple $3000 dollars than buy a Meta product again if I can help it.

    I suspect this will be more like the Apple Watch. A product people liked but didn’t get at first and then over time it became the de-facto choice of smart watch.

    But time will tell. I’m rooting for both the Vision Pro and the VR industry, myself, and I hope you are just like everyone I quoted you on every Apple product ever, just being foolish.


  • Thank you for the respectful responses, even though I started off with a little bit of attitude in the conversation. It has been a pleasant surprise today.

    I agree that that’s what they’re trying to do, but I think that what we are experiencing is exactly what was obviously going to happen with the measures they put into place. So I place the blame on the EU, because they put laws in place that have made everything worse for everyone in predictable ways.

    I also blame all the sites that make it hard for me to just visit them, but less so, since every individual site creator that uses cookies needs to do that, even if they are benign, and they have to deal with other regional laws such as California’s weak as all hell version intending to do the same thing.

    The USB-C argument is a great example of how most of these things have happened.

    Apple is basically responsible for USB being the industry-wide standard to begin with. It was developed by Intel, and not widely used before Apple put it as its only option on the iMac, effectively forcing the tech into the industry.

    It also provided a large portion of the engineers who developed the USB-C specification for the standards board. They effectively invented the standard alongside Intel. It was also the first to announce a laptop using the standard.

    It seems like they were building the the Lightning cable at the same time in-house, possibly to hedge bets, and it was objectively better by far than what the original USB-C spec was doing at proposal time. And since USB-C wasn’t adopted as a standard by the standards board yet, they chose the better product path.

    By the time USB-C was formally adopted, 4 years after Apple launched its first Lightning cable-based phone, there was already tons of e-waste to contend with and it didn’t have obvious benefits for the customer to make the switch, so why would they go choose that expensive, wasteful, option, that harms their users?

    The same is true about the blue vs green circles. If you read the history of RCS it’s like a circus show act.

    It is not some open standard alternative to iMessages, like people seem to love to claim. You cannot host your own RCS server.

    It doesn’t support the features iMessages does, such as E2E encryption. That is a proprietary add-on from Google’s chat app, not part of the “standard.”

    Google had to buy Jibe mobile and push hard to get this “standard” to be something serious, and it now profits off it by being basically the only one who runs the proprietary infrastructure. That purchase was 4 years after iMessages was launched.

    Major telecom companies tried to band together to create their own RCS infrastructure and official app, and they bumbled the whole thing in 2019. As a result they’re all centralizing on Google’s Jibe platform.

    All that for a product that isn’t as good as what Apple put out in 2011.

    I know I have biases towards the products I enjoy more, but it gets frustrating to not be allowed to enjoy them and also be on platforms like this where it’s constantly twisted, revised history, in favor of much more evil companies because Apple Bad seems to be the mantra here.


  • The iPhone launched without an App store. It later went on to define the concept of having a “killer app.”

    It is clear from the article I linked that there were tons of people who didn’t know how the iPhone fit into their lives. That’s hugely revisionist history. All of the complaints about the VisionPro were made about the original iPhone. For instance:

    “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item,” said then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

    People said it was too expensive! Here’s some more:

    To summarize: the iPhone is expensive and fails miserably at its primary function of making telephone calls, but other than that it’s really great.

    I still wouldn’t buy one for everyday use.

    We like our strategy. We’re selling millions and million and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones. In six months they’ll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace

    https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/65619/13-early-criticisms-doubts-and-disses-about-iphone

    I, personally, was a very late adopter to smart phones, joining when my motorola flip phone was stolen out of my hand during the iPhone 3g era. I later jumped to Android for the One Plus One, and stuck with that until jumping back to Apple devices years later.

    But you could point to the Apple Watch, or the iPod, or any number of successful products that Apple has brought out and find the exact same things being said.

    For example, Apple Watch will fail because:

    It doesn’t have a defining feature.

    https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/10-reasons-the-apple-watch-will-fail-ecfe7fdffebd

    As for the VisionPro, all of the reviews I’ve seen for the device have been universally mixed-to-positive. They generally share your sentiment that it isn’t clear yet where it fits in, but that it is an incredible, magical, device.

    The most negative review I’ve seen has said that it’s great but not worth messing up your hair to use.

    But to claim it’s universally panned is absolutely not true.

    It’s a great device that lots of people who can’t afford one are complaining about. That’s it so far.


  • Yes, I understood it was a quote from the investigation and was pointing out that it is phrased in a way to make it sound like the investigation was saying “guilty even though you don’t meet the criteria.”

    And, like all EU regulations, I am happy they think they’re helping but angry at the fallout of all of their actions.

    My boyfriend has a different phone model than I do, and we now have to carry multiple cables to do anything. My car has carplay over usb, so we have two cables in there, etc.

    And when I update his phone we will be producing a ton of e-waste.

    No I don’t want you to track me with cookies, but I also don’t want to go through three layers of pop ups to tell you that. Everything is shittier that the EU touches-tech-wise, and they’re fisting everything hard lately.


  • Not at all…

    But why bother bringing up a way in which Apple DOES NOT meet requirements in your PR?

    That’s what I was pointing out, ffs. Not some grand argument you are putting on me.

    For the record, unlike almost all the android folks who post constant hate and negativity on the apple enthusiast community, I like my Apple products and am annoyed that the EU is working to make them shittier for me so that they can applaud.

    There’s like 4 or 5 versions of this article posted to this community at once. People couldn’t wait to rub it in the faces of the few of us who are here to be enthusiastic about Apple products.

    It would be nice to have one community where I could enjoy the things I like without a flood of nonsense.





  • while its end user numbers were close to the threshold

    Why have a threshold if you literally ignore it?

    its importance for certain use cases, such as gaming apps.

    Sure, Jan. The iPad definitely has that gaming apps market gatekept!

    At this point it’s obvious these aren’t consumer protection mechanisms as much as they’re anti-tech measures meant to try to put the breaks on a highly competitive market that the EU is not a part of in hopes that home-grown alternatives can catch up.

    But since the EU is so tech-hostile, why would anyone want to startup tech there?



  • I don’t know the answer but they pointed this out further in the press release:

    However, it’s also important for us that Mastodon is one of the few, if not the only social media platform that operates out of the EU, and we would like to keep it that way.

    I’d assume that this is for a reason, too. If it were advantageous to run your company out of the EU people would probably do so sometimes.