whofearsthenight
@whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
- Comment on "Did you realize that we live in a reality where SciHub is illegal, and OpenAI is not?" 10 months ago:
I mean, I’m not sure why this conversation even needs to get this far. If I write an article about the history of Disney movies, and make it very clear the way I got all of those movies was to pirate them, this conversation is over pretty quick. OpenAI and most of the LLMs aren’t doing anything different. The Times isn’t Wikipedia, most of their stuff is behind a paywall with pretty clear terms of service and nothing entitles OpenAI to that content. OpenAI’s argument is “well, we’re pirating everything so it’s okay.” The output honestly seems irrelevant to me, they never should have had the content to begin with.
- Comment on How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever. 10 months ago:
I still have more subs for these than I would like, but I generally download anything I actually want to watch anyway. Like, the fact that justwatch.com even exists is an indictment of the way this works.
- Comment on Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994 10 months ago:
The only thing that I think is a little complicated these days is make sure that you’re not reliant on a particular Windows-only app. For the vast majority of common apps, you’re going to be fine, and it’s sounding more and more like even gaming on Linux is not only fine, but getting to the point of being the best way to do it. If you do have a particular app you rely on, I’d look into the various ways that you can get Windows apps running on Linux (which can be a little tricky, but usually not too bad.) But even like 10 years ago, I built a machine for an elderly family member, put probably some flavor of ubuntu on it, and I never had to troubleshoot that machine.
- Comment on Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994 10 months ago:
This tracks. I have recently gone back to running a Windows desktop machine for gaming, and now I have to actually shut it off because:
a) that fucking thing never stays asleep. Clean install with nothing other than Steam and a couple of games, sleep settings mean nothing. Just wakes up, stays awake forever.
b) Fortunately I have an enterprise license key so I don’t get as much random bullshit, but every update there is some new fucking thing I don’t want.My machine is a desktop, but I can’t image how this works well on laptops.
- Comment on Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994 10 months ago:
Copilot is their AI thing (which I think is just a wrapper for ChatGPT.) As for why you need it, fuck if I know. Love MS just adding another key that’s going to piss me off when I’m in a game.
- Comment on Cox deletes ‘Active Listening’ ad pitch after boasting that it eavesdrops though our phones 10 months ago:
Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it.
Bold added for emphasis, Apple claims privacy as a feature and OS control of the mic to prevent this exact sort of thing. Not only would someone have found it, it would be a news cycle on the mainstream news, and basically just the wallpaper for any tech-centric website.
I mean, fucks sake, iFixIt alone would find mics in places they shouldn’t be and this would be a story.
Unfortunately, the truth is more boring, and basically pretty much every app/website most of us use are tracking us in some way unless you really seek prevention. They don’t need the mic.
- Comment on Cox deletes ‘Active Listening’ ad pitch after boasting that it eavesdrops though our phones 10 months ago:
“if I were a corporate shitbag, how would I implement my shitbaggery?”
In this case, it would be pretty hard. We have wiretap laws, which would mean you have to tell the user you’re doing this. Even though no one reads the ToS, someone does, and it would be news if someone was doing this.
Even then, it would be a hard enough problem that companies would think twice about it for a few reasons. Number one, processing 24/7 of all audio in your home is going to be rather difficult/expensive, so you’d have to go with something like keyword-triggers-processing the way that your phone listens for “hey google/siri” or Amazon listens for “Alexa.” It works kinda like game video sharing - they are always listening and recording for a short time frame* but they only send the data somewhere if they hear the trigger phrase. That’s not easy in itself, they’ve spent a ton of time getting the right algorithm so that it correctly hears the right trigger phrase and you don’t get a ton of false positives to varying degrees of success. And keeping in mind these are companies that are best suited to it, they still struggle sometimes with even that. The ad companies would have to listen for dozens/hundreds/thousands of triggers…
And then you get to the data retention policies. Google is an ad company, Apple is not. One of the reasons that Apple can tout privacy as a feature is simply that they don’t need the data, so they don’t collect nearly as much, and they save even less. They get the bonus of not dealing with law enforcement and all that.
So, assuming they solve that, solve some big issues with the laws of the land and physics, now we’re to the point where they have to think about network traffic. Which is going to be trivially easy for nerds to figure out and circumvent, so they would have to have their own ad-hoc network which comes with another 137 or so difficulties.
- Comment on Cox deletes ‘Active Listening’ ad pitch after boasting that it eavesdrops though our phones 10 months ago:
If it were, it would be pretty common knowledge and there would be several news cycles about it. I don’t doubt that they could bury it in the terms of service, but we have wiretap laws in enough places that are two-party consent that it would have had to come out by now. Not to mention nerds like me running pi-hole and monitoring their traffic, repair people who could easily regonize a mic in the device, etc.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th unless you pay extra for ad-free 10 months ago:
Piracy is not even close to the reason any of the streamers are struggling, and even then I’d be surprised to see if Amazon was actually struggling. Piracy itself is a rounding error, and is more of a function of the shitty way that most of the streamers run their business.
There is a lot going on:
Lots of these streamers, and especially Amazon, keep spending green lighting projects with massive budgets but then forgetting to tell a good story or hire people who seem interested in making the show they’re making. Rings of Power and Wheel of Time have insane budgets for what are generously mediocre shows. I can’t even imagine the pitch meeting for WoT. “I want to take a massively beloved cornerstone of the fantasy genre that spans 14 gigantic books and a few novellas, turn it into a TV show with 8 ep seasons, make a ton of changes to the story and lore that is sure to piss off the audience that is most likely to generate word of mouth for us, and for the low, low price of like a billion dollars. You should trust me with this money because I worked on 2 seasons of the hit show (that was on the edge of cancellation basically it’s entire run) Agents of SHIELD and a streaming show on Netflix that was canceled after one season.” By pretty much any measure, this is an insane set of decisions.
This is everywhere - The Witcher, Halo, Star Trek: Discovery (and most of Picard), Secret Invasion, Book of Boba Fett, just about every goddamn “blockbuster” Netflix attempts. It’s either they take a beloved IP and decide to do something entirely different and usually not even good-different (has anyone that worked on Halo even seen an xbox?) or they set up a project with a pitch like “Ryan Reynolds is a big star, Fast and the Furious is a big franchise, make a movie with Ryan and cars or whatever.” Insert meme of the guy getting thrown out of the window for asking “does it need a plot?”
The existence of half of these streamers in general belie the real issues. You can’t tell me that Paramount+ or Peacock should even exist. The whole premise of these goddamn things is “people want to watch 20-40 year old re-runs of Star Trek and Seinfeld, I bet we can charge $15 in perpetuity for that as long as we sprinkle in the occasional new show that makes a point to let our audience know we hate them for liking these shows.”
It’s just a massively, massively mismanaged business on basically every level. Ads is the latest in this fiasco. They should be either small, cheap networks that make a lot of small budget shows, or if they’re going to take some big swings they might want to have a proven strategy of any sort. Quite a lot of the shows that found massive success were made for basically the change you find in the couch cushions. A show like Friends probably cost about $7 for the first season, and didn’t balloon until later seasons when the cast was each making a decent amount and every other episode had a major guest star. Most sci-fi until very recently was extremely cheap. Carter: Sir, we’ve arrived on the planet, looks like the MALP was accurate. O’Neill: It’s really weird how most of the planets we visit look like the woods in Vancouver, BC. Even Game of Thrones which probably started this arms race of spending, didn’t start getting $20+ million budgets until it was a massive, massive hit (worth noting how that show tried to stick closely to the source and didn’t start to suck until they ran out of book.)
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th unless you pay extra for ad-free 10 months ago:
streaming has absolutely no future.
Streaming isn’t going anywhere, and if anything will likely continue to grow for as cable dies off. It’s just going to consolidate and get shittier (ads) as basically things move back to a model more cable-like. Piracy will probably ramp back to like levels for music in the early 2000’s, but it will remain a niche. Amazon specifically will see blowback for this, but it’s unlikely to move many off of Prime since it’s sort of a tertiary benefit to having a Prime membership, and even if it’s all you got for your Prime membership, it’s still one of the cheapest streaming services.
- Comment on Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content 10 months ago:
“I want you to know that I don’t like nazis. But I am fine platforming them and profiting from them. Now here is some bullshit about silencing ‘ideas.’”
- Comment on Tesla removes Disney+ app amid Elon Musk's feud with Disney CEO Bob Iger 11 months ago:
I mean, Disney is run by adults, so I suspect they’re sitting over there watching Elon punch himself in the balls and laughing about it.
- Comment on Tesla removes Disney+ app amid Elon Musk's feud with Disney CEO Bob Iger 11 months ago:
Pretty sure they can only be used when parked like when you’re charging. Even at a super charger, it’s going to take 20-30 minutes to get back on the road.
- Comment on 41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!! 11 months ago:
Disagree entirely.
For one, Meta has diversified enough that it’s going to be nearly impossible for them to pull a MySpace. They have Insta, Facebook (blue app) and WhatsApp with a billion+ users each. Even Threads on its own is probably sustainable enough to carry them for a decade, and though far, far down the list, they’ve branched into other business like with the Quest. Except maybe pixelfed, there isn’t really even a direct competitor (other than just the vague “social media”) to Meta’s properties.
Second, I don’t think this is any indicator that Meta views the fedi as a threat. Had they, they probably would have just simply tried to buy their way in somewhere, as they did with Instagram and WhatsApp (this is definitely their MO, Facebook is the only true Meta product.) Further, I am not even sure how so many are making the case that the fediverse is somehow inevitable. Projects don’t succeed on pure ideology, and in particular with social media not only do you have to do the technicals right including building a product that users actually want to use, you also have to get the right combination of deliberate community building and sheer luck to get it to stick. Already, the entire point of the fediverse is at odds with how the majority of people want to use social media. With fediverse stuff, you’re expected to curate and deliberately shape your experience. I’ve found more use for blocks and mutes on Lemmy, which is ostensibly the smallest social media site I’ve ever used, and by a large margin. The default these days for most people are Instagram and TikTok - just open the app and watch whatever is served up.
So we’re basically starting at a point that the fediverse is offering a niche product with technical hurdles (which, are very small, but it doesn’t take much) for users to even get on, they’re going to have to spend a decent amount of time to getting to a usable product, find out they joined the wrong instance and rebuild that, and the communities seem to be made up of the gotcha police half of the time. And then there are just the pure numbers. Even with multiple external exogenous events (like reddit had with Digg, for example) from direct analogues to Lemmy and Mastodon, Lemmy is barely growing and Mastodon probably gained about as many users last month as Threads did while I was writing this.
This whole debate on the fediverse is very “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day in your life, but for me? It was Tuesday.” The fediverse, for its part, couldn’t be a better stooge for Meta at the moment. They can say to regulators “look at us, we’re open” and then watch as the fedi preemptively blocks millions of users from an introduction to the fedi.
- Comment on 41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!! 11 months ago:
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Serious question: how?
Second question: why?
What are the mechanics by which they are going extend or extinguish the fediverse and how would they do that from a technical standpoint? Second, why when the entire fediverse with years of time behind it is a rounding error compared to a product they launched like 6 months ago. Why does Meta give a tiny shit about the fedi compared to TikTok, for example?
- Comment on 41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!! 11 months ago:
So Threads, which is has 140+ million users and has consistently grown since launch without federation is worried about “getting enough users” from the fediverse, which has less than 10 million?
Fedi users are also about a bajillion times less likely to migrate to a Meta product than the other way around. There was the opportunity to catch some people and help grow the fediverse, but between this and the mastodon HOA (pushes glasses umm excuse me you forgot to put a CW warning on your post about flowers a flower killed my dog when I was five and this is very problematic trauma you’re causing and your alt-text should be at least 3 paragraphs and include a bibliography) it’s likely the fediverse just did what it needed to ensure it stays a niche for like 3 audiences and that more people are stuck with the corpos if they want content that’s not about being a communist or using linux.
Anyway, this is a step for Meta to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Everyone keeps saying how Meta is going to destroy the fedi (don’t worry, we’ll take care of it for them) but no one is saying how. For example, they cut us off? So what? We’re cut off right now.
- Comment on Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority 11 months ago:
Monopoly on what?
- Comment on Steve Jobs Rigged The First iPhone Demo By Faking Full Signal Strength And Secretly Swapping Devices Because Of Fragile Prototypes And Bug-Riddled Software 11 months ago:
How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn’t actually work yet?
For Apple, we can stop right here, the product worked as described. Apple did the demo, and then released the things they said they would in the time they said they would.
It’s like the Tesla “robot” that was clearly a person in a weird suit. Why are they allowed to advertise things that functionally don’t exist? Why are they allowed to sell unfinished products with promise they may one day be finished (cough full self driving cough)?
Snake oil salesman in the dictionary should just be updated to a picture of Elon Musk. Elon has a long track record of saying shit and not doing it, whether that’s full self driving, cybertruck (well, that finally came out), solving world hunger, etc.
I mean holy fuck it’s like Beeper offering paid access to a service that allows Android and PC users to use iMessage, but Apple keeps breaking each new iteration every few days… Like there was no long-term plan to make sure that the service would work long-term before asking people to pay for it.
- Comment on Steve Jobs Rigged The First iPhone Demo By Faking Full Signal Strength And Secretly Swapping Devices Because Of Fragile Prototypes And Bug-Riddled Software 11 months ago:
Android, Windows Phone (the “metro” rewrite from scratch - not the WinCE one), Palm WebOS, etc were all well and truly in development and close to launch and most of them were being developed in the open. Apple who was cutting corners everywhere to leapfrog those products. It took Apple just four years to go from initial planning to a shipping product.
This is ranges from just misleading to factually wrong. WebOS, for example, didn’t launch until 2009, 2 years after the iPhone demo in question.
In 2008, Microsoft reorganized the Windows Mobile group and started work on a new mobile operating system.
An early prototype had a close resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, but the arrival of 2007’s Apple iPhone meant that Android “had to go back to the drawing board”.
For ARM, I have to go with a “sort of?” Apple has been tied to ARM 80’s so that’s correct, but my phone prior to the first iPhone was one of these bad boys: the Palm Treo. It used a Intel PXA270 312 MHz. In my use, the Treo had better battery life, though admittedly that may just be because I rarely even tried to do things like use the internet on it because it was such a jank experience, so my primary use was planner types of things, texts, and since it was 2005-6, phone calls.
Anyway, back to the poster you responded to:
What competition? At that point it was BlackBerry and WinCE. Oh, and PalmPilot. [sic: by this point they had dropped “Pilot” which was actually a device type, not a company/brand.]
The actual timeline makes it pretty clear that this comment is almost objectively correct. However, even this is not correct because Apple didn’t set out to compete with what we considered “smartphones”:
He said Apple had set the goal of taking 1 percent of the world market for cellphones by the end of 2008. That may seem small, but with a billion handsets sold last year worldwide, that would mean 10 million iPhones — a healthy supplement to the 39 million iPods that Apple sold last year.
Bold added for emphasis.
Or, you can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth: Jobs at the original iPhone keynote.
Anyway, I was alive for all of this, iPhone 10000% caught literally everyone flatfooted.
- Comment on Steve Jobs Rigged The First iPhone Demo By Faking Full Signal Strength And Secretly Swapping Devices Because Of Fragile Prototypes And Bug-Riddled Software 11 months ago:
I have a hard time even figuring out what the issue here is? it’d be one thing if the first iPhone shipped and was riddled with bugs and promised/demoed features weren’t there, but that wasn’t the case. Launched more or less rock solid, and iPhoneOS 1.0 (as it was called then) was far from the buggiest wide release.
- Comment on Dear server admins, please defederate threads.net. Dear users, ask your server admin to defederate threads.net. 11 months ago:
I really, really doubt that this is going to be a concern. First, while technically Mastodon can interact with Lemmy, in practice how often does it happen? It’s not zero, but it’s not a lot, either, and I doubt that Threads will change that much because while it’s a neat technical feature, link aggregators and micro-blogging platforms are pretty incompatible culturally.
And then we have to remember that we’re talking about Threads normies. Do we really think that a bunch of Swifties and Kardasholes and other influencers are going to look at the absolute zoo of Marxist/Anarchist/Linuxist users on Lemmy and be like “this is the type of content I’ve been waiting for, I need to interact more with that community”? This reminds me a lot of neckbeards saying they wouldn’t date Megan Fox because she has weird thumbs.
And then we have the whole thing with the actual fediverse and the tech behind it. There is still going to be no algorithm artificially inflating the popularity of what are thinly veiled ads. Meta has no mechanism for introducing ads into the Fedi. Lemmy is not suddenly going to be massively interested in the vast majority of content on threads and start upvoting to the moon.
And the dev team behind the fedi I would wager is going to prevent any sort of real technical takeover, so that means that at any point defederating is possible, and with basically no loss to the fedi.
- Comment on Dear server admins, please defederate threads.net. Dear users, ask your server admin to defederate threads.net. 11 months ago:
Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.
- Comment on How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) 11 months ago:
I think it’s even slightly different in that Firefox has some dependence on Google (a scary level, actual, if Google ends that deal Mozilla is pretty much fucked) that the fediverse doesn’t - the people on the fediverse right now are enough to keep Fedi alive and moving, and I’d find it really, really hard to argue that they aren’t there deliberately to avoid being subject to the whims of Meta/Twitter/Reddit, etc. Like, in a lot of ways, it’s a sacrifice to be on these services because the bulk of content still exists in the proprietary silos. Because the actual protocols and main developers are also intrinsically motivated by the this separation, it’s hard to picture how they could even try to extend/extinguish here.
Like, if Threads fully federates, I’d guess that quite a lot of people block their instance just to keep their hands clean. Those that interact with Threads via Fedi probably fall into the boat that I would. I want some particular content or to follow some people, just not shoveled at me however Meta decides it should be, and not in a way that they can profit from showing me ads. If Meta pulls some bullshit, it’s likely the Fedi would more or less just block them entirely then give up and start a Threads account. And I have a hard time seeing a world where they go to Eugen or basically any of the other driving forces in the Fedi and are like “we need you to change Mastodon so we can [do some typical Facebook bullshit” and Eugen are like “yeah cool with me.”
I think its more likely that Threads users are eventually going to see fedi users dropping a long comment or some post that is about how it’s nice to have a clean ad-free feed and move clients if not over to the fedi in general. It won’t be enough to really matter for Meta other than to say “see we don’t have a monopoly!” and hey, if the fedi gets a little bigger it’s all good for the rest of us.
- Comment on Apple Is Holding the Final Nail for X’s Coffin 11 months ago:
I mean, he died in 2011 and pretty much all of his worst behaviors are well documented and I think he’s well regarded in spite of those things, but importantly also because he seemed to learn and grow through his life. The worst things Jobs seem to be responsible for are barely a Tuesday for Elon these days, and the level of talent are also so disparate that putting them in the same sentence is a little absurd.
- Comment on Senator Warren calls out Apple for shutting down Beeper's 'iMessage to Android' solution 11 months ago:
I think you’re conflating two different things when it comes to my comment. While I can agree in spirit, and were someone to release a FOSS version of this that did the same thing, I’d go right along with you on the whole “hacker spirit” thing (like the kid who wrote the original exploit and put it up for free on GitHub), but that’s not what is happening here. This:
Enabling interoperability in purposely walled gardens for the overall greater good of the Internet?
is not what’s happening, this is Beeper just trying to make money basically selling fake ID’s so you can get into the club, and the whole “uwu I’m a wittle startup don’t hurt me Apple” is just marketing spin for what I have to imagine was the rather insane assumption on the part of Beeper that they thought they found something that was unpatchable, and/or that they could somehow publicly pressure Apple to not sue them out of existence for what is potentially a crime (laws against hacking usually don’t give a shit about the method you use to breech a system, just whether that use is authorized which this is clearly not.) Apple has reasonable claim to financial damage as well, since Beeper is using Apple’s servers/bandwidth without approval or compensation. Charitably, Beeper might be hoping that this gets the attention of regulators and they’ll legislate opening it up, but that ship has sailed in the EU, and the legal argument for doing it in the states is “we don’t like green bubbles” so I wouldn’t hold my breath, and even then assuming there is a will in the legislature to do this, I have a hard time seeing how Beeper stays funded long enough to see that law pass.
Anyway, I am not saying this because I personally don’t want to see iMessage on Android (realistically I’d like the RCS standards body to get their head out of their asses and relegate iMessage and the various Facebook messengers to irrelevance) what I am saying is that Beeper trying to pretend to be a real business is laughable. Like, this is the type of product I would expect to buy in an alternate App Store with bitcoin or something, not something I would expect a real business to release on purpose with all of the fanfare and 100k’s of downloads. It’s the technical equivalent of putting up a stand in front of Costco advertising that you’re going to print fake cards so you can get into Costco, and you’re going to do that by plugging your printer setup into Costco’s power to do it. oh, and then when Costco cuts off power, you run an extension cord over to a different outlet. Like, you can argue that you think Costco should do away with membership, but we all see what an insane business plan that would be, right?
- Comment on Senator Warren calls out Apple for shutting down Beeper's 'iMessage to Android' solution 11 months ago:
It was an exploit
…
but it wasent sketchy
Ah yes, businesses based on exploits. Very not sketchy.
- Comment on Senator Warren calls out Apple for shutting down Beeper's 'iMessage to Android' solution 11 months ago:
While it’s not mostly about security, and I generally agree that Apple’s dickitry with regard to iMessage should end (they’d be doing a solid in the US to just release an Android client and monetize via sticker packs or something like it) there is most certainly a security risk for Apple to allow a reverse-engineering of their spec to spoof real iPhones, which is how Beeper works.:
pypush is a POC demo of my recent iMessage reverse-engineering. It can currently register as a new device on an Apple ID, set up encryption keys, and send and receive iMessages!
Now, your quote and the others in this thread:
Beeper didn’t find a security hole, nothing was compromised for Apple.
They sure as fuck did, lol. iMessage isn’t public, it’s not intended to be used by anyone other than Apple, and the bandwidth and servers are not free. Its not as if every iMessage isn’t going through Apple’s servers, they’re paying for it. Though they didn’t find a technical hole like a zero day or compromise iMessage for customers, they absolutely found a security concern for Apple. If you walk in to your house, find your neighbor there grabbing a couple of eggs out of the fridge and they hand wave away and say “don’t worry I didn’t break a window, I just figured out you keep a spare key under the mat and also I’m going to use these to make cookies for the block party and I’m not going to charge a lot for them and only you have these eggs from your chicken you’re hogging them!” you’d kick them out in a hurry and probably call the cops.
So two things:
- We can absolutely be mad at Apple for the lock in effect of iMessage, there were some leaked emails a while ago that confirm what we all know, this is just there to prevent buying your kid a cheap android phone. Personally, I think if Apple was serious about keeping their customers secure, they’d either release an Android client or better, just make sure that the minimum spec for RCS supports E2EE for wide adoption. They can still have a more robust platform with iMessage, and it’s still going to integrate with Apple shit in a way that only they could do.
- Anyone, anywhere, who thought that this was a viable business for Beeper has lost their fucking minds. Their model was basically “trust me bro, we’re going to socially pressure Apple and that’s going to totally work” and while it sounds like they’re back up for now, it will be extremely surprising if it stays that way longer than another week or two. It would be akin to someone launching a business being like “well, we didn’t hack Microsoft/Google/Facebook, but we’re planning on hosting a bajillion users on their backend for free without their approval.”
- Comment on Apple has seemingly found a way to block Android’s new iMessage app 11 months ago:
There is truth in what you’re saying, but I think it’s missing a lot of nuance especially when it comes to why a lot of the things you’re saying are true. A few quick things:
instead of going with DOS
Apple developed the original Mac OS to be the first major GUI OS, and MS was left struggling to catch up. Going with DOS would have been a major step back, and set computing back significantly.
always been isolated from the PC ecosystem.
which was originally more to do with IBM than Apple.
You could barely read PC files, and most PCs couldn’t read Mac files without external software until Apple changed to Mac OS X in 2001.
This was less because Apple wanted it to be that way, and more because Microsoft wanted it that way. The reason things switched in 2001 isn’t specifically because of OS X, it’s because Apple did a deal with MS in '99 or so (and MS only did it likely to avoid more regulatory scrutiny after losing an anti-trust case) and part of that deal was more interoperability. Apple had advertising campaigns basically saying “don’t worry, you can switch to Mac and bring your files with you.”
They’re doing nothing different from when they started.
This is also true, but again misses a crucial piece of context - they do it that way because they think it’s generally better and makes better products, and I think you’d generally have to be pretty unstable to argue otherwise. Think about snapshots in time - in the 80’s when it was DOS and original Mac OS. Do our computers look and work like DOS or Mac now? Compare modern laptops to a '94 powerbook or whatever was on the PC market. The modern phone and the modern OS compared to what came before iPhone. Or take a gander what Android looked like pre/post iPhone announcement; spoilers, it was a blackberry knock off instead of an iPhone knock off.) Even Windows today looks and acts more like macOS than it has since probably the 3.1 days.
Even some of the more seemingly shitty decisions follow this pattern. Remember, iMessage came out at a time when messages cost either $5-20 for what would now seem like an absurdly small block of messages a month or $0.10 a message. Its initial value prop was that it was stupid to pay that much and if you bought an iPhone you could cut your bill way down. Or Lightning instead of micro USB. MicroUSB couldn’t fulfill all of the functions Lightning could, and it’s a worse connector for a lot of reasons.
I mean, that said, iMessage was definitely designed to keep you on iPhone and it’s being deliberately used as lock in, and there are plenty of other shitty things about Apple (like any other corp) but the virulence with which people hate it is often just because they do not get it any more than I see people mindlessly bash Linux usually with insults that haven’t been true since 2006.
- Comment on Apple has seemingly found a way to block Android’s new iMessage app 11 months ago:
It’s not as good as we want it to be. Those using RCS on Android are almost all using Google’s specific implementation, Apple is instead going to be using a more standard implementation. It’s probably going to work better than SMS, but it’s going to be a far cry from everyone just using any modern internet messaging service.
- Comment on Apple has seemingly found a way to block Android’s new iMessage app 11 months ago:
Def agree that the vast majority don’t care about E2EE (though that’s probably growing with more news articles like that one where they went after someone for abortion and got their Facebook messages to prove it) I think it’s less about blue/green and more about how shitty the interop is. I don’t know anyone who is like “I won’t talk to green bubbles” but I know plenty who get annoyed when it fucks up the group chat or either side is stuck looking at a postage-stamp sized grainy image (if it even gets delivered.) Really, really blows that the predominate message services in the states are Apple-only iMessage, owned by Facebook, or SMS. I’m over 30, so I am not on Snap and most of my friends aren’t, I refuse to use Facebook products, so we’re stuck with SMS.