... was yesterday.
Tim Cook delivered the news (source article):
- "Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it, and we're here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.
If a business is built on misleading users on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.
We should not look away from the bigger picture. In a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement, the longer the better, and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible.
Too many are still asking the question "How much can we get away with?" when they need to be asking "What are the consequences?"
What are the consequences of prioritizing conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of the high rates of engagement?
What are the consequences of not just tolerating but rewarding content that undermines public trust in life-saving vaccinations?
What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users joining extremist groups and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?
It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn't come with a cause. A polarization of lost trust, and yes, of violence.
A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe."
Like Apple, hate Apple. Doesn't matter. They have created an ecosystem - and a brand - that just works, works well for 90% of the people, and does so in an elegant and distinctly "futuristic" way.
In remaining true to that core of elegance, they have become the most valuable computer company ever.
And they have done so while retaining absolute control over the ecosystem they created which ensures that 90% of their users will have a brilliant experience, thereby earning their loyalty and further purchases into the ecosystem.
It's just a good business plan.
And it has worked.
Facebook does not have a good business plan. It has a business plan that was hastily taped onto the back of a running cheetah, and the cheetah doesn't care about the business plan.
And I've been completely wrong before. (See my prediction about Twitter.)
But... I'm standing here on the shore... looking out at the ocean on this pleasant day... and I notice that the water has receded quite a ways.... even beyond the low-tide line... and it looks like the horizon is... what?... getting taller?
Hm. Maybe I need to start heading for higher ground about now......
This is inaccurate. Apple's business model is to sell things to people who buy products and services from them. It's no different than Microsoft's. Really, if you want to know why Skype sucks so hard it's because Microsoft doesn't really know how to monetize something they aren't billing users for. Frankly, the business model of most... businesses has been "I sell things to people who use them" since the dawn of capitalism. The aberration is advertising, and the Internet sucks for advertising. This is also inaccurate. Facebook's business plan is to sell its users to advertisers. So's Google's - Tim Cook was probably referencing Facebook (that "social dilemma becomes a social catastrophe" bit is too on-the-nose by half) but his description of engagement at all costs and radicalization could just as easily point at Youtube. For what it's worth, when you're one of Google's or Facebook's customers your experience is very different than when you're a member of Facebook or Google's aggregate sales. You got a problem with a Facebook ad? There's someone who will fix it for you within the hour. Your Google Adwords gone awry? There's a chat line for you. I use GSuite for my personal email and I have a couple services running on Google Cloud. If money is going from your wallet to Google or Facebook they treat you like a customer. But if there's no money link from you to Google or Facebook you are not a customer. So much of this upset over Google and Facebook is sheep bleating about being fleeced. Google and Facebook don't care, shouldn't be expected to care, and cannot be compelled to care - by the sheep, anyway. every privacy advocate out there has been saying "if it's free, you aren't the customer you're the product" since Netscape, FFS. They've also been saying that nothing short of a cataclysm will change anything. You'd think Cambridge Analytica would have done it. Instead we were all too busy arguing about terrorist brown people, no doubt because Facebook's board is 99% conservative assholes. Here's the dumb thing: Facebook's future is fundamentally tied to Libra. They know advertising is fucked because they're creating an online tower of Babel where nobody's microcommunity talks to anyone else and they don't have the scalability to keep your product from being advertised to white nationalist pedophiles. They also know that their money traffic is moving from Facebook to WhatsApp, where they can't really advertise. So they altered their terms of service to tie your Whatsapp conversations into their ad network and everyone lost their shit. So they put out ads saying "apple is mean" and Apple politely told them to eat a dick. Because fundamentally? Facebook needed to pivot from "our advertisers are our customers" to "our users are our customers" and because they got hammered by their shareholders when they rolled out Instagram Stories, they couldn't. so now The Squad has a cryptocurrency bill that basically says "get fucked, Libra" and India has a cryptocurrency bill that basically says "get fucked, Libra" and there is no one - no one - who has any trust for anything Facebook has done for the past five years and you know what? Tim Cook is testing the waters.They have created an ecosystem - and a brand - that just works, works well for 90% of the people, and does so in an elegant and distinctly "futuristic" way.
Facebook does not have a good business plan. It has a business plan that was hastily taped onto the back of a running cheetah, and the cheetah doesn't care about the business plan.
Facebook was built as a way to creep on girls. No monetization policy at all. It was only AFTER other websites moved to ad-based selling of their viewers' data that FB hastily pasted that capability on the top of the Feed. Ever since the platform has been rebuilt to support that mission, but that's not what it was designed to do. From Day 1, Apple was designed and built to sell a premium product to a limited audience that appreciated those premium features, and - with one brief dark period under John Sculley's leadership - has Apple ever deviated from selling a premium product to people who will pay top dollar for quality/experience. In my view of the world, your DNA matters. FB's DNA is fundamentally flawed and disrespectful of their users. Apple's DNA is to sell the best experience possible at a premium price. One of these houses is built of straw and one of brick. The little piggies are squealing and the Big Bad Wolf is coming... "Facebook does not have a good business plan. It has a business plan that was hastily taped onto the back of a running cheetah, and the cheetah doesn't care about the business plan.
This is also inaccurate. Facebook's business plan is to sell its users to advertisers.
That's a monetization policy. You sell the girls. Without Facebook? I can sell to this IP address with those cookies. With Facebook? I can sell to teenagers who like Nelly Furtado that browse Amazon on Tuesday evenings that live within a mile of an arbitrary lat/long combo. The tricky part is getting the girls: so you build a place for them to talk about their love of Nelly Furtado. You can pretend that somehow they were never thinking about money but they've been selling their users since the very beginning. Apple Macintosh MSRP, January 1984: $2495 IBM PC AT MSRP, August 1984: $6000 Yeah, a Mac cost more than a Commodore 64. But "from Day 1" Apple positioned themselves as the underdog. This was the case until the Powerbook G4, part of Steve Jobs' return from the wilderness, and a reflection of his adventures with NeXT, which actually was positioned as a premium product. Jobs wouldn't have been allowed to do it without Scully's clones, for sure, but Apple's market has always been prosumer: it's not an ugly tool like you would drag home from work but it's hella cooler than some crap you'd buy at Walmart. Apple sells to the people using its product. Facebook and Google sell to the companies using the people that use their product. No need to fanboi the shit; Apple can do more user-centric shit because their users are their customers. Facebook and Google can't because the better you treat the sheep the less wool and mutton you can extract from them.Facebook was built as a way to creep on girls. No monetization policy at all.
From Day 1, Apple was designed and built to sell a premium product to a limited audience that appreciated those premium features
NYT published a pretty devastating indictment of Facebook et al in an op-ed yesterday, too. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-surveillance-society-technology.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage I've always been a Google Fi user, because I like how cheap and portable it is, but I've been thinking about switching back to iPhone recently. Not sure it makes a difference though, given how many other Google products I use every day.
Honestly the Apple walled garden that everybody has been going on about for quite a while hasn't really been all that walled. I moved away from Windows to Linux in the late 90's (Slackware!), then later on to OS X, and I've been coding for about 30 years now, so it's not that all I use my computer for is Facebook and porn. On my computer I get an operating system that allows me to use the exact same stuff I would on the Linux side (well, in the terminal anyhow) but is otherwise much less of a pain in the ass than any version of Windows I've had to use in the past years. Sure, the OS & hardware has had its problems and it's honestly been getting worse, but never have I felt like the OS or Apple have prevented me from doing something or limited me. My days of using Gentoo and a tiling window manager with painstakingly crafted custom configuration and constant tweaking are way behind me. Now I just want my computer to stay the fuck out of my way and not piss me off unduly much, I don't really care all that much about the price, but I need a lot of the UNIX-y under-the-hood stuff too. Not too many options out there, really. Every time I'm forced to use eg. Windows it just amazes me what an absolute garbage fire of an OS it still is (and god fucking help you if you need to deal with Windows servers or workstation AD/LDAP/whatever setups), and not just because it's unfamiliar but because shit breaks constantly, configuration is hard to get to, the update mechanism is downright sadistic, usability in most applications (consumer or not) is often questionable at best, yada yada yaa. With my phone it's the same deal. I used Android (or Maemo, or Meego, etc.) for years and eventually my "fucking Android" exclamations turned into an in-joke with my friends. iOS I simply just don't have to curse at as much, it stays out of my way and does what I need; and I honestly don't need much. Phone's 5 years old and I only switched the last time because the previous one got so borked that it wasn't worth fixing. While I think the direction with eg the M1 (which is apparently really locked down) is terrible, putting a fucking touch bar on pro-line laptops was fantastically stupid, and combining iOS and macOS development isn't going to lead to solutions that'll keep me happy, I simply don't get what the issue is that people have with Apple products.
At one of my jobs, I had a Mac, Windows desktop, and UNIX (Solaris) workstation on my desk. When I moved overseas, Macs were still 2x to 3x the price they were in the US and support was VERY spotty in Eastern Europe, so I switched to Windows for most the time I lived there (7+ years). Some OSes are good at specific things. Some are bad at everything. Windows is the latter.
I have a hockey puck. It takes fifteen drivers. If it doesn't update properly you have to packagerape the download, extract a .bat file, thrash around in the registry, then run each driver individually, restarting after each one. If any of the fifteen don't work, nothing works. Windows is a Galapagos operating system. Unfortunately much of the world runs on a remote island in the Atlantic.and not just because it's unfamiliar but because shit breaks constantly, configuration is hard to get to, the update mechanism is downright sadistic, usability in most applications (consumer or not) is often questionable at best, yada yada yaa.
Galapagos – being a remote smattering of volcanic islands in the middle of nowhere – at least has plenty of redeeming features like being a remote smattering of islands in the middle of nowhere, and it's something I'd personally want to experience. Windows seems more like the creepy uncle of operating systems. Everybody knows about the scandals, has probably been personally subjected to abuse (like you with your mouse), nobody really likes them much less actually wants to have anything to do with them, but you're sort of expected to get along because that's just how things work and you don't have much choice. Every Christmas you grit your teeth and pour another glass of wine, carry on. A friend of mine who's also an old-timey IT nerd does all his Serious Computer Stuff™ on macOS or Linux but has a Windows setup for gaming, and he jokes about the fact that with Windows, reinstalling the OS is pretty much "Tuesday". And here's me with my current setup which is based on a backup image that I've been using for almost 10 years old now; while I've obviously updated the OS and hardware (but not too often…) along the years, I'm not sure I've ever had to do an actual reinstall in OS X / macOS. This despite the fact that the disk image has absolutely archaeological accumulations of cruft in it that I'm honestly a bit astonished that some combination of obscure config files I've modified over the aeons to do god knows what to who knows what hasn't triggered enough edge cases to make the OS just give up and die. I mean, parts of this image have been with me since before Apple moved to Intel hardware which was like in 1875
Oh don't worry if you do have to reinstall the OS god help you. Especially if it's old. You need to throw it into rescue mode, set the clock to 2011 or some shit and then it'll let you download Lion. If you don't know the clock trick you get to spend half a day finding the clock trick. Sofaking stupid.
This is so much worse than Manning face. I hate it.
Obviously not skin cancer'Facebook diagnosed w/ stage 4 terminal cancer'
We all need it. Happy to help :). Before shitposting was called as such, we had some equivalent like #nosharesonlysmiles. Well. I guess it was usually more uplifting than WHYSOSERIOUS's sunscreen job, tbf
Yeah, I couldn't find a history of the tag except in my memories, which are always suspect. I like how people deepfaking The Zuck' are courteous enough to publicly declare that it's not real. A courtesy not extended by The Zuck' to content on his own platform.
Have android phones and tablets, we bought these third party magnetic charging cables that require a little adapter... The adapter made them awkward to hold normally, sometimes would fall out or be pulled out by the cable, or worse the neodymium magnet would just shatter. Really unsatisfying given Apple seem to do it right!
Tripped my /s-meter, for sure. They're bringing back the magsafe adapter, btw. And there was great rejoicing!
I personally hope so... but there are very few things Apple "brings back". I'm a little worried that the rumors floating right now are just that... and that if they did do something MagSafe it would look more like a wireless charging mat not unlike the iPhone thing... I just don't see them re-using old tech. Apple and DJT have that in common: they don't admit when they are wrong. (and I may be the biggest apple fanboi on here)They're bringing back the magsafe adapter
You are right; once something is gone, it's gone for good. I expect the new MagSafe will not have an indent on the device... instead the adaptor on the end of the cable will be contoured to fit the shape of the device. A problem with MagSafe was junk and metal bits getting stuck in the power port on the laptop. The new iPads just have three tiny metal pads on the side. I place it into my charging stand, and those pads rest on the stand's pads, and charge the device. ... and I also suspect I am completely wrong ... whenever I have been sure of what Apple would do, they have proven me wrong and come up with something MUCH more clever... :-)
I like the way you think! and also... can completely relate to the following:I expect the new MagSafe will not have an indent on the device... instead the adaptor on the end of the cable will be contoured to fit the shape of the device.
whenever I have been sure of what Apple would do, they have proven me wrong and come up with something MUCH more clever
Yeah but they grudgingly bow to pressure. Kinda like how Apple has acknowledged a right-click since OS X.0.0 but a right click Apple mouse didn't exist until what? 2011? We updated three Macbook Airs to the bad keyboards and have already replaced two of them. They are shite. Meanwhile I have like a dozen cheap Chinese "magsafe" USB adapters in my life and they're fucking spectacular. You'd think Apple could figure this out but they're too busy being special.
Yeah... like I said, Apple has never tried to be everything to everybody. But what they have been is consistent. And by their relentless push for quality and reliability, people have gradually come around, and they are now the largest computer company in the world. They are NOT for anyone - and I totally get that - but they work well for so many they have also managed to become the cool lifestyle brand, as well. Double-coup.