probably (definitely) more active on other sites! anyways we're on here too. mostly to share art by buddies & pals & friends here.


tef
@tef

this sounds more evocative than i mean, but the apple i knew has died.

look, the apple i knew has died several times over. i'm still not over the years of "the most advanced keyboard" which broke after two weeks, i'm still bitter about headphone jacks, and i'm sure you've all have your moments of disappointment with apple, and will continue to do so.

it's just apple used to be a company that postured itself "for creatives", and i only realised just now how untrue that is, how untrue that's been for years. i just never thought i'd see apple do the full heel turn on their 1984 advert and proudly announce "we crushed everything that brings joy"


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

from at least the late 80s through the 2000s, apple's advertising focus was on individuality, personality, creativity. i need not cite the late-90s-early-2000s ads that were literally just videos of people dancing that told you nothing about the product; apple sold us on living life full for decades. now they are a company about Productivity. it is obvious why this happened.

a few years after the iphone came out, apple quietly became aware that 99% of emails sent by executives said "Sent from my iPhone" at the bottom. a couple years after the ipad came out, apple quietly became aware that virtually every retail establishment in the US that was not part of a chain was using them as POS terminals. so apple is now a company that makes productivity tools. often for business, but not always - sometimes it's just about personal productivity, tracking your X, finding your Y, always being in touch with Z. apple makes products for workers to help them work better. this is depressing.

but let's not be disingenuous here: it is because a couple massive advances in technology - primarily: multi-gig NAND flash, but also wireless broadband - eradicated the consumer electronics industry overnight, years ago. during the obama admin, and not even towards the tail end of it. there will never be another Walkman or Discman or iPod or iPod video because all of those things were the product of escalating storage capabilities, and storage is now a solved problem, forever. there will not be a new hill to crest; 128GB will still be a lot of storage 20 years from now. the same is true for all the other technologies relevant to consumer desires.

all the music you've ever heard is in your pocket, brand new hollywood movies and TV shows can be called into existence in the middle of the forest, and you have a camera that (speaking to the average user) exceeds your skills or desires as a photographer or videographer and has functionally unlimited storage. there is nothing left to sell to the pure consumer. consuming is a solved problem, it is effortless and works incredibly well. the instrument is as good as it needs to be for 95% of people, they figured out the form factor over ten years ago, and there is nothing you can add with an accessory or peripheral that nearly anyone would want. they can't even show you the headphone wires jangling in space because they got rid of those, years ago, way easier than anyone ever could have imagined. in fact, most of their 2010s+ developments come down to what they removed rather than anything they added. we're mad about them removing the headphone jack and making the device thinner, but it's because there is nothing left to add, so they are forced to subtract.

consumer technology happened, and is now over. a macbook from 2012 is all the macbook most people will ever need in terms of normal, everyday tasks. apple has not come up with anything in over a decade that they can add that anyone really gives a shit about. M1? what, like your intel mac didn't run for like 8+ hours anyway? like it felt slow doing the things you typically do? the M chips are amazing, but as far as most people are concerned, they're marginal improvements where they aren't simply invisible. if you disagree, it's because you're part of an incredibly small group, to which Apple is now advertising exclusively, because what else can they do. there is nothing left to advertise other than features hypertargeted at professionals. there's nothing left to invent that will make a billion dollars off the everyman.

we are all lucky enough to be alive to witness the end of consumerism, at least as the last six generations have known it. the problem is that it is not going gently into that good night.



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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

people occasionally bring up the indestructible drinking glasses produced by East Germany that no longer exist and opine that capitalism would not allow a product to exist which would not need replacing

Literally no MacBook Pro less than ten years old needs replacing

unless it has The Keyboard that explodes if it gets dust on it, or the screen ribbon cable that shears itself apart from you opening the lid of the laptop, or the pins that can short the display to a high voltage line, or the--

Louis Rossman's talked extensively about model years (fairly recent ones at that) plagued by incompetent design flaws. I couldn't find you the specific videos since he posts like twice a day, but needless to say, as rare as MacBook issues may or may not be, the issues that do crop up are often easily avoidable design blunders.

At least one - the Magic Keyboard or whatever they called it, that weird super low profile butterfly mechanism with almost no key travel - was widely reported on for failing if it got a speck of dust in it and the only way to fix it was the rip the keyboard out of its twenty or so rivets soldered to the chassis to install a new one - Apple never admitted to this, but silently went back to their old keyboard design after a couple years. The screen ribbon cables in one or two model years were slightly shorter than they should've been, so rubbed too tightly against the aluminum and would eventually slice itself apart after enough open-closes. The high voltage issue would actually short a line meant to power the display directly into a 5V data line going to the CPU and promptly fried your soldered CPU turning the machine into a paperweight. Albeit that last one was mostly only caused by liquid spills, but there were still edge cases where just the right kind of dust just conductive enough could cause the short anyways, because the two pins were right next to each other with absolutely nothing separating or shielding them.

They're not perfect machines, but those are basically random manufacturing flaws that got much higher profiles than might otherwise be expected of commodity hardware because people were comparing them to other macbook pros as opposed to the ewaste that is the entire rest of the consumer laptop market for the last twenty years

(My personal favourite in the genre occurs on one of my client machines, where if it's ever actually moved around then the display gets this bizarre orange smear across it as if something had been spilled on it, that goes away if the machine is left stationary for three or four days. Some guy has been trying to raise a class action lawsuit for this against apple for years and they have, predictably, completely ignored it and disavowed the problem. You don't get this on non-Apple hardware because nobody in their right mind is using a 2017 laptop from any other manufacturer as a portable daily driver, and any concept of support for any such device ended the second after the statutory warranty period expired)

the 2012 MacBook Pro 101 (that's somewhere in it's model number), the last model with a DVD drive, when upgraded with an SSD, is going to go down in history as one of the finest consumer tech devices ever made. The only problem it has, ironically, is that the little ribbon SATA cable often gets cut on an edge of the sharp laser cut aluminum it passes over. so like, do something about that if you own one, and then buckle in for a great ride.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Back when E3 folded, it got me thinking about the Consumer Electronics Show. Before E3 started in 1995, that used to be where console manufacturers showed off their video games. But CES is a shadow of what it used to be. They used to show off interesting new consumer electronics, but for the past decade companies have just been showing off smart fridges and smart lightbulbs.

And not only are those not new, we've pretty much explored the limits of the internet-of-things (And frankly, it sucks). You look at this year's CES, and it's all AI stuff or products that have existed for a decade. One of their "Innovation Award" winners was a power strip that had USBA and USBC ports.

It really does feel like Consumer Electronics is over. We solved it. Vacuums drive themselves and your dishwasher needs firmware updates, the only improvements they can make are to their bottom line, by removing expensive buttons for cheap touch screens and signing you up for a subscription.

i think what makes me sad is despite all the terrible problems apple has, it still felt incredible going from android to iphone and modern windows to modern mac

night and day, i still see the downsides , but it’s so horrible how windows and android just feel like spyware trash out of the box so hard

having a UX that doesn’t feel like it’s nonstop antagonizing me is such a low bar, for things to work cohesively together vaguely and feel intuitive ish

and to do so without destroying my battery, i can just charge my laptop once every two weeks and use it extremely sparingly. a windows laptop for me won’t even last a day in standby, i do not get it really