Isn’t it funny how “if you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?!” seems to be most employed when it’s hardest to leave? I feel that if there were a ton of phone options, criticism would probably be reasonably considered, not treated as a sign of disloyalty meriting banishment.
The same is of course true of countries. The most low effort response to any criticism of a country is to suggest you go fuck off to another country if you hate it so much. What? In what universe is “I want to invest *my* time to explain how this could be better” a bad thing?
And of course, if you do leave, then it proves you’re a traitor and thus no one should listen to your criticisms. He was never *really* “with us”. The same people who’ll tell you to leave the US often hate Eduardo Saverin for renouncing his citizenship and going to Singapore.
Bending over backwards to explain how much competition you have at the drop of a hat should be seen as a huge red flag that you’re a monopoly. Do normal companies immediately volunteer an explicit list of competitors and encourage you to leave? Of course not. It would be bizarre.
The more idiotic version of this is “Well you build your own phone then”. Imagine if a car company responded to complaints of a faulty battery with “well, once you start your own car company, you can decide to have a functioning battery, how about that Mr. Know-It-All?”
This is of course an implicit admission that you’re kind of monopolistic if you have to devolve down to “you always have the option to replicate my entire business if you don’t like it (which I would then sue the hell out of you for for violating my overly broad patents).”
Has anyone, ever, when asking to hold the pickles at McDonalds, had the guy behind them chime in with “HEY ASSHOLE, WHY DONT YOU GO TO BURGER KING IF YOU HATE MCDONALDS SO MUCH”. No. Because going to a dozen other fast food places is a real option, not a rhetorical technique.
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OK, I think the best solution to Notification Spam in iOS is to add a “Allow For 24 Hours After Using App,” which approximates the intent of Location’s “Allow While Using App”. This should theoretically handle delivery apps fine, while preventing them from sending you “deals”.
The 24 hour window would automatically reset every time you explicitly open the app, that way you don’t have to keep allowing it if you use it a lot. But if you rarely use it ,you also don’t have to remember to disable them to prevent it from abusing notifications later.
I currently e.g. always get close to disabling notifications for Uber Eats, but then get scared that if I use the app later I'll miss a notification (Does the app as’ for permissions again? Best not to test it). So I just ignore it and they get to keep getting away with it.
It’s really nuts how little “opportunity cost” plays in our discourse. Everything is judged in a vacuum, with almost zero imaginative input of “what if they had instead…” So as long as it’s kind of OK, it gets a pass, without seeing the cost it has on everything it’s preventing.
We of course see this with things like the @AppStore, where people really strain to understand the ramifications of rules since they by definition don’t see all the stuff the rules prevented! This tweet was so successful precisely because you didn’t have to imagine something new.
But I’m surprised how this is also true of things like the notch and Dynamic Island! It seems like it would be easier to imagine alternatives here. But instead everyone is just happy that *something* was done… to the point of almost acting like it’s not possible without it!
The notch (& island) has never made sense. It’s always been a stubborn over-engineered solution. Just make the iPhone a tiny bit taller & put the camera above the screen. No more obstruction & more room for battery. That’s obviously better than all this nonse for the last 5 years
And you can use that “bonus space” above the screen for my security UI idea which I think would have been way better. The point is, the actual content should have never had to compete with the cameras.
Notice BTW that if you really like the Dynamic Island, it can still exist as a UI element! Having a weird set of dead pixels in the middle of the screen is *not* a requirement for this UI. In fact, it is a *constraint*. It for example prevents it from rotating in landscape mode.
If true, then the iPhone may be developing the same problem the iPad has: products reverse-engineered from PRICE instead of USE. The iPhone mini made sense to be “worse," so it didn’t *feel* cheap. The iPhone 14 however just feels like “the cheap one.”
Below I showed an iPad lineup where the differentiation (and marketing!) was based on USE CASE and not price, so no one feels like they’re “settling.” For example, the “low end” iPad Go is positioned as “rugged,” what you take on a hike or give your kid.
The price-based product segmentation works even worse for Apple products because *everything is expensive*, and there’s plenty of price overlap between Pro and non-Pro. The iPhone 14 Plus with with 512GB is more expensive than the 128GB iPhone 14 Pro Max.
I think the history of tabs serves as a fascinating case study of how Apple's neglect for its own UI frameworks assisted the rise and acceptance of cross-platform frameworks like @electronjs and the corresponding decline in the importance of "nativeness" and "the HIG". 1/🧵
Tabs made their first appearance in NetCaptor in 1998, and by 2003 were considered such a killer feature that they made their way into the beta of Safari, to much fanfare. Today, tabs are of course considered a critical feature in every browser. 2/🧵
But more importantly, they've since become expected in just about every document-based app. The problem was, tabs were difficult to implement on the Mac since there was no built-in component and it was hard to make them fit into AppKit's NSDocument/WindowController model. 3/🧵
We’re past the point where giving Apple the benefit of the doubt can be interpreted as anything other than willful ignorance from a place of Western privilege. These aren’t hypotheticals, we already have examples of Apple's policies failing people in other countries. 1/🧵
Case in point, while we argue whether sideloading would ruin our "experience" on the iPhone, the bottleneck of the @AppStore was already wielded against Hong Kong protestors when China forced Apple to remove HKmap.live, an app they used to avoid police violence. 2/🧵
If your takeaway is that this is merely a "troubling situation" in the "complicated relationship with China," then you aren't only demonstrating how you feel about people in other countries, but also living under a comfortable delusion that this couldn’t happen here too. 3/🧵