Speaking of “worse on purpose,” I immediately tried to subscribe to this site’s RSS feed — none. Unthinkable on any blogging platform for most of the past twenty years.
Apple was considered very late to the smartphone game at the time.
Windows CE was introduced on PDAs around 1996, and was on phones by 2003, so the iPhone was arguably between four and eleven years late depending on how you define the space.
Microsoft’s dominance was a safe bet because they had never really failed to dominate any market at that point in history. Also nobody imagined that the size of the mobile market would eclipse laptops, so “Windows CE already won” wasn’t an absurd statement at all.
I guess it's just hard for me to consider those even "smartphones" with such small screens without capacitive multi-touch and with web browsers that didn't work properly on so many websites, at least compared to safari on the iPhone.
And even other factors like the music and videos was so poor, granted they were built for business use which didn't really need a good media consumption experience.
I suggest you watch the original iPhone video launch - Steve compares the iPhone with the existing smartphones of the time.
You’re taking for granted that we know how things panned out in hindsight. A complete touch screen phone with no fixed buttons at that time seemed nuts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these inflation-adjusted prices due to the big Apple Computer anniversary — an Apple // cost $5000 in 2026 dollars, meanwhile a $600 Macbook Neo cost $150 in 1980 cash!
What helped me reconcile this was an observation that we’ve inverted the prices of necessities and luxury goods. Rent and mortgage in particular were a much smaller slice of income back then, but luxury goods were very expensive, so one would save up for a year or two to buy a new TV or a computer for the kids.
Now the necessities take a much larger slice of our income, but TVs and computers are incredibly cheap. It takes very little money to get a nice computer, and not-buying it barely makes a dent in the bills. This isn’t a good thing.
I do disagree a little with your observation regarding the industry “squeezing every ounce of power out of hardware”. Beyond local LLM stuff, there’s basically nothing a modern computer can comfortably do that any laptop since the mainstreaming of SSDs can’t.
> You need something beefy if you're serious/professional about those
But you can get way better results with the lowest end computers than you could years ago.
Back in the 90s my grandfather used 3DS Max to map out his future apartment's rooms and start planning furniture, using renders to get an idea of how sunshine would look like at different times, etc. At the time, he did this on an expensive 486 that would take an entire day to render some of those visuals. Nowadays I can do the same with a free copy of Blender and any reasonably modern integrated GPU in probably under an hour.
You can just use SweetHome3D (GPL too) and call it a day. No need to mess with models, everything can be set and adjusted. Just design in a plane, set heights/widths for forniture, walls and the like, set a final render settings (hour of the day/sunny/cloudy and such) and even an Elementary kid could finish the work.
> Pay for a license for BetterTouchTool. Enable “Move Right Space (Without Animation)” and “Move Left Space (Without Animation)”.
> I managed to find [another solution] with none of the aforementioned drawbacks.
I don’t consider paying for quality software a drawback!
I’ve been using BetterTouchTool ever since the 2016 Macbook Pro with Touch Bar, so I guess that’s a decade now. It turned the Touch Bar into the best productivity enhancement I’ve ever experienced from a laptop, and evolved to suit even more use cases beyond the Touch Bar.
I consider it completely indispensable, and I doubt it would still be in (very) active development today if fans like me weren’t paying for it.
I recently switched from NextJS — where every one of the dozens of projects I built would have 7-8 minute deployment times, regardless of hosts — to React Router, and saw my deployment times drop to 1-2 minutes.
Aside from some difficulty with mastering environment variables, I’ve been delighted with the change and will probably not look back.
hi, I'm a dev who was working in journalism around thirty years ago and still has some connections.
The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.
The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.
So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().
They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.
(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)
Funny how 20 years ago Logitech's software sucked enough for me to pay for an alternative, and two decades later Logitech's software still sucks enough for people to pay for an alternative.
It's sort of ironic that at the time, there were many complaints that Apple made its devices thin at the expense of more important features. Now that M series MacBooks are thicker again, there are complaints that they are too thick.
I owned an i9 MBP with a discrete GPU. It absolutely was too thin. The CPU and GPU ran hot, it throttled like crazy. It would drain battery while USB-C docked while idling. Worst laptop I've ever owned.
The M1 Max I replaced it with was the opposite. I don't think I heard the fans for the first month. But it was much larger.
Based on the fanless Air, I strongly suspect an M1 Max in the old chassis would have been totally fine for non synthetic workloads and an M1 Pro would probably have been fine in all scenarios.
But I think they over corrected on the chassis design when they were shipping borderline faulty products and haven't walked it back yet.
I speculate they gave themselves a lot of thermal engineering margin to bump up TDP with the M-series MBP design (or perhaps they underestimated how good the M-series chips were going to be) The battery being at the TSA limit of 100Wh is quite nice as well. Another benefit is that it now differentiates the "Pro" line from the rest of the laptop lineup quite significantly. For most people the Air has enough power now and its plenty thin and light. The pro line is for "true" pros with actually intense workflows.
I'm a dev and the MBP line is definitely overkill for me. The 15" MBA handles everything I can throw at it.
By dimensions, assuming the 2015 ("eleven year old") version, the 13" M4 MBA is 0.17" wider, 0.9" deeper, and 0.32 lbs heavier. Where it's harder to compare is thickness. The M4 is 0.44" thick where the Intel one was tapered (0.11"-0.68").
Kind of hard to see that as "HUGE" in comparison. Bigger? Yes, but not really huge.
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