They did fix it (macOS 27, my experience). I have like 600,000 mail messages - there was a period where Mail search was awful but these days it's fast and accurate. It really comes down to whether you need to rebuild your index.
Spotlight works for me across files and apps on Mac, iOS, visionOS, pretty well - it has failed occasionally but usually it's because my disk is full. I haven't really found anything better (Alfred is good but is just a wrapper around Spotlight)
This is fiction. Apple co-developed USB-C, it's their tech, in particular the physical and electrical design in collaboration with Intel and HP (and Google and Microsoft on software drivers).
Changing connectors - after the 30 pin to lightning era - is a very annoying and wasteful thing where they and their customers wanted to wait as long as possible to do. On the other hand, Apple is legendary for pushing users to new ports far faster than the market is ready for them - original USB in 1997, and USB-C on laptops in 2015!
It was non-customers and competitors that pushed for USB-C. Th EU's mandate may have sped this up by a single annual iteration at best. Lightning cables are still ubiquitous to this day.
Yeah this narrative is effectively fiction as most of what you say is entirely untrue. They are very user-friendly, and it's why they have so many customers.
We can run old versions of macOS on ancient hardware just fine; Apple supports this up to about 7-8 years, anything after is possible through community support since Darwin is open.
They also support their mobile/embedded OSes longer than any other ecosystem.
Ironically, this essay is an example of at least somewhat "questionable taste". It has provoked dialogue and thus is valuable, but I think it makes a number of cognitive errors in its argument.
"Taste" is just knowledge. Advanced knowledge. Knowledge that is not easily put into words.
This is another restatement that knowledge, in a human head, is the determining factor of production, over land, labor and capital. This a post-capitalist argument that's been made for over 30 years (Peter Drucker in his 1993 book is my favorite), and it's been at least somewhat true even back to the 70s, just increasingly so as AI takes off.
The author's sidebar of AI or even cloud computing "taking ownership of the means of production away from workers" is entirely misunderstanding how the modern economy operates and shows how badly we need a new Marx (and Keynes, Schumpeter, or Drucker) since his analysis doesn't seem to provide the same analytical value in late capitalism. Renting vs. owning the means of production is now entirely a function of knowledge of the entrepreneurs (and their team).
Capital is ubiquitous now and is desperate for return - it remains powerful but is not all-powerful. We've had years of near-low interest rates and even after COVID inflation, they're still historically low. It is far more accessible to entrepreneurs than it has ever been in history, between grants, loans, subsidies, private equity, angels, crowdfunding, donations, etc. It's practically a cliche that billions in capital can be wasted on an initiative because the people involved had no idea what they were doing. I don't think AI changes that.
We don't need to rent our tokens, we can run open models on our local rigs (which still requires capital). We don't need to rent our servers, we can buy, rack and stack them on our own. Which we choose is fentirely dependent on the knowledge we have. If we don't know how to run an AI rig, we must rent it. If we don't know how to run a server, we must rent it. etc.
There are several walls driven by taste
- Design
- Testing
- Production
- Security
- Scalability
In particular, the author seems confused on what "production" is. Production is still the wall. There was a joke on X the other day:
"I vibe coded my dream app! Try it out here: http://localhost:8080/coolapp"
Software running in production is not tokens. I'm sure properly prompted AI can deploy and run simple software in production but this requires a lot of knowledge to prompt to constrain it to run in a secure, scalable, adaptable way as complexity, scale, and capability grows.
That's interesting. I would (and I think most?) would say the opposite. Good taste is hard to define because it is very contextual. There's popular taste but also there's artisanal/specialized knowledge taste. One potentially leads to mass adoption, the other leads to higher value for a few people.
Except this isn't like tulips or NFTs or Crypto; AI is actually useful (far beyond being a chatbot), and has real supply & demand, vs. a being pure speculative investment.
Yes, there's too much hype, and forcing the use of it does no one any good. And for sure a lot of that demand detached from results, and this means the demand will ebb. But I don't think this is like the dot-com bubble, it's more like the OPEC oil embargoing the 70s where soaring prices detached from results led to a collapse in demand that lasted a long while.
Why is it not like the dot-com bubble? The dot-com bubble is the most direct analogue. It is a genuinely useful technology that people are genuinely willing to pay lots of money for.
Crypto and NFTs were *speculative* bubbles, the assets had no inherent value whatsoever, people bought exclusively because they hoped to sell to a bigger fool later on.
Dot-com and AI are *tech* bubbles. The new technology is transforming a lot and growing fast and people are buying in in incredible numbers. But every technological adoption is an S curve, with an exponential phase followed by a logarithmic phase where it asymptotically levels off.
The tech bubble forms during the exponential phase. As long as we are in the exponential phase, it is mathematically impossible to guess where the ceiling will be based on the trend alone, so any bet is justifiable. The crash comes when adoption inflects and growth slows and we all learn where the curve will level off. The losers in the bubble are the people who made bets on the ceiling being higher than where it actually lands, and people who made more conservative bets come out basically untouched.
The outcome is dark fiber, or like we'll probably have in a few years, dark data centers. Infrastructure built by bankrupt firms who made big bets to get ready to service demand that is never going to come. But that infrastructure can be repurposed (the glut of bandwidth left by the Dark Fiber networks of 2001 basically enabled skype and voip).
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