Apple's 30% app cut is why we don't have the ability to make websites and web apps appear and operate like an app. Pinning a website onto your home screen to make it seem like an app is a cumbersome process which can't be automated into some "install" button. This is probably intentional to force people to make wrapper apps and thus subject something to the Apple platform fee.
They're also worrying about declining revenues in hardware so they are aggressively shifting to subscription and service fees, to the point of destroying the user experience of the Apple ecosystem. I am almost forced to use iCloud backups because of decades of neglect with offline syncing. Why must I pay monthly for gigabytes of storage to backup my iphone when a single $30 hard drive could do it?
I understand and see the value apple provides in a walled garden. It's not totally useless. It's one of the reasons apps tend to be higher quality in the App Store and the platform is basically free of viruses unlike an "open" platform like Windows. But I also welcome the changes that might make it easier for web based technologies to run freely on iOS.
I logged into my wife’s iPad and somehow all of our photos got merged. I have no idea how it happened or how to undo it, but now we both have to upgrade our iCloud tier to cover the extra storage. We will both be stuck on tat plan in perpetuity because it is such a mess trying to separate out the photos.
It’s 3 taps that require specific instructions that no one knows how to do. An app store may require taps but you can link to a page that has an Install button.
These small ux decisions make of break a feature or pattern. For example we had QR code readers but it didn’t become a thing to have QR codes until Apple baked it into the photos app. Meanwhile QR codes in China proliferated almost a decade earlier because it was baked into the defacto standard do-everything app WeChat.
> Why must I pay monthly for gigabytes of storage to backup my iphone when a single $30 hard drive could do it?
This is “I could build that in a weekend” mentality. Your data on iCloud is replicated, available via the internet, available 99.99% of the time, etc. If your $30 hard drive fails you lose everything.
The price and being able to use other services is worth debating, but comparing it to “a single $30 hard drive” is disingenuous.
My backup is also replicated. Once on my hard drive and once on my phone. Secondly, it’s apple’s job to build this feature. I’m not talking about why I do or do not do it myself. I’m talking about why apple doesn’t make it, which is because they want me to pay monthly to hold data that I may never actually access.
Third, apple did build this feature, but it has become a neglected second class citizen. You can do backups to a mac, but the experience is clearly neglected.
Public bathrooms are getting much better in China. There's been a very noticeable improvement recently, I think tied to a government inspection program.
Granted I was mostly outside of the urban core of tier 1 cities, but most places I went people were constantly smoking in bathrooms, had to BYOTP, and floors were often covered in urine. In some second tier cities like Harbin it was basically squat toilets everywhere, even in the airport lounges.
When did you last visit? I have seen a very big change in just the last year. Most bathrooms have soap and toilet paper now, at least in my random sampling of tier-1 and tier-2 cities.
Smoking is still ubiquitous, though. "禁止吸烟" signs are just completely ignored.
Public bathrooms can be disgusting in many first world countries.
I wonder if the true mark of civilization will eventually be clean public bathrooms. It cannot be that hard because some select countries have managed to do it. Too few though.
Cultural, if I’ll be honest. Until kids are taught and indoctrinated in school that public cleanliness is net good for everyone, hard to see it change.
Good to know. I've heard bad things about public restrooms (from travelers I know) about both China and India, though this information may be outdated.
I was worried about Vietnam, but this is encouraging. I always wanted to visit.
(Don't worry, I understand what "on average" means, and I also understand it varies from ___location to ___location).
Are we forgetting that this only happened because they got in huge trouble with regulators and had to withdraw their cars from the street for like a year? I wouldn't take their statement at complete face value and don't see any reason for pessimism for Waymo.
Yup, there is zero chance that the market is too small. The only issues are whether a company can the technology to work and obtain regulatory approval.
Size of the market is for all practical purposes function of price. The competition to robotaxis is first and foremost humans. The major question is if robotaxi companies can provide the service at the cost of ubers *profitably*.
"In the early 1980s AT&T asked McKinsey to estimate how many cellular phones would be in use in the world at the turn of the century. The consultancy noted all the problems with the new devices—the handsets were absurdly heavy, the batteries kept running out, the coverage was patchy and the cost per minute was exorbitant—and concluded that the total market would be about 900,000. At the time this persuaded AT&T to pull out of the market, although it changed its mind later. "
And in the more recent past, we asked Juicero if squeezing a small volume of bags by hand could be done more cheaply by machines, and they told us "absolutely!"
We know how big the taxi market is and it's growth rate. There is clearly room for a few businesses here alone. Then consider driverless will go beyond taxi to general transportation like trucking which is massive market. Also likely play a significant variable in what cars consumers choose.
I think the risk here is software tends to a winner (or small number of winners) gets all market.
That has to be a major risk/reward concern on the companies investing in this tech.
> that seems already underway, with Uber[Eats] drivers being the "robots".
One of the primary benefits of automation is actually a reduction of costs. Uber eats did reduce delivery costs a bit, but probably not to the same order of magnitude true automation could achieve. Historically, you could always "automate" by having some guy do it, but the difference between having a bunch of people copy a book and a mechanical printing press do it is revolutionary.
They're also worrying about declining revenues in hardware so they are aggressively shifting to subscription and service fees, to the point of destroying the user experience of the Apple ecosystem. I am almost forced to use iCloud backups because of decades of neglect with offline syncing. Why must I pay monthly for gigabytes of storage to backup my iphone when a single $30 hard drive could do it?
I understand and see the value apple provides in a walled garden. It's not totally useless. It's one of the reasons apps tend to be higher quality in the App Store and the platform is basically free of viruses unlike an "open" platform like Windows. But I also welcome the changes that might make it easier for web based technologies to run freely on iOS.
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