Can I also have an option to block/disable all YouTube Shorts on AppleTV and Samsung TV apps? Shorts is the biggest disservice to civilization - promoting time-wasting behaviours.
Also, promoting 10-20 minute videos with 2-5 minutes of content is also wasteful. Most videos are extended to 10-20 minutes just to be recommended by YouTube.
Finally, videos with AI voice, which I hope can be easily detected, need to have a label clearly visible and I want to have preferences to hide those completely.
Also add a "stolen content" option for reporting. There is an insane amount of content that has been blatantly ripped of from others to produce cheap AI generated Shorts. Unless you own the stolen content, there's nothing you can do, even if it's clearly an Instagram video or a Reddit posts run through an AI.
Short form content, especially combined with AI is an abomination foisted upon this world in search of a meagre profit.
My issue with Shorts are that you watch it, conclude that it was garbage and a waste of your time, so you hit "thumbs down". That apparently does NOTHING in YouTube land, because you watched, and hit a button, so you "engaged" with the content. There's so much good, well made, quality content on YouTube, but even if you pay for Premium, the algorithm, tweaked for engagement and ad impression just ruins it and the more YouTube push Shorts the worse it gets.
Yeah I learned early on with "engagement" is that the only winning move is not to play. Just ignore the voting arrows, and definitely don't leave a comment on the video.
Seems that if you are into photography you still have to wait until M4 Max based Studio is out and wait out Mac Mini Pro. 2x graphics performance will accelerate many GPU-based tasks in tools like Topaz Photo AI, Lightroom and Photoshop, Luminar, etc.
Topaz I can understand, but are you really struggling with performance in lightroom and photoshop?
I have a 50MP camera and I don’t have issues with older hardware
Actually, I don’t know how like an M3 pro or better compares with a ryzen 5600 and rtx 3060, I assume much better cpu performanc and similar GPU performance?
Reading this on 2017 iMac 27" - is the first 5k iMac that couldn't be used as a monitor after the computer inside is irrelevant.
I hope EU will push for some law that requires all AIO computers to work in monitor-only mode if internal hardware is no longer good enough or no longer supported by software updates.
I love the 5k screen on this iMac but the CPU is too old for photo or video editing as software got so much slower over the years.
I could have used this screen for many more years, but now it will hit landfill... Apple is only "green" in their presentations - in reality they care more about inifite sales only.
Apple should hire a couple hackers to create “end-of-life” firmware for their obsolete devices; give them new life as super-specialized devices. Part green program, part customer delight, even some wacky art projects.
Maybe if an iMac doesn’t have a video input—have it boot as an AirPlay-only monitor.
I’ve got 2 old EOL appleTV boxes sitting in a drawer—again, one last firmware update to make them dedicated AirPlay receivers.
Take my 2011 MacBook Air and make it a dedicated Notes machine/word processor—all it does it run notes and sync with iCloud.
Obsolete iPad picture frame is an obvious one.
They can work on the “Reuse” side of the 3R’s of waste reduction (with reduce and recycle, right?)
PS, I’m available, 9 years embedded SW experience ;)
I have an obsolete Epson scanner (an expensive one!) and an iPad from 2012. Neither are usable anymore, officially. The iPad won't install more than a handful of apps from the App store, and both Epson and Microsoft refuse to supply drivers for old scanners even though I'm sure they're little different to the ones they use for the latest model.
So I grabbed a raspberry pi, installed Apache, PHP and phpsane (heavily hacked) and now my scanner has an iPad for a control panel, and I can scan dozens of documents without turning on my computer. Then I can access the whole thing across the network (samba file shares for docs, or the scanner interface).
My SIL who was junking the scammer after upgrading to Windows 11 thinks it's a better solution than the new scanner she bought to replace it.
Such hacks shouldn't only be possible with years of tech experience though.
> "Apple should hire a couple hackers to create “end-of-life” firmware for their obsolete devices; give them new life as super-specialized devices."
They've actually done this in a few cases! There's a whole generation of obsolete Airport Express Wifi base stations that got a final firmware update which gave them AirPlay 2 functionality. Now they're still quite sought after as a device to make old stereos/speakers wirelessly compatible with the latest Apple devices. Especially if you have stereo eqipment that can take optical (TOSLINK) audio input.
Oh nice. I didn’t know about the Airplay 2 update, but I’ve been using an old Airport Express to airplay for this old audio receiver I have for ages. And I’ve got a spare I hold onto in case this one ever shits the bed.
And while we’re on the topic — its amazing how many hifi audio receivers I see being thrown away, stuff that is still top-of-the-line for sound quality, but is now considered “obsolete” purely based on connectivity options — ie not having a direct bluetooth/wifi ability, when one could easily buy a separate device for that and hook it up.
I build quite a bunch of Pi e.g for multiroom setups:
- some output directly via the jack (which is okay quality wise as long as you don't push the gain/stay at line level, the device downstream being the one doing amp)
- others have an iqaudio hat (either DAC for when the internal jack doesn't cut it or people want 24/192 or Amp+ to drive passive speakers)
And I didn't notice til recently but the Amp+ has onboard headers for balanced output, so with a bit of soldering one can add, say, XLR to the thing.
Then throw in some room eq via an impulse response and you get a device that rivals off the shelf stuff that cost one to two orders of magnitude more, plus you get to not throw away perfectly good hardware.
Similarly I've smartified a crapton of dumb+ devices with a bunch of Shelly stuff (notably Plug S are dead easy): washing machine, water heater, mechanical ventilation, light switches, thermostatic valves...
+ And in a few cases smart ones too, except I compared what I can do with the first party offering and my hackjob, and it's nuts that not only the first party shit is never local when technically it could totally be, but that my hacked-together BS is more useful than the first party option, on top of being 100% local.
Fun thing: I bought a board + enclosure for an iPad screen from AliExpress. I had a 2011 iPad to which I had no practical use. I did have to break the iPad (RIP) so I could detach the screen, but in return I got a really nice crisp display with mini-HDMI ports, cool!
I have a 2011 iPad that I watch videos on in the Gym. It's not everything it used to be, but I can stream videos on Prime, though it had a tendency to crash on offline Netflix, and I watch downloaded videos in VLC.
I solved this with a ~$200 driver board from AliExpress. I love the result because it's thinner than any other monitor that I own and I can swap between my MacBook Pro and my desktop machine (running either Windows or Linux).
Obviously this requires a little bit of tinkering and the end result isn't nicely packaged like a factory Apple product would be, but it only took about half an hour to put together and I haven't had any issues with the driver board yet. And it was way cheaper than a "Retina" display from Apple or LG.
I didn't bother to mess around with mounting, I just used command strips to attach the driver board to the back of the monitor and mounted the monitor on one of these clamp-type stands:
I solved it by not updating the OS or apps. I stopped updating at Mountain Lion. My older iMac is my scanning and photo editing Mac. A flatbed scanner is permanently attached and Photos from Mountain Lion is still useable. In fact the retouch tool is actually faster (Photos experienced a serious performance regression for the retouch tool soon after Mountain Lion).
> Apple is only "green" in their presentations - in reality they care more about inifite sales only.
needs citation. I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing.
It's not that they actively do bad things, it's that they only dedicate real resources in the direction of self-interest. Tim Cook likes to point to their solar investments and accessibility as examples of "doing good" when in reality the former is a good long term financial bet and the latter is generally under-resourced (or "cheap" to them).
They'd use M.2 SSDs in their Macs instead of soldering flash chips to the board to allow for upgradeability, but that would seriously hurt the average profit margin on their devices and (maybe) take more time to engineer.
The areas where their self-interest and the environment overlap are truly awesome, like shipping iPhones without chargers (increased margins) and in smaller paper boxes (more efficient shipping), but I don't wear rose-colored glasses about it.
They'll also never let the iPad run macOS, because if people could own one device instead of two, that would be bad for their profits. They'll keep them cleanly differentiated for as long as they can.
> They'll also never let the iPad run macOS, because if people could own one device instead of two, that would be bad for their profits. They'll keep them cleanly differentiated for as long as they can.
They also don't have profiles on the iPad because then families could share devices which would be bad for their profits. Instead it is one iPad per person.
That functionality used to exist on Android, but I haven't seen it show up on the past two phones I owned. Does it still exist in stock and xiaomi just got rid of it for whatever reason?
It definitely still exists on AOSP, and most vendors still have it. Xiaomi did get rid of it. It used to be available, then only available if you "disable MIUI optimizations", then it's been entirely removed. Whether this is to force you to buy two phones, or simply as a result of how amateurish the software stack on Xiaomi phones is up to debate.
Apple, the richest company in the world, who spends millions in money and engineering hours on stuff like making sure the packaging having the right neutral smell, and the box sliding out with the right amount of friction when you open it, and on security teams/mercenaries able to pull family members of workers from warzones, and you're telling me they have to nickel and dime their HW team for routing an NVME slot on the board instead of soldering the NAND chips because that would cost some more engineering time?
Thanks for the chuckle, I loved it. I think Apple spends more on toilet paper or hand soap in a month than the effort would cost their HW engineers to do that.
It's to reduce unit costs, not engineering costs. They integrated an NVMe controller into the SoC and they can now just buy NAND chips instead of full SSDs.
Soldering them to the board is just an asshole thing to do though, especially since these machines can't boot off of USB if the NAND dies. Surely some elastomer BGA sockets wouldn't cost that much. There's no sane explanation other than they're doing it so you have to buy a new Mac to get more storage.
The increase in per unit cost probably would be entirely insignificant and minuscule compared to the revenue they'd lose by not being able to charge predatory prices for storage upgrades. So it would be a secondary or a tertiary concern at best..
There was a whole fiasco with Toyota Camries maybe 15 or so years ago where the brakes would go out. It turned out that Toyota skimped out on thick enough wires or wire insulation and either the wire connecting the brakes to the pedal wore out or the insulation wore out and caused the brake wire to short. They chose the wiring they did to save something like 2 cents a unit (each Camry).
My laptop repair count went way down (from 3 a year to one every 5 years) once chips no longer had the ability to become unseated. I think it is a reliability boon and a repair cost savings, not an up-front cost savings.
Working IT consulting for about 5 years, I have never experienced an end user with an unseated chip, not even on my personal products.
Irony, of all laptop I have owned, the most problematic was the Apple PowerBook. It's screen became defected a month or two after the warranty ended. The external VGA connection had issues and might require a couple restarts to get a signal. It could barely be used as a desktop computer. Even though I used it to write my first production software solution. It was ditched as soon as financially possible.
> They integrated an NVMe controller into the SoC and they can now just buy NAND chips instead of full SSDs.
What they/everyone really ought to do is to standardize that, with the flash chips themselves still connected via a modular connector and the "NVMe controller" as open source.
Imagine integrating the flash ECC/RAIN with ZFS et al. Or the ability to decide for yourself if you want a lot of QLC or a bit of SLC or a mix of both, in software at runtime.
Failure rates are multiplicative, not concurrent. If I have a car with an engine that lasts on average 200k miles, adding a transmission that fails on average at 300k miles results in a vehicle with a MTBF of less than 200k miles.
As far as I know, they can't. Why would Thunderbolt be special?
At least some portion of an operating system's bootloader chain must be installed to the internal storage, because that's all the firmware knows how to read (unlike Wintel PCs where there's a UEFI driver providing USB storage stack support). That bootloader running from internal storage is then free to enumerate external storage devices to locate the rest of the OS it is trying to load.
:) but we take it that you are not disagreeing on the first part of their claim?
That said, I have bought many cheap Windows PCs/Laptop in my lifetime and I have only ever upgraded them once and they also don't last as long. Somehow... I don't feel shouting at Apple. These things do last a bit longer...
The engineer that developed AirDrop released an unofficial update because Apple would not support older Mac despite it was developed and tested on that very machine: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/gYXcHRGP4d
If that’s not planned obsolescence I don’t know what it is.
Funny how accessibility seems to be both. Too complex and manpower-sucking to actually fully support, and cheap, because someone need his argument to work. As a VoiceOver (blind) iOS user (since 13 years or so) I submit you are underestimating the complexity of something like shipping a screen reader for every device you put out. Yes, there are days where I hope the Accessibility Team had more resources to fix obviously long-standing issues, but that doesn't let me forget what a gracius gesture it originally was to say "Fuck ROI, we're going to be the first to do this."
The entire organization is very small. The work is complex, yes. They get to work early on their new platforms, which is great planning and prioritization. All great stuff.
But if it took an organization 1,500 people strong, like Maps and Siri did, I’m not so sure the Apple of today would do it.
The praise goes first to the hard working engineers and managers who deeply care about this stuff, and second to management is all I’m saying.
For context, I built the Shortcuts app!
(edit: AX is also a much broader effort, because it improves usability for everyone on the ability spectrum, and it digs into design, too. So I do think it does have a more foundational role because Apple is still at its core a design-driven company. I think of all of the effort to make the apps usable at all text sizes, for example. The easier to use the products are for more people, the more people will buy them. There are less inherent trade-offs in AX than with the environment/carbon, where selling fewer devices is in direct conflict with sustainability goals.)
I think it's extremely overestimated by the technical crowd how many people would ever upgrade their RAM or SSD in their Macbook. I honestly doubt it's even in the single digit percentage points. The energy, engineering and material wasted on having connectors probably vastly outweighs the environmental savings by having that one tech person upgrade their RAM or SSD,
> "I think it's extremely overestimated by the technical crowd how many people would ever upgrade their RAM or SSD in their Macbook."
Back in the day when this was possible (iBooks, Powerbooks, early-model MacBooks), I'd say that a large percentage of Mac laptops eventually did get upgraded. I certainly upgraded 100% of the Macs I owned and also did many for friends and family. Some models made upgrades quite easy: the RAM slots, especially, were often accessible without special tools. It was common to buy the base model Mac with the fastest CPU, then install your own RAM modules and big HDD/SSD to save money. Swapping HDDs out for SSDs was also, of course, a huge performance upgrade for a while.
Even non-technical users who wouldn't upgrade their Macs on their own would often trade them in to dealers/resellers who would refurbish and upgrade them for resale.
I bought an M1 Max with a 2TB SSD, but I’m running up against the capacity and I want more storage. The computer is still plenty fast. Normally, I’d upgrade my computer and continue using it, but now I need to sell it and get a new one to get more storage. Not to mention the carbon cost of doing that, these things are $4000!
Further, when I buy a new one, I’m now incentivized to over-provision it based on my current needs by that same logic.
I used OWC parts to make a 16 TB m2 SSD array that connects over Thunderbolt. It's fast enough to edit 8K footage, just like the internal disk. Look for the 4-bay Thunderbolt enclosure on Amazon. I did add extra cooling (heatsinks on the modules, and a bigger fan).
I have one of those suckers, but the read/write performance is nowhere near the multi GB/s speeds of the NAND. Could be useful for archival, but it wasn’t great for blockchain indexing or running VMs.
USB4 can hit those speeds, but then you’re in dongle town.
Agreed, it's just minority of users trying to defer extra $2500 upfront, and also about managing RAM capacity arms race. There is no engineering reason a laptop has to be upgraded _later_ to e.g. 8way/192GB/6TB configuration.
That said, I do think upgradable laptops are important as a resistance force against constant upgrades and planned obsolescence; if you could hypothetically add 2x32GB DDR4-2100 to a decade old ThinkPad and run stolen Apple Intelligence LLM just fine, the humanity wouldn't need $5k worth of labor wasted on one laptop per person per year.
Completely custom chip? Best webcams? Extremely tidy internals. Insane audio. You can hate on apple for many reasons but that their hardware is top class and this will demand much more engineering cost is really clear.
Apple wants $1200 for a 4TB SSD. I'm sure a LOT of people would gladly pay $300 for a top-end SSD of the same size and pay someone to install it for $100 and still save $800 on the price of the machine.
The article is about the desktop iMac model. Regardless, I think many would upgrade because ssds are cheap... RAM would lead to customers getting another year or two out of their computer...
Its very easy to upgrade storage on any desktop machine - my Mac Mini has a couple external drives attached to it. In the case of an iMac, a little Velcro tape would even hide them behind the screen.
Just look at the latest iMac M4.
Going from 256GB SSD to 512GB costs 230€.
Going from 256GB to 1TB costs 460€. The smallest model isn't offered with 2TB (or more). The upgrade from 512GB to 2TB on the better model costs 690€
You're saying few people would buy the 256GB model and pop in a fast 2TB M.2 SSD for 103€ if they could?
I’ll bite: what about their devices is not easily resellable? Sure seems easy to factory reset basically anything Apple, and their resale values hold up a lot better than most devices.
Apple Silicon MacBook's are actually a bit difficult to truly factory reset. In a divorce I ended up with an M1 MBP that was first set up using my ex-wife's AppleID, but was primarily my laptop. Her administrator account was deleted, my AppleID was shown in all the system setting menus that I could see in the operating system, and "FindMy" on her phone at least was not tracking its location.
Two years later I updated my login password and then promptly forgot the exact punctuation of the new password. I ended up getting completely locked out of the laptop with no self-service options to fix anything.
That day I learned that you have to boot into a special mode to truly factory reset, not just delete the administrator accounts with other AppleIDs. I was able to get Apple to remotely unlock the computer for me, but only because I could "prove" it was mine by sending them the original invoice slip from store.apple.com with my name, email, and the serial number of the laptop on it.
But that invoice slip is literally a piece of paper in a box, and you can't access it yourself after 18 months - I had to call into Apple support and get them to email me a new copy because it had been longer than 18 months.
If I had purchased the laptop from someone else on craigslist 2 years prior and then got locked out, I would be completely shit-out-of-luck, because I wouldn't be able to prove I truly owned it.
I think the key thing to check is that the device is no longer shown on the previous owner's iCloud account when checking through the website. It's Apple's servers that you have to ensure no longer hold any association between that machine and an iCloud account that you don't have the credentials for, because the activation lock that survives a complete erase of the machine is implemented server-side.
That is an iCloud lock thing that you need to worry about, but aside from antitheft issue, it’s actually quite nice to reinstall the OS on an Apple Silicon Mac because it behaves like an iOS device. You can simply use Apple Configurator or an open source tool on Linux to DFU restore the device. It’s faster than installing OS by booting into recovery mode.
With the way modern macOS is immutable and exactly the same on all machines thanks to signed and sealed images, no one needs to DFU to reset a Mac unless there is something very wrong.
Macs have had internet recovery even in Intel days (command+option+R). On Apple silicon they also have a nice erase process which quickly erases (effacable storage) as you describe but doesn’t quite as quickly install. In my experience DFU (or recovery) is faster esp if you have the macOS image pre downloaded. I usually opt for that even if not strictly necessary and firmware is not bricked.
Exactly! My iPhone 12 Mini is actually worth replacing the battery in. I could do that and still turn a profit reselling it, or continue using it for a couple more years before it actually becomes obsolete and unusable.
I factory reset a 2012 Mac book pro that was needed for a client to use to check emails and use the web browser. Device was instantly blocked by Apple from accessing most websites because the factory version of the OS was deemed insecure by Apple. This included blocking the updater from being able to update the device via the web to a safe version of the OS that was available. What was supposed to be a 1 hour service became about 4 hours of me reading online trying to work out wtf was going on. Then I had to spend time navigating my way around the nightmare of distro hopping it up OS updates manually til it got to the most recent "safe" supported os version.
Device works completely fine and lives behind a well secured network (battery was stuffed but it lives plugged in). Apple took it upon themselves to dictate to the user that it was no longer fit for operation. Apples solution was "replace the device and send the old one to landfil.
Apple literally greenwash their entire business model. But they are one of the most wasteful companies around.
Meanwhile I'm still reformatting 8, 12 and 15 year old windows pcs with Linux and putting them back into service for email checking and basic web browsing without a single hiccup. Saving more and more from landfil, they get used once in a blue moon but it's literally all the owners want. They don't mind waiting a bit for stuff to turn on, hell plenty of them are over 60, they've spend their life being patient and a few mins to make a cuppa while something turns on is a blessing to them.
> Device was instantly blocked by Apple from accessing most websites because the factory version of the OS was deemed insecure by Apple.
Is that your way of saying "it doesn't support any modern SSL ciphers?" I don't think there is anything built into the OS that asks Apple if it's allowed to visit websites.
Well given it was both the update app and the web browser, not just the web browser. It's definitely built in. Unless their app updater/software updater is just safari with an overlay.
The updater and Safari would use the same TLS/SSL library (which would only support older, no longer secure TLS ciphers and would have the same root certificates, some of which would be expired). If you put a recent version of Firefox or Chrome on (via a USB drive), they bundle their own TLS libraries and certificates so those would work.
(But in the same way the OS ones weren't working, you wouldn't be able to use a 12 year old version of Firefox or Chrome to access most websites either for the same reasons).
Either way the inbuilt update system had zero way of updating itself or the OS to something that worked and it resulted in a painful few hours of stepping the system up through various OS versions downloaded on other devices until it got to the end of the downloadable versions, and from there on it was inbuilt app for updates only. No downloadable OS. Which would indicate since you can no longer download the latest OS iso's eventually they will block the last available Iso's one from working on their app store and the devices will be bricks.
This is shite design. Let's not kid ourselves here. This is one of the wealthiest companies on earth and thy control their entire hardware and software stack from the ground up. If they can't keep stuff sorted so when an old system plugs in it atleast limp mode upgrades it to the latest offering that system was supported with, this isn't because it's something that's impossible, it's because they don't want to.
If community non profit managed linux distros can get installed on 15 year old machines and just you know, sort out the drivers for the ancient ass tech in them without the user doing any more than running the update manager to hell apple couldn't have worked out the same.
It's a load of crap sold under the guise of security. Some nefarious actor wants to dl updates from their servers for ancient tech? Why in the world should they not be able to? Their update servers shouldn't have any services attached other than being a glorified dl directory.it shouldn't even be something they care about because there is zero risk attached.
> This is shite design . . . [Stuff] sorted so when an old system plugins in it at least limp mode upgrades
It’s an economic- and risk-based calculation based on security.
You’re trying to get a TWELVE-YEAR OLD system online. Let’s see, since 2012, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 have been officially deprecated (in 2021). In 2024, companies serving TLS 1.1 do not pass certain modern compliance standards. Mountain Lion from 2012 doesn’t support TLS 1.2. Are you arguing that they should leave around a TLS 1.1-based endpoint up, with ciphers that are no longer recommended? And how many CAs can still issue a valid cert trusted by a 12-yr old system?
> [there is zero risk attached]
Community-based Linux distros also offer HTTP (insecure) mirrors. There is also zero risk attached to the mirror serving HTTP. All the risk is on the user side. They don’t care that it’s an exploitable vector. They don’t have a commercial risk/downside. They didn’t sell fleets of old devices with their name on it.
> This is one of the wealthiest corporations on earth
Well this is why. It’s because they spend their money wisely. They decided that supporting OSes over 7 year old (with god knows what unpatched critical bulbs) is not money wisely spent and poses too much risk to their user populace, so they would rather not allow it, rather than support it. They don’t want to train their support on it and they don’t want to allow the possibility of punters getting their old hardware to an older release with open CVEs.
SSL/TLS/etc are libraries, yes. And the certificate store is an OS service.
Ancient software has trouble talking to modern services; modern services and devices don't want to fall back to speaking the old versions because of downgrade attacks.
And if you have an important CA certificate expire, you can't talk to anything.
Why can't you just put Linux on the Macbook then? Most 12-15 year old laptops are not capable of running the current version of Windows, either, and have major vulnerabilities.
Because the client is >55 in age and isn't a fan of change. They want what they are used to. Other clients who are more open to learning definitely and have in the past gotten linux. Huge fan of using it for bringing life back to old hardware. Some clients are however very abrasive towards the idea of a different OS/Interface/Change.
Your elderly client made a smart choice using MacOS. Elderly using Windows were not given a choice to not upgrade to Windows 8, this forced upgrade was a crime against the elderly, many of whom suffered in silence.
Not sure if this is what they meant, but from what I've heard, lots of companies send "obsolete" devices to recyclers without disabling Activation Lock. Not really Apple's fault, but if they added a last-resort way to wipe devices they could cut down on a lot of waste. I'm somewhat skeptical that locking does anything to deter thieves anyway.
They don't strictly need to greenwash even despite the difficulties with repairing their devices. They talk about green stuff because that's what they want to be, for whatever reason.
> How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update?
I don't even know how they do it with all of that.
None of the changes between successive versions of the iPhone — ever — have felt like good value for money to me. I get new ones when the old ones break. Then again, I am a weird outlier in economic things, and I've known that since I was a teen.
I'd ask if people really are so much more interested in signalling green than being green, but of course I know they do — an old flame campaigned Green in the US, despite also having a big thing about supporting the striking coal miners in the UK (that happened before she was born).
Using an M2 SSD instead of soldering the chip on board has more implications: PCB gets physically larger, and takes more power or has less performance talking to the SSD. Heat transfer is also worse. I completely understand why they go for a soldered SSD chip.
One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with little additional space.
> PCB gets physically larger, and takes more power or has less performance talking to the SSD. Heat transfer is also worse.
I don't think these are real problems. The M.2 device would take up space you could have used for the PCB, but then you would have had to use that PCB space for the chips that are on the SSD.
The SSDs in current Macbooks do around 3GB/s. NVMe Gen5 does 14GB/s. The speed-of-light latency from any kind of connector is going to be totally irrelevant compared to the latency of the flash controller itself. There is no performance concern. Power is the same; when idle the link goes to sleep, when in use the connector is negligible compared to the device itself.
Heat transfer doesn't even seem related. If you want to improve heat transfer from the SSD then you put it into thermal contact with a heatsink or the chassis, which you can do regardless of whether it's M.2 or not.
> One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with little additional space.
The only real space requirement is the size of the connector itself, which is on the order of 50 square mm in a PCB which in a 12" laptop is some tens of thousands of square mm. <0.5% is "little additional space" to begin with.
Obviously you could design a connector which is even smaller, but the premise would have to be that that's even a real problem.
M.2 devices save space on a PCB: yes, the connector itself takes some room, but the alternative is sticking all those chips on the PCB itself, and those chips take up more space (just look at any M.2 NVMe drive). The M.2 form factor is moving those things off the main PCB, and onto a daughterboard that usually sits directly on top of it and parallel to it.
The idea that a PCB gets larger with an M.2 slot is truly insane.
Even on desktop motherboards, the space under a M.2 slot is usually nearly empty. On laptop motherboards, it is almost always completely empty save for possibly a thermal pad. Some laptops position the M.2 slot to have the SSD extend beyond the edge of the motherboard. But in either case, laptops are not reducing PCB footprint by using M.2 SSDs, because nothing gets stacked under the SSD; that space is reserved for the SSD.
For an iMac, though, they have a bigger thermal envelope and no battery. It seems more reasonable. Apple even did the software engineering necessary to support the Mac Pro.
That would be Apple’s counter-argument right there. Want Linux on your M1? Get a Mac, not an iPad. Want swappable storage? Get a Mac Pro, not an iMac.
That is some gorgeous PCB work. And goes to show that JLCPCB (you can tell from the order number) is perfectly usable for applications needing a controller impedance stackup.
> Wow, it’s almost like they are a publicly traded company with a legal obligation to do so!
This is an amazingly common misconception about fiduciary responsibility to share holders. Nowhere in the law does it state that they must seek profit and shareholder value at all costs, above all other concerns, regardless of the impact. Companies are absolutely allowed to do things that are not 100% aligned with self interest. Many companies routinely do such things like charitable giving, excellent customer service, expensive processes that make the product more recyclable or repairable, etc.
I wonder how many offended Apple employees and dedicated fans hang around this article, but seeing the number of grey comments being a bit sceptical about the overall efficiency of Apple environmentalism there most be more than one. ; )
But maybe still less than the number of electronics mass produced, sparing no efforts and resources, to supply mass(es of) consumers, the world!
We live in a sick society where peoples identities are intertwined with their consumer choices and they feel personally attacked by criticism of a megacorporstion. An engineer is more likely to be aware of design tradeoffs and skeptical of marketing fluff.
It boggles my mind that there are legions of people like this who will defend mega corporations for free. If you're gonna gaslight for a trillion dollar corporation, at least get paid to do it.
I wonder how many offended Apple employees and dedicated fans hang around this article, but seeing the number of grey comments being a bit sceptical about the overall efficiency of Apple environmentalism there most be more than one. ; )
Maybe people are just tired of the same old low-quality axe grinding that fills the HN comments section every time any story appears about Apple.
This whole page is filled with people rehashing 15-year-old complaints, moaning about computers other than the one in the article, and generally turning the whole thing into yet another off-topic bitch session.
You can put together a BINGO sheet for HN comments any time there is a story about Apple ("walled garden!"), Google ("graveyard!"), Microsoft ("Micro$oft!"), or Adobe ("subscription!").
It's old. It's boring. It's off-topic. It is rightly downvoted.
You forget to list 'it is not true' as the reason for downwote, my child!
(no, you did not forget, you had no such reason, only that you are bored or some are even offended by others do not like what is grown to be precious while done with a megaload of pretention and are not tired of pointing it out. Like a fella closeby, participating in distributing billions of electronics using a sizeable chunk of Earth's resources, then is proud of not throwing away each and every vessel he/she drank out of on the campus. And does not see the galactic inbalance. Does not want to, I suspect. Happy with the rigtheous image put on like a t-shirt. Being bored is no fucking mandate to make actions or criticize in this free discussion. Your bored sensitivity is insignificant in the subject, try to grow up, be adult and see the significant part of picture too and take seriously what is serious - unlike your boredom - instead of trying to wrap reality around your lack of amusement, please. People like yourself yield to pretentious greediness preserving a problem with willfull an intentional ignorance make problems 'old' - but definitely not boring. Would you care please yawn a huge one and downvote anything of a different an even bigger and even older 'boring' problem like child poverty for example? Just as an instance, there are mountains of 'old' and 'boring' problems you could consider boring and righful of shut about it! :( Before biting on details or analogies, the subject of criticism is the ignorant and egocentric mentality you represent, not the randdom elements came accross.)
I did not say that it’s bad or wrong or changeable.
I was actually just trying to explain that the internal feelings of employees are not the driving force, even if those feelings are real and deeply felt.
The iMac are the perfect example though. The horror of putting a DVI/HDMI port on that thing seemed so horrendous that they'd rather let the whole thing go to waste. Reading OP it seems like this has been corrected? But generation of generation of devices didn't have any sensible reason to exist.
Apple is also the king of integrated batteries. First with phones, then with laptops. I'm still baffled they got away with this. Such mindless waste at an incredible scale.
Being extremely environmentally conscientious while designing the packaging isn't going to offset that.
This would require additional hardware in every iMac sold.
Many people (I suspect the vast majority) would not reuse the iMacs as displays.
Would the total amount of extra hardware inside discarded iMacs (those not used as displays) be less than the amount of hardware saved by reuse of the others?
> Many people [...] would not reuse the iMacs as displays.
They could resell them as displays, given the resale value of Apple devices that might not be unpopular. If Apple actually cared they could easily add the hardware necessary. Would it cost them a few bucks more? Sure, but that's what choosing environment over maximum profit means.
Or they could at least make it easy to modify so tinkerers can quickly turn it into a display without having to destroy the case or something.
The citation is common sense.. if your business is consumerism, you are by definition the opposite of "green". Putting some idiots on stage every year to carefully gesticulate to soft music about how "green" creating immense amounts of industrial waste are and thinking it is real is getting high on your own supply.
There is very little change from one iPhone to the next but very much marketing which underscores the true intentions. The business model is built on a revolving demand cycle that is unrelated to long term thinking, maintainability, efficiency, nor sustainability. One may argue well that Apple is better than the other players in the field but it doesn't undercut the overall impact of producing incredibly complex and rapidly obsoleting assemblies. It's not just soldering some chips to a board and snapping it together, each individual component potentially has global impact as the raw materials and finished pieces move into their final form. The magnitude of what is going on is not immediately intuitive unless you are an insider or read a well researched book like "The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone"
The fundamental problem, which is out of sight out of mind from the consumer, is how much energy is required to produce and move assemblies around. See also the automotive industry, where the "green" thing to do is drive and maintain older vehicles for a long time.
And to be honest, this doesn't bother me that much, but if I'm not on the take as an engineer I have no particular qualms punching through the bullshit smokescreens as a customer of a company that takes my money. The attention and empathy fatigue of the bullshit does take away from things that do matter such as national versus international manufacturing.
>There is very little change from one iPhone to the next
Visually, sure. Under the hood? Wrong.
>The business model is built on a revolving demand cycle that is unrelated to long term thinking, maintainability, efficiency, nor sustainability.
Sorry you need to qualify this statement. An iPhone 6S is still completely usable and almost certain to be in a functional condition assuming it has been looked after correctly. That's a 8-9 year old phone. Meanwhile my 2001 phone was hopelessly outdated e-waste in 2007.
No way that any technologically competent person can claim that the iPhone 16 is a massive and amazing improvement over the iPhone 15. There is "change", sure - the chip is now every so slightly faster, it can do "AI things", it can take slightly better photos, etc.
But any comparison of these changes with the previous model for an average use case - which is what most people buy iPhones for, not benchmarking - would hardly yield any visible differences. Scrolling through reddit or HN or Instagram is about the same on both devices, and gaming gives you a few more frames if you care about that sort of thing, and I say that as someone with those exact models. Apple could have easily skipped releasing a new model this year, packaged exactly the same hardware and released the iPhone 16 the next year and fundamentally nothing would've changed. But the shareholders won't like that, will they?
>No way that any technologically competent person can claim that the iPhone 16 is a massive and amazing improvement over the iPhone 15.
Kicking off with a logical fallacy, strong start.
>There is "change", sure - the chip is now every so slightly faster, it can do "AI things", it can take slightly better photos, etc.
Just say you're technologically uninformed.
>But any comparison of these changes with the previous model for an average use case
Kathy using Instagram while she waits in line at the supermarket is not a useful point of comparison when we're comparing iterative improvements, keep up.
>Apple could have easily skipped releasing a new model this year, packaged exactly the same hardware and released the iPhone 16 the next year and fundamentally nothing would've changed.
I don't feel like I need to, the referenced book or a cursory look into the rare mineral trade and shipping industry would be more useful for anyone actually interested. If the 6S is still useful, the fact I can't remember the last time seeing anyone with a phone more than 5 years old kind of speaks for itself to the fashion aspect the business has built for itself.
I send all my old stuff for recycling now and get a gift card in return. They just did this for my ancient iPad that won’t even run the latest iPadOS.
I go on a site, pop in the serial number, and they ship me a box for free with a return label.
I basically got $45 for an incredibly slow brick, so I’d say that’s pretty good incentive for their recycling program.
Sure, you could install Linux and upcycle it, but how many people are actually going to do that? I think the recycling program is actually great for the 95%+ of people and how they use their devices.
Not in the UK; my iPad was unreliable from the off, eventually it was crashing 4 minutes after starting it. Trying to trade it in just got a message along the lines of "It can still have a good second life, go find a responsible recycler and give it to them. Have a Nice Day!".
It was disappointing to get unreliable hardware from a supposedly premium vendor, but it happens. It was the attitude and service that turned me off Apple though, not the hardware (which really should be more reliable than cheaper alternatives).
It's simple. I have a old iMac w a 5K screen. I would like to just but a now Mac Mini and keep using my iMac as a monitor. Instead my 5K iMac will end up in a landfill. Which is less green.
You could put Linux on it and use it as a sort of jukebox, or any multitude of other things. You could also send it to me if you aren't interested in doing any of that :)
I use Linux on mine. It's a bummer that the magic to send over 2 eDP tiled at 5k resolution was never open-sourced, so you can only send 4k and it ends up slightly blurry.
I'd love to put Linux on it, but one of the main reasons I use Linux is for CUDA programming and you can't even put an nVidia card in a Mac these days.
Waterproofing. It really is that simple. The math would never work out trading that for easy replaceability. And every average user can get a shop to replace their battery.
Waterproofing isn't a yes/no feature. Modern phones are way more waterproof and dust resistant than the S5. The plastic back on the S5 would quickly develop cracks that would let water in.
Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it showed that it can be done, and it's not particularly difficult either. An improved design could have a metal back panel instead of plastic, it could use screws instead of plastic snaps, etc. (And with most people using cases, who cares about visible screws?)
For the same reason I can't replace the battery on my electric car (not the 9V one). Because the car maker made that choice, for a myriad of good and bad reasons. What's your point?
I feel you. I just bought an exceptionally boring car in large part because it is meant to be largely user-serviceable. Sorry you got stuck with that problem.
My point was that GP made a strong assertion that didn’t quite bear up to scrutiny IMHO:
> I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing.
It seems to me that an “extremely environmentally conscientious” company would place a much higher priority on serviceability. But I am very open to contrary reasoning and I don’t know any Apple engineers. This was a rare opportunity.
I hasten to say that Apple products are so good I overlook this disadvantage, but then I don’t describe myself as extremely environmentally conscientious.
If you need a citation to understand, then nothing will get through to you. Apple glued in their batteries before "it was a thing" and implemented parts pairing DRM "before it was a thing" too. Whatever era you worked at Apple during, the company is changed now and has been changed for over a decade. Their modern rhetoric proves they detest the Reduce, reuse, recycle hierarchy that defines how "green" is and has been defined. You can prove that Apple is anti-green through basic examination of their modern business model:
- They deliberately limit the functionality of devices unsupported by their first-party services (eg. App Store and Safari) which prevents reduction of new hardware required. Third-parties are prevented from offering serious and lasting alternatives.
- They've systematically prevented repair of both their laptop and phone hardware, obviating the "reuse" part of the cycle. In their current scheme, independent repair shops are deliberately and unnecessarily cut off from the parts they need to repair Apple hardware at-cost.
- Their stance towards recycling is asinine and insidious. Since store owners can't recycle partially-broken hardware as donor boards and users can't extend the use of their devices once iOS stops supporting them, Apple graciously offers to take your valuable hardware for free and destroy it for parts or materials for their own benefit. Users aren't expected to want any better and instead are supposed to thank Apple for pocketing their broken hardware to pay for Carbon Credits and Mother Nature spotlights.
Apple's "serious" dedication to the environment is a joke, and the cracks have been showing for a while. They prioritize obstinate and unnecessary proprietary features instead of differentiating themselves through natural competition on their merits. If it wasn't for regulatory concern Apple would continue abusing the environment and people like you would keep defending Apple regardless.
>I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing.
Then please tell us why they can't put a HDMI/DP input on the iMac to be usable as an external monitor when the internal computer dies or just to be used as a secondary monitor?
Or why the SSD NAND on Macbooks needs to be soldered when a guy on youtube managed to hack an NVME connector on the motherboard to make the storage replaceable and expandable? What are the reasons other than driving more sales of new devices when old ones break?
Because they're clearly not technical limitations and without any substantiated info from your side, your comment just reads more like astroturfing ("Apple is so conscious, trust me bro I worked there").
> when a guy on youtube managed to hack an NVME connector on the motherboard to make the storage replaceable and expandable?
Link? I've seen several instances of third-party repair shops doing BGA swaps to replace the NAND with larger packages from other Apple products. I've seen one instance of somebody making a pair of custom boards, one soldering down to the original NAND BGA pads to provide a slot, and the other board slotting into that one to hold the scavenged BGA packages in an easily-replaced module. But I haven't seen anyone retrofit an off the shelf NVMe device to operate as primary storage for an Apple Silicon machine.
There are a ton of older iMacs on the used market, and if you have one, it's a fair complaint that you can no longer re-purpose it for whatever else you like. Ideally if I got a mac mini I'd just hook it up to the screen I already have, rather than spending another $2k on the only other option the brand sells.
Additionally, not having that option lets the manufacturer have control over how much value a product retains after it's useful life. Apple already does this in a number of different ways, and it's disgraceful. iPad too old to get new updates? Recycle, it's not like your backup included the versions that did work for your OS version, can't do much with the hardware. Battery dead? Recycle! Already have a 5k iMac but want Mac Studio for more performance? Well you better like spending a whole lot more for exactly no new value.
Just because the device is too slow for you does not make the device useless in totality. What are you going to ask for next? HDMI-in port on the iPad and MacBook so you can use it as a display when the internals are outdated?
> Just because the device is too slow for you does not make the device useless in totality.
Exactly, and it would be even less useless in totality if the screen was still feasible to use on its own.
> HDMI-in port on the iPad and MacBook so you can use it as a display when the internals are outdated?
Now that you mention it, I would like to use my old iPad as a second screen, since it's a mobile form factor already and is otherwise nearly useless for no intrinsic reason. But for the iMac, which is obviously a stationary large screen in an appealing enclosure, it would be a returning feature with a standard TB 4/5 port and cable, like it was originally with TB1.
"My use case" of ...*squints*... not throwing amazing and still functional monitors in the trash because the computer part in them is obsolete/dead and keep reusing them instead? How rude of me to reject Apple's marketing NPC programming and use common sense instead.
How about Apple just puts the 2 cent connector & PHY, and let the users who paid for the device decide how they want to use the product. Gaslighting people with the "you're holding/using it wrong" argument today is just .. I can't even express anymore without breaking HN rules.
Classic apple worker, missing the forest from the trees. You were bamboozled into making your products greener while forcing customers to buy more and more of them.
If you have the inclination and skills, it can be converted to an absolutely-zero-smartness display using an LCD driver board (this example conversion log used the A1419's housing with a separately purchased display panel): https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/diy-5k-monitor-success....
Someone needs to turn iMac-to-monitor conversion into a small business. At least in major cities, since packing up an iMac for shipping is not easy or fun if you don't have the original box anymore.
It was about $250 all said and done. I got lucky and got the iMac for free, though even if I had purchased the Mac it would still be more affordable than Apple's Studio Display.
I went from a 2560x1600 27” 2012 iMac to a 5K 2015 iMac. The 2015 model was the first not to offer target display mode, so it’s even worse than you say. For a while I ran the 2012 as a second display for the 2015.
The 2012 iMac is long gone, passed to a friend, but I still daily drive the 2015 5K. I’m interested in the new iMac but the 24” screen feels like a downgrade. The 27” studio display seems like a nice option but for similar money I get an extra computer in a smaller screen.
Naturally I could buy a cheap monitor but I don’t want to.
I used your iMac as the daily driver for years, and now use the 27” Studio Display. I don’t know what’s more frustrating: that it’s still effectively the same panel 10 years later, or that it’s still the best one (for reasonable money).
I was tempted to gut it and stick in a display driver board but that comes with a risk of destroying the thing. It’s still running fine and I could find use for it elsewhere.
Don’t landfill it please sell on eBay or locally. Crazy people like me that love the monitors and just surf the web will buy them. I was awestruck the other day how much I would have to spend to exceed the monitor quality on our ancient iMac. I bought a modern 4k one and it was still worse. They really put the magic in those old 5k monitors.
In a similar situation ( mine is iMac 2019 ), I just added Linux box with 8x Xeon cores and Nvidia GPU. I use iMac as remote VNC / X11 client for that server. It still good enough for web browsing, email, and heavy tasks offloaded to Linux server. I do mostly ML / software build, no video editing though.
Please don't landfill it. Recycle it responsibibly once it's lifetime is over by recycling it to Apple or taking it to a local electronics recycler like Best Buy.
I am in the same boat as I have an iMac 2015, although I specced it up from Apple at the time and it's just about holding on.
You can buy something like the camlink 4k from elgato which will give it a HDMI via video capture. I'm actually typing this now on a windows laptop that is connected to this.
It just means you need to boot the Mac and run the app, put it full screen and then you are done. The fans go like crazy though and obviously you need a working Mac.
I love this machine, but when it's time to upgrade, i'm going back to a seperate monitor setup for this reason. Maybe a studio display + mini.
the CPU is too old for photo or video editing as software got so much slower over the years. I could have used this screen for many more years, but now it will hit landfill.
It's not really too slow. If you're a professional and must use the latest software to turn jobs around fast and meet client expectations, use the machine for administration, coding, or just wipe it and sell it to someone else. Why would you put a working machine in the trash?
There is a reason that the old saying is "reduce, reuse, recycle". The effectiveness is in that order: reduce consumption, reuse what you have, and recycle what you can no longer use.
There is a very straightforward opportunity here for Apple to enable "reuse". They absolutely should be doing that.
I can't even name one other than an iMac that I would want to use. The whole reason to want to use the older 27" 5k iMac is that it's an incredible display. Better than you can buy, other than the 27" Apple Studio Display.
Not sure if you're kidding, but around 2014 on campus we all got reusable water bottles, and I still of course have mine, as they're useful (and less wasteful).
I hope more companies start recycling their own products. It makes me sad to see so much valuable electronics, so many "totalled" cars just thrown away on the same heap as other rubbish (and old cars respectively). Such a waste of resources is surpassed only by war.
Consumer electronics have a negative recycling value - the raw materials are worth significantly less than the extraction cost (in both financial and carbon terms), making recycling nothing but environmental theatre. If electronics manufacturers actually care about sustainability, they must extend the working life of the product by designing for longevity, repair and reuse.
Apple have a very mixed track record in this respect. iMacs used to work as an external monitor when the in-built computer became obsolete, but that feature has been removed. Most components in an iPhone are locked to that device, preventing their re-use as spare parts. Apple computers are almost entirely non-upgradeable, greatly limiting their potential useful lifespan.
Recycling electronics basically means crushing them and extracting some of the minerals inside. A lot of them can't really be recovered, and of course all the electricity that was used to create it is still gone and the water used is still tainted.
If you make electronics you should be forced to do everything humanly possible to extend its useful life.
I have this 2017 iMac and I hate that I can't use it as an external display. Felt it more during covid since I wanted to plug my work laptop on it and it as an external display.
That said, this display is old and I feel it more now when editing/viewing HDR videos. Though it was one of the top displays till a few yrs back
If you have no intent to use it longer, please do let me know. I am always looking for machines, books etc to give to my former high school in southern Africa. I'm in the US and can get it shipped
Apple is an US company, it's the role of the US to intervene. There is so much that the EU can do, especially when being less and less relevant technologically
the first 5k imac was actually a 2014 release. i got mine used much later, and eventually gave it away to a friend a couple months ago this year. i was pretty frustrated by the limitation and did research on converting it, before the kits were widely available.
during design and manufacturing of the initial 2014 release, there wasn't any off-the-shelf control board capable of driving the display. so internally, there's a customized controller with a specialized 5k mode that appears as two hardware displays, using two displayport channels for interlaced lines. a custom driver presents it as a single logical display to the OS (this is why windows support required a custom driver, and linux still has no support).
so i think primarily the reason they didn't set up target display mode is that they barely got it to work on its own. target display mode would have required significantly more development.
consider that DP didn't even announce protocol specs that could support the 5k resolution or tiled displays until a month before the imac release.
but yes, disappointingly, later 5k imac releases didn't restore the feature. at this point they have 'sidecar' and i guess they consider that a solution.
please, sell it. don't trash it!
a computer from 2017 is still perfect for most people, and especially for hackers. there is a market for computers that are barely 7 years old.
i am writing this from a macbook pro from 2012, and it's my daily driver. macs are really amazing machines (i guess there's a bit of luck involved, but they are in general very solid).
If the EU had mandated it, the 5K iMac may not have existed, would have been delayed if it did (to wait for display port 1.3 to be viable), and would have been more expensive.
Just understand what you’re asking for. Anyway, why have an AIO if that’s not what you want. Sell the iMac an upgrade to something else.
Netflix has a problem that the front page is now filled with "B-rated" rather than "A-rated" content for more money than before. The amount of content that they spent money on in the past is hardly discoverable, genre search is barely exposed in the interface. You have to rely on 3rd party sites to find links to category selections, say Epic movies based on true events... good luck finding what they have in this category in the AppleTV or Roku apps. They also don't allow to exclude content that one is not interested in, I want no superheroes, no animated stuff, no dei, etc - and yet every time I launch the app it is there front and center and I just hate this. And if I watched 2 WW2 movies it doesn't mean that's the only thing I'm interested in in the recommended section. I want to exclude producing studios as well, like Vox, let me tell Netflix what I don't like.
So if you start looking outside of their interface - why then not just finish and get the movie elsewhere?
Finally, pricing is not flexible, what if I want infrequent 4k UHD streaming on a single device - why do I pay for 4 streams as if I'm streaming 24/7? At this point, I'm better off with Netflix Pay Per View (if this was offered). I keep paying for this service just because I can and just because I might watch something - but I find it more and more frustrating to watch something...
The funny thing is they want to have a tech company valuation and everything you are describing is a tech issue that is easily solvable but they won’t do it.
They are a content creation company/studio now. Their price to earnings (PE) ratio is 45 for some reason and they are part of the FAANG acronym for some reason. I can’t even find anything I want to watch on there and we cancelled it until Stranger Things comes out again. Then we will cancel again. The PE for Universal Studios is 12. Paramount is -7.
They are not bugs but features. The problem they have is that their catalog is mostly filler content at this point. If they addressed the "bugs" you'd be looking at a fairly sparsely populated page with mostly stuff you've already seen.
Netflix is designed to suggest that they have more content than they actually have and that the reason you haven't found anything worth watching just yet isn't that they don't have it but that it's behind the next page of filler content. That's why they have the horizontal scrolling and the endless generic groups of the same content that you've already seen. It's all circular. It doesn't matter how you navigate, it's always the same stuff that surfaces.
I cancelled my subscription last year. I'm planning to re-enable it in one month bursts only if/when I know they have something new I actually would like to see. I'm not paying anyone to watch ads.
The FAANG acronym was invented by a TV host of a stock market show based on their value to stock market grifters, not actual tech they're working on (which is why it has Netflix but no Microsoft).
Yeah but if you always have to spend a lot of time finding something to watch, then that shows up in their analytics as increased engagement. Allowing you to remove garbage would make you spend less time in their app.
If you're actually watching content (a whole movie, a series, etc), the total actual usage of the service easily eclipses any time spent bouncing around the UI?
Isn't it still at least very unaware of them, to force you through such bad UI, even if your search time is 10min compared to 2h movie? If not stupid, then still unaware of significant problems of their product/platform.
Or maybe they're right and that's why piracy is growing rapidly. I share most of their complaints and it's a big part of why I quit paying for subscriptions.
I mean, I read stories about their excellent software teams who optimise the user experience all the time and their analytics are superb etc. Then when I use Netflix (not a lot) I notice that it keeps recommending me movies and shows I just f’ing watched. I have the same thing with YouTube and Prime. Are these devs just really bad or is there some motive here I don’t understand? I am not going to watch anything again that I watched 10 minutes ago… in all of these platforms now I have to use quite elaborate search to find things I didn’t watch but do find interesting, even though there must be millions of those. In my recommended feeds I get crap I either already saw or I would never watch (I watched romantic comedies literally never, so why do I keep them as recommended?).
This seems to be a reocurring pattern to me. The tech giants hire supposedly the best talend on the market for all their six figures, yet their products and platforms perform subpar for mny users. To me it seems, that all their talent is directed into the wrong channels and therefore cannot bring their skills to bear on something that makes an actually great product for those users.
You can have the best engineers and bright minds, but if your product sucks or your ethics are non-existent, and you don't let those engineers act outside of the limitting borders of the product, then they will not be able to make the product shine. They might be able to make a more dystopian version of your product, within the guidelines and ethical framework.
And lets not forget, that ethics of the engineers also play a big role. A decent developer with good ethics might make something, that the best engineers would never have even considered making or releasing to the public.
On your last point: Bundling features together in tiers even if not every user needs everything in every new tier is not new in any digital or even non-digital pricing strategy. Doubly so when the cost to Netflix to "grant" you 4 simultaneous streams is effectively 0.
Ehhhhhh, not sure I buy that. Sure, giving one person 4 streams instead of 1 has very little marginal cost, but giving everyone 4 streams instead of 1 is not cheap. They need more servers to serve the extra traffic, and they still have to pay for data transfer, presumably, even in places where they've put PoPs inside ISP data centers.
(Granted not everyone will be using those 4 simultaneous streams all at once, and some people won't even use the extra streams at all, but I'm sure enough will that it won't be free for Netflix to provide it.)
Tax laws as well as other laws, need to have a requirement to be rewritten from scratch and re-approved every 10 years or so, such that no law or regulation is complex enough that an elected official can't describe it in full before voting on it.
It will never happen. Tax law is complex by design, partially because it seeks to do things that are simply impossible, and partially because anybody with enough power to influence changing it benefits from the complex quagmire of ambiguous laws. The complexity allows the IRS to run roughshod over most people and businesses, but the truly powerful can do almost anything they want if they pay for enough advisors and lawyers. The system is in a perfect equilibrium in that respect.
I personally think that if a government fails to enforce a law to a reasonable standard, then the law should be invalidated. Which is probably quite similar to your idea, and addresses the problems created by discretionary enforcement. But that will never happen either.
"Why Python" by Eric Raymond in Linux Journal is what started my love of python for me before Ruby or JavaScript outside of the browser were even a thing.
A python script easily outperformed a bash shell script + shell commands for processing text and automating tasks.
Most Linux system administration with Python is just so much easier than any other way, that was after I tried doing the same with Perl which was awful in terms of readbility just a few days after the script was written.
Would love to see one day AI used to read annotated text with multiple voices, so each person in a novel gets his/her voice and also narrative voice. Would be epic and actually better than most audio books read by a single person attempting to pretend to speak in different voices.
Was always frustrated that Kindle was barred from reading books, it is such a natural progression of capabilities. Leave up to the buyer to decide if they want to pay for the person, but default TTS should be allowed for all books, such that if I read book at home and then can continue listening during a walk.
I hope this case will fail and establish a good precedent for all future AI litigations and may be even prevent new ones. Your code is open source - irregardless of license, one might read it as a text book and then remember or even copy snippets and re-use this somewhere else unrelated to the original application. If you don't like this, don't make your code open source. This was happening and is happening independent of any license all over the world by majority of developers. What Copilot and similar tools did was to make those snippets accessible for extrapolation in new applications.
If these folks win - we again throw progress under the bus.
No thank you.
I put a license to be followed, not to just be disregarded by an AI as "Learning material".
No human perfectly reproduces their learning material no matter what, but Copilot does.
You mean to tell me that no one has ever perfectly replicated an example that they read somewhere? There's only so many ways to write AABB collision, fibonacci, or any number of other common algorithms. I'm not saying there aren't things to consider but I'm sure I've perfectly replicated something I read somewhere whether I'm actively aware of it or not
So are you ok with it being illegal for humans to learn from copyrighted books unless they have a license that explicitly allows learning? That does not sound like a pleasant consequence.
Would you use an AI text generator to write a thesis? No, there's a risk a whole chunk of it will be considered plagiarism because you have no idea what the source of the AI output is, but you know it was trained with unknown copyrighted material. This has nothing to do with the way humans learn, it's about correct attribution.
There is no technical reason why Microsoft can't respect licenses with Copilot. But that would mean more work and less training input, so they do code laundering and excuse it with comparisons to human learning because making AI seem more advanced than it is has always worked well in marketing.
Edit: And where do you draw the line between "learning" and copying? I can train a network to exactly reproduce licensed code (or books, or movies) just like a human can memorize it given enough time - and both of those would be considered a copyright violation if used without correct attribution. If you trained an AI model with copyrighted data you will get copyrighted results with random variation which might be enough to become unrecognizable if you're lucky.
> Would you use an AI text generator to write a thesis? No, there's a risk a whole chunk of it will be considered plagiarism because you have no idea what the source of the AI output is, but you know it was trained with unknown copyrighted material.
Of course, but that's a separate issue. We're not talking about whether the output of the AI is copyrighted. We're talking about whether it's ok for it to learn from copyrighted material.
Again you can say exactly the same about humans. I am perfectly capable of plagiarising or outputting copyrighted material. That doesn't mean it's illegal to learn from that material, just to output it verbatim.
So the fundamental issue is that it's harder to tell when an AI is plagiarising than it is when you produce something yourself. But that is a technical (and probably solvable) issue, not a legal one. And it's not the subject of this lawsuit.
Here's the thing - the US has well-established laws around copyright that don't consider learning from books a violation of those copyrights. This lawsuit is intended to challenge Copilot as a violation of licensing and isn't a litigation of "how people learn." Your program stole my code in violation of my license - there's a clear legal issue here.
I'd pose a question to you - would it be okay for me to copy/paste your code verbatim into my paid product in violation of your license and claim that I'm just using it for "learning"?
If you cherry picked sections of my code? I'd have no more issue with it then George R.R. Martin would care if you grabbed a few paragraphs out of one of his fantasy books and used them in your novel.
I think they're taking issue with the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted code. That's distinct from learning how to code (which I don't think anyone would claim Copilot is doing) which people get from reading a book. If you were to read the book only to copy it verbatim and resell it, you're going to have a bad time.
It's a pleasant consequence for the person who spent years becoming an expert and then writing the book. It's also a pleasant consequence for the people who buy the book, which might not have existed without a copyright system to protect the writer's interests.
AI are not humans, no human can read _all_ the code on Github. They certainly can't read _all_ the code on Github at the scale that MS can, and are unlikely to be able to extract profits directly from that code, in violation of the licensing.
100% false, there are loads of historical cases of people with eidetic memories being able to reproduce things that they've seen with near complete fidelity, there's no reason to believe that a coder with such a memory would be any different.
> Your code is open source - irregardless of license, one might read it as a text book and then remember or even copy snippets and re-use this somewhere else unrelated to the original application.
Yes, but attribution should still be given. Just because you don't copy-paste someone else's creation doesn't mean you're licensed to use it.
Is it the role of the tool (in this case copilot) to include the license information? Or is it the responsibility of the organization using the code to make sure that it wasn't copied from somewhere?
What if, instead of a tool, you had a random consultant do some work, and it was found out that he asked a ton of stuff on Stack Overflow and copied the CC-BY-SA 4.0 answers into his work? What if it was then found out that one of those answers was based on copying something from the Linux kernel? Who is responsible for doing the license check on the code before releasing the product?
> Or is it the responsibility of the organization using the code to make sure that it wasn't copied from somewhere?
Do you know whether the code you got from Copilot has an incompatible license? No, so if you plan to use Copilot for serious projects you need it to include sources/licenses either way. In fact that would be a very helpful feature as it would let you filter licenses.
Licenses be damned, copyright law sits above it -- and for now, it's hard to see how this isn't fair use. The only case might be an open source Copilot alternative and GitHub and OpenAI can take any such projects out of the training set.
Perhaps the lawsuit contends that Copilot isn't in fact learning how to code, but is rather regurgitating information it has managed to glean and statistically categorize, without any real understanding as to what it was doing?
So why MS can screw only with some licenses that you call "open source".
Your example with a human reading a book would also work with code available licenses or decompiled binaries.
I would have been fine if the open source code was used to create an open model or if MS would have put his ass on the line and also train the model with all the GitHub code because they claim there is no copyright issue.
The problem is that copyright laws were introduced for a reason, and with a thinking similar to yours we might decide to get rid of copyright altogether, which I think is a bad idea.
If organisations are going to ignore the licenses attached to my OOS and that's legimitised in the law, then that's a surefire way to irreparably damage the open source ecosystem
Was following CNN on Twitter in 2008, out of an old habit mostly. Then it was only breaking news feed, and they were posting mostly relevant things. One day they posted something about Britney Spears there and then again. Stopped either watching or following CNN from that point on. Lots of good news sites were still at that time like BBC (which took the same path as CNN in later years) and still follow Reuters and Al Jazeera.
Really hope CNN one day will become a news source, like CNN International that is a joy to watch when traveling outside of the USA and Canada (at least it was the last time I watched a few years ago). Will follow CNN once Harry and Meghan or some pop stars will not appear in the headlines for at least a year.
I thank Go team, that the major version was not increased. You can't imagine how much wider adoption of generics will be as compared if Go went to version 2.0 There are thousands of under-educated and overly-cautious software development managers who would prevent their teams from upgrading to a major version of Go until it is "proven".
When it comes to developers there are two types who read changelogs and would know their tool well and take advantage of every small change in each minor version and then there are those who are there for the money, they will find out about a new feature only if manager instructs them to use it.
> There are thousands of under-educated and overly-cautious software development managers who would prevent their teams from upgrading to a major version of Go until it is "proven".
If semantic versioning is used correctly, like here, that's actually a reasonable-ish attitude.
Also, promoting 10-20 minute videos with 2-5 minutes of content is also wasteful. Most videos are extended to 10-20 minutes just to be recommended by YouTube.
Finally, videos with AI voice, which I hope can be easily detected, need to have a label clearly visible and I want to have preferences to hide those completely.