Comment by golly_ned

> The calendar thing is working correctly.

Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.

In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default.

There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.

Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be possible to set the time zone explicitly.

I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.

Mandatorily attaching a time zone to an event is the design defect. When a person in the real world is given the times of events, he is given those in the time local to where the event is happening. And when that person gets there, his phone will acquire that local time.

So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.

The butterfly keyboard is undoubtedly the biggest fail in hardware design of the past 10 years. They took something that we figured out in the 1970s and somehow managed to screw it up and held onto it for three consecutive generations.

You’re only as good as your last product, and Johnny Ive under the hand of Steve Jobs is a lot different than Johnny Ive under the hand of Tim Apple.

The context for this thread is about keeping persons on even when they are either no longer adding value, or even potentially detracting. In Ive's case, he absolutely created many successful aspects of Apples design language. But, he also put an over emphasis on minimalist design over function. The butterfly keyboards are one example. Was the removal of the ESC key something that happened on his design watch? The reduction of ports on their highest end pro models? Those are design decisions that have been undone as Apple realigns with the actual needs of its users rather than trying to dictate how they should use their hardware.

His designs were fine when reined in by Jobs. Now they take simplicity too far to the extreme.

Yep.

> For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.

Presumably plenty of people were employed in that timeframe.

Yeah I knew throwing Ive in there invites a skeptical response, but I really detest that guy's product-degrading mania and attitude.

And while the company obviously still thrived, Ive's intellectually bankrupt (and defective) design got bad enough to embarrass Apple even in the mainstream press. I thought this WSJ article was a brilliant dig: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...

Thanks for the link, but I don't think that fixes the problem. If anything, it looks like it'll make it worse. If I'm traveling from CA to NY and I enter a bunch of meetings and flight, and then get to NY and enter some additional ones... they're going to be wrong.

Thanks for the anecdote. I think a lot of us have been there, promoted into roles we're not quite ready for. The responsible ones kick into high gear to meet the challenge. I remember cramming a new programming language and framework when faced with a potential high-profile (public) failure for a new employer.

But when people repeatedly demonstrate that they don't have the mindset or aptitude for the role, or important aspects of it, they need to be relieved of responsibility for those aspects. I'm griping about the individuals for whom that isn't done.

> Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI.

There's literally millions of them. The gulf is that the current technology cannot possibly do any of those things.

> Everyone is building out capabilities

They're burning billions on a method that has already started showing diminishing returns. There's no exponential growth on the horizon with the current stack.

> while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime

If you told me this was your business plan I would short everything of yours I could.

> but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.

An infrastructure that will be outdated and unjustifiably expensive in 5 years. It's like we're pretending that the history of business for all time has nothing to do with the business of AI.

Those unwilling to stare history in the face will be eaten by it.

chatgpt is undeniably the killer app for LLMs

Wonder if that's still the case today when seemingly every software company has now been laying people off en masse for the better part of three years.

That kind of story is one you'd hear about "rest and vest" in the late 2010s.

Is this confined to the AI/ML group? Or across the software org at large?

I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths.

Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead.

Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.

My primary complaint is the aggression to turn it on. You don’t get an option of “No” any more just “Not Now” which is openly user hostile as it implies I can’t make my own choices, I can only delay the inevitable. They’ve been doing that for a while now and each time it pushes me a little closer to leaving the ecosystem.

Then there’s the fact that I hate photos, mail, and the rest of it - which they turn on by default and then you have to disable. The fact that Apple Music works fine in my car but for some reason all other music apps are buggy.

Apple News won’t let me block news sources, anything I try to block stays in my feed just greyed out. Like, I’m not allowed to keep BuzzFeed out of my feed? Wtf.

Then there’s the sick charade of their “privacy” claims, which I won’t even get into, but it’s laughable.

They went from being the most user-focused company to nakedly extracting rent from a captive audience. I no longer feel I own my Apple devices, they own me, and I’m sick of it.

> Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.

Everything is permitted if someone gets fabulously rich in the end. Got it.

Yep and this is why many modern organizations are going to shit. Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but also very often punished. You need to have a lot of power to get away with it. In my opinion all of this comes from submitting from the feminine way of working. Most women get shit done from men just by asking nicely (even when it's not really in their interest). Then they wrongly assumed that is how everything should work and pushed the "asking nicely" way of working everywhere.

Here is some anecdote. In in youth, I learned/played the french horn. Most of my teachers where nice feminine men, I was making progress but very slowly. But one year I got a guy that was out of the army music, he didn't take bullshit and forced me to work in a way the others never did. This year my progress was orders of magnitude better than any other year. At the time I thought he was a bit of an asshole, but now I know that if I had to choose, I would rather have someone like him. I quit french horn 3 years after, there were many reasons but not having a strong inspiring teacher was one of them for sure.