Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.

I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).

All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.

Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.

I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.

Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.

My biggest gripe with windows is it will steal your cursor focus from password prompts. And when it surfaces a password prompt, it does not focus it automatically.

I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.

Hilarious. But bad UX.

A backup without a restore test isn't a backup at all

You don't always have a copy of your hardware to restore onto. And the test's entire purpose is that you're not yet sure whether your restore will truly work. So you can't just run a backup and restore on your true prod system, because you're not sure it won't wreck it. So you need extra money to have a second system onto which you try to restore. If you don't have a lot of money, you will want to actually use your disks for storage, not to put them into a second testing server. Of course I'm not talking about very professional companies with super critical data. Just simpler smaller scale places or consumers.

No, even professional companies with critical data balk at this.

I worked at a company worth a few billion and the leadership balked when they told engineering they wanted a near instantaneous failover system and our department informed them that would require paying for a second environment that could be rolled over to.

It is rare to find leaders who can accept the cost of redundant infrastructure that is there for emergency backup.

What puzzles me is why they can’t accept it when they are perfectly fine with insurance costs and I can’t see much of a difference between the two when looking at a spreadsheet of costs other than possibly tax differences between the type of expenditure.

Sure, that's another category and different considerations. I've worked at an academic lab with a limited budget where we set up file servers, but couldn't afford to do anything approximating 3-2-1. We did a nightly backup of a tiny part (most important) of the data onto another server in a different building, but like 90% of the data was just YOLO (well, RAID, but that's not a backup), and that's just how it is. Disks are pretty good though, they don't die often nowadays, and when people accidentally deleted their data, it was just gone. Would have been cool to have a backup of everything, but even just pulling out a nightly backup from a dense server with dozens of terabytes isn't simple and you don't want to slow down the server by constantly reading just for constructing the backups. It's a tradeoff.

Redundancy has costs and those costs can be spent elsewhere like having higher quality or bigger disks, or a faster network switch or better CPUs etc.

In theory, it would also be better to own two cars instead of one, because what if the first one gets in an accident or just breaks down. Yet, not everyone can afford that. Should you just buy two half-as-expensive cars than what you can buy one of, so you can say you have a "backup"? Likely the two half-price ones would be so much crappier that the one good car would cause you less trouble in expectation than driving a shitty one and then having another shitty spare one, both of which will constantly have issues.

Resilvering operations with large capacity data drives take a ridiculously long time to complete. A double disk failure in a volume can result in a loss of the LUN. Populating a volume with drives from the same supplier with matching batch numbers can result in correlated failures not independent from each other. You have to ask yourself - do you feel lucky?

Of course. At a certain point, it's just physics. There is only going to be so much you can get out of such a tiny sensor and lens. Software can only do so much without turning it into an AI photo.

Even just carrying around a small Micro 4/3 camera gets you 3x the sensor surface area of a smartphone. An APS-C Fujifilm like an x100V gets you 5.2x the sensor surface and is still mostly "pocketable" (in a bag).

What the iPhone has effectively replaced though are the old point and shoot digicams, which now have smaller sensors than the iPhone.

One of the things which for me is always going to be important is: "The best camera is the one you always have with you"

In recent times I have travelled some insanely hot places. And every extra thing that you carry with you feels like such a burden. But the phone you always have with you.

I'd suspect the average person won't notice much difference (on the main lens) until about iPhone 11 or older, with still photos. Computational image processing does a TON of heavy lifting with these tiny sensors.

With video OTOH, the improvements are much more noticeable. I also suspect that is why Apple focuses so much on video as its a harder problem to solve and so much easier to differentiate your hardware from competitors.

> only photographers care about that, to most people it's just pictures

This is largely true, when it comes to photos of other people/people they care about.

I'm a wedding & family photographer part time, and at nearly every wedding I shoot, the photos the clients and their guests favorite the most from the galleries are usually the quick candid snaps where the subject has an expression they like or are doing something fun. It could be a blurry, grainy, dark mess of a photo and it will consistently be their favorite photo of the day.

For most non-photographers, the subject of the photo is what matters and is all they will notice. Almost no one is making a distinction between bokeh shape, or noise (unless its so obvious as to completely ruin the photo), composition, etc.

All that to say, photo quality is only one very small part of the equation.

> I prefer physical books at home, but if I'm out and about travelling I always take my kindle.

Same. I prefer hardcovers, I usually look for first editions, etc. I'd prefer not to lug them around so I also have a kindle for if I want to read away from home. I usually borrow the ebooks from my library though when the ones I want are available so I'm not buying twice.

I don't think I could ever get rid of physical books entirely though. There's a somatic element to reading that I appreciate that you lose entirely with an ereader.

I suspect even some of the more "advanced" queries they demoed off, i.e., "what was that restaurant John and I talked about last week?" also not require LLMs whatsoever and could have been accomplished with a simple search.

I think you're going to need some kind of ML to turn that question into a structured search, and interpret the results.

Not necessarily. NLP is possible to do without any ML. See ELIZA [0] as an example, which used pattern matching and substitution to process natural language. A few simple rules can cover a majority of requests. It's still AI, but not ML.

Though I do agree that the ML-based NLP thst we have today is much more usable, albeit more compute-expensive.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Small claims is great in that in most states lawyers generally aren't allowed so right out the gate you remove the wealth asymmetry issue. The downside is the dollar amount is very small. I'd like to see small claims limits expanded tbh.

Adjust them to the past X0 years of inflation from whenever the limits were last set, and peg them to inflation from then out.

And Businesses will buy, because the AI promise is a promise to automate workers away.