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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Seeing the recent headlines of large layoffs at tech companies, sometimes accompanied by snide comments that nothing of value was lost due to bloat at fat and efficient firms that enable quiet quitting, I thought about just how much innovation actually takes place in corporations that employ large numbers of knowledge workers.

It's hard to say. Twitter got rid of half its staff , yet nothing seems different in regard to the user experience. I think it's a situation in which 10% of staff produce 80% of the value. The goal of public companies is foremost to generate profits for shareholders. Innovation is secondary.

So maybe the Motte has fun ideas for how at least some sectors can deliver much faster innovation than today by being incentivized to do so by moving from continuous service to discrete product cycles.

Isn't this what apple does with its product launches. Same for Tesla. The changes seem continuous year over year, but the latest iPhone is vastly superior to the original 2007 phone. It makes sense to not change things too dramatically in the short-term, or else consumers may balk. It's too risky. For example, Microsoft in 2012 dramatically changed the interface with Windows 8, which consumers hated. Windows 10 restored some of the older interface.

Does anyone here actually get extra tangible uses out of the new iphone versions?

I have owned the 4, 5, 6, 8, and currently 11. Upon recent reflection, I that all the iPhones past the 5 have added nothing of meaningful value in terms of new features only minor quality of life updates like a better battery and camera, but nothing that has actively changed how I use the product. For this reason I won't be buying any of the newer versions of the iPhone.

So I'm curious if anyone here has an experience where there WAS a new feature added (past the iPhone 5) that has actively changed how they use their iPhone in some tangible way.

that has actively changed how they use their iPhone in some tangible way.

The LIDAR scanner is niche but sufficiently transformative (the FaceID camera can be used in this way as well due to the way its hardware works- and yeah, it actually does require special hardware for the required depth mapping). I'll likely be upgrading to a model that has it, because sometimes I want to 3D print things I find difficult to measure directly (curved internal surfaces are a real bitch to get right the first time).

Of course, that generally requires third-party applications to create and export the mesh as opposed to a first-party "we designed the phone to do this" philosophy Apple has always had, so I'm not entirely sure that counts. And it's not something I do every day, either.

For this reason I won't be buying any of the newer versions of the iPhone.

The same conditions are true for most Android devices; the iPhone just has far more useful lifespan per dollar especially once you're in the sub-500 price range (I legitimately don't understand the point of buying a new phone before the hardware physically dies or the software is too old to run anything, but I'm probably in the minority here).

There is one exception to this, however, and that's the folding-screen phones: they're ludicrously expensive, but being able to have 2 apps open at the same time is a really big deal just like it was for PCs back in the 1980s.

I think Google is wise to go all-in on this tech, even though it's going to take a while to trickle down into the 400-dollar phone market, because this really does bridge the usefulness gap between phone and tablet, and it's easier to stomach replacing a 200-dollar phone every 2 years than it is a 1000-dollar phone because the screen physically can't hold up to being bent that many times.

It's also not something Apple is going to be able to match for a long time if ever; multi-tasking has always been an afterthought for them.

The Face ID thing is kind of nice. But yeah; marginal improvements. Nothing transformative.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't Face ID completely a software change. So theoretically couldn't apple have put that same software on the iPhone 5? Or would the specs of the iPhone 5 not cut it to run whatever ML model they are running?

Windows is an example of a product that is worse in all the visible ways now, but has substantially improved in the invisible security area.

And, in my experience, in terms of system stability. I can't remember my last blue screen of death experience, which was very commonplace even 20 years ago.

If you're saying that Windows XP was likely to BSOD, I'd disagree. XP was the first consumer version of Windows that wasn't based on DOS (NT was for businesses) and that made it a lot more stable.

I'd also add that Windows "security improvements" are often things that people with computer knowledge told them to do 20 years ago and they just didn't do it for a while.

I might be mixing up XP and 98/ME. It's been a while.

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