I don’t see how a glass screen, no matter how amazing it feels, would be better than a keyboard. Of course, any judgement I pass is far too premature and a tad unfair since it’s just a patent and I haven’t tried out the product that uses the patent.
I do think that Apple is seemingly out of ideas. I’d be happy to buy a MacBook if they fixed the problems since 2016.
>I don’t see how a glass screen, no matter how amazing it feels, would be better than a keyboard.
2007 called, it wants its arguments back -- for those were the same arguments made in favor of Blackberry and other crappy experiences compared to today's touch smartphones.
Except modern BlackBerrys provide a far more enjoyable and accurate experience than typing on glass. It's not necessarily faster, but nicer. And you even get gesture support for stuff like adding suggestions and moving the cursors around. Modern BlackBerrys run Android.
I've never understood this attitude toward BlackBerry. Not that I really care, but you'd think more people would rather have more choice, than less.
It's true that BlackBerry the company was unsuccessful at selling phones since its heyday many years ago, but they're not in that business anymore, and haven't been for years. These days, they license the BlackBerry brand and patents to companies like TCL, who've been relatively successful with phones like the KeyOne and Key2. Just because BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?) form an almost insignificant share of Android devices doesn't mean they're not good.
A glass screen on a laptop is worlds different than on a pocket sized device, where the tiny keys were arguably something to improve.
If I can already type 90 words a minute, what problem does the glass solve? I have a glass screen on my iPad, and I never type on the screen keyboard for serious work.
I’ll give Apple the benefit of the doubt and wait to see this in the final product, but your comparison to 2007 is grossly inaccurate.
Apple has yet to put out a device in the post Jobs era that made me feel like I have to have this thing in my life.
The 2015 MacBook Pro was the last piece of great hardware from Apple, in terms of their laptops. The newer MacBooks with their gimmicky touchbar and useless keyboards, for the sake of being thin, just show Tim Cook and his advisors have no ideas other than taking advantage of Facebooks privacy disasters and trying to get consumers to keep buying Apple products because Apple is supposedly on a higher moral pedestal.
2015 MBP was great, but I also immensely enjoyed my 2013 MacBook Air. The Air's battery life, form factor and performance made it hands down the best laptop for its time.
I'm actually in the process of wiping it to give to a friend and feeling a bit of sadness. I use a 2017 MBP now - the screen is what finally got me - but you're right, todays hardware just doesn't compare to how it felt back then.
I consider myself lucky that the store still had a few 2015 MBP left in stock when I went to buy mine. Definitely much better than that stupid touchbar stuff, and the fault keyboard.
Not knowing anything about this other than what’s in the article, I’m a bit skeptical of how big of an issue there really is inside google and how much of this is just the media blowing something they heard out of proportion. Would love to hear someone who works there share their thoughts.
Source: I’m a senior engineer at another large tech company that’s had media articles posted about employee/management disagreements that were blown up several orders of magnitude.
Cost cutting at Google is definitely a real thing and people who’ve been there have been feeling the downward slope for a while now (on a relative basis to Google itself in the past, and doesn’t say much about Google relative to the market), so it’s natural that some people are unhappier and some have left and will leave for various reasons including compensation. However, what’s media reporting here is the result of annual employee survey and the answer to a question along the lines of I’m happy with my comp at Google, which may or may not be a reliable predictor for actual attrition due to comp.
That said it’s amazing that the CEO pay at Google LLC is so high. He’s paid higher than say, Tim Cook, who runs a real public company with significant operations that need to run on time that require management and operation skills, not merely a LLC subsidiary whose operations are nowhere close to Apple. It’s not clear that the company gets enough bang for the buck.
Google is the jewel in the crown for Alphabet, the only real source of profit in the whole operation. Whether that justifies his salary is another issue.
Bullshit. Who's been on the investor calls for the last few years? Sundar. It's not just that - Sundar is the public face of Alphabet (as it should be when Google revenues are 99.5% of Alphabet revenues).
Did they really plan it? I feel like no one expected Amazon to grow as much as they did. And the domino effect was everyone else started coming into the area because tech talent was here already (or across the lake in Bellevue and Redmond). I’m not a Seattle native so do correct me if that’s wrong.
the tunnel was always sort of dumb, but seattle had a really reasonable traffic growth plan for its expected growth. the actual growth has been way higher than the plan.
If everything interesting had moved out, people wouldn’t be moving in and rents would fizzle out. I think you meant to say things you f8nd interesting have moved out.
What I understood from your post is you don’t want an area full of product managers, data scientists, and software people, but you’re very content in an area that replaces them with Jewish people?
I think everything you said is entirely subjective. I would personally rather be surrounded by techies than people of a particular race or religion, as long as these people come from different genders, races, ethnicities, or beliefs. To me, that’s much better than being near a large Jewish population or Arab population or white population or people of ${preferred_religion} here.
"I wanted to be near a Jewish population because that is important to me."
I didn't know that Jewish people are only Jewish people and not Jewish product managers or jewish musicians, for example.
Well, if the data is accurate about Silicon Valley. The techies you surround yourself with don't com from many different races, religions, ethnicities, genders, beliefs, etc. Your whole talk about full diversity is just talk. The Bay Area, and especially tech, is not a diverse place or a particularly enlightened place.
You saw me mention a word (Jewish) and you honed in on it. Additionally, you don't understand that a Jewish population is more than a religious population.
IMO the Bay Area is far more diverse than many parts of the country with people from different Asian countries. It’s subjective. You don’t see it as diverse but having grew up in the Midwest, the culture and people of various ethnicities and lifestyles are far more diverse.
I didn’t say Jewish population is only a religious population. You’re arguing a straw man.
My point was I’m personally happy with the diversity in the Bay Area, which from reading your post, wasn’t good enough for you because you want a Jewish population.
Which studies back up your claims about SF being so horrible that people have to move to Israel? Wow.
Again, my point still stands that your view of the Bay Area not meeting some bar of diversity and particular culture, is subjective to you.
I disagree. What is “line” you referred to and who gets to define it?
No one forced you to use Facebook. Look, I don’t use FB, and I don’t particular respect Mark or Sheryl, but the daily barrage of anti tech posts crapping on FB, Apple, or Amazon are turning this place into armchairs experts and politicians all pretending to be on some moral high ground when their own employers are likely just as greed driven.
We need comprehensive regulation IMO. What that should look like, I’m not qualified to say. Regardless, it’s sad to see hacker news morph into Reddit.
I don't use Facebook either and yet they still collect data on me. Its the same issue that happened with Experian leaking data on people who never did business with Experian.
I'd be comfortable calling that a line that got crossed
I wouldn’t. That line doesn’t exist, at least in the laws of the legal system. It might cross your own moral boundary, but that’s intrinsic to you and subjective at best.
I’m not defending them as a company. I do think the rest of the media is just as horrible and would seize a similar opportunity if given the chance.
>>I wouldn’t. That line doesn’t exist, at least in the laws of the legal system.
Who cares? It is well known that the legal system trails technology by at least a decade. Therefore, it should be clear that we are discussing a line of an ethical nature, not a legal one.
Well said, we have to get past this "well you have a choice" nonsense. Data is too easily acquired and cross-referenced for that to be remotely true anymore.
Experian's entire business model is built around collecting data about people who have never interacted directly with Experian. In fact, our entire system of credit would break down unless there were ways for lenders to know the credit-worthiness of their borrowers. Now, very good arguments can be made that credit rating has an inherent conflict of interest if privatized. But that's another conversation. In this one, we seem to continually fail to distinguish between 'information about you' and 'private information.' There is clearly a distinction. Figuring out exactly what that distinction is almost certainly a regulatory problem.
People report their personal wealth and income to the local tax authority every year, presumably that tells you something about a person's financial credibility.
It's down to the unfortunate reality that people aren't the actual customers of Facebook or Experian, their actual customers are advertisers and lenders (principally there's a few other people but basically anyone who's asked you for permission for a credit report). Under that lens it makes perfect sense that both would have information about everyone because it makes them more valuable.
It's easier to see with Experian because people pretty much never actually use their credit report actively but rather monitor it to know what the actual users will see about them. It's a metric about you rather than a metric for you. Same basic schema applies to the advertiser profile Facebook builds. They've just built a facade to get you to give them a lot of info willingly (in the case of users).
> It's down to the unfortunate reality that people aren't the actual customers of Facebook or Experian, their actual customers are advertisers and lenders
These are kind of opposite cases, aren't they?
With Facebook, their actual customers are people who want to have a relationship with you.
With Experian, their actual customers are people who you want to have a relationship with.
Lenders also want to have a relationship with you too. They want to make all the loans they can as long as they're good loans. Either way it doesn't change the dynamic that much for the average person they're the product, or I suppose more accurately information about them is the product and the companies are the customer.
I agree. I also think that we need a lot more regulations, because the problem isn't only Facebook, there are so many companies that hold/collect/sell our information, and that's the bigger problem in my opinion, Facebook is just the biggest one so we hear about it the most.
Just because you don't use Facebook doesn't mean that some other company isn't doing the same thing with your data, you just probably haven't heard of it.
Not sure what these articles are trying to get at. Honestly we have some article against Facebook, Apple, and Amazon just about every day from some news outlet claiming the company is so horrible or terrible. I’m inclined to think this fake social justice focus is driven by big tech eating the media’s ad revenues.
Few of them are undocumented. There’s plenty of documentation on them - in schools, emergency rooms, police reports. As you well know, your term “undocumented” is designed to trivialize the border and deprecate the very concept of American citizenship.
At a minimum, refer to them as unauthorized immigrants, since that is the distinguishing factor from a public policy perspective.
> Labeling people as illegals is merely meant to dehumanize them.
No more than labelling those who commit crimes as criminals.
Subjects of foreign states — i.e. aliens — who are present illegally are illegal aliens. That's what they are (in addition, of course, to being human beings, with parents and rights and hopes and dreams and all the rest).
Labelling them 'undocumented immigrants' is a bit too cute, since many of them do retain the identifying documentation issued by their states. It's also begging the question of whether they should be immigrating at all.
For myself, I philosophically tend towards completely open borders, but I do wonder about the practical implications, and I dislike the blatant dishonesty & appeals to emotion common on both sides of the issue.
No it's not. They are humans who are breaking the law and who shouldn't be in the US. Nobody is saying they are not humans. Just that they don't get to stay in the US without following the process.
This is a political talking point to scare poor and uneducated white people. It’s why we are willing to penalize folks who were brought to this country as children and use this future for political gains.
"Undocumented resident" is an even worse euphemism - it's not like these are people who simply lost their papers, or people who were entitled to those papers and just forgot them.
These are people who are inside the US in violation of immigration law.
I don’t think it’s a worse euphemism. The people who I see angry about “illegals” are the same ones who think blacks are all criminals and it would be great if we could to to the good old days when blacks were segregated, women didn’t have the right to vote, and white men ruled supreme.
If your visa expires, wouldn't that mean that you're here without valid documentation, ie, undocumented? You were formerly documented, and you have been undocumented.
I do think that Apple is seemingly out of ideas. I’d be happy to buy a MacBook if they fixed the problems since 2016.