> B) how much money there is to be made having people wear them.
Meta have been desperately searching for “the next big walled garden” for like a decade.
The prize is clear: whatever the next big mass-consumer hardware device is with an app store attached will leech hundreds of billions in fees and enjoy absolute control over everyone building on it.
It's been a very frustrating year, I made the mistake of upgrading Pop OS 22.04 that I'd been using for years that was a rough couple of weeks!
Toshy still works to give me Mac keyboard shortcuts I might never let go of, but I still haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between open instances of the same program which drives me insane!
> Even ignoring bugs and design changes, in which way does it serve users to phase out Rosetta 2, which in a container-heavy world is more or less required for developers due to the ecosystem of ARM64 Linux containers being nowhere near as widespread as for AMD x86-64 ones, and which keeps many applications runnable that otherwise wouldn't be?
This is what tells me I'm completely misaligned with Apple's vision of the future.
Why would I want an OS that aspires to prevent me from running perfectly good software that runs very well??? And at a time when even smartphones are starting to run x86 software well!
That's literally the opposite of what I want from a computer. If I have to choose between losing Mac software vs losing x86 software it is much easier to leave Mac software behind.
"Preventing users from running the software they want to run" seems like such an anti-feature, yet every major system seems to be moving quickly in this direction. I feel like general purpose computing is going to be on life support, soon.
Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software, which is arguably what is important about the hardware.
PPC software is gone, 32 bit apps are gone, x86 apps are next, virtualizing or emulating platforms on iOS devices seems to be eternally damned, and what that looks like on Mac after Rosetta 2's quasi-retirement could only be inferior.
In an alternative universe you could connect an eGPU to a Mac or iPad and simply enjoy being the best platform for practically all software that ever existed. Run anything but the most intensive games directly on an AVP or iPad or MacBook Air or even an iPhone.
> Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software.
Apple delivered EFI 32 bit(ppc, 32) firmware updates to their 64 bit mac pro range, make booting/installing alternative operating systems much more difficult only shortly after the new intel range came out.
I had a few of these running Linux at the time and made the mistake of booting one into OSX to see if an update would fix an networking corner case, not an easy roll back.
You may wish to prefix your statement with "apple software".
As I recall, the PPC machines (like the Power Mac G5) never had EFI of any kind, and the early Intel Macs (including the Mac Pro) all had 32-but EFI even after the processors went 64-bit. I don't recall any of those Macs ever being switched from 32-bit EFI to 64-bit (U)EFI with a firmware update, or vice versa. It was a bit of a pain point because Linux was not initially ready to run a 64-bit kernel on top of 32-bit EFI, but that got resolved on the Linux side and I don't recall anything about Apple's firmware updates making that harder.
I must be mixing up my details, but I did think it was one of the first gen cheese graters.
I did have it booting Linux before upstream officially supported it. I remember using patches from infradead
You may very well be correct, Maybe it wasn't EFI, however they absolutely did ship an update that broke my existing installs, until upstream linux shipped an update, so your memory aligns more than mine does.
Competition is absolutely going to crush the concept of mooching off a simple app costing $6/week or $10/month, but it doesn't matter where that competition comes from the problem is a guitar tuner shouldn't cost $100/year, it was always artificially successful derived from preventing users any other way to get apps. If AI doesn't kill this it will be 3rd party marketplaces or open source app distribution that does it.
I' not sure for the reason that for every one of the successful subscription apps there were dozens of free or nearly free competitors. The app stores have been awash with wannabe clones from the start.
Yeah but virtually all customer acquisition comes from either being featured or paying for ads both of which favour subscription apps over free/nearly-free.
There was a browser-streaming app that would play them remotely, can't remember what it was called.
There was an official plugin by Adobe on Android but it was awful, I remember watching them showcase it at a conference it was tragic even with their handpicked and simple example.
Then there was a transpiler that produced native apps from Flash, this was actually pretty good but Apple then banned transpiling which killed its viability entirely, six months later they un-banned transpiling but the damage was done.
But on the plus side, Apple got to monopolize transaction fees in Flash games like Farmville for nearly two decades!
I think testing via browser automation is fantastic, API-driven web browsers are just amazing tools, but it's also the source of a lot of the flakiness because of the inherent difficulties determining when a page is completely in a state that it can do what you're expecting of it. Playwright improves a lot on this over Puppeteer but it's imperfect, I often end up with a wait for a selector, load state, or function evaluating when it's actually okay to proceed and sometimes I'll use a combination to really make sure, because what it's really waiting for is not just achieving some state but what actually happens after it does.
Yes, exactly how most of experience here goes. Each test ends up becoming sort of a custom implementation to handle specific use cases around interactivity and availability.
Do you feel yourself wanting to extract this logic (wait for a selector, load state, or function evaluating etc) to some shared utility and then just pushing all of your interactions through this as a sort of feedback engine for future problems?
> to some shared utility and then just pushing all of your interactions through this
Yeah that's basically what Playwright is doing under the hood, your click is more like "wait for the element to exist and then click". Back in my puppeteer days I'd usually have my own click/etc functions wrapping everything in a try/catch and retrying.
It's very hard to balance because ultimately the solution is basically always waiting <arbitrary ms> after any interaction and that itself is dependent on how busy the CPU is which varies between local vs CI, and you blow up your running time by setting like "slowMo" to 100ms for example.
A desktop version wouldn't have a "kill switch" that online services intrinsically have, but the ability to become deprived of security patches is effectively the same thing.
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