Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days – part 2 (gautiersblog.blogspot.com)

In one sense this is logical. A HomePod with a screen and an iOS variant. On the other hand, what is this for? What uses do these smart home devices serve? We are a decade plus into the “smart home” era and most of these things are more trouble than they are worth.

bryanrasmussen · 1h ago

Apple has on a few occasions in the past come in after people have spent a lot of time and energy developing things and making a small market, figuring out how it should actually work, making a nice version 1.0 of how it should actually work, making that market explode 100-fold and taking all the money.

That smart homes are more trouble than they are worth currently sounds to me like ripe territory for Apple to poach.

However not sure if without Jobs and Ive if they can actually do anything like what they used to.

paulryanrogers · 58m ago

Was Johnny Ive really a driver of innovation? Or just trading repairabily for vanity metrics?

DrBenCarson · 11m ago

You tell me, was the iPhone innovative?

nytesky · 10m ago

We do so much on phones now and sometimes it’s easier on a big display.

This sounds like it would be a quick home hub to add stuff to the calendar, check that email about soccer game carpool, buy plane tickets or pay a bill you got in the mail.

Like this but way more functions.

https://www.costco.com/skylight-15%22-smart-touchscreen-cale...

I personally like to not carry my phone around the house, and in kitchen having recipes displayed or an interactive reader would be great. We have a Google home but it doesn’t have a proper browser or search other than voice so it’s very kludgy. Recipes on phone are annoying because the screen timeout.

I would recommend a laser display keyboard or maybe onscreen for somewhat more sophisticated actions, but maybe an LLM will suffice

ajkjk · 28m ago

I feel like Apple has historical been good at taking things that are "good ideas but everyone is doing the execution so badly they haven't really caught on" into the "everyone uses it all the time" category (eg ipod, iphone, airpods). Certainly smart home stuff is kinda in the first category right now, like you said. Perhaps they believe they can give them the same treatment? It seems kinda plausible to me: there's no reason smart home stuff couldn't be a really good, seamless experience.

jayd16 · 26m ago

Multi-user support is possibly something deserving of a larger rewrite to iOS. It's been a pretty big assumption in all of the devices outside Macos, right?

kcplate · 4m ago

On the iPad and iOS front, I feel like the real driver of support for multiuser is families. I just can’t see it being a big desirable ask beyond families with kids because the devices form factors. If I am Apple, I am wondering if that subset market is big enough to add the feature. I love my wife and she loves me, but a single shared phone or iPad among us would create more problems than a coke bottle amid the bush people of the Kalahari.

treetalker · 31m ago

They're amazing at invading privacy!

Mistletoe · 40m ago

If I had to guess they are going to try and shoehorn AI into it to get a last gasp on the stock price going up.

codeaether · 12m ago

It's such a pity to see how much respect Apple has lost due to its lack of real technological ambition. Just a few years ago, Apple was admired for pushing boundaries—now it feels like history is repeating itself.

colechristensen · 7m ago

I think it's more there's nothing left to be done.

There have been little refinements but airliners look the same as they did in the 60s and the basics of all of it are just the same as they were 60 years ago as now.

Operating systems are the same.

slashdave · 52m ago

So, a new skin counts as "all-new"?

bnchrch · 32m ago

In the past I used to get excited for any rum or, teaser or upcoming release.

However, in this apple era I can’t.

Why? Because I can’t count on them to deliver.

The M series chips, and air pods have been a smashing success.

But the fact that Siri is still behind even pre LLM state of the art is abominable.

Apple vision was innovative. But the forward facing display, and titanium parts that bloated weight and cost was a sign of deteriorating design thinking.

Their delivery is so inconsistent lately its hard to trust the known what they’re doing with their future.

No comments yet

SG- · 52m ago

'all-new' meaning based on macOS just like iOS, watchOS, etc...

jayd16 · 24m ago

All new meaning yet another App Store target to build for and UX to support.

gnerd00 · 17m ago

AI-centric phone-like OS? .. hard pass. California gave rise to so many inspired and marvelous technology in the past, but this always-on Big Brother world built on massive pools of cash.. n-o spells no. I do not understand how people accept these consumer devices.

amelius · 1h ago

So is this about the kernel, or just the GUI layer? Or somewhere in between?

easton · 1h ago

Probably mostly the GUI and some different set of system services / APIs. I think all of the OSes are the same XNU/Darwin base and then diverge dramatically in user space.

altairprime · 17m ago

This is true to the best of our knowledge for their GUI-less OSes running on the HDMI adapter, T2 chips, and display chips as well.

vlovich123 · 1h ago

Somewhere in between. “New os” is them taking the base components of the OS and excluding some, including some new ones, changing the UX and DX, and defining how it fits into their broader ecosystem (in addition to things like adding new hardware support and whatnot).

dangus · 1h ago

> For example, he expects there to be a hexagonal grid of apps, just like on the Apple Watch.

One of the worst UI experiences out there.

veidr · 38m ago

YMMV. I also hate it (and use the simple, GenX-compatible alphabetically-ordered list) but all my kids and also my wife prefer the weird hex grid — they're just faster with it, it doesn't slow them down the way it does to my 1970s heavy-rock brain ¯\\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯

RatchetWerks · 43m ago

I'm in the minority here. I switched from list to hex. The hex allows for me to select X more apps versus scrolling down and looking for it. It was painful at first since I needed to remember what logos mapped to what app.

kamma4434 · 43m ago

Agreed. Super frustrating

ranger_danger · 1h ago

28 million watch sales may suggest that not everyone shares your opinion.

There can be other valid perspectives than your own.

aaronbrethorst · 1h ago

Apple Watch lets you switch between the unusable hexagonal grid and a list.

I’ve been an Apple Watch user for over ten years and switched from the grid to the list as soon as that was an option.

Also, thanks for introducing me to the term argumentum ad populum. I didn’t know what that was called before.

jsjohnst · 1h ago

As someone who has owned every single Apple Watch model/generation and love the hardware, I agree with GP on the terrible UX of the app grid.

jcelerier · 1h ago

Since when are sales in any way correlated to quality of the product?

ranger_danger · 36m ago

I think since forever...

https://frederik.today/blog/quality-vs-sales-affect-conversi...

https://avenuetalentpartners.com/2017/12/05/quality-always-w...

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescommunicationscouncil/...

Not saying it is a direct 1:1 correlation, but I think it's fair to say there is a correlation. And perhaps your definition of quality differs from others.

No comments yet

mkbelieve · 1h ago

I only ever use mine for the face + notifications. The UX is godawful. I'd probably buy an Apple watch that only served to relay OTPs.

dangus · 16m ago

This type of comment is so tiring. I didn’t say other people’s perspective wasn’t valid. I’m just offering mine.

By the way, by your logic $200 laptops/Chromebooks are better than MacBook Pros, since they sell so much better. McDonald’s is actually better than Michelin starred cuisine, too.

Also you’re basically locked into an Apple Watch as the only wearable that can actually do anything so it’s not really a free market of wearables on iOS.

glhaynes · 1h ago

It'll also be a very different experience on a screen many times as large.

leptons · 22m ago

They sold 28 million? That's only 0.34% of all people, so I'm not sure that's the wild success you think it is.

mathiaspoint · 1h ago

Wow Apple watch in the mac form factor. It's like they want to be known for the worst OSes possible.

calibas · 1h ago

I assume another custom version of FreeBSD.

Klonoar · 50m ago

I roll my eyes every time someone regurgitates the FreeBSD line.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_macOS_Without...

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