My comment on the other thread meanwhile wasn't nice at all, but it was also misdirected, and meant to refer to Hacker News rather than your own site.
(I like the style, too. It's good to see Helvetica get a deserved reevaluation, now that the millennial generation is aging out of even being able to imagine we are cool. Or ever were.)
My own profile on this website may help elucidate my perspective on the matter. I'm both shadowbanned and have applied a hundred-year "noprocrast" countdown, and it's frankly embarrassing how little that actually does to get the website not to accept those few contributions I still care to make.
It is as if the folks who run this place were getting a little desperate! - both for the "crowdsourced" unpaid work that goes into making this website worthy of interest, and for the last dwindling taste of what was once termed the "hacker spirit" by fringey weirdo ideologues like Stallman and Barlow.
(The idea that HTTP GET requests must be idempotent for safety, for example, has totally passed by this site's implementors and maintainers, or maybe never made a dent. Hence the subject of this very thread!)
In any case I regret the misplaced comment, and apologize for the dismay it likely caused. This website is embarrassing, and has just about run its course. Yours is not embarrassing at all, and I hope you're just getting started!
True, but it's rude to call that out, not to mention rather more arrogant than wise. These are trepidatory times, and like many, his job is not at all secure. In his shoes I'd be frightened too, and he displays reasonable grace in spite of it; I have done less well at times.
Honesty requires I note that I had badly mischaracterized my man, far more in his favor than anything of which he has proven deserving.
On that note please excuse my use of a shared account, as I finish wrapping up my affairs on this benighted website; Mr. Gackle has proven after all very inclined to behave in a precipitous and spiteful manner, and not nearly so evenhanded as I had previously seen cause to confide.
Assuming this comment survives to be read, I would counsel those continuing to use this website to conduct themselves accordingly and with all due care. Not my kind of problem any more, thank God: I work in a grocery store these days. Imagine that! It's like a gym membership that pays me.
Until now Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades. That's one human generation, and it is also the span of time between when something first hits and when it sees its first retro revival. That isn't a coincidence.
I'm starting to get a little excited! This is going to be quite a decade.
> What a wild take. I guess that explains the massive and growing popularity of iOS over that same time period.
Wild take, indeed.
I seem to recall something about Apple releasing a sub-$600 laptop so popular that weeks after it was announced it's backordered for more than 30 days.
> Until now Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades.
Going back to 2008:
> But the most fun on the conference call came when he parried analysts’ questions about new product areas that Apple might or might not enter. A recurring question among Apple watchers for decades has been, “When is Apple going to introduce a low-cost computer?
> Mr. Jobs answered that decades-old complaint by stating, “We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.” He argued instead that the company’s mission was to add more value for customers at current price points.
There is more to it than just accounting for inflation. Apple has done a number of other things in the meantime, including designing and manufacturing their own chips, that have changed the economies of this. Until the very recent RAM price explosion, a sub $500 computer in 2008 was probably more like a sub $350 computer today.
Inflation goes up - someone who could buy a $500 computer in 2008 should be able to buy a $766 or so computer today (cite: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com)
But today, if you can finagle the EDU discount, you can get a MacBook Neo for $499 ($600 without) which apparently isn't really compromised in any major way.
> Inflation goes up - someone who could buy a $500 computer in 2008 should be able to buy a $766 or so computer today
It should also be noted that technological advances tend to be deflationary in general: regardless of real or nominal dollars, the chips/storage/etc you can buy today were sometimes not even available in the past at any price.
True, a high-end 386 would have cost upwards of $10k when it first came out, but a MacBook Neo probably beats the pants off a supercomputer from the same era.
Yes, I'm aware how inflation works, you missed my point.
Many technology things have effectively gotten cheaper over time, when you account for overall performance/specs/capabilities/etc.
The "we don't know how to make a $500 computer that doesn't suck" statement of today would be more like "we don't know how to make a $350 computer that doesn't suck".
People want another "iphone"-level impact. I would bet there never will be. A device that does everything that we carry with us will also be like an evolution of the smart phone.
The only possibility I can imagine is a home robot that takes off.
The iPhone was basically the apotheosis of the Internet. I don’t think we will ever see another consumer product able to have an impact like that unless there is some other kind of “substructure” technology with a vast amount of untapped potential lying around.
Even other transformational technological advancements, like home robotics, I don’t think will be encompassed by a single device the way smartphones could. Home robots will be scattered across a bunch of different robotic devices doing independent activities. You’ll have purpose-built laundry robots, vacuum robots, cooking robots, driving robots, etc. but not a single company doing a single thing.
If I could do it all over again I would jump at the chance to live in that $5000 roach pit instead of wasting my life in the middle of bumfuckstan. It is one of my biggest regrets in life. Its insane how such a tiny fraction of land produces so much of the culture the world consumes.
"HR" does not set your professional obligations. If you need to be drunk to talk this honestly, you are not a "senior" nor a mentor, but an incipient alcoholic and a coward.
Then again, this person is obviously also lying to claim the engineer title - sit down, "data science!" You're only even here because Product prefers being lied to - so that really sets an ironically honest baseline on how seriously anyone should be taking any of this farrago.
