It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of.
They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry? Developers clearly can't wield enough influence; I say this from experience.
Nor customers. Apple's shoe-horning of "AI" shit into its products to pander to "pundits" and "analysts," shames the company that once held itself out as a rebel and disruptor.
And even Apple adherents have noted profoundly slipping quality. Absurd defects persist, and new ones arise. The "AI" BS reminds me of one of my favorite longstanding Apple blunders: If you are going on a business trip and you enter all your appointments and flight info into Calendar, you're in for a surprise (and potentially embarrassment) when Apple CHANGES THE TIMES of all of them simply because you TRAVELED to a different time zone.
There is no way to tell Calendar to simply USE THE TIME SHOWN ON THE PHONE. If you set up an appointment and then travel east, you will miss that appointment (or return flight) because Apple will change the time of that appointment to make it LATER. This is mind-boggling detachment from reality, but that's where Apple operates... and far too often gets a free pass on it. Is it any wonder that its "AI" is just as bad?
Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.
In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default.
There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.
This doesn’t look possible on the iOS/iPadOS Calendar apps.
As far as "floating," it says: "To keep the event from moving when you view a different time zone, choose Floating."
When I VIEW a different time zone? Does this also mean when I'm IN a different time zone?
Anyway... I will have to create a dummy "floating" appointment on my Mac before my next trip and see what the phone does with it when I get there. But it sure seems like this setting needs to exist on the mobile devices too...
The timezone picker in the window titlebar defaults to your system’s current timezone. When you create an event, the start and end times for that event default to the window’s current timezone.
You can use the newly-revealed picker in the inspector to change the timezone of an event. There is a single picker that alters both the start and end time. If you set this to something other than the timezone chosen in the window’s titlebar, the event will move to reflect when it will occur in the window’s timezone.
I am personally convinced this is what people want 99% of the time, and I think it’s silly that you have to check a checkbox in Calendar Settings to get it. It’s fairly common to receive details for an event in another timezone, such as a conference call or vacation. I live with Time Zone Support enabled on all my Macs, and while I rarely touch the timezone picker in the titlebar I make frequent use of the timezone picker when setting the event details window.
There’s one special option in the event details timezone picker: “Floating”. This tells Calendar to always reckon the start and end times in the timezone selected in the window’s titlebar. So if you create an event that starts at 7am and set its timezone to “Floating”, the event will always be shown to begin at 7am even if you change your system’s timezone or the timezone in the titlebar. I don’t use this feature much, but it’s useful for plotting out your daily routine. If you go for at 6am every day, regardless of where you are on the planet, you can create a floating “Daily Run” event that starts at 6am and doesn’t shift as you travel.
The iPhone version of calendar is designed differently. There is no “Time Zone Support” checkbox on iPhone. The event details view always shows time zone pickers for both the start and end times. This lets you create an event with the start and end times specified in local times in different timezones. I use this feature for every single flight I take, and I always have to enter them on my phone because the Mac doesn’t let you set the start and end timezones independently.
But the iPhone doesn’t let you choose Floating in the time zone picker, so you can’t use it to create daily-routine events. Thankfully, all versions of Calendar preserve the data and behavior of events created on any platform, so you can create your Floating events in a Mac and your timezone-spanning flights on an iPhone and they will render as expected on the other device, including the Event Details window.
As far as what people want most of the time, I would submit that way more than 99% of the time they want the appointment to start when the digits of the clock on their phone show a particular time... anywhere in the world.
And leave it to Apple to bury and obfuscate the option that supports the most-typical use case, with this "floating" setting. It also requires an extra step, every. damned. time. And of course it's asinine to omit the option from the devices on which it's arguably most important: MOBILE ones.
Final nitpick: Appointments don't show timezones when you look at them on iOS or the Mac. Even with "time zone support" turned on.
Time zone: Local
was exactly what I came up with.
The absurd thing about Apple's approach is, as you point out, that it serves the tiny minority of use cases. Who the hell looks up the time zone of everything they're going to do when they're traveling around? I just want it to use the time shown on the phone!
(No need to look up the timezone.)
I agree that calendar’s UI is a bit of a tire fire. One of Apple’s core UI design tenants is that you should be continuously surprised and delighted when you use iPhone, and then share your discoveries with friends to build up an Apple user community.
I don’t want the phone to surprise and delight me, or hide major features like a 1990’s microsoft excel easter egg.
For instance, why in the hell are “magnifier” and “scan + ocr document to pdf” not in the camera app?
Ha ha ha, I do remember this catchphrase and it so perfectly sums up what's wrong with a lot of Apple (and, to be fair, other) UI today. I want to get shit done, not play with an Advent calendar.
Friendly FYI: The word you're looking for is TENETS. Tenants would be renting space, and I haven't received any checks yet.
Actually, not true... those AAPL dividends might count.
Because a lot of people intuitively think a camera is different to a magnifying glass or a scanner.
I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.
I don't want my calendar changing appointment times on me. If I say 7pm when I'm in Istanbul, I expect it to alert at 7pm when I'm in Istanbul, 8pm if I'm in Dubai, 9pm if I'm in Karachi, and 1am if I'm in Izakaya. Entering it without a timezone should reasonably default to the timezone the calendar was in when the appointment was entered.
Let's take an example: suppose I have a calendar appointment to call my partner, at 7pm Istanbul time. I'm in Istanbul, and I enter 7pm with the "floating" scheduling method. Then, I travel to New Zealand, and at 7pm NZ time, alarm goes off, so I call my partner. Unfortunately, it is 9am in Istanbul, not 7pm: the floating screwed up the schedule. Including timezone in the appointment would have prevented this issue.
Let's take another example: you're in Istanbul, traveling to one of your company's remote offices in NZ for a week for a summit, and have your agenda set out in "floating" time according to NZ timezone. Then, a storm rolls in, and you can't fly out, so you'll attend the same appointments remotely. But now you must edit each and every appointment to reflect their new "floating" time according to Istanbul. Including timezone in the appointments would have prevented this issue.
I want it shown to me at my local time, so I'm prepared without having to care what offset they are.
If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>".
The unfortunate truth is that there’s no simple UI fix for this problem. Even if the phone could infer or just be told where you will be in the future, there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone.
If you travel for work a lot, you come up with your own way of dealing with this stuff. If you travel for work rarely, you’re going to be confused and frustrated no matter what.
If you add an event while in London that is going to happen in New York at 7pm NY time, you set it at "7pm".
So you see it as "7pm event" while in London - but you know e.g. that this 7pm event concerns your visit to the Mets game in NY.
Then, when you land in New York and the timezone changes, you still see them as 7pm. What you entered is interpreted by default as a timezone-less absolute time. The same if, while in NYC, you set a feature 11pm event that will happen in London. When you get to London, it shows as an 11pm event.
Now, if the event you want to set needs coordination with different people, it could have a toggle like "tag with local timezone" or allow to set an explicit one, and then another toggle to "translate to local timezone to the people you're sharing this with". So, as I wrote above, in that case:
"If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>".
And they, of course, should see "Meeting: 2pm" on theirs.
>there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone.
Sure there is. UTC. It's just laziness that doesn't have people adopt it.
Shared events should be shown in UTC, and next to it, your local translated time of that (and the name of the place of timezone). Then an easy selector to see it translated to any other timezone.
So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.
The person who created the distinctive Apple design language, several iconic products, got tons of awards, and his designs are still guiding today's Apple products (they're all Ive-derivative still), is one of your examples of failure?
You’re only as good as your last product, and Johnny Ive under the hand of Steve Jobs is a lot different than Johnny Ive under the hand of Tim Apple.
Well, while a fail, obviously we haven't "figured it out in the 1970s", as no laptop today has a (or could have a) 70s-style keyboard and be convenient.
And there are lots of things we haven't yet fixed with keyboard design, or are too expensive still, e.g.I'd like full dust protection.
>You’re only as good as your last product
Obviously false, as any designer (or product makers) has ups and downs. Ive had big failures in the late 90s/early 00s to o (e.g. the Cube).
If we valued people like that (and not by a weighted average of their track record) he'd never had a second or third or fourth chance - and similar for artists and other professions.
1. Thinner
2. Delete functionality
- Replace physical keys on Apple's "pro" laptop with an emoji bar.
One of my favorite Apple UI blunders was the iTunes control that disappeared if you didn't have an iPod plugged in... but controlled what happened when you DID plug it in: "Sync on connect," which was enabled by default.
Guess what happened when your hard drive went bad (or suffered some mass deletion), you replaced it, and then you plugged your iPod in?
> When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry?
For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.
It would take a lot to upset the investors, given the overall win rate.
Presumably plenty of people were employed in that timeframe.
Yes, employed to work on Jobs vision with Ive's designs.
Even if it does go down, that doesn't mean the investors will blame the right person — there's a reason why the English language retains the phrase "scape-goat" — but it has to go down or the investors will say "why would I change this?"
Edit: I originally phrased this as "if you want to get kick-back from the investors", turns out "kick-back" doesn't mean what I thought it meant.
And while the company obviously still thrived, Ive's intellectually bankrupt (and defective) design got bad enough to embarrass Apple even in the mainstream press. I thought this WSJ article was a brilliant dig: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...
I'm saying the investors caring about $$$ would have less than zero reason to object overall.
There are loads of apologists out there ready to defend bad design, and a (sadly) growing percentage of the population that has never been exposed to GOOD design in many product categories.
That said, you are able to fix your calendar to a specified time zone: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-display-even...
A Calendar event is a specific moment in time, it doesn't move with timezones.
So if you want to enter an event which will be at 7pm local time in NY but you're currently in CA, why would you enter it at 7pm in your own timezone? Just enter it at 7pm and select NY as timezone.
Because I (and, I suspect, most people) enter appointments BEFORE my trips. And, while on a trip, I may set up appointments that will take place after I return.
Why should we have to dick around figuring out what timezone we're going to be in for every appointment in the future? Who operates like that?
I know that the phone will show the correct time wherever I am. So all I need is to set up the appointment reminder based on the TIME SHOWN ON THE PHONE, regardless of where it is. I want to tell Calendar: "When the clock on my phone says '10:00 a.m.', raise an alert."
For whom is this not the most common use case? Obviously you should be ABLE to specify a timezone, but I submit that the default should be "local."
How can you make an appointment for a specific local time without setting a specific timezone? Are the people you’re having the appointment with traveling with you?
If I understand what you're saying, it's that you don't want the calendar to adjust any times based on location/timezone.
What I believe tour perfect scenario to be: you enter an event for 10am (even if in a different timezone than your local), and it always shows up as 10am on your calendar, regardless of where you are.
If you fix your calendar to a single timezone, nothing updates time dynamically, and you take on the responsibility of manually translating timezone shifts.
- You're in PT
- A 9am event in PT, you add at _9am_ on your calendar.
- A 10am event in ET, you do the timezone translation manually, and add at _8am_ on your calendar.
Am I missing something?
When I set up an appointment at 10 a.m., I want that reminder to go off when the clock on my phone says 10 a.m. anywhere in the world.
That is all.
When I was there the stance on "intelligence" was that Apple doesn't advertise itself as "AI" or "ML". It just builds good products by any means and if it happens to use particular technologies, then fine. Not so anymore.
But when people repeatedly demonstrate that they don't have the mindset or aptitude for the role, or important aspects of it, they need to be relieved of responsibility for those aspects. I'm griping about the individuals for whom that isn't done.
In any case, I don't think it's worth applying for a job at Apple unless you already are a well-known (semi)authority in your field so you can have a minimum amount of power to somewhat dictate the terms. Apple treats their supplier very badly, there is no reason they would do otherwise with people they don't really need.
If Apple were to be personified it would be the narcissistic mean girl that is extremely popular because of her beauty.
This is what a "job security fortress" looks like when management has more money and less sense than they know what to do with.
> a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
They need to rethink their entire strategy. What on earth possessed them to believe I wanted "summaries" of communications which have an average length of far less than 100 words anyways.
If "prompt engineering" and "phantom husbands" are a thing you don't have a viable mass market product.
There's literally millions of them. The gulf is that the current technology cannot possibly do any of those things.
> Everyone is building out capabilities
They're burning billions on a method that has already started showing diminishing returns. There's no exponential growth on the horizon with the current stack.
> while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime
If you told me this was your business plan I would short everything of yours I could.
> but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.
An infrastructure that will be outdated and unjustifiably expensive in 5 years. It's like we're pretending that the history of business for all time has nothing to do with the business of AI.
Those unwilling to stare history in the face will be eaten by it.
Any HN user can declare any opinion whatsoever regarding “killer apps” but that doesn’t automatically make their opinions true or meaningful.
Or a new cost-cutting government comes in, lays off all the best people and keeps the morons.
There were actually very fast ways to get fired - but if you were likable and didn’t leak you could work there seemingly forever making no progress and frustrating the people buying the “do your life’s work” pitch.
I was in a small auxiliary team though. The main way you could get fired was becoming the “directly responsible individual” for something important to a senior person and dropping the ball. But there were so many roles the senior people didn’t trust or care about that there was ample opportunity to never have one of those hot potatoes tossed your way in a team like mine. Frustrating, if you wanted to catch one and do something that mattered (tm) as young me did.
That kind of story is one you'd hear about "rest and vest" in the late 2010s.
The dept I reported to was laid-off en mass in late-2015/early-2016.
I interviewed for the iOS design team later that year and after several months and two interviews was ghosted and never heard from them again.
I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths.
Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead.
Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.
I also think it is expected for any sufficiently large bureaucracy. Scale is hard.
What about it? I often hear this sentiment but I hardly ever notice the OS having updated in the first place.
Then there’s the fact that I hate photos, mail, and the rest of it - which they turn on by default and then you have to disable. The fact that Apple Music works fine in my car but for some reason all other music apps are buggy.
Apple News won’t let me block news sources, anything I try to block stays in my feed just greyed out. Like, I’m not allowed to keep BuzzFeed out of my feed? Wtf.
Then there’s the sick charade of their “privacy” claims, which I won’t even get into, but it’s laughable.
They went from being the most user-focused company to nakedly extracting rent from a captive audience. I no longer feel I own my Apple devices, they own me, and I’m sick of it.
Just for some context, many people have older phones so they're not getting the AI shoved down their throats yet. their built in apps, OS updates don't really change anything there. I don't use mail/photos either but I have yet to notice it annoying me in any way, definitely it doesn't "turn on" in any way for me after an update.
I don't use their music or news apps, maybe that's the issue, maybe their apps just suck.
Whenever you hear people bitching about CEOs like Jobs, Bezos, or Musk, just keep in mind that most people's opinions are second-hand from people who got their arse kicked.
Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.
Everything is permitted if someone gets fabulously rich in the end. Got it.
You can live in a trailer park next with your meth addicted family but Musk is getting richer.
Here is some anecdote. In in youth, I learned/played the french horn. Most of my teachers where nice feminine men, I was making progress but very slowly. But one year I got a guy that was out of the army music, he didn't take bullshit and forced me to work in a way the others never did. This year my progress was orders of magnitude better than any other year. At the time I thought he was a bit of an asshole, but now I know that if I had to choose, I would rather have someone like him. I quit french horn 3 years after, there were many reasons but not having a strong inspiring teacher was one of them for sure.
Well the pendulum is swinging back. But it is going to take at least 10-15 years. As with everything we need both, and use them when ever it is appreciate.
I think a shock is needed for real transformation, politics are just a show, what really happens is dependent on the sentiment of the executants.
Otherwise, it's going to take a very long time like you said but it's not clear whether the system will survive that long, at least in the EU.
It's funny that I got downvoted and you as well. On HN the white knights outnumber people with a realistic world-view heavily. I don't blame them; when your earnings/power depends on you not asking too many questions and subscribing to the dominant ideology this is what you do.
I agree it may not survive that long in the EU, especially in the UK I am not even sure which one is worst.
Don't worry, France (where I'm from) is following very closely in the massive destruction happening under the weight of the dominant ideology.
Metternich, the Austrian chancellor once said: "When France Sneezes, the Rest of Europe Catches a Cold". So maybe we should worry a bit but at the same time France is nowhere near as relevant as it once was, so maybe we are just spectators of the fall of a once dominant culture.
The problem with downvoting is that it's just people refusing to engage in a productive debate because it hurts their feeling about what is supposedly good or bad. It ends up being a massive popularity contest which is exactly the pitfalls that Aristotle warned about democracy.
It's a little (ok a lot) like targeted ads. I'll believe it's targeted when it tries to sell me ancillary, related goods for e.g. that fridge freezer I bought, not show me ads for fridge freezer I now don't need.
Targeted ads are a useful reference point. A decade back, everyone was horrified (or amazed) by that story of supermarkets knowing some teenager was pregnant before their father did. But today… the category in which your fridge example is, is the best it gets for me — even Facebook, for the most part, is on-par with my actual spam folder, with ads for both boob surgery and dick pills, ads for lawyers based in a country I don't live in who specialise in giving up a citizenship I never had, recommendations for sports groups focusing on a sport I don't follow in a state I've never visited of a country I haven't set foot in since 2018. Plus, very occasionally, ads for things I already have.
One thing that I do wonder about is the value in adding AI and "Smartness", what if people don't use it? I know practically no one who uses their smart TV as anything but a monitor (and speakers). Everyone adds an AppleTV or a ChromeCast. My in-laws used Netflix on their Sony TV for a bit, but it was slow and two years ago Netflix stopped being supported on their TV and I gave them an old ChromeCast. Backed in AI could easily end up in the same situation. It's omni-present, but rarely used. That's a problem with the current logic behind innovation where little market research is done and companies are afraid to remove functionality as it may make them look less competitive (in the eyes of shareholders).
Someone point out that apparently Romanian online electronics retailers have a pretty nice selection of dumb TVs, at least they did a few years ago.
It totally would make sense in, e.g. art or photography (or, strangely, crocheting) circles to show that this image of a mouse was not vomited by an ML that had eaten too much LAION
It's fairly new, but with the mess around stock photo sites having undeclared AI images I wouldn't be surprised if it sites eventually showcase this information
I do not see this getting into consumer phone images, screenshots or such things.
Also, c2pa as done by Adobe simply records signed list of what AI tools were used, and, since they are pushing AI into everything, good luck deriving anything useful from that list of modifications.
Also, I've seen a few photographers on internet on one hand hating AI with all their might, and on other proudly sharing their "technique" of upscaling blurry mess photos to huge sizes using Topaz Labs. I mean...
This is either a straight up lie or an extreme stretching of the truth.
This is from the Danish models but literally this is what it puts as autocomplete for “woman are …”
> woman we not worth as much as men
And it’s not a one off. It’s been going around social media that autocomplete for a long range of other initial phrases are just as stereotypically chauvinistic or racist. It’s pretty clear that no effort was taken at all to sanitize the models.
And no, it’s not using your chat history, though it used to do this. Which just makes things worse as there things are being spread because everyone who draws attention to it on things like Facebook are immediately accused of being a racists or chauvinist.
AI is not perfect (and I personally think it's all BS) but why would you use AI features and then complain that you get hallucinations? The state of the art isn't error-proof, petitioning Apple to do better than state-of-the-art seems kind of meaningless?
My wife and I both have a habit of sending multiple small messages rather than a large one. Probably because we both used IRC extensively on the past and grew up on length-limited SMSes. The summaries are very very handy at letting me glance at my notification's and see if anything in her last x messages needs a reply now or whether it’s just “chat”.
I’ve found LLM summaries of stuff in general to be one of the handiest uses of it personally.
They could have merged the last few recent short messages into one bigger notification, instead of making the notification for the very last message cover the rest.
A bit notable: the AI summarization of spam texts makes them seem much more credible.
There probably should be.
I get the sense that making group chats silent by default would have a more useful impact on notification overload than AI summaries.
I know this is probably a joke but it reminds me of the moral questions that appear in the Apple TV+ show Severance. The idea of turning off a feature being compared to "killing" someone reminds me of the innie/outtie moral quandaries.
> The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.
> [...]
> A precise history of the global occurrence of transgender people is difficult to compose because the modern concept of being transgender, and of gender in general as relevant to transgender identity, did not develop until the mid-20th century. Historical understandings are thus inherently filtered through modern principles, and were largely viewed through a medical lens until the late 20th century.
> [...]
> Absence of autobiographical accounts has resulted in historians assigning identities to historical figures, which of course may be inaccurate.
Very important to understand that the people didn't change, we just understand more of how humans work more than before. The current understanding is far from perfect too - I'm sure people not 100 years later will look back to the current one as archaic, or missing something very important, that they now understand commonly. The people back then were not any better or worse, or different, than we are today.