Smartphones weren’t a new idea, Palm had been on it since the mid 90’s

Apple shipped the Newton in 1993. Well before Palm. And long, long, before shipping the Newton they were talking about hand held computers. The idea that they copied Palm is ridiculous.

Like Palm, the Newton wasn’t good enough to achieve widespread market adoption (and Apple recognised that - killing it in 1998).

Sure - iPhone wasn’t the first pocket computer and it was a very obvious invention that companies all over the world had failed to pull off for decades. I think Microsoft was the closest - their Pocket PC that was pretty good and they had a massive decade long version almost rebuilt from scratch about to ship when the iPhone came out… But Apple beat them to it and Google followed close behind - reportedly Google’s early hardware partners were planning to ship Windows on those devices but Microsoft lost out on the contract negotiations, Satya Nadela said they were just too slow - their hardware partners want to wait for them.

Apple was first to ship a good pocket computer. That was real innovation. Real innovators are the ones that get it right, and being first (to get it right) matters because once it’s done once everyone else can just copy your idea instead of wasting time developing and testing dead end solutions to hard problems. The early Android devices for example, looked more like the old Pocket PC or a Blackberry. They probably weren’t good enough to be successful. They quickly copied ideas like the software keyboard from Apple, and quickly adopted Apple’s open source technology like the WebKit rendering engine.

I’d say the UI was the biggest shakeup

I’d say the biggest shakeup was the features Jobs pushed hard in the keynote.

1. It was a cellphone. A good cell phone. Everyone had a cell phone and nearly everyone hated them. The blackberry was decent if all you did was send text messages and make phone calls, but it was rubbish at everything else. PocketPC and Symbian and other flip phones were even worse, though each specific model had a different set of feature trade offs (did you ever try writing an email on a small PocketPC device? You had to press tiny keys with an equally tiny stylus and text was almost impossible to read (or alternatively so large that you couldn’t fit enough text. Larger ones were a good experience but they were way too big for most people. Even the iPhone was considered huge at the time (it was much bigger than a blackberry for example).

2. It was an iPod. Everyone (who could afford one) owned an iPod and it sucked having two gadgets in their pocket all day and keeping two gadgets charged. That was the feature that made the iPhone a “must have” product. Combining your phone and music device was a massive improvement and an obvious one even if you weren’t sure about the other stuff. Other phones could play music by then, but they were all still really terrible. I could only fit a single album on my Symbian phone and it took hours of stuffing around and reading manuals and installing buggy software to figure out how to load MP3s onto the device. Yuck.

3. It was able to browse the internet. The real, full internet. Everyone working a desk job was used to doing that all day every day, but now it was possible to do it away from your desk. That was a huge deal and I think by far the most meaningful feature of the iPhone… except it was a product nobody had ever used before, so it couldn’t be the only headline feature.

There were a lot of little things that aren’t relevant today but were a big deal at the time. For example it had a web browser that actually worked to view the real internet, even though 99% of webpages were designed for screens the size of 30 iPhones.

Today all webpages are designed to work well on small screens - but that never would have happened without Apple. Or at least it would have taken a lot longer to happen. They got enough people using the internet on a phone to force web developers to support small screens. That was a big achievement - even today it’s a massive amount of work to design a webpage that works well with a mouse and with your thumbs. The tools we have now didn’t exist back then, and before Mobile Safari there weren’t any users of small screens anyway so why would anyone put in all that work?

Phones with web browsers predated the iPhone. They were completely unusable.

Steve Jobs and a lot of the best people at Apple left the company in 1985. The company was taken over by idiots (“bozos” was Steve’s preferred term).

Steve (and all the people at NeXT) returned to Apple 12 years later. Officially Apple “bought” NeXT but for nearly half a billion dollars but in reality that was clever account keeping to satisfy investors and Apple was in fact on the brink of going bankrupt. They didn’t have half a billion dollars. They didn’t even have enough money to cover salaries of their employees. The people at NeXT took over and made it into what it is today and they refer to 1997 as the year that NeXT bought Apple.

Both the Pippin and the Newton shipped several years after Steve and his core team left. They were products of the “Bozo” management team. Both were killed pretty much at the same time as Steve coming back. He killed a lot of other stupid products as well.

app bundles (which I still think are just fantastic) were a NeXT thing.

App bundles were just a better implementation of resource forks, which were invented by Apple and pre-dated NeXT.

(which of course became Apple, but they weren’t at the time)

NeXT was founded by people who worked at Apple (not just Steve) and they were largely put in charge when they came back to Apple. I wouldn’t call them separate companies. Just a weird moment in the history of the company. A lot like what just happened at OpenAI.

Sorry but that’s bullshit. That would be like disregarding all the engineering that goes into developing a car, just because someone else invented the wheel.

Sure - without that invention they couldn’t exist - but real innovation isn’t just the foundational features of the product. 99% of the work is in small refinements - for example about two hours a day my Mazda is a horrible car to drive because the sun catches the chrome logo on the steering wheel and blinds the driver. The newer models? They have a slightly different shape on the steering wheel that puts the shiny logo in the shade at that time of the day. It takes real work over decades to figure out tiny details like that. Most of the job is things that aren’t obvious when you first have an idea to build a product.

Someone else probably, probably millions of other people, likely had the idea long ago… the real innovator is the one that actually does the hard work to make it a product someone will actually want to use.

Apple is one of the companies behind the USB standard. There are other major companies (especially Intel) but they often make really stupid decisions and I don’t think the world would be using USB today if it wasn’t for Apple coming on board and doing some really awesome work. USB-C for example was designed by Apple. And Thunderbolt - another Intel project - was pretty much exclusive to Apple hardware… and it’s rumoured that Apple pushed intel hard to make serious improvements such as using copper instead of fibre optic and including it modern USB standards (thunderbolt, if you don’t know, is basically PCI-E over a USB cable - it works so much better than a regular USB connection the only drawback is it costs slightly more).

They took KHTML, a niche rendering engine that nobody had heard of which didn’t work for major websites… and made it into the foundation that backs every browser except FireFox.

The ARM CPU architecture was technically an independent company, but Apple provided nearly all their funding in the early days, provided ongoing funding for decades before they did anything interesting, and ARM’s founding CEO was an Apple employee.

Most of the best programming languages in the world, especially modern ones but even some old ones that have been re-architected, depend on LLVM which, while it’s an open source project, for many years was exclusively worked on by Apple (who hired the university student that started it as a side project and gave him an unlimited budget to make it what it is today).

They figured out how to make touch screen phones work. It existed before, but it was shit - in particular typing was unusable and while it wasn’t as good on the first iPhone as it is today it was Apple who was the first to find a way to make it “good enough” and that was some seriously innovative stuff. It looks like a tiny keyboard with touch buttons but that is not what’s going on under the hood. It’s far more complex.

Going forward - the Vision Pro headset has some pretty awesome innovations.

I could go on, but you get the picture. A really common theme is they took something that already existed (e.g. the mouse) and figured out how to actually make it good enough for people to adopt it. It takes a lot of R&D to develop something as comprehensive as, for example, the HIG:

Could someone else have achieved those innovations? Sure. If ARM/Apple didn’t do it… I’m sure someone else would have figured out how to make a fast processor that could run all day on a battery small enough to wear on your wrist. But with that and so many other things, Apple’s work was critical (a lot of that was software, not hardware - for example technology like ARC was critical to reach acceptable levels of efficiency). Somebody else would have done it eventually, but I’d argue Apple made it happen decades earlier than it otherwise would have. And once they proved it could be done, others coped them. Which is awesome - as Steve Jobs loved to quote Picasso “good artists copy; great artists steal” and said they do it shamelessly and expect their competitors to do the same… as long as they don’t steal branding. That’s when Apple’s legal team gets fired up - as they did with the early Samsung phones where everything, even the icons on the home screen which could have easily been unique, looked like an iPhone.

The fine will likely be a percentage of annual global turnover… since twitter doesn’t make much money it won’t be a huge fine relative to the amount of money Musk has, however it’ll just make it that much harder to become profitable and the bad publicity will cause problems.

Best case scenario is they comply with the law and maybe the X network will be good again. I wouldn’t hold my breath on that though.

Meanwhile Spotify gives you, what, playlist creations?

Distribution is hardly free. There are massive overheads - do you know all the details of sales tax law in your own country? What about in hundreds of other countries? They’re all different. And what about refund laws? That’s also different in each country. If someone writes you an email in a language you don’t even recognise… do you just ignore it? To give one example in my country if a customer asks for a tax receipt after a purchase, you are required by law to give it to them. That’s hard to comply if you don’t speak the same language as the customer. Spotify handles all those headaches for you.

What if your bank tells you they have refunded the payment someone made to buy your album, pending an investigation into wether or not the cardholder actually authorised the payment and received what was advertised. Can you prove it wasn’t a stolen card? Can you prove the album was delivered to the customer? The bank isn’t going to do that for you - they’re happy to just refund the payment (and might charge the seller a $50 processing fee…). Spotify is able to provide proof and will fight people who demand unreasonable refunds. You probably can’t prove it, which means anyone who wants a free album can just buy it and complain to their bank. And trust me, it will happen. Might not even be your customers asking for refunds - it might be a rival band that wants you to suffer. If there are too many refunds, the bank will just take way your ability to sell stuff.

Distributing the music is basically free these days - at least for the artist/label anyway. Artists can pay about ten bucks (per album) to various cloud services which will handle distribution - and that includes global physical CD distribution (via an online store, not retail stores). That cost is often $4 per disc and paid by the purchaser.

Recording an album and music video can cost a fortune, and marketing the album can cost an infinite amount of money. That’s where the record label spends most of their money and it’s not a fixed figure - it gets negotiated for each album. AFAIK the split between the artist and label usually varies depending on wether the label’s investment has been paid for yet. And marketing is an ongoing expense, the label can keep spending money on that indefinitely (and the artist probably wants them to keep spending money on marketing).

Artists aren’t forced to sign a contract with a label. They do it because they want to.

They do it because the label will often invest a million dollars in the artist upfront before the songs are even available for the public to stream.

Good recording studios are expensive to hire. And if you want a video track to go with it… those are even worse.

IMO shareholders should be livid

Why? Shareholders gave Spotify billions of dollars - they expect the company to spend that money. Shareholders are quite capable of depositing their own money in a bank if they didn’t want it to be spent.

My take is Spotify hired over 5,000 employees over 2020 and 2021 when the economy looked great. Then Russia Invaded Ukraine in 2022 screwing the global economy and particularly Europe which is Spotify’s biggest market. They’ve laid off about half the people they hired, which is unfortunate… but it’s understandable. The couldn’t have foreseen the economic shift.

Spotify removed the need for mp3’s for the majority of people, largely killing iTunes

Huh? Apple’s music service has about a hundred million users. Up from eighty million a few years ago. Spotify has more than twice that, but iTunes is hardly dead.

No if anything newer OS is faster. Apple works extremely hard to improve battery life and has been gradually reducing the size of the batteries in their laptops to get the weight down. My latest Mac has a 50Wh battery that lasts 18 hours in real world use. Years ago I used to get 5 hours from a 100Wh battery.

Those battery improvements aren’t just from efficient hardware - it also comes from more efficient software.

If you still had a HDD that’d be a problem, the software assumes a fast drive now and leaves memory on the disk that, years ago, would have been pulled into RAM, but you won’t have that problem since you have an SSD (also… that’s a big part of why Macs don’t need much RAM compared to Linux or Windows).

Apple drops support for old Macs when the cheapest configuration of that Mac is no-longer fast enough. With upgrades, like yours has, it’s often fine.

… but seriously when you can afford it an M1 processor will be an order of magnitude faster. I’ve got a 2014 Mac Mini at home and also an M1 laptop. The speed difference is astronomical. Mostly I just keep the Mac Mini around for backups/etc since connecting a laptop into an external backup drive is annoying.

Not everyone is in that boat - for example in our theatre we have Mac’s with QLab installed and nothing else. They’re not even connected to the internet.

QLab needs about 250MB of RAM.

Oh, and because reliability is critical (it controls large robots that operate heavy fast moving objects in close proximity to humans) we need two of them. They run next to each other with a big red button you can smash with your fist at any time to seamlessly disconnect one and connect the backup.

A bit of money saved by having less RAM is fine with me. We could afford 16GB (or a lot more) but why waste money on that? Especially when one of the Macs will hopefully never be used except for routine testing to check if it works.

QLab doesn’t run on other operating systems and doesn’t really have any viable alternative either. There’s plenty of professional software that doesn’t need a bunch of memory. This one is essentially just a graphical programming tool that allows artistically talented people to do things that would normally require a software engineer.

But seriously - the MacBook Pro has a HDMI port. Apple’s cheaper laptops are too thin for HDMI, so they obviously don’t have one. If all you do is email and meetings - then HDMI is totally worth it and 8GB is fine. It would be nice if protectors around the world switched to DisplayPort (which can run over USB-C) but that’s not the world we live in.

USB-C to HDMI cables are unreliable in my experience. They might work, but sometimes you get weird issues around areas like detecting the supported list of resolutions/aspect ratios and so on.

Yeah you need to be careful what memory numbers you read - I’ve seen some of them hit terabytes on my Mac, and I only have a 256GB SSD so there’s no way that’s physically possible. Just because a memory address is tracked by the kernel doesn’t mean it’s actually being used. You can have a single region of memory counted multiple times (in my case, probably millions of times… I don’t think I was using much swap at all).

Technically they don’t even have an SSD anymore. They just have a bunch of NAND chips.

The drive controller is in the CPU. Which is great for performance… especially when you’re reading data that is already cached by the drive controller you’re limited by RAM speed instead of PCIe - but it’s a bit of a headache when it comes to upgrades.

The band chips are on a daughter board on their larger desktops. And soldered on laptops and the tiny Mac Mini.

Except it’s rarely the “same car”. For example a Tesla Model 3 manufactured in China has an LFP lithium-ion battery, while the US manufactured ones use an NCA lithium-ion battery. It’s by far the most expensive component of the car and LFP batteries are much cheaper.

There are often other differences too - such as optional extras being standard in one market. And warranties vary (those are not free - it costs money to fix faulty cars and they factor it into the sale price).

In short: The per message AES key is derived from the contacts public RSA key.

Erm that’s not how it actually works. Though in your defence, “in short” is pretty hard to achieve here.

The real headache though isn’t encrypting the messages. It’s making sure that only the intended recipient has the decryption key for your message. That’s where E2EE messaging gets complex and frankly Apple doesn’t do the best job.

It’s theoretically possible with iMessage, especially in a nation state level attack, for a compromised device to be one of the recipients your encrypted message is sent to. Wether “theoretically” is “actually in practice” happening is hard to judge, because nation state attacks are normally hidden by court mandated disclosure suppression orders.

The way Signal is architected, it wouldn’t be possible to comply with a court order like that. Unfortunately that means some Signal based messaging services will be forced to exit the UK since laws coming into effect next year will give them no other choice. It’ll be interesting to see if signal based services (like Google RCS) also walk or will they weaken their encryption in order to be able to comply.

The fact at least one nation state is passing laws that force “encrypted” messaging services to have the vulnerability that iMessage has is a pretty strong smoke signal that attacks like that are happening…

Apple’s current market valuation is $3 trillion.

AFAIK it is if you message someone else who uses Google’s RCS.

If you message someone with regular RCS - no encryption.