So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I downgraded. From the 2016 MacBook Pro to my 2013, which I had kept in a drawer...

It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.
That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.
@wylieprof Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.
@wylieprof Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.
@wylieprof Just kidding! That was lame. On the plus side I could now plug the charger in either side. (Except I couldn’t quite because one of the ports was faulty, and it wouldn’t charge properly—I was alerted to that by the salience of a non-whoop silence.)
@wylieprof What else? Oh! The mysterious double-space. At some point, your new keyboard started occasionally inserting two spaces when I only hit the spacebar once.
@wylieprof Maybe I was typing too hard? But then I noticed it elsewhere. For example, I’m pretty sure it happened to Mary Beard too, judging by the unexpected in her tweets. Hi Mary!
@wylieprof The new software updates were great, too. For example, at some point AirPlay stopped working. Fortunately I had yet to upgrade my iPhone, so I could still play music on the stereo.
@wylieprof Still, the upgrade was worth it. After four years, I had a hard drive that was... 50% larger, and a processor that was... 25% faster.
@wylieprof This made it easier when I stared losing work (for the first time in a decade) by unexpected application crashes, because I could load up Safari and... hang on... oop
@wylieprof I also had new friends. Like Laurel and Hardy! Hi guys.
@wylieprof These were so advanced that I had to upgrade their firmware when I first plugged them in (!) Also I think they were $60 each.
@wylieprof The computer itself was so skinny that when I carried these around I felt like a photographer’s assistant at a fashion shoot.
@wylieprof Making the trackpad extra large was great because my finger got a concussion running off the edge of the last one? Not really, but now I could randomly fail to click something if I rested my palm wrong.
@wylieprof This was the first time since the late-1990s Jobs reboot that I felt I was working for my computer, not the other way around.
@wylieprof The era of understated perfection is, in my opinion, over. Given the bugs that erupt with each incremental update now, I can’t even imagine the current team rolling out an entire rewrite of the OS, as they did for OS X. https://t.co/2lZn5RQm4w
@wylieprof One last example, a little more technical. Apple rolled out a new file system. It’s called APFS, you’ll get it free if you upgrade to High Sierra.
@wylieprof APFS forbids “hardlinks”. So if you do upgrade, all of your UNIX stuff will probably break. Why? Because screw you, that’s why.
@wylieprof Oh also—APFS is incompatibile with older versions of Time Machine. Apple can’t even not break its own stuff. And you can’t reformat back to the old system.
@wylieprof https://t.co/RD5XpCYTSm if you don’t believe me.
@wylieprof A new update was released today or so—Mojave (motto: Welcome to the Desert of the Real).
@wylieprof I learned this because people already figured out it breaks Mathematica.
@wylieprof A well-built machine is a beautiful thing. You get attached to excellence in them the way people get attached to the old Volkswagen Beatle.
@wylieprof So, support request to @AppleSupport. Please fire Johnny Ive, and take everyone else on a five year retreat to Tibet to meditate on non-being or something.
@wylieprof @AppleSupport We can wait.
@wylieprof @AppleSupport Or, someone start a tweet campaign and get @elonmusk to build a better laptop—something that will last twenty years and be more than a platform for failed AI voice assistants and marketing popups from Software Update.
To cheer everybody up, here is a list of cool people using macs. https://t.co/pToRotyQyX
https://t.co/NloM4XBgIN
https://t.co/JcUr9ZahSZ
https://t.co/NTmT4BC8dA
Here's why Al Gore lost the election
https://t.co/Oi7WM6vmpe
(Compare to Gore)
The Dixie Chicks?
Don't tell Kayne he forgot the adapter.
Unfriend (@SwiftOnSecurity)
I do not enjoy this user experience
"Mr Putin, I can't find our password?"

More from Simon DeDeo

"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".

More from Tech

A common misunderstanding about Agile and “Big Design Up Front”:

There’s nothing in the Agile Manifesto or Principles that states you should never have any idea what you’re trying to build.

You’re allowed to think about a desired outcome from the beginning.

It’s not Big Design Up Front if you do in-depth research to understand the user’s problem.

It’s not BDUF if you spend detailed time learning who needs this thing and why they need it.

It’s not BDUF if you help every team member know what success looks like.

Agile is about reducing risk.

It’s not Agile if you increase risk by starting your sprints with complete ignorance.

It’s not Agile if you don’t research.

Don’t make the mistake of shutting down critical understanding by labeling it Bg Design Up Front.

It would be a mistake to assume this research should only be done by designers and researchers.

Product management and developers also need to be out with the team, conducting the research.

Shared Understanding is the key objective


Big Design Up Front is a thing to avoid.

Defining all the functionality before coding is BDUF.

Drawing every screen and every pixel is BDUF.

Promising functionality (or delivery dates) to customers before development starts is BDUF.

These things shouldn’t happen in Agile.
(1) Some haters of #Cardano are not only bag holders but also imperative developers.

If you are an imperative programmers you know that Plutus is not the most intuitive -> (https://t.co/m3fzq7rJYb)

It is, however, intuitive for people with IT financial background, e.g. banks

(2)

IELE + k framework will be a real game changer because there will be DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) in any programming language supported by K framework. The only issue is that we need to wait for all this

(3) Good news is that the moment we get IELE integrated into Cardano, we get some popular langs. To my knowledge we should get from day one: Solidity and Rust, maybe others as well?

List of langs:
https://t.co/0uj1eBfrYj, some commits from many years ago..

@rv_inc ?

#Cardano

(a) Last but not least, marketing to people with Haskell, functional programming with experience and decision makers in banks is a tricky one, how do you market but not tell them you want to replace them. In the end one strategy is to pitch new markets, e.g. developing world

(b) As banks realize what is happening they maybe more inclined to join - not because they would like to but because they will have to - in such cases some development talent maybe re-routed to Plutus / Cardano / Algorand / Tezos

You May Also Like