https://workspace.google.com/blog/sheets/new-innovations-in-...

"Building on improvements like smooth scrolling and expanded cell limits in Sheets, today we’re announcing that we’ve doubled the speed of calculation in Sheets on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers,"...

I assume this is 2x the speed of their current JavaScript code.

The idea that Apple is compliant with the DMA has yet to be tested. There are many direct statements by the enforcing commissioner and complaints from third parties that I think only a direct ruling will settle things.

I forgot about Prime Video purchases having a special back door deal for some of their purchases. I wasn’t referring to the subscription service but the purchase of digital books/movies. My point stands though. Digital goods could be sold and bought without special exceptions or loopholes from the 30% fee. That alone is a huge market opportunity.

John Sircacusa (from ATP.fm) pointed out years ago that the heart of Apple's biggest issues is business relationship management. This was when Apple only had a handful of issues with a few companies and made some poorly received statements about developers. Their ability to build mutually agreeable relations has only gotten worse in recent years.

Sony and Microsoft have kept their relations with third parties tough but ultimately agreeable. They promote practically all of their third parties (unlike the App Store which has so many apps that its like winning the lottery to be promoted). Consoles have stores which are probably more curated but which third party publishers/developers actually like.

IMO, DoJ, EU, etc. are acting primarily because they have received so many complaints from Spotify, Microsoft, Epic Games, Google, Meta, Tile, etc. Governments don't take action for the "public" interest on its own.

Unfairness is at the heart of so many antitrust lawsuits (whether successful or not). Anyone old enough to recall Microsoft in the 1990s would say that many people (not at MSFT) were pointing out how unfair bundling Internet Explorer was. You may disagree but it was one of the reasons MSFT got sued.

Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses. Facebook could have its marketplace conduct peer to peer transactions. Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself. While big businesses are best positioned to take advantage today, the effects directly trickle down to small startup businesses.

While I personally don't care for it, cryptocurrency use would have more potential. Apple blocked apps for NFT features in the past because they couldn't get their 30%.

Having third party marketplaces might make it so that there is some actual curation at the App Store.

You have to use Xcode. You can try other IDEs but LSP equivalent features are at the most basic level. Xcode is the kitchen sink of IDEs which has led to many negative opinions as it struggles under its own weight. Every other year there’s new UI for things like debugging which is fine but what would be really nice is if the actual debugging worked. Technically there are reasons why you can’t print a local variable sometimes when stepping through a program, but in practice, I do not care and I want to know what the value is.

If you don’t care about the “optional” tooling like the dependency manager and LSP or a linter (which is closer to ESLint versus Rust Analyzer), the required tooling leaves much to be desired. The compiler sometimes gives up when it takes too much time to process a complex type. It would be understandable in some cases but most people encounter the problem when just writing seemingly simple SwiftUI. Error messages and auto fix-it suggestions are improving but still disappointing. I remember when Apple switched from GCC to LLVM and everyone was praising the error messages as a reason to switch.

Swift is actually ambitious. The generics system is world class. It has to support the legacy of a huge ecosystem on multiple platforms. SwiftUI is one of those bets that you might be surprised that Apple can still make. But whenever I fire up that SwiftUI Preview, I am crossing my fingers that maybe I’ll see something instead of an error. Swift lives up to its name in terms of moving quickly and the language design is probably fine, but outside of that, the tooling is still very immature for a decade old language which tons of resources are invested in.

In the most recent iOS versions, if it can determine when "clean energy" is available near your location, it will also try to charge only during those time periods. I don't think any 3rd party has determined if it is effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nwLilQy64

and

https://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-d...

Whether it's revisionist history or not, there were later claims that Steve Jobs knew they couldn't have a native platform ready when the iPhone was first announced so they stalled for time to a) get the App Store ready and b) see what types of app ideas were popular to get those platform APIs finalized. The interim solution was web apps with recommendations to look at the Dashboard APIs in Mac OS X (which were basically web apps).

It's kind of like when most websites started to switch to responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations kinda dropped off. It was just too costly to make things work well.

If terminal based pair programming doesn't work, Visual Studio Code has an interesting "Live Share" feature which works similarly. You keep some of your extensions (and don't even need all of the same extensions installed to make things work depending on who shares).

  struct Item {
      value: u32,
  }

  fn process_item(input: Option) -> Option {
      input.map(|mut item| {
          item.value += 3;
          item
      })
  }

Also, instead of doing an unwrap() on optional values for assertion, sometimes I like:

  let my_list = vec![1,2,3]; 
  assert_eq!(Some(&my_list[0]), my_list.first());

Today though, BMW is not charging a “subscription” fee and much more importantly, all of their iDrive data is provided for free with free software updates. And yes, competitive pressure probably forced them to, but it is much better than just 5 or 6 years ago where you were charged for yearly map updates by buying a DVD. They are also the first car manufacturer to support the CarKey feature so they have changed (for now anyways).

Assistant wise, you'd get better results from Google Assistant/Alexa. Apple has been lagging and playing catchup (from not having multiple timers in the initial HomePod release to adding voice recognition last year when Google had it earlier). The answers are more limited like your iOS Siri (don't expect anything better). Even worse, it seems like HomePod's Siri backend is different than say an iPad's which generally means it's a generation behind. For instance, the HomePod doesn't really support continuous conversations/follow-up questions.

Siri is ok finding popular music, but if you ask it to play the "The A-List: K-Pop playlist" vs. "The A-List: Pop Music" for instance, it's a tossup on which it chooses dependent on the alignment of the planets. The same goes for musician names where if it kinda sounds like the more popular musician, it will tend to choose the more popular one. Furthermore, if you have a specific version of a song (say acoustic/live version), then the HomePod always tends to pick the most popular version of the song even if you say "acoustic" or any other hints.

There are "Shortcuts" on the HomePod. You can use it to add Todos to third party apps (if you don't want to use the Apple Reminders integration) or play a podcast from a third party player from your iPhone/iPad. Not as useful as Alexa skills and every now and then it takes some magical phrase to correctly activate them. The main problem with Siri beyond lacking knowledge is that Siri lacks consistency. While it's ambitious in letting you say anything versus the narrower "scripted keywords" that Alexa understands, if you say something one day that it perfectly understands and repeated it exactly a week later, you have no idea if Siri will still understand you. I read about this complaint before against Siri, but having experienced it more than a few times now, it is incredibly frustrating. And Siri sometimes (unintentionally) mocks you by repeating all the main parts of your request back to you correctly, but it does the wrong thing.

Hardware wise, the HomePod sounds better than a Google Home, Google Home mini, and Echo Dot. But of course, the others are cheaper. Two HomePods do sound better than one. Besides the better output, the mics are significantly more sensitive even in a loud environment. If you're putting the HomePod in a noisy kitchen or playing music loudly, then a HomePod can pick up your voice without you shouting at it.

The Apple TV integration has gotten better, but even with two HomePods, a relatively cheap home theater setup sounds better and can be used for all your TV content instead of just from your Apple devices. If you place the HomePods right next to the TV at roughly the same height, they sound good but if you move them too low/high or around the room, it does sound "off". The whole spatial two HomePod thing kinda does work for music in a room, but for TV content, it does not.

Really the other assistants are as good if not better than the HomePod, then the only distinguishing (non-privacy) feature is if you want a premium and pretty good way to listen to Apple Music. Maybe a few more music services which hopefully will be available soon. I don't regret buying the HomePods at all because I do like listening to music on them, but all of the assistant and "smart" tech is available on your iPhone if it can hear you.

Honda is also rumored to be adding wireless support ( https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/10/wireless-carplay-... ) for their 2021 Accord model so seems the feature is become available on more affordable cars too.