Hacker News: joemi

New comment by joemi in "Tesla Roadster"

joemi — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:40:54 +0000

To be fair, those were both post-Jobs projects at Apple, so Jobs' "real artists ship" quote doesn't exactly apply.

New comment by joemi in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

joemi — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:40:31 +0000

That's not a good analogy for the situation. A better grocery-based analogy would be if there's only a single Bob's Grocery in town (and for whatever reason more Bob's Groceries can't be opened) but there is a Sally's Groceries in town. Then Bob's Groceries isn't a monopoly. The only thing Bob's Groceries is a monopoly of is Bob's Groceries, which is a useless tautological argument.

Apple has neither a monopoly on phones nor on app marketplaces.

New comment by joemi in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

joemi — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:56:32 +0000

That's not how monopolies work, though.

New comment by joemi in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

joemi — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:55:27 +0000

iOS and iPadOS aren't the most dominant OSes, so therefore this can't be a monopoly.

New comment by joemi in "YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops"

joemi — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:41:21 +0000

Technically yes, but it's not without many caveats, and often depends on what you're doing with the recordings. See https://www.freedomforum.org/recording-in-public/ for _some_ of the complexities. (Note: freedomforum.org is a US site concerned with US laws, but the incident in the main post was in Canada, so not everything is the same, but Canada also has caveats/restrictions on such recording.)

New comment by joemi in "YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops"

joemi — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 22:09:33 +0000

Nice pithy statement, but police are able to do _many_ things that the general public aren't allowed to do, in order to do their jobs.

I'm not saying flock is good or anything like that, but arguing against it because the public can't do what the police can isn't a good argument.

New comment by joemi in "Beauty in DVD Menus"

joemi — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 19:26:11 +0000

Yeah, same. It was quite punishing to mix a bad DVD UI with a bad DVD player/remote!

New comment by joemi in "Beauty in DVD Menus"

joemi — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 19:23:08 +0000

It always seemed to me that (for the most part) the anticipation of special features was just because they were so hyped by the manufacturers as selling points. Kind of like when Apple makes such a big deal about the new colors their products are available in (and this is coming from an Apple fan). The one exception would be Criterion Collection DVDs which actually had worthwhile special features most of the time.

New comment by joemi in "Meta’s Muse is an adorable privacy and security dumpster fire"

joemi — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 19:51:59 +0000

To be fair, "just trust me, bro" has _always_ been Meta/Facebook's policy. Sure, they have a big long nicely-written policies if you look for them, but they continually break them, get caught, say "sorry, my bad" and then the way they broke the policy gets worked into the new policy as something that's allowed. This has happened so many times since Facebook started.

New comment by joemi in "Meta VR Glasses"

joemi — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 03:10:55 +0000

There's at least one way where there's a direct comparison: they both have dev kits.

New comment by joemi in "Meta VR Glasses"

joemi — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:20:39 +0000

Game console dev kits usually cost more than the consoles they're for, not less. They're not mass produced at the scale that the consoles are, and they're sold or leased to companies expecting to make several orders of magnitude more back off the products they create with the dev kits.

New comment by joemi in "Meta VR Glasses"

joemi — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:16:59 +0000

Game console dev kits are typically _more_ expensive than the consoles they're for. So "full price" isn't a good argument. (The fact that they were available to the public is a stronger argument.)

New comment by joemi in "Meta VR Glasses"

joemi — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:14:18 +0000

Game console developers always had to (and still have to) pay for their dev kits. That doesn't really make them products in the typical sense of the word, though.

The stronger argument for it being a product is that it was available to the public.

New comment by joemi in "AirPods 5"

joemi — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:49:45 +0000

You seem to be saying contradictory things. You're saying it's not a good incentive, but you're also saying Apple should have added it already. Why should they have already added it if it's not a good incentive? Why should they add it now if it's not a good incentive?

My argument is that adding it makes their product better, so they should add it. And if they add something that makes their product better, that's an incentive to buy it.

New comment by joemi in "iPhone Duo"

joemi — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:43:14 +0000

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

And I'll admit that there's chance I'd notice what you're talking about if I saw/used it in person instead of relying on promotional photos.

New comment by joemi in "iPhone Duo"

joemi — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 06:56:56 +0000

I don't think I agree that anything's cramped in the photo you linked to. If you were attempting to point out down at the bottom where it says "Size" that's not a fixed control. That's a webpage, and that's scrollable content on the screen. And if you were attempting to point out the little orange circle in the top-right corner, it's closer to the edge than other things, sure, but that very much looks like it was intentionally put there, not like they put it there because they had nowhere else for it. I've looked at other photos too and haven't seen things that are "way too close to edge", unless it's scrollable content that by its very nature goes right the edge when scrolling (or any phone that doesn't have a software bezel, mind you, not just this one).

New comment by joemi in "iPhone Duo"

joemi — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:13:02 +0000

> But find a voice that works for whoever is presenting

That's much much easier said than done. Sometimes the very rehearsed voice is as good as you're going to get, without the person being a professional lecturer.

> or get different presenters

It seems as though Apple is prioritizing having actual team leaders speaking about the products instead of just having hired actors do it. I'm perfectly happy with this.

New comment by joemi in "iPhone Duo"

joemi — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:42:32 +0000

The corners aren't rounded enough to impact those things though.

New comment by joemi in "AirPods 5"

joemi — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:31:59 +0000

So what are you saying? Because there are cheaper earbuds made by someone else with this feature, Apple _shouldn't_ add it to their earbuds? I'm not sure why that would be the case.

New comment by joemi in "iPhone Duo"

joemi — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:17:35 +0000

Why is that area non-trivial? Do you use anything that has important content in the very corners? I've never seen anything that has important content in the areas this cuts off. I'm really curious about your use of corners!