But if you read books from the 2000s, there was much discussion about the performance overhead of a VM and garbage collected language; something like WinForms was considered the bloated lazy option.

I’m sure in a few years computers will catch up (IMO they did a while ago actually) and Electron will be normal and some new alternative will be the the bloated option - maybe LLMs generating the UI on the fly à la the abomination Google was showing off recently?

FWIW Apple has made a similar transition recently from the relatively efficient AppKit/UIKit to the bloated dog that is SwiftUI.

It’s not like any of this is news. My newspaper of choice has been telling me about how fast china moves, in vivid detail, since at least 2018 - others probably knew much earlier than I did. I watched a graphic documentary on YouTube about Shenzhen in 2019 that gave me all of the same information in this tweet, minus the accomplishments that have happened since then.

My own eyes have seen how their consumer goods have transformed in a very short time. Maybe other Americans don’t notice because the key categories (tech, cars) have so much protectionism. I’m not sure about the Europeans.

The west is better at coming up with excuses and red tape than actually solving problems, it seems.

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_110#_agent-debug-pa...

It soaks the “rich” with an income threshold that isn’t indexed to inflation and kicks in at an income level where preschool is still a major affordability challenge.

And then you pay PFA and don’t get preschool for your kid because we’re still years away from having enough seats for everyone.

So it is preschool for some (multco paying for seats in existing preschool, aka kicking your kid out of their preschool spot) paid for by the broad middle class.

Even Kotek was ragging on it.

2020’s 125k/200k thresholds should be today’s 150/250 thresholds. They are not.

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/26/kotek-multnomah-count...

And if the voters were just a bit smarter and not bought into the “China bad” narrative, we might even get proper, nice, affordable EVs in the US.

Unfortunately the major vendors are in a race to the bottom and the alternatives aren’t much better. Linux might be better in some ways, but I expect there will be enough minor frustrations that on net it will be a downgrade, especially considering hardware. Some of it is just needing to learn the right way for the given system - people (perhaps rightly) tolerate needing to learn to use Linux but don’t tolerate needing to learn to use Mac. Obviously the basics should be intuitive, but power user workflows need to be learned on any system - installing yt-dlp is a power user workflow.

I see loads of essentially disinformation about Mac on here, mostly about things that could be solved by Googling (I prefer Kagi) or opening the help documentation.

When chip and pin was first rolled out, Europeans were shocked by the low security of swipe cards in the US. The reason that wasn’t an issue for Americans was (and still is) that credit cards have excellent fraud protections.

If someone steals my credit card, it is the bank’s problem, not mine.

The risk of paying by debit card on a regular basis is unfathomable to me, even with fancy tech to try to make it secure.

Also “unlocking” isn’t an inconvenient step, on iPhone it just happens automatically. As it should on android if the fingerprint sensor is in a convenient location.

I tried to switch to graphene for similar reasons to you. It just wasn’t viable, as you’re discovering.

And if you want to even attempt to have a modern smartphone experience, you’re logging into Google account, which is an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” move.

I tried switching but it is really hard when nearly every app is just horrible to use or missing basic features.

Sure there are some limitations on what software is easy to install (as there are and will be soon on Android), but at least iOS has software worthy of being installed.

If I have to install Google Messages for RCS, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality), … where is the benefit?

If I have to turn Graphene into a Pixel to make it usable, and I did, there’s not much point. And the apps are 90% of the time very noticeably better on iOS, so overall turns into a very bad trade.

There only two calendars in the entire Android ecosystem that support efficient use, one is a vendor lock in, the other is ugly as sin and requires a subscription.

As for web navigation, I’m comparing Safari to Vanadium and Firefox, neither are semi-abandoned.

Yes I could use Firefox and ublock to get around YouTube ads, but it actually worked worse than using Orion browser on iOS to do the equivalent. The Pixel 10 Pro couldn’t manage 2x without audio stuttering even at 360p. My iPhone can do it with 4K YouTube video, not that I need that.

iOS natively supports self-hosted contacts and calendars. No hoops. Android needs a separate app that may or may not work (my experience: it doesn’t work and doesn’t give useful feedback when it doesn’t work).

The app quality is so much worse on Android I had to go back. No forward gesture in apps and browsers - insane omission. There are literally only two calendar apps on Android that allow touch-based event editing - Business Calendar 2 Pro (paid subscription) and the Samsung exclusive calendar.

How does a modern smartphone not ship with a decent calendar?? Or touch friendly web navigation?

The rendering engine of the browser is far down the list of priorities compared to supporting basic daily workflows.

Yes DAVx5 exists, but Google Calendar was buggy with local calendars and DAVx5 actually didn't work reliably afaict.

Calendar.app is totally seamless with synology on iOS. Same with contacts.

Android was working overtime to make sure I use Google for everything. iOS isn't perfect but I don't have to jump through crazy hoops to be in control of my data.

- myNetDiary: seemingly equivalent features, but was super stuttery on Android - like 20fps just scrolling and interacting. It also didn't feel native at all

- Transit: the app was extremely glitch when trying to scroll. Seizure inducing.

- Wire guard supports on demand tunnel on iOS and macOS. No such option on Android. Inconceivable.

- If you want a polished experience, you have to install the Pixel/Google equivalents of apps, and it is hard to use them in ways that aren't associated with your Google account. The built-in messages app is horrible so you need to install Google Messages. If you're logged into Play you're logged into Google Messages; no choice in the matter. If you want a good camera you need to install Pixel camera, and they leverage that to lock you into Google Photos. iOS is no better, but the trade off with Android is less polish for more choice, not less polish for the same strong arm lock in tactics.

- the OS hijack navigation in ways that are horrible for day to day browsing. In particular, there are no forward gestures because android insists on making swipe left from the right edge go back. I was told android is customizable but there is no option here. Consequence: no draggable scrollbar, no forward navigation in browsers.

- the built-in calendar (Google calendar) doesn't support drag and drop for adjusting event times. It made the calendar app excruciating to use - everything takes many more taps than iOS. Also, no support for CalDAV and CardDAV out of the box means Android is a bad choice if you self host. I tried DAVx5 but found it unreliable.

- Google Calendar won't show local calendar entries on open until you navigate to a different app then go back.

- The back gesture works differently more or less at random. Sometimes an app screen is part of the navigation stack, sometimes it isn't. Because android apps assume you will have a back button, they don't provide any back option, but it is always ambiguous what back will do - close the keyboard, close the app, close the menu, navigate back within the app. On iOS the options are different but more clearly presented and overall far more consistent than android.

- copy and paste is less consistent than iOS. Sometimes it for some reason makes me do a detour through a full screen text editor. Not really sure why.

- app design is inconsistent - a mix of pre-material, material 1, and material 3/you.

- doesn't have basic features I've come to rely on. Like on iOS I can make an app require biometrics to open. No such option with stock android launcher. Similarly, basic android doesn't seem to have the photo slides how option for backgrounds, which I love on my iPhone.

- Android has poor support for RCS. RCS just worked on my iPhone, but it failed to set up after a day of trying on the Pixel.

- Health Connect does a bad job deduplicating data. On iOS my watch, phone, earphones, etc all contribute data. IOS can handle this without eg double counting steps. Health Connect cannot. There are also fewer options for visualizing the data, since Health Connect is very new, whereas HealthKit is well over a decade old.

There are parts of android that are polished. I think the basic launcher experience is overall better if you turn off the Google Now stuff. I like that the animations are faster. Material You, although underrealized, looks great where it is implemented, far better than liquid glass.