Apple's Numbers and Pages seem very far from ideal. Zoho didn't quite work for me. Maybe I should try Clickup.

For consumers, they get quantity.

Although it shouldn't be impossible, it seems really hard to get any kind of real quality out of isekai stories. Usually the stakes are low and the setting is surprisingly similar (even though having a different setting is ostensibly the entire reason for the genre). All you end up with is variety in characters, and even then there are common tropes.

Most people don't seem to be using the best possible desktop experience. Their desktop is decided by an employer, or whatever is pre-installed, or who knows what. But an ad in the start menu doesn't seem like it's likely to budge that number much.

0. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

But let's say you use Microsoft Windows, but don't want a Microsoft account. You're going to leave Windows over this? And go where?

Wait, is 2023 the fabled Year of Linux on the Desktop, at long last?

I haven't used Windows in many years, and I'm not trying to defend Microsoft here. Still, the framing of this piece seems silly. Very rarely is any single thing reason enough for the average person to completely switch operating systems. The cost of switching is too high.

I live in the United States of America, where the government is bought and paid for by companies who dislike privacy for their users.

In the meantime, it may not be Apple's "job," but it's part of their value proposition, and the grumbling from software vendors indicates it's reasonably effective.

0. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-priv...

UFB, I note, does not offer a debit card.

4.15% is not the highest yield currently available, but it would put them fourth on this list[0] of ten, making them better than average even on that rarified list. This without fees or minimums, which would put them behind only Betterment, which is not a bank, but a brokerage account.

As always with an Apple offering, there are ways that some people under some circumstances can find better terms so long as they don't care about some of the benefits Apple is offering, but that's a very long way from "below current market rates," and comes from a company a lot of people are already trusting with their funds.

It's fine if you already have an account with UFB, carry on! And next month when it's a different company leading the pack, transfer. And the month after that, while Apple is still consistently in the top five.

0. https://www.investopedia.com/best-high-yield-savings-account...

At Apple's scale, it's relatively easy for them to deliver $20B in ad revenue without any privacy-invading means.

People seem to have forgotten, but ads used to be based on context, so people looking at apps related to fitness might see ads related to fitness, but that wouldn't follow them around when they looked at other things. Apple still seems to be doing that; I haven't seen fitness ads on games, or game ads on fitness apps.

I'm not sure 2022 looks quite as good as you're suggesting, but it's clear the pandemic had a profound impact, certainly.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/19/britain-eco...

I still pay nothing in gas taxes, the primary funding for road maintenance. That doesn't seem quite right. I'd be happy to pay an annual fee based on miles driven and weight class.

0. https://www.caranddriver.com/chevrolet/bolt-euv/specs

1. https://www.autolist.com/guides/average-weight-of-car

Siri should be better! It lost features post-acquisition by Apple, and it seems like user privacy is why.

Home automation is arguable. If you consider a single point of failure on a server somewhere to be bad, Apple's solution is pretty great. Their commitment to zigging where others zagged put them behind, since hardware vendors didn't want to put in powerful (expensive) enough chips to handle the cryptography, but while other companies go out of business, or transmit images and video to external parties, Apple's works reliably and securely.

Still, as with most of my complaints about Apple, it's a trade-off between privacy and functionality, and Apple will seemingly always choose privacy over functionality, even as Google consistently chooses functionality over privacy.

[0] Yes, there are examples of edge cases that suggest a less-than-perfect record. Contrast that with their competitors, for which invading privacy is foundational to the business model.

I believe literally none of those things, and have explicitly stated the opposite of at least one of them on this page.

At this point I think an LLM would do a better job of responding to my comments, based on context and syntax alone.

NPR, as it happens, has run many stories that seemed aligned with the right or the left, depending on the subject. They're generally pro-military and pro-wealth, while being against racism and censorship, so it's not as if they're either all left-wing or all right-wing.

If you can communicate the truth with kindness and be heard, great. If not, move on.

In my experience, unkindness isn't any more effective than kindness in effecting change; it usually prompts defensiveness.