> Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys
The use case is rich iPhone users who want an easy experience to watch videos, read, or consume social media on a larger screen than their phones. It’s especially popular for the children or elderly parents of these rich people. You can argue this use case is narrow, but it’s decently profitable.
Just because this use case doesn’t apply to your experience doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees is a brainwashed fanboy.
I will agree that the iPad Pro range seems overly niche to me — but also it could be I just don’t understand the use case. If someone else finds it productive and pleasant to use, what difference does this make to me or you?
My recent-model Samsung TV repeatedly opens a pop-up info window about their AI features while my AppleTV is playing movies and shows.
So I didn’t connect the TV OS and it’s still thrown in my face. It’s not the end of the world to have to find the tv remote and dismiss a popup every few days, but I sure would welcome competition who doesn’t try this sort of nonsense.
I've found you have to stay granular, i.e. to the model level rather than the brand level, or you end up with basically no consumer focused brand to pick from (or, even more likely, a misunderstanding that a given brand had no such problems because you didn't casually run across an example).
Popping up dialogs in the middle of watching a movie sounds like a hidden manufacturing defect. That should be enough to get your money back on returning it to the shop (assuming your country has anything resembling consumer protection laws).
You hate that, but what I hate that so many of my tax dollars are funnelled into bloated software run by awful foreign companies with massive lock-in scams, when better free software is available. I hate that lobbyists and consultants get these systems into place and can’t be unseated despite its utter unreasonableness.
It’s a tremendous mis-allocation of public resources. Hiring local people to tailor the free software which already exists and contributing those changes back to the world would spend fewer of those dollars and spend them locally, and be pro-social at the same time.
So I don’t hate this story. I love it and see it as a massive win.
That's a double-edged sword, though. Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on. With a purely Open Source strategy, you'll have to pay multiple external consultants to take care of part of this, and/or cover these roles in-house. And suddenly, you've taken up a lot of tasks completely foreign to your business domain, such as new infrastructure and its maintenance, documentation requirements, software development, and so on. And we haven't even talked about the massive effort of educating your entire workforce on new tools and workflows.
Assuming you just replace a proprietary software ecosystem with an Open Source one and immediately get the same thing for free is a very naive view that will get you in trouble.
Having said that, as a German, I am very happy this switch happens and seems to have some backing in the local administration at least. But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure. In the end, it got swapped out for a new Microsoft contract in a wonderful example of lobbyism and bribery, and Open Source and Linux have been discredited, to the point no winning mayor candidate can ever bring it up again as a viable alternative.
> With a purely Open Source strategy, you'll have to pay multiple external consultants to take care of part of this, and/or cover these roles in-house. And suddenly, you've taken up a lot of tasks completely foreign to your business domain, such as new infrastructure and its maintenance, documentation requirements, software development, and so on.
Yes, this is what I’m talking about. Hiring people and developing expertise instead of paying expensive consultants is a preferred use of my tax dollars.
> But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure.
While this may be true, there are also quite prominent cases where the massively expensive foreign consultant solutions have also lead to disastrous project overruns.
> Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on.
Maybe this was true at one point in time. But now, it just pays for AI/Copilot and your latest support chatbot.
This. Also, with FOSS, you choose who you hire for support. From the article, it seems they’re hiring developers locally, so it’s also creating jobs in the region instead of outsourcing to MSFT. But I hope they donate a bit to the maintainers, too.
Your errant interpretation of the title would imply that Valve was funding individual game developers to support valve? This would be a fool’s errand, compared to the much more obvious interpretation that valve is funding a compatibility layer that would enable broad support for ARM.
It's not a fool's errand. You are underestimating how few games most of Steam user's playtime is in. Getting proper support for ARM to make out the most performance on the most popular titles is a reasonable thing to fund. Valve can still use FEX for addressing the long tail of games, but it will have disadvantages to a proper ARM port.
But why would Valve do that, Steam is a game market place, that happens to provide a really powerful comparability layer to allow you to run many windows games on not windows. It’s not a platform in any meaningful sense. The Steam deck is a platform, and the Steam frame, and if they can get existing games running on them, without involving the original devs what’s the problem? Dev get a new market to sell their games into, Stream gets a new market to extend their store front onto, how is that not a clear win-win?
Also Valve does fund plenty of games, such as all of the first party games you might have heard of, like Half Life, and its long tail of sequels and spin offs.
But is the disadvantage worth the relatively high overhead of specifically adding arm support? I doubt that. It is better game devs focus on what they're better at - x86 - while valve and open source devs focus on what they're better at, than trying to split funds across competing solutions to the problem.
The solutions have distant tradeoffs. When you want to run the latest PC games on mobile hardware using a battery, every cycle matters. Using translation layers for x86 will never be as good as as a native port.
Yeah. Also, software written for a wide gamut of hardware configs, even those under the same CPU ISA, will always be slower than software written for a unique hardware stack and only shipped for that hardware. Does it follow that all software should be written for specific hardware? I think not, because the performance overhead you take on allows saving on massive economic costs. It just isn't realistic to use development resources in that way. Even if devs are better at making ports for their games than fex, that takes precious time and money away from making the game, adding features, polishing, etc. It is much more realistic and sensible to focus on the comparative advantage than the absolute advantage [1].
> When you get new hardware and new features, you don’t want them sitting idle while you wait for patches to get upstreamed. Whether you develop for IoT, automotive, audio or mobile, when you get new features in a system-on-chip (SoC), you want to take advantage of them right now.
Sure doesn’t sound like mainstream consumer pc desktop is the target at all. Yes, they do provide instructions for how to run this on desktop but it’s far from accessible for the overwhelming majority of pc users.
I mean it’s still a good thing for Linux desktop to have this as an option, I’m not complaining. But to be realistic those benefits feel tangential to what Qualcomm is aiming at here.
Fully agree. When I said "consumer linux landscape" & "personal computing platform" I was thinking much more broadly than desktop PCs.
Admittedly a hypothetical Arm-based Steam Deck or Framework Laptop were at the forefront of my mind, but I think any consumer product running linux qualifies, be it "IoT, automotive, audio or mobile".
Whether people are buying EVs with a slick linux-based infotainment screens, gaming handhelds running SteamOS, or smart-devices with fancy local AI features, I think the effect is the same. If Qualcomm predicts significant growth in demand for efficient, high perf devices running customized Linux distros, I think it could be great for FOSS at large.
That’s overly reductive, based on my experience working for one of the tech behemoths back in its hypergrowth phase.
When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base. The growth is exciting and its in the news and people you know and those you don’t are constantly talking about it.
In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects. Uninformed opinions abound, and this can make it easy to dismiss or minimize legitimate concerns. You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter.
Obviously the money is a factor — it’s just not the only factor. When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm.
> When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base.
Also known as "working hard to keep making money".
> In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects.
Gosh, that must be so tough! Forgive me if I don't have a lot of sympathy for that position.
> You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter.
If that were the case for a given company, they could publicly commit to doing the right thing, publicly denounce other companies for doing the wrong thing, and publicly advocate for regulations that force all companies to do the right thing.
> When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm.
I will say this as simply as possible: too bad. "Making your company a success" is simply of infinitesimal and entirely negligible importance compared to doing societal harm. If you "don't want to consider it", you are already going down the wrong path.
I’m disambiguating between your projected image of a cartoonish villain desperate to do anything for a buck, vs humans having a massive blind spot due to the inherent biases involved with trying to make a team project succeed.
Your original comment suggests a simplistic outlook which doesn’t reflect the reality of the experience. I was trying to help you understand, not garnish sympathy.
But why does that matter? I mean what is the practical relevance of whether they have a massive blind spot or are deliberately trying to make as much money as possible?
Getting privacy advice from an adtech funded outlet sounds like reading democracy advice from the Chinese ruling party or vegetarianism advice from lions to be honest.
It might be correct-and-incomplete but they just have no credibility on the topic.
WaPo is dependent on subscription revenue, which is more than 2/3rd of their revenue.
Advertising revenue is less than a 1/3rd of their revenue, and dropping fast. Ad revenue from more than 50 million visitors is less than subscription revenue from 2.5 million subscribers.
If WaPo was dependent on ads, they would have taken steps to increase accessibility to articles, but they didn't and haven't. Instead, they're restricting more and more content to subscribers, because ultimately subscribers are the ones that keep the lights on.
In no world is a third of revenue a "small fraction", especially with such big losses, so you won't be able to argue out of this simple fact that it's dependent on ads.
> and dropping fast,
Just like the number of subscribers and subscription revenue?
"But their omission of Adblock in this article means they can't be credible."
But adblockers do not fully solve the problem that the article is focused on. Namely, the use, e.g., by Meta and Yandex, of websockets in closed source mobile apps to listen on a loopback address for requests by mobile browsers, e.g., for tracking pixels.
There are approaches to prevent such tracking that do not necessarily require adblockers running in browsers. If the article mentioned Adblock but omitted other approaches, then does that mean the publisher is not credible.
But the point of the comment was that there are other methods besides ad blockers running in browsers. There are often alternative methods that "tech journalists" rarely if ever mention.
Sometimes, these methods are arguably better. For example, some methods can limit _all_ connections, whether the connections are initiated from (a) browsers, (b) other applications or (c) pre-installed corporate operating systems.
You’re not wrong, but there was a time many of olds remember when editorial content and commercial concerns were firewalled. It used to be outrageous, and usually wrong, to suggest an editorial position was contingent upon a business benefit for the media outlet.
They're more tightly bound than that. They're dependent on Google Display Ads. Which really makes their whole diatribe that much more pathetic.
Any media company that decided to traffic the ads themselves, from their own servers, and inline with their own content, would effectively be immune from ad blocking.
> Ditching these deeply invasive products remains a good idea
While still allowing random third party javascript to run unchecked on a parent website.
> While still allowing random third party javascript to run unchecked on a parent website.
Lol, why are you commenting as if somehow allowing it to run negates the other good ideas in some way? Obviously some is better than none, and all is better than some, but each step takes more effort.
It’s odd that orgs like NYT don’t run their own ad services. I’m sure they have a dedicated department for ad sales for physical copies. They’re large enough that companies would work directly with them. And they would have at least some editorial control on what is displayed on their site.
I've worked for a few companies that had ad placements. I wasn't too deep into that side of things, and it was a long time ago, but as I recall, at reddit there was an in house ad auction platform. If there wasn't any ads sold for the period, we'd either show in house ads (think the old reddit merch store, pics of animals, a pic of one of the reddit staff with a paper tube on his forehead to resemble a narwhal, etc) or ads from a network like AdSense. Once upon a time this actually caused issues because there was malware being served from one of those and networks
Hosting the ads on the same server as the content is done in some cases, but doesn’t result in any immunity. If the ads are sufficiently annoying, it only leads to a merry little game with the adblocker annoyance list community, where they figure out new regexen to block the content, deploying daily. Bypass the blocks too effectively, and the adblocker will accidentally start blocking website content. Users will assume the website itself is broken, and visit less.
Self-hosting ads is not really a winning game unless your ads are non-animated, non-modal static text and images.
Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there.
If you don’t like Google (I don’t), or don’t like where they are moving their products (I don’t) — please use a competing search engine.
I’ve used DuckDuckGo for years and I don’t miss anything about Google. There are plenty of other good search engines out there too.
It’s not particularly difficult to switch away and get an experience more to your liking, so it’s a bit baffling when Google Search product decisions are equated with burying the web alive. Just don’t use it!
You have control over what you use to search the web, but you don't have control over the incentives of publishers, the content of which google used to get big and monetize and is now cannibalizing.
If the intent of the article was to say that Google is creating an environment which incentivizes publishers to lock away content from scrapers, then that’s probably correct in the medium and long term.
But I feel like the market described as being cannibalized here was already in the throes of death thanks to blogspam SEO. For many information categories, in my experience AI results are quite a bit better than the top-ranked results.
And typically for those types of results you want to quickly shuffle off general web search into something more specific like Wikipedia or a site with domain expertise.
LLMs read like ad copy even when they aren't ads. LLMs presumably trained on a ton of ad copy. A lot of ad copy is considered "public domain". Aren't the ads already injected and the real trick will be getting the advertisers to foot more of the bill?
I half believe Gemini already has an "AdSense billing model" in the works.
When "to google" has literally become a verb in several languages, you know it's not going to be that easy to convince literally hundreds of millions of people to use something different. For many unsavvy people, Google is and continues to be their window into the web, and they wouldn't even know they can have it another way.
Definitely poor branding. It needs much better 2025 branding and it’ll probably take off in this AI search era where results are really poor tbh and very inaccurate at times.
I don’t think AOL ever topped 40 million users while a significant chunk of humanity uses Google. This entire conversation hinges on their unprecedented scale and reach, I don’t think this is an apt comparison.
Sure, and that also didn't vanish in a day. All I'm saying is that there is a ton of inertia, and people will not be switching to something different in an instant.
It's a seemingly patronizing joke meme, but I've repeatedly seen many of my relatives type in e.g. "Facebook.com" into Google search box, and then blindly click the first entry (which is completely at the mercy of being hijacked/prioritized based on either who's paying more money to Google, or latest fun extension / glitchy website they've installed).
I have not yet found a working approach to alter that behaviour - obligatory XKCD reference [0]
So true and the holy grail of being the first entry fuels the industry of reviews and stars which fuels the industry of bad review removal services etc and so on. This is such a vast ecosystem and so humiliating for the participants that it is only logical to let AI write, read and handle it. This is our chance to get a life. Lets not squander it.
I find that yearly works better for me psychologically for stuff like this.
I got a 1 yr professional of kagi just to try it. IMO the results work. I've never seen Google do better when I compare; I have seen the Google AI responses be consistently straight up wrong.
To me it's worth the cost knowing I'm paying a sustainable rate for a service. Plus I want no part in whatever the hell Google is doing these days with search.
If Google Search gives you the experience you want, you should probably keep using it. I was discussing options for people who are dissatisfied with their product or product direction.
DuckDuckGo has not been infected yet, but for example also with Bing, if I make some search, a good part of the screen is wasted with some unwanted "Copilot Answer".
As expected, the "Copilot Answer" is not only useless for me, because I always want to see the original sources, but it is also unreliable.
Just today, I have made a search for the public holidays in some European country for the year 2025, and the "Copilot Answer" has presented a list with most of them. However, one holiday was omitted despite existing, and it was exactly the one in which I was interested, because I was not sure if it is a non-working day in that country and I did not know which is its date in 2025.
I've been using Brave search and it has had the AI answers for much longer than Google has. I would even go so far as to say Google stole the idea from Brave, but then someone will point out a different search engine that was doing it longer than Brave.
I find it extremely challenging to believe you actually think that. I can't even host my own email anymore without all of my messages getting filtered as spam, because if your email service doesn't play nice with Google, then you might as well not exist. Not to mention youtube, adsense, Android (Google is trying to kill AOSP to sink their claws more deeply into Android in light of the recent antitrust suits),
Google owns too much. They're easily on the same level as standard oil and the railroad tycoons.
When a company is paying millions annually, just towards psychologists, to keep people hooked, telling people "lol just turn the computer off" is disingenuous at best.
I've been using a private email server for decades now, but it's become clear that none of the email I send using it arrives at its destination. I can receive email with them, but not send.
That's certainly possible. I've had repeated issues over the years with my compilers being identified as "malware" because the object code did not match the Microsoft C runtime library. I.e. the code was not a match for anything in their databases.
I pay for FastMail with my own domains, and a huge portion of my email gets silently dropped, even when sending via FastMail vended domains. It's awful.
For one, I didn’t say anything about email or you had to boycott Google completely. You can just change your browser to use another engine it takes like 10 seconds max. Google Search is not the web.
Second, since you brought up email —- I’ve used Fastmail for a decade and it works just fine.
> Google owns too much. They're easily on the same level as standard oil and the railroad tycoons.
I agree 100% but since regulators largely refuse to deal with it, there’s nothing stopping individual people like you or me to make our own decisions. You literally just have to click a few buttons if you’re unhappy with the service Google Search is providing.
> Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there.
This is true for us, but a majority of non-software savvy people associate Google/Chrome (search implictly) with "the internet".
DDG is perfectly serviceable in ways Google is not.
But - Google owns the household name game. Anyone who does not just use whatever is the browser default quickly switches to Google because they are used to it and conventional wisdom is they are the best.
FWIW in terms of results, Bing is fine, I just fucking hate all the extra shit on the pages. I just want plain text.
The use case is rich iPhone users who want an easy experience to watch videos, read, or consume social media on a larger screen than their phones. It’s especially popular for the children or elderly parents of these rich people. You can argue this use case is narrow, but it’s decently profitable.
Just because this use case doesn’t apply to your experience doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees is a brainwashed fanboy.
I will agree that the iPad Pro range seems overly niche to me — but also it could be I just don’t understand the use case. If someone else finds it productive and pleasant to use, what difference does this make to me or you?
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