But why on earth would they do that? It's both cheaper and safer to buy Google's model, with whom they already have a longstanding relationship. Examples include the search engine deal, and using Google Cloud infrastructure for iCloud and other services. Their new "private cloud compute" already runs on GCP too, perfect! Buying Gemini just makes sense, for now. Wait a few years until the technology becomes more mature/stable and then replace it with their own for a reasonable price.
I think they know about them they just don’t care enough to spend money on fixing them. They are still primarily an ad company today and their users are still primarily the product not customers.
I was recently working for a company which got acquired by IBM and we had to do it too. It’s an IBM thing. I bet most people at HashiCorp hate it, at least that was the case for us.
I travel a lot for work and don’t want to bring a second MacBook Pro. iPad works well in the plane for watching movies, MacBook not so much, at least not in Economy class. Can’t use my work computer for personal stuff anyway unfortunately. Also can’t download Netflix content offline on desktop.
Another use case is in the kitchen. Recipes, YouTube, FaceTime, etc. I use my iPad Pro in the kitchen every day when I’m at home. Easy to clean up. Using a MacBook while cooking will make it gross very fast.
A lot of small things. For example importing Live Photos. On macOS when you drag and drop an image and video file with the same name into the Photos app, the Photos app combines both into a single Live Photo. On iOS/iPadOS this does not work.
There is bigger things too. A proper web browser for example. Google Docs is barely usable in Safari on iPad with larger documents. The permanent banner at the top asking you to install the app is so annoying. The Google Docs app is somehow even worse. And it’s not just Google apps. Many iPad apps are just upscaled iPhone apps with lots of features missing compared to the web version. And don’t even think about support for multiple tabs or windows in apps.
For YouTube and Netflix my iPad Pro is great but anything beyond hurts. And this is the „Pro“ model. You can say maybe I’m too advanced for the „Pro“ but most users have _something_ besides of YouTube and Netflix they want to do and will feel these limitations sooner or later. It’s it not a laptop replacement and Apple wouldn’t want it to be.
All my other devices have 120Hz and switching from any of these to my 5 year old 60Hz iPad Pro gives me physical pain. If the iPad Air had 120Hz I would probably buy that right now. I think I’ll wait for another year though as I’m pretty sure the next iPad Air generation will have 120Hz, now that the non-Pro iPhone has it as well.
I know not everyone is as sensitive to this as I am, so I recommend going to the store and trying both the Air and the Pro. If you’re like me you will notice the difference immediately.
I don’t know if people are noticing this but apple.com doesn’t have a cookie banner. It’s perfectly possible to operate a website – even a shop – without having a cookie banner. Even one of the biggest here in Europe in terms of revenue. As OP said, cookie banners are just malicious compliance. You don’t need one unless you’re doing shady things. Unfortunately it looks like the advertisers and trackers are winning as the EU is planing to relax the rules. I believe there would have been another way, something like banning unnecessary tracking altogether.
> My excitement soon turned to frustration when I discovered that the Music app had to be installed for the iOS 18.4 ambient music feature to work.
Not true. I don’t have the Music app installed and ambient music works fine. It does not play in the Music app, it has it’s own
lightweight media player UI which looks almost the same but is separate from the Music app.
Is the change applied internationally or in the US only? Google Maps does have the capability to show a different name based on the user’s region. Since the official name is still Gulf of Mexico in the rest of the world, it would make sense to use the new name in the US only.
I typically don’t argue in favor of big corporations but I believe them, kind of. Apple includes a lot of things into their SDKs for free, which are paid on Google's platform. For example Apple Maps, Apple Weather, etc. components are all free and can be extremely expensive on Android (Google charging per view for Google Maps, for example). That is of course if you use these things in your app.
> for entrenching you further into proprietary technology
But isn’t this already the case right now? In my opinion this argument is kind of backwards because the lack of (or access to) APIs is precisely what’s preventing us from having alternatives!
Siri is proprietary, closed source, big corp, etc.
Want an open source, community based, interoperable, fully local, etc. assistant/AI? It cannot exist in today's world simply because it requires what Meta asks for.
I dislike Meta very much but I refuse to believe that creating or opening up such APIs would foster „entrenching you further into proprietary technology“.
Technically they could already do this as JPEG allows adding arbitrary data to the file after the image data. ZIP files allow arbitrary data BEFORE the image data, therefore a file can be a valid JPEG and ZIP at the same time. So all you need to do is to put the MOV into a ZIP and append that to the image file, done. Live Photos in a single file!
Btw., you can abuse the „unlimited“ „free“ photos storage that comes with Amazon Prime that way.