Another Day Has Come

Blind person using Apple products here, and at least for phones, I agree. I wouldn't say it's exclusively because of iPhone, but a large part of my independence is definitely it. There have been problems, bugs that go unfixed for years, MacOS VoiceOver is quite a disaster even though I do still use and enjoy the platform overall, and anything worth using can be criticized I think. But iOS has so many features built in that help me every single day. VoiceOver, but also all of the features utilizing vision like door detection, OCR, etc. they're in the magnifier as well so you don't need VoiceOver enabled to play with them, and I think a number of them also require a lidar sensor?

Anyway, my phone is such an important companion wherever I go that I keep several magsafe batteries on me whenever I leave the house for a significant time. It has made an absolutely huge difference in confidence. It is definitely one of the single most important assistive tech devices I have together with my computer.

The first time I saw a blind person using an iPhone, I was blown away. I follow some Apple engineers who work on accessibility, and they all seem very passionate about their work. It’s an area where I truly believe Apple is doing it to help people, not just for profit.

I’m not blind, but I’m using accessibility features like Speak Screen, and the text-to-speech is pretty poor (mispronunciations abound, markup is ignored, punctuation is misinterpreted), usability is poor (can’t start at a user-selected location on a page for example), and it’s rather buggy, especially within Safari. It doesn’t seem like anyone at Apple is interested in making it a better experience.

I struggle not to have a cynical take these days. Of course he cared about the ROI. The ROI is access to an underserved market, a halo effect, a new community of adherents, a new reason for customers to cross the moat into the ecosystem… a modest investment with a durable long term return in multiple categories.

I appreciate that it’s a win-win for Apple and for its customers, and I firmly believe that accessibility features serve everyone eventually. I’m glad that there are some billionaires who also see it that way.

I guess I just wish we didn’t have to rely on rare cases of billionaires finding it in their own best interest to happen to serve the rest of us. Especially when the actual accessibility work and everything else is actually done by a whole class of people that never make headlines just for leaving their jobs and being replaced.

The TV shows and stuff were never in competition for their money, they spent over $700 billion on stock buybacks in the last decade that's where it went, and they certainly could have spent a miniscule portion of that to ignite the iPad and AVP software scene. It will be interesting to see if they change approach with the folding iPhone, the rumour mill says it won't support iPad apps so it is primed for the same problem.

Could you clarify your intended meaning in placing these quotes side by side?

Nah the execs want feudalism, they should get all the things that come with feudalism.

Hello John Apple.

How does that link discredit what Gruber said there? It seems to me to back it up.

FWIW, Gruber consistently condemns Trump, and portrayed Cook's obsequious sycophancy as lamentable and highly questionable "take one for the team" acts Cook chose to do for the sake of Apple.

It strikes me as a fairly plausible analysis.

Go read what Gruber says about Trump on his social media, or even on the very blog you were just on. Safe to say he isn’t a fan. I think what he’s saying is that Cook has been quite effective at stroking Trump’s ego enough that the admin leaves Apple alone, which is absolutely true in my opinion.

In a different world where Cook messed up, it might be Apple (a Big Tech company with uber-liberal employees, marketing, and vibes, and an openly gay CEO!) being designated a supply chain risk, not Anthropic.

Regardless of whether you agree with his opinions, Gruber invented Markdown. The world would be a very different place today without it.

> Until now Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades.

Going back to 2008:

> But the most fun on the conference call came when he parried analysts’ questions about new product areas that Apple might or might not enter. A recurring question among Apple watchers for decades has been, “When is Apple going to introduce a low-cost computer?

> Mr. Jobs answered that decades-old complaint by stating, “We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.” He argued instead that the company’s mission was to add more value for customers at current price points.

* https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/2...

USD(2008) 500 = USD(2026) 760:

* https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

which is about what the Neo costs.

> Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades

What a wild take. I guess that explains the massive and growing popularity of iOS over that same time period.

People want another "iphone"-level impact. I would bet there never will be. A device that does everything that we carry with us will also be like an evolution of the smart phone.

The only possibility I can imagine is a home robot that takes off.

They're now building the best cheap laptop ever made. That feels mass market to me.

2.5 bn iOS installed base, clearly a niche market.

As far as I know it should be pretty easy for Apple to comply with the regulation. The battery needs to be replaceable with standard or freely available tools and without adhesives. Many of Apple’s devices already meet this standard.

Edit: I'm not sure on the adhesives part. Apple uses an electrically-releasable adhesive in some of their newer products. The MacBook Neo doesn't use battery adhesive at all.

There are considerations in the law for water proofing, device safety, and battery durability (maintaining 80% capacity at 1000 cycles, which Apple already does). They do not require a pop open battery door on every device like it's 2005 again.

Apple already provides repair tools, guides, and replacement parts both to end users and third party technicians.

These regulations are complicated, but they aren't new and Apple isn't being blindsided with some catastrophe here.

To be clear, replaceable battery doesn't mean a lid like phones used to have. It means that you should be able to take the device apart with simple tools and remove the battery and pop in another one.

It actually probably affects other phone companies more than it affects Apple, as some of the others have very poor repairability

The battery thing doesn’t apply to water resistant devices, so doesn’t matter for iPhone/Apple Watch.

There’s rumors that upcoming iPad models are water resistant, I suspect that’s the motivation for it.

The Microsoft Lumia 540 looks remarkably like a modern phone still and it had a fairly easily replaceable battery, because it allowed you to replace the back cover.

There's also the Lumia 920, which is arguably a nicer looking phone than anything Apple current have, also have a fairly easily replaceable battery, requiring you to remove just two screws.

Didn't the Apple Faithful say the same for usb-c?

The iPhone 4 was easily disassembled with screwdrivers...

Here's the full context of that quote:

> In August 2011, Steve Jobs was sick. For years he’d managed to stay a step, sometimes two, ahead of the pancreatic cancer he’d been battling since 2003, but no more.

I read two steps as a physical metaphor—i.e., it was following him closely—and not like a chess metaphor—I.e., two moves ahead.

you met john gruber at apple?

He has always been a washed up irrelevant grifter.

The only thing he is known for is critiquing about Apple and harping on about Trump when it is a slow news day.

The day that Apple rebuked him last year sent his “blog” into the down path of irrelevancy.

I am sure there are more people in Apple who dislike this guy.