You don’t say

https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/16/iphone-apple-app-store-search...

The iron law of encrapification: if a company can make more money by downgrading the user experience, it will. I imagine within Apple there were still people who advocated for a better, more transparent user experience, but ultimately they seem to have lost out to services people who just want to grab more money.

It's unfortunate because user experience was a core differentiating advantage for Apple that got them to where they are now.

IMO that's unavoidable when you're a public company beholden to shareholders who only care about short term stock prices.

OK, maybe not all shareholders are playing the short game, but I feel like a lot of them are.

I miss Tim Apple saying that there were things (accessibility) that Apple did that weren't based on ROI, and people who disagreed should get out of the stock.

> I miss Tim Apple saying that there were things (accessibility) that Apple did that weren't based on ROI, and people who disagreed should get out of the stock.

That sounds like a great way to get booted out of the CEO position.

I don't understand, Apple users did get a more "transparent" experience /s

Hahaha. On an unrelated note I immediately turned off Liquid Glass.

Dawn of the year of the Linux desktop!

Seems like you’d asymptotically approach 0% and then this metric would ignore eg space travel or food production efficiency

Wild how well it would fit with CL LLMs in 2025

Similar to certain banks in 2007/2008, the idea would be “so much investment is tied to one company that if that company went bankrupt, it could have consequences for the broader economy”

The thing is, it is not 2007/2008 any more. The US government is holding record amounts of debt and countries around the world are now trying to become independent of it. This includes its bond markets on which the dollar relies upon to give it its reserve currency status, which in turn is what gives it its power to print money and bail industries out. If something happens that requires Big Tech to be bailed out and international bond holders decide the US is no longer reliable, it could very well end up triggering the collapse of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and the downfall of the US as we know it.

Not to mention, there’s also that tariffs thing going on.

I think most Americans would be struck by the revelation that the government has hidden cameras in traffic cones

Have most Americans never considered undercover operations? If you are investigating someone, you don't want them to know about it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be bothering with the undercover aspect. Now that the department has cool hidden cameras, of course they will be used for other purposes.

It's not like I'm out there hunting down police abuses, but having hidden cameras is just something I would absolutely expect them to have. I did not know they specifically had cameras hidden as traffic cones, but I'm also not shocked they do. That's the shocking part to me is the shock of others instead of others also going "of course they do"

Probably not, Apple would have to opensource it and that’s unlikely

Apple’s the exception that proves the rule, they do a fantastic job supporting legacy APIs, frameworks, and devices

I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem in one form or the other 40 years and that’s definitely not true compared to Microsoft.

Most recently they dropped support for 32 bit Mac and iOS apps. But before that it was dropping support for PPC apps and 68K apps.

On the hardware side, the funniest was they dropped support for my Core 2 Duo Mac Mini and I could still install a supported version of Windows 7 on it.

> they do a fantastic job supporting legacy APIs, frameworks, and devices

They do not.

They talk a good game, but the development tools, bright and shiny, but mostly work.

Mostly, is not good enough.

While they have so much mind share in the USA they are unavoidable. But from a developer perspective they are dire

As of two years ago. I find it hard to believe they have changed

There are 10 different answers for how to take a substring by index+len, depending on which version of Swift. They even changed how arrays as function parameters work between versions.

So then just use one version of Swift

Not viable to stay on an old version, especially doing iPhone dev. The real answer back in the Swift 1-4 times was to just use ObjC instead, it still had full support.

Also a summary of their efforts so far, lots of info I’ve not seen discussed much (though I am a fairly casual follower of SpaceX)

Which the OP acknowledges, but it’s an extra step (and one that a lot of people don’t realize is possible) that shouldn’t be necessary.

Androids implementation doesn't even have an extra step of screenshotting like iOS. You can just swipe up to open recents screen and start selecting text by holding down. Although it's not as good as native selection since it does some kind of OCR vs actually selecting the text data, so it cannot properly copy things it doesn't understand like random languages or hashes/urls etc. It does has it's own advantages though since it can select anything like text from paused videos vs only rendered text views if app allowed native selection).

Right, the more steps there are in the process, the more people just drop and forget it.