Like, kind of unreasonably good. You’d expect some perfunctory Electronic app that just barely wraps the website. But no, you get something that feels incredibly polished…more so than a lot of recent apps from Apple…and has powerful integrations into other apps, including text editors and terminals.
A future where we carry and manage just one device could be incredible. That said, today, even if iOS weren’t so locked down and more capable of that, I think I’d find myself frustrated. I run on device local llm’s on my iPhone and a heavily quantized 3b parameter model starts to cause the iPhones thermal management to heavily throttle after just a few prompts with light tokens, to the point it’s slower than 1 token per second for inference or response, and the phone gets hot to the touch. Maybe the rumored half iPhone half iPad device could be the eventual platform from which something like this emerges.
While my main driver is a maxed out MacMini hooked to an Apple Studio monitor, at least once a week I pack up and store my MacMini and plug an iPadPro into my large monitor for a few days.
So, I feel like I routinely experience what we are talking about in this sub-thread. Given a few VPS’s to ssh/mosh into for programming and a keyboard and mouse, this is a workable setup.
The one thing that always gets me to unpack my MacMini and set it up is that even with 16G shared memory on a iPadPro, I can only run local models in a chat-style app. On macOS, my LLM use is mostly embedded in experimental scripts and apps.
exactly. The real shame of these devices is they're 99% of the way there but that last inch of running x script requiring you to whip out a form-identical device that has been blessed with the ability of running uncertified code is maddening to say the least
perhaps that's what they're developing all these "private compute" servers for. Though I would be less than happy if Apple, the last (relatively) untaken hill of the SaaS enshittification wars were to go down that road. In the meantime I will continue to use my hilariously overpowered laptop as a SSH terminal to the machine I actually work on
Same is true in Iceland. It’s just the established norm. Much less costly vs installing gates and barriers and payment terminals and easier to add paid parking to non traditional locations where constricting entry/exit to barrier’ed lanes would be a challenge or impossible. Shifting the payment experience to the user’s smartphone.
It’s still a bit foreign to visitors from places where this isn’t the norm but for Iceland and Icelanders it works well and is a non issue.
To be fair, the relationship between the Icelandic people and their government and their corporate class is wildly different vs that in the US in 2025 to say the least.
A month or two after a visit to Iceland (my favorite country by far by the way), I received a ticket in the mail for speeding. It included a picture of the car I rented and a closeup of the driver's face- a face that did not belong to me (presumably another renter).
Luckily, a quick phone call and a copy of my drivers license cleared things up, but systems like these inevitably lead to "guilty until proven innocent" scenarios instead of "innocent until proven guilty".
Yes, profoundly true and sadly profoundly not understood by most. Levers can be pulled for near term quantitative gains at the expense of long term qualitative experience. ERP systems and the like largely measure the quantitative, all things pegged to the almighty dollar. Most orgs have no such system or competency (with the exception of siloed martech systems) for measuring the qualitative. And the customer journey isn’t set up in such a way to reliably and consistently throw off the needed data in the first place. I’ve been preaching that orgs looking for true longevity need to make measuring experiences and sentiment a core competency, so the qualitative impact of levers being pulled can be measured and reported on in realtime, allowing short sighted decisions to be backtracked, and ideally, long term, putting functional guard rails in place that prevent those decisions from being made in the first place.
I think it's fair to say the MD11 has had a difficult time, but I would caveat that it performs well for an aircraft of its vintage, and is still an acceptably safe aircraft. There have been something in the neighborhood of 2.4 million successful missions completed with the MD11, and around 12 hull losses with fatalities, around 14 hull losses total, over the 35 years the MD11 has been flying. Yes, it's below average compared to modern wide bodies (a330, a350, newer 777/787) which are incredibly (truly incredible to me) safe.
I do expect this incident will accelerate the retirement of the balance of the fleet that is still flying and the MD11 will complete its disappearance from the skies in the US before the end of the decade.
According to this article from just a few weeks ago there were 56 active MD11 (well, 55 now), split almost evenly by Fedex and UPS, and scheduled to be replaced within next 5-7 years:
A lack of effective resiliency and redundancy at all of the major US airlines makes air travel feel like a bit of a coin toss in terms of whether you can expect to get where you need to go on any given day. In the past 3 years each of the big 5 have had multiple full ground stops due to multi-hour/multi-day system failures. They get heavy coverage during and in the immediate wake but consumers and the market tend to forget relatively quickly. As such there just isn't enough consumer or regulatory pressure on these airlines to invest the actual resources required to build more effective fault tolerance into their operations. I'm afraid this is just going to be part of life in US air travel for the foreseeable future.
A small excerpt of the memorable ones or where I was personally affected, but there have been many more over the period:
Holiday 2022 Southwest system collapse
July 2024 Delta 5 day outage
August 2025 United weight and balance outage
June 2025 American outage
October 2025 AWS outage impacting AS, AA, UA, DL
What amazes me is watching Delta specifically on several occasions their crew management system seems to be a huge weakness. Once it goes down it seems to heavily rely on crews calling in to note where they are and other status details.
It's like once it goes down all state is lost and for a long time, often days, crews describe having to call in and wait while they figure it out who does what / goes where.
I don't like to oversimplify, but it really seems like a solvable problem ...
The diversions were almost certainly for this reason. Crew scheduling, weight and balance, passenger manifests, flight plan filing with ATC for IFR, etc are all handled before takeoff, once it's in the air there's not much ground systems involvement required. But if all gates are occupied with outage impacted planes and space is tight or non-existent to stick more birds on location, have to drop it somewhere with room for dead birds. Could have also dropped it in a location with more anticipated crew availability when ops resumes, however much less likely given the outage ops likely didn't have a handle on that info or the ability to be planning ahead like that.
I think it’s a quiet but deliberate strategy to keep macOS the spiritual successor to NeXTSTEP. While many of Jobs principles are under pressure at current day Apple, his ghost lives on.
I think you mean literal successor. It's descended from NeXT's codebase. Mac OS X 10.0 was basically NeXTSTEP 6 with Apple logos, Carbon and a Mac OS 9 VM.
There's a "ship of theseus" problem with this idea. There's enough different about OS X (different kernel and BSD base, different display server, different driver stack) that I think it's fair to describe it as a separate OS, yet clearly a lot _is_ directly taken from NS, especially the ObjC/application layer stuff. The waters are further muddled by the existence of Rhapsody and OS X Server 1.0, which are much more clearly "NeXTSTEP 6 with Apple logos, Carbon and a Mac OS 9 VM". I don't think anyone outside the original OS X development team really knows just how much code was kept vs scrapped for the start of OS X development. Given that NS/OS was based on USL-encumbered BSD, it seems likely to me that nothing from the original NS kernel was kept for that, at a minimum.
That's why I said 6, Rhapsody/OS X Server is 5. The kernel is/was the same kernel as NeXTSTEP just updated. The main differences were Carbon, Display PDF instead of Display Postscript and the new theme.
I bought the base model shortly after launch. It went from the coolest piece of tech I had ever handled to in a drawer untouched for at least a couple weeks. It probably would have mostly stayed there or been sold on eBay, until... right at a year ago I was in stopped traffic and hit by a distracted driver at highway speeds. Two broken hands, fractured sternum, head injury with vision issues, life changed in an instant. Fast forward a few weeks - hurt, bored, unable to use a computer comfortably I started using it to mirror my Mac with a lap desk & a Magic Keyboard/trackpad. It was a godsend, I was able to comfortably use my computer, communicate, watch TV, etc. Now, today, I'm mostly recovered, but I still use my VP daily, when not in meetings it's my preferred interface to my Mac, working without it feels like I'm missing a critical piece of the interface.
Sorry to hear about your accident, and glad to hear you've mostly mended up. Now that you're hopefully back to being for the most part a fully abled user I'm curious which parts of the interface feel critical for you now? What does your usage pattern actually look like today?
I don't think that was intentional, but it is. You're not the first person I've heard that has used it to accommodate a physical disability like that.
In fact, I used mine that way as well. I was also in a car, and lost my glasses in the process. My prescription had expired, and my face was swollen so much that even a week later I wasn't able to get an accurate eye exam. It's been two months, and I still haven't gotten my glasses worked out completely; I'm using a pair now with only one lens because one was defective.
I was able to comfortably wear the Vision Pro before I was able to get an accurate vision prescription, which I believe is because of the customized light seal. I used it for both work and play for a couple of weeks, until I was able to get new glasses that are adequate for screens.
That is patently false and nothing but rhetoric. Chicago has been consistently number 1 or top 5 for corporate (inbound) relocations over the past decade. Doesn’t fit the narrative so you might doubt me, google it. NYSE bought the CHX in 2018 which was nearly defunct in terms of volume even then for access to its SEC license. They are posturing to ensure if Texas based exchanges take hold they are a part of the story vs letting the incumbent Texas Stock Exchange win that market uncontested. Time will tell if either exchange gets traction toward relevance or if this fizzles out entirely as the Chicago based exchange was doing.
