Only allow “Mac mode” if you have a keyboard and monitor attached. Hell, automatically “sleep” it if you undock. Make it unapologetically keyboard-and-mouse first.

One UI for keyboard/mouse. A second UI for touch. One device that can do it all. That’s the dream.

I feel like we’ve had a few ham fisted attempts over the years at this, and Apple could actually pull it off. I get that it probably won’t happen though.

Mouse interfaces can be incredibly information dense because mice are both incredibly economic from a space and motion standpoint, and also somehow incredibly precise. You can flick your wrist to select any target the size of a grain of rice on a 32" screen. Touch interfaces require larger targets because fingertips are larger than a cursor point, and also require smaller screens because your arm now has to move the entire length of the screen, which is slow and tiring.

Where touchscreens excel is tactile experiences, things that mice cannot replicate. Multi-touch, pressure sensitivity, pen angle. Sweeping motions are difficult to control with a mouse. Manipulating multiple analog controls is nigh-impossible with a mouse.

When an app tries to accommodate both input styles, it inevitably ends up catering to one style or the other, unless two separate interfaces are built. And because a touchscreen laptop can be touched or have the mouse moved at any given time, it's not really possible to switch between the two input styles seamlessly.

I would really enjoy having a device that is capable of both, since the iPad has a gorgeous screen, a great form factor, and a lot of killer uses. But it can't cannibalize mouse interfaces or we wind up with the direction that MacOS is going.

There is nothing wrong with having a keyboard connected to a touch device per se, but the gross arm motion required to move between the touchscreen and the keyboard, and the awkward angle the keyboard puts the touchscreen at sort of nukes the usefulness of the touchscreen. And again, jumping in text is the sort of small target action that mice excel at.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that having touch means you only use touch. Same for a mouse/trackpad pointer. Each has strengths and weaknesses and it better at some tasks than others. The pointer is good for clicking on small UI elements or doing small movements. It suffers with larger movements across the screen. Touch is good for scrolling, zooming, tapping buttons, tabs, and sometimes links. It’s good for jumping around the screen and moving things.

The keyboard is a third input/control interface and can be even faster and more precise than the mouse pointer. When the mouse first came on the scene, people derided it as less efficient than a keyboard and complained that you had to move your fingers away from the keyboard to use one. They swore they would never use one.

Where these work best is a mix of input modes using different ones for different scenarios. Having a mix if broad and precise inputs means you don’t need to tailor the whole interface for just precision or just broad strokes. The interface can be designed to accommodate the presentation of information and let the choice of inputs be up to the user. A side benefit of having difference input modes is that your hands move in different ways for each. You are less subject to repetitive stress from doing the same hand motion for everything.

There's exactly one feature of touch interfaces that can be incredibly input-information dense, easily rivaling the mouse, and that's swiping gestures with 1-to-1 fluid animation for feedback. Usually seen with pie menus and the like. Drag and drop, the mouse equivalent, is extremely clunky - and mouse gestures that don't even involve clicking even more so.

[1] https://x.com/utmapp/status/1708907045314035986

A desktop mode was recently added for base Android tho. And you could always mod your Android device to open termux when you connected an external monitor, that sort of thing.

But I do agree with the original point that everyone has failed to make a unified interface for both modes and a distinct switch would be better until they can converge from real world learned lessons.

Apple will never make a product like that though.

Just tax it very very heavily and apply education / social pressure?

Australia (and the States) tried to impose ever increasing tax and restriction on smoking and over the last few years, smoking has reached critical mass, with more people smoking, cheaper smokes, and smokes becoming more available AND less regulated.

Previously a 20 pack was around $40-60 at most smoke shops, then the illegal darts started to come in, they were priced as low as $6 or $8 for the cheapest 20 pack. They become rampant and barely anyone purchased genuine smokes. In fact, these illegal smoke stores were exactly like real smoke shops, proper business, proper storefront and everything. Excluding the prices, you couldn't tell you were buying illegal products.

I’m guessing we’re gonna have a world like working on cars - most people won’t have expensive tools (ex a full hydraulic lift) for personal stuff, they are gonna have to make do with lesser tools.

i bought a $3k AMD395+ under the Sam Altman price hike and its got a local model that readily accomplishes medial tasks.

theres a ceiling to these price hikes because open weights will keep popping up as competitors tey to advertise their wares.

sure, we POV different capabilities but theres definitely not that much cash in propfietary models for their indererminance

What if that tool is something you can run on prem, and over time make the investment back?

It's not so simple.

Anyways, I'm just saying it's not so simple ;)

Real advice: national parks very much have seasons, be it weather, tourist (or lack thereof), wildlife, bugs, or all of the above. The same park can be a miserable experience or incredible a few months apart.

I left when shows I enjoyed were a revolving door, and the UI felt hostile (constantly trying to shove terrible quality original content on me).

When you're holding a hammer all the world looks to be nails or something.

EDIT: Also, there's no way in hell I'd let any of the AIs near something with my credit card info saved in their current state.

  bool silly_mistake = false;
  
  //... lots of lines of code

  free(x);

  //... lots of lines of code

  if (silly_mistake) { // silly_mistake shown to be false at this point in the program in all testing, so far
     free(x);
  }

FWIW there's a whole boutique industry around finding these. People have built whole careers around farming bug bounties for bugs like this. I think they will be among the first set of software engineers really in trouble from AI.

Imagine “silly mistake” is a parameter, and rename it “error_code” (pass by reference), put a label named “cleanup” right before the if statement, and throw in a ton of “goto cleanup” statements to the point the control flow of the function is hard to follow if you want it to model real code ever so slightly more.

It will be interesting to see the bugs it’s actually finding.

It sounds like they will fall into the lower CVE scores - real problems but not critical.

Those really evil bugs are the ones that exist in code paths that only trigger 0.001% of the time.

Often, the code path is not triggerable at all with regular input. But with malicious input, it is, so you can only find it through fuzzing or human analysis.

That is precisely what a static analyser can determine. E.g. if you are reading a 4-byte length from a file, and using that to allocate memory which involves adding that length to some other constant, it will assume (unless told otherwise) that the length can be all 4G values and complain about the range of values which will overflow.

Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).