Did they? Why don’t I see people using this product while driving, or even walking down the street?

You're asking why, if its software is better than its hardware, people aren't driving cars with them on? Not sure I follow...

The software being good and it being used in a product consumers wanted are two very different things.

What did you think you were asking? Or was this just a lame, ill-conceived gotcha that probably needed another few hours in the oven before being chucked in the garbage?

Because it costs thirty five hundred American dollars?

The Apple Vision still needs to get two or three times better preferably with an M6 or M6 processor, whoops, more memory, faster SSD, thunderbolt five etc. oh and it needs to be $1500 Hmm… not possible for another two years? With better software.

And to do that more than likely the engineering and design of memory systems probably needs to come in house. No more outside dependency.

Because the HW is bad and pricing is bad. Not because SW is bad.

The hardware is best than class in both software and hardware by a mile who is this other company Meta or is it Microsoft with a HoloLens? Long-term iteration is the only way the Apple Vision Pro will get better if it took 13 years to come up with an M1 processor beginning to end and six years to have your first working modem that can be used in a smartphone there are no shortcuts long hard iteration is the only way.

I misread the comment I was replying to; thought they were claiming HW was good, and SW was bad.

If they are going to tap a HW guy as CEO, the next big thing should be giving exec comp and positions to every member of the Asahi Linux team, and putting them in charge of SW at Apple.

No don’t waste any time on Linux, Apple memory independence, clustering and moving on to M5, M6, M7, and beyond, a technocrat in charge yes, hopefully Apple will continue to iterate across the software ecosystems and the hardware systems.

Official support for alternative OSes would be nice, but no reason to throw everything out to make that happen.

I wasn’t arguing everything be thrown out, just that a competent group be put in charge, and also that they open the HW up so there is competition on the SW side.

If you put third party support under macos leadership or next to it on the org chart, it’d be systematically sabotaged to death. That org hasn’t delivered anything useful in a decade (“useful” == “a user might notice and care”), so there’s no evidence current leadership could ship leadshot from a wet paper bag, even if they wanted to.

Also, they’d nearly double their laptop share overnight if they did this, and it’d cost them 10-20 FTEs.

You think that officially supporting Asahi linux would double their laptop share?

Google is worse. Most of their apps are cloud only with no E2EE. Also, they are much more user hostile when deciding what goes in the store (they make money off spying, but apple makes money off hw, so this makes sense).

Both those ecosystems are rapidly enshittifying (apple cannot even reliably process keystrokes with subsecond latency, and google is banning sideloading).

We need a third, actually user-serving and open alternative. Maybe the new CEO will slow or reverse the bleeding on the iOS / MacOS side.

Google has so far allowed installing apps without their explicit permission. So it's much higher on freedom index, imo. And there's no obligation to use Google cloud apps. There's alternative for every Google cloud app.

Also, Pixels have unlocked bootloaders and Android is open source to the point where third parties can and do make alternative OS distributions.

And it's necessary to have a second phone to actually use any of that while maintaining access to one's banking app.

The hardware is nominally open only because they enforce participation in their software ecosystem via other means.

> And it's necessary to have a second phone to actually use any of that while maintaining access to one's banking app.

Partially accurate / misleading at most.

I have a phone that can be unlocked, and I will lose access to my banking app (among other things I require) if I do so.

If your “partially accurate” objection is that I didn't describe a perfectly universal experience, I will be greatly disappointed.

Vouching your comment from dead to reply in good faith:

your bank’s app sucks, tell them they suck,

and or use the webapp.

Tens of thousands of financial institution apps work A-OK on GrapheneOS,

that is my objection.

That’s good to know. Is there a list? Maybe a vocal community of computer literate people with money could loudly move to banks that do work (regardless of which phone they have).

Apps with Google SafetyNet usage, and or Google Pay NFC dependency to start the app, two common failure modes.

What does “unlocked” mean, here?

Are we talking about root checks? Bootloader unlock?

That's like saying there's no freedom in USA because I didn't get a visa to visit. We are talking about the freedom of Google devices. And you are talking about banks not letting you install their apps on a non Google OS. Totally different things.

What do you use instead of the Claude code client app?

Unless stuff changed since I last checked, context caching just reduces cost / latency. It does not change what tokens are emitted.

I’m not sure what you are implying by “enterprise license”, but if you think it provides any meaningful protection against malicious US government actors, you really need to read and internalize the US CLOUD Act.

On a related note, I really need to try some local models (probably starting with qwen), since, at least in 2026, the Chinese models are way better at protecting democracy and free speech than the US models.

I’m really hoping this leads to criminal convictions once these clowns are voted out of office.

Congress needs to retroactively eliminate the presidential pardon, or (more realistically) states need to pass laws allowing them to prosecute members of the federal government (the federal government already did this to the states; the result would be symmetric, and likely survive legal challenges.)

The underlying problem is that the presidency is just a non-hereditary elected monarch. If you make a "CEO of the military", you have made a king. We need to get rid of or neuter the presidency.

The reason why we have this defective executive structure is because the Founders wanted separation of powers and thought Parliaments were inherently corrupt. In a Parliament, the executive is fundamentally a creature of the legislature and cannot disobey it. The Founders wanted an independent executive that couldn't be overruled by normal legislative actions, because the executive is supposed to be calling out the legislature when they do a tyranny. And since that executive executes the law, they also need control over the military. Congratulations, you have made a king.

Separation of powers failed the moment America got a party system: why would a Republican Congress check the power of a Republican President? Likewise, the process for removing a rogue President is laughably difficult to execute. In almost every party system in America, impeachment and conviction would require a complete collapse of party support for their own President. This rarely happens, because Congress is reliant on the Presidency to send votes downballot[0]. Voters do not reward political traitors for saving the voter's asses.

So in my mind, the only ways to fix this would be to either:

1. Replace the President and Vice President with an Executive Council (ala the EU Commission) where there is one member per department and every member is a separate elected position.

2. Make impeachment convictions a 50% majority matter.

3. Abolish the executive branch entirely and have Congress elect its own to do executive functions (i.e. become a Parliament).

I can see problems with all three, but they seem less problematic than just letting one guy run everything with term limits as the only check on their power.

[0] In general, there is a problem with Congressional and local elections not getting as much attention as they should be. I've found that mail-in ballots actually make it a lot easier to vote downballot. Even if I don't recognize the name off the top of my head, I can look them up and have a decent idea of what I'm voting for. If you have to do this in a ballot box, you aren't going to have a lot of time (there's a lot of people behind you) and will just skip the downballot races.

At what point does Google’s incompetence imply organizations that use its services are liable for negligence?

What if this were a bogus subpoena for a lawyer’s privileged conversations with a client? A doctor’s communications about reproductive health with a patient? A political consultant working for the democrats?