Plenty of places don't take American Express or Discover even now, but most will usually take VISA and Mastercard.
Costco's a weird one though because they resisted credit cards for a long time until they had their Amex contract with the dual-branded Costco Amex card, but then dropped them for a dual-branded VISA card in 2016.
California has more named islands than Washington, but they’re not all obvious since there’s quite a few small islands in the San Francisco Bay, Suisun Bay and the Sacramento River Delta. I tried fact checking which of the two had the most total islands between them but couldn’t find a satisfactory answer.
From a practical standpoint, sailing in the Bay Area is dead boring. There's not that much worth visiting. And once you go outside of the Bay, the next interesting stop is Japan. Puget Sound is way better.
It'd be nice to quantify this somehow. I guess one metric would be "navigable rocky islands"?
Not quite. He sold his shares in 1985. I think technically it was all except one so he could still get investor reports, but that last part might be apocryphal.
You missed MkLinux, but of the three (Copland, A/UX, and MkLinux), only one of those was ever slated to be the future of the Macintosh. A/UX was very interesting, but it was also encumbered with a fairly expensive UNIX license and was never really a consideration as a replacement for the existing Macintosh System software. Neither was MkLinux.
I know there was more to it than that, but it seems to me that a better managed Apple in some alternate history might have just thrown all the extensions "support" out, shipped, and said there would a better documented API for that kind of crap in the future. Probably also not waste time on OpenDoc because there was no shot that was ever going anywhere if you considered it from Microsoft's, QuarkXpress's and Adobe's perspectives.
Which is basically one of the reasons Mac OS X actually ended up shipping. You got a Classic VM in an OS that otherwise didn't care about making breaking changes, but you had a sliding scale from Classic to Carbon to Cocoa to fix your software eventually. Also OpenDoc got thrown out of consideration very early in the house cleaning process at Apple.
When the incentive is that when you develop features to distinguish yourself from the competition that stand out and make your own product better, but then the government comes along and tells you that you have to give that away, the value of developing new features for your own products starts to diminish and you start looking at different business opportunities instead. It actually undermines Apple as a competitor to Android, in a market where they are far from a dominant force, and the way the EU is doing it looks completely arbitrary.
> When the incentive is that when you develop features to distinguish yourself from the competition
The value of a networked feature goes up with the number of nodes implementing it. A product that is able to send files/stream media to all products is more valuable than one limited to sending to products of its own brand.
What you’re describing is true, but the iPhone runs general purpose software. They don’t have to give away their own features to their competitors and people who aren’t their customers, and it’s more valuable to them as something they took the time to develop as a point of differentiation to give their customers a better experience than they would otherwise have.
An iPhone can already send files or stream media to all products provided you negotiate the protocol by which you do it and the software is available or you write it yourself. YouTube has Google Cast built into it, which you don’t have to use with an Apple TV because AirPlay will work, but if you say wanted to put video from your phone up on a Samsung smart TV, it’s an option. If you want to transfer files from an iPhone, you are not lacking in options, but if it’s to another iPhone or a Mac, AirDrop is just one of those options.
Correlation != causation. Furthermore, the business models of a phone manufacturer are much different from a social media platform. Most phone manufacturers still make the bulk of their money directly from the end-user paying them cash (either for the device itself, or associated services), where as social media platforms primarily make their money from renting access to their captive audience to advertisers.
iPhone market share is above 80% in my country (Denmark), and smartphone ownership among adults is close to 100%. At that point, you're infrastructure.
If that's how the Danish feel, it makes more sense for Denmark to pass its own laws than rather than the EU, but I would posit that even at 80% marketshare, that's not enough to warrant the level of demands even from the Government of Denmark alone that the EU is imposing on Apple because in all the ways that matter for public purposes, the iPhone is already open enough: telephony, message exchange, open standards on the web, Bluetooth, I mean you name it, and if it's not a QoL thing like AirPlay or AirDrop, it's already there.
> telephony, message exchange, open standards on the web, Bluetooth
Things that existed before iPhones and that Apple cannot lock down? I'm glad they're open, but I won't give Apple credit. Particularly when they gently slid people out of SMS and into iMessage, for example. (Google did this less too but less successfully and are also at fault.)
Yes, the things that matter to a phone as far as the essentials go. I’m not saying give them credit, I’m saying that in every way that matters, the iPhone is already open, and the rest is Apple’s platform.
> Particularly when they gently slid people out of SMS and into iMessage, for example.
Or put another way, certainly the way it was perceived of at the time by their customers then and now: gave their customers a superior messaging experience over what was typically available to cell phones at the time that they wouldn’t be charged for. RIM also did this with BlackBerry Messenger. Then and now iMessage is a selling point for their phones, not the future of mobile messaging out of some misguided noblesse oblige or something that they owe the world (and by world I mean their competitors and non-iPhone customers) simply because they made it and people like it because it’s actually good–and for a long time it had its hiccups, but better than SMS was a low bar.
Elaborate if you’re going to disagree on why 80% is the magic number that means a supposedly liberal society should govern the QoL features of a foreign corporation’s product that already adheres to open standards on the communications hardware and software.
> when you develop features to distinguish yourself from the competition that stand out and make your own product better, but then the government comes along and tells you that you have to give that away,
Crippling a standard to reduce interoperability is not making a product better.
Steve Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT in late 1985 with the intent of developing a 3M computer: 1 MB of memory, 1 million pixels and 1 million instructions per second; or powerful enough to run wet lab simulations.
Jobs bought Pixar in 1986 when they developed their own computer systems. Luxo Jr. was shown at SIGGRAPH that same year, one part advertisement for their computer, and one part fun hobby project because some of the Pixar guys aspired to one day do a fully computer animated full length feature film of their own. This worked out very very well for them. Eventually, but they also stopped developing the Pixar Computer System in 1990 in part because Jobs was losing a lot of money propping up both NeXT and Pixar.
Development of NeXTSTEP began in 1986 under Avie Tevanian based upon the Mach kernel he had co-developed at Carnegie Mellon which was developed with the intention to replace the kernel in BSD, which at this point I believe is still just BSD and years away from fragmentation. NeXTSTEP 0.8 was previewed in October 1988 and all the core pieces were there: the Mach kernel, BSD, DriverKit, AppKit, FoundationKit, Objective-C runtime, and the NeXTSTEP GUI. 1.0 came in 1989.
IRIX 3.0 was released in 1987 debuting the 4Sight window manager which isn’t too similar to what was released in NeXTSTEP but does use NeWS and IRIS GL, however it was based on System V UNIX. It’s not until Pixar started making movies, I think actually starting with Toy Story, that they bought Silicon Graphics workstations. For Toy Story, the render farm also started off using SGI but eventually moved to Sun computers.
So if anything, IRIX and NeXTSTEP are probably a decent example of convergent evolution given they were both (at least initially) in the business of making high end graphical workstations and neither needed to reinvent the wheel for their target market.
Sure, but given the timeline, it’s unlikely the decision came about simply because he was influenced by “the Pixar guys”. I pointed out that the goal for the first NeXT computers was to be able to do wet lab simulations, and this was due to a conversation Jobs had with Paul Berg while Jobs was still at Apple. They met again after Jobs founded NeXT before drawing up the initial spec in September 1985.
More likely the decision to use Mach/BSD was because Avie Tevanian was the project lead for the operating system.
4Sight also didn’t debut until IRIX 3.0 (1987, also when it picked up the IRIX name), prior to that they used mex which I traced back as far as 1985 and prior to that I’m not sure, but I don’t think they had a window manager and it seems unlikely they would prior to 1985.
Reads like it was just a bad Mac all-around but the left-hand floppy drive was a visible symbol of that on the face of the machine because it was different from what was normal for a Macintosh in a machine that was full of things that were different from a normal Macintosh.
Also knowing Stephen Hackett, I don't think he's capable of hate for older Macs. He seems to love even the oddest of ducks and has a lab full of them.
Probably not, but Apple and NVIDIA collaborating on anything is news. They’re two companies that both want to be the ones wearing the Big Boy pants in any relationship so when they did anything together in the past, it hasn’t worked out for long.
Costco's a weird one though because they resisted credit cards for a long time until they had their Amex contract with the dual-branded Costco Amex card, but then dropped them for a dual-branded VISA card in 2016.
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