The Apple Watch - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2015/04/the_apple_watch <comment><USER3> Is John Gruber ever non-biased in his pieces about Apple? Given his history with the company, I feel like with Gruber we never ever get the real deal. Every article on every Apple product announcement starts out feeling well- intentioned and non-objective, but then always seems to segue into a subtle praise piece. I am not hating on him, he still makes some great points and he puts considerable amounts of effort into analysis pieces. I just feel like with Gruber we would never see an article honestly telling us something Apple have released is bad.

> Also, though it sounds trivial, I enjoy the perfect 60 FPS smoothness of > Apple Watch's second hand — a smoothness no mechanical watch could ever > match.

Based on a culmination of reviews and early preview articles I have read, videos and basically everything I have read about the Apple Watch this statement seems kind of ironic. The second hand might be smooth, but the very real performance issues people have encountered with the watch mean the rest of the Apple Watch experience is anything but smooth. What's the point of a smooth second hand if the rest of the experience is somewhat crippled and unusable?

I like the look of the Apple Watch and the very idea of it, but to an extent. It feels as though articles like Gruber's here are talking with reckless abandon, from the perspective that existing solutions aren't out there. From a user interface perspective the Pebble watch and Moto 360 especially are beautiful, well-crafted and smooth interfaces. Apple are not entering new territory nor are they introducing any ideas or improvements into the space (besides the physical appearance).

Lets not pretend that there aren't as equally good, if not, better smart watches out there. They might not have had the same amount of design and research put into them, but I think there is such a thing as over-engineering something. I am pretty happy with my Pebble watch, the battery life is great and so too, is the battery life.

I am by no means an expert, but I like nice watches and to me the Apple Watch will never match the build quality, feel and longevity of a nice traditional mechanical watch even if it is only from a battery life perspective.

<comment><USER4> He's definitely a shill. Imagine a couple years ago, when Gruber couldn't even bring himself to pretend to provide critical analysis of Apple products. I used to just flag daringfireball posts as soon as I saw them. These days there's at least information content in his posts so I usually leave them alone.

But Gruber also spends an extraordinary amount of time these days using framing devices to either draw false comparisons that put Apple on top, or minimize the cases where Apple clearly screwed up. You could easily cut this review down by 2/3rds just by getting rid of the superfluous framing he uses throughout and not lose any information at all. The amount of hemming and hawing in this makes me think that he's not really buying it this time. It's not a crap device, but it's not clear what it's good for and it's not strictly better than just a normal watch. He didn't really effuse about Apple's stated use-cases for the device. His hope throughout is that maybe it'll appeal to non-watch wearers?

You'll also notice that he carefully doesn't compare it to all the other smart watches in the growing segment. He pretends like it only is comparable to regular watches, like the Apple watch was introduced into a market vacuum, cut from whole cloth (Apple's magical genius cloth), and completely uninformed by the three decades of smartwatch development.

<comment><USER5> lucky for gruber, Apple has released an awful lot of good products recently. iPhones have stupid customer satisfaction numbers. They aren't the most valuable company in the world by a mile because everything they release is crap.

Obviously Gruber is a big fan of Apple, but your criticism of him is a bit harsh. I assume he didn't spend a lot of time comparing it to Android wear because he hasn't spent a ton of time using Android wear.

I'm a little afraid of the first gen bugs, and some of the reviews I read today weren't completely sold, but pretty much every single one that I read said it was far and away the best smartwatch they've used, even if they still weren't completely sold and gave it meh reviews overall.

<comment><USER4> Gruber is terrible. I'm completely unapologetic about my opinion about him. He's everything that's wrong in tech news today. He's been able to carve a niche for himself preaching to a choir of folks with large disposable incomes by providing unashamed regurgitation of Apple's marketing bullet points so that people can reinforce their beliefs by having another bullet point that they made the right technology purchase. If his recent posts continued his tradition of information free praise, I'd still be flagging them off the front-page. I can think of very few tech writers as well known as him who offer less useful information than he does on any topic.

You are right, Apple didn't get where they are by producing crap, but they also didn't get where they are without getting it wrong sometimes, and it's _really_ hard to find cases where Gruber recognizes that without bookending and drowning issues in a thousand words of qualification. Sure, he gets to point to the sentence among dozens where he mentions something that might, just _maybe_ , be wrong, but the context he places issues in minimize and excuse these issues away.

The question he needs to be answering is not if the Apple Watch is the best smartwatch on the market, I don't doubt that it is. But it's, "are smartwatches a good idea?". He's not capable of answering that question honestly because to Gruber, anything Apple does is a good idea, Apple is doing a smartwatch, therefore it must be a good idea. He waits till Apple tells him how to think, then he write a post recycling and expanding on their marketing direction -- and he does this completely unironically.

If you read his review with a critical eye it boils down to this:

\- It's a terrible watch (there's about 1,000 words trying to weazel around what a shitty watch it is)

\- The industrial design is nice

\- He hasn't found much value in the expressed use-cases it shipped with

\- If you don't wear watches, you'll probably be more interested in it than people who already wear watches

There, almost 6,000 words boiled down to the 4 main bullet points, and only the hardware received any real praise. I think it's interesting that these 4 bullet points are echoed in most of the early reviews I've seen. The problems he mentions, then tries to bury, are expanded on in more honest reviews.

They aren't really problems with Apple's version of the Smart Watch per se, but with the idea of Smart Watches as a class of product. It's really hard to come up with a Smart Watch that makes any kind of sense, and it's pretty clear that Apple hasn't been able to justify it (and if Apple can't crack that nut who can?)

Will Apple sell millions of them? Yeah probably. I wonder how many will be to people who made their purchase decision after reading daringfireball?

<comment><USER6> Totally baffled by your mindset. Why is Gruber terrible and everything wrong with tech news today? Compared to Engadget et al he seems reasonably fair and balanced. Please point me towards something he's written that's objectively biased or bad.

<comment><USER4> _Everything_ he writes is objectively biased. Have you ever read anything he's ever written?

Tech news is already so full of bought promotions pretending to be articles, fan boyism and subjective "analysis" it really doesn't need more. It's already enough of a burden on the reader to try to figure out if a review of some new product is being truthful or was paid for by an ad on page 23, or if the editor has some platform to push or if the writer wants to keep using the sources he's developed with some cool company.

Technology media is honestly pretty terrible in general, and very few of the faults of the arena _don 't_ apply to Gruber. Except he's also a really great writer. He's smart. So it's not quite out in the open like it might be on a lesser site like a CNET review. But he has lots and lots of tools that he employs to push his agenda.

Here's some literary devices that Gruber employs in almost everything he writes:

\- Minimizing or Maximizing Framing devices (when Apple is right, he makes them smarter than Gods, when they're dead wrong he makes it seem like a reasonable alternative that's still better than anybody else)

\- False comparisons (Apple's apple's to everybody else's inferior oranges)

\- Jumbling of facts (often used to lead into a Min/Max Framing segment)

\- Information-like sentences (lots of facts and figures, but no actual information)

\- Omissions (easy to excuse)

\- Emotionally driven excuses (Apple did it this way to pull at your heart strings)

\- Setting then ignoring a thesis ("Here's why Apple's is amazing", then uses the above devices to ignore that thesis when Apple doesn't live up to it)

He also likes to drop little bomb posts questioning the veracity and fairness of the rest of the media, which subtly informs the reader that he's not like _those_ journalists.

Here's his recent tech-news post history (I won't comment on his non-tech posts):

\- 'FINALLY' OF THE WEEK - where he criticizes the tech media for using the word finally in the following sentence "Cheap USB-C Cables for Your MacBook Are Finally Here"

\- TRIPADVISOR, BOOKING.COM REVIEWS START APPEARING IN APPLE MAPS - where he points out that Apple is a better company than Google because its Business Development team secured data sharing partnerships for Apple Maps

\- HIGHBALL 1.0 - where he pumps up a cocktail recipe app. He drops the not- so-subtle-jab at Google line "They might have actually found a good use for QR codes."

\- MORE ON APPLE'S CONSTRUCTION HIRING - where he brings doubt into Apple's probably illegal hiring policy for construction on their new campus w/r to convicted felons. Of course the doubt he sews is framed that everybody else _must_ be doing it so Apple discriminating against them is okay.

\- ROLLING STONE UVA RAPE STORY RETRACTION: A CASE STUDY IN FAILED JOURNALISM - again a piece that subtly brings up the failings of everybody else who's not him in providing trusted and Fox News style fair & balanced coverage of things

\- REPORT CLAIMS SAMSUNG PAID HUNDREDS OF 'FANS' TO ATTEND GALAXY S6 LAUNCH IN CHINA - an uncritical regurgitation of a quote from the WantChinaTimes, with an update of a quote from Samsung denying it. No insight or discussion from Gruber, no sources checked.

\- 'APPARENTLY NONE OF YOU GUYS REALIZE HOW BAD OF AN IDEA A TOUCHSCREEN IS ON A PHONE' - where he quotes somebody else quoting somebody from 2007 comparing a Samsung flip phone to an iPhone

\- FELONS BARRED FROM CONSTRUCTING APPLE'S CAMPUS - another post from him on this subject, this time excusing Apple because background checks on employees of the richest most profitable company in history must be "expensive"

\- Reach for the Sky, Pando - where he criticizes the SF Chronicle for breaking the story on Apple's discriminatory hiring process. He also takes time to defend Steve Job's notoriously abrasive personality and the illegal hiring practices Apple has taken part in previously w/r to tech workers.

\- JOANNA STERN'S GALAXY S6 REVIEW - where his only point is are that the S6 is an iPhone lookalike and Samsung's software sucks, and they aren't up to competing against Apple's products. Of course he completely omits that the article claims the S6, in balance, is a match to the iPhone 6. If your information source was Gruber's take on the review, you'd think the S6 was a cheap unusable knock-off. But the review doesn't claim that at all. He carefully omits in his quotes where the review praises the S6 for a better camera set, better battery life, faster recharging, bigger storage, cheaper price and a better screen.

and on and on and on going back _years_.

<comment><USER7> > \- JOANNA STERN'S GALAXY S6 REVIEW > If your information source was Gruber's > take on the review, you'd think the S6 was a cheap unusable knock-off

The software is the only point he cares to comment on. But his introduction to the quote is:

>> A rave review for everything but...

I had no trouble parsing this.

And for more context, this item preceded the link to Joanna Stern's review by a few posts:

[http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/04/03/bohn- galaxy-s6](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/04/03/bohn-galaxy-s6)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gruber's scenario with the two high school kids sending each other love taps, scribbles, and heartbeats was poignant. While the Apple Watch isn't for me, I can't begrudge those who decide to buy one. I think back to the late 90s and how I wouldn't have met my wife if not for IMing a screenname a mutual friend of ours passed along to me.

The internet, a crappy eMachines desktop, and AIM made this possible. Technically, I didn't "need" my own computer at the time, but it made interactions like this possible. Maybe the Apple Watch will create new interactions that could spark something great between people.

 _Shrug_

<comment><USER9> Gruber's scenario with the two high school kids was probably the worst thing he's ever written. There needs to be an annual 500-word short story writing competition, for best story turning on the sentence "But you both wore an Apple Watch".

I say this as someone who generally admires John Gruber's ability to sell me on 1000-2000 word blog posts on Apple minutia purely on the strength and clarity of his writing. This post was painful.

<comment><USER10> It certainly pulled my heartstring. It also was the first piece I've seen written that was forward looking about the purpose about a touch interface, and it's implication for the advancement of HCI. Not sure what it was that you disliked, but I guarantee you that an impartial observer would not say it was "probably the worst thing he's ever written." \- perhaps it's fair to say it's "the piece he's written that you've most disliked?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a very interesting article, and I like how it's written in the perspective of a functional watch user instead of being about fashion or watch collecting.

I couldn't help but laugh at this part:

> Also, though it sounds trivial, I enjoy the perfect 60 FPS smoothness of > Apple Watch's second hand — a smoothness no mechanical watch could ever > match.

Isn't a mechanical watch hand ∞ FPS by definition? Real life has got to be _at least_ better than 144hz :)

<comment><USER12> Mechanical watches, think Rolexes, have smooth second hand movements but they are acutally still ticking, just about 6 times a second. The Apple Watch, on the other hand, has a second hand with 60 ticks per second so that the second hand is about 10 times smoother.

<comment><USER13> Correction: Rolexes tick 8 times a second (or 28.800 beats per hour, as is used by watch people). 6 are the vintage ones.

<comment><USER14> You are wrong. The movement moves at 8 Hz per second, but it actually takes two cycles to actually tick once, so it's actually 4 ticks per second.

The old watches tick at 3 times per second on 6 Hz movements.

<comment><USER13> No, I'm not. It's 8 ticks per second. I have one and I have checked. Look at this video of the hand up close (it's a 28800 bph movement):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxgahvNH3q0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxgahvNH3q0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Article aside for a moment, I find it fascinating that with this release so many people are discussing smart watches and their interfaces as something completely new with no established precedents. I've had my Pebble for almost 2 years now and my LG G watch for about 8 months. From my perspective this seems like a late-comer to a market that is already well under-way? I would expect more existing market comparison conversation.

Edit: for the record I love both of them after being initially dubious about the usefulness of such a device.

<comment><USER16> I suspect Apple have somehow framed the product for reviewers so the alternatives in the market don't come to mind, even if the reviewers don't realise that they're ignoring them.

As one example, they could've picked recipients who they know haven't previously worn a smart watch.

<comment><USER17> The Verge reviewer compared it to Android Wear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Designing a 2015 smartwatch to fit the expectations of dumb-watches feels more and more to me like designing a 2007 smartphone to fit the expectations of the blackberry crowd (physical keyboard, removable battery).

The digital crown looks like one such mistake. Swipe-to-scroll is so natural, particularly at this point, that moving back to an indirect method of scrolling seems just _wrong_. And doing so on a device that's already touch, and already using swipe-to-scroll, feels twice and wrong and unnecessarily confusing.

I understand the intent and the goal, but the inconsistent use of the crown -- if it's so great, why can I still swipe to scroll at all? -- is a tell. It would have been better to simply detect swipe-to-scroll along the right edge of the bezel (if not along the right side of the frame itself) to effect "scrolling without obscuring".

Four-ways-to-click (crown-click vs tap vs force tap vs tap-and-hold) is an eyebrow-raise-er all its own.

Also: displays should be wider. At fifty- to one-hundred-percent wider the display would be far better for notifications and would make the selection of A/B buttons more clear and precise.

The next time you get a notification on your phone, rest your phone on your wrist, so the notification is displayed roughly where a smartwatch would sit. Ask yourself whether that notification would still "work", if it were crammed into an Apple Watch-sized screen. Some certainly do. More can be made to work _alright_ , if font size were reduced. IME, most simply don't work.

There just isn't enough room to get enough meaningful information onto a screen that size, in a comfortable font size, for me to make good decisions about what can be ignored and what should be addressed.

You can mitigate this problem if you can ignore all messages of a given type (e.g. don't even bother getting email alerts on your wrist). But even if you could do this, it would be better if you didn't have to. A screen that enables better decisions would make for a more useful object.

<comment><USER19> > The digital crown looks like one such mistake. Swipe-to-scroll is so > natural, particularly at this point, that moving back to an indirect method > of scrolling seems just wrong.

That's not the point of the digital crown. It's to free your "swipe to scroll" gesture which blocks a screen of that size, to a physical input. Apple has been very clear on it's existence, and it's taking a classic component of a watch and propelling it into the modern era.

Might want to rethink that first.

<comment><USER20> > it's taking a classic component of a watch and propelling it into the modern > era.

That's a spectacularly marketing-y phrase. It's a scroll wheel. There's nothing wrong with that, but we don't need to dress it up as anything else.

<comment><USER21> Why does it even need to be a dial? Why not a touch-strip along the side that you slide your finger along for scrolling?

The whole idea of a dial seems backwards. I've always hated dials on watches. They catch on everything.

<comment><USER22> With the touch strip you'd be limited by the length of it and 1:1 mapping for scrolling.

<comment><USER21> Why does it have to map 1:1?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Apple Watch's screen remains off until you tap the screen (...) or it > detects (...) that you've moved your wrist into a "tell the time" position.

That's really the one of the biggest problems I can imagine. Pity that the "show the time at least somehow" wasn't engineered as a special feature, something like "e-ink for somehow time" and the OLED (if that's what they're using) for the full color. I know that nobody made something exactly like that, but I've read that a hybrid e-ink/LCD exists (1). Maybe it wouldn't look so pretty at the moment, but that's why the "magic" is needed, I don't think anybody designed any such hybrid specially for a smart watch. That e-ink or any other magic wouldn't have to be able to display everything, just the time. Even the big unchangeable segments like on old passive LCD watches would be (maybe?) enough.

1) And Apple even has some patents, discovered as early as 2011! [http://www.wired.com/2011/04/apple-patent-hybrid- display/](http://www.wired.com/2011/04/apple-patent-hybrid-display/) Hmm.

<comment><USER24> They did [1]. The color version is not yet available (first unit should be shipped in May), but the black and white ones were here since 2012. They actually got a wave of preorders right after Apple Watch was shown in March.

Based on the back and white version, it indeed is not as nice looking, but I like that it comes as a watch that has smart functionality rather the other way around. And it lasts for 7 days.

Can't comment much on the Pebble Time, but the color display actually looks quite nice, it is always on and still last for a week on a single charge.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU5zFGkP2Uw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU5zFGkP2Uw)

<comment><USER25> That's not a hybrid display, only e-ink.

<comment><USER24> It's actually not e-ink, they call it e-paper, but it actually is a memory LCD.

That said, it addresses the problem OP mentioned, which is ability to display content all the time. The color version has only 64 colors but this is something I'm wiling to sacrifice in order to have longer battery life, continuous time display and ability seeing the contents in the sun.

What puzzles me is why nobody else is doing the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > It truly is a good and clever idea, and, presuming it is patent-protected > strongly enough, the lack of a digital crown is going to put competitors at > a disadvantage.

I rather scroll using the edge of the screen, I hate reading on my phone and interrupting with my finger to scroll, that's why I swipe at the very edge of the screen, almost scrolling with the metal.

When watches get thinner, and they will, the crown will give place to the scrolling edge, longer area, more ergonomic.

And I hope nobody patents it.

<comment><USER27> It's kind of gross that basic UI controls can be patented like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> His description of a video call being an image rather than a direct view, and the equivalent with voice, helps put the touch features in perspective. They go from gimmick to potentially the start of something.

I wonder if that small postage stamp portal to your wife's wrist will be the notable precursor to larger contact features and eventually touch-featured clothing or (ooooer) playsuits?

He has a fairly flowery and gushing writing style with Apple topics, but it's obvious he thinks everything through and looks for a deeper angle.

I wonder if many people will buy a pair of these watches as something to experience with their partner? Touch or smooth/personal gestures are certainly a bit more personal and emotive than blue and green text bubbles.

</comment><comment><USER28> I am quite excited about upgrading my watch experience and the next generation of connected devices, however, the biggest surprise for me is that Apple doesn't offer more gesture recognition.

I always imagined the primary interface for shortcuts would be gestures such as waving away your arm to dismiss a message or flicking the wrist multiple times (if you try it right now, you can easily flick your wrist 3-4 times per second). It would make interaction that much easier and wrist flicking could even become a thing. One flick for health, two for time, etc. depending on the context.

Another thing that could be mildly annoying for a lot of people is that it can only ever be operated by engaging both hands. Phone by contrast can easily be operated with one hand using the thumb.

EDIT: If the watch has enough sensors, I am sure it could detect users not only flicking the wrist via rotation but also bending your hand down/up (which tends to pull/push the tendons on your wrist) though the watch would need to be worn snugly.

<comment><USER29> _(if you try it right now, you can easily flick your wrist 3-4 times per second)._

You'll also look very odd while you do it, which might have informed Apple not using it.

<comment><USER28> Haha, yes you're right.

A person from a decade or two ago might find a lot of things odd such as taking selfies, Facebook checkins, talking on a bluetooth headset, holding a 5.5" phone to your ear when the 90s was all about miniaturisation, the shake- to-shuffle a song, etc.

It's only an oddity because it's not common.

I am sure that things will gravitate toward gestures as this space evolves. It just seems like a very convenient way to interface and offers the path of least resistance for users.

<comment><USER29> It might become normal. But look at Google Glass - the "weirdness" attached to it absolutely had an effect on its success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _"You'll still be able to do with Apple Watch what you do with your current watch: tell the time (and if you want, the date) at a glance and trust that it's accurate."_

...if you return your watch to a charging station daily.

He goes on:

 _That said, compared to a traditional watch, daily charging is terrible._

Before entering into the smartphone market, I charged my cellphone less than 100 times per year. Now, I have to charge my smartphone at least once a day. It's a tax on my lifestyle that I don't mind paying.

I hated the daily charging of my smartphone at first. Now, I plan my day and commutes with respect to a battery to ensure I have enough charge for me to interweave the technology in my pocket with my experiencing of the analog world.

I suspect I and others will make the same allowance for a smart watch and the Apple Watch will be a very profitable device for Apple.

<comment><USER31> I never quite understood the complaints about smartphones not having a multi- day battery life. As long as it makes it from morning to bedtime and charges to 100% overnight, what's the problem? Obviously if it _can 't_ make it to bedtime on one charge, that's a problem, but nightly charging makes no real difference. I imagine the watch will be similar. A one-day battery life for a watch is kind of absurd, but it doesn't seem like it'll matter.

One exception to this is people who just never take their watch off. I did this for a couple of years. Having to charge it every night would have been a problem then. I don't know that people do this in large enough numbers to be significant though.

<comment><USER32> If you travel, it's one more thing to carry. Plus, I occasionally forget to plug the phone in to charge at night. My current smartphone makes it through two days without charging, though.

<comment><USER31> That's a good point. You'd probably want to carry the charger anyway (unless it's just an overnight trip and your phone lasts many days) but even just the travel itself can put extra demands on the phone, because of time zone changes or watching lots of videos or whatever. A phone that's perfectly acceptable because it can last 18 hours in normal use can cause problems if you're taking a 14-hour flight and playing with it the whole way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Imagine: You're 16. You're in school. You're sitting in class.

Honestly, I think it's impossible for anyone above ~25 to imagine what it's like to be 16 in school today.

Context and social dynamics have changed too much for anyone that old (and probably anyone at all) to be insightful about the behaviour of groups of teenagers using a yet unreleased product.

<comment><USER34> I can imagine it but only if it's a private school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If I had to choose between a dumb watch that never needs recharging (like my Citizen Eco-Drive) and a "smart" watch that doesn't even last a full day, I'd choose the dumb watch.

Who the hell think that a watch that can't even function a day is an acceptable product? This just blows my mind. And yet, I'm pretty sure they are going to sell millions of them. I wouldn't want one if it was free.

<comment><USER5> Why is charging electronics such a problem? Do people wear watches while sleeping? Why is setting it on the charger on my nightstand actually a problem? This seems like an absurd nitpicky thing to complain about.

<comment><USER36> I already have to charge (and bring cables and charger with sufficient ports for): Laptop iPhone USB Backup battery (many long travel days) Wifi hotspot

Pretty much every day. By some counts, a watch doesn't really change that very much, by other counts it pushes my daily-shit-to-charge list over the limit. It's nitpicky when viewed in a vacuum, but not in relation to the overall technology charging burden. It seems like we should be moving away from charger dependencies, not towards it.

<comment><USER5> i find it interesting that 5 is over the limit, but 4 is perfectly reasonable. Personally i have 1, my phone, and increasing it to 2 seems like no change at all personally.

<comment><USER36> Sorry, to be clear, I don't consider 4 "reasonable". It's more like it's crept up and I've set a pretty hard limit on more rechargeable tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Without the Taptic Engine, Apple Watch is not a compelling device."

This is why I value Gruber's reviews. He's unabashedly pro-Apple, but he's also critical and observant.

<comment><USER16> Is he really being that critical if he observes their product would fail without something it already has?

I know it's not a direct comparison, but you wouldn't call me insightfully critical if I noted that a car was not a compelling device without wheels.

<comment><USER38> Yes but this analogy only holds true if every other car has hexagonal wheels, and the apple watch "car" has circular ones.

<comment><USER39> Yes but this makes the analogy a criticism of other cars, not the Apple one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's interesting that even gruber's review isn't all that positive.

<comment><USER41> >even gruber..

I don't think Gruber is particularly biased about Apple - they're just his area of speciality. He thinks very deeply about them, and has done for such a long time that he has an acute sense of them. But I think he calls them out fairly when he thinks they're wrong, whether that's policy decisions, devices, or software.

<comment><USER42> I don't know if it can be your area of speciality and not be biased. He's the definitive Apple fanboy

[https://twitter.com/gruber/status/344163857234812928](https://twitter.com/gruber/status/344163857234812928)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> So the smartphones replaced watches and now watches are going to have a sudden comeback? I must admit I got rid of all my watches except for a purely mechanical one with a mainspring since my first smartphone. For gym/swimming/running I have a special device with a chest strap - if Apple solved problems plaguing strap-less heart rate monitors I might be interested, however for $400+ definitely not.

</comment><comment><USER44> I can't help wondering how dated such a device will look / feel next year, particularly as I saw Swiss watches in a shop the other day and they really are timeless bits of machinery.

</comment><comment><USER45> A bit of sidelined, but still...

> You simply hold the connector near the back of the watch, where magnets > cause it to snap into place automatically.

I would instantly buy a phone without a traditional connector port for headphone and USB - just metal pads flush with the surface (maybe laid in rubber to be watertight) and kept aligned by magnets.

Seriously, the amount of devices failed due to either bent (e.g. during gaming) or rusted/dust-damaged Micro USB connectors (and don't forget the headphone connectors, where even the tiniest damage can be _heard_ ) is ridiculous.

The only real option is to buy one of CATs smartphones or (iirc) one of the Galaxy series with protectors over the connectors - but again, the protectors start to annoy after a while. Too bad Apple holds a patent over MagSafe - <USER2> then doesn't even employ it in their phones!

<comment><USER46> Or you can buy a device that supports wireless charging and charge wirelessly.

I have one (Nexus 4) and I'm never going back.

<comment><USER45> Useless when you want to hold your phone in the hand for a round of Real Racing or any other hq game, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> "Apple seemingly tries to enter markets at, or just after, that tipping point — when Moore's Law and Apple's ever-increasing engineering and manufacturing prowess allow them to produce a gadget-y computer that the computer-y gadgets from the established market leaders cannot compete with."

A recurring event in the advance of technology. I saw it hit hard when Smith Corona's computer-y typewriters couldn't keep up with gadget-y word processing software, and the typewriter died. Likewise when computer-y photography (lots of image processing introduced into developing photos) lost favor with consumers vs gadget-y digital cameras.

"the established market — watches — is not despised. They not only don't suck, they are beloved. And the best and most-beloved watches aren't even electronic. They're purely mechanical — all gadget, no computer."

Yet...all they do is tell time. Elegantly, yes, or cheaply, if you like...but time and little else. Attempts to add computer-y function failed for a decade, succumbing to horrible interfaces and anemic UIs; the author completely overlooks the computer-y phases which watches have gone thru (and failed miserably). That a $5 POS watch tells time more accurately, and with less maintenance, than my elegant $500 Movado or the improbable $500,000 watches seen on [http://uncrate.com](http://uncrate.com) et al, was setting off warnings that the market was ripe for...something.

<comment><USER14> Your $500 Movado uses a cheap Quartz movement that costs about $5 anyway, so it's as reliable and accurate as any $5 POS :)

Only mechanical watches require maintenance and are less accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> How does this guy always nail his articles?

I think he's the only one I've ever heard of who gets paid so much to write blog articles.

<comment><USER49> Gruber has perfected the art of knowing your audience - and his audience is people who are neck deep in the Apple ecosystem. His writing is practically a prescription for managing post-purchase cognitive dissonance for Apple consumers.

I think he's an excellent writer but let's be honest, he doesn't really "review" Apple products any more than their marketing department. Apple could re-introduce the Newton and Gruber would be writing about it's "elegant simplicity" and "thoughtful processing".

I'm sure the Apple Watch is neat tech, but from what I've gathered, it's suffering from "version one syndrome" a little more than most of their product launches. That said, it will probably be a wild success anyway if only because it's an even more conspicuous consumption signal than the iPhone...

<comment><USER50> > Apple could re-introduce the Newton and Gruber would be writing about it's > "elegant simplicity" and "thoughtful processing"

While they have not re-introduced the Newton, his latest podcast mentions the Newton and very similar in tone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's ironic that the people who attack the Apple watch under the pragmatic guise that a regular watch performs better, are forgetting the fact that a regular watch is completely superfluous.

In this day and age, with a phone on you, and everyone else, you can always get the time. A watch is a relic of the past. It's Tradition. It's ornamental. It's redundant.

With tens of thousands of brilliant people working day and night to build amazing third party apps, the smart watches can actually do things. A regular watch can't do shit. It's not a tool, it's not a workhorse. People that are satisfied with their traditional watches are kidding themselves, as much if not more than the people who will happily buy an Apple watch and tout it's features.

<comment><USER52> The regular watch, a dumb watch if you like has some big advantages over a smart watch or a phone. Its always on, can always be seen, the battery lasts for years, its waterproof. Having said that, I think these advantages are mostly important for niche uses - scuba divers for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> He is wrong in this article: CDs did not suck. Compressed audio sucked, unless you had NIHL and love reduced dynamic range and poor attack transients.

I am glad CDs are still around to stop this MP3 slime from washing away all the uncompressed audio!

<comment><USER53> You need to read this: [https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil- young.html](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

<comment><USER44> Very informative, thanks. I avoid 192kHz and record everything at 24bit 48kHz when I'm recording (I would like some hard disk space left, particularly if you're recording 24 tracks at once); 96kHz is only really useful in live applications as you obviously get half the latency which is important if you're flinging audio from one side of the arena to the other.

But with regard to the content within the audio file, uncompressed is obviously superior to compressed. It is particularly apparent on decent speakers, not earbuds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I can barely stand reading Gruber because it feels like reading Apple marketing materials. But he is required reading because he is one of the few ways that Apple releases important industry information. It would be great to have a daringfireball tl;dr service emphasizing his forecasts and "predictions" (which are usually actually Apple leaks).

<comment><USER55> Did you read this review? Gruber's blind love for anything apple generally turns me off. In this article though i thought his fanboy-ism stayed pretty restricted to apple the company, and it seems like quite a fair critical review of the watch itself.

<comment><USER54> I didn't. I read the first few paragraphs and then couldn't take it and left the comment here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I like the health monitoring aspects the most. Fitbit type of devices, tracking activities/health, have been picking up and will pick up more. Apple has jumped on that pretty well and traditional watches can't compete on those features.

I stopped wearing watches but have thought about a Fitbit watch and why not have that be an Apple watch maybe.

</comment><comment><USER57> I lose watches. Period. It's why I wear a near disposable $5 plastic eyesore from Target on my wrist.

No way am I wearing a $500+ wrist computer to tell the time.

<comment><USER58> Same boat here. I lose jewelry. In my time I've worn earrings, ear cuffs, necklaces, dreadlock weaves, bolo ties, neck ties, zipper ties, hats, etc etc etc... they all get lost, they all get damaged quickly. And really, in the end, they just feel uncomfortable on my body. I haven't worn a watch in 15+ years and have never regretted it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'm a die-hard iPhone guy. I love when I meet someone, get their phone number, text them, and the message bubble is blue. I feel like we're in the same club. (Albeit a very large club.)

However, I keep my phone in my pocket. Wearing a watch that millions of other people may have feels a bit weird to me. It's like taking that membership of the iPhone "club" and turning it into an external badge signifying membership.

Watches become part of your visual identity, and I'm not sure that I want something that ubiquitous as part of mine.

<comment><USER60> As opposed to people using their iPhones in public, using MBPs at conferences or wearing Beats headphones or those distinctive white Apple earplugs?

This isn't exactly new. Teenagers were sticking white shoelaces in their ears before the iPhone was even a thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Just like the iPhone wasn't a smarter phone but a smaller computer, I guess Apple Watch isn't a smarter watch but a smaller iPhone.

<comment><USER62> The iPhone was a computing device in a form factor that the market was able to relate to as a phone. The Apple Watch is a computing device in a form factor that the market will be able to relate to as a watch.

'Phone' and 'watch' are just entry points. The form factor, UI, and controls will dictate what it actually is. I'm fairly certain, NOT a smaller iPhone.

<comment><USER61> Not sure I understand. A laptop is a computer device, an iphone is a computer device and now a watch is a computer device.

People wont buy Apple Watch because it's better watch just as they didn't buy the iPhone because it was a better phone.

That is the point I was trying to make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For people who want to skip all the non-critical Apple praise and marketing regurgitation and don't want to spend their time filtering out the endless variety of framing devices Gruber uses to try to turn Apple's lemons into lemonaid here's a summary review:

\- Using the watch as a watch is broken. He spends almost 1,000 words across 8 paragraphs talking about how broken it is. It may be accurate, but it's overly complex, fussy and unreliable to get it to show you the time.

\- The water resistance is unacceptable for a device intended as a fitness companion, some of this is due to compromises to the overly complex design.

\- As a watch targeting people who wear watches, it's probably a failure. He repeats some variation of this a number of times.

\- the build quality feels high, not as high as the early press hands-on

\- the rubber watch band is easy to size and the material feels good, but swapping out bands is "fiddly"

\- the watch is designed to hide the bezel, but in good lighting you can see it, again reminding that it isn't a great watch

\- the shape (square) is not a good watch shape

\- the gender-neutral design comes off as modern

\- battery life will get you through a day of moderate usage

\- the induction charger is easy to use and works as advertised

\- one of the main marketing points, that it's a health and fitness device, is not useful to him in any way and he has no interest in it

\- some of the fitness features intrude into non-fitness uses in a bad way

\- other fitness features seem pretty accurate and potentially useful

\- the digital crown works basically like a mouse scroll-wheel

\- touch, the crown and haptic feedback work as well as you'd expect and they work together well

\- haptic feedback works so well that you can turn off sound for notifications

\- he had a 50% failure rate on the haptic feedback on his test watches requiring him to get a replacement watch during his week-long review

\- the digital touch features were untested, though he provides a cute story of two rich teenagers flirting in class he provides no actual coverage of the feature

tl;dr none of the smart watch features were particularly interesting and it's not a great watch to use for time keeping

It's not really surprising, it's the same problem all the smart watches have, it's not really clear that the extra expense and fuss of a smartwatch, on a severely compromised display and interaction platform is worth it. The target audience he holds out hope for, non-watch wearers who wouldn't know any better, are probably not going to start wearing an expensive fussy fiddly device that provides no unqualified benefit that they have to charge every day. I'm not a watch wearer and the only smartwatch I'd even consider is something like the Pebble and that's only because it's focused on

a) being a watch

b) notifications

c) not making me charge it all the time

Except that I'm literally surrounded by clocks nearly all the time, so I don't need to tell time. My phone already vibrates and makes sound, and it's usually letting me know something that I'm already being notified about on my monitor. The one use-case I can really see for a smartwatch is to help with navigation, especially while walking since walking around with your phone out getting turn-by-turn isn't all that great. But it's something I need literally once or twice per year.

</comment><comment><USER63> A great perspective, as Gruber typically gives.

But his take on sending a heartbeat as a flirting 16 year old was awful. That was basically the same pitch for Facebook pokes, which initially were cute but quickly turned obnoxious. Sending taps sounds like it could be useful. Sending your heartbeat seems like a gimmick. Ultimately his last point is right, we won't know unless/until Apple Watch becomes a thing.

</comment><comment><USER64> Gshock watches already have digital crowns, so Apple can't patent them unless there is something new.

</comment><comment><USER65> _I enjoy the perfect 60 FPS smoothness of Apple Watch's second hand — a smoothness no mechanical watch could ever match._

How can the the smoothness of an actual, physical piece of metal smoothly rotating in a circle at a constant angular velocity be "out-smoothed" by a 60 FPS simulacrum?

<comment><USER66> Lots of mechanical clocks have hands and seconds which _ticks_ one unit at a time, and doesn't move in a smooth movement. But that's obviously done intentionally through the mechanics and requires extra effort to "implement", so it's not a sign of a "low" quality watch either.

Not sure what Gruber is hinting at here honestly.

<comment><USER65> I have one here in a clocks n' (stop) watches box that moves the second hand at a significantly higher rate than 60 per second, but I must admit I didn't know that was something special.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> It actually kind of saddens me to read his summary of how touch will be "awesome". A teenager is afraid to talk to a girl he likes so he sends her what amounts to a text on his watch? It feels like humans keep building more and more barriers to ACTUAL communication. I can't help but think at some point it will have serious negative effects on the human race. Part of growing up and maturing is learning to deal with difficult emotional situations, like being rejected by the girl you really have a crush on.

What happens the first time that kid who was too afraid of rejection to talk to a girl he liked messes up in his "grown-up" job? Is he going to send his boss an apology over his watch? Or is going to break down in tears because he's never had to deal with an emotionally stressful situation "IRL"?

<comment><USER68> I was the typical nerdy, shy, socially inept teenager who read the z80 instruction set documentation alone at the cafeteria during lunch. In the 10th grade there was this girl I really liked, but my complete lack of social skills prevented me from acting upon it.

I forget how, but I eventually found a way to add her on MSN messenger, where we spent many evenings and weekends chatting. This allowed me to get over my initial shyness; we eventually dated for about a year. She was my first girlfriend, and I gained a lot in self confidence and social skills through this experience.

I don't lock myself in the bathroom when I mess up at my job these days.

I think your message is either a silly straw man, or that you really don't get teenagers.

<comment><USER69> ...But in this case, you'll first have to work up the guts to go ask her for her phone number, so that you can go back to your desk and send her your heartbeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Honest questions: How people can write such long articles? How many hours they might have spent in writing? Does anyone read it from the top to bottom completely? Is it not possible to express the whole thing in a small article without losing the gist?

EDIT 1: Gruber's articles have lot of useful information,analysis and insights but I feel, current article is too lengthy.

EDIT 2: Anandtech's reviews are also detailed but they are easy to select to go to required part of the review. Hope interface of DF may change in future.

<comment><USER71> Personally, I enjoyed reading through the article all the way very much. Gruber is not writing for people who want an answer to a particular question or who are looking for tabular comparisons. He gives you his experience with the watch, and a description how his opinions of various features changed after using them. He gives context for his opinions about it as a long-time watch-wearer, and detailed personal examples of its problems.

I don't think a review that just gives an opinion without any context is useful. How can I judge the relevance to my life if I know nothing about the reviewer's? With something as personal and intimate as a watch, the details matter and the context matters.</comment></comment>


RedHat: The Open Brand Project - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/en/about/our-brand/open-brand-project <comment><USER2> I'm gonna guess they've already decided on the new logo and branding because of this, which says the new will be revealed next Wednesday.

[https://www.wraltechwire.com/2019/04/25/red-hats- signature-f...](https://www.wraltechwire.com/2019/04/25/red-hats-signature- fedora-logo-to-disappear-from-hq-tower-may-1/)</comment>


Xinhua op-ed:  Why doom predictors always get it wrong when it comes to China - <AUTHOR> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2016-02/01/c_135064983.htm <comment><USER2> Exercise: imagine this was written in 1989; how many edits would you need to turn this into an optimistic defense of the long-term prospects of the Japanese economy?</comment>


Rust for C++ programmers – part 6: Rc, Gc, and * pointers - <AUTHOR> http://featherweightmusings.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/rust-for-c-programmers-part-6-rc-gc-and.html?m=1

<comment><USER2> Why are nullable Rust pointers checked with "is_null" and not pattern-matched against null vs. non-null?

<comment><USER3> We don't have pattern matching for unsafe pointers in the language. Nobody has asked for it, probably because unsafe pointers aren't used enough for it to matter.

<comment><USER4> > Nobody has asked for it, probably because unsafe pointers aren't used enough > for it to matter.

Which is a good thing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761760)</comment>


Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve - <AUTHOR> https://www.azul.com/love-it-or-hate-it-java-continues-to-evolve/ <comment><USER2> In my experience most people don't like Java due to experiences they had before Java 8. This means they were used to the bloat, config as XML style world which made Java a pain to write and slow to run.

Once I show them Java 11 with var keyword, lambda's and streams they start appreciating how modern the language has become. Then you throw in frameworks like javalin or sparkjava and suddenly they are not as hostile as they were before.

Honestly the only things I would really like out of Java these days are data classes and possibly native runtime compilation out of the box. Containers solve the latter issue, but id love to just build a binary and run it.

Do that and its on the same level as Go in many ways which nailed the tooling and deployment model, even if the language has issues. Java already has the tooling.

I suppose a decent syntax highlighter library like pygments or chroma would be nice too.

<comment><USER3> Java 11 is obviously much better than Java 8, which is still leaps and bounds ahed of Java 6, itself an improvement over Java 4. You'd see the same in every language.

Java's problem is that for many years it used to be the slowest car around. Maybe this was one of the things that helped Java become the undisputed ruler Enterprise Inc. but now it's got a lot to catch up with, and even though the pace has picked up since Java 9, it's far behind its competitors.

Everything you mention (var, lambdas, streams) and everything you might mention when Java 13 comes out (switch expressions, text blocks) is just too little, too late.

Yeah, var is a lifesaver if you have to use Java, but compare the limited type inference it brings to the table with almost any other competing language (Kotlin, C#, Scala or Swift) which at the very least can do a return value inference.

Likewise, streams are long due, but the syntax is horrible and the repertoire of built-in operations is meager, and since Java does not support extension functions like the rest of the languages mentioned here you can't extend them gracefully.

If you take one of the examples given here:

      var grades = school.students()
                     .stream()
                     .flatMap(student -> student.grades()
                        .stream()
                        .map(grade -> new NamedGrade(student.name(), student.grades())
                     .filter(x -> x.grade() > 60)
                     .collect(Collectors.toList());

Kotlin goes the same route, but makes it little more natural to use:

      val grades = school.students
                     .flatMap { (name, grades) -> grades.map {
                                  NamedGrade(name, it)
                      }}
                     .filter { it.grade() > 60 }
                     .toList()

Besides simply more natural syntax, get the special 'it' variable, destructuring, more operations and

Now take C#, a language had something "Streams" since version 3.0 (released 7 years before Java 8):

      var result = students
                      .SelectMany(student => student.Grades.Select(grade => new { Name = student.Name, Grade = grade }))
                      .Where(record => record.Grade > 60);

Where you get anonymous records - you don't need to define a new type anymore.

Or with LINQ:

      var result = from student in students select
          from grade in student.Grades
          where grade > 60
          select new { Name = student.Name, Grade = grade };

You get a highly readable built-in query language as well.

<comment><USER4> Quick nitpick. Both of the C# examples are called LINQ. The first is called the "method syntax", the latter is called the "query syntax". The query syntax is transpiled into the method syntax before compilation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the reason so many people have mixed feelings about Java is that "Java" is actually several things:

\- The Java language

\- The Java API (and/or whatever set of libraries you're using)

\- The Java ecosystem, tooling, etc.

\- The sorts of work typically done these days with Java

It's perfectly possible for one person to feel strongly one way about some of those aspects while feeling strongly the other way about others.

For instance, I'm quite fond of the Java language, I mildly dislike the Java API (in how bloated it's become), I'm ambivalent about the ecosystem, and I do my best to avoid the "Enterprise Software" CRUD-churn that Java development often entails (although this might have changed, it's been a while since I did Java commercially.)

<comment><USER6> Not a die hard java/go-or-anything entusiast, but replace the name Java with Go and you have the exact same thing.

<comment><USER7> But with Go you can iterate quickly compared to java as the compilation time is very small. This difference is massive in big projects. This is an important reason why I took up Go for many projects.

<comment><USER8> Can you give a few numbers what counts as "very small" here? Most of my big java projects take less than two minutes for a full compile and incremental compile of the whole project is usually in the range of 10 secs. If you run the whole test suite it can take longer depending on the tests, but that's not what I'd count as "compile time".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My biggest issue with Java isn't even the language, it's the culture. I feel like typical Java solutions are just layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of abstractions, frameworks inside of frameworks, and stack traces taller than skyscrapers. It's just too much!

It seems like the Java community has lost the art of coding without a framework. It feels incredibly bloated and entirely too magical. But this has more to do with the ecosystem and philosophies of the community, rather than the language, or even runtime, itself. From a purely language and runtime perspective, I think it's fine.

But I don't enjoy it. Every time I need to work on a Java project, it's like it's a form of punishment. I'd rather do basically anything else.

<comment><USER10> To me you're talking about the java of a few years ago. It's really not the case now.

The enterprise-y types are no longer dominant in the space.

<comment><USER11> But the Java of a few years ago will still need to be maintained for many years to come.

<comment><USER10> Maybe so, but that's not a job I'm interested in :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Stack Overflow yearly survey[1] mentions that ~40+% developers who took the survey use Java. Not very surprising if you look at how long ago Java came into being (24 years ago!). I, for one am happy that it continues to evolve. At the very least it shows that the developers of the language are still taking lessons from the programming languages ecosystem :-)

[1][https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#most- popular-...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#most-popular- technologies)

</comment><comment><USER13> Java 8 made it an "okay" language for me to use.

It's a lot better nowadays, but historically the biggest problem with Java has been the 3rd party libraries. They tended to be written with extensibility in mind at the expense of usability. Extensibility is great, but it's not the only important thing in a design.

I'm not a huge fan of annotations. It makes the language feel a bit magical and hard to debug in some places. It can be difficult to track down how a given library actually treats an annotation - or even a set of annotations since you can put more than one on a given thing. It puts the language in a strange place: sometimes both boilerplate-heavy and magical.

> The introduction of annotations in JDK 5 has made enterprise Java > development a whole lot simpler by allowing things like dependency > injection.

This is a bit weird - you don't need annotations to do dependency injection. And you don't need a DI framework either. One thing I don't quite understand is the infatuation with DI frameworks in Javaland. I prefer to just do it by hand where both necessary and plausible.

<comment><USER14> 99% of the time I see DI used in Java it is solely to enable mocked dependencies in unit testing rather than injecting different production implementations depending on environmental differences or something like that.

I have had Code Reviews where "This is all good, but you should use Guice to mock X" where X is the one time I might have a package-private test only constructor with a NullObject for the one dependency I need to mock out in a commit and Guice is not currently used in the package at all.

Personally I think DI has reached cargo cult status in Javaland.

<comment><USER15> Dynamic languages like Python do not have this issue as you can mock any method runtime for the duration of test. This can done via "monkey patching". It is unclean, but the development cost of having a framework to do just this is a tad high.

The only downside is that if you parallel test you need to run them in separate processes (which you usually want to do.any case).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My only problem with Java is how it's written. Enterprise java tends to be abstracted to absurd levels. I prefer a more direct approach.

<comment><USER17> Yes @ absurd level of abstraction, EnterpriseFizzBuzz even manages to laugh at this old-school 'Enterprise' style of writing code[1].

Some enterprises have managed to move away from this though -- DevOps in the enterprise is real and it looks pretty similar to DevOps elsewhere.

I've worked with teams in very conservative enterprises that have automated tests and CD pipelines, and release 100s of times a day, and support their own code. And with their newfound autonomy -- no more diktats about "use J2EE" from up top -- these developers did what smart developers do: simplify and reduce dependencies and tech debt. Lots of vanilla JS (or maybe React at most), plain old Java, even Kotlin and Clojure where possible (microservices made polyglot development really easy).

I've always thought this was a big reason Oracle dropped J2EE. Their most conservative customers weren't interested as J2EE had become irrelevant for their needs.

Here's a public video of how one institution (JP Morgan) managed to modernize[2].

[1] [https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...](https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tyev4Ti9Xsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tyev4Ti9Xsc)

<comment><USER18> I love the fact that EnterpriseFizzBuzz has 271 open issues!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd like to see a JVM with a garbage collector that isn't designed to always consume the maximum amount of memory before it starts collecting. If you configure the JVM to have at most 400MB and it's current heap size is 120MB and you allocate 0.5MB every second or simply allocate 400MB of temporary objects that could be collected right away, it will allocate more GC heap until it hits the maximum 400MB and only then it decides to start a collection cycle. This makes the JVM useless for anything that isn't a web server that uses the entire RAM anyway.

Although Shenandoah looks promising but it's pretty telling that even in 2019 the JVM only has a single good garbage collector and it's still experimental. 23 years of history my ass. Other than the awful JEE ecosystem, the JVM is probably the worst part about the Java ecosystem. You can't fix it with a language that runs on top of it. It's slow (mostly startup performance), the GC is awful and it gobbles up a huge amount of memory. Obviously my company doesn't care because 8GB of RAM for a webserver costs them almost nothing.

It wouldn't surprise me if a WebASM implementation will take over one day, because the JVM is such a failure.

<comment><USER20> The JVM has state of the art GCs, name another platform that comes close in terms of offering the ability to tune it for throughput or latency as the JVM does, or that comes close in performance (.NET probably is the only contender).

If you don't want memory usage to go up to 400MB, then you can set the maximum memory the JVM can use to less than 400MB. It only makes sense from an efficiency and throughput standpoint to use as much memory available for performance.

JVMs regularly run on GBs or even TBs of heap space in production.

Both Shenandoah and ZGC target lower pause times (at the expense of throughput, naturally). There are commercial offerings like offerings from Azul that target low pause times as well.

> the JVM is probably the worst part about the Java ecosystem

On the contrary, the amount of optimizations that the JVM performs, as well as the monitoring, management, hotswapping, etc capabilities are second to none.

> It's slow

The fact that the JVM tops several charts here says otherwise: [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=ph&test=json)

> (mostly startup performance)

This is already being resolved through GraalVM. See for example [https://quarkus.io/](https://quarkus.io/)

> because the JVM is such a failure.

It only runs the backends of companies like Amazon, Google, FB, EA, LinkedIn, Ebay, Apple, Netflix, and countless others. Not to mention it's being used in high performance spaces like HFT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The only reason I like Java is that it allows you to sneak in Clojure code.

"I'm going to build a solution that runs on the JVM"

<comment><USER22> I made Clojure a first class citizen at my startup :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Most people don't even know why they hate Java. And the rest hates it because their Chief Architect taught J2EE is a great idea.

<comment> yoz-y Personally I developed a dislike for it because of Eclipse, Android Studio, Swing and JavaDoc.

<comment><USER24> Those are at the top of my list as well... in addition to Hibernate. Maven appears near the top of my list too, I mean can we please chill out with the copious XML already? Not to mention naming a real construct a "bean" rather than something that actually describes what it is, annotations and other magical shit (AOP anyone?) scattered throughout many Java codebases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When I first went to college for my Associate's Degree, we learned C++ and had the option to choose between Java and Visual Basic. I chose Java, obviously, because who the hell wants to know Visual Basic?

I really liked Java back then because C++ had always been a struggle, not because of pointers or anything like that... but because I always found project management, figuring out how to link libraries, and build my projects, to be overly complicated. With Java, I only had to import a library, and that was it. I didn't need to link external libraries because Java's standard library was large enough that it had most of what I needed at the time, and adding external libraries wasn't nearly as difficult as C++.

However, over the years, I feel like I've kind of grown apart from it and have started to want to migrate back towards C++ and Python. I still use Java because it's the language I know best and it's the language I'm writing my game in, but after I finish my game, I think I'll be using it significantly less. The bulkiness of the code, the complications from the JVM, and the lack of good options for deploying executable code is just getting more and more frustrating.

Also, as I was working on my Bachelor's Degree, filling in the gaps of knowledge left by a "meh" education at my previous school, I could see that Java is just not good for writing good, fast code.

That said, Java 8 did make me like Java a lot more when it came out, but they're starting to deploy new versions so frequently now I feel like 8 is the last version I will bother learning.

<comment><USER20> > and the lack of good options for deploying executable code

GraalVM is a way to resolve that: [https://quarkus.io/](https://quarkus.io/), [https://micronaut.io/](https://micronaut.io/)

You might want to check out C# as well. .NET Core is coming along nicely, and you get to work in a safe environment, with the ability to drop down to pointers if needed, unlike the unsafety that is inherent to C++.

There is also a C# to C++ compiler that the Unity people wrote, worth checking out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Only a person who loves something would start with "Love it or Hate it", FYI.

</comment><comment><USER27> "James Gosling, the Father of Java, described it as a Blue collar programming language."

I wonder what can be considered a white collar programming language which is actually used a lot. Erlang? ES6 with ever changing front end frameworks?

<comment><USER28> Python or Ruby I'd say, Erlang's a little bit too unique I think for that analogy

<comment><USER27> Python/Ruby are even easier than Java and don't require much skill to master.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I both love and hate it. I love the high quality libraries and ecosystem, reasonable performance, simple semantics. I hate the annotations and reflection magic, bloated frameworks, type erasure, lack of null safety, build systems. Luckily, it is possible to avoid some of that by not jumping on the bandwagon's standard stack. Leave that framework on the shelf, and Just Write Java. Unfortunately, many existing Java projects you come across in the wild are trainwrecks.

</comment><comment><USER30> Which lib/framework to use today for a webapp backend development in Java ?

(I am senior dev, some past java7/8 core server experience, FE will probably be React and then mobile)

<comment><USER31> Vert.x + RxJava is great :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What kept me away from Java was mostly configuration rather than language itself. You had to manually place jars in some lib folder, have things like "classpaths" and lot of this shit was glued together using XML files.

But once gradle came into picture along with IntelliJ I totally moved to Java.

</comment><comment><USER33> One thing I would really love to see is a better way how you manipulate strings. Variable interpolation would be nice and you wouldn't have to have all that ugly string concatenation all over the place.

<comment><USER34> Don't forget regular expressions. How anyone puts up with having to escape all backlashes is beyond me. But, then, I'm used to Perl and Ruby. Scala, Clojure and Kotlin don't have this problem so why is the Emperor Without Clothes That Is Java having such a hard time?

<comment><USER35> Because it's 20+ years old and tries to be as source compatible as possible?

<comment><USER34> Perl and Ruby are at least as old but I never had to backslash everything when writing regexen in Perl or Ruby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There has been about a 7 year window of opportunity for Oracle to really push JavaFX as cross platform UI, but they insisted on making it hard to legally use even for desperate Java Swing developer. Almost every Java Swing shop I know is either still on Swing, switched to .NET or switched to web shit.

Why, why, why did they not make JavaFX on Android a first class citizen?

<comment><USER37> You have to ask Google why, not Oracle.

Oracle has made JavaFX open source and available to everyone that wishes to work on it.

[https://openjfx.io/](https://openjfx.io/)

[https://openjdk.java.net/projects/openjfx/](https://openjdk.java.net/projects/openjfx/)

[https://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/javafxports/](https://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/javafxports/)

Naturally Google prefers to push Android J++.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I love Java, it's awesome language!

</comment><comment><USER39> Why are the links larger than the body text on mobile? It's so annoying trying to read this whole article. Especially when one of the links is pushing their commercial support of Java.

Good design and java rarely go hand in hand. These small details matter. I don't think it's a mistake that Ruby, JS, Rust, Elixir, etc attract people with good design sensibilities which is reflected in their blog posts, websites, and also API designs, documentation, etc.

But otherwise this articles content is not bad, I think we all know why Java and C++ are so popular. It's one of the first questions every programmer learns their first year programming. This article is a good summary of why. The fact both C++ and Java got things like Lambdas and other modern stuff in recent years is great, but they are obviously incredibly late to the game. Which makes you wonder how long until the other good things will take. Maybe that whole backwards compatibility with decades of some questionable code being a dead weight dragging down the language is one of the reasons why people hate it? You can repaint a broken down house but that doesn't mean it's as good as the new house next door.

<comment><USER40> Any language that will survive as much as Java or C++ will accumulate some baggage, even your cool shine new language will look outdated 20 years from now to the new cool programmers.

Look at other examples, CSS - full of bad examples on how do do X, JS - a lot of bad parts, missing core stuff like importing modules , Python - it had is issue caused by some old decisions that caused a lot of pain when migrating version 3.

My point a 5 old years new language will eventually have similar issue in 10-15 years

<comment><USER41> The point is to work at the sweetspot of emerging language/high pay and then get out once the framework decision level bugs start emerging.

Then come back as a consultant in 20 years at the intersection of high pay/no one else can figure out how to fix the software.

If you're working with Java you're mostly in medium pay/tearing hair out coz of legacy issues-which you WILL have because a Java shop never COMPLETELY moves to the new thing. Not a fun place to be.

<comment><USER40> >If you're working with Java you're mostly in medium pay/tearing hair out coz of legacy issues-which you WILL have because a Java shop never COMPLETELY moves to the new thing. Not a fun place to be.

I am working in the present on Web tech, SPAs, but you know what, it sucks even if is the cool thin, the project was started with angular1 which is no longer the cool thing, it uses ES5 and gulp(no longer the cool thing), the backend uses Silex(a PHP framework that is not that cool) ...

The only cool thing I assume is to start new project in the this month cool shit and then after 1 year move to the new shiny and let people like me maintain your inexperienced code in the experimental shiny thing of last years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> problem is it evolves way to slow that alternatives already emerged and are used by a lot of people who were looking for alternatives

so yeah, evolving in an empty ocean</comment>


Aho dishes the dirt on AWK - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1726534212;fp;4194304;fpid;1

<comment><USER2> The print-only link: [http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1726534212;fp;4...](http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1726534212;fp;4194304;fpid;1;pf;1)</comment>


Saving the Feynman van - <AUTHOR> http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/may-2014/saving-the-feynman-van

<comment><USER2> If you want to see the van, I believe it is at Fermilab for this week.

<comment><USER3> Yep still there: [https://picasaweb.google.com/101140337460005353839/FeynmanTr...](https://picasaweb.google.com/101140337460005353839/FeynmanTradesman?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCIjQjc6azo3aBQ&feat=directlink)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whats written on the stickers?

... or bust?

</comment><comment><USER5> Site is down. Cached?

</comment><comment><USER6> Buy it and do physics down by the river.

<comment><USER7> There'll be plenty of time for doin' physics and livin' in a van down by the river, when you're doin' physics and livin' in a van down by the river.

<comment><USER6> This guy gets it!</comment></comment></comment>


Ag Tech Startup FarmLogs Gets Seeded, Bringing Analytics to Small Farms - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/detroit/2013/02/25/ag-tech-startup-farmlogs-nets-1m-in-seed-funding/

<comment><USER2> Nice to see YC and VCs backing a company like this! I am a cofounder of a company in the same space (<http://mercariscompany.com/>) and it has been challenging to find investors whose 'sweet spot' we are in. Don't get me wrong, we have found some amazing investors who are happy to work with us. It is more an observation that ag-tech investment doesn't seem to be anyone's specialty, outside of a life sciences play.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it was about 15 years ago that I first heard of small farmers using GPS-based analytics to track the output of every last bit of their farm, but I didn't realize that the software was difficult. I wish these guys the best of luck, and hope they succeed quickly, I'm glad to see usability being a key feature.</comment>