Apple's 2016 in review - <AUTHOR> https://chuqui.com/2017/01/apples-2016-in-review/ <comment><USER2> _How do they fix this? They need to do more talking — and even more listening — with their users. Engage with the influencers. Sit down and find out what their developers need that the current products don't offer. Find out what is making their users unhappy._

Asking people what they want will give you predictable results: complaints about any kind of change and positive feedback about shiny-looking features that demo well. You'll end up pulled in a million directions as you try to account for everyone's feedback.

The traditional Apple solution was to give a single idealized user — Steve Jobs — the power to improve his own experience. Nobody can replace Steve, but I think someone (or some group) inside Apple needs to fill this role before their products can become really great again.

<comment><USER3> Henry Ford: "If I asked people what they want, they'd say 'faster horses'"

<comment><USER4> So what? The key take out here is "faster", so asking questions is not necessarily irrelevant, instead of focusing on making one's horses shinier or more economical. You need to find out what problem to fix.

<comment><USER5> > The key take out here is "faster"

Even that part is mostly wrong. A fast horse can run more than 40MPH which about all you can expect from a car in a city. The main reason most people don't own a horse isn't that a car is faster.

Users ask for things that are obvious. No kidding faster is better. Can we have it cheaper and more reliable too?

If you ask most people in 1870 how to improve those aspects of a horse they'll tell you all about horse breeding but that doesn't get you a car.

<comment><USER4> > Even that part is mostly wrong. A fast horse can run more than 40MPH which > about all you can expect from a car in a city. The main reason most people > don't own a horse isn't that a car is faster.

Only on flat ground. Make a horse go uphill for a while and he will soon stop if carrying anything. A car, even an ancient one, not so much.

Add to that that cars can maintain a sustained speed as long as they have fuel, and of course cars are much faster than horses all things considered, and of course this is one of the reasons of their adoption - you can get much farther with a car than with a horse in the same amount of time, and it needs less maintenance as well.

<comment><USER5> > Make a horse go uphill for a while and he will soon stop if carrying > anything. A car, even an ancient one, not so much.

> you can get much farther with a car than with a horse in the same amount of > time, and it needs less maintenance as well.

But that's not _faster_. That's endurance, reliability, economy. You're arguing that the tortoise is faster than the hare, but "being faster" isn't how the tortoise won the race.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I went from almost never needing to restart my mac (with Snow Leopard) to having to restart it a couple of times a week with Sierra. The UI just becomes totally unresponsive (the cursor stops moving, the time in the menu bar stops ticking and the spinning wheel stops spinning) and needs a restart. And I don't even have things like SIMBL installed (I used to with snow leopard, not anymore). I just have Karabiner elements and Little snitch running (oh and coconut battery since Apple in it's great wisdom decided to hide the remaining time estimate).

The new versions of macOs provide no added advantage and have a lot of regressions. I used to use Exposé all the time, now I don't because everything slows to a crawl when I activate it.

And I run into severe bugs. For example, when I installed Yosemite and activated Filevault, it managed to corrupt my partition and all my data (luckily I had a backup).

I really wish Apple starts actually hiring good software engineers or at least manage them to work on their OS because right now it's embarrassing. It reminds me of when Windows ME was a thing. If Apple ran the I'm a Mac, I'm a PC ad nowadays they wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on.

And then don't even get me started on their pro apps. Aperture used to be a great app (much better than lightroom), they stopped its development.

<comment><USER7> This. The thing that made the MacOS ecosystem worth the pain and sacrifice was the quality and things "just working". What I don't understand is Apple has more than 10 times the developer resources they had 10 years ago yet quality has gone backwards. Do you really need to be a Stalin to ensure your company makes quality software?

<comment><USER8> They're stuck conforming to an artificial schedule of once a year major releases. They won't let themselves take the time they need to get things right anymore. It's no surprise quality has gone down.

<comment><USER9> Quality usually don't go up when releasing less frequently, quite the opposite. The more you change things, the more likely you are to have severe bugs. When Apple was releasing major OS upgrades less frequently, you usually had to wait until a .4 or .5 point upgrade to have something usable.

The first release of macOS Sierra (10.12.0) was vastly more usable than the first release of MacOS X Snow Leopard (10.6.0). I should know: I transitioned to Snow Leopard on release and practically nothing was running on it. I think it's the only time in my life I reverted to the previous version of macOS... It didn't prevent Snow Leopard to become one of the best OS, in the end.

The problem is that Apple is shipping things that aren't right/ready, but this _should_ be independent from the release schedule.

<comment><USER8> At least they had time to reach that .4 or .5 version. Now they pop out a new one before the old one is fixed, and we're stuck in a never-ending cycle of suck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're browsing this and say "Great, another developer article shitting on Apple after the Pro release who thinks they have figured out everything about the company", please do read this. I was truly surprised at the depth, fairness, and considerations in this article.

I'm very curious to see how Apple plays out in the next few years and will likely look back at this article to compare, if I remember to.

As a developer, I wonder if making a Mac Developer model could be an interesting path, and if it would make financial sense in any way given the idea of "power users".

<comment><USER11> But the Macbook Pro was meant to be for Power Users?

<comment><USER12> I have no idea what these self-annoited "professionals" do, but it's actually quite difficult to get the MacBook Pro to its limits. Doing webdev or using Xcode it's hard to ever notice any delay.

But maybe I'm just a noob who isn't professional enough to suddenly discover that life just isn't worth it without 32GB of RAM.

<comment><USER13> Virtual Machines. If you use VM's, 16gb is likely going to be a problem. I, quite easily, hit it all the time. It has nothing to do with being 'professional enough'. The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they are doing.

<comment> yoz-y Bollocks, I have a 16GB ram MBP from 2014, running a VM all the time and compiling on both the VM and the host OS. No problems there. The 32GB might be more comfortable for some, but I have hard time figuring out how something so exclusive has now become a necessity.

<comment><USER13> > The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they > are doing.

This was a very important part of your comment. It's good that 16gb isn't an issue for you, but for some of us, it is.

<comment> yoz-y One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop. Scouring the web for some time shows me that in 2015 it was quite hard to get a non-gaming laptop with 32GB of ram. Now, there are quite a lot of voices that cry that it is some bare minimum.

To me it seems that more people now prefer laptops to desktops and it is annoying to sacrifice performance for portability. The lack of a truly powerful desktop Mac definitely is not helping in this regard either.

<comment><USER14> Actually replying to lsadam0 but can't for some reason

> If the 2016 kept the same thickness but offered 32gb, I would have been > happy.

That's not possible with the current chip offerings from Intel though. The Intel CPUs that fit the MBP form factor and other features APple needs only go up to 16 GB RAM. If you doubt this is a pain point for Apple, note that Apple standardized on 16GB RAM out of the box. I'm sure thy'd love to be able to offer 32GB as an up-sell.

Sure they could inflate the MBP form factor an re-design around the chipsets that do offer 32GB RAM, but the chipsets that suit the current form factor and support 32 GB are supposedly due out next year.

<comment><USER15> "That's not possible with the current chip offerings from Intel though. The Intel CPUs that fit the MBP form factor and other features APple needs only go up to 16 GB RAM."

That's entirely reversed. Your statement should read:

"That's entirely possible with the current chip offerings from Intel. However, it's not possible with Apple's requirements for form factor and power."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In 2009 I bought my first Apple product: an 8GB 13" MacBook Pro that cost $3000 ($1000 for the extra 4gb, like a dumbass). Quite soon after I got an iPhone 3GS. Now every computer in the house (family of four) is an Apple. Every phone is an Apple. Even AirPlay was an influencing factor in selecting a hi-fi receiver (HTR7065). Apple TVs sit next to actual TVs.

Yesterday I replaced our fleet of TimeCapsules and Airports with Lumas. Despite their problems they are still better than the Apple product. Rumor has it Apple isn't working on Airports any more.

Today, I began looking for a replacement for the 2009 MBP, which my 11yo son now uses. I started by looking at Microsoft Surface.

In the present, Apple doesn't meet my needs and as I look to the future, when _I_ will need a new machine, the MacBook "Pro" is more like a MacBook "Bling".

Apple used to be an ecosystem. Now its just incremental phone updates.

<comment><USER17> > Now its just incremental phone updates.

And the software side of those updates is _bad_.

Apple hardware is probably better than ever. The mechanical engineering and precision involved blows away anyone else in consumer electronics. The new MacBooks and iPhones are truly works of art compared to the cheap injection- molded stuff everyone else is pumping out.

But the software just keeps getting worse and worse.

My iPhone (and those belonging to my friend and family with iPhones) regularly has strange graphics glitches and Springboard crashes. MacOS is a clusterf*ck with tons of poorly-implemented useless "features" and UI glitches.

My suspicion is that Apple is hitting a level of software complexity where the development and maintenance costs of correct code are too high. I believe writing correct software has a super-linear cost; if you have N components in your code, you can expect something like O(N^2) cross-component interactions in your code, because any given piece of existing code is likely to interact with some portion of new code. I suspect Apple will have to change their software engineering practices if they hope to go back to a good level of quality and usability with a reasonable temporal and financial engineering budget.

<comment><USER18> Even if Apple hardware is a feat of mechanical engineering and precision, I don't want to upgrade my Macbook Air or iPhone 6 with an Apple product right now because nothing fits my needs.

I want a phone with a flat back that won't rock on a desk without a case. I want a desktop with modern specs. I want a laptop with great battery life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > But here's the problem: sitting in this niche of excluded users are some of > Apple's strongest supporters, the influencers that create word of mouth...

I see this point made a lot, especially on Hacker News whenever this general topic comes up. I'm just curious: what evidence is there to support this point of view?

I'm as frustrated as the next software engineer that the new Macbook Pros aren't targeted at me or users like me (and that there hasn't been a new Mac Pro in a long time), and my next primary machine may well not be an Apple product when my current Macbook Pro ages out. But I don't really see an argument that draws a line between that fact and a future perception issue for Apple - and that seems to be accepted as gospel whenever the topic of Apple comes up in developer circles. Who are these "influencers" whose opinions purportedly closely align with software engineers' and why do consumers care about them?

<comment><USER20> I don't even want to know how much revenue I brought Apple by "word of mouth" alone as I've been one of the _gazillion_ fevered and outspoken Unix converts (Darwin fan since 2004). Friends, family and random people in every potential "evangelizable" context – don't even get me started on how many fellow netizens, students, sysadmins and developers I actively tipped over as well (these often were the hardest actually).

Macs or later iPhone, it didn't matter we had to tell everyone that those nice and shiny devices were the real deal and we kept showing and telling until the last potential convert saw the light as well.

I have been buying a new Mac and iPhone almost annually for about ten years now – even (or especially) after 2011 _and_ 2013\. I honestly was thrilled by iOS7, I loved it from the moment of its introduction and only saw potential.

All that said, no "OSX" release has made me happier than Snow Leopard unfortunately and I am still convinced that "Losing the Functional High- Ground" by Marco Arment channeled an important message about a pattern most of us likely still see across the whole product line-up even though many things got better since.

Why else have we slowly but steadily stopped recommending Macs over the last two years?

When will that happen to iPhones or iPads? I'm still recommending them left and right but it somehow also is getting harder in a way, especially when people keep losing their safe-in-the-cloud data (in some cases even those precious _moments with iPhone_ – _photos_ ).

Unfortunately Apple does seem to need a (kool-aid sober) benevolent dictator with taste _and_ wholistic understanding of their core product/business (what is that going to be btw?).

<comment><USER19> I can definitely believe that you, as an individual, have driven tens of thousands of dollars in sales Apple's way over the last decade. But even if we assume that there are tens of thousands of people doing the same thing as you (as effectively as you) for the same reasons, that adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars, which is three orders of magnitude below Apple's sales per year, and your impact is stretched out over a decade. Hard to see that loss as more than a rounding error on any Apple projection.

What I'm asking after, I suppose, is evidence that there are "gazillions" of former "Unix converts" driving significantly more money than I'm estimating here. I still continue to feel like this whole "software developers are influencers" line of argumentation when it comes to Apple products is just wishful thinking crossed with extrapolating from very limited personal anecdotes.

<comment><USER21> I'm sure we each overestimate our importance. Plenty of my non tech friends went out and bought tech without asking me, heck they probably know i'd tell them not to buy that windows phone on a plan but they did anyway because it came with free spotify.

I think the better insight is that our needs, for practicality and occasional updates, are quite common. Its nice to add more memory or disk without needing a new machine. It would be nice to have a replaceable battery in my laptop. Apple is screwing up all these simple things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The day Apple makes a power cord that doesn't have a cable sheath with the consistency and durability of silly putty is the day I will recognize them as back on track.

It's a small detail, but the power cord is the one part of the computer that users have no choice but to interact with every day and they've been ignoring the problems with them for the better part of half a decade.

Every Mac at work either has detached and frayed around the power connector strain relief, or looks like an extremely precise samurai has made tens of small cuts in the jacket of the cable.

<comment><USER23> Of all the MacBooks, MacBook Pros and idevices I've had over the years (including my still running perfectly Jan 2011 MBP) I've never had a single issue with any power cord tearing / breaking or power supply even fail as far as I can remember. I always assume when I hear of people with this problem that they're disrespecting their hardware by jamming it in doors / desks or perhaps have pets that chew on them.

<comment><USER24> Blaming the user isn't helpful.

I've had more problems with Apple cables than any other brand - and Apple tends to make their cables sleeker looking. Coincidence? I doubt it.

At least they've improved from the Wallstreet-era Powerbook G3 chargers, though. I think I went through 3 of those circa 1998. Of course, those machines, and the early G4 Powerbooks, had bigger issues than just that. Dark times in Macland.

(As an aside, how people talk about their device history is a good litmus test of the length of their experience with Apple hardware, thanks to the Intel switch laptop name change.)

<comment><USER25> In some circumstances you can certainly blame the user. Any remotely feasible charger cable can easy be broken by repeated abuse. The real question is what percentage of users break their cables. If that percentage is very low, then I think you _can_ blame the user (or, rather than blame, sugggest they just be a little more careful). I have no idea what the percentage is in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Apple is the world's most profitable business - twice the profits of #2 (JP Morgan Chase) and almost a 4x magnitude over Google.(1)

I agree with the author's final assessment - "meets expectations with some areas that need improvement" \- and I think this is the key.

They are stoking the fire, keeping it burning, but clearly their focus seems to be diminished on their core business.

And even companies of this scale need hyper focus to drive what seem like small but obvious improvements, usually executives are faced with two choices:

(a) Focus on today's business and unlock maximum value in your product line / distribution.

(b) Innovate to turn a corner and plan for tomorrow.

I am surprised at how few people attribute the current challenges at Apple to what I suspect is an internal focus on planning for tomorrow.

How much more profitable is the iPhone going to get? The smartphone market is approaching saturation (2)

So what does the leadership do?

Are laptops, imacs, and apple pro's the future?

No, they barely represent 9% of Apples sales and have been FLAT for years (3)

What about Apple TV & Apple Watch (the "other" category) - those have already grown to 6% of sales - and moving in the right direction.

But is that it?

My suspicion is that Apple / Tim Cook knows something BIG that we don't that they are going to get PERFECT while they still have the cash fire hose of the iPhone to drive the engine.

(1) [http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable- co...](http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable- companies-2016/)

(2) [https://www.cnet.com/news/smartphone-markets-glory-days- are-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/smartphone-markets-glory-days-are-over- says-analyst/)

(3) [http://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/26/q1-2016-results/](http://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/26/q1-2016-results/)

<comment><USER24> Apple should absolutely be investing big into future product categories, as they have done in the past.

However, with revenue and profit levels where they are, it's baffling to see them seem to devote _less_ resources in an absolute sense (not just a proportional one) to existing money-makers. Mac laptops are big sellers. iPhones are big sellers. Yet the refreshes get more and more basic, and the software quality seems to be sliding downward. Could they really not fix this without sacrificing future investment? They did it in the past when they had less money to play with, after all...

<comment><USER27> They have invested in future product categories, the Apple Watch being the most recent - and not very successful - example.

I'm afraid what Apple is doing is purely looking at figures - if it doesn't sell at least X or account for Y% of revenue, it's discarded. AirPort, gone, displays, gone, 17 inch MBP, long gone.

And yet their R&D budget is still going up ([http://cdn.macrumors.com/article- new/2016/05/Apple-RD-Spendi...](http://cdn.macrumors.com/article- new/2016/05/Apple-RD-Spending-2016.png)), estimated to become $12 billion in 2017. IDK where it all goes though.

<comment><USER28> It's going to the car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Apple is a company that is following the process they learned when Steve ran the show, without any clear understanding of _why_ that process exists. As a result, they are unable to adapt to adapt that process to the external world while remaining true to the underlying principles.

What you see is the predictable result: ossified thinking couple with a rigid adherence to "what makes them great". all criticism falls on deaf ears and they'll just continue like this until Tim Cook is gone and they get a product guy back in the heal who can give Apple direction and heart.

<comment><USER30> _Apple is a company that is following the process they learned when Steve ran the show, without any clear understanding of why that process exists_

Apple created Apple University years before Steve died, to understand clearly _why_ they became so successful. They even hired a top professor from an Ivy League university to run it.

Whatever ails Apple these days is not caused by them not understanding how they became great. It's caused by the lessons of the past not being applicable to the reality of today.

<comment><USER31> You cannot teach taste and vision. Apple giving up monitors is the clearest sign of that: it's the face of the computer, so much that novices confused it for the computer itself.

The Jobs-style answer was the all-in-one iMacs and the monitor-as-a-dock, a computer that wants to be seen. The Cook-style answer is to put somebody else's logo right on their product's display case. Madness.

<comment><USER32> For someone that was waiting for this hardware refresh to get a Macbook Pro and a new Cinema Display, I was surprised that the keyboard became less utilitarian and the display more-so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Defining products by the spreadsheet: A big percentage of complaints over > the new MacBook Pro devices is that they ignore the needs of the "power" > user. The problem? This group is fairly small and have needs living well > towards the end of the bell curve.

The problem with ignoring this niche is because these users are either developers or big influencers. They help with the ongoing success of the App Store as well as with free marketing.

This is also a big reason why Apple needs to release either an iMac without a screen or a more affordable Mac Pro. The Mac Mini has never really cut it for anything but personal use.

For the 1st time in years, I'm thinking of switching back to Windows since Docker makes development easier now. I'll still get a cheap Mac for personal stuff like Photos, but it'll just be relegated for that.

<comment><USER34> My household has been Mac-only for about 20 years, but I finally gave up waiting for a decent Mac Pro or a powerful Mac Mini. Last year I put together a PC for about $1500 [1] which looks great _and_ completely demolishes any Mac for GPU-heavy tasks, thanks to its Nvidia GTX 1070. The build was super-easy (my 10 year-old daughter did half of it) and the machine worked perfectly the first time I powered it on. And, much to my surprise, Windows 10 really isn't bad.

I still use a MacBook Pro for most of my development work, but all gaming and video stuff is now PC, and I can't see myself going back. The ability to easily upgrade individual parts on an as-needed basis is just too appealing.

I still prefer MacOS to Windows, but if MacOS is the _only_ thing a $2500+ Mac Pro brings to the table in 2017--compared to 2017 PC hardware--it really isn't enough anymore.

[1]: [https://pcpartpicker.com/user/joshcarter/saved/Dq2kLk](https://pcpartpicker.com/user/joshcarter/saved/Dq2kLk)

<comment><USER35> I built my first gaming PC (GTX 1070 as well) not that long ago, and you're right, it wasn't too hard (though my wife did most of the work). And I use that for gaming all the time.

However, I would never dream of using it for development. One of the games I play is World of Warcraft, and I maintain a few addons, and even just trying to edit Lua files on Windows is a PITA. Atom kind of sucks, and the CLI isn't very good. I installed Windows Subsystem For Linux in order to get bash and git, but it turns out there's no way to open GUI apps from that system, so I have to independently navigate to my projects in both Explorer and the shell. Oh, and Windows doesn't implement enough of Linux so tmux can't actually remember my paths, so every time I reboot, I have to find all of my projects again. And of course Linux symlinks don't work in Windows, and Windows aliases don't work in Linux, so I have a shell script that copies a bunch of the addons into place that I have to run each time because I can't symlink it. Ultimately, it's all just very annoying.

<comment><USER34> Agreed, macOS is a far superior blend of Unix underpinnings and a graphical front-end. I love that I can have my terminal and Emacs run seamlessly on the same platform as Sketch and Photoshop. Fortunately, my MacBook Pro is still a plenty capable machine for the programming I do in my day job.

But I have to say, PC hardware has come a long way, not just in terms of performance, but also in build quality and ease of use. The aluminum case I bought looks as good as any Mac Pro tower Apple has made, it has fantastic cable routing so everything's clean and tidy, and tons of options for thermal management--I can run games on ultra quality and my PC is still silent!

It's really too bad we can't have the best of both worlds. But I don't see Apple going towards PC-standard hardware, Windows will probably never be a great Unix, and Linux never quite gets the software adoption it needs to become my desktop OS. I'd love to be proven wrong on any of those, however!

<comment><USER36> Actually it can be done and works well after ironing down some stuff: [https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/search?q=flair%3A"succes...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/search?q=flair%3A"success!"&sort=hot&restrict_sr=on&t=all#success)!

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the pointer, I may stick an extra disk in there and give Hackintosh a shot. Can you imagine how fast Apple Motion or Final Cut Pro would run with a GTX 1070 GPU behind it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I feel like Apple are one of the few large SV companies that are producing products for their users.

For everyone else the user is a resource that they're selling to advertisers.

They've shown they're willing to stand up for user rights. For this reason alone I hope they continue to be successful.

<comment><USER38> I totally agree with this but at the same time I'm annoyed with the current state of macOS and the Mac product line.

The Mac (and maybe the AirPort Extreme) are the only Apple products I really care about or depend on.

I'm holding on to my iPhone because Apple have a great strategy with regard to privacy and user rights but I'm not upgrading it because I'm pissed off about the Mac. Pathetic as that is, as a Mac user it's about the only small leverage available.

Sadly, I think Tim knows more about business than me. For every disgruntled, Unix loving, Mac user they loose they'll probably add 10 more iOS users for whom emoji are culturally interesting. :(

<comment><USER37> As a UNIX-like system loving dev... I always found macs (running MacOS) a bit frustrating for dev work.

It's nice that you have a familiar command structure to work with, but installing software from homebrew/whatever else was always a nightmare. They were nice laptops... but it seems inefficient.

So I maintain 2 laptop. A macbook which I basically use for Skype and office work (and use about twice a month), and a cheap Thinkpad running Linux for dev work. When I need more power, I can pull the drive out of the Thinkpad and throw it in a desktop and it just works.

So... I think it's kind of hard to make a good case for macbooks as ideal general purpose dev machines. And they were really never meant to be general purpose dev machines. They probably work great for Mac/iOS dev and general purpose applications though.

<comment><USER38> Each to their own I suppose. I personally don't find homebrew to be a nightmare at all but that is of course anecdotal.

You are mistaken if you think that Apple never intended the Mac to be used for general purpose Unix development though, they used to advertise it for that purpose on the science section of their website, before it was removed.

[https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-drops- science-...](https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-drops-science-as- core-market-web-page-deleted)

<comment><USER39> Apple used to prominently promote its Unix heritage. For example, here's an article from MacWorld in 2001.

[http://www.macworld.com/article/1001970/21osx- unix.html](http://www.macworld.com/article/1001970/21osx-unix.html)

And an advertisement:

"Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null"

[http://www.mackungfu.org/vintage-os-x-ad-emphasises-unix- pow...](http://www.mackungfu.org/vintage-os-x-ad-emphasises-unix-power)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The trouble at Apple is one of culture and timing. The ideals of Apple and the timing of their thinking is in many ways out of sync with the rest of the world.

This was the same that happened to Microsoft when their lets just create machines with a million different providers and slap our OS on top were surpassed by Apple when Steve Jobs came back. The advantages of Apples vertical integration allowed them to push for radical new hardware design aesthetics when that was craved the most. On top of that a completely different way of pushing product in sync with the OS which allowed them to avoid the issues of backwards compatibility which MS struggled with. Today though in many ways the Apple aesthetic have been commoditized and were it haven't Apple just haven't spent enough time improving (looking at you OSX and Mac)

I frankly don't think there is much to do about it for the simple reason that it would require Apple to change it's culture from being a secretive one to being more open. This is where Google have many advantages as it's much more in sync with where the world and technology is heading (Cloud, Deep Learning, web). I don't think Steve would have been able to save Apple either although I think he would have done things a little better.

I am a big fan of apples products and own only that but I can see a future, if things doesn't change were I would easily use ex. Android phone.

</comment><comment><USER41> I remember feeling the same way about Apple back in late 2012/early 2013. I was ready to replace my iPhone 4, and Apple was only making phones with small screens, while the market trend was for larger screens. Then Apple Maps came out, and it was the worst release I can remember Apple ever doing. Android seemed to be pulling ahead in a lot of ways. A lot of people were saying that Tim Cook wasn't capable of running the company, and that the magic died with Steve Jobs. The stock price started to slide.

As we all know, Apple recovered from its bad release of Maps and revamped iOS, the stock price recovered, and there was much rejoicing. So, it's important to have a sense of perspective about these things.

Apple certainly seems like it has slowed down lately, but they have more resources available to improve the situation than any other company in the world. I suspect the current issues are caused by internal organizational problems rather than a lack of product vision.

<comment><USER42> >> I suspect the current issues are caused by internal organizational problems rather than a lack of product vision.

Absolutely. If they'd figure out how to scale up such that they're able to fix the most annoying bugs filed via their bug radar, macOS would be a much better product.

The sad thing is that at some point there were more and more bugs and UX problems which I didn't even bother reporting since they were so obvious that everyone using the OS should notice.

So apparently they're not able to scale in that regard. Even completely isolated apps like Preview.app are affected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I find the recent turn of public opinion against Apple to be interesting. Two years ago people were writing about brilliant Tim Cook was, largely because of the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Which was Apple simply scaling up to product sizes that they had previously resisted in joining, but were common to the rest of the market.

So was praise then wrong and overblown? Or is the current wave of discontent wrong and overblown? Or is two years enough time for Apple to underperform and cause a loss in faith?

I think it's a bit of all three, but also a lot because this current unhappiness is driven by developers, who had expected Apple to treat the MBP- much less the Mac Pro- with greater care and respect. 2014 saw the introduction of Swift, and developers were happy.

<comment><USER44> Even 2 years ago, people were grumpy how long the "can" style Mac Pro had not been refreshed and its obvious limitations, and that the Mac Mini had not been refreshed in a long time. But this does get overshadowed in perception (both public and of the critics) by a great launch like the iPhone 6. The introduction of Swift was certainly a surprise move by Apple and a sign that they cared about developers. But people were not unconditionally "happy", there was some valid criticism of it back then.

<comment><USER45> > and that the Mac Mini had not been refreshed in a long time

Worth keeping in mind the last refresh of the Mini performed way worse than the model that existed before it and had all upgradability locked down when the previous model actually championed the fact it could be opened and upgraded.

These Mac updates are not only slow but it's a recurring theme they're performing worse than what came before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> One thing Apple needs to fix ASAP is online (iCloud) and offline storage (iPhone).

Almost all my family members are having issues with running out of space on their iPhone. Some even bought additional iCloud to improve storage space only to be completely shocked and pissed to find that iCloud isn't really add additional storage (it is just for synchronization).

On top of this Google is taking serious advantage of Apple's bad execution with a fairly effective marketing campaign.

In some regards the most important thing about your phone these days is the memories you have collected and not so much what operating system or form factor is being used.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think this is a fair article and it echoes a lot of my sentiments. Something is going wrong over at Apple. No, they're not going to go out of business soon, but I think the sheer volume of criticism they've been receiving (not just from users, but also from noted Apple advocates) is troubling, and they need to do something about it.

My standout is the battery case they released a few years ago. The design of that case is just unspeakably hideous. They need somebody with a Jobsian level of ruthlessness, attention to detail and unified vision to steer the ship back in the right direction. Another example here would be the fact (mentioned in this article) that they effectively copied the rest of the market by providing a larger phone. The Apple of old didn't do this. They didn't really follow market trends, they started them. And then to be flummoxed by demand when people responded so positively to smaller phones is baffling to me.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see some C level leadership changes some time this year.

<comment><USER48> > They need somebody with a Jobsian level of ruthlessness, attention to detail > and unified vision to steer the ship back in the right direction.

This. I buy Apple products not because I'm looking for the latest tech gadget. I want something that feels like a work of art. There are too many products, too many sizes, too many options. Jobs would have told whoever suggested an iPhone Plus that he's a shithead moron. Why am I using Fantastical instead of the default Calendar app? I never did this on iOS 6. Go on their website and you see all sorts of crap acquisition products (Beats) they're selling. I don't want Beats I want Apple! I want premium, exclusive, luxury, high-end, polished tech products that work as simple as toasters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Mirror: [http://archive.is/aVNM3](http://archive.is/aVNM3)

</comment><comment><USER50> What's the reasoning for trying to disable right click on your website? I simple wanted to google for the WiFi company mentioned - I had to find an add- on to copy the thing. For someone really into Apple you're good at obnoxious design.

<comment><USER51> It might be just a firefox thing, but shift+right click bypasses it. Also Ctrl+C for copying text (or Cmd + C on Mac, I believe).

<comment><USER52> No it's the same on Chrome and shift+right click isn't working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've seen very little discussion here of the battery issues with the new MBP, which in my opinion is the most offensive example of Apple's decline in quality. Lucky users are reporting 9 hour battery life, while others are getting 4-5. Nobody is getting the promised 10 hour battery life from their $1,500+ laptops.

<comment><USER54> In regards to the battery life, I was excited to see "9 hours remaining" the first time I turned the new MBP on. Realistically, I get about 3-5 depending on what I'm doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> A great write up. I wonder, whether Apple just has gotten a bit to large for their current organizational structure. It worked, when Apple had no iOS devices to care for and the attention was divided across much less products. Especially the signs of "sloppiness" point in that direction. At minimum, Apple should create senior positions overlooking individual product categories. Even the rather forgotten iPod business could be larger, if there was a small team focussed on the question: what can we do to make new products people want to buy? A friend was just missing a small (waterproof) iPod which works seamlessly with Apple Music for example

The same with the Mac. It is understandable from the view of the company, that iOS is the bigger thing. But, as the article mentions, the Mac is a vital part of the Apple eco system. And the Mac Pro is a vital part of the Mac eco system. You need to support the professional developers to have all the applications for your "non-professional" customers. The best sign, that Apple was surprised by the public reaction to the new MacBook Pro was, that they reacted by reducing the dongle prices. It didn't seem to have thought that people would object at buying a collection of them at full prices. When I bought my G3 iBook, it came with the necessary dongles included.

Besides the obvious conceptual issues with the current Mac Pro, the biggest sin was not to update its hardware regularly. Same for the Mac Mini. So there needs to be two things done:

\- set up senior people for each product to make sure that issues/development for that product/category gets the necessary attention, e.g. people who only care about the mac.

\- these people need to make sure that each product is updated in set cycles. The iOS devices as well as the operating systems are updated in a yearly cycle. Maybe not as strict as with the iPhone, this should be applied to all products. The releases might shift a bit on parts availability, but the Mac Pro and the Mini have missed several updates of CPUs/GPUs/other hardware.

One more thing: while it is understandable that the retina MacBook only has soldered on parts, this is less understandable for the MacBook Pro, and not at all for the Mini, iMac or the Mac Pro. How can you design desktop machines like the iMac, where you have to unglue the screen to get to its internals? I still have my G5 iMac, and that was a nicely designed machine. A mac czar could tell upper management, where clever and efficient production methods stop and making a bad product starts...

</comment><comment><USER55> the _brand new_ Macbook Pro has last-generation Intel CPUs. I remember when Jobs announced one of the first Intel Macbook Pros with chips that no other manufacturer had even been given the chance to ship yet.

<comment><USER56> This is a really interesting point. Apple seems to have stopped pushing suppliers as much as they used to.

<comment><USER57> It's not an interesting point, because if you do your research, there is no gain to using a Kaby Lake (7th generation) CPU over a "Skylake-U" (6th gen) CPU:

Current/2016 13" max-spec i7 MBP uses i7-6567U which scores slightly higher (average single/multi-core geekbench results) than the best dual-core Kaby Lake CPU, being the i7-7500U.

[https://twitter.com/mattkocaj/status/814090388986175488](https://twitter.com/mattkocaj/status/814090388986175488)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> _> Want us to think you're still serious about the Mac, Apple? Show us parity of capabilities between the two platforms, at least on your core product sets..._

Be careful what you wish for.

      The primary problem with Sierra with respect to PDFs is that Apple chose to
      rewrite the PDFKit framework in macOS 10.12 and it broke a number of things
      that PDF-related developers relied upon...

      Apple wants to use a common foundation for both iOS and macOS. However, it was
      released way too early, and for the first time (at least in my experience)
      Apple deprecated several features without caring about compatibility. And to
      make things worse, lots of former features are now broken or not implemented at
      all, meaning that we had to add lots of workarounds or implement stuff on our
      own. And there's still work left to be done.

      10.12.2 introduces new issues (it seems that Apple wants to fix at least the
      broken compatibility now) and of course fixed almost none of the other issues.

[http://tidbits.com/article/16966](http://tidbits.com/article/16966)

</comment><comment><USER59> Apple has forgotten how to compete in the computer industry. In the old days there was a ruthless and relentless refresh cycle with manufacturers working hard and fast to trump each other with more advanced products.

Apple appears to simply no longer have that cycle as part of its business DNA, and no longer seems to even understand that is what the computer industry is (or was) about.

I am looking ever more favorably at Windows again.

<comment><USER60> The new MacBooks outsold all their competitors, so I glean that they still know how to compete:

[https://intelligence.slice.com/apples-macbook-pro- launch/](https://intelligence.slice.com/apples-macbook-pro-launch/)

<comment><USER59> Maybe there was record sales because there was a record number of years since the hardware was last updated.

Latent demand = sales.

It's certainly not due to the effusive praise of the press.

<comment><USER60> Conversely, this could also mean that the "press" and the vocal majority on a few online forums have no bearing on what people out there really want.

In almost every discussion about this, you will see some people who have actually purchased — unlike the detractors — these machines and are happy with them.

I personally don't see anything bad about the new MacBooks either, except the lack of out-of-the-box compatibility with the new iPhones/EarPods, and their price point in relation to my budget at this current point in time. I will definitely be buying one as soon as I can afford it.

Going all USB3/Thunderbolt only is very good, exciting even, and harkens back to 2 decades ago when the very first iMac came out as the first every USB-only computer. The wide color displays have to be seen in person to be appreciated. The battery problems and GPU glitches have been found to be on the software side, iirc, and some of those issues have already been patched.

<comment><USER61> It is all great if you do not have existing hardware you want to use.

I have a Logitech mouse I love, it has a USB connector receiver that sticks 3 mm out of my laptop so I keep it plugged in all the time. The idea of it hanging of some cable adapter is just silly, not even mentioning the fact that you have to buy it.

Or my fancy 27" Apple Thunderbolt display. I had no issue paying the Apple tax because I loved the display and it doubles as a docking station (integrated power adapter). Guess what, it doesn't work with the new laptop. The new display they are selling is made by LG and was not available for purchase until few weeks ago.

<comment><USER62> There's an adapter for your Thunderbolt Display. You will however miss out on the power provided by the display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This may be rather ignorant of how the motivational structure of a large company works, but is it possible that some of these issues, like missed ship dates, is caused by a lessening of the amount of fear that trickles down the hierarchy?

Wasn't Jobs the kind of person you were terrified of letting down and doesn't that kind of thing trickle downward?

</comment><comment><USER64> Even customer service seems to be befuddled by Apple's policies at times. The current battery issue with the iphone 6s took months until Apple made it 'claimable'. Then people are told to send their iphones in and are expected to wait for 6 weeks (without a temporary replacement). But what's better: they get the same phone back (because the system check apple performs won't test for cold temperature based battery issues, so the device always passes).

I don't know if the Apple before Cook and Icahn was different in that, but this is soooo ... dare I say "heyday Microsoft"?

</comment><comment><USER65> Apple doesn't seem to have anything new. Just minor upgrades of the old stuff. The car project, whatever that was, seems to have been canceled. The watch is something of a dud. Amazon and Google are fighting it out in the voice operated home control space, while Nest doesn't have an entry.

Apple is still making tons of money. Boring but profitable isn't that bad a place to be. It's possible to be boring, profitable, and still be a prestige brand. Look at Rolex.

<comment><USER62> Your comment sounds like Nest is a division of Apple. That's not the case, it's a subsidiary of Google-parten Alphabet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I have a 2013 13" MBP and have started to look for a specifically non-Apple machine to replace it with. What got me to give up on Apple is not really the high price or infrequent updates but rather the state of macOS and bundled apps. It just sucks. Each upgrade seems to introduce more eye candy, more complications, more bugs, and is also slower. To me it feels like planned obsolescence.

<comment><USER38> Yep it's like Aperture. If they neglect it long enough people will just move the approved Apple alternative. In the case of Aperture it's Photos, for macOS I think they want us to move to iOS.

It didn't work for Aperture, pros generally moved to Lightroom or something else. For macOS either Linux or Windows seems more likely than iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Just an idle thought: could the construction of, and move to, the new Apple campus be partly to blame for the company becoming distracted?

<comment><USER68> I highly recommend firing up Google Earth and checking out the new campus. Someone has painstakingly modeled the construction site in 3D. Make sure you have 3D buildings enabled in Google Earth, and give it a chance to load the details. Tiny details like vehicles and machinery, mounds of dirt, even porta- loos have been rendered, You can zoom down inside and between the buildings to get a good feel of the space.

I wouldn't mind knowing who did that, and what their workflow is to model all that stuff.

I think once Apples moves in, they will be inspired to pick things up. It really is an amazing building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> With regards to shipping dates. It used to be a source of pride of Apple to say "shipping now" when they demonstrated a new product but somewhere along the line they fell into the trap of announcing well before they could deliver. They need to pull back.

having owned an airport router I no longer see the need as other routers have become just as easy to use. my 1g service from AT&T was a breeze to setup for home use and heavily customize, all from my Mac.

the only bone I have to pick with Apple is the disgraceful product cycle associated with the mini and Pro. If they are going to drop these products then drop them. if they aren't going to do yearly updates then either drop the product or guarantee refreshes so people don't feel like they are buying into a dead end.

finally, damn please get all your products to one connector again and fast and in the mean time adapters should be included when your own products don't interconnect

</comment><comment><USER70> I just got a Google Home speaker and for me it feels like how the iPhone felt in 2007; a revolution in computing!

But Apple is so far behind with the horrid Siri it's laughable. I've used Siri almost daily since 2011 and after using Google Now I cant stand to use Siri as her accuracy is 90 percent if lucky vs. her competitors 100 percent.

</comment><comment><USER71> I am really interested to see in 2017 Apple's product releases. Is iPhone 8 going to make me staying in iPhone? I already switched from Mac to Dell XPS and I am quite happy with it. I guess this year there will be many old Mac users that will be leaving Apple. Unless they do something drastic? But what could they do?

</comment><comment><USER72> Apple has a large enough hardware footprint.

They now need to compete on AI. I imagine a lot of their resources are being put in the catch-up-to-Google bucket.

There have been a lot of blog posts saying Apple doesn't know who their customers are. But their products are already accepted by everyone (every group). Their customers are everyone.

<comment><USER73> I'd second that. They're on their way of losing the battle for AI. From my experience (and those around me), Siri is way behind Alexa and the Google Assistant, in both voice recognition and features. It was once the selling point of iPhones, now no one really talks about it anymore.

I don't understand why their development in that area slowed down so much, when Amazon started much later and was still able to produce the first home assistant. An Apple version of Amazon Echo (Siri for Home) would've been the perfect product to integrate users further in their environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > it makes sense for Apple to stop making WIFI devices

Only if Apple is looking not to innovate. Mesh networking has great potential to take off, especially if the software was integrated into iOS. One missing element from mesh is AAA, which Apple could definitely mediate.

</comment><comment><USER74> 2 things really concern me about Apple's direction under Tim Cook: his statements that he doesn't see why someone would need a computer in addition to an iPad and iPhone, and the fact that he has reportedly combined the iOS and MacOS teams.

My MBP is only 1 year old, waiting to see what comes out of Cupertino later this year before deciding if I'll move away from Apple products for my dev machine.

</comment><comment><USER75> I see a lot of articles suggest that Apple may no longer support developers, building only consumer devices. But what are Apple developers using internally? Would Apple maintain some hackintosh build for their developers? This seems unlikely to me. I would instead expect that we will soon see some new hardware suitable for developers. But maybe I'm wrong. They got rid of Xserve, which means they either are building server hardware they don't sell or they are using Linux or Windows for their own servers.

</comment><comment><USER76> Somehow despite leading the charge Apple has missed the boat on voice.

<comment><USER77> Unlikely. Volume of voice input for Siri probably is still orders of magnitude larger than those Alexa or Google Home handle. It also does so internationally and multilanguage. Once you start looking closely advantage is not really that big. Google, Alexa and Cortana also mishandle queries and they might excel at some tasks but fall short in others. Still a lot of room to improve for everyone, Apple included, but I would argue they are all in a very similar situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > They need to do more talking — and even more listening — with their users. > Engage with the influencers

Some influencers who are not either professional bloggers or iOS devs too please.

</comment><comment><USER78> At this point my expectations for Apple are set so low that I'd be thrilled if 2017 brought us options for a physical escape key and 32GB RAM on a spec- bumped MacBook Pro. But I suspect even that is too much to ask.

</comment><comment><USER59> Apple should spin off the Mac division to be its own company so theoretically the management might give sh*t about competing.

<comment><USER79> After brainstorming what they would call this subset company, it dawned on me that the Mac, as in the Mcintosh (fruit) is an apple. I'm embarrassed to admit I never put the two together. I am not a smart man.

They were correct in not naming the iPhone the Granny Smith.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Quite a manifesto about a single company...

</comment><comment><USER81> I switched from Mac Pro to PC a few months ago. We needed NVIDIA and running some hack over thunderbolt isn't a real option, despite what the Apple Zealots say.

<comment><USER45> Recently made the same decision myself to use CUDA too. After months of considering hacked open thunderbolt enclosures that nearly cost the same as a PC anyway I just switched.

I now measure my 3D render times in seconds not double digit minutes.

There is no doubt in my mind that if the trashcan mac had Nvidia GPUs I would have just saved up and spent over double I spent on this PC even if it had worse performance. I've been a mac user for 17 years and didn't make this decision lightly.

<comment><USER68> Can I ask what sort of rendering you're doing? Do you mean animation or still images... what software? I find that between different software you can get vastly differing render times. Also, for really serious and large work aren't people using render farms now anyway?

<comment><USER45> Doing animation and still (admittedly haven't produced anything yet as I've only had this setup running for a week) mostly motion graphics and advertising focused.

I'm working in Cinema 4D and Octane render (render engine built from the ground up for GPU) with a single GTX 1080, coming from a 2.7 i5 MBP with no dedicated GPU the difference isn't even comparable.

Good idea of what you can expect from a single 1080+Octane is in this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGXmsUnbPCM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGXmsUnbPCM)

The industry is at a bit of a crossroads from what I can see, of course huge studios have investments in render farms and CPU based tech but for individuals and <10 person studios it's all moving towards GPU rendering.

Being able to run a renderer on your desktop machine that can show the end result in near real time completely changes your workflow. It's no longer just using experience to make guesses with lighting and materials then waiting minutes to see if your hypothesis was correct.

<comment><USER68> Thanks for info. Yes the live render previewing is getting quite nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> seriously, if you have a problem with apple, don't use it. There are thousands of other vendors. Instead of posting dribble on the web...

<comment><USER73> Not really. There's one other major phone OS out there (Android), with the majority of phones made by less than a dozen companies. Linux and Windows are the only other choices when it comes to operating systems for computers, and few companies manufacture high-end laptops with acceptable quality.

The only company selling everything is probably Microsoft, where you can buy a laptop from the manufacturer of the OS. But Windows Phones aren't nearly as well supported when it comes to third party apps, so you'll have to go with Google there.

So there's not really any company (except perhaps Microsoft) that can offer a similar experience as Apple used to.

<comment><USER82> hp elitebooks, thinkpads, toshiba's notebooks are all well designed. You can throw anything on it.. linux, bsd unix or windows. You have a variety of distributions or bsd os'es. i don't know what you're talking about phones: there are plenty of phone vendors out there, too. Instead of whining about a company, it would be better to move on and decide what you need and buy that.

<comment><USER73> Yes, but you'll still have a Microsoft OS, HP laptop, Google phone, etc. What many people (including me) like about Apple that you have/had a well designed ecosystem for all your devices, where hardware and software are made to work well with each other. No one else can really provide that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I killed Thrudb for the love of Cassandra - <AUTHOR> http://3.rdrail.net/blog/i-killed-thrudb-for-the-love-of-cassandra/

<comment><USER2> Thank you! This is extremely healthy for the NoSQL community. Whenever I see an "XXXX open source project has closed down because we're duplicating tons of work from another project" I rejoice, as a huge problem in open source is fragmentation.

</comment><comment><USER3> What an amazingly gracious thing to do. It's the opposite of a 'vanity fork' (I fork because I want to be the leader of something).

There should be more of this, fragmentation is open sources' strength but also by far its biggest weakness.

Too many projects that duplicate 80% of the (easy) functionality of other projects and miss out on the remaining 20% because of the waste in resources.

</comment><comment><USER4> It was a great effort and a brilliant design, Jake. Thanks for all of your help when I was using ThruDB at Archivd.</comment>


Growing Black Holes Within Accretion Disks - <AUTHOR> https://aasnova.org/2018/08/01/growing-black-holes-within-accretion-disks/ <comment><USER2> Wait. I thought you could not perceive black holes as growing because, by relativistic effects, you could not perceive from the outside anything penetrating the event horizon?

<comment><USER3> We don't exactly see them directly growing, but the strong gravitational effects a blackhole exerts on the stars/blackholes around it gives us a pretty good idea of the size of the blackhole, among other things. We can also infer the size of a blackhole through gravitational waves produced due to it/around it, which is the subject of this work.</comment></comment>


A Blockchain Analysis of the July 13th Mueller Indictment - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cotten.io/bitcoin-money-laundering-and-muellers-12-e2fa91097e12 <comment><USER2> I have to imagine that the first person at the FBI (or whichever agency is responsible for tracking money laundering) to come across bitcoin fell out of their chair laughing when they came across it. It's a protocol that has a public, dated, irrefutable log of every transaction made... and its users think it untraceable (or at least, they thought it untraceable back when it first came out).

<comment><USER3> it's about as untraceable as cash. If you pick some up anonymously, then use a different address for each transaction, all while obfuscating your connection using Tor or the like, your transactions should be difficult to trace.

<comment><USER2> What makes cash difficult to trace is the difficulty of establishing that transactions took place in the first place, let alone other potentially pertinent details.

The fact that Bitcoin has a public record of all transactions makes it far easier than cash to deanonymize addresses. Suppose you bought $2.56 worth of Bitcoin via credit card from a friendly Bitcoin seller that doesn't keep any record of this transaction. The government can go to VISA and ask "okay, who gave $2.56 to this vendor within this time frame." Now the government knows your credit card, and can then ask VISA to find all of the other transactions you did, and then look for bitcoin movement of the appropriate size to those transactions involving single-use addresses. All of those addresses are now tied together.

See, the untraceability is entirely dependent on how good your operational security is, and how well you know the capabilities of government financial tracking. And, when you consider that governments have been trying to tackle this problem for difficult-to-trace cash flow, bitcoin is at best no harder and at worst much easier.

<comment><USER3> Visa would not be considered an anonymous source.

And cash has ID numbers, of which official entities and corporations also track.

Both cash and bitcoin require good opsec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great,

I wish there was more technical discussion of the hack and the indicment. Due to the political nature of the case nearly everything written is extremely partisan. However there is actually quite a bit of "source material" out there: The indicment, the crowdstrike analysis, the published hacked data, the bitcoin blockchain. Which could use some cold headed technical analysis.

Due to the nature of the case the FBI seems to have thrown more resources after the investigation than they normally would do. One thing I notice is section 41 in the indicment.

As I am understanding this, the perpetrator, strugling to formulate the contents of the wordpress site he would publish the day after, was typing in phrases into Google (presumely) under that later would occur on the Guccifer 2.0-site.

Showing two things. That searches are logged extensively and are accessable to American authorities. And that the said GRU perpetrators didn't really care to cover their tracks that much.

</comment><comment><USER5> Details on count 10 are pretty damning. They managed to correlate their various sources of information pretty well. There's not much to say, they managed to tie a wallet address to a person/ip address and were able to trace a surprising amount of attempted money laundering that way.

<comment><USER6> Well, maybe something is damning, but if you believe that these "operatives" signed their e-mails with their full names including patronymics and ranks like "GRU captain" I have a cheap sunny beach in Greenland for sale. Or if you believe that the US spies had somehow full access to this info and are not afraid to compromise their sources by these revelations. Or, finally, if you believe that the US security agencies including Mueller himself

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mueller#Director_of_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mueller#Director_of_the_FBI)

are to be trusted on anything at all.

<comment><USER5> What is your explanation of those ledger entries? Was Mueller setting up Russia before he was named Special Counsel?

Also, I read the indictment ([https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2018/07/Mueller...](https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2018/07/Muellerindictment.pdf)) but I missed the part about, _" these "operatives" signed their e-mails with their full names including patronymics and ranks like "GRU captain""_. Please point me to it?

I assumed they used stolen identities, like it seems to state in count 10's paragraph 59 and 60, and uses multiple accounts across multiple exchanges to obscure the money trail (paragraph 63).

edit: It's common knowledge who Robert Mueller is. He's been a public figure for decades, and nobody ever made any effort conceal his background. Why are you providing me a wikipedia link?

<comment><USER7> I don't think there has been any public release of information confirming the evidence revealed in the indictment. Indictments are supposed to be somewhat hyperbolic in appearance (not literally, but figuratively). They aren't supposed to lie, but at the same time they will omit key facts explaining how or why they know or suspect person X did action Y. Those facts will be revealed to the defense or during trial. Unfortunately, these indictments will never result in a trial or pre-trial discovery on part of the defense, so the public may never know the reasons.

That said, the Dutch were able to watch[0] Unit 26165 (a/k/a Cozy Bear, APT29) on CCTV, so it doesn't seem entirely implausible that the NSA or some other FVEY group was capable of retrieving emails from whatever webmail provider Unit 26165 was using (appears to be yandex and mail.com in the indictment).

0: [https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/dutch-agencies- provide-...](https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/dutch-agencies-provide- crucial-intel-about-russia-s-interference-in-us-elections~b4f8111b/)

<comment><USER8> > information confirming the evidence

People will never be satisfied. If/When the full emails quoted in the indictment are released, they will point out that e-mails are just UTF-8 characters in a file that anybody could have created. There simply is no evidence, nor is it even possible for there to be any evidence, that people could verify at home. Even if the official Russian "Certificate of Excellence in Hacking Democracy", printed on Russia's own polonium-laced paper, affixed with "Putin's Seal of Outrageous Heterosexuality" self-appointed sceptics will complain that all they can access is a photo, and the FBI isn't letting them stop by and inspect the original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only problem is there is no way to prove that that address actually belongs to the GRU.

The transaction referenced in the indictment clearly happened, but Mueller and his team could have easily searched through the Bitcoin blockchain to find any transaction that paid for a VPN, hosting, or domain registration using Bitcoin on or around the date of the hack.

The indictment makes it sound like the request for 0.026043 BTC came via email. I think that is a bit strange. If you are Russian Military Intelligence about to hack the government of the United States, why would you include references and payment info related to your Bitcoin transactions in hundreds of emails? Surely just keeping track of the Bitcoin addresses on the blockchain would be enough since that is the entire point of the Blockchain. Keeping a reference via email sounds like a good plot for an episode of America's Dumbest Criminals, not the Russian military.

It is certainly possible that this is exactly what happened, but I think the American people deserve to see some evidence.

<comment><USER10> _The only problem is there is no way to prove that that address actually belongs to the GRU._

They don't have to. This case isn't going to trial; it was basically a PR stunt. It wouldn't survive a trial. The strategy is simple: Indict a bunch of people that you cannot extradite, and you get a PR win with just some broad strokes and have to prove nothing. You get to keep your unlimited budget to continue the investigation, and the press keeps listening to you.

<comment><USER11> Assets can be frozen. Their travel to countries who _do_ extradite will be restricted. And evidence for levying sanctions has been produced by the executive and judicial branches, providing the legislative branch cover. These charges are far from pointless.

<comment><USER10> Your reply is off topic. What does any of that have to do with the point of my comment? My point was that the indictment appears flimsy because prosecutors knew that they would never actually have to prove these charges beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. There is a reason that every single person indicted here happens to be beyond the reach of the US government. If you know that you will never have to try the case, you can make all the accusations you think are reasonable (even if you know you cannot prove them) and then drop the charges you can't prove much later if one of these guys ever actually did wind up in custody (which is extremely unlikely).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great, now I know how to frame someone using Bitcoin.

1\. Select a victim 2\. Every time you are about to make a Bitcoin transaction, send an email to the victim's address requesting the amount you are about to send. (Bonus point if you can get directly into the spam folder.) 3\. Send bitcoins as you intended to do.

Now lay back and wait for your victim to be linked to your shady activities.

(I'm writing this as a critique of the technique used and conclusions reached in the article. Hopefully the investigation has something more robust.)

<comment><USER13> Or just pick someone and watch the chain and send the appropriate emails.

I used to do that in a weird way with a lightly paranoid coworker (he wasn't battling mental illness or anything, he was fine). He did have a lot of concerns about e-privacy in the 90s (legit forward thinking stuff) and I would send him emails through open mail relays like whitehouse.gov and such "Hey man I dropped off all the magic white powder stuff in your blue Honda Accord.". It was all in jest, he was fine last I heard.

<comment><USER14> Hahaha, I like how much you justify him being okay

<comment><USER13> Well I said paranoid... didn't want anyone to think he was in a clinical sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >In short, we can be confident that the bitcoin address used in the alleged conspiracy was 1LQv8aKtQoiY5M5zkaG8RWL7LMwNzVaVqR.

I tried to verify this using blockchain explorer and couldn't find any matching addresses, is there a better way to do this? I'm pretty out of the loop at this point (last used it years ago)

<comment><USER16> [https://www.blockchain.com/en/btc/address/1LQv8aKtQoiY5M5zka...](https://www.blockchain.com/en/btc/address/1LQv8aKtQoiY5M5zkaG8RWL7LMwNzVaVqR)

<comment><USER15> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's not money laundering. There's no dirty money involved and it's not about the money at all

</comment><comment><USER18> A skeptic's counterpoint: [https://www.strategic- culture.org/news/2018/07/19/establishm...](https://www.strategic- culture.org/news/2018/07/19/establishment-strikes-back.html)

<comment><USER19> The site you linked: _Strategic Culture Foundation, a Moscow think tank run by Yuri Profokiev, a former head of Moscow's Communist Party and member of the Soviet Politburo._

<comment><USER20> And happens to be strongly pro-Trump. How curious.

<comment><USER21> Really? this article[1] doesn't seem pro-Trump at all.

[1][https://www.strategic- culture.org/news/2018/07/18/stripping-...](https://www.strategic- culture.org/news/2018/07/18/stripping-away-local-governmental-powers-global- rising-tide-fascism.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ultimately, by letting their servers unsecured, the DNC, RNC, and HRC, DTC are fully guilty of nothing [sic][sarcasm]

Cough b.s. DNC needs to sober up and admit defeat ahead of the RNC hack releases. Right now the hilarious Trump Derangement Disorder they're suffering from will only continue to promote inequality.

<comment><USER13> Bad security maybe, but facing a state sponsored and determined attack and I'm not sure given enough time that any security is enough.

We're already at a point where security researchers question if you can ever declare any device "clean" simply due to the complexity of devices and attacks.</comment></comment>


The World's Longest Invoice - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldslongestinvoice.com/ <comment><USER2> What purpose does this server other than to demonstrate these individuals lacked the savvy to secure their compensation?</comment>


Show HN: DoNot iOS game - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/donot-pret-a-swiper/id941637423?mt=8

<comment><USER2> is there a version for color blind people?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Not yet, but we are working on it :) I'll keep you in touch!</comment></comment>


Griddit - <AUTHOR> http://karan.github.io/griddit

<comment><AUTHOR> Also here's the accompanying blog post: [http://karan.github.io/reddit-is- flawed/](http://karan.github.io/reddit-is-flawed/)

It basically explains why I made this and what my vision is.

</comment><comment><USER2> You submitted this a few hours ago. Deleting then resubmitting is not good.</comment>


Unverified.email - <AUTHOR> https://kerestey.net/writing/2020-04-05-announcing-unverified-dot-email.html <comment><USER2> > we can create a mailbox via HTTP GET request to > [https://api.unverified.email/create](https://api.unverified.email/create)

Shouldn't GETs be idempotent? (Sorry for not having feedback on the idea, skimming it it seems nice, though there is fierce competition as others have shown here)

<comment><USER3> No. GET is defined to be nullipotent, or having no side effects. That is not the same as "not making a change."

To be pedantic, every GET request to a modern website makes a state change somewhere... to a log file, to a database, to a tracking system. The difference is it has no side effect for the user (i.e. your comment gets duplicated or your order placed twice)

<comment><USER4> Not being pedantic, then, but is GET even the right verb to create a resource?

<comment><USER5> PILLAGE was too long, so we use GET.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What kind of anti-abuse mechanisms do you have in play?

As soon as the API is figured out, it'll be used for mass spam signups. I've done one of these before, and pretty much if you allow any form of being able to retrieve a code or URL or number from the body/subject, it'll be used for millions of spam signups.

<comment><USER7> > create a mailbox via HTTP GET request

I'd suggest a POST here. Theres some extra web browser checks against sending cross origin POSTs that GETs don't have. The GET makes abuse easier.

<comment><USER8> GET can also be cached by intermediate proxies. This can cause failures that are very hard to troubleshoot. POST cannot be cached and therefore is more suited to this type of action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice work. I investigated a few similar services, mailtrap, mailgun, mailosaur. I wanted to try having my end-to-end tests assert that the email which got sent out actually included the correct info. (As in, you request a password reset to email@example.com, and then you make API calls to assert the email exists and includes the correct text)

It works well for peace of mind as it gave me a high degree of confidence that I'm testing almost exactly what the end-user would experience. However, it does add 5-10 seconds of delay to your tests while polling the email inbox, it can be a little expensive depending on your test frequency, I think there are even some cases where you can hurt your email deliverability stats during automated email sending.

In the end, I decided to keep this test manual which I run every now and then only after making big changes. Instead integration tests which mock the email service are probably enough for my use case.

Curious how do others test the end-to-end behaviour of their web application, when it comes to emailing?

<comment><USER10> I'm doing an application backed by AWS's Amplify, and so I _have_ to have a service that gets the email with the confirmation code.

I'm using Guerrilla Mail[0] for that, and it works, but it's slow to receive the email and make it available.

I'm using gauge[1] with taiko[2] to write the tests, and liking it a lot, even though I never liked cucumber. taiko is just very reliable, and the test support code is much nicer to write.

[0] [https://www.guerrillamail.com](https://www.guerrillamail.com) [1] [https://gauge.org](https://gauge.org) [2] [https://taiko.dev](https://taiko.dev)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having more open source software is always good, so congrats on putting something out there.

I'm very curious why this takes the approach it appears to take: running two docker containers with opensmtpd in one of them, and then scanning the maildir for message content; compared to what the numerous existing solutions (mailcatcher, mailtrap, mailhog, maildump) all do: run an in-process SMTP server.

<comment> rooam-dev My guess is that it's a simpler approach. Maildir stores messages in files, so persistence out of the box.

Meanwhile [https://thehackernews.com/2020/01/openbsd-opensmtpd- hacking....](https://thehackernews.com/2020/01/openbsd-opensmtpd-hacking.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use a simple local catch-all SMTP server for testing. I install it on my test machine listening on some non-SMTP port (default is 2000), and then use iptables to make all connection attempts to port 25 end up at the catch-all server.

Here's the iptable command: "iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j REDIRECT --to-port 2000"

The catch-all server is ridiculously simple. It just responds with a "220 hello" when connected to, and then just reads input line by line, logging all input to a file. It only knows about two SMTP commands: DATA and QUIT.

On QUIT it sends "221 bye" and closes the connection.

On DATA it sends "354 send the message" and then just reads the data and logs it to the file.

Anything else? It just sends "250 OK".

Note that this is pretty useless if what you are trying to test is a mail client, because you cannot test error cases. The purpose of this SMTP catch- all is for testing the content of messages your software sends, not for testing the process of mailing itself.

Each connection is logged to a separate file.

The source is a single Java file. Here it is if anyone wants it [1]. "javac SmtpSink.java" to compile. "java SmtpSink" to run. Messages are stored in the "msgs" directory, which you should make before running it.

[1] [https://pastebin.com/WqkS7jNH](https://pastebin.com/WqkS7jNH)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see an analogous service for SMS: I. e. provide a new phone number.

<comment><USER14> Why not use Twilio for this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Shameless plug: I've made a similar service with both an API and a web interface at: [https://mailspons.com/](https://mailspons.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> If, by chance,the author happens to see the comments here... you may consider choosing an alternate (high-numbered / "unprivileged") port -- say, 2525? -- and redirecting connections to that port to 25/TCP on the same host.

This can be easily accomplished with a single iptables / nftables / pf / etc. rule.

(A non-insignificant number of ISPs, CSPs, etc., block outbound connections to 25/TCP by default -- except, in some cases, those going to to their own mail servers or "smarthosts".)

<comment><USER17> If they're blocking SMTP, doesn't it make sense to block the encrypted ports too, e.g. 587? But if they're blocking 587, then how do people with these ISPs use their own email clients like Outlook (or whatever it's called these days) with third party email providers, e.g. Gmail?

<comment><USER16> 25/TCP is, technically, for MTA <-> MTA traffic, so many (residential, in particular) ISPs block it because "you shouldn't be running servers".

587/TCP is the "submission" port and is exactly what people _should_ be using instead of 25/TCP (it usually -- but not always -- requires authentication and is pretty much never blocked). Indeed, that's the intended purpose!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's also [https://ethereal.email/](https://ethereal.email/) which has a Web GUI.

</comment><comment><USER19> See also Mailslurper [0] and Mailcatcher [1] if you'd like to self-host an email catch-all service.

Mailslurper appears to be abandoned and seems to be missing deterministic builds that go module support provides.

Mailcatcher has been around for a while, with my first discovering it being used in a legacy project's test suite back in 2014.

Both could use some better SEO since it's nearly impossible to find unless you know exactly the right keywords to use.

[0]: [http://mailslurper.com/](http://mailslurper.com/) [1]: [https://mailcatcher.me/](https://mailcatcher.me/)

</comment><comment><USER20> >The mailbox_id from the above setup should be included somewhere in the text of the email, the subject, the bcc address, the headers, or any other field (even email address of the sender or recipient will do).

Sorry... how does it know what mailbox id to look for?

<comment><USER21> The mailbox_id can be anywhere in any field you send, apparently.

<comment><USER20> No no, but... nowhere in the PUT request is there a mailbox ID. In fact the PUT doesn't contain any token from the mailbox creation. So how does it link your email without searching for every mailbox ID that currently exists within your email? I mean, maybe that's how it works, since they expire in a fairly short amount of time... seems ripe for DDoSing.

<comment><USER22> The ids follow a set format, so it probably scans the email for all strings of that format, then looks them up against a dictionary of existing mailbox ids

<comment><USER22> I may be wrong. I'm not the strongest with Haskell, but skimming the code, it appears to just dump all incoming email into the same dir and when you receive on a mailbox it scans the directory for any files containing the mailbox id. I'm not sure what code goes through and cleans up old emails though.

Edit: it used a cron job that runs every minute and used `find` to delete any file that's 5 minutes old. This both cleans up emails and deleted mailbox ids.

This is a rather simple way to do this but you could just dump a massive amount of email on the service and it'll run really slowly for the next 5 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Mailinator is a much more well-known service. It has both a web interface and an API.

<comment><USER24> For perspective (and I'm not affiliated with this new service, or really, anyone in this space): at some point, Altavista was more well-known that Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If your testing system depends on a remote server, it's not testing just your code anymore. Tests must be as isolated from other changes as possible or else they do not tell you anything.

</comment><comment><USER26> Mailtrap, which is listed as an alternative Ruby library, is also available as a service: [https://mailtrap.io/](https://mailtrap.io/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Could the JSON return info like SPF/DKIM too passes too?</comment>


Ask HN: Proper Way of Load Testing and Good Tools? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,<p>Which load testing tools do you suggest for web application performance and capacity measuring. What is the best practices or proper way of doing load testing? Could you please share your experience? Thanks. <comment><USER2> There are some very good, very expensive machines for this.

Open-source wise, there's Tsung: [http://tsung.erlang- projects.org/](http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> FWIW I'm not sure if it's good practice or not. I used locust.io recently. The client allowed me to ramp up request rates until I got HTTP Errors. I measured against their previous analytic sites. Of course this was a guesstimate because GA doesn't let you see the max num of simultaneous users. I found holes in the infrastructure that need to be remedied. The holes were to prevent anything similar to a slashdot effect. I also watched against the servers IO/CPU utlization, and RAM.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can get a lot of mileage out of Apache Bench[1].

[1] [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for suggestion. How do you plan test case scenarios and how do you interpret them? There was an article stating that developers just use powers of 10 when doing performance tests but that does not necessarily give correct results.

<comment><USER4> For a naive test, powers of ten work alright. Generally I increase the number requests until it tops out. Lets say your app takes 200ms and you can handle 1000 reqs/sec, you can use that as a baseline to determine whether you need to throw more hardware at it or work on improving the software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Also, good for you that you've decided to actually run a scalability test. Most people don't ;-)

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.loadimpact.com](http://www.loadimpact.com)</comment>


Document Management - Can "Knowledge Tree Live" move it to the cloud? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/07/knowledgetreelive-can-document.php

<comment><USER2> Well, document management is free to move to the cloud.

But to the users it sure isn't (for many of commercial solutions). Consider (from the OP):

"According to the company's price list on-premise version of Knowledge Tree has an annual fee of $2,400 for a 20-user license at the basic level. The most basic SaaS version is $2,950 for 10 users, and is limited to 50 GB of storage"

What about small-time users? How about a small-sized offering?

Better yet: some open source solutions?</comment>


Discuss HN: Small App vs Big App - <AUTHOR>

This just came to my mind while reading HN.
Is it better to create a quick app (a weekend of coding) and start making small but quick income or would you rather spend a month or two building something bigger in order to have a larger income but might take longer.
Lets say you already have a full time job and this will be just a side income. <comment><USER2> I think it really depends on the idea. Sometimes it is good to write it over the weekend, release it, and see what up. Now if you are building a more interesting service, I would go for the two months. Sorry, but if I don't know the app, I cant tell!

</comment><comment><USER3> it depends how much risk you want to take with your free time :)

nothing is guaranteed. neither your small or big project is guaranteed to earn a cent. so all it comes down to is how much of your time are you willing to give up and how enthusiastic are you about each idea.

I will say this though - I spent about 6 months doing a "big" side project and now I'm working on a couple of smaller projects, for fun. The big project can sit in the background earning income, giving you more free time to experiment.</comment>