Help me explain farmer logic to tech folk - <AUTHOR> I am trying to get a conversation going between technical people doing robotics and small farmers like me.
I am organizing small round table talks to get conversation going.
Here is one thing that I am struggling to explain. Many farm robots are designed for large commodity crop farms and it seems like there isn't a lot of opportunity in small speciality food crop sector.
I think they are wrong. Why?
1. Small farms need more help. Large commodity farms are already mechanized. 2. Commodity farms are several thousands of acres but $ per acre is meager.opp is true for food producing small acreage farms. 3. Margins are thin in small acreage farms because of labour. If we close the gap, there is room for optimization. The opposite is true for large commodity farms.
And yet, I don't understand why tech and Silicon Valley finds large commodity farms more viable than small food producing farms?
We have an area that has room for improvement and to increase profit margin.
The VC investment enthusiasm trend in large heavy autonomous systems seems counter intuitive to me.
You can always scale up in farming. You can't miniaturize and halve/reduce the cost of giguantic robotic systems by scaling DOWN.
I am struggling to get my point across. How can I put it across in concise manner and short sentences? <comment><USER2> Perhaps you need to look at the tech company perspective. They have to make a profit on the development of expensive hardware and software, and they may not sell many units -- it's not exactly a mass market. So of course it makes sense for them to go after deep-pocketed corporations, rather than small farmers. Rather than expect developers to think like a small farmer, try framing your pitch to developers in terms of how they can fund their development, and how they can then scale up sales volume to justify their investment. Or, try organizing the farmers to form some kind of entity that has numbers and money behind it, to attract the attention of developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. I hear you. I will work on it and try it again here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Actually this is a topic very near to my interests. You mention it in farming (and that interests me, but the extent of my farming knowledge is growing a small garden of tomato plants) ... but I think it's a more general trend that technology tends to be developed with an eye toward massive scale, with small- scale efficiency as an afterthought.

Could you give some examples of opportunities you see in developing technology for farming at the small scale? In particular, examples where the technology designed for the large scale farms wouldn't be appropriate?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Large farms have already reached peak mechanization. 2\. Robotics is for automation, not mechanization. 3\. For large farms, drone technology, precision application of pesticides/herbicides/fertilizers are areas of opportunity.

Smaller farms can never hope to achieve the economies of scale that the big farms can easily grasp.

Smaller farms need modular solutions. The knowledge to grow diverse market crops in a small acreage is an entirely diff skill set.

Small farms don't need 'intelligent' systems. We need automation to reduce labour costs.

Robotic solutions for small farms may reduce our labour costs and we could generate higher profits.

AI and robots for larger farms might make the operations more expensive and not increase profit margins.

AI and robotic systems for large operations will be integrated with existing big tractor companies. Maybe licensed.

Which opens another can of worms. Farmers will never own the proprietary software or algorithms. Farmers generally don't like to use anything that they can't understand.(already happening with John Deere and DMCA). This is mostly because harvest/planting/feeding windows are seasonal and varied every year. Because of perishable nature of our products, even a slight error in timing will ruin that year's income. And you can't wait for someone to debug your tractor or trust that it will be fixed.

One area where large farms are suited for both intelligent systems(AI..suitable for large farms) and automated systems(robotics..suitable for smaller acreage farms) are those working in vineyards. It's almost like a warehouse environment and it's a premium product. It can handle it.

<comment><USER4> I'm not the parent, but I believe you failed to answer their question. He understands the issuend. He's looking for direction on a specific example for what exactly you would like automated and why the solutions for large scale farms wouldn't work in this scenerio.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote several replies and deleted them all. I honestly don't know how to answer.

Large farms grow commodity crops that are entirely diff from small farms diverse crops. They are like two diff animals.

Example: there is a lettuce thinning robot in the market. It sprays concentrated fertilizer at regular intervals in rows where seeds are direct down.

In smaller farms we would plant greenhouse grown baby lettuce starts and not direct sow. Too much wastage and labour to direct sow. Weed thinning bot is overkill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Based on your post and your messages, it looks like you're saying that robots and automation could help small farms most by reducing labor costs.

So it sounds to me like the kind of automation that's needed will be very task specific. You might find it easier to connect with the the folk by describing some of the specific laborious tasks you'd like to automate. That will get their tech brains thinking about specific solutions to your specific problems.

Perhaps start by picking 2-5 tasks that are repetitive and take up a lot of your time or require you to hire lots of people. Some of them might end up being quick wins that wouldn't be too hard/expensive to automate. Providing the tech folks with a list to choose from will help them focus on the items that they know they can solve in a reasonable amount of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have about seven repetitive manual tasks that would be easily accomplished by automation.

I will refine it further and translate with maybe visual snippets. I was thinking of maybe showing it as graphic novel strip because I feel like a lot of times farmer's and engineers speak a diff 'mental' language. But taking a ripper shank to compacted ground illustrated with a 'thwack' inside a serrated thought bubble can explain more than if I explain in English. The knives and rippers and v-shanks we sometimes use as implements is very difficult to explain in words. A lot of times, farmers just tinker together stuff in their shop to suit their particular soil condition or that year's weather challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think examples of jobs that have a high potential to be automated could help. Just to get the creative ball rolling. Or just presenting specific problems. The tech crowd loves to dive deep into an issue and try and fix it. But I think part of the problem is, they don't have enough understanding or knowledge to know what could be automated and where the opportunities are. For example, I grew up in a rural community, but was not directly involved in running a farm. I am interested in what you are saying, but I have trouble thinking of what needs automated. I want to put my brain too it, I just don't exactly know what I am putting it to. Hopefully that makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I hear you! Because I feel the same way when I sit down and try to explain with words not the design of my robot but its function.

I think I tried with 5 people who fabricate custom machinery. The only ones who understood what I was trying to say are those who have had some field knowledge or some farm background.

No task can be completely automated without some kind of code making decisions. That's why large automation machinery meant for commodity farms are like blind farm labourers. They can't make decisions. Like pruning autonomous tractors or something that mows down or discs 500 acres. But completely diff and won't work when it comes to a bot harvesting strawberries.

Some do..if they have a vision system or has some kind of intelligence system making decisions. And that's why it will be several millions of dollars. Nothing is as efficient as a human making decisions in the field.

But our jobs can be made easier 1. if the data we need to make decisions is easily available. 2. If there is less manual labour.

Smaller farms are great for robots. If there is disease in a 500 acre corn field, how would you figure it out? But if it's 100 five acre blocks. And we have a swarm of 10 bots that can handle five acres at a time, then they can work as a swarm and also collect information to compare data with other blocks.

My point is that if we create intelligent systems AND autonomous solutions for small blocks/farms, they are scalable and can be replicated. And diff data sets can be created.

But if something is created which functions only with a minimum lay of 500 acres, it's not only expensive but limited in its application. Also..it would be easier to customize and build on top of existing applications because each year farm conditions change and small farms are more diverse.

I don't know if this kind of thinking is right or if it makes sense. But that's my reasoning for why one needs small acreage robots rather than large commodity crops farm bots.

Thank you! I would like to know if I am able to be articulate. I still can't be precise and say in short sentences which seems to be a desirable thing for tech people. But it's tough for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Approach it from the numbers: You need 1 big farm buying one $2 million dollar unit, Or you need 100 small farms each buying one $20,000 unit.

If you can make a compelling case that there are many such $20,000 units (for example) that could be researched and invested in, and you have some strong ideas on devices and their network interplay, you could be onto something very strong.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the cost of a small tractor already. It takes additional implements and man hours to operate it. If a 20k base module can exist like ..say..an iPhone and there is a library of tasks that can downloaded..like say a kindle book. I think we can see cheap tech.

Let's say: clay soil + Swiss chard + zone 8A + September-December. We know enough to come up with a crop plan. As it's a shared library, with time, we can get whatever disease or pests come to that zone at that time of the year. What nutrients need to be added. Soil probes in the base module can figure out what's deficient and we can know what to supplement the existing soil with..connected with gps, weather data and past years pests issues/crop plans, you have a reasonably proficient farm assistant that can go into a mapped field and recognize the chard row..and scan for bugs or do a soil probe every 6 weeks or check if it's ready for harvest and predict how much will be ready for market every week etc. it's possible.</comment></comment>


Apple Is Listening - <AUTHOR> https://marco.org/2019/06/09/apple-is-listening <comment><USER2> I'm glad that Apple is finally updating their Macs again, but at the same time Apple has doubled-down on its refusal to sell user-serviceable, upgradeable, and expandable hardware at prices that are within reach for most customers. The laptops have soldered RAM and soldered storage. The Mac Mini and iMac Pro thankfully have DIMMs, but in order to keep the warranty, you have to visit an Apple-approved repair center to have a specialist perform the upgrade, which costs more than doing it yourself. After over two years of waiting, the Mac Pro announcement was a huge letdown since the cost of the only user- serviceable Mac has doubled from $2999 to $5999, alienating Mac Pro users who can afford a $2999 computer but not a $5999 one.

It's one thing for me to buy a "disposable computer" when it is priced very low. It's another thing for me when you can't upgrade or service computers with premium-priced parts in them. This is a trend I don't support.

Unfortunately the only way to protest Apple's business decisions is to leave the Mac, which means giving up macOS, which I find a more productive environment for me than Windows or any of the Linux desktops like KDE and GNOME. I started using macOS back when Macs were user-serviceable, upgradeable, and reasonably affordable. I continue using the Mac for macOS, but I'm finding myself alienated by Apple's business decisions.

I wish the situation for personal computer operating systems were better. I want PC hardware with an operating system that has the same power, attention to detail, usability, and reliability that macOS has. At this point I am willing to spend my spare time on such a project.

<comment><USER3> With Apple making the Mac Pro so expensive it opens up the grey market for Hackintosh PCs to run MacOS at a fraction of the cost. If Apple wants to beat the Hackintosh they need an ATX based Mac that doesn't cost $5999 but more like $999 that can be upgraded with a better graphics card and etc.

<comment><USER4> Hackintosh is fun for a tinkerer but not really practical for someone that just needs to get work done. I say this as someone who dislikes macOS and has tried the hackintosh approach in an attempt to build iOS apps without having to buy a mac. You can make it work, but it's a big pain and all bets are off when an update comes down the line.

<comment><USER5> I know a few people who work from home as freelancers in the visual effects industry around here. They are all rabid Apple fanboys/fangirls, owned pre- trashcan Mac Pros, but just couldn't stomach the trashcan version. They all switched to Hackintosh or Windows in the last few years.

Even for technically challenged artists, it is not difficult because there are several technicians around here that install Hackintosh machines for this industry and update them from time to time. Their names are passed by word-of- mouth.

The bigger production houses will probably buy the new Mac Pros, but the entire freelance sector will keep their Hackintoshes or move to Windows. The pricing is just crazy.

<comment><USER4> > _there are several technicians around here that install Hackintosh machines > for this industry and update them from time to time. Their names are passed > by word-of-mouth._

Like I said, it can work, but relying on "word of mouth technicians" isn't very practical. There are also times when, after an update, things just _break_ , and the "technician" may not even be able to fix the issue in a timely fashion, especially issues related to sound or QE/CI. I've done enough digging around and tinkering with kext files and video drivers to know that it can sometimes take _days_ of concerted effort to fix these issues. I'm sure mileage varies depending on one's needs or the particular hardware configuration but you're rolling the dice every time you update.

<comment><USER5> > but you're rolling the dice every time you update.

Definitely, they've all become paranoid about updates or installing anything which is not absolutely necessary. They are a version or two of macOS behind, and never update without confirming with the technician.

I shudder at the security implications, but I'm told it has become quite common after the trashcan came out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think Apple released this Mac Pro & Display at the wrong event. From every indication, it was designed for Hollywood. Developers don't need expansion, but Audio and Video producers do! Announcing at an LA event for producers and artists would have cleared any confusion.

It wasn't designed for AI or ML either, because Apple is having a war with NVidia now, probably over component pricing, but who knows.

Developers didn't ask for this machine or a $6k reference monitor. They just wanted something they can swap out the video cards or memory or hard drives occasionally as time goes on. They wanted a nice display that gave them 200% scaling and proper color correction in a matching aluminum body.

Whether I can afford this machine or not at home is beside the point. It's just that after the keynote high wore off, and we returned to reality, it's clear Apple revealed the machine at the wrong event.

<comment><USER7> I think they probably felt they had to reveal it at this event for PR reasons, if nothing else; you're right in that this is clearly a machine made for A/V editors, but I can't see Apple introducing the new Mac Pro at NAB. A new Final Cut Pro, sure, but not a new Mac Pro.

I think they dropped the ball by not having _two_ displays, though -- the $6K Pro Display XDR for the crowd who goes "OMG that's so cheap for a monitor like that," and a $1500 Pro Display (sans XDR) that's basically the 5K panel from the iMac Pro. I am hoping that either that's still coming, or at least there are people with some weight in the company looking at the reaction to the XDR display and its "optional" stand and saying, "Did we tell you so? Yes, yes, we did, Doug. We told you so."

<comment><USER8> > _they dropped the ball by not having two displays, though_

As you said, they're going for a specific market with this product. They can always release a general-market display down the road. Focusing on a specific set of power users first is how Apple built its renowned culture, and it's nice to see it returning to those roots.

<comment><USER7> I see people downvoting this comment, but...it's kind of true.

The "kind of" part is this: Apple arguably built its culture first around the _extremely_ hacker-friendly Apple II, then around the original Macintosh -- which was certainly _expensive,_ but was very specifically pitched as "the computer for the rest of us." That segment is one that they're ironically a bit wobbly on right now. (The MacBook Air and the iMac are close.)

But: the Mac got adopted by the high end graphic design and print layout industry, and Apple started making higher end machines specifically targeted to that market like the Mac IIfx -- which was a $9K machine at its introduction in 1990, and that is _not_ adjusted for inflation. As far as I can tell, that was their high water mark in pricing, but they've regularly had "flagship" models breaking the $4K mark at introduction, e.g., the Power Macintosh 9500. The sub-$3K flagship era of the Power Mac G5 and original Mac Pros is something of an anomaly. (Which isn't to say that I wouldn't like to see a headless Mac with internal expansion slots that starts at $1999.)

<comment><USER2> _The sub-$3K flagship era of the Power Mac G5 and original Mac Pros is something of an anomaly._

Apple actually was able to maintain this pricing for entry-level Power Macs and Mac Pros from 1999 (I haven't checked earlier prices) through the 2013 Mac Pro model. Here is a list of prices I compiled:

      Blue and White Power Mac G3 (January 1999) -- $1,599 ($2,453 in 2019 dollars)
      Graphite Power Mac G4 (December 1999) -- $1,599 ($2,453 in 2019 dollars)
      2001 Power Mac G4 (January 2001) -- $1,699 ($2,453)
      2001 Quicksilver Power Mac G4 (July 2001) -- $1,699 ($2,453)
      2002 Mirrored Drive Door Power Mac G4 (August 2002) -- $1,699 ($2,413)
      2003 Power Mac G5 (August 2003) -- $1,999 ($2,776), reduced to $1,799 ($2,499) in November 2003
      2006 Mac Pro (August 2006) -- $2,199 ($2,787)
      2010 Mac Pro (July 2010) -- $2,499 ($2,929)
      2013 Mac Pro (December 2013) -- $2,999 ($3,289.83 in 2019 dollars, but you can still purchase an entry-level 2013 Mac Pro today from Apple for $2,999 in 2019 dollars).

<comment><USER9> interesting! Looked up some old datapoints on wikipedia

Apple Lisa 1983 $9,995 ($25,143 in 2018 dollars)

Apple Macintosh 128k 1/24/84 $2,495 ($6,000 in 2018 dollars)

Macintosh II 3/2/87 $5,498 ($12,125 in 2018)

Next Cube 9/18/90 $10,000 ($19,177 in 2018 dollars)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Back in 2012, I bought the original rMBP.

It fit everything I needed: it was thinner than my previous laptop as it had no optical drive, it was lightweight, it had a gorgeous screen, good enough keyboard, and seemed like a reasonable price for a higher end laptop work computer. I've used it everyday since 2012, and aside from the battery which I eventually replaced, it's been functioning without a hitch. From the 90s to the late 2000s, I used a variety of PC laptops and this was the only laptop that survived a huge amount of abuse from travel and daily usage (obviously, YMMV).

I'd love to upgrade to a new MBP, but I truly don't understand what they were thinking with this current iteration. The touchbar feels gimmicky and over the top. Call me old school, but give me physical buttons any day of the week and keep the keyboard simple. Most importantly, give me a keyboard that has more room to press so that random dust getting in there isn't going to screw shit up.

<comment><USER11> The worrying part is that in order to keep using the good MacBooks from the past, you need to keep them on the OS version that they shipped with.

I have a 2012 MacBook Air that was crazy fast, weighed four grams, and even ran windows 7. Sure, the drive was small, but it was perfect.

But some time in 2015 or so I made the terrible strategic blunder of upgrading to the latest OS version. Performance immediately dropped to zero, and now when I open it up for any reason, I just spend my whole time watching it spin uselessly trying to idle along with one browser tab open. It's sad to see it so reduced.

I've had the same experience with every iPad I've ever owned. Delightful, responsive machines that get auto-updated to brick status over the course of about three years. (I have every model up to air 3, and the only one still working perfectly is the old 1st gen air that I've kept on iOS 8 and spend a minute every day carefully dismissing the auto update prompt).

I have one of the sacred 2015 MacBook Pros, which now can't edit videos using the new format exported from my wife's iPhone x. An OS upgrade would solve that. But the machine is too precious to risk it.

I don't know what the solution is.

<comment><USER12> Upgrade your drive with a dedicated mSATA adaptor (you can still get Samsung 1TB mSATA drives). That could boost your performance.

<comment><USER13> Actually, you can still get _2TB_ Samsung mSATA drives. The Samsung T5 and T3 external drives are just enclosures around mSATA parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Once they replace this travesty of a generation of MBP, I'll agree with this. I've been impressed recently with the improvements in software and hardware.

I have a maxed out 2015 MBP and I won't buy the most generation under any circumstances. I buy laptops with the expectation it will last at least 4 years, and I have no confidence that this generation will last that long. I have full confidence though that the rumored replacement will be amazing, much like the new Mac Pro adessed the past criticisms.

<comment><USER15> To be fair it should last for four years, as that's how long the keyboard replacement program covers it for. I'm not aware of any other critical flaws, although repairiability of this generation is probably quite bad overall.

Whether it will last much more than 4 years I'm not sure, I'm not that confident - could be worth mashing some biscuit into the keyboard just shy of the 4 year mark to get a replacement ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Actually, I think Microsoft's effort is putting much needed pressure on Apple. My wife about a year ago got a Microsoft Surface 6, the tablet with keyboard + trackpad. It was about the same price as a MacBook and with a bundle, the Microsoft Office suite came included. It works well for my wife's use case and she's able to stay with her preferred interface.

Hardware has been trouble free, Windows 10 with One Drive makes it straight forward to change machines, apps run well as a normal user account, and to my knowledge it hasn't been hit with any malware. The screen being capable of touch interface, can actually be cleaned!

In comparison, my last of the "good" MBPr from 2015 has a partially fouled screen because the slightly greasy keys touched the screen. I am so annoyed when the screen is dark but I'm in a well lit room.

<comment><USER17> My late 2013 MBPr battery finally died recently, and I took it to an Apple store for service. Two days and $199 later I have it back with a new battery (and keyboard, which is attached to the battery) and in like-new condition. It looks and feels like a brand new computer.

Probably worth seeing if having Apple Service can do the same for yours, but via a screen replacement.

<comment><USER18> I had a similar experience with my 2012 rMBP last year. Out of warranty: screen, logic board, keyboard and battery replaced.

Charge? £0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, I'm not so sold on this.

1) Pro users wanted a replacement for the Mac Pro of yore. Instead they got something suitable only for high end pro studios, willing to pay $6k starting price for the new Pro (or are in need of a very-cheap-for-what-it-does (even- with-the-stand-included) but still very expensive reference quality monitor).

Where's my $3K-$5K Mac Pro (basically a headless iMac Pro grade machine) for regular videographers, graphic designers, etc, that don't make more than $100K/year and don't work for Nike or Hollywood? We used to have several options from Apple back in the day, now it's either the iMac Pro or, I dunno, the mini. Still no extensibility.

2) Where's a redesigned keyboard as a first priority? Why do they wait for a "new redesign" of the whole laptop? Meanwhile forcing people to keep buying the same broken design, even for the 2019 model? Just release the same current design with a decent 2015 style keyboard and the minimal tweaks needed to make it fit.

3) Where's a pro apple monitor that people who don't need /can't afford a $6K reference beast can buy? Where's the iMac / iMac Pro monitor in standalone form?

<comment><USER20> > now it's either the iMac Pro or, I dunno, the mini

What about the 5K iMac? With an i9 it becomes a very powerful machine that describes your use case perfectly.

It's not as repairable as a tower though, but neither are the iMac Pro or the Mini.

<comment><USER19> It's not upgradable (nor is the mini and iMac Pro) and like the iMac comes with a screen that can't be used on its own (when the computer part is old in 5-6 years).

<comment><USER20> True, but you can upgrade the RAM, use eGPU via TB3, and add more storage via TB3/USB3. It's not like an iPad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm wondering why you need so much power in 1 machine for DCC work. Wouldn't it be better to have a relatively cheap model, and when you need to Render, to farm it out to a cluster of computers?

For example, they claim the beefiest model will be 4x the old Mac Pro. But at what cost? $10,000-15,000 for maxed out system? How many cheap PC renderfarm computers can I get for that? How many cloud rendering instances could I rent?

To me, it's like they "listened" and built a Bugatti Veyron instead of a Ford F-350. The people wanting an upgradeable workstation are not looking for a max-out computer off the shelf. They simply want the capability to upgrade it over time or modify it according to their needs. In particular, for rendering 3d workloads, it seems renting cloud computers is far more scalable. If I am time limited, I can easily buy enough power to render 20x faster than this system in a crunch.

This seems more like a vanity project.

<comment><USER22> Remember the joke of "never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of hard drives"? That's the render farm. Throw a ton of work at it, and it'll get done faster than a big single machine could. What would have taken a week now takes a day.

The Mac Pro in our analogy is 5G wireless: not nearly as much bandwidth as the 747, but at much lower latency. Lots of interactive/real time applications are possible that in a farm would be bottlenecked by network bandwidth alone.

<comment><USER22> Besides, we're already using render farms where each machine has 20+ cores and 256GB RAM. A future render farm might as well be built from machines with specs similar to the new Mac PRo.

<comment><USER21> As far as I can tell, this Mac Pro's specs are on par with 2017 PC workstations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'll believe it when they produce a MacBook Pro that developers love again or a Mac Pro that (not yet independently wealthy) developers can afford again.

<comment><USER24> As far as a desktop Mac, a suitably configured iMac is more than powerful enough for development. A $2100 5K iMac - 6 Core I5 3Ghz (turbo boost to 4Ghz), 256GB SSD, 16GB of RAM. The RAM is user upgradable and an external SSD drive would be as fast as any normal internal SSD drive.

As far as a laptop? I'm not spending my own money on a development class laptop. I hate developing with just a laptop. I have a dual external monitor setup at home and at work. My next personal computer will definitely be a desktop. You still get more power and more thermal headroom on desktops than more expensive laptops.

<comment><USER25> Dunno nowadays with all the Electron apps, the RAM jacked up by open JIRA browser tabs, needing Outlook open plus JVM based IDEs from JetBrains having 16GB of RAM is not enough. I need at least 32GB and even then I would feel better with 64GB cause I fear it will only get worse. I am partially hoping JetBrains makes their IDEs fully Kotlin based and compile them natively to much lower memory footprints.

I am also ashamed of Slack and how they dont even take advantage of Electron to add things that Chromium supports, might as well convert it to a native app and make it worthwhile. I feel like Slack could do so much more and yet it sits there nothing new or special. Theres plenty that could be improved for Slack. I could share a dozen ideas but I rather see them get off their own lazy butts and give everybody their moneys worth.

<comment><USER24> I wouldn't pay $600 for the 32GB upgrade from Apple. I would buy the 8GB configuration from Apple that would take the price down to $1899 and buy 3rd party RAM.

[https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/imac-2019-27-inch](https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/imac-2019-27-inch)

I refuse to use Slack or Outlook on my computer. I keep them both running on my phone.

<comment><USER25> Except the RAM is soldered on their laptops. It's company provided so I rather not argue against a laptop, plus I am effective in using it anyway.

I wish I could buy 3rd party RAM for a MacBook Pro unless they finally stopped soldering on the RAM recently, then I would love to buy a new MBP with my own cash if I can get a normal keyboard.

<comment><USER24> The 13 inch comes with 8GB and only support 16GB - a $200 upgrade. The 15 inch comes with 16GB and only supports up to 32GB - a $400 upgrade.

You would probably only save up to $200 on third party memory. Which is not nothing but if you get a 15 inch you're already talking about $2400

<comment><USER25> I think I get what you're saying, so you rather get the 8GB model and add on a 8GB RAM stick? For a total of 16GB and a few hundred bucks saved, cause afaik they solder all RAM. I'm all for putting new RAM on a laptop, but unsoldering RAM sounds like too much effort to me.

<comment><USER24> No I'm saying if hypothetically the RAM wasn't soldered onto to the 13" MacBookPro and you could buy third party RAM, you wouldn't save "a few hundred bucks". The maximum ram that It can handle is 16GB and that's $200. Just taking a cursory look, you could save maybe $150. Which is not nothing but you're already willing to spend Apple prices on a MacBook Pro, I can't see how $150 in savings would be the deciding factor.

On the other hand, the price delta between Apple prices for the 16GB -> 32GB upgrade is about $250 more for the 15 inch than you could get from a third party if that were an option but you're already spending at least $2400 on a 15 inch MacBook Pro.

Don't get me wrong, I'm arguing hypothetically. I'm not spending my own money for an expensive laptop. I don't need portability for my personal computer. I need portability for my work computer and a job will give you a work computer - and hopefully one that is beefy enough to do what you need.

My personal development computer will always be a desktop. You get more bang for your buck and I hate developing on just a laptop without external peripherals anyway. I've never been interested in Apple laptops enough to spend my own money over just getting a much cheaper mid range Dell when I needed the portability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think I might just be done with Apple. That culture of saying nothing and the surprising customers with things is like betting in Vegas. And unfortunately for Apple, the house always wins. They can repair the damage of the Mac Pro debacle with a new Mac Pro, but they haven't owned the train wreck of a keyboard on the Macbook Pro. Sure, they might be ready to hit it big on a double down on black, but in the meantime, my Lenovo keyboard is a delight.

<comment><USER27> What about the trackpad though?

I just can't get over how inferior everyone else's trackpads are.

<comment><USER28> If I had a Thinkpad I wouldn't care about the trackpad. The biggest annoyance of my 2015 Macbook pro is the lack of trackpoint.

<comment><USER29> Having recently gotten my first Thinkpad since IBM stopped making them, I was very disappointed that the trackpoint is nowhere near as good as I remember them being. Don't know if it me or the laptops that have changed though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The article mentions it in passing but they still need to fix the Macbook Pro: the keyboard sucks, it doesn't have enough ports of any kind (and I _hate_ carrying dongles - they eventually always get lost), it's not upgradeable[1], the battery is too weak to sustain heavy workloads for long when running unplugged. They do at least seem to be introducing models with more horsepower.

I'm still "surviving" on a late-2015 15" MBP, which is making me twitchy because I'm down to one machine after my late-2011 17" MBP - which I used as my studio machine (built-in Firewire FTW) - died last week due to the somewhat infamous discrete GPU overheating issue (and Apple will no longer repair it; possibly fair enough after 8 years trouble-free use). I've resorted to buying a heatgun and some thermal paste to try fixing it, and will probably source a spare machine from that era for scavenging parts in future. I'm also considering a used 27" iMac from a similar era for the studio, although it's not so convenient to tote around.

Other options include buying a Windows laptop (probably Lenovo, which seem decent), although I hate Windows so would prefer to avoid it. Linux, although perfectly fine for a lot of what I do (and would I think be fine on many Lenovo models), will only run Ableton Live via Wine, which is not a prospect that fills me with joyful anticipation (ditto, Microsoft Office, I believe).

 _[1] A lot of people love the 2015 models and, I agree, they 're not bad, but the rot had already set it. For me, peak MBP occurred a few years earlier, back in 2011: HDD and memory are both upgradeable, battery is easily replaced, and in fact the modular design of the interior makes it fairly straightforward to pull out and replace or clean most internal components (motherboard, optical drive, fans, etc.). The GPU overheating design flaw is, however, a big fail, so these machines are still far from perfect._

</comment><comment><USER31> To give people a bit of perspective, the Macintosh IIfx was released in 1990 for US$8,969 which in inflation-adjusted dollars is ~$17,500 today. The PowerMacintosh 8100 released in 1994 for ~$4,250 which in today's prices is ~$7,300. The original 128kb Macintosh would be ~$6,100 in today's dollars. Those are all the bottom-end models. By contrast, a Chevy S-10 pickup truck was about $7,000 in 1990 (if my googling was accurate).

<comment><USER32> > Those are all the bottom-end models.

I think you misspoke; the 128k, IIfx and 8100 were all unequivocally top-end models at the time of release.

<comment><USER31> Sorry, I meant that the pricing were for the entry-level configuration, not cherry-picked top configurations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was ready to upgrade when the touchbar came out, but no, have been holding back for however many years that is. Still stuck on a 2013 MBP. Hoping Apple fixes the MBP soon. What's broken? We all know -- keyboards, needless and costly touchbar, and SSD prices out of step with market prices. Yes I know you can get it without the touchbar, but not with top of the line specs, which I usually go for.

</comment><comment><USER34> On the new MacPro, we have to consider the target audience.

It's doubtful the machine is a good choice for anything other than an artist doing crazy sound/video stuff. It's simply too much compute power. Of course I'd love to have a 56-thread monster (I always wanted Intel to invest more seriously on Xeon Phi as a homogeneous CPU/GPU replacement because I got tired of the VAX+supercomputer arrangement from the 80's that survives today as the normal clever x86 driving stupid-but-can-lift-heavy-things GPU) but I simply can't justify one for me. When I actually need to do some heavy lifting, there is always Google or AWS to help me with it (and Azure can rent me some really big Cray iron if I really, really need that kind of power). I have a cousin who was into computational chemistry that has mastered programming the classic Cray boxes and even he would probably be very happy with ad-hoc swarms of cloud-based boxes these days.

The main advantage of the Mac Mini is the size, but if you match specs with an iMac Pro or even an iMac, you'll kind of end up with the same price for a machine without a monitor. It's cute, but I wouldn't get one. And the actual desk footprint of an iMac is more or less the same as a Mini with a monitor.

It'd be nice if Apple decided to sell the iMac LCD panels as standalone monitors (because I'd love to have a monitor with the same color responses as my iMac, just so that the background looks the same on all screens - or even the black background of the terminals were all the same shade of black, FFS). Maybe they will, but, again, considering all machines that can run macOS, all practical options in the low-to-mid-to-high-end (MacPros are waaay above that) have pretty nice free screens attached to the machine.

One minor complaint: the stand... Asking $999 for a monitor stand is beyond ridiculous. If it costs that much to make, then just sell the ultra-HDR 8K wundermonitor for $999 more and put the stand in the box. It's not like it's not much cheaper than the reference monitors it goes against. I'd totally get one without a Mac if I had to edit 8K video for money (lots of it). The stand is 2019's version of the "I'm rich" iPhone app.

All in all, we should think of the Pro as the SGI Tezro of our time - exotic, expensive, ugly (it _really_ looks like a cheese grater) and probably more than we need.

</comment><comment><USER35> Sure - working great for somebody like Marco who's already loaded.

<comment><USER24> You know that's an old popular meme in the Apple community...

"That might work for Marco".

Marco didn't come from money or have any connections. He found a job on Craigslist working for a random guy named David Karpe as his first employee. They started Tumblr and he lucked out when it got acquired by Yahoo and made a few million.

But the acquisition happened after he started a blog that became popular, wrote Instapaper, and started a podcast that became popular. I'm sure Overcast was helped by his popularity but if it had sucked, no one would have downloaded it. Even for that he tried three different monetization strategies until he landed on one that worked -- writing his own non scummy ad platform. All of this with no outside funding.

And he lucked up and made money by being an early investor in Gimlet Media but that was way later.

But on a personal note. If I needed it, a $5,000 iMac Pro wouldn't break the bank and I'm just a regular old enterprise developer. That's less than two weeks billable work for a halfway competent cheap software contractor.

Heck my college computer was $4000 in 1992. A Mac LCII with 10MB of RAM, a //e card, a 5-1/4 disk drive, a Personal Laserwriter printer and a copy of Soft AT to run Dos compilers and a 12" monitor. Over the next two years I upgraded it with a larger monitor, an external hard drive, and an accelerator card using money I got doing a contract for a college.

<comment><USER36> I don't think the OP was saying that he doesn't deserve his money, but it really is absolutely absurd. Apple is an international company, worth a trillion dollars selling millions of devices.

I work in the UK. I make about 80k a year pre-taxes. That's an average, if not relatively high salary for a developer. "Regular old enterprise developers" don't make 5000 bucks in two weeks, at least not in 99% of the developed world, not to speak of the rest.

And it's true that technology in 1992 was very expensive, but _technology is actually supposed to get cheaper_ , that's the entire point, you get more for less. If you pay more for the same, that's anti-technology

<comment><USER37> $5k in two weeks is $130k a year, you make ~$104k a year with some currency conversion. They're not incredibly far apart.

<comment><USER4> In a world where you pay no taxes sure, in the real world it's closer to $160k a year and almost certainly more for someone living in Europe. Even if your math was correct, 30k a year at that income level is _massive_ , that's an extra $1000 per pay period, definitely a brow-raising sum the first time you see that boost.

<comment><USER24> I mentioned how many hours a low paid 1099 contractor in Atlanta would have to work to pay for this. If I were a 1099 contractor, this would be a business expense - therefore pretax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Apple took it to the max in terms of what IS possible with the Mac Pro. That's awesome.

I don't see any of the post-houses I work with on a regular basis chomping a the bit for the power they're offering at $6k though. Most have already switched to PC/Windows after Final Cut X and the Mac Pro trashcan came up very very VERY short.

This is definitely aimed at the highest budget niche audience. I'm sure a few very successful independent media people will buy them. I'll be jealous.

I've owned 3 Mac Pros in my life, but this breaks any budget I could possibly lay out for anything I have ever worked on in my entire career.

</comment><comment><USER39> It is quite plain that Apple never really listens to the user feedback in a traditional way (and rightly so). Their business strategy for Mac hardware and MacOS (specifically, pricing strategy) may not align with what most early and advanced users of Mac want. But this post seems to be sugarcoating it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Now, when can I get 8-core 15" MacBook Pro without touch bar or 13" MacBook Pro with 32GB RAM? I'd pay premium for non-touch bar option...

</comment><comment><USER40> Pro & screen is a great machine. I think that because people are talking about it it is already a success. They will sell a lot, because Ferrari sell a lot, Red cameras sell a lot. They won't sell one to me, because even though I am a successful indie dev I am clearly not the market they seek. The machines they make for me are - Mac mini, iMac Pro and hopefully the upcoming Macbook Pro, because my barely alive, coating missing from the screen, doesn't hold any charge late 2013 Macbook Pro is still far better than the current brand new one.

</comment><comment><USER41> The iMac 5k and Pros dont get enough love. They look great, are blazingly fast, and the display is ridiculously good. But i suppose the Pro is post-2017.

</comment><comment><USER42> Half of the keyboard started acting up on my 6 year old Early 2013 15" MBP yesterday. Was waiting for the rumoured 16" rework but had my hand forced to the 2019 15". The touch bar is already winding me up as I'm used to resting my fingers on the edge of the top of the keyboard. It's constantly like: Siri, mute, brightness! siri! siri!

It looked cool on iMessage that I could scroll through smileys but that's about it. Just about ready to completely disable the thing. Not sure how they'll be able to backpedal on it cause replacing it would mean admitting it was a failure.

Perhaps replacing all keys with mini screens to allow total customisation of what's displayed with the ability to still scroll on them?

<comment><USER43> You can remove Siri from the touchbar. I did because I kept activating it when authenticating with Touch ID.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Apple's 2013 "trash can" design of MacPro actually helped HP Z8 series desktops finally get recognized for their power! No one realized that there existed a beast much more powerful than a MacPro.

</comment><comment><USER45> Releasing a hilariously overpriced and ugly computer that can cost as much as a new car and might appeal to a niche of a niche, to me, doesn't really demonstrate any change in direction. (I love how people keep saying "the most powerful Mac ever". Ok, but the laptop I bought 7 months ago for 2k has about the same amount of power as the base 6k Mac and it's not housed in a giant garish cheese grater)

I say this as a person that bought exclusively macs from 2009 - 2015 but they don't have a single computer I even remotely want at the moment.

<comment><USER24> It's not for you. The market that it is for are chomping at the bit to buy one.

But as far as it's "garish appearance", that's exactly what Pro's were asking for something that didn't put form over function.

<comment><USER45> Well you're right, it isn't for me. Which is exactly my point. I am their target market (user of creative software that's willing to pay a bit of a premium), who has been willing to buy their computers in the past, and none of what they sell holds any appeal. It's either ridiculously priced (Mac Pro), shoddy (MacBook) or not very modifiable (iMac) "The market" that it's for ("creatives") is saying things like "why can't I get an Nvidia card?" And "I can't afford a twelve thousand dollar computer" (what this thing costs if you pair it with the monitor)

I've worked in games and CAD so I'm no stranger to needing powerful computers, but those numbers are absurd and most of that software doesn't need to run on Mac. I don't care much about the OS I'm on and I'm perfectly fine with windows or Linux if I save 8 thousand dollars and can use a broader range of hardware.

As far as I can tell the only people that NEED macOS are iOS developers. If I'm working on films or games or design almost all of that software runs on windows.

<comment><USER46> FPGA developer here. Access to a Linux cluster at work, everyone has 96GB ECC ram, dual Xeon on win 10 as a backup in case of any issues or if they prefer running locally.

Our badass computers were a hair over 10k a piece. I have no idea why anyone would pay what Apple is asking. I remember when it was "counterculture" to give people more compute, for less money - do real work, on machines that made financial sense - that was sticking it to "the Man" (IBM, the suits who thought they knew anything).

Now Microsoft is the counter culture, increasingly open, value for money.

I don't understand this timeline at all.

<comment><USER24> What point are you trying to make? You said your computers are a hair over $10K a piece. The base price of the Mac Pro is $6000. Unless you think that Apple is going to charge $4000 to upgrade from 32GB to 96GB.

<comment><USER47> On the iMac pro 32 to 128 costs 2k, there is no 96. Then there is storage, display, gpu and the fact that the referenced machine was purchased months or years in the past vs months in the future.

Assuming the user can do basic numeric comparison I'm assuming that his 10k includes substantial extras beyond ram that would also have to be added to the equivalent Mac.

<comment><USER24> Well seeing that

\- none of the upgrades have been announced.

\- he didn't say anything about specs besides the memory and processor

\- you can get third party RAM for the iMac Pro.

So the question remains - what point was he trying to make? Unless he like the other poster was bundling the cost of the monitor with the Mac Pro as if you have to buy both.

<comment><USER46> The 6k config comes with dual Xeons? That might not be a bad deal. I thought that was the base configuration, with dual processors available as an upgrade.

It says "up to 28 cores".

<comment><USER24> The base just says "8 core". How many cores are per per processor?

But the point remains - with the specs that he quoted, unless he thinks that upgrading to 96GB of RAM and matching the core count is going to be more than $4000. What point is he trying to prove?

<comment><USER47> Logically the 8 core option is a single cpu with 8 cores as 2x4 would cost more.

I think the point being made is that apple is and was overpriced. What you could have bought for 10k from apple when user actually purchased his computer would have been a joke by comparison.

New data doesn't lead user to change that assessment given that the $5k base model looks equivalent to a $1k->$2k pc.

You are comparing a pc you can't even buy yet to one that was purchased previously months prior in order to come to the conclusion that there doesn't exist a pricing disparity.

<comment><USER46> They're charging $999 for a stand. I think that assumption is safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Stockholm syndrome is strong with this one.

On a serious note, problem seems to be extremely long product cycles for Apple Hardware products with "my way or highway attitude" from Apple.

These 2 make for a disaster recipe. Putting form before function is a fallacy which is bound to boomerang sooner or later.

E.g The monitor stand fiasco speaks volumes of either a disconnect or ridicule raised by wrong audience.

The latest MacBook pro is a bad and good design both depending on audience.

Last Mac Pro was laughably form before function for a fortune.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm not sure Apple is listening. I've had four Mac Pros over the years, and I've been waiting for years to replace my current (6-core, 32GB/512GB) 2013 Mac Pro. I won't be buying the new Mac Pro. I've ordered an upgraded new Mac Mini for MacOS work instead.

I really like my low end Dell servers running Linux so I'll probably look for a Dell workstation to get a system with Xeon cpu and ECC memory. Maybe I'll build a Threadripper system.

</comment><comment><USER50> > Apple has doubled-down on its refusal to sell user-serviceable, upgradeable, > and expandable hardware at prices that are within reach for most customers

Apple needs to bring back something like the Quadra 700, which was only $5700 in 1991. ;-)

Though I suppose what you are asking for is actually the 1st gen Mac Pro, which was $2500 in 2006.

</comment><comment><USER51> Nice rig! In a way I guess I am happy that they don't have CUDA/deep learning support so I am not tempted to buy one.

It pays for Apple to provide very fast dev machines to support iOS and macOS platforms, and my Dad has been waiting for a new release to support 3D animation and video production.

</comment><comment><USER52> Building a Hackintosh is no fun any more.

It used to be a challenge but with the right hardware choices (plenty of lists) it's only really one extra step than installing macOS on genuine Apple hardware

In the immortal word of Monty Python; there's no pleasing some people :-)

<comment> inspector-g Is this _really_ true these days? I've heard this same statement made repeatedly over the last 4-5ish years, but each time I've tried to find one of these lists and experiment with a hackintosh the experience has been FAR from straightforward.

It usually comes down to some NIC, Bluetooth, or audio device not working nearly as well as is claimed by whoever put together one of these lists, and then of course the updates to macOS will break something after having _finally_ configured the machine correctly after several weekends of painful forum searching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I see a lot of people complaining about Mac Pro not for them and iMac / Pro doesn't fit their needs / price point.

Is there any reason why Apple isn't considering the option of using AMD?

<comment><USER54> The main rumor these days (well, it's been a rumor for quite a few years) is that they'll be dropping Intel and switching to house-designed ARM chips across the board.

<comment><USER53> Well that would be the case if they didn't introduce Mac Pro. And now it is obvious that Apple don't want to do that, at least there is no way Apple is going to design a 250W CPU just for the Mac Pro.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I would like to remind international users that making use of American technology makes you a pawn in the current trade war.

The US is a counterparty risk.

<comment><USER13> Huawei is a nice example here: even Chinese SOEs are critically dependent upon US technology.

It is just not possible to buy any modern workstation/desktop, laptop, or smartphone without exposure, as you put it, to "US counterparty risk". Buying an Apple workstation is not significantly riskier than, say, a Lenovo workstation.

And by your logic, wouldn't buying a workstation from a Chinese manufacturer _also_ make you a pawn in the current trade war, albeit a pawn for the other side?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Gotta love posts with more comments than votes.

Steve Jobbs was a visionary tyrant who miraculously knew all this shit. They better be listening.

<comment><USER56> I can't figure out how to delete this. Pretend I didn't say it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> today's proof ==> [https://twitter.com/_JulianoRossi/status/1137840401904209920...](https://twitter.com/_JulianoRossi/status/1137840401904209920?s=20), Craig is responding email :)

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm not giving them a cent until they remove those awful keyboards from their laptops.

I'm on a Mid-2015 MacBook Pro which works great. Waiting.

</comment><comment><USER59> Apple is listening to the shareholders.

<comment><USER24> I doubt that the shareholders care about the new Mac Pro. It won't move the needle as far as revenue and profit.

I also doubt that they care about improvements to SiriKit, the Audio APIs, and SwiftUI....

</comment></comment><comment> DDH-182 No they aren't. If Apple were listening, we wouldn't be expected to shell out $6000 for a machine where we're going to have to disable half the cores (and lose 40-60% of the remaining performance) to achieve "it might work" security (until the next Intel vuln is found). If Apple were listening they wouldn't be selling a freaking monitor stand for $1000. If Apple were listening, they wouldn't be forced to abandon bash because they can't be bothered to actually comply with the GPL (v3). Nobody can justify Apple at this point and the sooner it dies, the better.

<comment><USER24> The people who care about "GPL3 compliance" (what are you referring to?) are such an insignificant minority it doesn't matter. _You_ probably aren't expected to buy a Mac Pro. You aren't the target audience. There are plenty of desktop Macs that would meet your needs. What exactly was Apple suppose to use if not Intel chips at the high end?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> The 2019 Mac Pro is what you get when you let "Pro's", the users of the intended product, influence the vision of the product. Something I don't think has Apple has done ever, and rightly so. Users aren't product designers, they should not be involved in the vision of the product; they must be involved in getting the details right for them.

I would have liked to see a much more innovative product where not only the internals were replaceable and extendable, but that also allowed users to string multiple Mac Pro's together, making it's compute and memory almost infinitely expandable. Maybe even in some sort of lattice network form.

In this way a single Mac Pro could be cheaper and appeal to a broader range of Pro users (e.g. 4000 USD with 2 high-end GPUs). If you'd really wanted computational power, like the hollywood studios need to have, you could string three or four Mac Pro's together. If you are a heavy machine learning Pro, maybe you would put 16 Mac Pro's in a lattice setup, who knows.

I would have expected that the Mac Pro would have some sort of high-bandwidth interface, almost directly exposing the PCI bus, making it possible for software to see all resources (GPUs, CPUs, memory) of all connected Macs as a single machine. Apple, with their software and hardware design capabilities could have pulled that off.

[edit] PS: The Mac mini is not a good replacement for the suggestion I made to string multiple Mac Pro's together, because it lacks to possibility to install one or more powerful GPUs.

<comment><USER60> Why is my comment downvoted? If you have any beef with it, please reply.</comment></comment>


Introducing SOD – An Embedded Computer Vision and Machine Learning Library - <AUTHOR> https://sod.pixlab.io <comment><USER2> Does SOD support ARM?

<comment><AUTHOR> The library is cross platform and should compile fine on most modern architectures.</comment></comment>


Video: Ruby on Bells - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/1261369

<comment><USER2> This is just awesome. An hour ago I was at FOSCON 08 in Portland and one of the creators just demoed RAD. Really cool stuff. <http://rad.rubyforge.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, great quality video. I don't care much about RAD, but I'd love to hear more about how it was filmed...</comment>


GitHub ❤ ~/ - <AUTHOR> http://dotfiles.github.com/

<comment><USER2> Now that so many people are hosting their dotfiles on GitHub, I'd like to see someone write a script that can scan all those dotfiles and produce some statistics about the most popular settings and aliases. It would be educational, but it could also give operating system vendors some suggestions for new terminal defaults.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was posted yesterday, wasn't it? (And with a more descriptive name, I believe.)</comment>


Why Silicon Valley Real Estate Is Insane (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2016/06/17/silicon-valley-takeover-468182.html <comment><AUTHOR> > "If you put all the current trends together, it seems obvious Silicon Valley > will become the most powerful place on earth at the expense of just about > everywhere else on earth."

It's not a zero-sum game. Google is collecting huge sums of ad revenue, but in return, it is improving the productivity of virtually all of its users. Just to illustrate what I mean, Kelly, my mechanical engineering friend, used to disappear into the engineering library for days looking up parts in catalogs, calling vendors to confirm specs and availability, placing orders over fax or phone, and waiting, sometimes weeks, for parts to arrive. Today, it's an afternoon's work, mainly on Google, and he has the parts in two or three days.</comment>


Finale for Now on Google's Self-Inflicted Trust Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/finale-for-now-on-googles-self-inflicted-trust-problem/274286/

<comment><USER2> Google's been picked on a lot over Reader, but it's a microcosm of the entire web services industry. We've developed a culture over the last two decades of launching compelling new services without a clear revenue model in a land-grab for users. Many software frameworks utilize lazy loading, whereby they defer the execution of expensive operations until the last possible minute. Our business culture lazy-loads revenue models. We set up a product, hope for enough users, then hope to monetize those users effectively. Without a compelling product or an audience to consume it, a business model is useless, so we've optimized that out to focus on the bare minimum.

There's an implicit assumption in all of this that the perceived value of a free service outweighs the potential costs of the service eventually failing in the user's eyes, that they'll keep coming back for something free and cool every time we ship it. As an industry, we haven't addressed the risk of crying wolf. At what point do enough consumers say "I'm going to wait until this has traction" before they're willing to invest their time and their hearts into the services we build? If the wait-and-see crowd grows large enough, it could seriously impact our ability to launch minimum-viable-products on the hope they'll monetize later.

<comment><USER3> There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, yet plenty of platforms, products and services with perfectly viable business models go away. The Apple Newton (for which people paid good money) was launched and discontinued in less time Reader existed.

Perhaps all the "highly influential taste-makers" who are asserting that they'll not trust Google products in the future chose not to buy iPods because of Apple's behavior. I doubt it.

At the end of the day, the "tax" that early adopters pay often consists both of higher prices and the chance that the thing they are investing in will never take off. Indeed, I bought a Sony Smart Watch last year expecting that it'll fail, but I still saw value in getting personal experience with a type of technology that I expect will be influential.

There are reasons why people are slow adopters and laggards, they aren't just Luddites, they want to receive proven value, and not waste their time on dead ends.

We are lucky enough to live in a time where the rate of innovation is increasing. There are more options, more value created, and also more dead ends. Perhaps some people need to re-calibrate how they self identify as adopters.

<comment><USER4> > _There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, yet plenty of platforms, > products and services with perfectly viable business models go away. The > Apple Newton (for which people paid good money) was launched and > discontinued in less time Reader existed._

... and nobody's Newton disappeared.

In fact, you can still find one: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Newton- Original-MessagePad-OMP...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Newton-Original- MessagePad-OMP-Model-Number-H1000-Ready-To- Go-/140937551295?pt=PDA_s_Pocket_PC_s&hash=item20d0885dbf)

This is the major difference between cloud architectures and DRM-licensed media that you rent, versus actual products that you own.

<comment><USER3> True, but regardless, a not inconsiderable part of the value of a Newton died when the platform came to the end of it's life. A betamax machine or an HD-DVD player may still exist, but that does not mean a lot for their owner.

<comment><USER5> The people who bought VHS instead of Betamax aren't getting a lot of value from their systems at this point either. And I've bought, used, and thrown away multiple DVD players over the years.

<comment><USER6> Point of order: the hypothetical HD-DVD player to which @msabalau refers is not a standard DVD player, as you seem to have assumed. HD-DVD was a format iteration meant to compete with Blu-ray. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD>

<comment><USER7> Point of information: that was a point of information, not a point of order.

A point of order would be something like pointing out that someone replied under the wrong parent.

<comment><USER5> Isn't it a point of order to say that somebody incorrectly called a point of order?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're five years and billions of dollars of wealth destroyed from the following Google headline:

 _Google to re-focus on it's core competency in search, in bid to regain competitiveness and re-ignite growth._

Remember the good old days when Google's mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Someday, they'll get back to that. For now, it's clone Facebook! Stat!

Google Reader organized RSS feeds -- information. That was the old Google, the old mission statement, the old focus. That's why Larry killed it. Someday, Google will swing back, because that's actually why we all like Google anyway. Hopefully, it won't be too late.

<comment><USER9> Google swing back? I doubt it. Once they crossed over into a billion+ company, their mission became to be a billion+ company. That they still organize the world's information, or claim to do whatever they did in the past, is just momentum that will bleed off.

They make money. That's all they do. Nothing wrong with that, but they're never going to be what they were. Their future is to be General Electric, or Comcast, or HP in their declining years. The difference between HP and Google is acceleration; the days of Bill and Dave are remembered wistfully, as they were not there for the decline and destruction.

The days of Page Rank and Labs and excitement are dead and gone, as are the human days of Lestat, never to return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Google Reader furore reached embarrassing levels of absurdity days ago. I have attempted many times to formulate my feelings on the matter into words (for the sake of balance if nothing else) so here goes nothing:

The rage about the death of reader has been engendered and encouraged by over- zealous bloggers and early adopters, who placed a personal agenda ahead of sensible appraisal of events. A breach of the trust placed in them by the wider user base who look to them for guidance.

\</comment><comment>--

Their temper tantrum has achieved several things:

\</comment><comment>--

\- Underscoring the severe issues with citizen journalism, where influence and weight is placed in the words of those who have no code of ethics or conduct to adhere to. I was particularly taken aback by what I consider to be an unprofessional article by Om Malik: [http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry- google-you-can-keep-it-to...](http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you- can-keep-it-to-yourself/)

\- Riding roughshod over the launch of interesting Google products such as Keep and The Drive API. Ironically the people who say they would not use Keep because they could not trust it to be around in x years time are arguably the ones who, by drowning launch coverage in unrelated negative feedback, contribute most to the likelihood of that outcome. In this way - the prophecy becomes self fulfilling, and a lot of self-important people get to pat themselves on the back for 'getting it right'.

\- Highlighting the reality that almost no tech products live on in the same form ad infinitum. Old systems built upon old technologies make way for new systems built upon new technologies. This iterative process has long been the life blood of the developing platform that is the internet. This is a good thing - this process gave us Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Maps, Foursquare & Reddit from the ashes of such things as MySpace, Digg, MultiMap & Alta Vista. Far worse would be the continued life of an old and increasing unused technology to pander to a small but influential community. Doing that would be a waste of Google's engineering talent and by extension a disservice to it's wider user base. IE 6 anyone ?

\- Highlighting the need for data portability and transparency. This is a good thing - In my opinion the only good thing to come out of this childish whining session. The thing is, Google already caters to this need as well as any, and far better than most, major internet tech firms. Therefore is doesn't seem rational or sensible to lynch them on these grounds either.

\</comment><comment>--

The aforementioned temper tantrum has notably NOT achieved one thing:

\</comment><comment>--

\- Persuading Google to continue to actively support and develop Google Reader.

Some facts to finish off:

Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the interests of it's shareholders.

It makes good business sense for Google to frequently kill off experiments. Allowing them to re focus engineering talent on yet more experiments.

Everyone enjoys the innovations that come from Google's experimental culture (G-Mail etc...). However - Google are not prescient ... they cannot always accurately predict what will be useful to the widest audience along the path to their eventual goal of making all the word's information accessible. In order to be right some of the time, Google, like everybody else, has to be wrong some of the time too. If they did not recognise when they were wrong and account for it then their pace of innovation would grind to a halt under the weight of their own legacy support.

When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have your cake and eat it too.

RSS was and is a dead technology. Bloggers telling me otherwise (no matter how loudly, and with what ridiculous hyperbole) is akin to musicians telling me that the CD is still alive and well. I don't care ... neither do most other people ... HMV is still shutting down!

\</comment><comment>--

I desperately hope that someone with a louder voice than I possess manages to get some traction when they inevitably say: "Go home internets, you're drunk."

<comment><USER10> >Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the interests of it's shareholders.

I seriously doubt the shareholders were going to be pissed off at Google if Reader were continued. And interests of shareholders is not a black and white thing, for example CostCo pays and treats their workers better than Walmart does. They don't have a legal responsibility to reduce all possible expenses for the sake of profits. The executive leadership has considerable leverage in running a company.

>When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have your cake and eat it too.

That doesn't make much sense. Google has $48 billion cash on hand and made $2.1 billion in net income in just the last quarter. The big companies run a lot of things that are not directly profitable but give them goodwill and a halo effect of staying in the ecosystem.

<comment><USER11> On the first point, yes, this is a frequent misunderstanding of the law. The management of a company has a general fiduciary duty to shareholders, but does _not_ have any kind of narrow legal obligation to maximize profits, certainly not over any specific timeframe. They have quite large leeway to make decisions on the basis of whatever strategy they think is correct, and they may value things such as "customer loyalty" and "brand perceptions" in whatever way they see fit. If Google's management decided, for example, that it was important for their reputation that they stand behind their products long-term, and therefore that nothing would be shut down except in extraordinary circumstances, there'd be no legal problem with adopting that policy, even if it lost money short/medium-term. That's simply a strategic decision, which might be wise or unwise, but which courts have no authority to second-guess. Shareholders could vote out the board if they disagree with it, but there would be no violation of fiduciary duty.

<comment><USER6> I am not suggesting the the law is black and white. Nor am I saying that there is anything codified as law that would require Google to do anything so specific as moth ball reader. The decision to mothball reader (rightly or wrongly) was clearly a business decision: Google obviously felt it could better serve its user-base as a whole (and by extension its shareholders) by distributing its time and LOCs in other ways. The reason I brought up the law was in support of the general point that Google has every right to distribute its finite time and resources with this tenet in mind.

If they chose to keep Reader going it would be purely on the basis that its niche user base is somewhat influential, and might have some success on the future success of their products. That is not in service of it's wider user bases' interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm really starting to get annoyed at the whole "whelp, Google Reader died, therefore everything else is unsafe" mantra being carried by the tech industry as of late. Sure, it was worth mentioning early in the game (and more importantly once), but at this point it's become a bandwagon.

The press is declaring Google Reader a sign of things to come, but for the average user this has little effect. If we assume Google wasn't lying, and the users were dropping off, it makes sense for them to cut off a product that wasn't being actively developed in the first place. I'm a Reader fan, and I hate that it shut down, but that's beside the point - Google is trying to build new, better products, not let old ones fester without support or development.

This doesn't even tackle the fact that Keep isn't a true Evernote competitor. It's more of a supplement/addition to Evernote. For once, a Gizmodo article is relevant here: [http://gizmodo.com/5991723/6-obvious-evernote-features- googl...](http://gizmodo.com/5991723/6-obvious-evernote-features-google-keep- cant-replace)

<comment><USER13> You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API.

And there has been this assumption with Google that they would keep their APIs available. Especially for something a innocuous as an RSS API. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

<comment><USER14> > You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API.

A hacked up, reverse-engineered API. Since it was never official they haven't actually broken any promises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No one can predict ahead of time what will be a success, and what won't. That's the beauty of making lots of bets, and having the fittest survive. There's no formula for success, no matter how many business gurus write articles saying otherwise. You try an experiment, you collect data, you iterate. You climb lots of mountains, sometimes you climb the wrong ones.

Google perceives itself as a technology company. Hire smart people, try lots of things, most of them will fail. Some will stick. What people are bashing Google over is what collectively, angels and venture capitals do every day, only this time, the venture capitalist is Google, and they are investing in oodles of their own internal projects.

Why do this? To avoid the Innovators Dilemma.

IMHO, the best thing we can do to guard against the downsides of disruption is to ensure transparency of data. You should expect products to die every couple of years. Reader outlasted most at 8 years. How long will Pinterest be around? Or Vine? Path?

The problem today is that most companies are not transparent, they are building siloed clouds, and so when they die, content dies with them.

Worse is non-textual data, like books, music, and film. Not only do you have siloed clouds, you have heavy use of DRM, which means purchases are non- transferrable, often even if the company themselves wants it to be.

The lesson is, invest your energy in supporting services with data transparency. Demand it. Not just from Google, but from Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al.

</comment><comment><USER16> Besides search and gmail, I have no intention of ever using another Google offering again. I also now regularly back up up gmail using Thunderbird just in case Google does something stupid there as well.

<comment><USER17> Personally, I think if it weren't for Search and Gmail with its tie-in effect, people would have moved out of all other Google services a long time ago.

I do not like this new direction Google has taken since the past few product redesigns (Gmail, Google Groups, Image Search among others) where the products have gone from beautifully functional and feature rich to outright broken even for basic features. Groups has become absolutely unusable.

The Gmail redesign was a sore point and I customized it to be as close as it could be to the older design, but I expect them to break it further in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > and whether Google has hurt its reputation as 'organizer of all the worlds > information.'

This is my biggest issue with Google, past the immediate concerns about the Reader shutdown. Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs in one G+ basket, regardless of whether it's a good fit for the problem at hand.

Spreading out lead them to create lots of good products that served all sorts of niches - the loudest outcry about Reader has come not from tech nerds, but from journalists of every stripe. Keep eliminating niche products, and soon enough it adds up to a large chunk of your audience, each of which had a different need that Google decided wasn't important enough to serve. There's value in diversity.

<comment><USER19> > Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs > in one G+ basket

What makes you think that? Google has been killing projects since long before G+ existed. They also adopted their "focus strategy" before releasing G+. Is there any evidence that Reader was killed to benefit G+ in some way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The speed w/ which Google deployed, and then discontinued Google Buzz discouraged the adoption of Google+ for many folks, myself included.

> Launched February 9, 2010 > Current status Discontinued December 15, 2011

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz>

<comment><USER21> For me it was Google Wave. The presentation[1] got me very excited and I couldn't wait to start using it. I signed up for the beta and told everyone I work with to do so as well. It quickly became an invaluable tool for me, I couldn't imagine what I'd do without it. And then, a year after it was introduced, only 3 months after it was released to the general public, Google announced Wave was dead.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ>

<comment><USER22> At least they open-sourced it and released a stand-alone version via the Apache Foundation. You can still use Wave, it's just called Apache Wave or Wave in a Box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google Reader has been active for 8 years. That's longer than most technology products. In addition, there are countless alternatives to choose from, and you can easily get your data out of Reader and move to one of those countless alternatives.

This whole thing has been so overblown. It's like everyone is bored or something.

<comment><USER13> I have hundreds of starred articles which unless someone makes a replacement for Google Reader is going to disappear come July. For me it's like losing years worth of bookmarks.

And I hope that you post the same thing if/when Google discontinues Google Mail.

<comment><USER24> Well, strictly speaking, starred messages are included in OPML bundle that you can download. Even if you don't get complete replacement for GReader, you can still extract information from that file, it's just JSON.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Blogger seems like a direct competitor to Google+

Does it seem unrealistic to worry that Google might cut that? It is easy to export data from Blogger to other blogging systems (I just moved off of Blogger), so at least good for Google for making it easy to export data from their products.

</comment><comment><USER26> The reason why the hoopla about Google Reader shutdown won't die is that bloggers and online journalists will lose readership.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there any indication that non-Google services are likely to have a longer expected lifetime than Google services? I don't think so... If services going extinct bothers you, the only sane alternative seems to be non-cloud services based on open standards.

Bashing Google seems silly...

<comment><USER28> I think it's reasonable to say that evernote - for whom this is their core business - are likely to keep their service around longer than google, for whom this is a niche side product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> really shocking to see the extent of myopia over at google, for 'smart people' they are acting incredibly dumb

<comment><USER30> I'd venture to say that this is all Larry Page. The start of this "myopia" seems to coincide with him taking over as CEO.

<comment><USER13> It actually started when Larry met Steve Jobs and was recommended he focus his efforts.

Ever since then it's been all about Google+ and finding new ways to force feed to everyone.

<comment><USER31> Let us now daydream about the possibility that Steve sabotaged Larry.

<comment><USER32> Reminds me of this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284524>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wonder how long until they shut down Keep with everyone having put a lot into using it. We should start a web site for pooling bets...

<comment><USER34> 5 years? Would that be enough? Or do you like using services for life? Especially ones of such little value and little tie-in as a note app. Most people would rather get bored with it and try something new than be upset about Google killing Keep in 5 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Did everyone forget about this? [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more- wood-behind-fewe...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind- fewer-arrows.html)

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I've attempted to stay away from Google products mainly because the customer service or support of their products is horrendous.

That being said, I wish they would either better evaluate the popularity of their products and monetize them, or simply not allow them out into the wild for people to use and then kill it a year later regardless of adoption.</comment>


Google Makes 1.5 Million Books Available For iPhone, Android Phones - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/iphone/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213202148 <comment><AUTHOR> The link is: <http://books.google.com/m></comment>


How I'm fighting Procrastination every day? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sanjeevy133/how-im-fighting-procrastination-everyday-667597ff892a <comment><AUTHOR> Me sharing my journey of battling with procrastination and what I have learned on the way.</comment>


Check out my website I finally finished it  - <AUTHOR> http://ethankr.com

<comment><USER2> No.</comment>


Microsoft, Open Source, and the Meaning of Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jprosise/archive/2008/07/11/microsoft-open-source-and-the-meaning-of-life.aspx

<comment><USER2> FUD. MS wouldn't have to worry if they're not linking to it. Distributing Paint.NET is fine so long as the source is available. Using its APIs is also fine.

Not to mention Paint.NET's license is MIT which is GPL compatible .... That Microsoft insider's talking out of his ass.

And the injunction wouldn't prevent selling. It would prevent distributing.. which is a moot point because the source is already available...

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, excellent points in the article... I have to take those arguments into account, as my company sells software. It's not about avoiding open source, it's about removing all doubt as to the origin and ownership of the software.</comment>


Food's Biggest Scam: The Great Kobe Beef Lie - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2012/04/12/foods-biggest-scam-the-great-kobe-beef-lie/

<comment><USER2> There are a lot of similar food scams. Ever had Red Snapper? Probably not unless you caught it yourself.

If you have bought it in a store or had it at a restaurant, it most likely wasn't Red Snapper.

</comment><comment><USER3> What about Wagyu beef? I see outrageous prices for that in Las Vegas. Is that legit?

<comment><USER4> See Part 2:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2012/04/13/foods- bi...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2012/04/13/foods-biggest-scam- part-2-domestic-kobe-and-wagyu-beef/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: A HR news aggregation tool I made - <AUTHOR> http://hr-report.attendmind.com

<comment><USER2> it's quite nice, I have a couple of comments anyway.

Why only 2 columns? you have plenty of space for even 4 if you want or 3 if you do not want too much but as it is now it seems it's a lot of space wasted.

When hovering a link the tile becomes really dark and it's impossible to read, I don't like that.

It would be better IMHO if hovering cell would show the description instead of hovering the links. This would keep consistency because other way it feels... funny, can't really explain why...

But nice anyway good job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :-)

Its actually 3 columns. but if you are seeing 2 then there probably is a css issue. Can you tell me what platform you are on?

I noticed the hovering issue now. Thanks for that. I will correct it.

"It would be better IMHO if hovering cell would show the description instead of hovering the links" - interesting. I will definitely try and see how that feels

<comment><USER2> This is what it looks like on the latest chrome windows 7 <http://i.imgur.com/asnKlVo.png>

I tried to enlarge the window and it actually expanded but with this resolution it looks quite strange because it doesn't fill all the page.

It is just a metter of the minimum width of the coulmns I think, nothing serious :D

<comment><AUTHOR> ouch. Yes thats odd. I will fix this. Thanks for taking the trouble. Very helpful :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CSS3 image filters with examples - <AUTHOR> http://coderwall.com/p/ruaoig

<comment><USER2> Finally, I can use my favourite IE5 features in Google Chrome!

<comment><USER3> The good ol' DHTML days!

<comment><USER2> I remember as a kid viewing the IE Web Channel (or whatever they called it) demos. I was amazed that the cartoons weren't videos, but actually animated HTML elements!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for pointing this out. I was about to implement some simple Image Processing (brightness, contrast, invert, etc) for x-ray images and I think the CSS image filters will give me everything I need. It's a research website and nearly everyone is using webkit browsers, so no problem there.

</comment><comment><USER5> Made a CSS-filter playground a while a go: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4071880>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure what the point of some of these is. Take the sepia one for example: why do we need a filter just for that? What's the use case?

Interesting to note that the blur one "breaks" out of its box, although not while it's transitioning.

<comment><USER7> Rollover effects using only 1 image.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but how many sites have you seen with a sepia rollover effect? It doesn't strike me as terribly useful - it seems to me that a more generic implementation, allowing for some sort of simple filter language would be much more appropriate.

<comment><USER8> The number of sites you see with a given effect is at least partly a function of the difficulty of implementing the effect.

Also, for whatever reason, sepia is a canonical filter that apparently every set of image filters must include, so it would be silly to leave it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4218709>

</comment><comment><USER10> ...and the gap between native and web ui gets even narrower.</comment>