Tivo broke Civilization.

The olds will remember.

In the early 80s, every American watched the same TV programs at the same time. LIve, broadcast TV. It was the national American culture. Everyone at work and at school the next morning talked about their shared experience and varying reactions to the BroadCast that The Party had shown them the prior night.

Cable TV - by offering a few more channels - had _some_ impact on the "breakup" of America.

But it was Tivo - mass-scale consumer time shifting. Americans no longer watched all the same propaganda at the same time.

The monoculture started to crack.

The rest of it is downstream from there. The bigs tried to retain their control of culture and opinion, but it became too fragmented and too decentralized. They couldn't.

Nobody is mad about the internet. They are mad they don't control the internet.

Well no shit... if you're preventing users from even visiting the web sites you stole the information from, who's going to pay you for clicks and ad exposures?

I'm tempted to ask Gemini to draw a political cartoons showing Philipp Schindler sawing a branch while he stands on it, Wile E. Coyote style. In case that's too obscure for you, the branch could be labelled "Search Profits" and the saw could be labelled "AI Mode."

First of all, I am not a Democrat, so it's no concern of mine.

Second, the DOJ still does not decide tax rates.

Finally, Remember. The pendulum swings both ways.

I probably am misreading it then...

It could not have happened to a more deserving bunch.

Welcome to the panopticon. Be seeing you!

It looks like a square of toilet paper.

No thanks on the light-up Apple logo for me. I think it started with the Powerbook G3 (I had one, it was a great computer) and it was sort of obnoxious even then. I'm not paid to be a light-up billboard everywhere I go.

No thanks on the laptop touchscreen, either. I understand it on something like a Surface tablet -- almost -- but most of the time I used my Surface with a keyboard, like a regular laptop, and never touched the screen. I think ramming touchscreens down everybody's throats was just a gimmick Microsoft came up with, both to A.) convince everybody that Windows 8 worked equally well on laptops and tablets (it sure did); and B.) once again, everybody needed to go out and buy a new laptop, even though their current one worked and served their needs just fine.

Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho

(now I owe Disney royalties)

Covid 19 ... Plague26

Conspicuously missing from the specs is any mention of Apple Pencil support. I can understand maybe not integrating a way to charge it so forcing you to use the USB-C version but touchscreens look like crap with fingerprints smudges so Pencil support would go a long way. Considering I have both a MBP and an iPad and I have to clean the iPad's screen daily... this seems like a gap.

Many people are underpaid. But the solution is not simply pay more money and suddenly everyone is smarter and happier and better at their jobs. More money is not a magic bullet. If everyone received a 100% raise tomorrow, nothing would change, except inflation.

I've only been paying attention since 1990 but every single time a feature they don't offer "is stupid" until they offer it.

Even when I liked the company this Cluster B behavior always bothered me.

If there's an example of "that's a really nice feature our competitor has but we don't offer it yet" I haven't seen it.

The closest I can think of was offering WebObjects for Solaris. Not sure if that ever shipped or we just had a beta. I bailed from that Healthcare IT team when the CIO pulled funding for two-phase commit among disparate patient medication systems with the rationale "even if medication errors kill someone it'll be cheaper to settle the lawsuits than pay for the license." Enough people left that they outsourced and everybody still hates that replacement system.

I learned too late that MBA's don't care about quality.

It would be a shame to get your avocado-greased fingerprints all over such a display!

Maybe in another dimension

Damn, dude. According to PG&E, my home averaged 3.39kWh per day last week.