I made them again this morning and took a new photo that's not overcontrasted from iPhone's built-in photo contrast. I'll get my fancier camera out like a real food blogger next time!
I was thinking the same thing. The tuning slide is not what you use while playing, it's the separate slide on the bell side of the trombone for fine adjustment to ensure you're in tune with the rest of the band.
Is AI responsible for the committed code? Should AI be blamed when services go down due to the change?
The answer is absolutely not - the developer is responsible whether the code was AI assisted or not, and the dev's name should be attached to it just like any change.
The OP is right: these are ads, plain and simple, and it's a dark pattern for these companies to have attribution enabled by default
If a particular AI provider is responsible for a disproportionate amount of buggy code I absolutely want to know that. Perhaps we'll switch providers. Sure, this will be flagged in CR too, but I would want to see trends over time.
I don't know why you wouldn't want to track this information.
I don't agree at all. I think it was a dark pattern when attribution was not enabled by default and angrily demanded it from everyone who sent me AI-generated code. It's not OK to declare sole authorship of something that you did not in fact author simply because you're volunteering to take responsibility for it.
I don't know why dylan604 is trying to die on this hill but thats the point, you can't tell apart people using different tools, everybody has their own preferences.
Case in point, I have no way to know if dylan604 is even a real human at this point.
Positive credit is not the only purpose of attribution.
There's also the named authors not taking credit for something they didn't fully do, regardless of whether the credit goes to someone else.
There's also traceability, if the authors/provenance needs to be considered because of some kind of problem or potential problem -- technical, legal, security, or otherwise.
Your caring about the entity cited doesn't actually change the nature of the citation. Your saying "Co-authored by Copilot" does the same thing--gives Copilot possible exposure and definite credit--even if it doesn't need it and you don't care about it.
I write "reported by gcc16 -pedantic" when I'm fixing a bug, because it's useful to flag "this is how they issue became visible" in case readers want to use the same tool on their code.
The fact that it's just a tool is irrelevant. You don't need to mention search and replace because everyone already knows that exists... mind you I have had commit messages which included sed commandlines, for ease of future reuse.
I know this is a bit off tangent - but can you please convey that point to every damned dev/team that ends up with a freaking ".vscode" directory in their repo
So does my brain, but no one complains. If I’ve read and understand all of the code it’s effectively the same thing. I’m washing the LLM output so it’s clean. My brain parses the LLMs code and deems it safe.
I get the opposition to product names, but as someone who's trying hard to make an OpenAI boycott work, I personally value being told which LLM in particular is responsible.
To be fair I've never used Laravel - but I do have a memory of code generators/scaffolders inserting files that made clear they were responsible for work
Do I need to write “coauthored by protoc” when pushing grpc changes? “Coauthored by gofmt” when formatting? “Coauthored by React when using npx create-next-app”?
It's not the gun's responsibility when you shoot it but we still need to have discussion and rules about guns. Enough with this tired, worthless semantics argument.
And there is something useful about being able to trace the ballistics back to find out which gun was responsible for the shot, as a key to who was wielding it and is ultimately responsible for its use.
But of course, owning an iPhone early on was seen as prestigious. Using an LLM is... not? Many people really don't want the world to know. For blogs in particular, the urge to have an LLM generate the entire thing and then post it under your name seems to be really difficult to resist.
This is the second or third HN post I'm seeing this month along the lines of "how dare AI companies flag my code as AI-generated". I just don't remember similar complaints about the iPhone footer. Not many HNers complain about The North Face putting the text "The North Face" on their hoodies either. Or Honda putting their logo on the car.
The reasons for this difference are interesting. The fact that companies put their logos / brands on stuff is a lot less interesting to me. You can call it bad, but again, why is this instance worse?
Plenty of people turned off the iPhone thingie once they figured out where the setting was (kinda buried).
Plenty of people don’t like logos. And some do, because they tie their identity with brands. Maybe in the future some of us will tie our identities to specific agents/LLMs.
To each their own. I don’t have clothing with logos, I find it gross. And you also don’t know I’ve sent you an email from an iPhone. Ça va.
I think of the AVP like Steve Jobs once described: headphones for video [0]
I use it a few hours a day, a few times a week exclusively as a virtual display for my macbook.
Being able to put a huge virtual monitor anywhere is the killer feature and I don't tend to use it for anything else. It's indispensable on flights where laptop lids can't even fully open.
Apple got the interactions just about perfect for AR window management, etc.
Of course the main drawbacks are the weight, size, and overall embarrassment from having a giant face computer strapped to your head.
I don't find it very comfortable for more than a couple hours at time, at least with the solo knit band + the belkin head strap. I'd like to get a dual knit band at some point.
But when this sort of hardware gets miniaturized I think many people will prefer it to hunching over a laptop screen. Just like headphones, wearing glasses while typing at a black screen could signal "Do not disturb, I'm working here"
You're right, and it's also why this device is such a non sequitur for Apple. Almost all of their successful products are trendsetting and cool (iPhone, mac, airpods), this is one causes embarrassment and I just don't think it's fixable.
As I remember, and supported by the article quoted below, AirPods were ridiculed quite a bit when first launched.
>Of all the widely ridiculed tech products, Apple’s AirPods have experienced an extraordinary turnaround. Back in 2016, they were roundly mocked by the tech industry. Tiny wireless earbuds? It seemed like a recipe for disaster – streets would be littered with these lost headphones, which would clutter up city pavements like discarded gloves and babies’ socks." – https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2019/feb/10...
Apple loves to stealth test new tech in full public view by sneaking it into relatively mundane places, so debuting agentic AI via accessibility is very on brand.
A few other examples:
- The Touch Bar was much more than an OLED strip, it was Apple’s first move in the transition to Apple Silicon on macs. The Apple T1 chip in the 2016 Touch Bar MacBooks was the first solely Apple-designed processor to appear in a Mac and took over several responsibilities away from intel chipsets like power management, fans, sleep/wake, access to the camera & mic, and the secure enclave powering touch ID. Then the T2 added encryption of the SSD, audio management, image processing for the camera, and prevented tampering with the boot process
- The iPhone 3G shipped with a Liquidmetal SIM eject tool, which is made from a strong custom metal alloy which is "practically unbendable by hand unless you want to hurt or cut your fingers." Although Apple hasn’t released anything with the alloy since then, now nearly 20 years later Apple is rumored to be using liquid metal in their upcoming foldable iPhone.
- RealityKit had 3D scanning and a lot of other cool AR capabilities for years which didn’t make sense until the Apple Vision Pro was released.
You're reading way too much into it. These are just failed attempts at commercializing something.
- People hated the touchbar. Only years after it became liked, and only under tech enthusiasts that hacked and tweaked it to have much deeper functionality.
- Making the ejector out of an expensive alloy made no sense.
- Realitykit (and the Vision, which is also crashing and burning) is a solution looking for a problem.
- 3D touch had both discoverability and usability problems.
You're underestimating Apple's meticulous planning, which has only become more intense in the Cook era. Bad feature/UX or not, each one of those decisions was calculated.
Read this ars quote from 2010 [0]:
>Apple used the small part—one that is not integral to the device’s functionality—to see if the company was capable or producing a custom design to Apple’s specifications. Typically, manufacturers prefer to have at least two sources for parts, so that a supply problem from one supplier won’t halt manufacturing. Since Liquidmetal is only available from one source, Apple needed to make sure the company could deliver.
For Apple Silicon, there was no way they'd make the switch in one go, so they had to figure out a way to hedge that bet. That's what the TouchBar really was, with all its warts and solutions for problems nobody had.
And as someone else in this thread pointed out, the first custom cellular chip wasn't released with a flagship model - they exclusively paired it with the budget iPhone 16e.
I think you confuse long-term planning with long-term success. Just because something is meticulously planned doesn’t guarantee the plan wasn’t flawed fundamentally.
Additionally, wireless charging is viewed as a flop? MagSafe (wireless) is a really strong product option. Lightning vs USB-C doesn’t matter, no need to fiddle with anything in the dark, etc. MagSafe for mounting in a car is also a strong offering. Most Android phones use Qi as well.
I think the reference to wireless charging was to their rumored-but-never-released product that was going to allow charging at a distance, not mere magsafe charging.
> I think you confuse long-term planning with long-term success.
No. Long-term planning presupposes actual planning and execution, including failure modes, usage patterns etc. There's markedly less and less of that under Cook's leadership.
Oh, by the way. You can't really have long-term meticulous planning when everything is on an artificially enforced yearly cycle. The hardware division has mostly emerged unscathed, but that's a miracle in Cook's Apple.
> wireless charging is viewed as a flop?
I was referring to AirPower. Announced, never shipped. I should've looked up the name for it. Otherwise yes, wireless charging has been used everywhere, and Apple was just one of very last holdouts to implement it.
I'm gonna echo the sibling comment here because you're conflating different things. The point is that all of these seemingly weird things that were sometimes failures were part of more or less elaborate plans, and most importantly, that *commercial success for any given feature was not necessarily the purpose of the plan.*
You're conflating what I wrote with "you're talking about commercial success".
Broken keyboards shipped for years, "we didn't think about thermal throttling", "we have no working replacement for a widely used professional machine", and "hey, here's this half-assed redesign that we still can't properly fix after release" have nothing to do with either commercial success or meticulous planning.
The keyboard issue was prolonged only by the nature of Apple's hardware release cycle. When the keyboard was released to the public, the next gen hardware was already way into the design/build cycle that it could not just be replaced. The fact they even had time to put the condoms under each key for the next year's model was surprising to me. They wanked the plug on the keyboard faster than I've seen them yank any hardware design.
> The keyboard issue was prolonged only by the nature of Apple's hardware release cycle.
You know that "meticulous planning" is supposed to include mechanical tests, catching edge cases etc. right? Instead, it persisted for 5 years with minor acknowledgements and minor changes.
It took them 3 years to put the "condoms" on, 4 years to add additional caps.
3 years after release Apple started offering free keyboard repairs to all users with a butterfly keyboard.
All that for a "meticulously planned" keyboard whose issues were immediately apparent within weeks of release.
What are you on about, wireless charging is great, and using the magnet to hang my phone is also great. If that goes away I might have to consider switching phones!
You're misunderstanding how difficult it is to make major architectural changes to products the way Apple can. One of the ways to do it is to hide the architectural change as something else, something niche, and only when it has survived the fire of deployment there try to scale it up to the full market. It's actually quite genious, and you can expect more of it now that Apple's hardware guru is the chief.
I can't help but wonder if this agentic-via-accessibility angle is the result of this new leadership. If it is, it's a very good sign for Apple, because software and especially the AI gap is Apple's achillies right now.
ML-related improvements to accessibility has been the trend for a couple of years now.
Changes which might not meet the quality bar to be a default user experience have a different calculus when they can be packaged up to be opt-in, and life-changing for certain people.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day also leads WWDC by a few weeks, so it serves as a taste of what Apple has been working on for the last year.
In terms of changes being led by a smaller feature, my favorite was night shift (which adjusted blue lighting at night) - which provided API months leading the first device with adaptive color adjustments from ambient light sensors.
I liked the TouchBar. There were two problems with it:
1. It replaced the F keys. I suspect pros wouldn’t have complained so loudly if it didn’t. And it was too expensive for the cheaper computers where it may have been more popular.
2. They never changed it. Ok the first version wasn’t a big hit. Other than bringing back the escape key they never did anything. They sent it out to be a hit or to die and gave up there.
Steve Jobs also thought that the abomination that was that stupid circular mouse was the pinnacle of UX.
Requiring the use of two hands in order to right click is also a fascinating hill to die on. I'm surprised that the operation didn't also require a foot pedal, all to, presumably, not confuse their users with the inclusion of a second button on their mice.
What's wild is they STILL haven't built a mouse with two switches for clicking. Right clicking is on all their mice/trackpads faked with things like touch sensors. They are just dead set against it for some reason even though it does actually mean it's impossible to play something like a modern FPS* with a Magic Mouse.
Not on the 13" no but they could have made the touch pad slightly smaller.
For me touch keys will never work, like the other poster said I need tactile feedback. Apple's keyboards are pretty bad at that already by the way, even the return to scissor models. The only ones I find workable are the ones of 2015 and before.
Removing the escape key is what bothered me most as someone using Vim keybindings. It made it feel very unpleasant to edit code because the Touch Bar had no physical feedback. I still have a visceral memory of how much I disliked touching the glass with my left ring finger.
I have never got into macros, so missing a row of function keys didn't impact me. A row of system integration actions (like dynamic volume and brightness controls) was nice.
However, a capacitive touch surface should not be so close to tactile buttons. This made it way more likely to falsely register actions.
Move it a half key width farther up and make it taller to have greater flexibility on how it uses the space and I think it would have been a much better feature.
IMHO the big problem is that the five year hardware cycle of the MBP is not conducive for revolutionary improvements. They had the MacBook back then, which would have been a great platform for faster design iterations.
no2 is what annoyed me the most. I liked it for the most part, but it was never updated, even on the software side we had very few changes. It could've been great.
Having the Touch Bar screen show up the relevant buttons for the context I was in was really nice compared to trying to remember which F key was which debug option.
A "I wish..." would have been a $200 usb bar and hub that could sit right behind my keyboard for a desktop.
The other was I made some Shortcuts that were very handy for me and set them up as buttons. It’s been over a year, I still miss them.
One would pop up a dialog I could type a Jira ticket number into and it would open it. I tried to do that with Salesforce but they’re insane so you can’t.
My favorite would open my next meeting. Know I have a meeting in 5 minutes? Hit the button and my browser would open the right Google Meet or Zoom and come to the front.
So useful.
The desktop problem is a real one too. It was great… as long as you only use your laptop as a laptop or your keyboard. Use anything else and you list it.
iMac? No. Mac Pro? No. Mac Mini? Don’t be stupid. No.
My primary issue with the TouchBar, losing the F keys was a concern but lot my primary one, was that it required me to look at it to use it. With keys you can feel them, and learn their place. But, the TouchBar had me looking at it and not the screen to do something. If it was angled so I could see it in my periphery whilst looking at the screen it would been awesome.
Vociferous tech people hated the touchbar same with the butterfly keyboard or Neo laptop. And it makes perfect sense to test out new chips in small ways before you release them in a major product that is Apples edge today with Apple Silicon in comparison to most of their competition.
> - People hated the touchbar. Only years after it became liked, and only under tech enthusiasts that hacked and tweaked it to have much deeper functionality.
We hated the touchbar because it took away esc + f-keys.
If it had been on top of the F-key row, everyone would've loved it.
Vision is hilarious as it is more than just a solution looking for a problem. It was also desperately avoiding the current market that exists for it. Anything but games, it seemed.
Apple is on the three generation C chip I think the contract is up in the next two years with Qualcomm and within the next two generations that will it for Qualcomm modems next up Memory? The way things are currently going?
And their upcoming smart glasses are the best UX for almost everything they showed the user holding up her phone for.
I read their glasses when taking video or pics the lense will light up and or flash more prominently then Metas. Maybe that will help the whole privacy issue and also it's not Meta (do love my Meta or smart glasses as a whole will ditch Metas for Apple quickly as both pair of Metas broke & there's no store for support).
I also am looking forward to Apple smart glasses. I use Meta glasses because thre useful since I'm totally blind. I'd much rather have on device recognission though if possible. I also trust Apple more then Meta. At least I'm technically enclined enough to realize I shouldn't wear them in the bathroom or bedroom. At least when humans look at my AI prompts there maily seeing food boxes or computer bios screens.
Same for me! Both pairs of Metas are now inoperative because I can't get them back to factory reset. Once you pull that little blue tab out of them when they're new, it's GAME OVER.
Well do want to add more detail. First pair bought in Oct 2023 and used them up until March 2025 where a software update hosed them. Then in April 2025 bought a new pair that lasted til the end of June 2025 cause of water splashes. So i two pairs of dumb sunglasses until March 2026 when my pair with the water damage came back alive.
Overall tho Meta doesn't make durable smart glasses and they only have two flagships store for support while Apple has tons of stores for tech support.
And they do it with products on relatively small volume. A lot of these used to happen on Apple Watch. And at one point I thought Apple Watch would be the place to do a lot of testing work.
Until Apple Watch became so popular it is now back to volume manufacturing and operation efficiency mode.
Liquid Metal never got anywhere because Apple couldn't figure out how to mass manufacture it at a cost they were willing to pay.
Apple Vision Pro's hand tracking was first alluded to in a section of their first machine learning research publication. It was about using GANs to add realistic sensor noise to synthetic datasets. The bulk of the article is about eye tracking.
'liquid metal' sounds cool. It's probably a metallic glass. I super dislike that it seemingly will be synonymous with the brand name by Apple even though that stuff has been around for decades.
Not that there are particularly many places where this is used - mostly because it really is just very expensive. In the awesome position that Apple is in, economic feasibility is so much easier to achieve, with like tens of millions of guaranteed parts to be preduced.
Are you sure? Liquid metal was the name of a bulk metallic glass. There were usb flash drives using it as a case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal. Wikipedia lists apple licensing this technology.
Metal injection molding is also a thing but I haven't heard it called liquid metal. Usually its MIM.
Honestly, I didn't know that "amorphous metal alloy" is also called metallic glass. I computed it to something else entirely. So you're right on that front.
MIM is something else, that's right, but properties of Liquid Glass allows it to be injection molded AFAIK.
MIM process is completely different from casting Liquid Metal. MIM generally starts as a powder and heated and molded, Liquid Metal can be just "melted and molded".
I have a stainless steel razor built with MIM. Has no resemblence to SanDisk Titanium's feel (which I also have).
I did my Ph.D. by developing BEM evaluators for working on metals, but glasses (as in class of materials) were not in my domain, so I'm thick as a brick on that part of the materials science.
Edit: BEM methods is as fun as USB buses and PSU units.
You can buy shares in the company that makes and holds the patents on liquid metal they are currently a penny stock and have been for several years and at one time the shares sold for $23 a share at its highest point many years ago..
I don’t expect anything out of it, but I own 12,000 shares just for fun.
I’ve always been a “remap capslock to escape” kind of guy (vim), so I didn’t mind much. Access to the brightness (screen and keyboard) and volume slider was neat but superfluous with the OG fn keys. Context-driven controls were probably the best thing about the touch bar, and I don’t think it got enough love to make that stick.
Adding to the list of grievances, the functionality and the options it presented differed from app to app. I understand that the function keys also change their function app to app, but the visual noise the Touch Bar (wow - the word even gets autocorrected to have the right capitalization!) added as you switched between apps was too distracting.
1) First generation made ESC button a touch button. Aside from ergonomics (or lack of them), at least for me, on a psychological level "abort" button needs to be something you can smash. Also, macOS already had the worst input handling under load, making it virtual button made it worse.
2) While "happy path" on macOS pretty much never requires you to use Fkeys, but my workflow does. Blindly using touch buttons is harder than real buttons.
3) I'm not huge media keys users, but I bet #2 applies here as well.
I liked the touchbar in every other sense. If it was just an addition to an existing keyboard, people wouldn't have hate it[];
[]: At that time it was hard to not be frustrated using mac (butterfly keyboard etc), so touchbar might have gotten more hate than it deserved because of overall frustration.
Also, the Touch Bar seemed to be abandoned as soon as it launched. It only ever launched on the Pro line. There were never any feature updates. They never made it flexible enough for people to customize it.
> They never made it flexible enough for people to customize it.
I feel like it was fairly customizable - the Mac system settings let you do a lot of drag and drop of controls, and
I recall iTerm having a similar interface for customizing the bar in its own settings.
I do think it should’ve been given a lot more love, but that’s Apple for ya I guess
I think a bigger issue was that so few applications used it in cool, interesting ways. It has the same appeal as the oled button boxes some people have, except it’s right there on the deck… but nobody did anything with it.
I sure did prefer the media controls on it, though. I still have a 16” here and am reminded of what could have been.
I actually think it would have done well if it was just like those button boxes / Stream Deck / etc. Like a row of transparent function keys with screens, but then that would have been a flexibility tradeoff.
It was extremely flexible in customization options, and there were SDKs to make it do additional cool stuff in apps, but nobody really cared for the most part.
I honestly think it was mostly a "we have a custom secure coprocessor now, what can we do with it?" sort of thing, which also worked out for Touch ID and disk encryption.
I still have a personal Touch Bar MBP, and I find it annoying.
My problem is that I lightly rest my hands on the keyboard (including the f keys), and this habit is harmless on most Macs, but inadvertently activates the Touch Bar functions.
I actually like the idea a lot, and would probably love it if it required a little more pressure to activate.
The touch bar and the butterfly keyboard were the only Apple features in recent memory I ever hated. I hated them because they introduced them for (what felt like to me) anti-consumer reasons. It felt pretentious and useless and prone to breaking and created problems instead of improving product use.
One more on top of others. Many people felt it was a solution in search of a problem. As in, there was no problem i had that it solved. And it was forced on us, in place of something useful. From the start i read that as: This wont be here in a couple years. Which then made it annoying to deal with in the meantime (the hate).
Things that stick around, are generally value adding across a large or complete subset of their users. Touch bar was always niche, and thus always doomed. I think a good counter comparison is Apple VR headsets. For me, i have no use and little interest. But i can see them as a hedge at the very least, or as an enthusiast entrant into an emerging market, where future products in that segment may become interesting. And on top, it doesnt impact me - i can ignore their existence until it becomes useful.
If touch bar were launched like VR, i suspect it would have gotten similar level of dismisals, but less hate.
I am fortunate enough to have both a butterfly keyboard MBP and a touch bar MBP. Obviously the butterfly keyboard has the known issues, but the touch bar MBP also has the very common issues with that hardware.
I can replace the butterfly keycaps myself. It's something like $10 from aliexpress for a full set of keycaps and clips and a minute's work to pop the busted one and replace it. Annoying, but not fatal.
The touch bar needs a full battery, keyboard, track pad, and upper case replacement to fix. I just have to live that that thing flickering brightly at me every day, or spend AU$500+ to get it fixed.
There's nothing agentic about these features. Live captions have existed on other platforms for more than 6 years now, before "agentic" had even been coined.
I bought one of these in 2004 and it really was a slice of the future. The screen was way bigger and higher res than anything I had owned prior, and the ability to jailbreak and run emulators gave it a lot more use than just UMD games.
I still have my original PSP 1000 which worked well until my daughter dropped it a couple weeks ago...
IIRC, the PSP was the first XMB-style OS Sony had, predating the PS3. I remember even the loading/downloading screens looking so futuristic on the PSP.
re: US Politics, I view Apple's gift of the gold & glass trophy to Trump more as a humiliation ritual Cook had to endure so that they can continue to uphold their principles, but with a less adversarial government.
Sure it's gross but it does not necessarily signal an abandonment of values from Apple.
Disagree. Trump is 100% willing and apparently able to crush American businesses unless they kneel. If watching a movie and giving him a gold toilet seat bought off that extortionist it was probably the cheapest any tech firm got off. Cook made the right call not to let Apple get destroyed by our whimsical overlord.
Yet he keeps going to his parties and schmoozing with his cronies. I don't recall Pichai or Nadella giving Trump a gold trinket to save their businesses.
I reject pretty much every point of this article, and I worry that it will lead readers down two dark roads: apathy and secrecy
do you really think bigco is going to steal your vibecoded app just because you used their API? ridiculous. They could already do this before AI with their army of devs.
should you hide all of your ideas until they're perfect and ready for millions of users? we all know this goes against a core tenet of startups which is still true today: launch early and often.
promptfoo/openclaw weren't cloned by openai when they got poplular, they were bought for real $$$
also, regarding this:
> 2009, I bought a refurbished ThinkPad, installed Xubuntu, and started coding.
you can still do this, even with that same 2009 thinkpad. the hard work is in getting your app out there in front of people, coding is just a small piece of a successful business
totally valid to call out apple for issues, but for most folks already accustomed to apple's walled garden, the grass is not greener on the other side
For instance, I've had a ton of issues with Airpods Max so I moved over to the Sony WH-1000XM6, and they do a much worse job sharing connections between multiple devices to the point where I have to reset them constantly to get sound to reliably play from both my phone & computer.
Same for moving to macOS to linux - the issues on add up to the point where the papercuts from macOS are still worth it.
light blonde pancakes taste the best IMO, but char being carcinogenic seems compelling enough on its own to warrant turning down the heat
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