Is it not rather the opposite? His striving for unconventional "taste" (as opposed to boring convention) was probably a factor in him seeking "alternative" medicine.
in some sense i think it shows having taste. sometimes taste can be dangerous. you can only have a taste for say rock climbing equipment, by rock climbing, which exposes you to danger.
Presumably hot reload and IDE integrations that actually work. Xcode is really crappy compared to other IDEs, so platforms that can avoid it for most of your work tend to be an advantage. Xcode 26 generally broke anything that relies on indexing, like autocomplete, edit in scope, or refactoring, among others.
> React Native is popular because there’s a thousand times more React devs than native devs.
Exactly this. And they come cheaper. JS dominance in development stems from business logic, not from quality of development environment or tools, or developers preference.
Extremely relative. I escaped part of the US where any car that started reliably was luxury. New, or brand selection, was absolutely out of the question.
62k Euros gets a lifetime of used vehicles. I'll say the quiet thing: buying a new car and taking the depreciation is a form of luxury. More about status than getting to the destination.
Dan has a point. I could pay for half of a house right now, committing seems silly until things cool down. Two articles away from being relocated again, despite working remotely.
Tesla is not a luxury brand, but they ask for premium prices, compared to the value (worst in ADAC statistics on repairs)
“ In 1974, a new car cost an average of 5320 euros. The average income was 13,928 euros per year, so a buyer had to work for an average of 4.6 months for a new car. 20 years later, it was already 7.4 months per new car. Until 2019, this number remained stable, but then it skyrocketed. Today, a buyer has to spend all his income from 9.6 months of employment to buy a new car. For more expensive e-cars, it is even 11.4 months. The reason is stagnant incomes, but also high profit margins of the manufacturers.” https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/kosten-auto...
From my personal perspective, as an employed software engineer, all cars over 50k are luxury.
The value derived and average usage of a car has increased too...
Also the financing around cars have made it smoother to buy one.
Also Electric can demand a premium because they save on gas costs.
So credit card benefits suck, because the consumers can't be exploited to create a large profit surplus that can partially be used to benefit a small subset of consumers.
There are no benefits for any of the credit cards I could get since roughly Corona - I was using them before but all cards which had positive benefits were removed/discontinued since.
Hence I'm back using a debit, because it works the same (no benefits either way) and doesn't come with a monthly bill.
I don't know that I'd call not paying an extra 5% just to receive 1% back "sucking". It seems like a win-win to me. If you need something, pay for it (with that extra 4% saving) instead of jumping through a million hoops to pretend it's free.
> That’s because credit card benefits suck in Europe and there’s no point to using them.
Theres still a very good reason to use them - buyer protection.
I use a Virgin Atlantic reward card and have it set to pay off automatically, never running up debt. It both protects me as a buyer, and has the benefit of taking ~£500 off annual family holidays, and gives me a free companion seat in the process, effectively halving the price for one of the passengers.
If you purchase an item on credit, it's the bank that makes the purchase. You then pay them back, 30 or 60 (or more) days later.
If there's a problem with the item, you can "return" it to the bank — after all, they own it! So in practise you can ask the shop for a refund, or you can ask the bank.
It is a stronger protection than a debit card chargeback.
As an example, I bought flight tickets from an obscure budget airline on a credit card. Months later, beyond the usual debit chargeback time limit, the airline went bankrupt — but my bank purchased that service, and isn't going to provide it! They refund immediately.
>has the benefit of taking ~£500 off annual family holidays, and gives me a free companion seat in the process, effectively halving the price for one of the passengers.
You know you're paying higher sticker prices to finance that, right?
If I am then so is every other traveler with every single airline in the world.
Go on Virgin Atlantics site, search for any flight, you can then apply points to that, or redeem a companion voucher. That doesn't bump the price up prior to redemption.
I dont "pay" for the points I get, as I'm not spending any extra day to day. The credit card is free.
What shop? What on earth are you on about? Every single business in the entirety of the UK charges 3% more to cover virgin giving away cheaper flights? Use your words as this sounds nuts. Credit card rewards aren't exclusive to the UK so I can't work out what on earth you are talking about. If you are suggesting the UK as a whole pays 3% more on every single CC transaction then your argument becomes even more odd as you'd be contradicting your original point.
I've had very good luck with it the past 10 years. A few petrol stations in deep rural Spain didn't accept it, but that's all I can remember recently :-) They also have fantastic customer service
This is more than just about revenue. There is massive engineering cost and complexity involved to support the EU’s demands. Interoperability is not easy to build. It slows down worldwide development pace too.
I’m not convinced that a rule that essentially says ”some API:s you have for your own devices should be made public” is a massively complex engineering project.
Coding and documenting different API:s has been a major part of my day job since about 15 years. The only difference of note for those is the amount of available documentation.
The entire premise of Apple is building highly tuned private APIs. It’s what makes things like Apple Silicon battery performance and power to watt ratio possible. This kind of super fine tuning is practically impossible over a public API boundary, or at least much more difficult task. Take Live Translation for example. It has very tight latency and performance requirements which would be hard to make work over a public API where you can’t control the other device. Many types of audio applications are literally impossible to build on non-Apple devices due to the latency requirements. There is an entire audio ecosystem that cannot exist on Android due to the realtime performance requirements.
The ease of implementation is not part of the question. Apple is just not allowed to hide these API:s (eg. Low latency audio and bluetooth pairing) and then block and punish any competitor who tries to use them.
There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault. Just like how consumers blamed Microsoft for BSODs even though it wasn’t their fault.
Edit: the evidence for my claim - just look at how realtime audio apps with tight latency requirements can’t work on Android
> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have.
You have no evidence for any of these two claims. From my professional experience it is 100% possible. Making a API public seldom, if ever, requires changes to called code behaviour. Not punishing competitors who tried to use your API is also not requiring any code changes, it is a policy decision.
Evidence: Open source devs and Google and Microsoft have been trying to build MacBook Pro laptop performance for decades and failed. The entire performance advantage of Apple products is due to their tightly controlled integration of the hardware and
software stack.
Apple consumers have come to expect this level of quality from Apple products. It is unreasonable for the EU to demand interoperability with other products when the very thing that makes Apple products work well depends on tight integrations that are not interoperable.
In order to build a high performance product you have to control all of the API surfaces. Apple devices battery life would suffer if any shoddily written third party device could operate with crappy drivers for it.
Again, that has nothing to do with why Apple considers it okay to punish other companies who wants to use those API:s. Apple is under zero obligation to make the API:s easy to implement, it’s just that they cannot forbid anyone from using them, no matter how complex you imagine them to be. No matter if only engineers at Apple has the mental acuity to understand them, no matter if Apple by laws of nature is the only company in the galaxy that could design such silicon to be able to use the API effectively, and so on… Apple is under no obligation to change the behaviour of their API:s to accommodate competing products, they are just not allowed to hide them from and punish competitors.
I, as an engineer, absolutely support keeping private APIs private in order to preserve the performance of products. This is a good policy decision and a good engineering decision. Allowing others to build products on top of private APIs creates false user expectations. The user doesn't know the difference between a public or private API, they just expect their devices to work properly. If you allow a private API to be abused, then third parties may create crappy products (such as fake AirPods) which will ruin the battery life and security of Apple devices. The user doesn't know who to blame, Apple or the third party. It is absolutely within Apple's rights to protect their private APIs from misuse in order to preserve security and performance of their products for all users. The user is free to choose a different brand if they want interoperability. I, as an Apple user, want security and performance, not interoperability. If I wanted interoperability I would choose Android. The EU has no right to force Apple to become crappier like Android.
It’s not about ease of implementation. It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs. Just look at how open source devs failed to fix battery issues with Framework Laptops or build realtime audio over Android. You can’t get Apple quality performance over a public api.
Then effing let them try? Apple, if you are correct will provide 100% of the best products every time. If it is so impossible, why have a corporate policy to punish competitors who try? They will obviously inevitably fail according to you.
It’s about the fact that opening your API limits your own engineering capabilities. A device with an open API has a different security and performance profile.
So Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.
If Apple provided public APIs for their products their own mobile devices battery life and security would be worse due to crappy third party integrations. Apple achieves high performance experiences precisely because that is a ENGINEERING REQUIREMENT to build high quality products.
At the end of the day - it’s not. Apple could have the greatest tech in the world, the least complexity, but if they don’t consistently show a graph that goes up in terms of revenue- they’ll find themselves irrelevant pretty quickly.
Where are they going to find 25% to cover this loss of revenue? Nowhere
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