They had to pull their version of string interpolation in 2024 because they couldn’t make it work.
C# has had string interpolation since 2015.
2015.
And it’s gotten a hell of a lot slicker and easier to use in the meantime.
Don’t get me wrong, you WANT Java if your app needs to remain up and running for years on end with tens of thousands of actions a second. There is a damn good reason, for example, why Azureus/BiglyBT is written in Java, after all… it remains up and running with absolutely crushing loads long after other torrent clients go titsup.
But “modern”??
Sorry, that is all sorts of hilariously wrong. From where I stand, “modern” Java feels a lot like C#… circa 2012.
Ecosystem integration is the shining difference between Apple and others, as it is radically better than any other available implementation.
I would argue that ecosystem integration is the only primary consideration that you need to use at the top/first-culling-step of the flowchart to either include or discount Apple products in any purchasing decision. Anything else is secondary, and has workarounds.
> UI has regressed
Honestly, I love the UI of MacOS 9.2.2 the most. But I don’t have a Time Machine or Elon Musk levels of wealth to chart a different course.
And sure, some UI decisions of late have been questionable. That is always the case with non-niche products that don’t have highly focused and largely conforming users. Apple moved out of that category back in the early 2000s, and it is forced to make the same UI tradeoffs that Microsoft makes.
I actually don’t mind the modern UI, and aside from a few warts I think they’re going in a very user-friendly direction even if power users feel slighted and abandoned.
I am perfectly fine with many of the technological restrictions on this device, and think it represents a great balance.
However, I think that two will bring sour tastes to people’s metaphorical mouths much more than expected: the RAM and drive space.
There should have been a 16Gb option. Nosebleed the price if you have to, or include a SODIMM slot if needed, but the option should have been there to expand the memory to 16Gb either on spec or at a later date. Because each version of MacOS gets weightier and more demanding of hardware - Windows isn’t the only resource hog out there - and at 8Gb the pain will begin to be felt long before the 7-year usability cycle comes to an end.
There should have been a 1Tb option. Not because people use that much drive space - many don’t - but because 1Tb is the level which provides enough cells in parallel to properly saturate the PCIe bus, ensuring maximum performance. Not always at that 1Tb level, and not on every machine. But typically 1Tb or above, rather than below. Even if it required a hairdryer to unstick the original due to the constrained space not permitting a lock-down screw, the drive should have been either replaceable or with the size as (again) a nosebleed-price option at provisioning.
Because while I see every other compromise as acceptable, it is those two which make me hesitate on getting this as a long-term secondary/casual system.
Other than that, this is a laptop which can only goose Apple’s further adoption among students and casual users.
16GB is going to leap you into the air category. They intentionally make this an entry premium laptop. The retina itself and MacOSX’s mandate of font conformity make this premium over other budget laptop in that price range.
> Anyone who knows what any of that means, or even to looks at those specs, are not in the market for this and should know better.
Why? I am a power user, and if I didn’t already have a copious stable of second-hand machines (a side effect of also being in the hardware end of IT), I would gladly pick one of these machines up as a “vacation/personal device”.
I mean, as a power user I am going to need high specs… for my work.
In my off time and on my vacation time, all I need is something that can connect to the Internet, let me do basic eMail and web surfing, and lets me connect remotely to my iron back in my office to keep a light touch on things.
And in that regard, this machine is perfect.
My issue with the device is in term of long-term ownership, where 8Gb RAM and 512Gb of storage isn’t going to get me all the way out to 7-8 years of usage in a comfortable manner. Even with light duties, imma gonna see the seams stretch uncomfortably so somewhere in the 4-6 year stage.
I mean, maybe I’m just a bit on the older side. And being on the spectrum, I am also brutally practical.
But reading this was a lot like having an alien psychology described to me. It’s got solid echoes of the Beanie Baby craze of the 90s, and confuses me deeply and to no end.
Password Generator: please add a fifth checkbox to include the entire printable UTF-8 character set, and a slider to tweak how much of the password should use those characters.
The slider is important, because the existing 4 only use a minuscule subset of UTF-8. Without the percentage slider, the password would be utterly dominated by the much larger address space, and any one random password would be unlikely to contain a number or English character.
You could go even further by having a stepwise intermediate: all possible Latin characters. Again with a percentage slider. But this alone would be much simpler to implement, and may be sufficient for most complexity situations where length is artificially constrained by the third party.
Quick question: while I love the offline aspect, how does this handle spelling in relation to context? Is that via a ruleset, or is there some intelligence that learns user speaking patterns and common subjects?
Good question! The short answer is, neither. There are no hardcoded rules, but the app also doesn't actively learn your personal speaking patterns over time.
All the context-awareness comes straight from the pre-trained Whisper model. Since it's a transformer network, it looks at the entire sentence context rather than translating word-by-word. For example, if you dictate a sentence about coding, it naturally knows to capitalize "Rust" and "Python" instead of writing about rusty metal and snakes.
I deliberately kept the model static. Trying to fine-tune it locally on the fly would mean I'd have to store your voice data (which kills the 100% privacy promise).
That being said, adding a custom dictionary feature, so you can feed it highly specific industry jargon right before you speak, is at the very top of my to-do list!
Let me know how it handles your vocabulary if you give the trial a spin.
Tim Poole… right-wing rage farmer. Misinformation and disinformation is his bread-and-butter. Going to need significant secondary sources before I believe anything he says.
Yes, Java is robust and bulletproof, but modern?
They had to pull their version of string interpolation in 2024 because they couldn’t make it work.
C# has had string interpolation since 2015.
2015.
And it’s gotten a hell of a lot slicker and easier to use in the meantime.
Don’t get me wrong, you WANT Java if your app needs to remain up and running for years on end with tens of thousands of actions a second. There is a damn good reason, for example, why Azureus/BiglyBT is written in Java, after all… it remains up and running with absolutely crushing loads long after other torrent clients go titsup.
But “modern”??
Sorry, that is all sorts of hilariously wrong. From where I stand, “modern” Java feels a lot like C#… circa 2012.
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