zerosleeps

It started in August 2004 when I bought my first Apple product - a green iPod mini. Boy was it somethin’ special. Things spiralled somewhat from there. I have since purchased - with my own money - two Mac minis, two iMacs, at least three MacBook Pros, an iPod nano, an iPod touch, a Thunderbolt Display, half-a-dozen different iPhones, several keyboards, mice, and trackpads, and to hammer home a point, I even bought the Apple Battery Charger. Yes, that was a thing.

I’ve also owned an iBook G4, a PowerBook G4, an iPad, and a couple of Apple TVs. Oh and I used a noisy Power Mac G5 for a while at work back in the mid-2000’s.

Plus software, dongles, AppleCare, iTunes purchases.

And I’ve converted friends and family.

Well, you get the picture.

But I am pissed at Apple right now, and I’m feeling a bit dumb for letting myself becoming such a locked-in fanboi. To nobody’s shock, it’s the current MacBook Pro keyboard that may well prove to be a tipping point for me. I’ve used two of the fourth generation models as my daily drivers now - a 13-inch 2016 model, and the current 2018 13-inch model. The 2016 is still being used daily by my partner and it’s just started developing keyboard issues. The 2018 model, which I use to earn my living, has already had it’s keyboard replaced once and the “E” key on the replacement has just started to act up.

Now getting worked up about a few dodgy keys over the space of 15 years might seem a bit dramatic, but Apple have been making keyboards for a really long time. And the thing is, the keyboard I’m typing this on right now is Apple’s second or third attempt at fixing this style of keyboard. There’s absolutely no way Apple engineers didn’t know this keyboard was junk when they launched it over two years ago, yet they’re still delivering it to their pro customers with fixed-not-fixed solutions.

As a self-employed software developer I can’t afford to be without my computer for a few days while Apple replace a dud keyboard with another dud keyboard (again), so the whole experience has got me wondering:

Could I switch to Windows…?

Ghacks:

Could this have been Google’s plan all along? Create a web browser and use it to combat the use of content blockers? Block some annoying ads, allow basic content blockers, and block any other form of content blocking to make sure that Google’s advertising business improves again?

Yeah, no shit.

This is a depressing read. There’s no point in adding my own comments, because the middle section of this article reflects my feelings much more eloquently than I can:

I root for Firefox’s success. I have been doing so since they made the first crack in Microsoft’s IE dominance and have been doing ever since. Not because I think they have the best browser, instead because of sentimental reasons: they are the only independent browser, guardians of an open, shared web. They have superior, human values compared to the rest. I want them to do well.

Increasingly I’m seeing sites, code experiments, all kinds of things not working well or not working at all in Firefox. And nobody cares. The behavior of seeing Firefox as an unimportant browser is slowly normalized. The question of whether Firefox is relevant is already answered: it isn’t. The only question is how irrelevant it will become.

The sad, sad kicker:

When choosing between convenience and principles, most people pick convenience.

Another unnecessarily confusing sign on one of Melbourne’s trams. The awkward placement of the comma makes this read like you don’t need to touch off in order to touch on. In my internal voice it sounds like “Hey remember! To touch on you don’t need to touch off.”

What it’s trying to say is that you must always touch on, but you don’t need to touch off. It could be rewritten in any number of ways to make that much clearer. Split up the two actions:

“Remember to touch on. You don’t need to touch off.”

Or swap it around:

“Remember, you don’t need to touch off, but you do need to touch on.”

Or something a bit more conversational:

“Remember to touch on, but you don’t need to touch off.”

Maybe it’s not just the comma - it’s the use of the word “remember” as well. What about this which forgoes friendliness for clarity:

“Always touch on. You don’t need to touch off.”

I dunno. I still maintain that all of this would go away if myki was fixed so that the instruction simply becomes “Always touch on. Always touch off”. Maybe we’ll get an overhaul when the new Metro Tunnel stations are added…?