WWDC24 - Key Points from the presentations

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Key Points:

  • ALL the Senior Managers seem to be in their 20s - does this mean the non-senior Managers are teenagers? And the workers come straight from Kindergarden? What happens when you pass 30 - is anyone over the age of 30 automatically promoted to the Board of Directors? Where do they go? They aren’t being eliminated after “SURPRISE” is being shouted at them … or are they?

  • I’m all for inclusion - but maybe include people that are easier to understand?

  • Predictive Code Completion is cool - I see a new challenge coming: “Write a complete app in under 100 keystrokes” …

  • Official support for more Linux versions (Debian & Fedora) and improved support for Windows (?) … does that mean they get serious about competing with Xojo or that they clean them more often? After all, that Donut HQ has a LOT of very large ones …

  • Award for the most stylish presenter goes to En Kelly … by a country mile! Even I want a jumper like her’s - despite Orange sooo not being my colour … and it would make me look like an overstuffed sausage anyway … but I still want one! And for goodness sake: Hire her for the next X-Men movie!

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Maximum hiring age for senior positions below top management is 35 here in Switzerland. The ‘young’ appearance is everything in marketing. To Apple’s defence we must say that they presented a few older people they keep in the stable :sunglasses:

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It seems the Swiss (like the Dutch) just don’t get irony … :wink:

… so a reply of „The modern wonders of Plastic Surgery“ would have destroyed that particular notion …

… but then Germans allegedly have no sense of humour … :thinking:

… so brownie points for „a few older people they keep in the stable“ :partying_face:

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Apple takes possession of the ‘young coder’ market. Which is reasonable since the ‘a platform for elderly coders’ niche is already taken by another business and its product. :sunglasses:

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It is like it is. Over the age of 50 you should have earned enough money to get retired or you may have a problem of loosing your job and that’s it. The super young senior dev’s won’t accept the meaning and experience of a 50 years old grandpa. Id this tendency a good way? I don’t think so. Is it the best way? Definitely not. Will they still do it? Yepp. And they have a nice condition: paying less money for senior devs.

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To any Scientist that is like winning the lottery: nice but happens to exceedingly few.

Reality for most is termed contracts with 6 weeks to at best 3 years (very rarely) duration, little pay, no career progression, no job security, 80+ hours per week with no overtime payments or time in lieu, need to raise money yourself to pay for your job & materials & technicians & going to conferences even without being a group leader, very hard to get another job after 40 (if at all as considered past their best) and required to do another job (taxi driver? teacher?) especially if they want a family (thankfully I didn’t) and need a steady income. Often working internationally which means you get a nice letter from the government at some point telling you to be eligible for a minimum pension at 68 you’ll have to work till 72 because the countries you worked in have no pension agreements with each other and therefore you don’t fulfil the requirements in any country (but then I don’t expect to make it to 68 anyway so that’s ok - phew! Dodged a bullet there …).

There is no “may” for Scientists - it is guaranteed for 99% of them. Have you never wondered why except for the group leader there are rarely any Scientists over 40 in a lab?

My sister never understood why I became a Scientist if it meant I didn’t make oodles of money. When my brother got Colon Cancer she got a slight inkling …

But “Over the age of 50 you should have earned enough money to get retired” comes across as rather arrogant.

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No, I was not mwondering about that. While it is like it is. People getting fired when becoming older. It is today so and it will be in future so. The only chance I have is: working in my company until I decide to retire. The biggest Problem inside is: the big mass of people. When working in my Lab I can do that until I am 80. But managers deciding: you can do that until 50. Why? No Idea, I believt there is no real reason. And the length of contracts is also a problem. There are people outside studied with me together and driving taxi. No job and no chance for a Job. Too many people studied physics. And to many people concentrated on nuceus. As we have no nuclear industries anymore and even no nuclear powerplant running we have no chance for people like us. And most of them realized that. The structure is made like this. And the Manager brigade decided that people with 50 are with a knowledge from 30 years before. Like they did not learned anything after.

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The reason that 40 is usually the age limit was an analysis that most Scientists made their main discoveries before that age - so in a manager’s mind that means that after 40 you will not produce much of value.

But that is the wrong conclusion.

What they do not consider is that most Scientists want to start a family at some point (usually after 40) and realise that you can’t raise and be there for the family if you continue in Science - lots of work to do, no job security, low pay - and therefore leave Science.

So if there are hardly any Scientists after 40 in the lab, then of course few people will have big discoveries after 40.

That’s a DOH! that managers do not get … :man_facepalming: … so they don’t want to employ those over 40.

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And managers (often far over 40) prefer troups below 40 (easier to manage)… and of course, forget THEY ARE > 40 !!! :slight_smile:

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Explains the absolute lack of care for the macOS, I bet none of 'em touched a Mac until they started working at Apple and with no feeling on how the Mac should be, they just throw it the iOS scraps.

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The most results I am producing now and not before ten years. Between 30 and 40 I had 6 projects succsessful in peer review. Between 40 and 50 over 20. That shows: there is more activity and also more experience. That managers believing like this shows also that they have no Idea how science works. In my case it is physics and biophysics. There is no chance for publishing it for example. Why? Because I can not publish scientific results of my own company to tell the rest of the world how my products will work and treat and on which facts my systems are based.

That is like this for many scientists. And that falsified the statistics. Why? While statistics like that counting only the published work of a scientist and not the internal works which are not published in so many cases. But is that “non working” or “no output”? No.

The fact is also: in university labs and company labs many scientists are leaving cause of low pay. Nobody wants to work like a donkey and getting a payment that is worth to work one day for it. This also falsified the statistics. Is that good for the science? No. While experience, patience, and knowledge are the most important facts.

But look on the people deciding that. A Manager which is over 40 did only not got fired said Warren Buffet once. And he is right. So the entire problem is that there is a tendency to hire young and dynamic people for that Jobs. And guess what they believe: oh, that scientist published until 32 and afterwards not anymore. He was resting on this works until today. Based on this behavior of management there came up a culture of hiring as young as possible. In germany we say: “they want people with two bachelors, two masters and a Doctor title not older than 25 but with ten years work experience in their industry”. And they form something like that. Okay, people are a bit older but not over the age of 40.

That kind of killing arguments is not helping us in case of building a good science in industry and also in universities. It kills. Universities having not enough money to pay the scientists in higher age so they can live from what they are doing. Industry does not want to have that kind of scientists cause they do not want to have people over 40 while statistics say…

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Apple still selling 8GB machines without a hint in their product description that all that famous AI stuff requires at least 16GB. Either this requirement will go down to 8GB in the near future or Apple went totally bonkers.

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Tim Cook doesn’t know what a computer is and doesn’t care.

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I think it was Jobs who observed that the next billion “computer” users would not be in North America, and would probably ONLY have a mobile device as their sole “computer”

He’s probably been shown to be largely correct

How many now have JUST their smartphone for everything ?
I suspect that number is a lot bigger than we might guess

This study doesnt address that head on unfortunately

EDIT And I cant find one that does delineate usage by that :frowning:

EDIT - there IS this one
https://www.zippia.com/advice/us-smartphone-industry-statistics/
In it they say

U.S. SMARTPHONE INDUSTRY STATISTICS BY MOBILE INTERNET
Approximately 3 in 20 people in the United States only use the internet on their mobile devices.
While more than half of all web traffic worldwide is mobile, about 47.07% of web traffic is mobile in the U.S

That number may be higher in other areas of the world where the likelihood someone owns both a computer & smartphone is lower

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Apple is not the best Hardware on this planet. Not the fastest. Not the smartest. But the most expensive. For 24 core 128GB Ram Mac machine I’ll have to pay around 7400 Euro. For 5k I can get a 24 Core Threadripper. Faster in multithreading. If I want I can setup another CPU, enhance memory, enhance SSD and running a really fast NVIDIA or AMD graphics card. Makes it easy to decide.

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If you do not like Apple products, just stay far away from them; don’t ever think about them. Concentrate on what you like.

Your choice.

Some people may have a different point of view.

And we can all live together.

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No problem but we have to support also Apple Devices. If I could I would never touch them. Simple answer, isn’t it? The customers deciding what they want to buy. They want Apple Hardware then I have to delicver apple Software and I need to have all the hardware they may use for testing. Sooo simple. And for the customers with Xojo projects I have also to work with Apple Hardware. Why? While Xojo was never getting Xojo Linux to run properly on Linux. It is not usable until today. So Apple Hardware is needed. Like I said: if I could I would never buy this crap.

Also IOS: I don’t like it cause it is really complex to support. And it has a shitty support from it’s vendor. And you need to use their Labs when building medical Device Software controlling a medical device. But you anyhow need to use for US market an underwriters laboratory and for EU market an accredited laboratory for EU. What apple does here: making cash for nothing. They did not even anylyzed the Hardware in one project, they did not even switched it on. But took 18k cash. So what? Nobody needs this on this planet. But when and if customers want Ipads we have to support it.

So if you think I can get out of it: no, there is no chance for this. I have to live with it and to pay. The entire difference is: with Windows and Linux there are simply less problems in releasing Software. Also with Android.

Getting rid of this vendor? No. Hoping that EU will bring them to their positions in case of sideloading? Na, is not helping while only for the EU market if even something will happened.As Soft- and Hardware vendor on the EU and US-market I can only say: sad what they do. But it is like it is and what it is. A money making machine. Not more. Not less.

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Maybe I’m super old here, but I didn’t get anything new from the presentation besides the AI stuff, and that stuff appears to be poorly thought out (at least, at this point, but it looks like it was a super early appease people type announcement).

The new photos app for example, is the same thing as the old photos app. All the new features we currently have. Nothing changed except presentation, and then only slightly. And it’s scary to see people praising it’s new features when I’m looking at them in my hand, but also remembering that iPhoto had these back in 2002(?) (and other companies like Picasa definitely had it too but the point isn’t about them).

Siri can do quite a few of the things they demo’d with the new AI, and some of the features existed in one way or another back to the iPhone 4, but things get removed and shuffled around. We lose features, then we get them sold back to us again. They sold us widgets how many times, and after destroying the company that did a good job with them?

Many of the new features we did in the early 90’s on 20mhz processors. The unified search, the AI assistant stuff, the handwriting recognition (okay, it got usable in '94, '95), etc. I know its kinda cynical to scream about there being nothing new ever, but this keynote felt like being fed emotional instructions to be excited about things I had 2 decades ago as if they were new, and features I already had today as if it was new. Wasn’t there a simpsons episode about this in the 90’s too?

The satellite features were cool, but just when things would have been interesting, they cut away to talk about… a damn calculator app on the iPad that has new amazing feature of … writing math out and having it solved and ugh … look, I’ve had Soulver for years, and I’ve used a handwriting math application (myscript math) since 2013. And I don’t want answers written in my handwriting – that muddies the presentation.

And on release, if its anything like their current state, there will be usability issues that would have never been allowed even pre-iOS 7.

Apple (and pretty much everyone at this point) should probably demonstrate they can release something solid before trying to expand their app coverage, etc.

The keynotes used to be better and actually informative. They’ve become something me and my high school kid MST3K together. But this time, after the first 30 min we made it a contest on who would give up watching it first – I let him win.

Also, admittedly nitpicky thing, but the skydive drove me nuts, because Google did that in 2010(?) and did it for real, and live.

Regarding hard to understand people… I did just fine. They seem to be polishing their speaking presentation, and the hardest part to hear was the skydive but … subtitles are something they still do well.

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Apple is rushing it’s AI technology. The rumor goes they had no interest until someone demo’d Windows Co-Pilot to one of the VPs, who then phreaked out and started waving his arms around.

Remember Apple’s customers have become less important under Cook’s regime, which is illustrated by the fact that they spend more on stock buybacks than they do on products, this year they announced 110 Billion dollars of buybacks. Apple’s target audience is the shareholders.

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Have we reached “Gil Amelio would be better” status yet?