Google is in a panic about ChatGPT as a threat to its business. But were they ever really good enough to compete?

A few years ago (with COVID-related time-dilation, 5 years is now ‘a few’) I wrote a blog post about the then-imminent iMac Pro comparing it to the first crossover. Back then, I wrote:

The iMac Pro […] is the AMC Eagle. It’s the first Mac to be car-first, run by the A-series processor which then boots the legacy Intel hardware. For now, it will (like the Eagle) only provide a few benefits to security. Eventually, this will become the way all mainstream computers are built…

It was the first mainstream computer to use a mobile chip in a primary role — taking the A10 processor out of the iPhone 7. Most computers at the time were descended from the proverbial ‘truck’ — even the lightest laptops were using processors for heavy-duty computing evolved to work in a smaller computer. That iMac in 2017 heralded an era when computers would be based primarily on chips originally designed for phones and then scaled up to power laptops and desktops.

Thanks to Tom Insam for the inspiration

This takes all the photos out of your iCloud Photo Library and syncs them to your Synology. You end up with exactly the same photos on your synology volume as you do in iCloud. It’s important to note that this is a sync — if you delete a photo from iCloud, it’ll also delete from your Synology. This is done by watching the ‘deleted’ folder in iCloud, so if a photo goes missing without appearing in your deleted folder it will remain.

Updated August 11, 2023: I’ve modified this guide to use a virtual environment instead of installing as root. It should run much more reliably and be less likely to break with DSM updates now. You also no longer need sudo.

A few weeks ago, Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo found a software update that contained the code for Apple’s upcoming iMac Pro. Confirming some earlier rumors, it appears that the iMac will have both an Intel processor, as previously announced, and an A10 — the Apple-designed processor powering the iPhone 7. Inevitably, someone will soon bring up the famous quote from Steve Jobs about how traditional desktop computing is a truck, and iOS devices are the cars that everyone will use from now on. In this case, it seems even more appropriate than most.

Yesterday, Xiaomi announced the Mi Mix. MKBHD has, as usual, an excellent hands-on summary of the news:

Xiaomi Mi Mix hands-on - the bezel-less display in 2016! Sharp Aquos Crystal: https://youtu.be/opVgMDtBecA Video Gear I use: http://kit.com/MKBHD/video-gear#recommendation17959 Intro Track: Ongoing Thing by 20syl, Oddisee ~ http://twitter.com/MKBHD http://snapchat.com/add/MKBHD http://google.com/+MarquesBrownlee http://instagram.com/MKBHD http://facebook.com/MKBHD

A brief bit of background on Xiaomi, if you haven't heard of them, is in order. It's a relatively young Chinese electronics manufacturer, which has risen rapidly in prominence because they sell their phones at essentially zero margin (this will be important later). They also control pricing by only building phones when there is demand, meaning there is rarely enough supply of their devices — many models are often sold out for months at a time (ditto). They've even poached some of Google's most senior Android product folks in order to build Android-based devices with a level of engineering & attention to detail not unlike Apple's. With a strong team, lots of venture capital backing, and more than a little bit of grit, they've become the dominant manufacturer in their home market, and are rapidly expanding into developing markets around the globe. It's not exactly surprising that they're ready to show off their engineering chops a bit, with a splashy, envelope-pushing device.

Goddamnit, @MLB pic.twitter.com/E7sX3Tmok2

— Sam Gross (@SamTheGeek) October 21, 2016

Last night I was frustrated. Not by the Cubs, who are making a historic playoff run — and who I'm hoping will win their first title since the fall of the Ottoman Empire — but by my inability to watch it. I tried three different, entirely legal, ways to watch the Cubs-Dodgers game and was stymied each time. You'd reasonably assume that postseason baseball is widely viewed enough that it'd be available over-the-air in the largest media market, but no dice. Due to a complicated and ridiculous TV deal, Fox owns these games, but chooses to air them on their new sports channel, Fox Sports 1 — thus forcing cable providers to include it in basic cable packages. As a card-carrying millennial, I don't have cable, preferring the extra $64.95 per month to spend on 🎮 and 🍺. It turns out that the other two ways I have of watching baseball also were blocked. Thanks to Jon Legere's insanity and an old T-Mobile iPad, I have a subscription to MLB.tv except — surprise! — that's blacked out until the World Series. And then we come to the message above. What Fox is saying (via TiVo and Verizon FiOS) is that even though I've paid for this channel, and want to watch it live, with commercials, I'm not allowed to because... something.

Each September, Apple releases a new version of iOS to a chorus of cheers from the average user, and a series of frustrated blog posts by the more technically-inclined. Every crash, sync failure, or edge case is held aloft as evidence of Apple's slow decline into irrelevancy. Jokes reference Marco Arment's (since-retracted) post on the increase in weird bugs in Apple's software. Screenshots abound of weird behavior. Sarcastic tweets are retweeted, quote tweeted, debated, and debunked. Flame wars spread across the internet, as people either argue that Apple and its products are in a decline akin to the Roman Empire after the sack of Rome or vehemently deny there's a problem like Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

And nobody noticed.

In OS X Lion, Apple introduced Gatekeeper, which prevented unsigned code from running on a Mac without explicit user approval. During the period between announcement and release, the typical barrage of thought-pieces and angry Tweets were published — most tended towards a cautious optimism that Apple had left users and developers enough headroom. Users could bypass all of the protections with a single click, while Developers could still choose to distribute software, signed or not, through whatever channel they chose.