Mark Gurman, who’s normally dead on the money when it comes to Apple, thinks they’re unlikely to keep up annual releases (though I should note the linked article suggests the new iPhone model schedule is unlikely to change for now).

Gandalf is the name of a dwarf in the Norse Poetic Edda (from which Tolkien borrowed a bunch of names, mostly dwarves). He supposed – probably accurately – that it meant “wand-elf”, but he originally gave the name to Thorin.

√ is not ✓ 😠

There’s a definite industry problem, but that doesn’t excuse Spotify.

Apple Music pays artists 50-100% more than Spotify do per play, and Tidal pay triple to quadruple. Even Amazon pay artists more than Spotify; only YouTube is worse.

Good list! We differ on some of them…

I take issue with the settings menu still relying on the old menus while having shuffled things around so I’m forced to look for settings

This is still an issue, but I feel it’s diminishing as they (annoyingly slowly) do move all of the functionality to the new app. It was much worse in Windows 10, I think.

I can say that the start menu is horrendously slow, it can take up to 5 seconds for it to load.

“Works on my machine” is a profoundly unhelpful answer for me to give, but I’m fortunate enough not to have experienced this. If you’re looking for a workaround and don’t mind a further Microsoft app, the launcher in Powertoys is pretty solid.

Sometimes keystrokes disappear in the start menu only to magically appear some time later.

God, I hate the search from the start menu - but I would say that it’s been profoundly broken since Windows 8 and is marginally better in Windows 11.

They made the right click menu worse and only changeable in regedit.

100% agreed. I do think Windows 10 and earlier had a growing issue with the context menus getting unwieldy (Visual Studio is a great demo of how this can get really out of hand) but the solution Windows 11 have brought is annoying more than useful. I suspect at one point I made the registry change and forgot about it, because I’m back to a big Win10-style list.

They made RDP credentials only saveable using CMD.

Agreed again. That said, you’re a masochist if you’re not using an RDP manager like mRemoteNG! I wish Microsoft had a decent RDP app that wasn’t tied into Azure.

They removed vertical taskbars.

I found vertical taskbars incompatible with hotdesking on desks with different monitor configurations, but I do agree this one sucks.

how to unfuck up windows 11 so it works how you expect it to.

I think “how you expect it to” goes to the core of my point - needing to adapt to change isn’t inherently bad. But I’m not pretending Windows 11 is a wholesale improvement, and I do concede many of your arguments.

Agree with all of those points, I just don’t love the reductive notion that every change is a bad change and nothing’s been for the better. In several ways it’s a better OS - but as you say, they are also getting more contemptuous of the end user with things like privacy, anticompetitivity, and ads.

At the risk of being unpopular, I think a lot of what people perceive as unintuitive or worse in terms of settings and OS features is just change. I’m on Enterprise Windows 11 at work and I wouldn’t willingly go back to Windows 10.

I think because it’s Enterprise I’m dodging a lot of the worst of it - ads, telemetry, surprise updates, etc - but the unified settings are better once you learn them, tabbed File Explorer is better, dark mode switching is way better - there’s plenty to like.

I want to see the rise of the Linux desktop as much as anyone, but implying Windows 11 is all bad isn’t that fair an assessment.

The EFF have a bit more general information about location data brokers. Well worth a read.

Ideally read in a terrible mock-Texan accent:

Schmidt promises that these AI companies will make energy generation systems at least 15% more efficient or maybe even better, telling the audience that “that’s a lot of money for a utility.”

He’s not even trying to be subtle about it.

that is a good analysis

The whole article is just a description of these tweets: https://nitter.privacydev.net/Amina_io/status/1840759345354809414

As Calvin awoke one morning from uneasy dreams…

VS Code’s diff tools are killer. Comparison is smarter than most, and you can edit either file as you go.

They’re both men, but neither of them are Men.

*IR light, in the interest of avoiding confusion.

Quis lautus ipsos lavat?

Crassus’ lost legion is just conjecture, there’s no convincing evidence. It’s a fun thought, though.

I’ve never seen a convincing source for this factoid. As best I can tell, “killer whale” was never “whale killer” in recorded written text.

Obligatory Big Train link: “the actual train wouldn’t be quite as fast as that.”