Linked List: January 10, 2025

Friday, 10 January 2025

Zuckerberg Disses Apple With Joe Rogan: ‘They Haven’t Invented Anything Great in a While’ 

Chance Miller listened so we don’t have to:

Zuckerberg also took issue with AirPods and the fact that Apple wouldn’t give Meta the same access to the iPhone for its Meta Ray-Ban glasses:

They build stuff like AirPods, which are cool, but they’ve just thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way.

There were a lot of other companies in the world that would be able to build like a very good earbud, but Apple has a specific protocol that they’ve built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it.

It’s just much more seamless because they’ve enabled that, but they don’t let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there.

If only there existed other phone platforms than the iPhone, we could see how cool these other earbuds would be. And Meta Ray-Bans could integrate with those phones in super cool ways that would make iPhone users realize what dopes they’ve been.

What’s really rich about Meta and Zuckerberg’s incessant complaining about being restricted by Apple’s rules for third party software on Apple’s platforms is that Meta doesn’t allow third parties any sort of access to their successful platforms. There are no third-party clients for Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or WhatsApp. It is very hard to get any information out of them let alone integrate with them bi-directionally.

Miller concludes:

Let us also not forget that Meta has never “invented anything great.” Oculus was an acquisition, WhatsApp was an acquisition, Instagram was an acquisition, and intermixed with those acquisitions are features copied and pasted from other platforms.

Yeah but other than that they invented a lot.

James Thomson on the Origins of the MacOS Dock 

James Thomson:

So, we are coming up on a little anniversary for me this weekend. On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo.

Towards the end of the presentation, he showed off the Dock. You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).

I would not accept this Dock placement blasphemy from anyone else, but from Thomson, well, OK. (The correct location is on the right. Left, we’ll let you argue for. But definitely not on the bottom.)

I didn’t design the dock — that was Bas Ording, a talented young UI designer that Steve had personally recruited. But it was my job to take his prototypes built in Macromind Director and turn them into working code, as part of the Finder team.

I had already written another dock — DragThing — before I worked for Apple, and that had helped me get a job there. I moved over from Scotland to Ireland in late 1996 with my future wife, with both of us joining the small software team there. It was primarily a manufacturing plant, but there was a little bit of software and hardware testing and engineering that went on around the edges.

In the middle of all that, when I was out in Cupertino, I was asked if I wanted to work on a secret project with the code name “Überbar”. I was shown some prototypes and basically told that six people had seen it, and if it leaked they would know it was me that had talked. I figured if anybody was finally going to kill off DragThing, it might as well be me.

I’ve heard most of this story over the years — from James — but never all in one narrative like this. There are a lot of 25-year-old stories about how Mac OS X came together that I hope the participants start sharing. Even Apple folks should be free to talk about quarter-century-old work — and both the work and the stories are so good.

Los Angeles Fires: The Damage in Maps, Video, and Images 

Just heartbreaking, and a scale of destruction that’s hard to comprehend.