I actually recommended a cheap android tablet to another relative, after listening to his needs. Which was basically getting a substitute for the mobile dvd players used to pacify the kids in the back seat. Good enough for those.
But that particular quote came in the context of people who learned how much the simple iPad Air did cost, after we gifted it to my wife’s parents and who now do more “computer stuff” they ever did before. But apparently some people would rather carry twice the weight and have a far worse display and speed than to spend some bucks. Which they have. As long as they convince themselves that they “saved money”.
They didn’t make one. It was just the need to claim that they would’ve gotten a far better deal.
And I’ll give them credit that they do know where to safe money by purchasing wisely. Except when they are so out of their water that they don’t even know it.
Well there is that. I’m looking at it as someone who’s really not had any money to speak of for most of his life beyond family making sure the basics are covered… so I haven’t paid attention to apple. It’s too locked down, too costly, and too little had historically been written for it software wise. Why should i care?
18 years later, the book has not aged well. It reminds me a lot of the Linux advocates at work, who are smart but end up causing more problems with small but deadly oops moments. Nerdier than thou nerds.
Sorry, I’m just grumpy because I had to clean up another code mess left behind by the Linux guy on the dev team who left in a huff.
Oh yes , please educate me about something I’ve used on the server side for well over 10 years, cursing quite a few times when a major linux update and the following image-magick/php packages had to be updated. Because the frigging interface and even the behaviour would change.
Two months ago I had my obligatory appraisal interview with my manager. What part of your work projects(*) are you proudest about, she asked. I said “Trimming the assets by 30% w/out losing quality”. But in retrospect I should have said “Showing that our customers to not use the ImageMagick effects and dropping the library from our app.”
Because those effects were so “good” that nearly none of our customers actually used them. Safe three, which our go-to SSE/openCL guy rewrote in a day each, making them faster.
*) We are actually encouraged to make our own suggestions apart from the roadmap often get to implement then.
A mere counter example. Lately, I’ve been relying on “automator”, the mac’s scripting GUI, to perform many of the same repetitive taks that bash and imagemagick could provide. As you say, CUDA and openCL are good at this sort of thing, and straight C-code wastes time.
Well, ImageMagick triggered me. I’m not even convinced it’s “straight C code” – you can waste a lot of cycles in straight C by writing badly and it’s hard to get it right. (Spend nearly a week net time to write a ZIP-file manipulation program, that at the end was nearly as fast using cat.
Anyway, a GUI makes things discoverable. That’s the great thing about it and it saves hours of work, which otherwise would mean reading man pages, which are often badly written. And trial-and-error on the GUI is often so much faster.
There are exceptions, of course. I do a lot of automation. Building audiobooks from a group of MP3, cleaning up the chapter names, using ffmpeg to extract the artwork from the first file and setting this as the cover artwork to be used by audiobing? Sure, I wrote a script for that. And lots more. I even track my purchases and todos by speaking them into my Apple Watch and have scripts extract the transcripts and act on them.
But there’s literally years of experience and usage behind this. And the time, as compared to doing it on the GUI, often pays only if IS a repeatable task.
