But this isn't sacrificing your experience, you're free to keep using your Apple AirPods with the quality and reliability you'd expect from Apple. This just means other brands can create products with similar features to AirPods, and if they're not as good or reliable, well that's why you're paying Apple for theirs.

It removes incentives to differentiate a platform because the EU will just come in and make every company exactly the same by forcing others to allow other companies access to their R&D budgets. Why bother? It’s easier to just avoid the EU market

The best code is no code. Every line of extra code added, and every extra platform supported is potential for more bugs, which has the potential to affect my user experience.

I see their point.

If Apple knew they would need to expand this feature past their gear, possible they’d never have implemented.

We may never know what stays unimplemented due to this.

(This is a neutral take - note I do not have a personal opinion formed in this “debate”.)

> If Apple knew they would need to expand this feature past their gear, possible they’d never have implemented.

And this is EXACTLY why they need to open up more core access to their devices. So someone else can innovate.

Why they need to be forced to, you mean?

I'm not seeing an incentive structure for them to change being the only source of good workflows for their users - it's their whole thing "It just works" - regardless of if it's true in practice or not.

If you want the "it just works" experience, you can still buy the Apple products though, that's not changing. You just also have the option to not do so.

which other company spends as much investing in UX? there is not a single other company on the planet with as polished of a user experience as apple, so who would develop a better workflow?

Indeed. They have shown (and keep showing via blatant malicious compliance) that they can’t be trusted to play fairly.

Is there anything that makes you believe they'll sacrifice quality to have universal support?

They did their initial AirPod implementation in a pretty insecure manner because it was securely locked to their hardware and they could trust themselves to not be malicious. If they have to build a feature, plus all the security around it, plus documentation, etc… it makes it much harder to bring to market. They may opt to skip it in favor of something else.

Spite? It's standard practice for corporations to take the ball home when they are forced to play fair.

They won’t, but Apple previously lied similarly against PWAs.

the long term innovation outlooks are still better, so you benefit long term as well.

It’s just less obvious / measurable that immediate benefits.

And also, short term, isn’t it that other EarPods are getting better, rather than AirPods getting worse?

Medium term, I don’t think that Apple will stop innovating on AirPods just because of the EU market and this one feature not being exclusive to AirPods anymore. But it’s a possibility, I agree.

You built a solid app!

> Users simply do not want to type out “hey, can you increase the font size for me” when they could simply hit “ctrl-plus” or click a single button3.

I would def challenge this. “Turn off private relay”, “send this photo to X”, “Add a pit stop at a coffee shop along the way” are all voice commands I would love to use

Old Apple Newton had a feature, I don't remember how they called it, but on any screen you could write "please", and then describe what to do, e. g. using one of their examples: "please fax this to Bob". And it worked. Internally it was a rather simple keyword match plus access to data, such as the system address book. New applications could register their own names for actions and relevant dictionaries.

Yes, this! esp the last one. Finding coffee shop / restaurant options ALONG THE WAY seems like it should've been solved years ago. Scenario: while driving, "want to eat in about an hour, must have vegetarian options, don't add more than 10m extra drive time" and get a shortlist to pick from.

Yeah that one is surprisingly difficult even with a Human Intelligence in the passenger seat.

Yes, not using it especially during a job search is foolish. The information asymmetry is against you, fight the machine!

Thanks for documenting your experience, I would not buy a Volvo ever.

As someone currently on the H1B program, and working in tech for the past 10 years, how do I navigate the current climate in the US? Especially when sentiment around H1B workers is at an all time low - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606374 ?

I love working in the cutting edge of tech, but no other part of the world has been able to replicate this model the way Bay Area, SF, Seattle, and now NYC has. Great companies, ambitious people, new emerging tech, and large compensation.

Are there other countries where YC sees companies originate from and they prove with a path to citizenship for software engineers?

Demand a competitive salary. If you stay in the US, your pay is a logistic curve that tops out when you reach your late 30s. You will start to feel the pressure of not keeping up wage-wise in your 40s, and you will be completely excluded from being able to work at all sometime in your 50s. That's the reality.

You can literally download and try it for free. Cursor is just better, its insane that Microsoft screwed up AGAIN!

Currently using cursor. I've found cursor even without the AI features to be a more responsive VS Code. I've found the AI features to be particularly useful when I contain the blast radius to a unit of work.

If I am continuously able to break down my work into smaller pieces and build a tight testing loop, it does help me be more productive.

How do you define a unit of work for your purposes?

Crazy to see him just bury their DB provider. I wonder how many SaaS-infra providers that aim to provide a more managed infrastructure experience over AWS would share the same fate if one of their users blew up like Cursor!

At least for now the large cloud providers are effectively the best place to run workloads at scale, so all these smaller SaaS providers are probably trying to gain customers by advertising the simpler and more productive dev experience. With the lure to smaller teams not needing to understand the full blown complexity of managing infrastructure on AWS, but in-actuality the profits are probably solely driven by overcommitting compute resources on shared fleets, and clever capacity management.

I wonder if the cost of software development reduces, which side of the equation will give out first. Will there be more new software developers, so managed experience providers like Yugabyte will have a bigger target market thus continuing to grow, or will dev tools get so good that smaller teams will directly be able to use AWS and bypass the UX benefits some of these SaaS companies provide.

I know this is a fast evolving space, but I'd love to learn more about what exactly is possible here. The API doesn't seem to be very well documented.