Alexander Chalkidis

Month: November 2020

  • What nobody is telling you about the new Macs

    What nobody is telling you about the new Macs

    The entire industry has gone crazy about the “phenomenal” performance of the new Apple computers. As I predicted, under Tim Cook Apple is indeed changing. But not nearly enough. And don’t be fooled like all those tech “experts” who make money from click baiting you with the impressive titles about “PC killing performance”. When Cook first took over I famously wrote that I might buy an iPhone in a couple of future iterations. I stand corrected. Tim Cook disappointed me, he didn’t turn it into the best version of IBM. This is a company with no mission statement that simply doesn’t have any technological innovation of its own. Apple is not about technology, it is more of an American stock market game that moves the i-Goalposts as much as is needed to fool enough of the people.

    So before you rush out to buy one of these new laptops everyone is raving about, let me tell you why you will regret it. Let’s look at a two year scenario. What could go wrong with this lovely new Apple laptop in the next two years?

    1. If anything isn’t working, well, you’re on your own. Apple users have been crying over faulty keyboards forever and the company didn’t even acknowledge them, let alone fix it for them. The “you are holding it wrong” mentality is still strong at Apple.
    2. Accessories – they have you by the balls! Even when Apple pretends to follow a standard, they twist it into something proprietary. Whether it is power, Bluetooth, storage, or even simple cables, they always find a way to make you pay more and restrict your choices. Apple can make even buying a webcam a difficult task while the rest of the planet simply plugs and plays.
    3. We know that the gimmicks might disappear. They put that bar on the top of the keyboard, made you pay extra for it, you showed it off to your friends the first day, and then what? Other companies will at least make an effort to support it a few years into the future, Apple takes pride in not giving a damn about you and how much you loved or hated something on their machines.
    4. We burn Pentiums to the ground. We have seen this exact scenario before. Apple had moved to IBM made processors. For a very short period they had a bit of an edge in performance. It wasn’t like for like if you also considered price, but it was close. Almost immediately however Pentiums took over. As the benchmark test showed Apple falling much behind even on Photoshop and other staples of the designer world Apple simply disregarded them. After years of pretending they finally switched to Intel. 95% of the planet works on PCS. That is where science develops everything, that is where serious businesses invest. It is simply a matter of time for the serious users to overtake any minor party trick Apple comes up with.
    5. It has got a bit easier to go IN their walled garden but remains almost impossible to get OUT of the Apple ecosystem. They are making money from services now, trying to reduce their dependency on iPhones. So YOU are the product. Buy those much cheaper Apple speakers, wow, they are a third of the original price, why? Because much like Amazon they just want to get you into their world of services. (I can export everything from twenty years of living with Google with one click and take them to any other IT system as they are openly accessible formats.)
    6. Apple has no friends. I watched the company enter the video business. They never innovated, simply bought other companies, used them to gain market share. They made a big fuss about entering the broadcast business, then suddenly gave up and left everyone high and dry with no support. Even Final Cut Pro languished unloved and unsupported. They don’t share with partners, they don’t invest in retail channels. That is how Apple rolls. It never includes your best interests.

    Indeed Apple has written the book on “how to do something that really screws your customers and get away with it”. They stop supporting something you love all of a sudden with no explanation. It might be that they make no new drivers for your printer, it might be that they stop working completely with a peripheral company you had already bought everything from. When they switched to 64bit machines, yes, we all knew that sooner or later the industry was heading that way. But only a selfish idiot would force that on us. Even now millions of people rely on 32bit solutions thanks to the incredible backwards compatibility of Windows. When Steve Jobs announced he was killing Flash he was no prophet; he was a disgustingly selfish businessman trying to bully the planet through marketing gloss. I hate Flash as much as anyone, probably more, but it is still around for good reason and it outlasted Jobs. Acting selfishly is part of their charm according to their fans.

    Well, if you like that sort of thing and have plenty time and money to waste, run along and buy a new MacBook. I warned you.

  • Enemy at the gates: content marketing vs natural language (vs litigation)

    Enemy at the gates: content marketing vs natural language (vs litigation)

    I couldn’t help it. The English in the post was so bad I had to state the case. Sure, it only had one “like” and probably almost nobody had seen it, but all the same, it cried out “auto-translate”. The sentence structure was not blatantly incorrect, just…off. Sure, there were several actual mistakes, but they were the sort of thing that you would find in a Google search.

    But in a different context.

    This particular post was promoting a content marketing seminar or something like that. Some self-professed expert selling expertise. It was full of hashtags and the actual words were possibly spurted out by some paid service of other experts. The Facebook page had several thousand “likes” but the actual post just one which is fairly typical of this level of wannabees. But it is indicative of a larger problem.

    While we discuss politics and how, when, if and what the platforms should censor or not in public dialogue, this is what is happening in the background. If they make their algorithms so they favor tags, well, tags is what users will give them. Even Apple has started using tags on their YouTube channel. They won’t get high in search ranking without them. Plain and simple.

    So the post with terrible English attracted the attention of the owner of the page. He initially said it was correct, then said it might have been a typo. He then set his lawyer on me with threats to delete it. In a way this behaviour is entirely consistent with all the other things he has copied and pasted in order to present himself as an expert. That is how it works. A pecking order of ignorance. In the fast-changing world of social media, you can be an expert as long as you find customers with less knowledge or desire to keep up with the latest trends. Threatening to sue is standard operating procedure and we are all the poorer for it.

    For what is the value of social media if I can’t freely post on my wall and discuss with my friends without fear of litigation? Should we all end up using it simply as content marketing, ever promoting something and seeing it simply as yet another channel? Social networks should actively protect our right to write freely and without fear or the content will simply become pointless. Even public figures should have the right to discuss freely on social media with their friends.

    As well as all other problems, the actual language will end up being computer code compatible with whatever indexing mechanisms they use. Humans like to communicate. Stop policing it and enjoy.

    Oh well, at least he corrected his post the next day. ; )

    FOR THE RECORD: Ι flagged the comment where I was threatened with litigation to Linkedin but have not received an answer.

  • The Queen’s Gambit isn’t just bad. It is proof that Netflix has made us stupid.

    The Queen’s Gambit isn’t just bad. It is proof that Netflix has made us stupid.

    You will be extremely hard-pressed to find a negative review of “The Queen’s Gambit”, a Netflix series about a chess prodigy. So let me do my best.

    We are living in a cinema-free pandemic period with limited choices. Important major international releases are frozen, production of new ones restricted seriously. Netflix can sit at a table with the producers of the new 007 and ask for it at a ridiculously low price because it is going stale and they don’t have many options. So let me start another way around. How did I hear about the Queen’s Gambit?

    It was on Netflix’s reccomendations. We all know that it is a bad reccomendation engine but what other options do we have? Check it out on IMDB? That is getting worse every day as Amazon hasn’t spent time improving it in ages. First reviews? Always gloating for any old crap. So we take the bait, the Netflix promo on Netflix makes it look better than others, you see the first episode and then, well, the rest, because you are on the binge machine that is Netflix. Worse still, friends and family are also stuck in the same rut so we are not even cross checking. The Emperor has no clothes but, meh, let’s wait till the parade is over before saying it. And when you have invested eight hours on the parade of the mini series you are highly unlikely to admit it was wasted on mediocrity.

    I will go further than that. The Queen’s Gambit is downright insulting and dangerous. Take for example the topic of substance abuse. The way it is presented we are left with the impression that it is a) easy to control b) useful for chess playing and c) with no long term consequences. Or maybe let’s see how the series portrays a woman entering a male-dominated realm: a) everything is polite b) nothing particularly nasty happens to her and c) grandmasters lose to her and immediately offer to help train her for her next challenge. This level of lying is insulting to millions of women of that era and even today. Women’s rights organizations should be an uproar.

    In fact all the topics touched by this series are done in such a superficial way that it is problematic. Take the scene where she visits a hippy house to enjoy marijuana for example. It is the cleanest and least messy den ever shown on television to represent a hippy household. My daughter didn’t even understand the point of the scene as our heroine hoovered and tidied the place after a one night stand , also confusingly presented. This isn’t political correctness, it isn’t the opposite. It is just terrible movie-making that fails to really touch the audience in any meaningful way.

    The Queen’s Gambit is an insult to so many great chess movies, so many true chess stories, to the heroes that battled hate in the Cold War. It isn’t just bad TV, it has a negative impact. People won’t start playing chess because of it, they will start pretending to play chess for a while maybe.

    So my movie review would be like this: “If you are really bored with the pandemic in lockdown and have no access to anything else other than Netflix, if you want to mindlessly waste 8 hours of your life without learning anything of consequence, don’t miss it!”

    The serious social and technological problem remains: how will we fix recommendation engines? If we introduce a social aspect to them, can we as a society, ensure we hold ourselves up to any level of intelligent critique? Or do we just want to have fun? Well the Queen’s Gambit is not even fun.

  • Messages and Music: Google doesn’t care

    Messages and Music: Google doesn’t care

    Tech pundits have often bashed at Google’s ever-changing messaging solutions array. Let me assure you: Google simply doesn’t care. There is little useful data in your silly little chats. It will not help the algorithms improve, it will not help them serve better ads.

    I know, I know, this is just a theory. Nobody knows how Google decides things, not even most of the people working there. But I know because I just spent some time trying to reorganize the way I handle music. Google decided to end Play Music, a service many of you don’t even know existed other than the shortcut on your phone if it was an Android. But I loved it. I could upload endless mp3 files (50,000 actually was the limit) and have them available on all my devices. I could also just click on an album name or folder full of lectures I want to hear while running. That is the same thing as what Spotify charges you 10 bucks a month to do. Only free. It integrated stuff online with offline life almost perfectly. Much like the very excellent and underrated Google Play Books service which is – as far as anyone can tell – also without limit in terms of number of books you can have on it for free.

    There was actually a good working model in all these. One service for everything. You want a book? Add it to Play Books. You want it on your device? Just click “download”. You want to see it from any other device? No problem. It is actually the model most users want. All in one. Limitless. And free.

    Google gives you infinite space on Google photos. Infinite Google Docs. Infinite books to upload and enjoy. Common denominator? You are helping them get more data. The sort of data they like and can use to improve their all-knowing God-like algorithms. Messaging is obviously not useful or they would have introduced a killer app ages ago. They have the users, they have the tech, they have the power. But now we know that music is also useless in that respect. So don’t bother with YouTube music folks. It will fold and fail like so many other Google experiments before it.

    If you’re not part of the solution, you probably don’t even know what the problem was.