I am 75, and have a ton of computer gear. I can imagine myself as an old man later in life, not wanting to do any programming, and just wanting a single digital device like a future version of this product. Let’s see what Apple has available in 10 years.
Sir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming. I used to love this stuff. But after watching all my favourite companies and CEOs turn to greedy villains… I’m just done. How do I survive another 35 years doing this stuff?
Good news! According to some, we don’t have more than 3.5 years in the career path, so that’s 10x less time you have to survive.
Now _that's_ the kind of 10x engineering I can get behind!
I hope they're wrong, I need to squeeze out 6 years for this career. Fortunately I work for a big stodgy old company whose idea of fast tech adoption is measured in years anyway.
Are they hiring and are they ok with remote ;)
Yes but they need people who can hang on to an HN account for longer than a day.
Oh never mind then; too needy and clingy
Go work for companies you like. There are plenty of good people out there making useful software. Or make your own opensource software and put your effort where your heart is.
It’s easy in our industry to burn out doing commercial work with no soul. But it’s not the only kind of work out there.
I worked for a large unethical company in the US that worked to emulate big tech, and took a page out of Jack Welch's playbook (stack ranking etc). I was miserable working there and thinking of changing careers.
I ended up moving to New Zealand and working for a small civil engineering firm that has developers to write internal tools that are used by the engineering team to process their data. The technology I'm working with is a lot more dated, the development processes aren't sophisticated (there are 0 meetings and no attempt at project management) and I took a real pay cut, but I genuinely feel that the software I'm working with is beneficial and has a net positive impact on the world, no matter how small. There is also no on call and I work exactly 37.5 hours a week, on top of all of the workplace culture differences in NZ.
Sounds miserable.
Where do we sign up?
They've always been greedy villains.
Nah, this is a really dangerous narrative. Shareholder primacy is a pretty recent concept (a fundamentally anti-American one) that has recently gone metastatic and is now completely self-referential.
We've Goodharted the entire premise of the profit-seeking corporation and now openly say that Goodharting it is actually the point. Maybe it should be called Meta-goodharting or something.
Edit: Since large numbers of 1) historically illiterate and 2) "ideas don't matter" type people tend to congregate on HN, it's worth saying explicitly that the takeover of shareholder primacy is empirically visible in all sorts of corporate behaviors.
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the other robber barons of the Gilded Age have a hearty chuckle and say hi.
If you think Rockefeller (especially) is an example of unalloyed greed, you unfortunately land in category (1) mentioned above.
The problem is not wealth. The problem is not producing massive value and capturing a portion of it.
The problem is thinking that the system-level goal of capitalism is to extract wealth rather than to produce it and distribute it. Of the men you listed, only Vanderbilt supports your argument.
I would be fascinated to hear what value you think JP Morgan created rather than moved around. His company continues to do so long after his death.
If you don't think underwriting and lending (and extended universe of financial services) are legitimate forms of value creation, I'm afraid that a hackernews comment thread won't be up to the task of demonstrating otherwise.
Theres a reason American capital markets and tech go hand in hand after all. Just read the recent Mistral thread about the lack of capital in Europe and why Mistral seems largely third rate in the AI frontiers.
... Aren't we back to a definition, then, that includes tech companies adding value too? All the free services I use every day I would consider value for me. Instant free search, fast home delivery, insightful educational content (90s educational TV had no competition over modern educational YouTube). Etc etc. I see fewer ads than I did in the 90s, too.
Rockefeller, the “competition is sin” guy, sure that has nothing to do with greed. His philanthropy had a positive impact but he was still an unethical business person hellbent on stopping anyone else from making money on his turf
Shareholder primacy certainly is relatively new, but it's also true that "the system-level goal of capitalism is to extract wealth". After that, hopefully we use that capital to produce and distribute goods "fairly".
But Capitalism isn't synonymous with the free market, or any other market configuration, and it's totally possible for the people who control the means of production and distribution to... not produce or distribute. In fact, that may be advantageous in their efforts to secure more capital.
Ultimately, "they" really always have been greedy villains. Shareholder supremacy just made it worse.
At least we got some nice museums and libraries out of them.
Enshittification says hi
Could you elaborate? Goodharting what metric exactly and how was that different earlier?
Isn't the distribution of shares among the population instead of just a few private investors a good thing? Democratizing in a sense, everybody can participate? (If only wealth was distributed more evenly. But that's a different problem it seems.)
I highly recommend Incorruptible by Eric Reis - it makes it clear that shareholder primacy is a relatively recent phenomena, but capital and markets have been corrupting businesses for a long, long time.
He did an AMA here recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477135
There are several business philosophies a person (or a culture) can pick from. The dominant philosophy in the US today is "shareholder primacy" where business leaders believe their only dictum is to maximize shareholder value. This is so pervasive that many Americans (businesspeople and non-) think that it's baked into what it means to be a profit-seeking business, but it is not.
Shareholder primacy took off after Milton Friedman advocated for it 1962. The philosophy that it supplanted (in the US) was "stakeholder capitalism" where businesses explicitly sought to be positive contributors to a much more comprehensive set of stakeholders: their shareholders, their managers, their employees, their customers, their suppliers, and their communities (non-exhaustive).
The central conceit of capitalism is that you can co-opt the individual's greed and, properly constrained by laws and guided by markets, you can reward them for doing things of value for their community.
The question then is what philosophy do you build around that central greed-of-the-individual. Do you temper it with expectations of taking care of people other than oneself? Or do you fan it and unbridle it by saying, "actually, greed isn't the evil that we must co-opt to pro-social ends, greed is actually the pro-social end itself?"
It turns out that if you do the latter, business managers, shareholders, and regulators can collude to create extremely positive outcomes for each other at the expense of other stakeholders. You can save money by dumping your waste product into rivers, you can arbitrage labor away to infinitely far away lands, you can buy politicians, etc. etc.
How might regulators behave differently in a world where people believe a corporation ought to take care of its entire community, versus a world where the literal only purpose of a corporation is to enrich its shareholders? Quite different, probably!
Then all of this stacks on top of the natural "capital flows to capital" dynamic in capitalism which I'd argue is insufficiently mitigated, and you just get this ridiculous feedback loop that piles more resources and positive outcomes into a narrower set of people, while offloading more negative outcomes onto everyone else.
Obviously opting into a different business philosophy doesn't preclude negative outcomes, but I think that more budding business leaders could, should, and would essentially have their careers strangled earlier on if they exhibited antisocial traits if we had a business culture that didn't pretend like this was literally an asset.
Re your second question:
Assuming that shareholder primacy is the only philosophy we could pick from, then yes a market with many public shareholders is better than the alternative. But 1) not everyone is invested in public markets, 2) not all companies are available to purchase in public markets, 3) public markets are demonstrably not good at solving certain types of problems – especially problems that occur over extended time horizons or are easy to externalize off the balance sheet, and most importantly 4) costs-benefits are not zero-sum. You can't generally undo the harms of Company A by investing in its competitor Company B. It would be best if both companies' management felt they had an obligation not to harm their communities even if it could further enrich their shareholders to do so. It would be even better if investors in general felt both companies should have an obligation to take care of their communities or employees, and so companies lived in fear of divestment if they chose to violate their communities.
But in a culture that has opted into shareholder primacy, all feedback signals in this direction are removed. Regulators, investors, shareholders, employees, and the general public all pretty much believe that maximally externalizing harms and maximally capturing benefits is actually literally the way it's supposed to be.
Know any good books on this stuff ?
Stakeholder Capitalism sounds like a much longer term success vector for most companies.
Quantity has a quality all its own
Spend less money, save more money, then retire. I'm retired at 42 and I hardly had a top shelf career, middle of the pack at best. Even if you're starting at zero you can do it in 10 years very easily, 5 if you haven't spent every dime up till now and you are aggressive.
Do you have kids?
The answer to this question seems obvious. There are no 42 year olds that retire by merely "saving and not over spending" when even one child is involved.
Yes there are. My brother in law sold his startup and is sufficiently retired while raising my nephews. Not a common case, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not zero.
I used my words carefully when I said "retire by merely 'saving and not over spending'".
Your brother in law did not merely save and not over spend, he built a business and sold it for a large payout.
> Sir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming.
It's a shame you didn't come to this conclusion 10 years ago!
Find a hobby that doesn’t involve computers. It’s the only thing that will keep you sane in these trying times.
Switch the work mindset off, turn your nose up at technology and go touch grass. I wouldn’t be recommending if it didn’t work for me.
If nothing else it helps reframe your perspective on the world which technology companies as of late have been trying to distort to enrich the dozen or so people at the helm to their own benefit..
I have come to the conclusion recently after trying to use computers as a hobby for years. Hobby coding, games, shows … anything with a screen just doesn’t provide the relief I need. Just takes a lot of time and leaves with a feeling of exhaustion
Holy batman, are you me?? I too am 40 and so sick of this industry after the masks came off and AI greed forced all CEOs and execs to salivate like hungry hyenas.
Are you sure you're just not frustrated that you didn't win the greedy villain lottery?
My dad is 87 and I'm seriously thinking about buying him one of these. He wants a phone that will fit in his pocket, but his vision isn't great so he has the text size bumped up pretty high. Right now he's using an iPhone 15. Large text size on a small-form-factor phone, it turns out, makes a fair number of apps nearly unusable. For example, it's super common to see a dialog box pop up where the "OK" button is pushed off the bottom of the screen by the text, leaving you with no way to dismiss it. I frequently get tech-support calls from him that end up boiling down to that problem, and it makes using apps a pretty frustrating experience for him.
A device that fits in his pocket and that he can still hold in one hand when he's using it as a phone, but that has enough screen real estate to run apps in large-print mode without constantly breaking UI designs, would meaningfully improve his life.
Im not 87 and have great vision but I recently got some magnifying shop style glasses for close up work on tiny stuff. It also has the advantage of being like readers in that it corrects for close vision (closer point of focus) in addition to magnifying. That could also help.
This would actually be a growing market in 10-15 years due to increased life expectancy and every boomers has reached retiring age by then. Maybe Apple would introduce an iPhone optimized to be used especially for older people
I know my Pixel has an accessibility setting that is effectively "make this device more usable for older people." It gets rid of the home screen/app switching/go back gestures and replaces them with the old icons at the bottom of the screen, makes all the text and icons larger, and apparently increases the amount of time you need to press on the screen for it to count as a long press.
Apparently as you age, the capacitive touch sensitivity to your fingers goes down as well.
Iphone 15 counting as "small form factor" says a lot.
I encounter the same problem of unclickable buttons on my iPhone 15 fairly often. Sometimes I can make them reachable by switching to landscape mode, but not always. I’m 69 and do prefer larger fonts, though I don’t think my font size settings are causing the problem.
Good catch! I misremembered his model. He actually uses an iPhone 13 Mini, which definitely counts as small (by modern smartphone standards, anyway).
Its a 2200$ device which does the same thing as a 500$ tablet or any other option.
If people would at least use the power they buy... :|
We (the HN audience) have disposable income for that type of thing, I don’t see the issue with being a casual user of an expensive device
I can't even afford the 17e, who is this we?
The audience at large. It’s obviously not every single individual
That’s a roundabout way of saying “you’re unusually broke.”
I also can't fathom paying $2,200 for a phone, which is to say that we're not all working for US big tech companies in here.
I have the disposable income and would still not pay 2k USD for a phone a FWIW. But I spend that on other hobbies (just ordered a programmable power supply and an oscilloscope earlier this week, close to that price when taken together)
>We (the HN audience) have disposable income
Ah the fallacy of thinking a collection of individuals as being a homogeneity.
See the sibling response, not sure how you missed it before commenting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49633340
I cannot with good faith tell you the financials of every HN user to any degree of accuracy to defend a statement like you're defending.
What you have is a "guess".
Maybe one data point is that this forum is open to all, without any gatekeeping based on salary?
It’s of course a guess, I don’t know how else you would read such a large generalization. Most of the HN audience is based in the US, most people here work in software. It’s not a crazy stretch
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I intended to generalize, which is what I’ve done. There is nothing wrong with that. You can skip the patronizing tone
The typical HN user likely has more disposable income than most people
Doesn't ycombinator run a business where they let people borrow money with a high degree of likelihood that the venture will be a complete failure?
If I was the receiver of such a loan, am I just going to give myself a huge salary, or what it is that you do, here?
Work in a white collar job instead of for example part time retail. That will put you well above average earnings.
Blue collar maintenance worker here. I will have a yearly average income much higher than most of my peers because I'll likely die before I can retire and spend it ;)
A $2200 device and still limited to running dumbed-down touchscreen 'apps' from the App Store.
OP is 75 years old and belongs to the generation that already own a house and pretty much comfortable in their lives and any money they have/earn is just to consume things and live life. So why not spend it on a first generation device
It does far more than just a tablet. If it was easy, there would be one or two other companies out there who is this other vertical computer company?
Most tablets can't make cellular phone calls.
i've been hearing this critique of new apple products for about two decades now and inevitably: - apple's product "does the same thing" as [device sold at 25% of the cost] AND - apple's product "does the thing" at a level of polish that's in an entirely different league from every competitor.
siri is the great exception here. jesus christ what a piece of shit
This year it's the most ___ ever.
(I hope so, would be embarrassing to say last years iphone was faster but used more power, so ....)
Thats not the point. There is a difference between someone spending a lot of money on compute and never use it vs. doing the same thing.
Its like buying a porsch and driving it always at 100km only.
a better analogy would be a toyota hybrid, which is basically the same as any other hybrid car, except for the one issue of reliability.
So yes, a toyota hybrid and a chevrolet hybrid should be exactly the same, but they are not, the price difference reflects it, as does the number of twenty year old toyota hybrids still on the road.
My wife has gone through a large number of iPhones in the past 14 years, where as I've had a total of 2 android phones. Way easier to repair, and add software well past the end of life date.
Why has she gone through so many iPhones? I’m typing this on my iPhone 12 from 2020. Before that I had an iPhone 6s from 2015. I’m considering upgrading this year, but I could hold off for another few years if I wanted to. My phone still runs like it did when it was new. I get through most days with 60%+ battery remaining.
The biggest problem with my phone is modern software bloat. I only have the 64gb model. Modern software - especially iOS itself - has gotten ginormous. Every time a patch comes out I’ve gotta delete a bunch of stuff in order to update. And running unpatched software seems pretty dangerous right about now.
Perhaps a bit pedantic, but ironically I don't think Chevrolet makes any normal price range hybrids atm
The $500 tablet could be an Apple iPad
In fact iPads start at $429
The iPad Mini starts at $599, with a more comparable screen size.
And there isn't really any competitive tablet with Android in that size. I've only seen cheaper tablets with lower specs.
Hell before the recent price hikes $2000 would get you a Macbook Neo, an iPad Mini, and an iPhone 17e.
There used to be a pretty big gap between iPhone and android in terms of polish. that gap keeps narrowing, but it is still there for sure.
I have an iPhone and an Android phone and I don't see the gap at all when it comes to software. Quite the opposite, I think iOS regressed a lot with iOS 26 to the point where I see quite a lot of render stutters on an iPhone Air and 17 Pro. Besides that, Android is much more configurable (especially OneUI).
Apple is still the indisputable leader when it comes to hardware though. Great SoC, great cameras, great build quality.
Too bad it doesn't have GrapheneOS :).
Is there, though? The last few iOS releases have been pretty classless and inconsistent, imho.
That gap isn’t closing when it comes to the total package software plus hardware, and fit and finish there is a huge gap between Apple being a vertical computer company and whatever PC, Linux, Android product you look at, someone else brought up Toyota or Honda when you look at those two companies and you compare what they make to what GM and Ford make there is still a gap and you can also still see a gap when you talk about some of the other German companies when it comes to fit and finish too.
The classic slashdot comment!
They can charge as much as they think people will pay for.
Fact is, having a better pocket computer (that is your only pocket computer I might add) is probably going to have a lot of value for people.
Nah, let's just throw a new web framework at them that consumes all their newfound computing capacity. Always leave em' wanting more
Do you think there’s some cabal of executives trying to use more resources so that users are forced buy newer hardware?
Or is it more likely that software companies are making a tradeoff based on typical consumer hardware and would rather prioritize making $$$ over optimizing their software?
And liquid ass.
You sound like ESR ranting about how Apple was doomed by Android back when the iPhone came out. He would rant and rant every time about how there was no conceivable way that Apple could survive. Somehow, Apple has managed to survive by the skin of it's teeth.../s
Hey other Mark Watson :)
You all laugh but yeah your brain is going to directly interface with some small portable client hooked up to the internet. Will probably just be integrated with the microchip in your head.
If Apple continues like that, in 10 years it won’t exist
How about open and rotate for 1.4x zoom?
in 10 years any phone should be able to wirelessly stream it to any monitor / tv and plenty of those will be everywhere
We can do this now, but I don't think the user experience makes it worth it compared to casting. Bandwidth limitations require lower frame rates and responsiveness, which is fine for video but bad for interactive apps (most phones are native 120+hz + VRR_. But re-encoding video is (processor & battery life) expensive and probably lower quality than the original stream.
People who do this a lot probably just use a DV adapter (maybe it just works with USB-C, but I haven't tried it) for native apps, or casting for streaming video.
Right — I would have hoped a while ago already that we transcend past the notion of an endpoint device. A tablet, a laptop, or a phone should all just be entry points to access my one OS instance.
You could think this a bit further still, and have all kinds of devices offer an interface to nearby endpoints with a display or controls, establishing connectivity automatically.
Right now, Apple is the only vertical company out there at scale. Maybe one of the Chinese companies might eventually get there but who is this western company other than Apple? It certainly isn’t Google or Microsoft at this point their efforts are more halfhearted me-too products, and when I say hardware, I mean in-house designed and engineered hardware not buying it from somebody else.
I'm really sad that the ubuntu phone dream was never realized
Apple does this right now. I use AirPlay to extend one laptop into an older laptop so I can have 2 displays when I’m away from home
There is a difference between laptop and a phone. Hopefully in the future phone can be switched to a full desktop mode and OS when it beams to large screen. Well that is unless by then we have chip in our brains or what's equally bad everything rented and leased and can be used from any physical location. Convenient but deadly.
I mean you kinda can do that now.
>"kinda" - is a keyword. experience is abysmal, especially when it works but true desktop paradigm is not supported
I find Dex to be decent enough. Its biggest limitation is that it runs Android apps, but for doing stuff in a browser on a big screen and multitasking with some other apps that are tolerable to use that way it's pretty good.
>"I find Dex to be decent enough" - I guess it is very personal. I find it atrocious. Not this and not that. My instincts are screwed
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I presume you're trying to be friendly here, but your first couple sentences come off a bit harsh.
I like that he's well into his life and still enjoying writing (or authoring, or whatever we call it now) code, and looks forward to a nice long life. No one lives forever, and I'm sure he's aware of that.
Yeah I'm quite old myself and that's ok. I find that sometimes we put off things unnecessarily. Life is short, enjoy it.
I take it this is a joke? I am in my 50s and don’t see myself staring at screens for too long, let alone coding.
Edit: I don’t know of anyone 75 still coding outside of retired professors here and there. I am not trying to be an ageist. I just don’t think I will be physically capable when I am 75.
It doesn't seem like a joke?
>"I am in my 50s and don’t see myself staring at screens for too long, let alone coding."
I am 65 and still enjoy software development (not coding in particular) but decomposing business idea into software architecture and functionality. Decomposing is the part I really enjoy, the rest is a necessity but with AI that rest takes way less of my time than it used to.
I do not work for someone though. I develop products for clients or for my own business, was doing it all my life and was doing it from my own office for last 26 years. Not overworked either. Have enough time to enjoy life. Al in all very happy