The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s remaining daily users are engaged similarly as before. But the pool is shrinking. Apptopia pulls its data from more than 100,000 apps on iOS and Android, along with publicly available sources.

So apparently it lost only 13% of daily users? Thats a smaller number than I thought. Still bad news for Twitter though.

On the other hand, it shows the power of content creators and niche communities. I used less Twitter but cannot delete it because it is literally how I connect with my niche community on there.

  • upstream@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    You almost had me there - until you claimed Apples business plan was to sell to stupid people.

      • upstream@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        “Known to scam people”, “designed to stop working”.

        I am fully aware that people can say anything on the internet, but clearly you are not objective at all.

        Obviously any further attempt at discussion is pointless. Enjoy your fruit-less life, may it treat you with software updates until the next flagship device is launched.

        • off_brand_@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          The scam part notwithstanding, Apple products are designed to stop working. Or, at least, degrade more quickly than they might otherwise. That’s just planned obsolescence though, and Apple certainly isn’t the only one.

          • upstream@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Should Apple support their products longer?

            Yes, definitely.

            But there’s a big difference between not supporting old devices with software updates and designing them to stop working which you allege to.

            If you ask me theres way worse fish out there than Apple, and if you look at phone support Apple is the golden standard by a mile with most Android devices still not being supported for more than a year or two tops.

            What we should have is a requirement to support devices for at least ten years.

            Yes, I know, ten years is a long time, but we’ve gotten to a point where we should expect a device that’s been treated well to last that long.

            My 2013 MBP runs just fine, so does my 2011 MBA, my dad’s Fujitsu-Siemens laptop from 2008 even still works. But only one of those is running an updated operating system. Guess which one?

            Doesn’t mean that the product is designed to fail, just that Apple chose not to support them any longer.

            • off_brand_@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              Mind that I’m not the person you originally responded to. I don’t think Apple installs a time bomb that bricks your device at a certain point.

              But it’s disingenuous to say they aren’t intentionally reducing product life spans, and degrading the experience in the meantime. I don’t necessarily mean support either!

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

              You’re free to decide if you take their statements on this at face value. But it’s really not just Apple. It’s everyone. Cars today have a shorter lifespan than they used to. Fridges. Laptops. Competitor phones.

              Like are you saying planned obsolescence isn’t a thing generally, isn’t a thing for Apple, or just that it isn’t that bad with them?

              • upstream@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                I’m saying that anyone singling out Apple for planned obsolescence and disregarding the rest of the market is playing into someone’s playbook.

                I’m also fully aware of the so-called batterygate (oh, how I loathe how people add a “gate”-suffix to things to make a “scandal” completely clueless to the fact that Water_gate_ was the name of a fucking hotel. Anyways…), and while we may only speculate wether or not Apple was trying to push people to buy new phones, from appearances it would seem that they were acting in the (somewhat*, I’ll get back to that later) best interest of the consumers, but just failing to communicate it in a good manner.

                1. Before the story broke people discovered that replacing batteries made the devices run faster again.
                2. Before Apple started power/performance-throttling devices with worn batteries plenty of older iPhones exhibited shutdown issues, especially at lower SoC. I remember being clueless as to why some devices among friends and family behaved this way. After Batterygate broke it suddenly clicked.
                3. Built-in batteries can be replaced for a reasonable price either via Apple (less reasonably), or via a third-party (more reasonably). Device experience is regained (minus software bloat), and device longevity is maintained.

                Now let me get back to my asterisk:

                *: There are different types of battery chemistries, and while Apple thumped their own chests back in the day that their MacBook batteries took 1000 charge cycles to get to 80% of factory capacity.

                Apple willingly choose to use cheaper chemistries for iPhone batteries than they could use if they wanted longevity to be higher.

                So yes, in that regard you can argue planned obsolescence. The amount of money Apple charge for their phones they could definitely put better batteries in, but on the other hand there’s likely arguments for why they choose these batteries, such as capacity or other characteristics. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on battery chemistries, and will leave that to someone else.

                With regards to some of your comments on longevity then and now; note that we used to use the best material to make something, regardless of its impact on people and environment. Some environmental concerns do actually reduce product longevity.

                Combined with increased technological complexity and a higher rate of improvement in the digital era than in the analog era it’s been a long period where don’t think it’s too bad to replace a device after a few years time.

                However, we’re now seeing so good performance from a lot of our tech products that an upgrade feels much more incremental than it used to.

                I definitely think we should demand more lifetime from our products, but this needs to be through regulation and not just left to consumers.

                • Software needs to be supported and updated so that the devices can be used safely
                • Parts need to be available for replacement.
                • Soldering components with limited lifespan to the motherboard should be illegal without providing a backup port and room for a replacement device, at least over a certain form factor. Thinking of SSD’s primarily.

                Louis Rossmann also had some good points here: https://youtu.be/l27_75pDvd4

                We should be able to use cloud features without being locked to the manufacturer. Especially if they go belly-up.

                He mentions a Chinese car manufacturer, and Arlo cameras, but it could just as well be Norwegian EV charge box manufacturer Easee, or a cell phone manufacturer like RIM (BlackBerry) or a TV manufacturer, etc.

                So many products today depend on cloud services for basic functionality, and for a lot of those devices their planned obsolescence will be the cloud service they’re connected to.

    • YⓄ乙 @aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      In his defense , the laptop is the only thing that you can give credit for, rest of the stuff is just overrated BS with locked in feature that will only work with other apple products so yea its selling to stupid people who love apple *ecosystem"

      • PupBiru@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        yeah stupid people like most tech workers who just need their tech to work as expected rather than be “customisable”

        there’s value in the “just works” when not working costs you hundreds of $ per hour that it doesn’t work

        $2000 for a phone is nothing when it’s a professional device

        • rglullis@communick.news
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          1 year ago

          Since at the very least the release of Dell XPS 13 we can have “just-works” machines that run Linux.

          Also, specially for developers, the amount of software tools that have better performance and UX on linux is incredible. Homebrew is a clunky mess compared to any other package manager. I’ve worked with devs who refused to run docker on their machines because they said they battery got destroyed. Unless you work with iOS development there is no real, practical advantage in using MacOS for work.

        • Helvedeshunden@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Most nerds I know (including sysadms) started out on Android because of all the reasons you’d expect. Most of them now use iOS / iPadOS because, at home, they want things to Just Work - and have the available income to throw at the problem. Desktop-wise many of them have used Macs on and off, but it seems like lately they trend Windows and Linux again. Probably because macOS has become more hassle than it’s worth with the continued locking down, increased paranoia, lower flexibility and ridiculous storage prices. It used to be that you could work around the storage prices, but these days it’s practically impossible to run programs from somewhere other than Applications if you want your system to stay up to date. Macs just aren’t the great *nix alternative that they used to be, and while Windows is still pretty awful for my use, Linux as a desktop/gaming system is getting better every day. At least so far. I miss when macOS became more useful for every release. The big releases these days break more than they fix for me.

          • Coffee Junky ❤️@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            I work in software development, not sure why but most of the sysadmins and DevOps guys I know use Apple (phone and laptop). Most developers use Android (and usually Linux). Most testers use Android and Windows. This is purely from personal experience from the last few teams I worked in.

        • cloud@lazysoci.al
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          1 year ago

          Mobile phones are toys designed not to be professional devices at all. Photographers use real cameras, journalists, business men, programmers, don’t type their shit on a 1 inch touch keyboard.

          If you want your tech to just work you don’t buy apple products that gets locked in by updates and have all sort of incompatibilities, some of their shit doesn’t even have usb ports

          • abhibeckert@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Photographers use real cameras

            They are real cameras. Have you seen the photos and videos people create with phones? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8qFTgcRV6w

            Yes, there are some situations where an iPhone won’t get you a great photo… but that’s true of any real camera too. You don’t take a several hundred thousand dollar Sony HDC-4800 to a wedding for example. Professionals use the right tool for the situation and these days that is often a phone.

            journalists, business men, programmers, don’t type their shit on a 1 inch touch keyboard.

            I’m two of those, I type constantly on my phone. Yes - I also have a nice mechanical keyboard and I always use it at my desk, but I’m not always at my desk.