Well I agree that with Apple there is always some sort of plan. But the real question would be: is that plan worth it?

Considering what they are doing with the Vision Pro, I am extremely skeptical. I think Apple has lost touch with why people bought their stuff and this is more evidence of that.

When half of your work output is taken away to give to your already well-off parents, you don't have much left over to have kids.

Yep that's pretty much it.

If it was all about value, we wouldn't have people doing "work" who not only don't generate any material wealth but actually consume a lot of value for nothing very valuable in return.

You can't say they did nothing about it. They actually did: make sure to restrain access to well-paying jobs with long and costly studies; make sure to regulate any way the young could get ahead by creating rules for things they never had to suffer through and make sure to increase the age of retirement as well as increase the ratio of contributions from salary.

It's all very cynical, and it's based on fundamental egoistic human behavior. Most boomers I know are proud to be egoist and very often stingy. They all think that they can make the difference by helping their own children, but this is flawed "thinking" in a system that is profoundly collectivist.

And all this comes from the massive flaw of democracy: only numbers matter, if you are the dominant demographic, you can get whatever you want, regardless of the nefarious impacts down the line.

When people keep repeating the trope of democracy is the worst form of government expect of all the others, I laugh my ass off. It can only be so if you have a way to weigh the votes otherwise you are just ruled by the tyranny of the mob and that generally doesn't turn out nicely.

The problem has been artificially created, the ideology said that restricting personal freedom was better for everyone as a whole and we can very much observe that this was a lie of epic proportions...

If what you say is even remotely true, wealth would have never been passed from generation to generation and people would have never invested in stuff useful for the future.

What you actually mean is that there is a non-negligible portion of the population who act like children and won't ever be able to plan for the future, so we have to force them. But not only them, everyone into the same basket, regardless of their qualities and wants/needs.

Sure, a non-collectivist system would break a few more eggs, but isn't it the point? Rewarding the best/most useful behaviors seems like a fundamental need of a lasting society.

The curent system is problematic because it has pushed the equality ideology at the expense of personal freedom. The irony is that people who could benefit from better environment/luck/opportunities, will still get ahead at the end of the day. You are disproportionately impacting those who could have had better outcomes to "save" the ones who will have bad outcomes regardless.

It's all very cynical, and the peoples in power don't have to care, they are fundamentally not at risk...

Exactly. People looking at a direct 1-to-1 replacement are thinking about it the wrong way. Like you said, newspapers didn't get replaced by another kind of newspaper, various web media took their place.

I was talking about this kind of thing with my father the other day. He was telling me about a friend working in communication work in a very old school way (the Adobe softwares he uses are pre Creative Cloud). He is losing business to youngsters who offer the same kind of product/results for cheaper. Not just because they are young and lack skills but because they use AI to generate stuff that takes him a long time to do. Now he doesn't care because he is close to retirement but the future for people like him is uncertain.

It's pretty clear that over time AI will replace all kind of white-collar work with a crazy efficiency. Now the question is, what will replace those jobs and can we even replace them in our highly automated efficiency world?

Contempt is like the default mode of operation of today's Apple.

Even if you like their stuff, find them useful and valuable, it's hard to abstract away the behavior. At some point it is bound to hurt you as well...

Yeah it's really not the same odds and merit.

But the thing is people always use the extreme outlier as "proof" that something is possible. There is both survival bias and moral rationalisation when it comes from rich people.

Sure enough, such and such poor person who started with nothing and a terrible environment succeeded. But how many like them with comparable merit/talent didn't? And what was the key event that put them on the good trajectory? People always underestimate the importance of luck.

On the other hand, coming from a rich background practically ensures a minimal amount of success. Even if you fail to become good/great you will be able to truck along with very little risk and still access to plenty opportunities.

About 15 years ago, I met some people who had true generational wealth. The brother went into music and the sister into design/art. They currently have a moderate amount of success and the reason is solely the connections/opportunities their parents provided. The work isn't bad per se, but I have met people who are much more talented and never got anywhere near the same type of opportunities. Many (most) have to switch to some sort of boring job to put food on the table. Meanwhile a rich competitor can afford to only work on his stuff until he succeed/make it somehow.

Life is fundamentally unfair and it's not a big deal but I really hate it when people pretend, they "made it" purely on talent/merit/hard work.

And that's the fundamental problem with web software, regardless of its technical merit (or lack thereof).

It's crazy that you can pay something for so long but whenever they decide it's not profitable enough, you not only loose access to the hosted ressources but also to the complete usefulness of the tool.

Meanwhile there are people still keeping around computers from the late 2000s. They might not be secure for browsing the web but at least the software can still be useful.

The update everything all the time is such a perverse incentive, tech is gobbling up value that could be better invested somewhere else.

That's a pretty good display of the nonsense of SaaS. Someone who has paid for premium will find itself with a shitty export that won't be usable without investing a lot of time into importing somewhere else or making some sort of software to exploit it.

And there is no way to prolong its useful life by keeping an old system around or make it work in a VM. Subscription software is a travesty and only cares about extracting the most money from customers. It's not even worth much in terms of compute requirements because you still need to invest in decent hardware for other softwares (that most likely won't ever be able to be fully remote).

Web software isn't bad but the hostage situation it allows is pretty bad. But then again, even Apple with their pride in native local software has pushed subscription to extract the most money possible, so... Greed is such a destructive sin.