Who doesn’t want a permanently open serving window between their apartment and the public hallway

I liked one of the comments:

> The average American already owes 100k+ on the national debt, and now we’re debating whether borrowing more money to invest on their behalf in the stock market is a good idea?

Not because Apple made a jump in sales but mostly because Samsung has been on a decade long decline.

Samsung has good hardware, but their software is really mediocre, at best. Many of their devices are laggy and slow down further after some updates.

This is the case even on high-end devices. Our 12-month-old Galaxy Tab is slower than a 7-year-old Pixel. Hard to understand.

Plus, they make really odd tweaks to the UI, such as adding a permanent button overlay that clashes with most hamburger icons in websites and apps. This drives novice users insane.

If you wanna ship a custom Android, at least get it right. Otherwise, just stick to stock. Sony does this really well: https://developerworld.wpp.developer.sony.com/open-source

Samsung makes a lot of cheap and mid-tier devices with little RAM and not so powerful SoCs. Google also uses slow SoCs, but at least they compensate in hardware.

If you just buy a high-end phone, Samsung is generally fine. If you buy anything cheaper than that, or god forbid buy a phone through a carrier that pumps it full of crap, you're gonna have a terrible time when apps get slower and bulkier and shittier and the hardware shows its age.

Odd. I've had the Z Fold 5 and now 7 and the last few years' worth of Samsung firmware has been excellent for me. Perhaps they build 'for' their flagships and let devices that perhaps have lower tier chipsets run slowly?

I have the Z Fold 4 (EU) and it performs well to this day. It even got the Android 16 upgrade.

Z Fold 3 here, going happily on 4-5 years.

Samsung has nice hardware quality, but no sense of UX, and that goes for their software and hardware.

Similarly for TVs - i got a samsung oled few years ago, and while the hardware seems great, I do wish I had gone with LG as their TVs seem more open to install custom firmware. (I do pretty much just use appleTV and fireTV devices plugged in to the Samsung, but still, the main TV ui is pretty abysmal)

Samsung hardware is not what it used to be.

They have been shipping the same camera block for something like three or four models. Compared to what Chinese competitors like Xiaomi or Oppo offer, it doesn't look that great anymore.

The poor software is just the cherry on top.

On top of buggy software they just have user hostile design choices. Like forcing agreements to sell health data if you want a step counter, or shoving ads in your face that you can't disable without hamstringing functionality.

Makes me think about switching if alternative markets really do come to iOS and they get a real firefox

Well Samsung was overtaken by Xiaomi and Xiaomi software is even worse...?

The status bar icons on the top right of One UI (Samsung's firmware skin) aren't even aligned or the same size. It's only just been fixed in One UI 8.5, years from the problem first happening.

You're welcome if you can't unsee it now.

It's nothing major, but it's one example of how inconsistent and disorganised their software is, there's so much low hanging fruit that you'd think their software division was under duress, along with year long delays to software updates.

And on top of that, you can't unlock One UI 8 and above.

As much as I wish it wasn't the case, not being able to bootloader unlock is not a cause of any meaningful reduction in sales. The Android ROM community has been on life support for a few years now.

I recently got a Samsung device for testing, and the experience was terrible. It took three hours to get the device into a usable state.

First, it essentially forces you to create both a Samsung account and a Google account, with numerous shady prompts for "improving services" and "allowing targeted ads."

Then it required nine system updates (apparently, it can only update incrementally), and worst of all, after a while, it automatically started downloading bloatware like "Kawai" and other questionable apps, and you cannot cancel the downloads.

I wonder how much Samsung gets paid to preinstall all that crap. The phone wasn't cheap, either. The company seems penny wise and pound foolish.

These accounts are not required! I use my Samsungs without a Google account. And I only use a Samsung account on some of them.

It's harder to install apps but I use aurora store. Push messaging still works without a Google account.

I don't disagree with Samsung's decline, but:

> Sales of the iPhone 17 series in the U.S. — including the iPhone Air — during the first four weeks after launch was 12% higher than that of the iPhone 16 series, excluding the iPhone 16e, the research firm said. In China, a critical market for Apple, sales of the iPhone 17 series during the same period were 18% higher than its predecessor.

So iPhone 17 is selling well. I think it's fair to call it a hit. Do they make another hit next year? Who knows (I'd bet against it), but they won this year's game I believe.

Wait, why is the 16e excluded?

The 16e was launched out of the usual release cycle, five months after the rest of the 16 family.

If it weren't for the S-Pen, I'd ditch Samsung in a heartbeat.

The day iPhone has a built-in EMR/AES stylus is the day I become a customer (despite being an Android lifer).

Don't think that will ever happen though, despite Apple shipping Pencil for iPads.

Samsung has definitely built a (small) moat being the only vendor with that offering.

The rumors say Apple is shipping their folding phone next year, I'm crossing my fingers that one might have stylus support and then it'll meander its way back to the regular phones.

I'm in the same boat. Although I would also be willing to go back to Apple if they release a truly small phone. But I'm forced to carry one of these gigantic beasts I want to be able to take (handwritten) notes with it.

The 17 series has some upgrade-worthy features at least, unlike 16 where I'm not sure where the improvements were.

The base 17 got always on display, while the 17 Pro got a huge camera upgrade. Both 17s got the much-improved selfie camera.

True, thanks for that info. Changes the narrative entirely.

I don't call them Samdung for no reason

And then a service on top that checks the feed and notifies you when there’s a new item.

I presume most mobile RSS readers do this already. With the added bonus that users can set their own settings of how often to refresh their feed rather than writing a service to do it

Hard to gauge what gibberish is without an example of the data and what you prompted the LLM with.

If you wanted examples, you needed only ask :)

These are screenshots from that week: https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1995900100174880806

I'm not going to share the prompt because (1) it's very long (2) there were dozens of variations and (3) it seems like poor business practices to share the most indefensible part of your business online XD

Surely reads like someone's brain transformed into a tree :)

Impressive, I haven't seen that myself yet, I've only used 5 conversationally, not via API yet.

Heh it's a quote from Archer FX (and admittedly a poor machine translation, it's a very old expression of mine).

And yes, this only happens when I ask it to apply my formatting rules. If you let GPT format itself, I would be surprised if this ever happens.

> I guess they hope I forget to cancel.

Business model of most subscription based services.

For me it's just that I am too lazy to start switching from my GPT subscription, I use it with codex and it's very good for my use-case. And the price at least here in Asia is not expensive at all for the plus tier. The amount of tokens are so much that I usually cannot even spend the weekly quota, although I use context smartly and know my codebase so I can always point it to right place right away.

I feel like at least for normies if they are familiar with ChatGPT, it might be hard to make them switch especially if they are subscribed.

I estimate at 10% of meetup runs like that

Corporate garbagespeak, has no relation to reality whatsoever.

Concerted effort among the greediest people in the world all competing with each other? I find that very hard to imagine.

Not how I understood it. It was about climate “vs” health not whether the climate is breaking down.

Parents are also suspicious of AI targeted at kids.