This has started to turn around in the US, and states like CA and MN require it, with MA to follow in a few days.
The problem is that if you don't use that dark pattern, you take a double digit revenue hit. So you revert to the dark pattern while shaking your fist at why the customers "just don't understand?"
I think that was one of Biden's FTC initiatives about hidden fees in things like airlines, car rentals, hotel rooms, etc.. Honestly one of the better moves by the FTC, here's hoping it survives.
You’re spot on. Bootstrapping a reputation is really hard (and expensive), and the very painful accreditation process makes it much harder (need students to get accredited, can’t offer degree to students without accreditation).
Two good colleges who’ve overcome the challenges recently are Olin (engineering school in Boston) and Minerva (globally distributed college).
I bought an M2 iMac for my parents. It’ll last at least five years for them - likely closer to 10. At that point, I’m happy to recycle or donate it and get them a new iMac - likely with some major updates (form factor? Display? Etc?) that wouldn’t get with a RAM / CPU upgrade.
Spending ~$150-$300/year for them to have an easy to use & fast computer feels very worth it for me.
All that said - I would love for the machine to be upgradeable as well! Just explaining why it’s not a dealbreaker.
Same, I had to panic buy a 13" m1, i was remote working extra remotely and my laptop got destroyed. The 13" m1 was not an ideal machine, it had limited usb ports, limited ram.. but it was pretty quick and I wasn't going to buy intel.
A few years later the m2pro/max's came out (i think technically in 14"). I picked one up and just handed my m1 down to family. Huge upgrade over their old intel air that had already lasted them like 10 years.
My main bitch is the soldered in storage. It's a shitty optimization that has to punish apple as much as it punishes users. To have a machine that I can't just go buy a harddrive and slot in when i want more storage or when the drive fails is a total fucking nightmare.
Congrats on the launch! Curious how you fit into the landscape of award travel tolls like point.me and seats.aero. What are you doing differently & who’s your target user?
Thanks! In our view, the more tools, the better to help educate and bring more people into the points world.
We're focused on the beginner points user and helping them through the learning curve of points. Want people to use our engine to book their first ever business class flight.
In terms of product, we provide 365 days of free real-time search across all the loyalty programs we cover and any fare class.
How are you going to deal with the fact that airlines don't want more people in the points world? (Or at least, they don't want people finding inexpensive redemptions, which cost them money.)
The fundamental reason that it's hard to find cheap redemptions is that the economic incentives are aligned against cheap redemptions existing in the first place. Airlines want the revenue stream from points to be as high as possible, and the redemption rate to be as low as possible.
So this is an interesting question because there isn't a clear cut answer. The airline industry is fragmented globally, there are tons of national carriers. And each airline team has different incentives.
Airlines, especially US airlines are making billions of dollars a year by selling points to credit card companies. So in theory, they actually want as many people in the world of points as possible because they a consistent high margin revenue from credit card companies.
I believe the real difference between airlines is how they balance loyalty redemptions vs. revenue sales. Airlines full control the pricing of the points redemptions, but they have to balance pricing with capacity and fixed costs. If the flight is only 50% full, then that points redemption is going to help amortize the large fixed costs of operating that half empty flight. So having a bargain points redemption rate, would look attractive.
Now, if that flight is 90% full, then the airline may not offer seats to redeem with points or raise the price to something extremely high like 200,000 points.
> Airlines, especially US airlines are making billions of dollars a year by selling points to credit card companies. So in theory, they actually want as many people in the world of points as possible because they a consistent high margin revenue from credit card companies.
They want to sell as many points as possible, for as much as they can, and redeem them for as little as they can. (And in the middle, they want you to keep them as long as possible while they collect interest on the float while depreciating their value.)
> If the flight is only 50% full, then that points redemption is going to help amortize the large fixed costs of operating that half empty flight. So having a bargain points redemption rate, would look attractive. Now, if that flight is 90% full, then the airline may not offer seats to redeem with points or raise the price to something extremely high like 200,000 points.
I suspect the market for flight redemptions reflects this. The airlines would prefer that you can't redeem your points until the flight is absolutely unbookable by any more valuable means -- and for the airlines, essentially every form of cash booking is more valuable than points, since a "point" in your wallet means cash on their balance sheet. It's not in their interest to make cheap redemptions easy to find.
If I had to guess, the airlines that do early releases of award seats treat it as marketing expense. All things equal, they'd prefer that you have to hunt for them like truffles.
Yes, but it's a push and pull. Short term vs. long-term. If you devalue your points too much and make them too hard to redeem, then consumers won't want your miles.
I grant your point that there's an (intangible) limit to how much airlines can devalue their private currencies before people stop using them and/or they get regulated out of existence. It's just that this might come a good bit later than you can maintain a reasonable business providing transparency into their ecosystems.
I don't mean to be argumentative; this is a hard question. I only bring it up because you're probably going to hear it from investors. I assume you have an answer that you don't want to say publicly, which I respect.
The long term answer to this is easy: the airlines (really just Air Canada, and that will set a precedent) will lose this battle.
They will devalue points, change award charts, play the stupid cat and mouse game of trying to prevent scraping, but they will lose.
Even Southwest is giving up; they’re switching to assigned seats after many decades, because no amount of trying to prevent bots from checking you in has worked, long term, and checking in exactly at the minute and getting a C group number is infuriating. This isn’t a Taylor Swift concert; it’s a goddamn flight to JFK, lol.
The airlines make up the fake currency, control its value, distribution, and ultimately, the entire consumer market for the currency. I don't know how you can conclude that they'll lose, when they run the entire game.
I think you can see the last backed-up day (but not list of apps for other devices) somewhere on iCloud.com or in settings on some other iPhone/iPad on their account. Alternatively, you could try restoring to a new/temporary old iPad.
The external monitor + keyboard suggestions in sibling comments could be combined with this advice (or other backup procedures in the article I linked), assuming backup is disabled.
I somehow experienced data loss with procreate at one point, but maybe it was some weird accident. You’re right that procreate seems to advertise iCloud sync. All I know is it didn’t work when I needed it most, so I was leery of just blindly trusting it when the data is currently sitting on my table.
I remember loving the "Wishbone" shows on PBS as a kid... this reminds me of that but 100x better (kids are reading along with the movie, not having the movie replace the book). Love it!
