With a subopena you would be the one unencrypting your disk. Being in comptent of the court usually means imprisonment or daily fine until you comply with the court order.
Apple is unabashedly, outwardly, privacy focused. Just their law enforcement policies put them way ahead of their competitors. But this argument usually deteriorates to "they are all the same!" so I won't even bother making a case for them.
What I will say that if Apple is what Woz feared. Then what's OpenAI and X/Grok and Google and Facebook (hell bench on world domination)? Unimaginable?
Chorus They are all the same! Chorus
Apple helped create the black rectangle monolith appliances-in-a-smartphone plague. But they are not even in the top 10 list of companies I'm currently worried about. They are far more embarrassing than dangerous as of late.
I think you are attributing to choice what can easily be explained by contigent circumstances.
Apple is privacy focused because it's a lifestyle and tech fashion company that competes with internet data brokers. Apple's instincts for monopoly power, locking down the market and choking life out of their complements is second to none.
Given the opportunity, all successful tech CEOs are bred and selected to burn the world down if the result is aligned to their power goals.
I don't see it as choking the life out of anything. They started in blank slate era of PCs. They grew as a compnay developing many human centric details for computing. They have a group of customers that like that approach and that is who they cater to. They just want to play in their own sandbox. The desire to control their own sandbox and customers is not aggressive. Their success with customers is a reaction to that. The fact that they keep some developers ideas at arms length is not aggressive. They support development with a different set of criteria than the mass market.
It’s both. Steve was who he was. Tim was a gay man in an era when the fbi would blackmail you over your choices. The product decisions and enterprise decisions aren’t made in a vacuum.
Initially Tepid about AI. Didn’t want to upset their base like Adobe was (seemingly) doing. Look at that year’s Figcon for evidence. The keynote led with the new Figma, front loaded anything. He quickly moved past it and spent 90% of the rest of the time on non-consequential features.
Then that AI feature they highlighted was pulled off production because it was cloning iOS.
The AI heavy product dump we just got are lessons from that time.
I was one of their first Enterprise customers way back in 2017’ish-give-or-take.
The brilliance of the system he built was that it allowed for real time collaboration. Which was god send from the Sketch -> Zeplin -> Invision -> Avocode (version management) ‘stack’ that lost Enterprise design orgs were using.
Which was already a large leap from what Adobe was expecting us to do with Photoshop/Illustrator (after they depreciated Fireworks).
Figma made handoff much easier. Made version control dead simple. Made my life as a UX leader much much better. I remembered talking to a few now-Gigantic companies back then and we all plotted the move together
It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness.
And for anyone who’s going to say “Sketch was Mac only that’s why it failed!” I assure you that had nothing to do with it. For the same reasons an entire generation of UX/UI designers stopped using Axure. But we would need to start talking about Invision 7 and Invision Studio if you wanted to get into the nitty gritty.
> And for anyone who’s going to say “Sketch was Mac only that’s why it failed!”
Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and (presumably) well. Apple themselves continue to officially release design files for Sketch with every OS release. They share more resources for Sketch than any other app, including Figma and Photoshop.
I’ve been seeing that word used a lot in this context, so just wanted to point out (I’d appreciate if someone did the same for me) that what you mean is “deprecated” (no “i”), as depreciating is a different thing.
> Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and (presumably) well
When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black and white than the average person.
With that said, Sketch certainly didn't become more popular because the macOS requirement even for viewing the files. I remember that there was some hacks to be able to at least view them on Linux, and other things like Zepplin (or similar) made it even easier, but it was still cumbersome.
Then Figma appeared, offered more or less the same features, slightly worse performance than Sketch, but worked absolutely everywhere and was easy to open and inspect things for everyone on the team. Obviously, Figma ate a lot of the Sketch user-base, which is something I saw in multiple companies myself.
> When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black and white than the average person.
Good point (also, “deep into the startup-woods” is a great way to put it). I suspect there’s a major overlap between those people and the ones who are obsessed with products “killing” another. The same kind of people who are hyped by any new shiny pebble as if it’s the second coming of Christ and immediately eschew everything which came before. The people who are so blind to context they shouted “zOMG Google is dead because of ChatGPT” because they were incapable of thinking for two seconds that Google has a ton of cash to survive in the long run, were already leading research in the field, and (of course) wouldn’t just fold their arms and stay still. In short, people not worth listening to.
This is 1 part hilarious and 1 part bewildering. You wrote an entire silly imaginary novel about my life based on a poorly worded (to your standards) sentence.
Sketch dominated the landscape. Now they are a small percentage of the landscape. I characterized that as a 'fail'. Sure, maybe an inexact word but what else do you call going from 60%+ of the market share down to below 20%? And btw I currently pay Sketch $120 for a personal license (so they obviously haven't failed in that sense).
And spare me the 'context' thing. Because my context on this subject is as a individual contributor, leader of multiple large design orgs with dozens of designers all in the same tools, as an early Sketch, Figma, Invision and Framer X customer. The context is up there with the Console Wars but I don't have the room for that here.
Er, my friend, you utterly misunderstood my comment. I wasn’t thinking about you at all when I wrote that (I didn’t have any individual in mind, just an amalgamation of opinions I’ve seen shared in multiple places). Why would I? The way I understood (and replied) to your original comment, you weren’t one of the people saying Sketch had failed. I was supporting and continuing your point, not refuting it, though now I understand you were indeed agreeing with your imaginary users saying Sketch failed but disagreeing with their imaginary reasons. My bad, I misunderstood that about your argument.
But if you felt attacked, that is entirely on you. It wasn’t at all my intention, and my comment is pretty clearly a continuation of what the other user said, which in my view also didn’t attack anyone specifically. Yours was one of the strangest and most unexpected responses I got in recent memory, and it took me a bit to even understand why you were so mad and thumping your chest. Hilarious and bewildering indeed.
People say it all of the time. Go onto any other platform discussing this topic and you'll see it as the most cited reason for Figma's dominance.
Yes, Sketch's logo has been featured in a Apple keynote before. I'm familiar with their relationship with Apple and it seems like their team is perfectly happy not being the gargantuan that Figma is.
Sometimes I feel like people just want to find any reason to disagree on here.
Lastly, maybe you should just make a depreciation (sic) bot.
Of course we would say that, with the exception of my current employer, and I am approaching 50 years, no one else has used Apple gear on the office, designers working at my previous employers had to put up with Windows if they wanted a job, and I can vouch we always had plenty of candidates looking for one.
> It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering.
Writing this from the perspective of someone who used to spend all day every day in Photoshop/Sketch/Figma for decades. This markedly contradicts my recollection of the state of Sketch at the time Figma was in its first public beta. Sketch's performance was abhorrent and it was constantly crashing while working with libraries. I was very skeptical about web-technology based tool in terms of performance, but Figma blew me away. It was FAST.
There's definitely others that shared your perspective. A commonly cited reason of early Figma adopters was that they felt it was faster than Sketch.
Of course, the reality was that performance is a super nuanced thing. It's always measured in relation to specific things, but ultimately summarized via a "feeling".
Aspects of performance include:
- Loading a (blank/medium/large) file from (scratch/cache/etc)
- Performance when editing (what?), panning, zooming (small or large doc?)
- Performance with a large number of simple objects, or complex objects (components? variables? nested components? drop shadows/background blurs?)
I haven't personally done some performance comparisons between the two apps since ~2018 but at the time there were definitely things where Figma was noticeably faster than sketch, a lot of things that were comparable, some things that were slower. My own very biased feeling was that Figma was faster more often than not but it's always up to the individual use case, how their file is setup, what they are doing within that file, and how they mentally weigh those different scenarios.
I definitely didn't feel like being on the web was a limiting factor. In some theoretical state, with infinite resources to optimize everything, native could be faster since you have access to lower-level APIs. In practice, that's the same argument as "it could be faster in hand-written assembly". Almost never did we get to the point where we'd use those abilities even if we had them, due to their cost on development and impact on the correctness/maintainability of the code.
> It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness.
yep, even though i personally prefer sketch, if i was running a company i'd most likely go with figma as well because of the collaborative capabilities; its just a huge productivity boost for collaborative teams
thats the biggest one probably; saw it firsthand at a large company that was using sketch but managers and others using windows or devs on linux wanted to see the designs for work and nobody was gonna change to mac for that so figma it was...
After the Adobe/Figma deal fell through a few years ago I thought they might breath new life into XD, it's a good program that integrates with your Creative Cloud libraries. No idea why they've put it on ice, especially without Figma.
The perception at the time was that Adobe had abandoned UX designers and wasn't willing to tailor any of their tools to them. So they (we) moved on.
I was at a SXSW session with XD's product team in the early weeks/months of that products existence. The Q&A section was filled with a lot of dismissive statements and questions. XD was never going to survive.
This sounds like Python development....and React.....and Svelte....and oh, remember Angular 2 to 3? Or people who invest time in Clojure? Were you a fan of the MEAN stack a decade ago? Build something on it? How's that app doing?
What you're describing is not unique to Apple. It's a regular occurrence for anyone who's not writing for a enterprise SAAS company with a largely legacy codebase and a dozen DevOps guys mostly obscuring that stuff from you.
I can easily do those on my Late 2013 MBP running Catalina, but not iOS development for the App Store, because it has a minimum Xcode version requirement, which in turn requires a newer OS, which requires buying a new Mac.
> This sounds like Python development....and React.....and Svelte....and oh, remember Angular 2 to 3?
I can open a webpage written in Angular 1, or written in year 1990. I can run a program written for windows 95 on my new PC with windows 11. It’s normal to keep compatibility for compiled/finished ebd user software.
but, can you run npm install on your angular 1 codebase from 1990? or was it bower install ? remember grunt?
my 2012 mac hardware works perfectly fine, even the battery is OG, apple stopped supporting it, chrome won't give update on the last supported os.
software is fragile.
i constrain myself to html and plain vanilla js. if i have to use deps, they are local or hosted .js lib files, minified. d3 is a great example of this pattern.
I miss gulp, things seemed so much simpler back then in retrospect and the nature of JavaScript fatigue seemed to be the FOMO kind instead of this abstraction over abstraction that abstracts that other abstraction but you still have to the understand what it abstracted away kind we have going on today.
Will TypeScript go the way of CoffeeScript in the future? Who knows.
Nonsense. Upgrading python using standard tools does not regularly require OS upgrades. asdf, rbenv or various other tools will happily pull in new releases from their ecosystems.
Go requires macos from 2016 or kernel 3.2 which I think is over a decade old. I can't find any limit for jvm 25, though I'm sure there is one. No competently-built tool requires OS upgrades like xcode.
Feedback: If I don’t get back to reading/viewing it it’s because you’re requiring me to watch videos to understand your results. When 66% of the promise are rasters and vectors.
Got it. You want to see some screenshots of the output? (I had been focusing on the process, but let me see if I still have some of the files created).
