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Time to cue the Extras outtakes with Gervais. Stewart was effing funny

I wonder why the iMac still has that chin design and small panel. They’ve been producing displays for long enough that the iMac and Studio Display should have the same form factor.

There may be some technical reasons for it, but I'm not convinced. The chin is a core part of the imac design language. Without the chin it would just be a display and not recognizably different from any other display. The chin is part of the design that that makes it recognizably an imac.

They didn't always have the chin. Imac G4 put the computer at the base. Consider the size of a mac mini you could do something like that today without needing half a sphere like the g4.

The chin is where Apple puts the logic board and speakers for the iMac. Yes, they could move that behind the display, but I'm guessing that'd make the display thicker (which they wouldn't want) and make the thermals harder. It's certainly something they could engineer, after all the iPad has its logic board behind the display. But it's not like the chin serves no purpose and it probably helps with the thermals and sustained performance and probably makes it easier to engineer everything for what is probably one of their lower volume sellers (compared to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks).

I worked for an AASP in the early 00s and I questioned this, considering that previously the logic boards were actually housed behind the display for both PowerPC and Intel models[0]. This does appear to be mostly true[1] (some of the logic board pokes up beyond the chin).

0: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2309+...

1: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+M3+24-Inch+Teardown:+Ap...


The white plastic iMacs from the PPC and early Intel era were about four times thicker than the current design. Back then they were putting optical drives and 3.5" hard drives and AC power supplies behind the display; now, it's too thin to fit an Ethernet port. The current set of tradeoffs really doesn't make sense to me, but if you accept the thin design as a constraint the continued existence of the chin is pretty obviously necessary; those older iMacs could have much more easily ditched the chin.

There were serious thermal issues with the late 00's 24" iMacs. I had one that ate 3 hard drives, and then the display in about 6 years.

It'd be interesting if they used that power brick tether to drive the display similar to the Samsung Frame, which takes power and signal from a fiber optic cable that runs really easily in a wall. If they could shuttle Ethernet up the power cord, they could send video signal back, too.

Power over fibre?

Makes the angle very easy to adjust.

I used to put post-its on mine too.


But where would you put post-it notes? :P

You should look into Jai’s metaprogramming features, which are ahead of everything else out there. Zig is really the only language exploring some of the same concepts with comptime, but doesn’t even come close.

Yeah I wrote some metaprogramming stuff, but to me it felt like run a python script and use python AST to manip the program. Its basically just a program that runs and has hooks into the compiler steps and the code.

This left me feeling like "I wish I had decorators and annotations" from other languages, not a way to write arbitrary compile-time code. The use case for that is so rare, and kludgy, that I don't think its worth it.

Now it did shine with basic hygenic macros, which felt useful and solid. Its basically how C macros should have been done originally (a function that emits code at compile time). However conventions like $Code where a bit jank imo, again felt like using someone's home-spun scripting language, rather than a well thought out solid design, versus something like Rust's Syn.

I know Jon Blow hates "design by committee", as he is so much smarter than others, but honestly a lot of this felt like listening to any sane reviewers would catch this stuff. I mean really basic stuff like #cast which reads like a compile-time macro/pragma, but its actually a runtime cast? Or mixing casing conventions, underscores or not, etc. Names of modules are all over the place, it just feels like one dude trying to make a half-baked lang over a long period while being distracted doing 20 other things.


What can i do in Jai i cant in, say Zig? I have never use Jai so im curious. I really how Haxe does metaprogramming, its incredibly powerfull. But not sure how Jai compares.

In Haxe i can pretty much do anything, run code, generate code, i even built an openapi doc on compile time just from types.


There’s no such thing as UI “art” as a separate process from “UX”. User experience is just a vague term Norman used to describe the general impression of using digital interfaces. He’s never actually even defined what criteria constitutes “good” or “bad”. So the term is as useless as “dining experience” is for restaurants. UX designer as a title and quasi-discipline became a thing the same way “agentic engineer” is a title nowadays, they’re not actual disciplines, they’re titles void of any history that consultancy firms come up with to sell more services.

The real title for this discipline is “interaction designer”, as that stems from HCI research, which itself was an extension of systems design. There is a clear lineage. Also: user experience absolutely is an aesthetic field, but again because the title is vague in practice so is its education. The thinking is that “UX” designers have a set of skills about design that are scientific, but there’s virtually nothing about human interaction that’s scientifically provable. Like you don’t do A/B testing and move a button’s position from a delta result based off of Fitt’s law or Gestalt theory (I don’t think I’ve ever met a UX designer who knows about gestalt theory). You just observe results and move the goalposts accordingly. And again apropos aesthetics: user testing just never works with wireframes, the closer you are to the final result the better the feedback.

The need to science-wash this ultimately volatile process comes from the need to assure clients that their investment in an emerging market (digital platforms from the 80s onwards) has provably positive results.


I think the idea of a separate discipline of UX design came along is because, outside of big companies, a lot of designers in the field at that point in time were coming from a print/graphic design background rather than HCI.

It was a bit of "let's not forget this element of application development".


Fantastic comment, thank you


Node was once the shiny new thing, so that argument is irrelevant. Deno got a lot of traction by promising to fix Node’s issues, some people trusted that promise, and Deno just didn’t deliver.


Aside from the technical aspect I strongly encourage everyone to also read about VISA’s founder Dee Hock, still a very underrated figure in leadership and finance.


Are you implying that removing the display would therefore be more space and power efficient than the actual 3mm display specifically calibrated to be powered by the built-in battery lmao. OP is just stupidly contrarian.


I believe since he wanted to hide the machine away somewhere in his caravan and connect to it remotely only, also I believe that he didn't make peace with himself aboug Apple devices and thought that having a complete system might mean giving up that mental red-line and breaching his stance.

Also, he states that "he doesn't love laptops", because having peripherals he didn't choose are redundant. I believe that's a somewhat distorted and carried-on trauma with laptops with subpar input devices and screens.

While I respect his choices and understand where he's coming from, in my opinion he has to change some perspectives and throw away some prejudices like he did for his belonging to fit into that caravan.

Emotional minimalism and throwing away expired things from our mindset is very beneficial for us.


Because nobody's actually implemented it properly. VSCode's live share came close but was buggy and unusable.


> Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by the JetBrains RustRover team

Honestly there should be a filter for these types of articles. I’m not going to bother reading something another person did not even bother writing.


"AI-assisted" != "AI-written". People who have AI write their articles entirely surely don't mention it at all.


Then they should elaborate and define what "A.I.-assisted" actually means. I have no idea to be honest. Could be anything.


I agree. I think it's an escape hatch phrase for people to try to avoid criticism. A.I. tooling is so similar to a highly addictive drug. Users think they can control how much they use, they eventually start using so much, and eventually use the signs as any addict who cannot think for themself any longer. "I can stop using it any time. I'm not addicted. You don't know me!" It's denial at its finest. Nothing worse than somebody be believing that they're an expert at something, and again they know nothing. A.I. Should simply be deemed the Dunning-Kruger drug.


Stinky manager != stinky person


Calling someone stinky is a personal & childish attack. It doesn't matter how you attach it to some other label.

What Kelley would have said if he were acting like an adult & offering professional criticism was that Jarred was a bad manager. Ineffective, even. That is what an adult would have said there.


an attack is not personal because it encompasses the whole person, but because it targets an aspect of that person. for an attack to be not personal it would have to target a category of people.

"software developers are stinky managers" is not a personal attack. neither is "managers are stinky", but "you/he/she/etc are something" is personal. it may not be an attack though if it is still part of a generalization: "you are a stinky manager because all software developers are stinky managers". but the article is not making that generalization, and therefore it's not just personal but also an attack.


Some people even like stinky!


only if it's cheese or tofu.


Come on now.


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