Todd Sizemore

I’ve largely quit listening to most Apple fan podcasts over the last few months. Make fun of me if you wish listening to them in the first place, but I also listen to a variety of tech podcasts. Linux and OSS podcasts, general tech podcasts and even a couple of Windows ones. I like to get a wide perspective on the tech world. Out of all of these though, I feel as if the Apple guys have gone off the deep end with nonstop AI talk.

I do understand that AI is THE big topic right now and frankly almost everything else about it is a bummer. I guess I am just burned out about it all and I don’t feel as if I’m getting anything from them other than their latest escapades in Claude Code/Codex/Vibe Coding. Maybe they don’t feel as if they are the right ones to talk about the detriments of AI? Maybe they don’t think they can contribute to the narrative? Maybe they just don’t care?

The second part is frankly that Apple is just an awful company. They are anti-competition, anti-openness, arrogant to the extreme. Hearing a bunch of well-off guys Stan for a 5 trillion dollar company is pretty pathetic. The worst part is that Apple is still the best of a bunch of bad choices. I am sitting here writing this post on a Mac Mini after all with an iPhone on the table beside me.

This is a good article about how I feel like Apple is losing its lustor by adding so many ads. If I wanted those I could go back to Android and Windows and at least get them at a cheaper price. Always Choose the Good Soap

While at home I took part in one of my favourite pastimes. Catching various animals around my parents house. This summer’s haul was a bit on the low side. Just an Eastern Box Turtle and a Broadhead Skink. I don’t keep them, I just catch them to take a picture and release.

I think my brain has become too inflexible to switch from Apple Podcasts. When I objectively examine Apple Podcasts versus Overcast or Pocketcasts, it’s easy to see where it comes up short. Queue building is very basic and well hidden, intro and outro skip settings are not there. But I still keep using it over what seem to be better choices. Maybe I should just stop thinking about it since it obviously doesn’t matter enough for my brain to break the connection.

With all that said, the AI generated chapters are really useful to me. One of the few uses I have seen for the tech that makes sense.

I don’t give a shit about these two companies fighting.

It occurred to me that Microsoft has always tried to forcibly change the market with their gaming ambitions. The problem is that they were always doing so from third place. It’s pretty rare that the weakest contender can somehow find an idea their bigger rivals haven’t considered and flip a market to their advantage. In their history, they had only had one slight chance at it (the 360 to One transition) and they blew it.

My opinion is that they should have hunkered down and kept trying to make a top-tier gaming platform rather than turning the Xbox One into some sort of multimedia home hub idea. They could have still felt out their ideas overtime and seen what if any of them the market would accept without degrading their money driver (games!).

Microsoft suffers from a desire to make big bets rather than do the hard job of building up overtime. I won’t go into why they have always tried to shortcut their way to the top, because frankly I don’t know. I guess the desire for money makes you dumb? To quote a hockey term, “gotta do the reps boys”.

Having a Mac with non Apple accessories can be like death from a 1000 paper cuts. I have a Logitech G305 mouse and it does not support smooth scrolling on MacOS. I know it can be done because both Linux and Windows scroll smoothly with this mouse Fortunately there is a little app called Mos that’s solves this problem. Why you need a third party app to make non-Apple mice support smooth scrolling? It’s not in Apple’s interests I guess, open ecosystems aren’t really their thing but you would think that Logitech might get a little bit better treatment since they have worked with Apple on several accessories. I guess everyone is a second class citizen in Apple’s eyes.

I gave Apple $610 dollars CAD today to upgrade my son’s iPad from a 9th generation to the latest model. I didn’t like doing it because I was forced into the decision. Yesterday, Apple raised prices on damn near everything. Looking around I saw that Bestbuy still had the base model iPad for the old price so I struck. My plan was to wait until Christmas but I don’t trust even the new higher prices will stay that same until then. Some analysts are predicting RAM could still double in cost by this time next year!

You can blame AI Datacenters for this trouble and you definitely should. But let’s not forget that Apple has a profit margin of like 37% on their hardware. They chose to transfer almost all of the increased component costs over to the consumer rather than touch that margin.

I’ve mentioned before this before but it seems that the reasons for using Apple products are getting smaller and smaller every year. They chasing the insanity of an unending growth story that will surely end.

This is the worst time of year for my RSS feed as every website I follow spams hundreds of Amazon Prime deals across their feeds. I don’t blame them for doing so because they have to make money somehow (Google sure isn’t helping them out), but it’s annoying as hell. For one, I’m not in the US anymore, so most of these deals don’t apply to me. Two, I don’t buy from Amazon as much as possible.

Even past Prime Day, I have noticed a huge uptick in rss articles being nothing more than affiliate link promo messages. Again I don’t blame them, but it does sully their reputations in my mind. It’s especially bad for sites like Wired, which I pay, for to do such a thing. At least they could do is offer an ad-free feed for subscribers.

I need to find an RSS app for Mac and iOS that can do some keyword filtering. I know a RSS service like Feebin or Inoreader could do this, but I have subscription fatigue as it is, and I won’t use the rest of the features enough to gain the benefit. So I guess I am stuck complaining on the internet.

I was listening to Windows Weekly this morning and they had a big section devoted to Microsoft closing/selling/spinning off several game studios. While listening they mentioned the price hikes that Game Pass underwent last year and their reduction earlier this year. In talking about the pricing dynamics of a subscription service I got the idea in my head that maybe by trying to bundle newer games into the service its over inflated the value of these games.

When Game Pass was a cheap service to play older and smaller games I bet the costs to acquire games was probably right in line with their expected value in return. I.E. They were making a good return for the money they were putting in. When larger (AA or AAA) games started to become the focus I suspect that Microsoft started to overpay as they bet that these games would increase the subscriber base. That threw the careful pricing of games for the service out of whack and lead to its loss in subscribers when they dramatically increased the cost.

I wonder if Game Pass stuck with its original intent (older, smaller titles) if it would have faired better, maybe the subscriber base would still be stagnate but at least it would still providing a decent return. This is all just me speculating and I have no evidence to back it up. Just another opinion out on the internet.