Yeah, I felt like the TechCrunch title was a bit clickbaity ("The reputation of troubled YC startup Delve has gotten even worse"), so I opted to write my own title, which I feel helped get this thread on the front page.
I think it’s more the principle of deception that upsets people. Imagine if Apple released a new iPhone and publicly compared its specs to some previous gen Android. It’s not in good faith.
They compared their M-series chips to older Intel Macs for a while, likely to target users who were still on Intel chips. If they released a lower cost iPhone and compared it to a previous gen Android I could see the reasoning for it. It's not deception if it's a valid comparison and people just fail to understand what's being compared.
Now, is it mildly deceptive because all of the companies using incredibly confusing naming conventions for their models? Maybe!
Apple continues to compare to prior versions of Apple Silicon. I suspect it is a mix of trying to provide useful, realistic upgrade information and numbers that still sound good for those not paying attention.
I don't think any org doing this is necessarily being deceptive, so long as there's some reasonable basis for the chosen comparable(s).
For example, comparing a new iPhone to a prior Android phone might make sense if the install base is considerably large and Apple is targeting the cohort for user acquisition. (~"These benchmarks are not for you.")
The community will always run the numbers and get the clicks for the benchmarks not filled in by the 1st party. I noticed what appeared to be some movement from Apple in content they've produced to get ahead of this with recent product content.
Why are we so quick to call it deception? Their figure is quite clear. They aren't fiddling with the graph or hiding the labels, they are clearly stating which models it compares against. But I agree on the sentiment that the standard practice should be to bench against the latest SOTA models.
Majority of people use their mobile devices these days to browse the Internet. Installing an ad blocker on your iPhone is a significantly bigger challenge than on desktop.
Use Firefox/Fennec which allow you to install a variety of the add-ons you can install on the desktop version such as UBO, Stylus, ViolentMonkey, Bitwarden, SponsorBlock, etc... or install Brave which comes with adblock by default. As for iPhone, you can install Brave which has adblock, I don't think Firefox has add-ons in that version though, not sure.
I don’t think you can write off Apple or Microsoft just because Thiel made some investment in them.
Being the VC to a company’s round B, C, and D (adding up to maybe 40% ownership/control) is VERY different from simply throwing some money at a trillion dollar company to see some returns.
Firefox on Android supports it without any issue. That would cover a significant enough segment of the population that it might encourage actual change in the industry if people started moving to that platform.
Firefox on Android has approximately 0.5% market share on mobile, less than Opera. I really doubt it's enough to spark any sort of industry-wide change.
I'm not saying that Firefox on Android has significant market share; rather that Android has significant market share, and those users could be served by switching to Firefox solely for the purpose of using an adblocker.
If all Android users did this, something would change.
The point is it’s easy. It’s near frictionless. Unlike a lot of pie in the sky statements I see here like how “easy” it is to install and run Linux (it isn’t), Firefox adoption is truly trivial for any smartphone user and presents a stronger baseline than chrome does. People here often get critical of Firefox/Mozilla, and I totally get it, but compared to Google Chrome it doesn’t, well, compare.
Firefox runs great 99.99% of the time. It’s easy to add extensions. So we should be pushing people to adopt it.
It’s becoming easier on iPhone (even uBlock origini is now available, if only the lite version), which is nice because internet is becoming more and more unusable without them.
AdGuard installs through the App Store and integrates seamlessly with Safari. It's not as perfect as some of the desktop class adblockers, but it's free and can be up and running in a couple minutes.
If you're on Android, Firefox supports many full desktop extensions, including uBlock Origin.
There have been mobile Safari ad blockers for 10 years now, free or paid, and many of them can now be unified with desktop Safari. Many alternative iOS browsers include ad blocking directly, since they can't use the Safari plugins (despite all being powered by WebKit).
Can't speak for IOS but for android users I highly recommend Firefox for android, since you can install ublock origin within it.
Let's be real, browsing the modern internet is downright impossible without it today.
Not anymore. You can just find one on the app store and install it, almost exactly the same as you do in a browser's extension "store". It won't be as good as uBlock but it certainly works fine even in Safari.
ublock origin lite is straight up on the app store now, should work with any moderately recent version of iOS/iPadOS. Installed this on my family's Apple devices and it works pretty well.
There's also been other adblock apps for a long while, though (adguard comes to mind).
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