Archive for January 6, 2021

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

10th Anniversary of the Mac App Store

Joe Rossignol:

Apple announced that the Mac App Store was “open for business” in a press release timed with the launch. “With more than 1,000 apps, the Mac App Store is off to a great start,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former CEO. “We think users are going to love this innovative new way to discover and buy their favorite apps.”

[…]

Since its inception, the Mac App Store has attracted its fair share of criticism from developers. Apple has addressed some of these complaints over the years by allowing developers to offer free trials via in-app purchase, create app bundles, distribute apps on multiple Apple platforms as a universal purchase, view analytics for Mac apps, respond to customer reviews, and more, but some developers remain unsatisfied with the Mac App Store due to Apple’s review process, the lack of upgrade pricing, the lack of sandboxing exceptions for trusted developers, the absence of TestFlight beta testing for Mac apps, and other reasons.

Thinking back to the early days of the Mac App Store, I remember how its introduction killed a nascent third-party effort to build a similar store. And I recall how, just months after the store opened, Apple changed the rules to require that apps be sandboxed. Apps accepted under the prior rules were grandfathered in but not allowed to add any major features. As a result, in categories where sandboxing is impossible, searching the Mac App Store today only turns up results of apps that have been abandoned or haven’t had a major new version. At the time, most people expected that the sandbox capabilities would expand with each version so that eventually nearly all apps could be included. Instead, as with the rest of the Mac App Store, they have changed very little over the years.

Previously:

Samsung T7 Review

Lloyd Chambers:

MPG reviewed the Samsung T5 back in 2017 and found a lot to like. Great performance, and prices came way down by 2020—an excellent value.

[…]

That is, the Samsung T7 can deliver speeds slightly exceeding 1000 MB/sec for reads and writes. But as the tests show:

Under sustained writing, the Samsung T7 speed falls off a cliff.

And even worse, sustained read speeds are mediocre.

[…]

While the T5 does not offer the same peak speeds, it also sustains considerably higher write and read speeds. At least for my uses, this is far preferable.