davidmalcolm

It’s also pretty obvious that as soon as it’s practical Apple will move device assembly to robots. Even if it costs more they’ll have at least some products being made in part by robots so that as climate change destabilizes the warmer/poorer parts of the world, they’re still able to pump out devices. (Also let’s be honest, COVID  put a huge wrench into things. So the sooner they can move to a system where they don’t have to rely on large groups of humans breathing the same air, the sooner they will.)

I have noticed for some people though they associate good sound with rattling bass. The HomePods have up firing woofers which means they’re intentionally not rattling your home (which apartment dwelling neighbours will appreciate.) I’m regularly shocked that none of my neighbours complain about how loud I play my music but between the concrete walls in my building and the fact that the bass isn’t being directed into the floor etc nobody complains. 

For headphones it’s funny, I have a set of AirPods 3 I really like (I don’t like in ear tips) but I almost never wear them since getting my Dyson Zones, I get sick when exposed to perfume (which is in almost everything people clean themselves and other things with which makes leaving my home a mine field.) The Dysons sound quite good but I’m sure I’d appreciate a set of AirPods Max if I could save my wear them out. 

I find that Sonos has a great reputation for their hardware, but the company seems to be failing to appreciate good design with their software. I had to help someone with the Sonos app for Mac a few months ago and I remember thinking, “this is the software that one of the top audio brands give their customers? This makes Android’s UI look like a high quality product!”

I just don’t understand why some companies spend so much on hardware engineering and then trip on the finish line with bad software for the user. I’ve recently gotten into using Dyson stuff more and their app isn’t perfect, but it’s clear they approached it and accomplished what they were trying to do. (I wouldn’t do it all that way, but I can’t say that it isn’t well thought out and there isn’t attention to detail.) 

Giving a show an insane budget can lead to crazy good stuff, but it's not a for sure thing. Foundation got it's budget scrapped in part because the show is good but not great. It looks amazing but if anything a lot of the crazy visuals end up dragging the plot down because it feels like it's moving so slow because you're needing to spend time in all these insane sets to justify the cost.

And a show like Constellation always had this feel like the budget was way more than the show deserved.

Either way it's still one of the best streaming services you can get but one of the nice things about it is that it generally has good content when they put up a new show. But it certainly doesn't have the overwhelming amount of stuff that something like Netflix has.

Apple has had Siri for a long time and for a long time people wanted to have Siri do what ChatGPT does. They wanted their own Jarvis from Iron Man. And Apple for a long time has considered that a privacy nightmare. It would also have been prohibitively expensive and they could have been first to market with a product that would have been ridiculed even if out of the gate it was as good as GPT 3 was. 

Apple Maps once told someone to drive into a lake and people still act as if it does that. The media’s standards are far higher than they are for anyone else. 

OpenAI releasing ChatGPT has moved the needle though. The general population is now much more happy to accept generative AI as both useful and useless at the same time. They know it can be used to do a lot of tasks that people struggle with, but they also are generally aware that you can’t trust the results yourself. 

In that atmosphere Apple can honestly release tools using LLMs that will get a lot of ‘oh wow!’ And the media won’t make fun of them for being just as imperfect and inaccurate as anyone else’s especially if you give people access to other models within Apple’s UI. 

Is it some brilliant big brain play? I wouldn’t say so. But at the same time in the last few years I’m sure there have been some brilliant people at Apple who have been focused on how to use LLMs while also confining them to Apple’s ideologies. (Caring about people’s privacy to the extent that they do actually is super important. Because they ensure that one side of the conversation is rooted in a significant privacy focus. And even people who hate Apple should appreciate how much their focus on privacy forces other companies to move a little closer to giving a damn about your safety.)

But yeah, in terms of saying that Apple has been working on Apple Intelligence for 7 years feels like spin. If you want to look at what Apple was really working on in terms of machine learning look at the Vision Pro.

Apple’s long term outlook was to move toward you being the centre of your digital hub. It is a really cool plan and long term it could be great. But in the mean time tech is going to go in the direction of perusing generative AI.

That said, though it’s in the hands of the general public now? The Vision Pro is priced like a concept car. But it’s nearly 2024 and what people really want right now is to be able to have their computers magically do tasks that they find overwhelming and do them quickly and good enough. 

The dangerous part is going to be, what happens to human intelligence when nobody has to learn to write well? What’s going to happen to art when kids compare their drawings to what AI can do? Humans develop skills through time practicing things so that they can accomplish tasks.

Not to say I’m sure it’ll be bad. Hundreds of years ago finding clean water was a skill people learned. Our plumbing goes out due to war, I definitely don’t have the skills to find clean drinking water. But yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how AI changes base level human thought for those who grow up with it. 

That said I suspect they did it because they’d noticed some sort of vector that was being used by an organized crime group or something like that. IE all the passwords that were stored in one of those big password storing apps that got hacked were all being exploited and causing accounts to be turned into bot accounts used for either iMessage spam or for money laundering or something.

of course Apple won’t give anyone public facing the rationale because that would tip off the crime group doing the exploit.

I wish Apple would let people get their password reset by registered mail where it has to be hand delivered to the address that was already on the account and the user has to pay for it using a credit card with their name on it.   

Tim got played by the right wing goons and now he’s trying to keep them from doing irreparable harm to Apple’s long term future. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like Tim as much as I can like any Billionaire. But it wasn’t the working class who rigged the system so that the only options were a disingenuous lady who couldn’t even say genocide was bad, and a geriatric baby who can’t remember what he said last sentence let alone last week. 

Apple could have been pushing Biden for more reforms that would have benefitted society. They could have been working with their unions. Instead Apple like everyone else kept acting like America could keep eating its own tail and it would never get to the head. 

And honestly now it’s too late for Tim to fight back in any meaningful capacity. The only thing that will give America a chance of avoiding complete collapse in the next three years is a heart attack, stroke or some other surprise illness. Or at least something that looks like one of those. 

America’s debt to GDP is out of control and the politicians want to slash taxes for those who need it the least so they can make… more innovative… restaurant delivery apps? 

The politicians are acting like they can squeeze the working class more to dig themselves out of the debt crisis that they’ve been fostering for decades.

America is being sacrificed on the alter of Reaganomics.