Marvin

seanj said:

9secondkox2 said:

So now that Twitter is finally being taken seriously, NOW Apple wants out? These advertisers should be ashamed. Nothing but a political shove. 

They can't take about trust and safety while trying to boycott Twitter to ensure it gets hurt. As if their tactic isn't blatantly ovious.

It’s always had a low user-base and failed to grow like other social media networks.

Twitter is one of the most used services in the world with nearly 400 million users:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users

For social media conversation, it is only behind Facebook, WeChat and Weibo.

The ad spend is quite large. Twitter makes nearly 90% of their revenue from ads. This was $4.5b out of $5b in 2021.
This is small relative to Facebook where the ad revenue in 2021 was $115b but it's still a lot of revenue.
Costs were $1.8b direct costs, $1.2b R&D, $1.2b marketing, $0.6b general/admin, $0.7b litigation.
Net income was loss of $0.5b.
In the recent quarter (before Musk takeover), the losses have been $340m, which is nearly $4m/day.

Firing 3500 employees likely saved around $0.5b/year in payroll costs and there's an aim to cut some of the direct infrastructure costs by up to $1b/year at the risk of service outages under heavy load:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-orders-twitter-cut-infrastructure-213643529.html

Musk owns $200b in other companies. If he needed to bankroll Twitter, at $5b/year, he could for a while and it's not likely it would lose $5b/year. Plus Twitter has around $6b in current assets so most likely sustainable for at least 3 years.

AppleInsider said:

It's unclear why Musk thinks that Twitter is entitled to the advertising dollars since the companies are executing the free speech rights they are entitled to in pulling the ads.

It demonstrates what Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey had conversations about, as does the EU trying to dictate what's permitted under their rules:

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/04/26/eu-warns-elon-musk-that-twitter-must-play-by-its-tough-new-rules

Advertisers threatening to defund Twitter and the EU threatening fines for speech that doesn't conform to their preference is restricting the freedom for people to say what they want. Restrictions are necessary if the aim is to have meaningful, civil conversations but having corporations and politicians determining this standard for public conversation is not ideal. People just assume that it's right for elected representatives to determine the status quo but imagine a time in history when people believed the Earth was the center of the universe and people were prosecuted for saying otherwise:

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-accused-of-heresy

The modern equivalent would be that if Galileo spread his (now known to be correct) ideas on Twitter, companies would stop running ads and the EU would fine Twitter unless they were removed.

This is why Musk wants to move Twitter's revenue stream to subscriptions because it takes away the control of the conversation from corporations and puts it in control of the people having the conversations. Most of the normally suppressed content is unlikely to be Galileo quality information, the vast majority of suppressed content is justifiable but once in a while there will be information suppressed that shouldn't be.

There's probably a way to make it work well for most people. What people want is control over their association. Companies don't want their brands to be shown next to offensive content because it makes it look like they are directly funding it. Twitter would need to identify offensive content/language and users and isolate the advertising from it and give advertisers assurance that this is happening. They can give advertisers the option to only run ads on selected groups of users with different grades of content.

Tweets from the most followed account would generally be safe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_accounts

If the replying comments have offensive content, they can hide the ads when a user opens the comments or hide those replies as sensitive and hide the ads when they are opened.

It would be easier to manage if the topics were tagged by category. The most likely comments to be offensive will be political. They can have a bot tag political comments and allow advertisers to avoid those conversations.

eightzero said:

OK, I'll 'fess up here. I do have a twitter account, and I follow a few entertaining accounts (at least for now). But what are these "twitter advertisers" you speak of? I'm looking at a twitter client on my desktop, and I don't see any ads. Yes, if I click on something there, I'm directed to something that does, but all I see is the 140 characters. Am I doing something wrong, because...boy...if I'm missing ads on twitter, I feel really like I'm missing out.

Ad-based Tweets get promoted into people's feeds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xsongkm8dg&t=1136s

When corporate accounts like Apple's sends out a tweet, it's probably an ad campaign for a new product:

https://twitter.com/Apple/status/1435307157944078336

https://twitter.com/Apple/status/1569424565637611521

It's quite an effective way to advertise because people don't know they are ads. Apple's main account seem to not be loading past tweets in the main feed, maybe it's just a glitch or maybe that's how they suspended the campaigns:

https://twitter.com/Apple

Toortog said:

But isn't one of the main reasons for wanting 3nm Apple Silicon is because it was suppose to run cooler.   Maybe the 3nm design used isn't as efficient as the 5nm so the new chips are having to work harder to do the same task and in turn generating more heat.   

There's a thorough thermal test done here and the 3nm chip were expected to be running cooler than this:



The iPhone 15 series measured 2C hotter than the equivalent 14 models (15:46). They increased the clock speeds to get faster performance but CPU only really gains from the clock speed increase as shown in the test.

The performance is still good, at 18:09, they test Resident Evil Village vs PC GPUs at the same settings and it starts at 1/2 an Nvidia 1060 then throttles to 1/3, while consuming around 4W of power without MetalFX. It performs almost the same as a Steam Deck at under 1/3 the power.

At 19:00, they say that the iPhone thermal dissipation isn't as good as it could be. They obviously don't want to use heavier heatsinks though nor rare materials in such a high volume product.

It's not good having such high temperatures regularly because it can damage the battery, if people are gaming on these, they'd be best to have a special cooling case. Gaming will probably increase with the new capability, performance and new higher-end games:



The USB-C video out can be plugged into the TV (8:00) and it works with the Steam Deck dock.

mpantone said:

The film industry continues to use this benchmark because it's a pretty good indication of a film's popularity relative to the most important film consumer market in the world: the USA.

Seems like there's too many variables for it to be a reliable measure. The opening weekend total puts it behind Cocaine Bear:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2023/?grossesOption=totalGrosses&sort=openingWeekendGross&ref_=bo_yld__resort#table

But worldwide revenue for Cocaine Bear was $88m:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/releasegroup/gr445207045/

Even though they are in the same range, Killers of the Flower Moon is already above this:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/releasegroup/gr3466220037/

There's a big variation in the split between domestic and international from one movie to another because some movies mainly appeal to US audiences. Taylor Swift's movie, like Cocaine Bear, has a roughly 75:25 domestic/international split:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/releasegroup/gr4238103045/

Oppenheimer is 35:65. Killers of the Flower Moon so far is around 50:50.

The opening weekend for Oppenheimer was just below Taylor Swift's but eventually made 2x domestically and 4.5x internationally.
Fast X domestic total was below Taylor Swift's but made 80% internationally.

Killers of the Flower Moon is 38th worldwide this year:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/?ref_=bo_nb_yld_tab

The top 20 mostly makes sense. This movies feels like it should at least be in position 20-30 but that would need another $40m. If it has enough time left in the theaters, maybe it can make it.

It has good reviews at least so it should measure well on streaming and the more of this quality of exclusive content, the better the Apple TV service will be.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/killers_of_the_flower_moon
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/oppenheimer_2023

multimedia said:

I think the mother should petition Tim Apple to gift her the money lost back from his personal account in the spirit of Christmas. He should empathize with her for this unfortunate technology related mistake which has really put her in dire straights.

The game developer (Sega) should return the money, they're the ones who got it, it's not a loss for them, they're just virtual coins that aren't worth anything. It's obscene that game devs are milking players like this, especially knowing they target children.

There are a number of reasons a parent wouldn't notice the bills. They might not check the email account tied to the Apple account, they may have setup an email for the kid. They saw the credit card bill earlier but didn't know where the charges came from.

While they should have been able to prevent it, Apple could easily implement a policy that requires the card holder to enter their card details for any cumulative purchases on an individual app over $200 and again above $1000. This kind of thing would never happen again. Charges like this should be explicitly opt-in for the card holder.

foregoneconclusion said:

In January AI reported that Apple Arcade had a monthly user base that was on par with Steam and double what services like GeForce Now have.

This site reported roughly 30m subs in the US based on a survey (potentially 60m worldwide):

https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/for-years-we-said-to-take-games-efforts-of-these-companies-seriously-now-they-are-serious-players

Nintendo, Steam, Geforce Now and Arcade have different revenue models though.
For Nintendo, people buy the games and pay for the sub on top so for 5 popular games (10m units each), people pay $60 x 5 x 10m + $4/month x 30m = $3.1b.
For Geforce Now (plays Steam games), people do the same so for 5 games, $60 x 5 x 10m = $3b to different game devs, $11/month x 30m = $330m/month to Nvidia.
For Apple Arcade, it's $7/month for everything so $7/month x 30m = $210m/month split between Apple and devs. It can work out to be a fair bit lower revenue vs the others.

Microsoft Game Pass has around 30m subs too and they charge $10-17/month for everything, like Arcade. They reportedly make around $3b/year revenue and spend $1b/year on acquiring game licenses for the service.

Apple's revenue shouldn't be far off Game Pass but on mobile, the most popular games don't change much over years so they take the bulk of the revenue all the time.

$2.5b/year revenue is divided by 200 games on Arcade. If Apple takes 30%, 70% divided by 200 games should be $8.7m per game but the engagement can be 100x higher on a popular game vs unpopular so the top 10 out of 200 games might get 30% of the revenue ($75m/year each) and bottom 10, 0.3% ($750k/year) of the revenue. From the developer comments, it's probably even more skewed, the top 100 App Store games (out of over 2 million) take over 60% of the revenue.

This is quite common with the games industry where low-budget/indie games get squeezed for revenue and have to close studios.

https://tech4gamers.com/game-studios-shut-down-2023/

One of the closed studios in that link released this game (2600 ratings):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/742420/Saints_Row/
https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2023/02/saints-row-sales-flop-forces-parent-company-to-change-its-policy-on-new-games

Compare to one of the most successful games last year released at the same time (500,000 ratings):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086940/Baldurs_Gate_3/

jgreg728 said:

Apple is so godd**n stupid with their “gaming efforts”. Here you have a full fledged service in the middle of the App Store - the only App Store on iOS tvOS and iPadOS - along with announcements and grandstanding of how console level games can be played on their newest hardware. WHY AREN’T MORE AAA GAMES MAKING IT TO ARCADE???? Why aren’t Apple TVs being made with it in mind??? Why didn’t they try to get games like RE4 and Death Stranding on the service?? Arcade has the infrastructure and hardware it needs to be a mainstream Steam, but Apple just has their heads up their asses when it comes to reaching the potential of their services in general. They need to do better.

Games like RE4 are expensive to make and it's new so it makes more selling standalone, same way movies make more in the cinema than on streaming. RE4 sold over 6m copies at $60 = $360m:

https://www.eurogamer.net/resident-evil-4-remake-becomes-series-fastest-selling-entry-now-sold-64m

Apple Arcade is $7/month x 30m subs = $210m/month. If it had 5% of the engagement out of 200 games, they'd make $14m/month. Standalone sales on Mac could be 1m units = $60m.

If the engagement held up over time, it's worthwhile but not worth the risk when it's new. Microsoft Game Pass doesn't have RE4 either, just the older 2 and 3 and on PC this is on the higher $17/month tier:

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/games#pcgames

Of course Apple could pay ~$100m for big games and they probably wouldn't lose much on it. Especially if the games work on Mac too.

It sounds like it may not be the Arcade service underperforming but that Apple is trying to pivot the service to more premium, high quality titles from big developers like NBA, Disney Dreamlight Valley, Hello Kitty, Sonic, Football Manager:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/11/8-new-games-and-more-than-50-updates-coming-to-apple-arcade-this-holiday-season/

The higher engagement with bigger budget titles will massively reduce the share for lower end titles. Maybe they can introduce a revenue floor if they don't have one so that lower-end devs get something for the effort e.g allocate 5% of revenue evenly across all titles on the service then 95% based on engagement.

I'm sure Apple knows that investing in big budget games is the way to drive subscriptions just like big budget movies for Apple TV+ and inevitably lower tier studios will get less support as a result.

daveinpublic said:

So if someone offers a game for free, and it gets 1,000,000 downloads, and it made the developer $200K in a year....

That developer went from only giving Unity $20K total, to now $200K per month. In one year it will cost them 120x more. It will bankrupt them.

That's the fastest change in price structure I've ever seen. Your game went from making you $180K in a year, to costing you $200K each month.

I think they've messed up on their pricing structure. If you were making money from the games, you'd likely have a Pro license, which is about $2k/year.

The Pro license gives you 1,000,000 free installs. If you get more downloads than this and make more than $1m, like say 100m downloads, the charge per download goes down to $0.02 for most of the other 99m downloads. That's still crazy though at ~$2m because it could be more than you make if it's a free-to-play game.

These changes happen when a company has been mismanaged and is struggling financially. Unity has only recently made a profit and has been losing money all the time until then and not a small amount - billions in losses.



Just like what happened with Reddit, they come up with a crazy plan on how to make money and are prepared to burn every bridge because they are in survival mode.

Reddit was in the position to do it and will be ok. Unity isn't in the position to do this. They aren't the leading game engine developer. It won't be easy for every developer to switch to another engine. Genshin Impact is built on Unity for example and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make but a lot of the cost is asset creation and code, which doesn't have to be remade from scratch.

Unity earnings are here:

https://investors.unity.com/financials/sec-filings/default.aspx
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U

The worst part isn't so much the pricing but that they can change the terms whenever they want, to arbitrarily harmful terms and game devs investing so much time and capital have to deal with it. Once that trust is broken, devs will abandon the platform. The question is to what? While Unreal is an obvious choice, it's a very heavy engine for Indie developers and is mainly designed for high-end AAA games with a steep learning curve.

Maybe this will be a wake up call for game studios that there needs to be an engine separate from an individual company's or even an individual company owner's (Sweeney) problems. A lot of companies already make their own engine, they could easily all share an engine and contribute to it. It would be best to be a minimal core engine that companies can build out with their own extras.

The core engine would mainly need to cover the renderer and the target platform deployment, which are the hardest parts. Once you can handle realistic lighting and shading and deploy to multiple devices, the rest can be handled by small 3rd party code libraries.

hagar said:

9secondkox2 said:

It’s only right. This isn’t some frivolous indie app.abbreviating the name to be cool.  This is a social media giant undergoing a legitimate rebrand. X is its name so X should be its listing. Anything else would be asinine. 

Tell that to Google. Search for X and see what happens. 

This is the most insane rebrand ever. 

The rebrand makes sense in the context of what the future intention is for the company, which is to handle payments. The Twitter brand is only relevant for messaging. TwitPay, TweetPay, Twitter Pay don't fit.

Elon Musk wants to make another Paypal but mixed with social media instead of eBay. It's resurrecting an old company brand from over 20 years ago X.com, which was renamed Paypal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal

The parent company is X Holdings and there are suggestions Musk might try to wrap all his companies (Tesla, SpaceX, X.com/Twitter) under X Holdings similar to Alphabet with Google.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-x-everything-app-finances-twitter-payments-2023-7?op=1

Online financial services are becoming more popular but haven't replaced big banks: Revolut, Wise, Venmo, Swish etc. Some of them are banks so they offer the same kind of insurance as a bank and are much more accessible. Some also allow direct trading in stocks and crypto ( https://www.thestreet.com/cryptocurrency/elon-musk-x-twitter-dogecoin ).

Most have only a few million users. Venmo has 90 million. Paypal has over 400 million. WeChat Pay has 900 million. AliPay has 1.3 billion.

X.com will be setup similar to WeChat Pay, owned by Tencent Holdings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat_Pay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat

The messaging brand could have been XChat or Xpress (likely all used already) but whatever brands they use for the separate services, X will be the parent brand, which Musk has used in the sense of a Mathematical variable:

https://news.yahoo.com/x-xii-pronounce-name-elon-220808895.html

Alphabet is an alphabet of company names, X is a variable that can be assigned to anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com (X.com redirects to Twitter)

jeffharris said:

What about old Mac games like titles from Ambrosia Software. Mars Rising, etc?
There was a developer that released a whole bunch of pinball games.
Or Hellcats. 

That would be great!

OS 9 can be run via UTM. Apple's change here may have been influenced by the alt store, which will be one of the first 3rd party app stores:

https://www.theverge.com/24100979/altstore-europe-app-marketplace-price-games
https://altstore.io/

The featured apps on that store are emulators like Delta, UTM, Dolphin:

https://getutm.app/

Here is UTM running OS 9:



Emulation speed on M-series chips is very good, some people think M-chips are overpowered for mobile devices but the benefit shows with CPU-intensive apps:



Nintendo recently sued an emulator developer:

https://www.polygon.com/24090351/nintendo-2-4-million-yuzu-switch-emulator-settlement-lawsuit

Some emulators can run current-gen games, which can result in the company losing money, e.g Nintendo Switch games like Mario Wonder and Zelda:





Nintendo could make a lot of money with an official emulator for mobile for the old systems, especially if they legally supply ROMs.

rob53 said:

Apple keeps pushing laptops because they feel portability is what everyone wants.

Apple's not pushing people to laptops, they just sell what people want. The trend towards laptops and mobile has happened everywhere.

Laptop also doesn't mean confined to a small display. A desktop confines people to a large display and fixed location. Many people opt for the best of both (Apple employees use this setup in their offices):







This allows for a larger display than the iMac as well as options like OLED and matching dual displays and should the need arise to take the laptop on vacation, to bed, to the lounge, to work or take it for repair, unplug it and it's portable.

chasm said:

mayfly said:

Is it just me, or are those before and after exactly the same?

Read the caption on the picture more carefully. In the first image on the left, you are seeing the entire image. As the caption says, the artist used the generative feature to add more landscape to the BOTTOM of the picture, which is evident in the image on the right.

I would certainly agree that a better example would have been converting a 4:3 photo into a 16:9 photo, but the example in the article does show what it is claiming to show.

It can do even better than that. Here's an example photo:

https://www.theaussieflashpacker.com/2015/10/top-10-most-beautiful-lakes-in-world.html

Uncrop image, select inside, invert, generative fill with no prompt:



It can still give some bad results for people, animals etc with things not drawn correctly like hands but it's getting very good and fast at doing some things. It will be a huge time saver when it comes to doing quick mockups or marketing images.