Blizzard

cia said:

Portal, Portal 2, Peggle, Peggle Nights, Bioshock Infinite.  The only reason I still have an old machine working is to play these games. The fact the developers won't update the games is already a pain, now Steam is killing support on their end also?

These aren't no name games either.

You can't even buy an updated version anywhere for any of these games.  They are literally killing them unless you have a old machine around dedicated to just these.

paulmacintosh said:

Right now, AI is a gimmick. Until it’s actually useful, it won’t make much impact. As I once read online, on a comment thread: people don’t want AI to do art and poetry so they can do their washing (laundry), they want AI to do their washing/laundry so they can do art and poetry. The Microsofts, Googles and Samsungs of the tech industry are falling over each other to go headfirst in the wrong direction. Let them; Napoleon would. Slow and steady wins the race. As in the nursery rhyme; and the parable: it was the tortoise, not the hare, which won the race; and the guy who took the low road got to Scotland before the guy who took the (glitzy/gimmicky) high road.

nubus said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

blastdoor said:

This earnings report in NO WAY proves that people worried about Apple's ability to capitalize on AI are wrong. 

This report absolutely proves that the analysts who cried about this quarter because of Apple Intelligence were wrong.

The report does indeed prove that analysts were wrong about the quarter. Currency tailwinds (likely 2%), tariff scare moving sales forward (1%), access to $42 billion in government incentives from China (MSRP of iPhone 16 Pro dropped 30%!), strong F1 opening, limited negative impact of tariffs, and boost in services.The analysts didn't see all of that.

But @blastdoor is right in the sense that AI is holding Apple back. While Apple delivered 24% growth in services then MS hit 34%. Microsoft is also less exposed to tariffs. The series of strategic blunders and product misfires from Apple caused this, and the quarter just expanded it to nearly a trillion gap.

And Apple might be heading towards another strategic miscalculation. Apple is trying to keep AI on-device. It will increase the cost of devices and expose them to tariffs while the quality of AI on-device remains limited by storage, battery, memory, and processing power. MS is mostly doing AI as services delivering tariff free recurring income with constantly updated models.

Apple is betting on on-device to the point where we have a datacenter gap (thanks Dr. Strangelove). The Environmental Progress Report from Apple is showing 6.7% growth in data centers from 2023 to 2024. Microsoft is growing 33% per year (both numbers based on energy consumption). This gap can define what Apple is capable of doing when looking ahead.