AbcdEft said:

Their Greater China branch is even making a higher price tag at product launch in order to slow the third-party sellers' price drop. The starting price of the iPad Pro with M4 in mainland is about $120 higher than almost everywhere on this planet. Although the third-party price is still the same and dropping. Fierce competition is happening in China every day, high-end market especially. The record low price of iPhone 15 Pro is below $800/128 GB. Chinese users use their phones heavily, bad thermal design, A17 Pro's power issues, low-freq PWM screen flickering method and bad cellular connectivity is within their worries. Maybe that's all going to improve with the next-gen launch, but the lack of design change might just be the issue. The iPhone 13 Pro/Pro Max users there were laughing, still laughing now, and will laugh for couple years to come, for making the right iPhone choice ever. No ground-breaking updates since then, but worse thermal perf and battery life. Looking forward to iPhone 16/17 series, but due to the economy, can't say it would be better.

danvm said:

tmay said:

avon b7 said:

chasm said:

22july2013 said:

Is Apple's model designed to be small enough to run natively on an iPhone? Are all the other models you mentioned small enough to run on an iPhone? (It's a sincere question; I don't know the answer. It sounds like you are comparing Apples to Oranges.)

Max_Troll isn't a good source of accurate information, so let me answer that one for you: Apple's models are designed to be as much on-device as possible, but of course the whole of human experience and knowledge isn't going to fit, so some tasks will be quickly handed to Apple's Private Cloud Compute online if needed.

For queries that involve specialized knowledge (like medical or legal advice, as examples, or other specialty areas), Apple will offer to send your query privately to OpenAI for an answer, but that requires your permission each time its needed. OpenAI doesn't get to collect your data, or train itself on your queries.

For more about how this all works, I'd suggest watching the "Apple Intelligence" video on Apple's YouTube channel rather than the entire keynote.

All that said, this article is about LLM and dataset models Apple is offering the wider AI community, not the specific models it will use on any of its own products. Apple has figured out how to create models that are modest in size AND use less computing power than the offerings from other companies, so it is offering those compression techniques and computing algorithms to the wider community.

That's a fair stab at an answer but, to be fair, claims in the article like this are off the mark:

"Apple's ability to create incredibly compact yet powerful AI models is unequaled in the industry."

There is a huge amount of research going into tiny LLM's and it seems new advances come out every week. Open source or not, and many are specifically tailored to specific areas or languages. Apple is unlikely to challenge native Chinese models for the Chinese language. And what about Arabic? 

When I say 'huge' I mean it's very difficult to know exactly what might appear and keep track of it all. 

Earbuds can make great use of NLP and everything related to voice biometrics, bone, conduction, audio processing etc. Little more is needed there. 

Then this:

"In debuting both Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute at its WWDC conference in June, the company silenced critics who had claimed that Apple was behind the industry on artificial intelligence applications in its devices"

The critics were simply pointing out reality. No equivalent shipping product from Apple was available. That remains the case today and will remain the case until something actually ships. Sometime late this year on a small range of models and well into next year for the rest of what was announced.

To all intents and purposes 'Apple Intelligence' was more akin to a placeholder at WWDC to generate buzz and let people know what's coming.

That's fine but we still have to wait to see what eventually comes out of the pipe and how it performs. 

The more the better IMO but the 'industry' isn't slacking and is actually shipping. 

To date, AAPL has been rewarded nicely vs MSFT, so the market looks very favorably on Apple's AI implementation plans.

Perhaps those "critics" were entirely wrong?

MS CoPilot, as an example, has subsequently received quite a bit of "well earned" bad press by early users.

Perhaps the rush to deliver has consequences?

More to the point, critics totally ignored the fact that Apple has something on the order of 1.5 billion iPhone users, most of whom will upgrade in the future to more powerful AI hardware the does in essence allow increasingly larger models.

Calling this AI "race" at the starting gate, as you are oft to do, isn't a determining factor in Apple ultimate AI success. 

I could be wrong, but the only bad press MS had was with Windows 11 Recall, and not with CoPilot.  On the contrary, I have seen CoPilot working.  And while it's not perfect, it's very good, especially with the MS Office integration. 

avon b7 said:

chasm said:

22july2013 said:

Is Apple's model designed to be small enough to run natively on an iPhone? Are all the other models you mentioned small enough to run on an iPhone? (It's a sincere question; I don't know the answer. It sounds like you are comparing Apples to Oranges.)

Max_Troll isn't a good source of accurate information, so let me answer that one for you: Apple's models are designed to be as much on-device as possible, but of course the whole of human experience and knowledge isn't going to fit, so some tasks will be quickly handed to Apple's Private Cloud Compute online if needed.

For queries that involve specialized knowledge (like medical or legal advice, as examples, or other specialty areas), Apple will offer to send your query privately to OpenAI for an answer, but that requires your permission each time its needed. OpenAI doesn't get to collect your data, or train itself on your queries.

For more about how this all works, I'd suggest watching the "Apple Intelligence" video on Apple's YouTube channel rather than the entire keynote.

All that said, this article is about LLM and dataset models Apple is offering the wider AI community, not the specific models it will use on any of its own products. Apple has figured out how to create models that are modest in size AND use less computing power than the offerings from other companies, so it is offering those compression techniques and computing algorithms to the wider community.

That's a fair stab at an answer but, to be fair, claims in the article like this are off the mark:

"Apple's ability to create incredibly compact yet powerful AI models is unequaled in the industry."

There is a huge amount of research going into tiny LLM's and it seems new advances come out every week. Open source or not, and many are specifically tailored to specific areas or languages. Apple is unlikely to challenge native Chinese models for the Chinese language. And what about Arabic? 

When I say 'huge' I mean it's very difficult to know exactly what might appear and keep track of it all. 

Earbuds can make great use of NLP and everything related to voice biometrics, bone, conduction, audio processing etc. Little more is needed there. 

Then this:

"In debuting both Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute at its WWDC conference in June, the company silenced critics who had claimed that Apple was behind the industry on artificial intelligence applications in its devices"

The critics were simply pointing out reality. No equivalent shipping product from Apple was available. That remains the case today and will remain the case until something actually ships. Sometime late this year on a small range of models and well into next year for the rest of what was announced.

To all intents and purposes 'Apple Intelligence' was more akin to a placeholder at WWDC to generate buzz and let people know what's coming.

That's fine but we still have to wait to see what eventually comes out of the pipe and how it performs. 

The more the better IMO but the 'industry' isn't slacking and is actually shipping. 

avon b7 said:

tmay said:

avon b7 said:

igorsky said:

avon b7 said:

rob53 said:

I really don't care about how many phones China has sold. All this garbage about percentages. Apple sold 45.2M phones in China. That's still a lot. Apple continues to sell millions of phones of every year. I'd rather see total sales figures than percentages of phones, especially when you include garbage phones that are only(?) sold in China. 

Definitely not 'garbage' and if you want a folding or flip phone, Apple isn't even in that game. Neither is it in the 'smart car' market so if you're looking for that you only have a very limited Car Play option while others offer the whole integration feast. 

What exactly is the point of these examples? Flip phone sales are a rounding error and not nearly as popular as Samsung and Chinese OEMs would like you to believe. And CarPlay is an add-on and not a product. 

“Shipments have increased” is the takeaway from this article and everything else is just noise. 

Rounding error or not, they have an impact and YoY sales are through the roof. Of the millions of folding phones sold, some will be lost iPhone sales and Apple doesn't offer a competing product. 

Sales are already tough in China as seen by almost continuous discounting. 

Car Play as an 'add on' just adds to the problem as competitors offer deeply integrated solutions. 

https://apnews.com/article/china-economy-plenum-jinping-gdp-34ed1e8bf2c953c3ba799501415c6b26

China’s economy slowed in the last quarter as weak consumer demand dragged on growth

There are a ton of links like this, due in fact to China's showing economy that looks to have been driven into a ditch by Xi. So when you talk about discounts, you would be better off noting that China's industry looks to be deflationary, so everyone is discounting, not just Apple.

Yet Apple does in fact continue to garner something over 80% of worldwide smartphone profits. Selling lots of models, which is common for China's OEM's, isn't a path to profitability, yet you diss Apple for not yet having added foldables to its offering. Pretty much an indication that foldables are a long way from mainstream profitability.


Deflation is a threat in China;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azW8vygS_mU

Why China’s Deflation Is More Dangerous Than High Inflation | WSJ

China loses even more foreign investment;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vWCzfX9MI4

How Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism is killing China’s economy | Business Beyond

There you go again! 

Look, phone sales are up across the board, according to the report. 

Obviously, the general Chinese economy is not of much importance overall in terms of smartphone sales. The primary indicator for the health of the general economy is car sales, not smartphone sales. 

Where it is more important is for Apple because it offers nowhere near the breadth of product pricing as the competition.

That leaves it with just one big card to play: discounting.

Now, discounting among the competition is irrelevant because it is not new. It is part of Industry. Always has been. 

Where it is new is for Apple which is famously discount-shy and tends to use indirect discounting (via trade ins etc). 

Allowing direct discounting for so long is worthy of note. 

avon b7 said:

igorsky said:

avon b7 said:

rob53 said:

I really don't care about how many phones China has sold. All this garbage about percentages. Apple sold 45.2M phones in China. That's still a lot. Apple continues to sell millions of phones of every year. I'd rather see total sales figures than percentages of phones, especially when you include garbage phones that are only(?) sold in China. 

Definitely not 'garbage' and if you want a folding or flip phone, Apple isn't even in that game. Neither is it in the 'smart car' market so if you're looking for that you only have a very limited Car Play option while others offer the whole integration feast. 

What exactly is the point of these examples? Flip phone sales are a rounding error and not nearly as popular as Samsung and Chinese OEMs would like you to believe. And CarPlay is an add-on and not a product. 

“Shipments have increased” is the takeaway from this article and everything else is just noise. 

Rounding error or not, they have an impact and YoY sales are through the roof. Of the millions of folding phones sold, some will be lost iPhone sales and Apple doesn't offer a competing product. 

Sales are already tough in China as seen by almost continuous discounting. 

Car Play as an 'add on' just adds to the problem as competitors offer deeply integrated solutions. 

China’s economy slowed in the last quarter as weak consumer demand dragged on growth

Why China’s Deflation Is More Dangerous Than High Inflation | WSJ

How Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism is killing China’s economy | Business Beyond