verne arase

ralphabet said:

So where is the source of it's AI images? It has to glean images from somewhere to train it's AI tool. Does anyone know?

Betcha they paid publishers, image repositories, and maybe some social media platforms with compliant terms of service to train their models.

Last thing a company like Apple wants is someone claiming their models were trained on stolen IP.

DAalseth said:

There are a few things that would be useful, an improved Siri for example. But there has never in my recollection been a WWDC keynote where I said “Oh F*** no” quite as many times. Many of their headline abilities I will just want to disable as soon as I can and as completely as I can. I AM an artist. I AM a writer. I have no use for AI generating my images and text. 

AI isn't just for generating images or text - it's also used to more correctly understand commands/requests, and is probably used for things like categorizing your emails or searching or identifying objects in your photo library - and interpreting what's happening and with whom in your videos.

There's a lot that can be done with AI including summarizing data.

You don't have to use the rewrite feature - though I suspect you will - and will probably use image manipulation features as well.

Not everything done by generative models has to do with stealing content from the internet.

omasou said:

Will be really interesting to see how these web based platforms, where you are the product, address questions related to privacy.

For sure they cannot offer what Apple is doing.

Also interesting how they played down the Apple data center chips.

I wonder this stuff will be running on M4 Ultra, and if that SoC will include a stronger neural engine.

In the past I believe all the M class SoCs of a given generation shared the same NPU, but the new strategy may scale up the number of NPU cores with higher level chips.

charlesn said:

"Big" improvement over M2? Even Apple marketing isn't trying to make that claim, focusing instead on comparisons with Intel chips and M1. For the sake of argument, let's say the 20% bump in bench testing is accurate... what does that translate to in real world tasks? Is it even 10%? And considering that the vast majority of real world tasks are now handled instantly, how much does a 10% improvement on "instantly" matter? Possibly, professionals who work in processor-intensive tasks that do take time on a daily basis--video editing comes to mind--would benefit if everything was 10% faster. But those people are probably buying Macbook Pros or desktop machines. 

And look, I get it: what was Apple going to do, NOT upgrade the MBAs to M3? Obviously, this needed to happen, if for no reason other than marketing purposes. But this is Apple's conundrum across product lines, except at the pro level: the hardware is already beyond what the vast majority of people will ever demand of it. Apple now needs new and compelling capabilities that require new hardware to drive the rationale for upgrading Apple products. We all know that the M4, M5, M-etc. chips are coming in a year, two, three, whatever. Do you care? Tell me what those machines will be able to DO that my current machines can't and you'll have my attention. 

The biggest determinant of a computer's snappiness - especially for workloads in this machine's target demographic - is single core performance.

No one throughout the course of ownership has ever regretted having a faster machine, and if you get one of these puppies with 16 GB RAM and at least 512 GB storage you'll have eliminated most of the bottlenecks that the target audience for this machine will experience and will handle pretty much any workload leaving plenty of aspirational power for things like low-end video, photo, or audio editing.

The big improvement over M2 means an even bigger improvement over the M1 - and a mind boggling improvement over an Intel-based Mac - all with great battery life and no fan noise whatsoever. This is the machine that Microsoft and Qualcomm urgently want to build, and spoiled Mac users just show their distain when Apple releases it with just a press release.

Heck, this thing can probably handle low-end Blender work because it now features hardware level ray tracing, and will probably handle gaming much better as well.

teejay2012 said:

The EU does not generate enough profit for Apple to be happy about a $2B fine. That is going to hurt. Why for all this, when Apple was responding to DMA and making accommodations for their anti steering practices?... Because Margrethe Vestager is still very angry from losing the Irish tax case, which was over ruled on appeal as it did not provide proof of wrong doing. I think on appeal the same could happen here, as the EU commission is not the same as EU courts which adhere to the law and not vendetta driven. Apple could have allowed more information to music customers of course, but Spotify and Daniel Ek are nasty pieces in this. US tech companies have every right to become paranoid about future business in the EU, as clearly they are being targeted, to the advantage of EU companies. The corruption is obvious imo, but I suppose that is what businesses are all about. In the future, I doubt Apple will leave the EU, but certainly the products and services in the EU will differ, and likely will be more expensive.

I've long held that Apple should begin to manufacture devices for highly regulated markets like the EU which comply with EC regulations and are released some time after Apple releases their world market devices at a higher price to accommodate the additional engineering costs. They could also tack on regulatory fine costs and spread them over the EU devices uniformly.

This would mean that when the EC comes up with bonkers design decisions like all devices need replaceable batteries the whole world won't have to suffer with phones that aren't waterproof or lack inductive charging because a battery and cover being where the inductive charging coil currently sit today.

Of course, Europeans could still try and smuggle in grey market world phones, but that's a matter for the EU and their enforcement agencies to try to stop.

Everyone outside of these regulated countries could also buy the regulated phone but chances are they'd opt for the cheaper world phone (unless for some perverse reason you had the need to carry around a phone with a bunch of replaceable batteries).

IOW, just treat the Europeans and their demands as a cost of doing business, and have a side engineering department whose sole job is refitting a higher cost European iPhone to satisfy the more restrictive European market. Heck, the European phones could even be manufactured in the EU which would contribute to an even higher cost but would keep EU regulators happy.