dewme

Holy cow, here comes the invasion of the drama queens and other self annointed armchair experts who think that can run Apple way better than Tim Cook runs Apple.  Tim Cook has done a fabulous job for Apple's stakeholders and has created enormous wealth for so many people. That doesn't mean that Tim Cook should stay around forever. He's skippered the ship amazingly well and kept it out of harms way. All great leaders must eventually step down and the most important job that Tim Cook must do at this point in his leadership role is to ensure that a suitable successor is being prepared to assume the CEO role in as bump-less a fashion as possible. This is obviously something Tim Cook does not do alone and the planning for his transition has been in the works for a long time. 

When I think about Siri and how it relates to Apple Intelligence my honest take on it is that I don't know what I'm missing. I mean that literally. I've never been a big user of Siri so I haven't been laying in bed at night staring at the ceiling and wondering "What is to become of our little cyber helper who hasn't been able to get past third grade?" Siri being stuck where it has been for more years than anyone at Apple would like to admit hasn't bothered me at all. I've undoubtedly enjoyed some of the ML conveniences that Apple has added here and there in their operating system, and quickly disabled other things that I found were annoying for me personally, but the future of Siri has never really been on my mind. That's just me, but I know there are lots of other people out there that do have legitimate needs and desires for Apple's automation and intelligent agents to bring more capabilities and conveniences to their lives.

That said, I have no reservations at all calling out Apple for how they handled the launch of the iPhone 16 product line. They overpromised and underdelivered on the value that Apple Intelligence meant to both the iPhone 16 and the latest operating systems. It was impossible to watch an Apple iPhone advertisement without a gushing pitch for Apple Intelligence and how it was a transformational addition that made buying the latest iPhone so very attractive. The problem was that Apple Intelligence was still doughy on the counter and had yet to be rolled out and baked. In the ensuing months it went from cookie dough to half baked, if we're being very generous. Those who got all excited when they smelled the cookies baking are still wondering when all those promised goodies are going to be taken out of the oven. If I bought an iPhone 16 to bring Apple Intelligence into my life, I would have a little twinge of buyer's remorse over the past several months. My exact thoughts would be, "Hell, I could've just waited for the iPhone 17 or maybe the iPhone 18, dammit, and be another year or two out from its obsolescence day of reckoning."

Finally, I will still admit that there is part of me that believes Apple calling their AI "Apple Intelligence" was more of a chaff cloud than a grand enlightenment by the Apple executives. It was easy to say that "Hey, we're not behind on our 'artificial intelligence' programs because we aren't doing 'artificial intelligence,' we are doing 'Apple Intelligence'." Yeah, sure, and that furry four legged barking and drooling mammal you just adopted from the pound is not a dog. It's a dog, admit it.

I disagree with the declaration that Google is a monopoly. Those who are making these assertions have very little understanding of the dynamics and nature of today’s technology driven products and how their growth and spread happens due to networking effects. 

That store really needs a rethink. In addition to being too small, it is also way too hidden and inconspicuous. It feels like it's in a back alley and like it was wedged in as an afterthought. Crocker Park is fairly new and is built around a new theme of being a quaint village atmosphere with a mix of retail and residential, much like the Apple Store in the Easton Town Center in Columbus. With the not so slow extinction of the cavernous mega malls from the 60s through the 80s and the move to more quaint and outdoorsy and mixed-use malls, the Apple Stores in these new malls shouldn't feel like they would be equally at home in the old dinosaur malls. Apple of course sets its own theme, but they need to maintain their place of prominence while still fitting into the new mall aesthetic that has arrived in in the past couple of decades. The bottom line factor is that these new mall settings are where people want to shop and where they feel safe in comparison to some of the cavernous old style malls where half or more of the storefronts are blanked out and the cops are often being called to break up one thing or another.

programmer said:

keithw said:

While it's nice that the M3 Ultra is now finally out, why did it take them over a year to release it?  (The M3 line came out on October 30, 2023!) Why didn't they release the M4 Max Studio at the same time as the M4 Max MBP?  If they had, I may have saved a few thousand $$$ since I got tired of waiting and bought the MBP.   And is the single core performance of the M3 Ultra the same as the M4 Max? Enquiring minds want to know...  But I guess with the 512MB memory capacity and the 80 graphics cores on top of the 32 CPU cores, the M3 Ultra should be killer LLM machine.

The thing people don’t seem to understand when whining about not getting this or that is that these products take a huge development effort to create.  And then when they have been designed, there is a complicated balancing act about fab capacities and yields.  This isn’t some blokes with a drill press pumping out aluminum parts from their garage.  This is light years beyond that in terms of complexity.  Apple (and the rest of the industry) are pulling off miracles, and forum trolls pour hate on them because doing that takes no brain cells and you don’t even have to get off the couch.

If I were to speculate wildly, I would suppose that the process node (N3B) used for the M3 series had some issues, and pretty much only Apple used it.  So to address the issues, Apple moved faster on the M4 using the newer process (N3E), and eschewed the ultra connector to get that line out faster.  This may have freed up M3-capable capacity, which they can now use for the M3 Ultra… and IIRC (and this is even more speculative) the first process did have some advantages over the later one (they removed features from N3E to make it work better), which may play better to what high end chips like the ultra need.  So rather than spending the time to make the ultra connector work using N3E, they are probably focused on N3P, which is apparently what comes next.

Thank you x 10 for injecting some sanity into the conversation. First of all, none of the so-called Apple soothsayers who claim to know what Apple’s plans really are are privy to what Apple is actually planning that’s not been externally announced. 

In my opinion the base iPad has always been an incredible bargain for what it delivers at its price point. The new model does not change my opinion at all. If Apple Intelligence was fully baked and transformational I would say its omission is a big deal. But in 2025, not really. If Apple really starts to deliver significant improvements with a clear purpose with Apple Intelligence, delivering things that no third party AI can deliver because they are too far from Apple’s core, next years base iPad lacking Apple Intelligence will be a serious oversight.