jdiamond

An easy misstep, but no excuse for Siri.  A typical leading foundation model takes about 2 months to train on ~16,000 GPUs.  I don't know where Apple was on that scale, but let's say as a result of stinginess, Apple took 4 months instead of 2 months to train a model.  Doesn't explain why 2 years later they have nothing.  Or why they didn't have something already back in 2023.

photography guy said:

I feel like there's an opportunity for Apple here. Apple has notoriously high margins on their hardware—as much as 50% on some products, I think—whereas other manufacturers have always had razor thin margins; it's why the "Apple products are so expensive" trope has endured as long as it has. Apple has some room to narrow margins on some products, maybe even take some losses in some lines, so long as those losses can be balanced by other lines. Profits will take a massive hit either way. All other companies will have to sharply increase prices on their products to compensate for the tariffs, whereas Apple could keep their prices the same, and use that in their marketing: "While others are increasing prices on their products, the new MacBook Air still starts at $999. And we're introducing the new iMac e [following the iPhone 16 e nomenclature], also starting at $999."

It all depends what that ~40% margin really is.  It costs Apple a ton to design and sell and support this stuff.  On Apple's last quarterly, they reported 29% net income, some of which they gave back to shareholders.  So they can't pay all the tariffs.  Apple could indeed leverage their position to pay more of the tariffs than other manufacturers, but remember, Apple as a company is not designed for high volume - look how crowded Apple stores are already.  My guess is they could lower their margins on the cheapest models (and probably cut their specs), while increasing the price on higher end models.  But remember, the vast bulk of their sales come from the cheapest models, and you can't make that up with a few $10,000 Macbook Pros.  Geez, if an 8 TB HD cost $1,200 now, think what it might cost in the future!

Remember there are two different types of businesses.  You can own 90% of the market and make 10% of the profit, or own 10% of the market and make 90% of the profit.

Also ignored the part where he claimed they were all clear because the texting group had been vetted. 

I can relate - something weird about iOS 18 - it's been giving me all kinds of incorrect suggestions of who it thinks someone is.

Kinda ironic, given that when I need to type, I use a keyboard cover with my iPads. . Maybe they could find a way to integrate a keyboard cover, then the entire foldable thing would just be about a more compact way to carry it around.

Just another point of reference:  My daughter went to film school, and her instructor *used* to use FCP for most of the curriculum.  But after the FCP-X change, he dropped it from the program, and the students now learn using Davinci Resolve and other tools.  So Apple was as entrenched as they could possibly get and they threw it all away.  I think the main point isn't how much money Apple made from FCP, but how it enabled people to use Mac Hardware and have state of the art, fully optimized software for their needs.  I think Windows was the ultimate example of how it's the available software that sells the hardware. If you're making a film and you have to use software that doesn't run well on a Mac, then you can't use a Mac.