chasm

Amazon sells everything you say to Alexa. Apple does not sell anything you say to anyone.

That said, I’m hoping that HomeKit will get a big refocus/upgrading over the next year or two.

But they hurt the HELL out of small businesses both in the issuing country and the exporting country.

Tariffs are a constitutionally enumerated power of CONGRESS (Article 1, Section 8), though Congress ceded to the executive branch the power to negotiate trade agreements in 1934. Some additional tariff authority was ceded to the executive in laws passed in 1962 and 1974, which was a mistake in my view.

Congress should claw back those two latter changes via new legislation. Yes, the current Congress is lopsidedly partisan in line (mostly) with the current president, but that's part and parcel of the US' imperfect system, and voters at least have a chance to address partisan imbalances every two years.

So I encourage any US residents reading this to be sure you are registered to vote. I also encourage voters who tend to prefer one party over another to bee willing to cross your usual party lines in order to stock Congress with representatives that have a plan to undo the tariffs in favour of other, better measures that might better address the concerns the president has raised.

As for the AI luddites here:

1. You can turn off Apple Intelligence with a switch if you like, Amish.

2. Most of the tools of Apple Intelligence work as advertised. Writing tools are great, Image Playground I'd rate as "okay" (not something I routinely need, but the non-human images seem rather good), the ChatGPT integration really helps Siri answer random questions (you can turn off the "ask for permission every time" thing if you want).

3. What's missing, and IMO the only thing the entitled whiners have a legitimate grievance about, is the delay in app intents/Siri awareness. It is indeed disappointing that that's been delayed, but there's an important consideration here that I don't think the whiners are taking into account: Apple is going to do this -- however long it takes -- without compromising your privacy, even when you are interacting with ChatGPT. Your data is not being used to train the ChatGPT.

That is a claim no other AI engine can make. Maybe that's not important to you, but it is very important in the long run.

I get it, nobody likes to feel like they are "behind" their colleagues using other AI engines. Just like Mac users in the 90s didn't like feeling slower than PC users back before the Intel deal. I've been there, it's mildly annoying.

But for the vast majority of Apple users, you're not behind anybody except in novelty tricks. Apple remains the platform for productivity + privacy + security work of all sorts.

And btw -- some of you should really be leveraging those writing tools.