loquitur

I'm a bit worried that DJT will try to undermine Cook in the way he did with Zelensky and Jerome Powell
in joint appearances. E.g. he could say that he still wants iPhone assembly done  in the U.S. and that
shifting between China and India is not "good enough". Hopefully Cook can finesse the fact that
supply chains can't turn on a dime. But Trump is probably still irked that Cook outlasted Trump 1.0,
so wants to keep up the pressure during 2.0.

There are other forces pushing/pulling Apple's approaches to AI rather than just an internal/external "make vs. buy"
decision, one side favoring Apple's "walled garden" using in-house IP, the other side ceding some control in the arena.

That is, AI is regarded as so recognizably important by the world, Apple will be forced to at least entertain an open
framework by rest-of-world.  E.g. just as Apple (and Microsoft) allow for multiple browsers and search engines, partly for
antitrust reasons, they will be required to do so for LLMs.

The EU can easily mandate room for multiple LLM providers, just as they are now pressuring for app stores, together
with how others do so for multiple payment-processing methods. China likely has preferred state-sanctioned providers,
and Apple will have to roll with that.

Personally, although I'm fine with Google Search morphing into Google AI for Q&A search, I use a paid ChatGPT
account for software development experiments, but I'm not allergic to others such as Anthropic's Claude
or open-source LLMs.

Yes, there's an immediate vacuum for better Siri functionality, but I don't care where it might come from for
English speakers such as I. Plus, there might be a special version just for France, so Apple doesn't shouldn't have
to be a sole provider of everything.

Lastly, the media makes out everything as a "winner-take-all" battle, but it's not.  Within the current frontier of AI, there
is room for everyone.

It does appear to be of greater import than the "How many R's are there in 'strawberry'" problem.

(Currently Siri/Apple Intelligence answers with "two" since it seems to be based upon the ChatGPT 4o
family. ChatGPT o1 answers differently, but who knows when Apple will point to a better model?)

However, the elephant-in-the-room remains the "your AI violates our copyright" stance.
I haven't heard much about that lately. Unfortunately Apple is the largest of the large
"deep pockets" so expect more turmoil in this arena.

I'm very skeptical of this chip-binning-due-to-flaws notion. As yields improve, a chip customer
might not be able to get enough off-spec chips to match the market. They'd have to eventually
ship full-spec chips and somehow "nerf" the functionality before incorporation into products.

But if they can do that at the outset (turn off a CPU/GPU, cut lines to a cache, fiddle with
frequencies and firmware), isn't the more likely explanation ithat the 18's are exactly
an 18 pro with functionality reduced by firmware/circuitry hacks at the nano level?

This was actually a time-honored tradition in the days of the "mainframe". Models would
ship with instruction set add-ons (like better floating-point or string-related instructions,
or maybe a "population count" instruction which the NSA supposedly liked for cryptography).  
But the shipped machines, for manufacturing efficiency, had exactly the same parts -- they
just needed the extra stuff to be enabled in the field, for $ of course!

Oh, and there was such a thing as "reverse binning".  A possibly apocryphal story
involved legendary supercomputer designer Seymour Cray, who was upset that
a more fleshed-out design couldn't be made to run as fast with a full-complement
of parts.  It turned out that the first few transistors/ICs were special faster "quantity one"
one-offs from the supplier, but couldn't be made available with full-speed spec
in larger quantity. Perhaps the truth was that the quantity one parts were just a teaser
and they just wanted more money to scale up.

Massiveattack87 said:

[....]
Apple Car has never made sense. 

Since the Tesla Model 3 debuted as a minimalist software-driven iPad on wheels, indeed, an Apple effort never made sense. (Although I don't drink Elon Musk Koolaid, I'm quite happy with my Tesla, only needing windshield washer fluid and tires over the last five years.)

What value did they think they would add?  Apple doesn't do much in the way of batteries, etc. I'd really like to know
from the ex- amps among the 2,000 what Apple thought their angle would be over just being a "me too" EV.
Further, why did it take them that long to "say no" -- just bureaucracy?