michelb76

rob53 said:

The sad thing is that none of these people actually do the work necessary to make a billion dollars, they simply lead lots of vastly lower paid employees who are the real people who design and build the products these people get the credit for. Sorry Tim Cook, you haven't designed an Apple product and only got your job because Steve Jobs unfortunately died. Of course even Steve wasn't the one who designed the first Apple products, he was the great(est) salesman (not snake-oil salesman) in history.

You just described capitalism. It's the American way.

Curious if there is a shake-up coming, especially now that Meta has poached Apple's AI Foundation Models lead.

Makes sense. There are many Watch apps/components that are useless or unusable on the watch. I'd say many more apps could be removed since they don't add much, if anything, to the watch. Why waste any time on this?

discountopinion said:

A better partner for Apple would be xAi with Grok. They currently appear to be iterating faster than the rest and also have a lower user base than the rest which may mean that they are more open for the massive distribution that Apple could offer.

well no, Grok/Musk/X are as far removed from Apple's values as possible. Highly unlikely. Also, Grok is way behind the other models.

dmitrek said:

There are no tradeoffs except for total computing speed — whole transition to Apple silicon started from Apple Dev Kit (or Dev Transition kit) where A12 Bionic was put into Mac Mini enclosure, and it was already faster than Intel macs back then.

michelb76 said:
Curious what tradeoffs will be made. Most of the 'cost' is in the profit on the base and upgrades like RAM. Does this need to compete with Chromebooks?

Well then how will they make it cheaper? The CPU will be binned as it doesn't make sense to scale this out. They can already offer the M2 Air for much less if they let go of the 30-35% margin, but why would they? So it's going to need cheaper parts, reduced ports, functionalities or else this will cannibalise the lowest offer. 8GB RAM is not going to be enough next year, so there's an expense already. the M2 is at a theoretical $999, a $799 model does not make sense. Competition(whatever that will be) is at $400-$600. I can't see Apple go below $600 and higher than $600 does not make much sense. And if they CAN make a cheaper model without too many compromises, the Air is too expensive.