Marvin

avon b7 said:

"Apple's "good faith efforts to engage" with the European Commission."

I think this takes the biscuit.

It's fine for Apple to disagree with the EU but to 'comply' with a requirement that expressly goes against anti-steering tactics by imposing a seperate system that effectively imposes the same financial burden on developers under a different name is not engaging in good faith efforts.

Apple is really earning itself a bad name here. 

Apple is still entitled to a commission when a link is used.

A law that requires Apple to allow free linking to outside payments undermines the entire App Store business model.

This would be like a government deciding that Amazon is so big that nobody can realistically compete with them so they should be forced to allow people to list products on Amazon that link to their own stores without paying Amazon anything.

These arguments have been justified due to Apple having exclusive control of the platform but in the EU they already allowed 3rd party stores and they allow certain companies to operate exclusively controlled stores.

It's the biggest companies that are trying to take advantage of this. Microsoft owns Minecraft and Candy Crush, they could drop in-app purchases, link out to a Microsoft payment portal to topup coins in their accounts. Apple has to curate 1.5 billion customers and direct their traffic to Microsoft games without receiving anything in return. That's not a justified ruling.

If they want to make a fairer ruling to make the system more competitive like lower fees so be it but destroying their business model entirely is not the way to go about it and just serves as another example of technologically illiterate public officials wrecking businesses. They have no right to dictate to a company that they should offer a service to competing billion-dollar companies for free. It's high time the EU Commission had some 3rd party oversight because their interference in business is getting way out of control. Handling B2C issues is fair enough like data privacy concerns but they have no right to pick winners in B2B issues.

AppleInsider said:

The company credited strong Redmi Band 5 sales and deeper integration through HyperOS, its custom operating system. 

The fitness bands are popular as they cover most of the basics at a lower price. Apple Watch SE at $249 is a reasonable starting price but some of the fitness bands are under $100:

https://www.amazon.com/Xiaomi-Version-Display-Battery-Resistant/dp/B0D8WQ94W5 ($58)

If Apple made a fitness band, it might have to either not support 3rd party apps as the display would be smaller or have a different UI. As long as it had Apple Pay, fitness tracking, biometrics and some notifications from other devices, that would cover most things people use the watch for. If they can price it at $149, that would sell more units.

One thing that would set Apple apart is the style options. Usually the fitness bands have basic styles like on the left below. If they had styles like on the right to make the bands look more like jewellery, more people would be inclined to go for them.

Supersillyus said:

The device won't include a display

Ok it's dead then. 

People like to look at stuff. 

If you want to speak to a device you can do that to your phone or watch already. 

And you can look at images on them.

The End.

They are saying it's designed to work with other devices so it could display things on those screens. Although Jony Ive said products like Humane were poorly made, the description of their product sounds similar. One of the biggest downsides of the Humane product was waiting for cloud processing:



If it offloads processing to a local iPhone or other device or has a built-in neural chip, it would be much faster and more private but would need pretty advanced models to run on low-end hardware.

It would be useful for students and in business. A student studying could be stuck on something and would normally ask a teacher for help. The AI device would see the screen and the student can point to the issue and ask it. If it needs to display something, it can show on a phone or computer screen. If it has agent capability, it can control the screen and type things.

The same applies in business. Someone might be processing company earnings reports and need to make a presentation comparing the data. You could open the earnings reports for each year, have the camera look at it and tell it to load this data into Excel and create a graph showing the net income growth.

Someone working in Photoshop could describe actions, remove this object, lighten the photo, crop it to landscape, add a text caption with a suitable font and it can do it.

The main thing Sam Altman alluded to improving on was having to take out a computer, load up a browser, open a chat window, type in a problem and wait for a reply. They want interaction with AI to be more efficient than this and this will broaden its appeal.

They have to focus on improving things that matter to people and are common sources of inefficiency.

AppleInsider said:

Apple created a model that can process the training material created by human instructors, as well as that created by robotic demonstrators -- the paper calls this "Physical Human-Humanoid Data" or PH2D. The model that deals with the data, known as the "Human-humanoid Action Transformer" or HAT, is capable of processing input created by both humans and robots alike.

The company will likely implement this training method for future products. Though it has only demonstrated its robot-lamp prototype so far, Apple is said to be working on a mobile robot for end consumers that could perform chores and simple tasks.

This could be part of their plan to increase US manufacturing. AI robots would be able to assemble iPhones, like the teardown video in reverse.





They need to assemble around 0.6m iPhones per day. If each robot can assemble an iPhone in an hour, being able to run 24/7, they'd need 25,000 robots to handle their worldwide supply.

It would likely be a mix of human and robot and they can still use their normal factories for parts of their supply.

This is a reason why people consider AI to be the next industrial revolution. It can automate a huge number of menial jobs. Amazon uses AI robots for less delicate tasks, this can be applied to more precise product assembly with training:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-robotics-robots-fulfillment-center
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/foxconn-digital-twin-ai/

randominternetperson said:

netrox said:

I don't get it - passwords should ALWAYS be hashed and salted. How can passwords be exposed? Are they still using plaintext? Surely, it cannot be with Meta, Apple, Google, they already know never to hold passwords in plaintext. 

You cannot use hashed passwords to authenticate. 

Excellent question/point. Conceivably these are the result of a massive brute force effort, I suppose. Once you get a hit, you know the password for an account even if only the hash was stored on the backend.

At this scale, phishing is more likely. One way they do it is compromise a server and send mass emails that look like they are from Apple, Google, Microsoft etc, like this:



Some users will click the link and login and they get user id and password in plain text, which will get stored in a database.

It could also be from a legitimate web service that allows logging in via 3rd party services where they haven't bothered to implement the APIs properly and instead put up a standard login that stores everything in plain text.

Passkeys will eventually make this a thing of the past and these security breaches serve as a reminder why it's important to use them instead.