Marvin

JP234 said:

100% against Apple becoming a carmaker. History suggests that virtually ALL carmakers in America fail sooner or later, usually sooner (There are literally hundreds of dead American automakers, some really really great, like Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg, Packard, Studebaker, Nash, American Motors to name just a few). Sure, there are exceptions, but the investment required to pull off a successful launch and sustain sales is in the tens of billions of dollars, possibly hundreds. I've been a fan of Apple, a former Apple professional employee, and an Apple-driven entrepeneur. But this venture is, IMHO, an enormous mistake.

Apple should continue to focus like a laser beam on core competencies in hardware, software and services, and ignore the siren call of diworseification (apologies to Peter Lynch). Leverage what you do right for maxmimum growth, rather than a futile effort to grow through acquisition.

Here's a link to defunct automakers. Read it and then calculate the ratio of success to failure, and you'll get my point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_manufacturers_of_the_United_States

There are similar lists of computer and phone companies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_computer_companies_of_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_mobile_phone_manufacturers

What's important is why they went out of business, not that they went out of business. A lot of companies are like PC box and Android phone companies where they buy the parts and just assemble them. They have very little USP. If you don't have good design, marketing, ecosystem, support, then you are competing on price and margins, which will inevitably lose the more that people can afford the products from companies that do have all those things. Apple's used products are more appealing than brand new products from low margin companies.

Most of the car companies were also making combustion engine vehicles. If Apple was making a combustion engine vehicle, they'd likely need to get an expensive engine from a 3rd party and setup a network of maintenance shops. Electric engines change the whole game.

Apple also has hundreds of billions of dollars. Investing $100b would allow them to build over 1m vehicles.

mpantone said:

Marvin said:

mpantone said:

blastdoor said:

The M2 in the MBA gets a single core score of 1899, so these results seem ballpark reasonable to me -- within the range of testing reliability. 

This makes zero sense. The two scores are nearly identical.

The purported benchmark is for an M2 Max. If the score and name of the processor are to be believed then there is no performance improvement with the M2 Max. And Apple most certainly will not release a new SoC that has the identical performance as a predecessor.

Remember: M_ < M_ Pro < M_ Max < M_ Ultra

This Geekbench score is likely fake or maybe the SoC's name was incorrectly reported.

My belief is that an M2 Max will need a 15-30% performance uplift over an M2 Pro to make it marketable.

Assuming Apple does not jump process nodes with the M2 Max, I'm guessing that the performance boost on standard integer and floating point tests will be more modest with greater improvements for machine learning tasks.

The M2 is very similar to the M1 in Geekbench:

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

It is however much faster for GPU (40%) and some video encoding.

These tests would suggest M2 Pro/Max might be the worst outcome expected for an upgrade - delayed to 2023 and using the same N5P process as M2 so the better N3 upgrade might not come until 2024.

There's a possibility they could make the GPU cores on N3 and the CPU cores on N5P but it's more likely they will do N5P.

It's highly unlikely that Apple will do this. After all the CPU and GPU cores are on the same die, right?

There's a report saying Intel plans to do this:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tiled-design-and-tsmc-n3-will-enable-intel-to-offer-monstrous-igpus

They use tiles. Apple's chip design might prevent them doing the same.

mpantone said:

Marvin said:

mpantone said:

blastdoor said:

The M2 in the MBA gets a single core score of 1899, so these results seem ballpark reasonable to me -- within the range of testing reliability. 

This makes zero sense. The two scores are nearly identical.

The purported benchmark is for an M2 Max. If the score and name of the processor are to be believed then there is no performance improvement with the M2 Max. And Apple most certainly will not release a new SoC that has the identical performance as a predecessor.

Remember: M_ < M_ Pro < M_ Max < M_ Ultra

This Geekbench score is likely fake or maybe the SoC's name was incorrectly reported.

My belief is that an M2 Max will need a 15-30% performance uplift over an M2 Pro to make it marketable.

Assuming Apple does not jump process nodes with the M2 Max, I'm guessing that the performance boost on standard integer and floating point tests will be more modest with greater improvements for machine learning tasks.

The M2 is very similar to the M1 in Geekbench:

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

It is however much faster for GPU (40%) and some video encoding.

These tests would suggest M2 Pro/Max might be the worst outcome expected for an upgrade - delayed to 2023 and using the same N5P process as M2 so the better N3 upgrade might not come until 2024.

There's a possibility they could make the GPU cores on N3 and the CPU cores on N5P but it's more likely they will do N5P.

It is pretty far fetched to think that Apple will release three M2 SoCs with identical single core performance.

I'm not saying that it can't be done. I'm just saying that the likelihood of this happening is extremely low. And doing so would also put them at risk of being the laughingstock of the semiconductor industry for years to come. I'm thinking that Johny Sroudji wouldn't care for that very much.

Apple has done some bizarre stuff before but I just don't see the business case in Apple releasing an M2 Max SoC that's supposed to be two tiers above the vanilla M2 with an identical Geekbench score, despite the fact that Geekbench is a seriously flawed measurement.

They already did this with M1. M1/M1 Pro/M1Max all have the same single core performance. It's the same with the Intel chips, i5/i7/i9 in the same generation have very similar single core.

All that matters for the higher-end chips is better multi-core performance.

M2 Max multi-core (12-core) = 13855
M2 multi-core (8-core) = 8737

12/8 = 1.5x, 13855/8737 = 1.58x

The GPU offers the most value these days so hopefully that will get a significant boost. If M2 managed 40% increase (3.6TFLOPs vs 2.6TFLOPs), M2 Pro and Max can get a similar improvement from increasing GPU core count. This means M2 Pro is 7.2TFLOPs and M2 Max is 14.5TFLOPs. N3 would mean the M3 Max would be close to an Ultra in a laptop.

FileMakerFeller said:

there's no need for Apple to buy Disney as a whole, and no clear benefit to doing so.

It's too much to take the whole company but there's value from the production studios and IP (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, National Geographic, ESPN) and their ~200m paid subscribers. 200m subs on $8/month is $19b/year. Currently Disney streaming makes a loss but Apple would likely run it profitably.

$200b is a steep price and comes with nearly 200k employees, which would double Apple's headcount.

I imagine that for a company merger they'd have to turn large portions of the business into franchises like the theme parks and not run it themselves and they'd downsize payroll significantly, probably selling off whole divisions of the company.

From Disney's point of view, they may be in a similar position to George Lucas:

https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/30/george-lucas-i-sold-lucasfilm-to-disney-to-protect-it/

Finding a competent CEO to run such a large business is very difficult. They got rid of the replacement CEO Chapek because he wasn't running the company in a way the staff were happy about. Iger is 71, I doubt he wants to be running Disney again and his only options are try to find another replacement CEO or sell it off and Apple's the only option for selling it.

Maybe Iger should start splitting the business first. If they franchise out the theme parks, there will be way more of them without the heavy costs and they'd be able to open to a lot more customers in developing countries like South America, India and Africa. Australia can get some parks.

If the Disney company was split into 4x $50b parts (streaming media rights, broadcast media rights, parks, licensing/IP(cinema, Blu-ray, music, live events)), they'd be able to sell it more easily. Companies like Comcast could take the broadcast rights. Apple could have the streaming rights and roll it into Apple TV+. Parks would be franchised or sold to an entertainment/cruise company. Licensing/IP can be Apple or a company like Sony/Warner or the licensing/IP remains as the Disney core company that is much smaller and easier to manage.

For Disney's shareholders, the profit is what matters in the end. Disney usually makes a few billion a year and it's dropped significantly in recent years:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-income

10% of franchise revenue could make half this net income on its own.

It's only the 25% streaming rights that is worthwhile for Apple and would be worth it for $50b to get 200m subscribers.

AppleInsider said:

Elon Musk says Twitter will tentatively bring back a series of color-coded "Verified" marks, complete with manual checking of applicants.

Questioned about the idea of using a "gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals," Musk did briefly elaborate.

"All verified individual humans will have same blue check," he tweeted, "as boundary of what constitutes 'notable' is otherwise too subjective."

"Individuals can have secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org if verified as such by that org," continued Musk. "Longer explanation next week."

It's not clear, then, whether there are actually to be four "verified" check marks, if a verified individual is also verified to be working with a verified company. It's also not known whether all or some of the new verification checkmarks will have to be paid for.

Despite stating that "all verified accounts will be manually authenticated," Musk gave no indication of how that can would be done.

The verification doesn't all need to be done manually, except for companies, celebrities and politicians. To avoid fake accounts, they can maintain a list of celebrities and company accounts and already verified account names and any time a user tries to change their name to be similar one on the list (need to check for capital i substituting L and number 0 vs letter O), flag it for review. They can also give extra scrutiny to frequent name changes, significantly varied changes and new accounts.

Notable individuals isn't all that subjective. There's a grey area (wrestling stars, TV personalities, Youtubers) but famous actors, musicians (Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Hugh Jackman) and heavily followed accounts (Kardashians, models) are clearly notable and distinguished from everyday individuals with low followers. There's going to be more than one Tom Jones in the world and they can't all look like the same account. The famous one should be grey/gold tick. People can appeal their notable status but at the very least only allow one account to use that name and they can pay to reserve it. Pewdiepie can pay $1000 to reserve his name, even if he's only blue tick and nobody will pay that for a joke.

seanj said:

9secondkox2 said:

So now that Twitter is finally being taken seriously, NOW Apple wants out? These advertisers should be ashamed. Nothing but a political shove. 

They can't take about trust and safety while trying to boycott Twitter to ensure it gets hurt. As if their tactic isn't blatantly ovious.

It’s always had a low user-base and failed to grow like other social media networks.

Twitter is one of the most used services in the world with nearly 400 million users:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users

For social media conversation, it is only behind Facebook, WeChat and Weibo.

The ad spend is quite large. Twitter makes nearly 90% of their revenue from ads. This was $4.5b out of $5b in 2021.
This is small relative to Facebook where the ad revenue in 2021 was $115b but it's still a lot of revenue.
Costs were $1.8b direct costs, $1.2b R&D, $1.2b marketing, $0.6b general/admin, $0.7b litigation.
Net income was loss of $0.5b.
In the recent quarter (before Musk takeover), the losses have been $340m, which is nearly $4m/day.

Firing 3500 employees likely saved around $0.5b/year in payroll costs and there's an aim to cut some of the direct infrastructure costs by up to $1b/year at the risk of service outages under heavy load:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-orders-twitter-cut-infrastructure-213643529.html

Musk owns $200b in other companies. If he needed to bankroll Twitter, at $5b/year, he could for a while and it's not likely it would lose $5b/year. Plus Twitter has around $6b in current assets so most likely sustainable for at least 3 years.

AppleInsider said:

It's unclear why Musk thinks that Twitter is entitled to the advertising dollars since the companies are executing the free speech rights they are entitled to in pulling the ads.

It demonstrates what Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey had conversations about, as does the EU trying to dictate what's permitted under their rules:

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/04/26/eu-warns-elon-musk-that-twitter-must-play-by-its-tough-new-rules

Advertisers threatening to defund Twitter and the EU threatening fines for speech that doesn't conform to their preference is restricting the freedom for people to say what they want. Restrictions are necessary if the aim is to have meaningful, civil conversations but having corporations and politicians determining this standard for public conversation is not ideal. People just assume that it's right for elected representatives to determine the status quo but imagine a time in history when people believed the Earth was the center of the universe and people were prosecuted for saying otherwise:

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-accused-of-heresy

The modern equivalent would be that if Galileo spread his (now known to be correct) ideas on Twitter, companies would stop running ads and the EU would fine Twitter unless they were removed.

This is why Musk wants to move Twitter's revenue stream to subscriptions because it takes away the control of the conversation from corporations and puts it in control of the people having the conversations. Most of the normally suppressed content is unlikely to be Galileo quality information, the vast majority of suppressed content is justifiable but once in a while there will be information suppressed that shouldn't be.

There's probably a way to make it work well for most people. What people want is control over their association. Companies don't want their brands to be shown next to offensive content because it makes it look like they are directly funding it. Twitter would need to identify offensive content/language and users and isolate the advertising from it and give advertisers assurance that this is happening. They can give advertisers the option to only run ads on selected groups of users with different grades of content.

Tweets from the most followed account would generally be safe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_accounts

If the replying comments have offensive content, they can hide the ads when a user opens the comments or hide those replies as sensitive and hide the ads when they are opened.

It would be easier to manage if the topics were tagged by category. The most likely comments to be offensive will be political. They can have a bot tag political comments and allow advertisers to avoid those conversations.

eightzero said:

OK, I'll 'fess up here. I do have a twitter account, and I follow a few entertaining accounts (at least for now). But what are these "twitter advertisers" you speak of? I'm looking at a twitter client on my desktop, and I don't see any ads. Yes, if I click on something there, I'm directed to something that does, but all I see is the 140 characters. Am I doing something wrong, because...boy...if I'm missing ads on twitter, I feel really like I'm missing out.

Ad-based Tweets get promoted into people's feeds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xsongkm8dg&t=1136s

When corporate accounts like Apple's sends out a tweet, it's probably an ad campaign for a new product:

https://twitter.com/Apple/status/1435307157944078336

https://twitter.com/Apple/status/1569424565637611521

It's quite an effective way to advertise because people don't know they are ads. Apple's main account seem to not be loading past tweets in the main feed, maybe it's just a glitch or maybe that's how they suspended the campaigns:

https://twitter.com/Apple