Marvin

hmlongco said:

People use phones to read, play games, watch videos, take photos and videos, and more. 

Until there's a replacement for the screen, the iPhone will still be around.

And for those looking forward to implants, may I direct you to S07E01 of Black Mirror?

The screen replacement will be what the Apple Vision Pro becomes. At an advanced stage, AVP replaces everything.

iPhone replaced cameras, GPS, iPod, phones, pagers, alarms etc.

The wearable computer can replace desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. These separate products only exist due to screen sizes and cooling/power usage. This will have an OS that incorporates an advanced AI that learns about the user and the environment while blending digital content into the real world.

The OS on the wearable will be able to create an entire photoreal virtual world and people in it. The standard 2D UI vs full spatial computing will look like how the old terminals looked before the GUI.

AppleInsider said:

In a press gaggle, President Donald Trump said that some companies that have been hit the hardest by the blockbuster tariffs applied by the administration may get some relief -- and nobody has been or will be hit harder than Apple.

A reporter asks him about potential exemptions while he's out doing a meet-and-greet with race car drivers. Trump states that exemptions are being considered for companies "hit harder" by tariffs, but decisions will be made based on "instinct."

Exemptions could be based on where the company pays taxes. There's nothing to gain by harming US businesses but tariffs can be applied to companies like Temu, Tencent, Samsung, Huawei that profit from US consumers but use their revenue to invest in their own country. Apple invests their revenue in the US already. Then tariffs would work to the benefit of US companies rather than against them.

mpantone said:

linkman said:

I'm convinced this morning is the lowest AAPL we'll see. So convinced that I spent all of my remaining brokerage cash account on it. Cook knows how to master Apple's supply chain and it is extremely likely he was prepared for these tariffs several months ago.

Nah, yesterday and today's activity was a false bounce. The stock market has more room for downward movement. The BlackRock CEO thinks we're already in a recession.

The market will remain extremely turbulent until there is some sort of equilibrium reached but no one has blinked yet in this staring contest.

It's all just bluster for the time being. The gambling/speculation industry doesn't reflect the real world until the numbers start being reported, at least 3 months after price changes take effect. Most of the big companies trade internationally in a broad way so the impact of price increases between individual countries will be minimal and there will always be workarounds. The big companies that trade mostly domestically will be largely unaffected.

Apple has healthy income to buy stock back, which can keep the price higher.

A recession requires real world impact to GDP and employment levels and nothing indicates this at this stage. CEOs are obviously concerned because their remuneration is in large stock awards that will be taking a hit but that's not the case for the people who keep the economy running.

It's speculators' overreaction that is tanking stocks just now. If they cut down on the caffeine, cocaine and gambling behavior, they would be a bit more patient and wait to see what the real world impact is. It could all get resolved next week for all anyone knows.

Mike Wuerthele said:

ssfe11 said:

Maybe I’m missing something but Tim meeting with Trump and in Feb and then both announcing the 500b US investment has total exemption written all over it. Again am I missing something? Would welcome comments. 

You're missing the fact that the President said yesterday that there were no exemptions.

There are some exemptions listed on the site:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-increase-our-competitive-edge-protect-our-sovereignty-and-strengthen-our-national-and-economic-security/

"Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel/aluminum articles and autos/auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/semiconductors-are-exempt-from-trump-s-massive-32-tariff-on-taiwan-though-pc-gamers-will-still-feel-the-heat/ar-AA1Cev7t

It's not clear how much impact it will have on Apple's products.

This move is being widely criticized but other countries have been unfairly locking US companies out of trade for a long time. While this likely won't have a good outcome, continuing to let other countries engage in unfair business practices shouldn't just be accepted either. These tariffs are in response to the unfair trading practises of other countries. The expected outcome is that other countries start trading fairly and drop their original unfair business practises and tariffs and the US can do the same.

https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

If the US tariffs were removed tomorrow, all that happens is US businesses go back to being taken advantage of. It's clearly a ham-fisted approach with the intent of trying to get a quick fix similar to the war negotiations but the US has a huge debt running out of control:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-could-hit-debt-ceiling-as-early-as-mid-july-study-shows/ar-AA1ByPeh

This is what the government spending cuts and tariffs are about. If there's a better way to fix the debt issue other than cutting spending and trying to make up trade deficits, they'd probably like to hear some ideas. These moves suggest they don't have any better ones.

Wesley Hilliard said:

This so-called AGI is just more nonsense packaged in a way that means OpenAI can charge more money for whatever mediocre model the release under that guise. I can't comment on something that doesn't exist yet, so let's see how AGI goes if it ever really happens.

I have a feeling we're already way past peak AI and all that's left for the current iteration is refinement. No, that doesn't mean a new more capable model won't be out next week, what I mean is we've seen the peak of what it can do and it's just going to get better at those tasks. Like these examples, better movie deepfakes, better translation skills, better scientific research and data parsing.

I doubt we'll see something significantly different emerge beyond the AI slop images, video, and text. And we most definitely are not on the way to a sentient computer.

People have different interpretations of AGI, some would say that sentience is a requirement but this isn't required to replace a human role and there are human characteristics that drive sentience that a machine will never need and may never have like motivations driven by physical constraints, which would need to be simulated in a machine.

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

All that would be needed from an AGI initially is to replicate a human in a role:

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

AGI is described on the following page as doing all the work of a company of people independently and is generally expected within the next 5 years:

https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-is-coming-in-2025-and-machines-will-be-able-to-think-like-humans-when-it-happens

Online customer service is the most obvious use case as many of those roles are online and this is millions of jobs. AI is not at this level yet and it's obvious when an AI is being used but it can reach a level where it's not obvious.

Another example would be a film editor who would edit product review videos. This person would take a lot of raw footage, crop it, sort the files in order, drop them into a timeline and make a sequence where the dialog is cohesive.

Let's say Apple adds an AI feature to Final Cut Pro where you select a group of clips and ask it to make a review video. It would transcribe the audio from all the clips, do image recognition, abbreviate the text into an interesting short form and arrange the clips in Final Cut according to the audio timestamps. It can do this very quickly. This would be capable enough to replace the editor entirely.

It might be more apt to describe it as advanced automation vs intelligence but either way, it is replacing the human role entirely.

The more roles that a singular AI can replace, the more of a general intelligence agent it will be.

Then add it to a physical robot and it can be asked to make dinner, clean the house, take the dog for a walk, do the tax returns, wash the car:



This kind of personal robotics is huge for elderly people.

tht said:

Yes, useful, but not national strategic initiative worthy. I liken it to more advanced grammar checkers, more advanced code completion. Great stuff, but that doesn't drive Nvidia to be worth $3T in the stock market. It's "robots replaced humans" and all the money that used to flow to humans will be flowing to AI service owners and AI hardware owners. So, concentrating billions for the many to a few.

Nvidia is making a lot of revenue from hardware sales:

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-2025

Their stock valuation is based on growth rate and earnings. Nvidia's latest earnings show $72b net income for the year (112% revenue growth), $2.9t market cap. Apple's last report showed $93b net income ($3.2t market cap, 2% revenue growth).

AI is well beyond simple tools and needs to be taken seriously at the national level. It poses a national security risk when it comes to cybersecurity. It has applications for everything: military strategy, security, facial recognition, medicine, it is discovering new materials, new drugs, new processes for diagnosing diseases.

https://moneywise.com/investing/stocks/bill-gates-says-this-new-technology-is-the-first-that-has-no-limit

People are being complacent with it now because it's at the stage of a child/adolescent where it makes a lot of mistakes. It will need the right training to correct this and this will need more research but once people reconcile with the fact that humans are just smarter apes that have evolved through massive training programs, it's easy to see that we can put machines through the same process and things accelerate quickly when the AI is used to train itself.

Look how advanced this video and audio generation is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdQaiDT-Ecg&t=526s

The rate of improvement over the last few years has been very high. AI will go beyond basic tools. Add in augmented reality and robotics and there will be a lot of interesting directions to go in. Many possibilities won't happen for commercial reasons so healthy skepticism is justified but people are overly focused on the mistakes of the early products.