mpantone

I don't see why anyone is should be surprised by this. There was zero growth for the FireWire interface over many years while USB exploded.

Apple discontinued all Macs that featured FireWire interfaces years ago and wholeheartedly embraced USB and later Thunderbolt. It was simply a matter of "when" not "if". 

Apple has explicitly labeled Apple Intelligence as "Beta" for a reason, probably several.

People, this service isn't ready for primetime. Hell, Apple can't run any of its iCloud services with 100% uptime. That's simply unrealistic. All of these services have downtimes whether they are labeled "release quality" or not.

Just understand this and plan accordingly. You cannot rely on any of these consumer facing services with total reliability. Nothing new here, it has been like this for decades.

And this is not restricted to Apple. Google's services have gone down, so have Meta/Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, whatever. 

michelb76 said:

Even with the M4 Max, Apple still has long way to go.

Apple will never beat the top consumer PC GPU.

Apple has explained their priority time and time again, most prominently during the 2020 keynote when they revealed Apple Silicon architecture. Johny Srouji -- currently SVP Hardware Technologies -- repeatedly emphasized that Apple was focused on performance-per-watt. He pounded that concept over and over during that keynote. Clearly some people still haven't gotten the memo.

Apple is not trying to dethrone Nvidia's top GPU or Intel/AMD's top CPU. They want great performance at a fraction of the power consumption.

They have no interest in being in the top spot in (fill_in_the_blank) benchmark table.

KMWAZ said:

shamino said:

It's never been that complicated.  Any sub-30s audio file encoded as AAC can be used.  Just rename the file to have an ".m4r" extension and drag/drop it onto the phone (via the Finder on modern versions of macOS, via iTunes for older ones).  That's it.

That's not working for me.  Running OS 15.5, iPhone 16pro.  Dropping it from Finder onto iPhone on Finder didn't do anything.  Are there any other steps?

Shamino's instructions are correct.

I've been doing the same for 10+ years. I just copied three ".m4r" files onto my iPhone 12 mini (iOS 17.7.2) via Finder (macOS 14.7.6 Sonoma). They all work fine. This used to work on iTunes before Apple got rid of that application.

I'm using old ringtones (US, UK, French, Japanese phones) and some old Trillian notification sounds to replace the default Apple ones. Most of these date back to my first iPhone, the 4S (circa 2011).

Maybe you can get someone to help you or book an appointment at a nearby Apple Store for assistance.

LLMs are a dead end with clear limitations that won't bring Apple or anyone else to that contextual awareness + common sense that people see in commercials or dream about.

Apple can forget about releasing an "improved" [sic] Siri if it is only as good as the competition's LLM-powered AI chatbot assistants (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, whatever dogchow). And Apple's senior management already knows this which is why they have balked on this so-called "improved" Siri.

Apple needs to do something that differentiates themselves from the rest of the pack, beyond just preserving privacy. That is a super tall task and I bet Apple senior management accepts this challenge.

A second place AI chatbot assistant is garbage because 1st place is still a massive failure 40% of the time. It's easy to laugh off/dismiss obviously stupid AI suggestions like eating rocks or using glue as a pizza topping. The more insidious issue is triaging through answers that are completely wrong that still sound right. That's A.) a waste of time, and B.) a massive hit to user trustworthiness.

Apple knows all of this which is why the much-anticipated "improved Siri" has zero presence at WWDC 2025. Apple senior managers vaguely deflected this to 2026 but that really implies late 2026, like December if we're "lucky". So possibly 2+ years late.

All the while their competitors will be feeding Joe Consumer dogchow.