mpantone

ssfe11 said:

I think it will all be about JuneQ guidance which with the dollar falling off a cliff, iPhone panic buying and stock price favorabiliy buyback ramp ups should be pretty strong. 

Apple has not provided guidance since before the pandemic so five years ago.

The conference call with the ANALysts may provide a few hints about their level of optimism/pessimism if you pay attention to Apple executives' word choices however between tariffs, the bond market, the weakening dollar, and interest rates, it is highly unlikely that Apple (or most other companies in the Fortune 500 for that matter) will be setting new revenue records in 2025 or 2026. However don't expect any numerical figures or guesstimates from Apple.

Perhaps more than anything else global investors showing less confidence in the US dollar as a safe haven is the most troubling development from the current administration's policies. There is much more interest in European bonds and gold in the past few months (even before the tariffs kicked in). I have "economic headwinds" on my Apple ANALyst call bingo card.

Well, hopefully it won't get any dumber. Consumer-facing LLM-based AI chatbot assistants in April 2025 are dumb as rocks: no artistry, no common sense, no contextual awareness, no taste and more. And some of today's newer LLMs are worse than their predecessors were a couple years ago with a lot of regressions and hallucinations.

Lots of progress being made on the commercial/enterprise use of machine learning though. It's the consumer stuff that is still years away from primetime. It's embarrassing that all of today's GPUs haven't made any headway cleaning up junk e-mail and phishing. I look at my junk folder on e-mail and just shake my head that AI can't do anything about it. Absolutely pathetic.

randominternetperson said:

I don't understand this product.

Without Command/Ctrl/Windows/alt/option keys it's essentially useless. Also having the trackball buttons above the trackball? Who would actually (try to) use this keyboard?

I agree with you: you don't understand this product. 

It's a collectible/gag gift, not an actual product designed for real world usage in an office. It's basically a piece of fiction brought to life. But it's still not designed to be functional -- just like the ones in the television series don't actually do anything. They're not real peripherals plugged into real computers running a real company. Severance is fake. In the same way if you buy a replica sword modeled after one from Final Fantasy, it's not really meant to slay beasts with. It's just a toy.

As for trackballs with buttons above them, the most famous one of all -- Logitech Trackman -- is designed like this. If you are manipulating the trackball with your thumb or palm of your hand, the natural position of your fingertips will be above the trackball. Note that this is different than trackballs that are designed to be manipulated by the fingertips (such as old PC notebooks from about twenty years ago). Your whole hand can be used to manipulate tools.

As for who might try to use this, probably the ones who buy it although some of them will probably leave them in the box unopened hoping they will increase in value over time. Not sure how great of a strategy that is, buying Class B shares of Berkshire-Hathaway sounds like a better investment but oh well, not my money.

That said, it apparently is recognized as a peripheral when you plug it into a computer. That means it could be used in situations where physical ctrl, esc, option keys aren't required or could be remapped to other keys (such as in gaming).

Just remember that the stuff you see in media is often fake. Those EKGs you see in hospital dramas? They aren't recording anyone's heartbeat. That's why you don't understand this product.

Best of luck.

Huh, I apparently did not understand this particular issue perhaps because I have usually done so from the same county. It's strange that Apple would just bill every online tangible item as a sale from Cupertino.

Anyhow, Cupertino gets to keep some of their tax revenue and now has to tighten their belts and find other sources of revenue. LOL, maybe a bond measure.

This seems very shortsighted from Apple. Anything that discourages people from filing bug reports is not a particularly wise move especially from a company that has built up a reputation for protecting user privacy. There really should be an opt-out toggle for the people (some of whom have already voiced their interest) who don't want to let their data be used to train AI models.

After all, a lot of the debugging data does say what the user was doing at the time and some of this might not be desirable to let idiot AI models parse through.

Just the fact that it generated some discussion and hesistation amongst AppleInsider forum participants is really enough to make having an AI training opt out a necessity.