mpantone

It's important to note that mining these rare earth elements is pretty bad for the environment. There are ways to extract the desired minerals from the ore but of course that's more costly. China uses a lot of chemicals in their mines for cheap processing. Ramping up mining of these minerals in the USA would take years and some very critical debates about how much environmental damage is acceptable.

It's not like you can drill a hole in the ground and start pumping out rare earth minerals ready for use in manufacturing.

This TechSpot article touches a little on these issues:

https://www.techspot.com/news/107534-china-halts-exports-rare-earth-exports-sparking-fears.html

China is one of the richest countries in the world in natural resources and not just in rare earth minerals or iron ore (for steel).

The rare earth mining element issue isn't China's only card in this trade war. They also hold about $770 billion in US Treasury bonds. That's a more dire concern for the US government. If China (or other countries) decide to dump Treasuries, there's a very real risk of serious economic downturn.

We already saw a little of this last week when the bond market went a little bonkers and Trump removed his foot off the tariff pedal for a couple of days (as he put it "queasy"). China has several other arrows in their quiver; they can damage the USA (and the rest of the world) in other ways. They do have to be careful otherwise they might incite other countries to retail against them as well. 

China shutting off rare earth mineral exports is a red flag. They aren't playing around.

When Apple revealed the iPhone 16e, a lot of Western journalists (including some here at AppleInsider) and many commentors scratched their heads saying "I don't know who this iPhone 16e is for."

And like every other lower-priced smartphone, the answer is always the same: emerging markets.

I don't know how many comments I read like "the lack of MagSafe is a dealbreaker for me." Clearly there's a very large portion of this planet who really doesn't prioritize MagSafe. Note that if you're mostly on-the-go (particularly if you rely on public transit), using a MagSafe charger simply isn't part of your daytime modus operandii. It's good for big fat Americans who sit in front of their big fat monitors (or in their big fat SUVs) where having a stationary MagSafe charger is a reality.

Remember people, smartphones have reached the point of saturation in the USA and many other technologically advanced markets (Japan, South Korea, much of Western Europe, Canada, etc.). It's places like India, Brazil, Indonesia, Latin America, Africa where there is growth potential. Removing MagSafe from the iPhone 16e was a very reasonable compromise in features to cut costs.

Same with the lack of mmWave 5G: poorly adopted outside of the USA and even here in the States, it's mostly metropolitan downtown zones, sports stadiums, and a handful of other places that really benefit from mmWave technology.

I'm sure the next time Apple releases another lower-priced iPhone, we'll get the same ignorance about emerging markets. This is nothing new, we saw this with the iPhone 5c and every single iteration of the iPhone SE and the two iPhone minis.

swat671 said:

One thing I wonder about is if the privacy focus could screw things up. I’ve read other stories in the past that because Apple doesn’t let Siri store information and other things and let it use other info like Google, Amazon, Open AI, etc do, it really hobbles Siri’s ability to improve itself. So Apple’s privacy focus in this case means they’re shoring themselves in the foot. 

Apple would likely need to find a way to house the most sensitive Siri data somewhere safe. I'm not sure if the Secure Enclave is currently designed to house that type of data. But for sure, to be done with a strong security focus much of it would have to stay on-device.

It is very possible that Apple would need to make some significant hardware changes to do this properly. Uploading everything to the cloud is not an option for privacy-minded Apple.

Ultimately Apple needs to treat Siri data with as much caution as your health or financial data.

Remember that not everyone will tolerate eyeglasses let alone a vision obstructing HMD. I have an Oculus Rift S and I can't wear it for more than 40-45 minutes tops. And the Rift S is way lighter than AVP. I also hate headphones, I hate goggles.

I wear glasses and I take frequent breaks for short relief. My glasses are 30-35 grams.

If Apple wants to release "Apple Glass" they are going to need to come in around 50-75 grams tops. Not convinced today's technology is sufficient.

jdiamond said:

An easy misstep, but no excuse for Siri.  A typical leading foundation model takes about 2 months to train on ~16,000 GPUs.  I don't know where Apple was on that scale, but let's say as a result of stinginess, Apple took 4 months instead of 2 months to train a model.  Doesn't explain why 2 years later they have nothing.  Or why they didn't have something already back in 2023.

There are two separate components in Siri With Apple Intelligence. Let's look at the AI part first.

My guess is that Apple has an LLM-based AI chatbot assistant that is comparable in quality to the competition (no one stands head and shoulders above the rest). And that's a problem. Apple executives undoubtedly realize that "just as good" isn't what they need to deliver. They need to ship something markedly better. An AI assistant that works 60-70% of the time is not reliable enough for Joe Consumer. It's just a waste of resources: time, electricity, water, money. If you had a human personal assistant that would bungle 30-40% of assigned tasks, you'd fire them that first week.

In the same way, if your iPhone failed at subway fare gates 40% of the time, you'd quickly give up using Apple Pay as a transit pass for your daily commute. You'd just pull out your plastic card or shove a paper ticket into a slot.

For true usability, an AI assistant will likely need to be 99.99% reliable. Maybe even more accurate than that. No one has time to query 7-8 AI chatbot assistants and continuously triage through the responses until they stumble upon the right answer but that's the state of the consumer-facing AI industry in April 2025.

The second problem is that Siri's current input method is voice only. Voice input is notoriously unreliable. It works some of the time for some people. This is not news, it has been like this for decades.

You combine a balky input method with unreliable assistance and you get something that might be amusing from time-to-time but not useful in the long run.

Apple needs to make Siri's primary input as text. That will reduce query interpretation errors. There's no surprise that all of the other big AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, whatever) start out as text-based tools.

There's a third challenge for Apple: they prioritize privacy and data security more than the competition. That makes it harder for Apple not easier. Apple's main competition in this area wants to take your AI chatbot activity data and sell it to the highest bidder. Apple has to put more effort and resources into their service because it takes extra work to ensure privacy and security.

Remember Microsoft Recall from last year? Well, it's supposed to ship soon, almost a year late. Reason? Heavy criticism about Microsoft's utter lack of security and privacy features for the service.

Throwing more money at AI model training isn't improving chatbot assistant reliability.