mpantone

lukei said:

Cesar Battistini Maziero said:

I NEED WhatsApp for the iPad, everything uses WhatsApp in Brazil and not having it one iPad is my biggest gripe today.

That and the fact that it doesn't run MacOS

Just use the web app, it works fine 

The web app on iPad is fine if you only have one Instagram account. It's far more awkward than a native app (even the scaled iPhone app) when switching between multiple accounts.

Meta is a very obtuse organization with precious little vision. They really can't see that the tablet experience can be vastly different than the smartphone experience. There are many possibilities on the larger tablet screen that really aren't available on smartphones from a practical sense. I'd love to see something like a hybrid Flipboard type interface as an option or putting the main feed, reels, and following together on the same screen.

I think a larger issue is that Apple's upcharge on increased storage capacities are notoriously steep which is why the GM on larger capacity iPhones, Macs, and iPads is notably higher.

For Apple to "persuade" people to move to higher capacity devices would really require them to reduce the storage upcharges but that would erode GM on those SKUs.

In any case, the tariffs will be applied as a flat percentage across the board for all iPhone SKUs. The tariffs themselves don't affect GM, they would affect net income (deducted after gross profit).

As for the rest of the world seeing the USA in different lenses today, well there are already signs of that. Summer vacation travel bookings to the United States are already down considerably. What the current administration is doing with tariffs most definitely is not a goodwill gesture to the rest of the world. In the end people will likely lean toward regional travel (e.g., Europeans vacationing more in the EU than venturing off the continent).

It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks and Giannandrea is no spring chicken or recent college graduate. If there was a corporate culture mismatch then it is Apple's fault for putting him in his previous role. Apple has made mistakes before picking senior executives (Mark Papermaster, John Browett are two off the top of my head) who didn't fit the Apple Way.

Giannandrea had a good track record at Google so clearly he's smart. But being a great researcher is not the same as being a manager who will be rightfully judged by making product deadlines.

This isn't entirely Giannandrea's fault. Ultimately Apple failed in putting someone responsible for maintaining and improving Siri after their acquisition and now that hopping about the AI bandwagon is a top priority, a decade's worth of neglect has come back to bite them hard. Apple created their current conundrum by mismanaging Siri for years before they handed Giannandrea the torch.

They cannot fix Siri in a year and it's clear as day now. 

My guess is they tried and belatedly came to the conclusion that they have to rewrite Siri from scratch to interface correctly with current and emerging AI technologies. This is far harder for Apple than most other companies because Apple has placed security and privacy as two pillars of their core values.

The peanut gallery who has been whining for years that Siri was falling behind the competition was right all along.

Someday Apple will put out a useful Siri but it will trail the competition for several more years. It's notable that Apple Maps has never caught up to Google Maps especially when you look at the two side-by-side in many places outside of the USA.

PERockwell said:

Files that no longer exist are deleted on the backup drive.

This is not true. Part of Time Machine's feature set is to provide access to the files the way they were at the time the snapshot was made. Thus if you make daily TM backups and you deleted a file a week ago, all subsequent snapshots would not have that file. However if you went to a TM snapshot 10 days ago, it would still be there.

That's a large part of its value. TM does not go back into archives and change history. That would eliminate much of its value. The only time it starts deleting content is when the backup disk is full and it needs to delete old snapshots to make up space. Then yes, you might start losing archived data.

If you really want to preserve a snapshot of your Mac for the foreseeable future, use another backup tool more suited to make a complete backup like Carbon Copy Cloner. I've done this before after I've set up a new Mac with user accounts and user data just in case I blow something up and I need to quickly restore to a known good state. Sometimes I do this right before I do a major upgrade (like when I jumped from Mojave to Big Sur skipping Crapalina).

The stock market reacts far less on past results: instead it is forward looking. This is why Apple (or another company) can announce admirable quarterly earnings but get dogged the following day because of weak guidance.

While Apple is a very visibly traded stock, most of the share volume is from the big boys: fund managers, BlackRock, FMR, Vanguard, CalPERS, etc., not your coked-up playboy investor types, little Aunt Millies, or snotty fanboys on Reddit with three shares.

And it's not just Apple that's tanking, it's the entire market. Speculative gambling types simply don't have the capital to move global markets that much. Yes, they can muck around with one minor company like GameStop but not the entire S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite, Russell 2000, FTSE, DAX, CAC, Nikkei, HSI, etc. Remember that the safety locks kicked in and stopped futures trading on the Nikkei 200 the other day. It's not just a handful of spastic gamblers doing this.

It's worth pointing out that the Russell 2000 has gotten hit harder YTD than the S&P 500. The small caps and mid cap companies are getting clobbered far more than the Apples, Nvidias, Alphabets, and Amazons of this world. Hell, even DELL, HPQ, and HPE share prices have been brutalized way more than AAPL as a percentage drop YTD.

India's central bank just cut their interest rates by 25 basis points as new tariffs kick in. There's no coke-snorting gambler fraternity who drove that decision.

Anyhow tomorrow (Wednesday April 9, already on the East Coast) is going to be another tricky day for the market. We live in especially interesting times.