mpantone

baconstang said:

I think APPL needs to sharpen its claws.....

APPL is the now-defunct longtime stock symbol for Appell Petroleum. Not sure why were are discussing an oil & gas company here in this Q&A forum.

The sad thing is that people have been making this error for well over three decades and is often pointed out when it occurs. I guess it just goes to confirm the level of financial literacy on the Internet, sad when it's someone with over 10 years here at AppleInsider.

Makes one wonder how much online people are understanding and retaining these days.

Oh well...

Zero surprise with this rumor.

As I have mentioned previously in other discussions, Home Hub is a much lower priority than Apple Intelligence and will require the latter to be extremely reliable to be of any use to Joe Consumer (the mainstream public, not geeky tinkerers).

Note that Home Hub is only useful at home (or other similar static locations) for a limited range of tasks. Apple Intelligence has a vastly wider scope since it will eventually be available to anyone with a modern/recent iPhone and thus useful on the go.

I still believe the touchpanel device makes zero sense. Everyone loves being attached to their iPhones (and to a lesser extent their Apple Watches). The smart home must be able to be controlled by a phone or maybe a watch. It makes far less sense to have to get up to fiddle around in some menu system hanging on a wall, especially if you live in a larger property where the touchpanel may be far away from where you are located (or worse, on a different floor).

We have seen this in the failure of home theater tablet control panels. Normal people don't want them.

A reliable Siri with Apple Intelligence takes top priority. And by reliable, we mean something like 99.99% reliable, not just 66%, 75%, 90% or 95% of the time. Trust me, if you or someone in your family has to get up to adjust the lights once out of four attempts, the smart home hub will be decommissioned and sent to the e-waste recycling center real quick.

And no one should be spending 10-15 minutes to configure a smartphone light socket or electrical outlet. This stuff needs to work nearly effortlessly for widespread adoption by Joe Consumer.

A truly useful "Home Hub" will eventually get here, probably 5 years after Apple Intelligence reaches release status. Remember that all consumer-facing AI is still alpha quality software here in Q2 2025.

I suspect he's paranoid that AI writing tools are the death knell of his profession. If I were in his shoes I'd probably feel the same although my guess is my public reaction would be different.

Anyhow AI writing tools here in 2025 aren't going to win any Pulitzer Prizes. They will facilitate the composition of mundane communications like summarizing notes from this morning's meeting into an e-mail or writing basic expository articles.

They will help people with weaker writing skills bring their output to something closer to their colleagues who are more capable of articulating their thoughts into words.

Which brings up one key point. AI doesn't make the user smarter. It just does the work for them. In decades of working in a lot of businesses from small mom-and-pop shops to a Fortune 500 tech company, I've noted a strong correlation between good thinking and good writing. Having AI writing tools do the writing part won't make you think any better. It just takes away some of the tedium, especially for more mundane writing chores (like many work e-mails).

But in order to know if the AI writing tools did a good job, you really need to be a decent writer to begin with and to make sure that the LLM used isn't steering the points the wrong direction.

AI writing tools are also very helpful for people with weaker typing skills or are writing in a language that isn't their native tongue.

In the end AI writing tools are just like any tools and you can choose to use them or not use them. There are carpenters who use circular saws for a lot of work but hand tools for certain tasks, especially finishing work. There are bakers who use large electric mixers for some work, but still end up kneading bread dough and shaping loaves by hand. Cooks. Tailors and seamstresses. Farmers and gardeners. The list goes on and on.

In the same way sometimes I fire up my inkjet printer but I still write thank you notes and postcards by hand.

Apple is not pointing a gun at anyone's head saying they need to use AI assisted tools. Even if Apple Intelligence is turned on, you still need to deliberately click a button (or two) to use the AI assisted functions.

The way Apple is rolling out AI features is relatively unobtrusive and benign, partly because this is really alpha-quality software and they are late to the party, partly because many of the AI functions on smartphones are limited to a small percentage of iPhones in use (iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 family), and partly because Apple has prioritized user privacy which means less data is being sent to the cloud.

It's not the end of the world yet for professional writers. But for sure these tools will improve over time and most people in an office setting will find themselves spending less of the company's time pumping out corpspeak. I sure wish I had AI-assisted spreadsheet tools when I was at my last corporate job.

Consumers always get saddled with the costs ultimately whether it's a direct tax or something like a tariff.

Publicly traded companies aren't going to the absorb the charge and give up gross margin.

This should be perfectly clear to anyone who has any money in the stock market. And that includes any American with a retirement account or pension plan. That includes anyone who voted for the person currently occupying the Oval Office.

This is not a complicated scenario. It's very simple.

Computer scientists have an acronym for this: GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Tomorrow Americans of all political leanings will experience this truth.

I'm sure Cook was smart enough to see this transaction result in cash. I liquidated half of my bull positions two days ago. I will get slaughtered tomorrow but not as much as if I had stayed in this clown show. But it's not all gloom-and-doom for me. I bought some 3x tech inverse funds in a tax-free retirement account. Gonna ease the pain a bit tomorrow.

But god damn, it is going to be a sh!t storm that we never saw during the previous administration.

Looking at futures right now tomorrow (April 3) looks like a world class sh!t storm. In fact, safety locks might be triggered. You know, the ones when the stock market drops too much during one trading session. Right now, tomorrow might be one of those historic days.

America wanted change. Well, tomorrow they will get it. Enjoy the ride.

Apple will survive. But Joe Average American is going to feel it to the core. Too bad.