mpantone

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.

This makes zero sense. This is a low volume product, they don't need a 12 month production ramp. Even iPhone generally has a 2-2.5 month production ramp.

Remember that this is a cutting edge product. Having 1.5 year old technology in a premium-priced VR HMD at launch isn't a competitive advantage. It'll be obsolete when the first UPS truck delivers the first package.

This rumor is a load of $%#8!

decoderring said:

Wow, I think this is the first time I’ve ever not wanted to install an update.

I’ll do it because there are likely some security updates, but I wish it were possible to not have all the AI stuff that, for me, just creates bloat.

The storage change between iOS 18.3.2 and 18.4 is very minor.

On an iPhone 16 that was factory reset, there was 232.74 GB free space available on iOS 18.3.2 (Apple Intelligence off, iCloud off).

I installed iOS 18.4, ensured that both Apple Intelligence was off (the iOS 18.4 upgrade did *NOT* enable Apple Intelligence) and iCloud remained unconfigured, and shut down the phone. I rebooted and the iPhone 16 had 232.18 GB free space left.

So we're really talking about a 560 MB delta between 18.3.2 and 18.4. If you already have iOS 18.3.x on your phone, you might as well upgrade to 18.4 regardless of whether or not you use Apple Intelligence features.

Wesley Hilliard said:

9secondkox2 said:

Tim’s ai, headset, and car haven’t panned out so far. 

Would love to see a return to the days of Apple not releasing something until it’s 100% ready and captivating. I’ll give Cook’s car a pass since it was never officially announced. 

Even the watch was closely guarded. And it was a success when it finally launched. A return to form in that regard would be most welcome. 

No more public experiments and betas please. 

I'll never understand what people mean when they say this other than "I don't like it so it didn't pan out." By what metrics are you measuring the panning? 

Other than delaying one feature, Apple Intelligence is doing fine. Apple didn't promise a sentient machine like others in the space did. Is that a bad thing? Them delaying something that isn't ready instead of releasing it anyway is exactly what you're asking Apple to do, yet you're criticizing them for it.

And unless you know something about how Apple Vision Pro has done so far and Apple's expectation for the product, there's no way of knowing "how it panned out." It's been pretty awesome from my perspective.

Nah, Vision Pro weighs too much regardless of the image quality. (Disclaimer: I own an Oculus Rift S).

For the ficticious future "Apple Glass" to be successful, it really needs to be around the same weight as my current eyeglasses: about 30 grams.

One of the AI photo features has been helpful. Of course there are third party tools that function similarly, it's just nice to have the Apple Intelligence one closely integrated in the OS.

You're a writer so you are attuned to the writing benefits of Apple Intelligence. Many on this planet won't benefit. As I mentioned elsewhere, Apple Intelligence is good at generating corpspeak, the stuff one shoves into a work e-mail. There's very little style involved. Writing is highly commoditized these days, it doesn't take much effort for an AI assistant to pump out copy that resembles 99.9% of drivel on the Internet anyhow.

And with LLMs training on Internet accessible content, the quality of their datasets is dropping over time. Old school computer scientists have an expression for this: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). That's a really good way to describe LLM-powered AI chatbot assistant responses in March 2025.

Note that there are similar examples of regression in generative AI photo tools. Some of the AI generation tools today put out less satisfactory images than they did a year ago.

I expect consumer-facing AI to put out more and more useless crap in the next 12-24 months because these models are training themselves on garbage that their predecessors created. There really needs to be some sort of quantum leap in AI model performance to circumnavigate this decline. The longer this takes, the harder it will be for AI models to overcome the poor quality data.

When I do a standard Internet search engine query, I'm seeing mostly garbage. It's pretty easy for me to identify in a few seconds but LLMs don't have any natural quality distinctions, they will take absorb satire, fact, and outright lies equally. This probably explains why LLMs can't effectively process the junkmail folder in my e-mail. What is obvious to me as junkmail goes unrecognized by AI tools.

Let's remember that John Giannandrea was the former head of AI at Google. It's not like he was unqualified for his post at Apple. However being a good researcher and shipping product are two very different disciplines.

Unfortunately Apple took its sweet time to make this change, just like letting Project Titan fester for years.

Let's also remember that consumer-facing AI is new technology still in its infancy. It's not like there's any (consumer) company that has been doing this for 20+ years. Apple only started including machine learning silicon in their chips in 2017.

Everyone is pretty new to AI which is why not a single consumer-facing AI assistant is head-and-shoulders better than the competition. It's all alpha quality right now. And it doesn't look like whoever has the most datacenter Nvidia GPUs wins either.

Like most Americans with a retirement plan, I am an indirect investor in almost all of the major players. I have a vested interest in seeing some level of success from all of them. Competition is good, it drives quality, innovation and value. I also appreciate Apple's commitment to privacy. This reason itself makes me want Apple to be a top competitor in this field.