mpantone

bloggerblog said:

I would like to see Apple run their own MacWorld expo, no iPhones or iPads, just Macs. MacWorld events were super useful and I miss them. I'm sure there will be iPhone, iPad, Windows, Linux, and other products but they'll be related to the Mac.

It won't happen ever.

The world has changed and Steve predicted it.

Today the smartphone is the primary computing modality for Joe Consumer. When the iPhone was unveiled, Steve referred to it as "the computer for the rest of us." He was correct.

In the past ten years, the smartphone has been the primary driver of almost all consumer electronics innovation. Not just hardware but also software and services.

The personal computer -- while still important -- no longer is where the innovation is happening.

Remember that Apple dominated Macworld Expo up until its departure. Today's Apple gets what it wants holding its own media events, not sharing the limelight with anyone. Operating at their own schedule (not forced to show up annually at a tradeshow whose date is pretty much set in stone) and in their venue of choice.

Remember that both Winter CES and Macworld Expo open the new year, which puts a strain on staff who want to take time off during the holidays (Christmas, New Years). It also butts up with issues concerning manufacturing since China takes about two weeks off for the Lunar New Year holiday.

Apple gets more bang for its buck just by editing videos now and holding small meet-and-greet demo sessions after the launch announcements. All the attention is on them. They have full control over time, venue, and messaging.

Tech tradeshows are really just dinosaurs. Their fate was pretty obvious when COMDEX shut down after 2003. There are still justifications for holding developer conferences but these big tradeshows are pretty anachronistic. Even videogame focused E3 (a descendant of Summer CES) is dead. Unsurprisingly Nintendo is often a no-show at gaming shows.

Tech tradeshows made more sense in an era when the typical journalist didn't know what a PDF spec sheet was and the few who did still needed to fly home, go to the office and fire up their desktop PC to download that document (and probably print it out). So most people just carried 5 pounds of deadtrees marketing collateral on the flight home.

elijahg said:

tiredskills said:

chasm said:

Here’s a crazy thought: hire a few HUMANS to write the news summaries. Or, at least, proofread the AI summaries.

How quaint and old-fashioned I’ve become

Here's another one, headlines don't need to be summarised, they are already a summary of a bigger article.  Apple are putting AI to pointless tasks and fudging it right up.

I agree. You can't compress 3 or 4 headlines (which are often clickbatey) into a 3 line summary. It seems too that the AI doesn't look at the news article content either, so clickbait headlines don't get "fixed" to match the article content. Maybe that would be a better use of AI, apply it to Apple News articles and generate neutral headlines.

You have identified part of the issue. Humans are writing clickbait headlines and the AI tools are summarizing these not understanding that many of these are clickbait and aren't to be trusted at face value.

Again this goes back to the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) concept.

Worse, there are considerable differences between American English and British English. The initial version of Apple Intelligence is being written by American software engineers using an LLM that is highly skewed toward American English. This is why the BBC headlines are being butchered more than headlines from mainstream American media sources.

I don't know of an easy fix. And apparently neither does Apple because their response doesn't fix the problem. It's just a more obvious acknowledgement of Apple Intelligence's primitive capabilities.

As I mentioned earlier, AI has zero common sense. A relatively intelligent, well read, and thoughtful person can read a BBC headline and say "well, I think it actually means something considerably different than the literal prose". Brits do this all the time, use words that might be the opposite of what is trying to be conveyed because other Brits will understand.

If you source news from various media outlets, with a combination of American, British, and other English variants, I would expect these sort of AI news summary errors to continue for the time being.

Not convinced that today's LLMs are sophisticated enough to discern and correctly process the nuanced differences. LLMs seem to do much better with numbers and hard science (mathematics, physics, engineering, maybe chemistry) where data is quantitative.

As 2025, I suspect we will see more shortcomings and clearer examples of limitations of today's AI implementations. That is, AI will bungle more stuff this year, not just news headline summaries.

In a couple of years it is likely that some of the tasks that AI is doing now will be abandoned because it simply creates more problems than it fixes. Luckily iOS 18 allows users to disable AI notification summaries.

NYC362 said:

There comes a point where Apple is going to have to bite the bullet and flip the Indonesian government the bird and just pull completely out of the country until saner heads prevail. 

It’s one thing to require some investment, but constantly moving the goal posts is outright bribery at this point. 

There are some problems with abandoning this market.

It is the fourth largest country by population, about 283 million inhabitants (after India, China, and the USA itself).

Indonesia is an emerging market with a growing population (birthrate greater than replacement rate). Also as a country in Southeast Asia, they likely have aspirations of becoming a destination where manufacturers would set up operations, creating jobs.

As Indonesia's population represents a 3.5% world share, this market impacts Apple's revenue materially. It's not like Apple considering abandoning Tuvalu (population 12,000).

Anyhow, if Apple really wanted to abandon Indonesia, they wouldn't have engaged in discussion. Both sides know the stakes are considerable. It's really going to be some sort of compromise, a meeting point somewhere between what each side wants.

Obviously Apple is well aware that if it concedes and signs up for a big investment amount, other nations will queue up with outstretched hands begging for dollars. It will also open the door for the Indonesian government to make similar demands from other companies.

Apple knows it cannot just pack up all of its toys and leave the sandbox. Not the fourth populous nation in the world. That would anger investors. As a publicly traded company, Apple's primary responsibility is to increase shareholder value. That is a tougher task if their abandon the 4th largest market (by population). That simply isn't a realistic option for any Fortune 100 company.

M68000 said:

To me, the question is about form factor.  Is the iconic wedge design gone forever? I own two MacBook Airs and they’re precious to me.  Simply the best laptops I’ve  ever used. But,  if the new ones have the same shape and weight as the MacBook pros,  are they really “Air” models?

No one with most of their marbles believes that the MacBook Air will weigh the same as the MacBook Pro. If the two lines were identical in form factor and weight with only a handful of minor features and price as differentiation, Apple would have difficulty convincing anyone to buy the higher priced Pro.

While it may come to a surprise to you Apple isn't that stupid. They have been marketing notebook computers for over a quarter of a century.