tht

lordjohnwhorfin said:

How about no camera bump so the phone doesn’t look stupid and wobbly like a table with one short leg when you put it down on its back, and use the extra space for a biiiiig battery so I can go several days without charging? After all if you’re going to sell the satellite SOS feature, might as well make something useful for serious hikers.

I'm all for the flat back too. Make it 10mm thick with more stuff inside, or offer a back cam module with lessor camera performance that results in a flat back.

The thicker phone with more battery life has been tried in the market. The Moto "Maxx" series of phones is probably the highest profile one in the USA. Since they didn't catch on, it implies runtimes greater than 20 hrs in a ~11 mm thick form factor wasn't more valuable to customers than a ~7 mm thick phone with 12 hrs runtime and a camera bump.

For people that want 20 hr runtimes, battery cases and MagSafe batteries basically gave that niche what they "wanted" without sacrificing the larger niche that wants a thinner phone.

Yup. This was inevitable. You could tell from the WWDC videos on visionOS common environments. 

nubus said:

9secondkox2 said:

Forstall would not have made a great ceo. He was great at attaching himself to people in power and playing the game. He gets a lot of miles out of being the team lead over the iOS fork that was built on Mac OS. But that’s his claim to fame. After that, crickets. Before that, crickets. Oh and that initial maps hiccup that took forever to be forgotten. And since then? What? Broadway? Nah. Not missing much. Even as a presenter, he was super awkward. 

Joz is brilliant guy and it seems he’s been groomed for the ceo role for a while. He knows enough of the business complexities, is careful with media, and cares about what made apple what it is. He’s the number one pick I’m sure. 

Fully agree about Forstall after how he handled Maps. He did the wrong thing. Joz... we simply can't have one more COO going CEO at Apple. This is not HP. I would rather see Michael Dell. He reimagined distribution using tech from NeXT (later Apple used the same for their online shop), started from nothing, and well... he worked with Jobs. However, it likely is going to be a corporate insider, and the COO is the most likely candidate. It would however be nice to have one with a vision for the products and one that wouldn't accept 10 years of Car-to-nowhere or 6 years of butterfly keyboards. One that can push us forward and is better at global politics than Cook without being Elon Musk.

Forstall was more pragmatic than Steve Jobs. Having a nice balance of pragmatism, idealism, ambition, and managing smart people is hugely important in these roles. Forstall essentially saved Apple by promoting the Carbon API and he played a huge part in the iPhone. Without Carbon, it meant MS Office and Adobe apps weren't going to be on Mac OS X, at least in anything resembling a quick timeline. Without those apps, Apple would have gone out of business. Then for the iPhone, he basically took all that they learned from AppKit and made UIKit, a second generation Obj-C platform, which is the basis for all iPhone apps until Swift came out.

So, he was really good at making these platforms, revising them, making the developer community came along. This all plays out in hardware and products. Swift and SwiftUI is basically Apple's next gen platform, and is essentially the official end of NeXT technologies at Apple. It's pretty slow going on the Swift front, and, its benefits don't seem that great. I wonder what a 3rd revision of an Obj-C platform would mean for all of Apple's hardware and user interfaces. You have to wonder what Apple's products would be like if Jony Ive wasn't in charge of UI and UE.

He wasn't fired because Apple Maps. He was fired because he didn't "get along" with Jony Ive, Phil Schiller, et al. On the one hand, the C-suite needs to work together. On the other hand, the C-suite can't become compliant to one dominant person either. They shouldn't be susceptible to group think. Someone needed to say no to some products or some actions. Apple Maps was initially a fiasco, but it was also a 1.0. With time and data, it became competitive, and it would have happened with Forstall remaining in charge of it. I didn't think anyone needed to publicly "apologize" for it.

I do think Apple is quite stuck in its own triangulation of what features its products should have. Apple puts limitations on their platforms that don't need to be there. iPads are hyper triangulated. They don't seem to want to have new product just cannibalize an old product. They don't want to take any chances at an odd or unusual product. (AVP is a breath of fresh air here). We've all lived through 2012 to 2018 or so. There were a lot of strange mistakes during this time. There needs to be a book written about how those mistakes were made and why it took so long to fix of change. Eg, 3 iterations of butterfly keyboards that didn't work. iPadOS multitasking is limited on purpose, with UI that don't get fixed or fixed fast.

Rudimentary math states that 2024-2008 = 16 years. 

Thinnovation!

eriamjh said:

jellyapple said:

I can’t imagine how Apple can convince and keep buyers on Apple products if the end-point on-device chip, like A18, A19, M4, M5 etc. do not have AI /AGI capabilities.  

Exactly what makes a chip AI capable?

The label largely stems from a computer having a dedicated "neural processing unit", NPU. Basically a specialized execution unit design for 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit integer SIMD workloads that machine learning tools use.

There is now a big advertising push in the "PC" world for it because Intel has started putting these NPUs into their SoCs. That's why "AI PCs" are part of media cycle now.

Apple has had a NPU, they call it a neural processing engine (NPE), in their SoCs for about 5 to 6 years now. All Apple Silicon Macs would be considered an "AI PC" because they have an NPE in their chips. All iPhones and iPads for the past few years could also be considered AI PCs. Heck, even the 2024 Apple Watch 9 and Watch Ultra 2 models could be considered AI PCs because the S9 SiP has a 4 core NPE in them.

Otherwise, all these machine learning algorithms would be running on the GPU, or even worse the CPU, which is slower, hotter, uses more power. By having the specialized execution units in the SoC chip, it makes running these workloads faster and more energy efficient.