tht

mikethemartian said:

Pema said:

9secondkox2 said:

By now, AI is a known quantity. Reverse engineering and IP theft are not new either. This is just the tip of the proverbial "iceberg" as relates to an incoming swarm of products / services like this. yawn. China is not new to knockoffs, software included. AI is no different. Easy to develop something rapidly when you're copying the work of pioneers who put much of their lives into the work. Should software controlled by a hostile nation be on American's devices? It's an interesting question. But outside of government officials, members of the military, or those with security credentials, probably not too big a concern. But it's worth investigating. It's not like we didn't just have the chinese surveilance devices surveying our nation from the air last year. The less information an adversarial nation has on another nations citizens, the better. It may not be a WMD or whatever, but it's definitely not something to be dismissed.

I am not so sure about this. 

Recall how back in the late 60s and early 70s we used to mock the Japanese, especially their cars. And then gradually they upended the industry and forced us to up our game, in cars, electronics and cameras.

I would not suggest that the Chinese are ripping anyone off, it is just that they are doing it the smart way and we are doing it the hard and unwieldily way. 

Much as Mr Trump wants to make America great again and resurrect the American Empire, going forward it is going to be the Chinese Empire. 

You only need to read books like 'The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbons)' or Barbarians at the Gate and realise what's happening with the US. We have become fat and lazy; too much booze and too many drugs; let our guard down at our borders which is exactly what happened with the almighty Romans. 

The Chinese have captured the EV market; they have sown up the manufacturing of just about everything and now they are showing us how AI is done. Marc Andreessen of Mosaic fame calls this the 'Sputnik' moment. When the Russians orbited the earth before we even knew how to build rockets. 

It forced us (remember JFK's famous speech) to wake up, commit billions of dollars, create NASA and land on the moon in 1969. 

Perhaps Trump and this event will force us to wake up and take the reins and rise up out of the ashes or we will continue to sink into oblivion: a nation of lazy drug users who can't get their game together. Our problem is not that we have too many undocumented migrants. Even if we round up and evict every single one of them it won't restore our boldness, vision and greatness. 

That's what is happening here. Blaming the Chinese for stealing our IP is just nonsense and short viewed. 

I should read Gibbons one day.

You probably shouldn’t. I suppose you should, but read someone else as well. Gibbon blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on the rise of Christianity, trying to make the case that Romans didn’t have its zeal or vitality because of it. As soon as you hear words like vitality or zeal in an explanation, that’s psychobabble or bullshit territory. 

The media should stop using the word, “cameras”, to describe these sensors. More and more, they sound like more capable proximity sensors than anything we would describe as cameras. 

SmittyW said:

tht said:

Looks like any other Apple Store?

What I would like to see are sound dampening materials, inside the store. Place is loud!

Obviously, I'm big on being carbon neutral, if not negative. So, roof has to be either a solar PV panel set, painted white or passive radiative cooling panels. There should be battery storage. Windows are thermally efficient or solar PV. Parking lot, if an open field, not a garage, should be covered by PV panels.

I'm guessing Apple considers the 'liveliness' of the noise a good juxtaposition to the minimalist style. Although, perhaps the noise is why they include trees in some of their stores.

Personally, I was disappointed about the carbon neutral part. Geologically speaking, we're at record-low CO2 levels. The plants/algae, and thus every other form of life on this planet, need more CO2. %0.04 of the atmosphere is anemic.

Regardless, I can't wait to visit this store, maybe even for the opening, it looks amazing. 

The noise is mostly a function of how many people are in the store, or restaurant, whatever interior space. If it is loud enough such that you have to talk loudly or strain to hear the person next to you, it's too loud, and it stresses the people inside.

Perhaps the store owners view it as a sign, to customers, that the store is vibrant, busy and a place to go, and as such, they don't want to address it. They want it that way. For restaurants, they don't have the capital to do anything about it as it likely requires sound dampening foam on the ceiling and walls. For Apple? They really should do something about it.

Solar+storage is a win-win for any new and renovated building if the geometry is right for solar. Over a 20 year time span, it cuts the cost of energy in half. For this Apple retail store, what, it's 10,000 ft2?, I'd estimate about 350 KWH per day on average. At $0.20 per KWH, that's $70 per day, 25k per year and 500k over 20 years. A solar+storage system that covers 99% of their usage will cost on order 250k. Saves money, it's carbon neutral, and it protects them from the shenanigans from the grid utility. Win-win-win.

Kind of amazing that many Apple retail stores are over 20 years old now; and, there isn't much doubt (?) that the Apple stores can go on another 20 years. They have survived the Amazon asteroid hitting retail everywhere. But. How much longer can they hold on? Some sociology their team has to figure out to keep people going to the retail stores.

As far as global warming, if Wes allows, I will refute every single one of your denier talking points, and will not let you have the last post. You know that, right? I'd rather you just say you don't care about the future and only care about the present, instead of parroting denier talking points.

CO2 constitutes less than 1% of the atmosphere, yes, but that other 99% does not absorb infrared radiation, but CO2 does. Absorption of infrared radiation in the atmosphere is what makes the entire atmosphere hot enough to support life on the planet. That less than 1% is thusly a critical 1%, like small amounts of poison in your body is critical, or the difference between your car windows being open or closed on a hot day. Absolutely critical for atmospheric temperatures.

The water vapor (~55%), the CO2 (~30%) and the methane (~10%) in the air serve a vital purpose, by increasing the atmospheric temps from a would-be global average of 32 °F to 55 °F. Without that 1%, the planet would be an ice world, not able to support life. Too much of it, it would make most of the planet unlivable and threatens humanity. We have dug up fossil fuels, all carbon based fuels, from the ground, burned them and released CO2 into the atmosphere. We have increased it 50% and are on track to doubling, perhaps tripling, the concentration within our children's lifetimes. The means an average increase of atmospheric temperatures of about 5 °F to 10°F, and it will keep on going up in our grandchildren's lifetimes.

This has rather ugly consequences as people near the equator are already living at the limit of their sweat-based cooling systems. Same for all forms of life. Further increases only endanger them, agriculture, livestock etc. It will be a race between humanity engineering their agricultural plants, their livestock to survive this climate, migrating poleward, designing everything to be inside buildings, engineering everything to be productive near the poles, and the inevitable reduction in human population due to this temperature increase. Heck, we will likely be using hydrolysis to release oxygen into the atmosphere, to make up for all the dead coral reefs that release half the O2 that goes into the atmosphere.

You are intimating that it is the sun that is causing global warming. We've been able to measure solar irradiance for the better part of 200 years now, and over the last 50 years, we've been able to measure it all over the world and in space. In space, it has been a steady 1361 +/- 0.5 W/m2 for the last 50 years. Over the last 50 years, global average temperatures have risen 1.5 °F. Solar irradiance has been at 1361 W/m2, if not a slight decrease.

Like Wes said, in the geologic past, while CO2 concentrations have been higher, solar irradiance in the geologic past was lower. It generally balanced out to make life possible. The sun has been increasing its solar irradiance about 1% every 100m years (number may be wrong, memory isn't that good anymore). 1% in solar irradiance is a huge change. 1% 13.6 W/m2. Decadal solar cycles only change about 1 to 2 W/m2, an order of magnitude difference, and higher CO2 concentrations in the past was actually required for a planet with life. Now? We really want it to be on 30% less than where we are now. 200m years from now? We are either blocking the sun or are moving the Earth to higher orbit as an increase of 25 W/m2 will likely mean a mostly lifeless planet on the surface, and perhaps life only underground.

From my perspective, all we are doing is changing how energy is generated. That's it. Life will be normal, as you are doing it today. All this fight, denial, misinformation to protect fossil fuel interests. Why?

mpantone said:

Apple's greatest innovation in the 21st century is the iPhone. Anyone who thinks otherwise is still living in 2005-2010.

Steve introduced the iPhone in 2007 as "the computer for the rest of us" then went on to remove Computer from the name of his own company. Today the revenue from the iPhone, iPad, and wearables dwarfs the Mac business unit.

Pretty much every single consumer-facing technology we have today has been driven by smartphones because they are the primary computing modality of today's consumers and have been for 10+ years. We've gone over this before, things like NFC contactless payment systems (which actually started on Japanese featurephones a few years before smartphones), biometric identification systems, computational photography, touchscreen displays, et cetera ad nauseam. Not all of these originated on the smartphone but mainstream popularity was pushed by smartphones.

Even today, you have macOS trailing iOS in features (this is particularly notable in biometric ID, Apple Intelligence feature rollout). Apple even debuted the M4 SoC on a handheld device (iPad Pro) rather than sticking it in first in a MacBook.

Like clockwork Apple releases new iPhones every fall and lets the high-end Mac Pro fester years and years (where one might expect PC innovation to occur). What has Apple done on the Mac side in recent years? Let's see, they've removed the Touchbar, released a jumbo Mac mini called the Studio, and finally released a long-overdue Mac mini in a smaller form factor thirteen years after they discontinued their last model with a built-in 5.25" optical drive (which was the main reason for the old size).

Meanwhile, Apple spends far more time, effort, and resources on iOS than macOS. This is completely obvious if you pay attention to WWDC.

iPhone/iOS is where to see where Mac/macOS is going.

Some tech journalists and pundits hold on tightly to their "personal computers are king" mentality but those days are long gone. Staying in the past just ends up being less relevant as time goes by. I'm a longtime Apple computer user (i.e., pre-1984) and I still own a Mac. But I don't look at my Mac as where the innovation is happening.

Time to stick a fork in this petrified paradigm because the rest of the (sane) world already did a decade ago. This article might have sounded less nutty in 2010. Today it's like an SNL parody of a tech article.

I think you can make the case that the Mach+BSD+ObjC/Swift system underlying all of Apple's user facing devices is Apple's biggest asset, or perhaps innovation. iOS was basically "NeXTSTEP 6" when it came out. A 2nd/3rd go-around with the Objective-C application frameworks, Mach+BSD mostly settled down. Security model integral to the system design. Since NeXSTEP was not di novo created out of Apple, not sure how to quantify it, but most of the NeXTSTEP folks took over OS development at Apple, plus other leadership position, allowing them to apply their lessons learned to a new system. 

Today, Mach+BSD+ObjC/Swift runs on everything. Apple TV, HomePods, and at one point in time, it even ran in a iPhone Lightning video dongle.

Will be interesting to see if they will use Mach+BSD for their custom cellular modem, or use the L4 based OS used in the Secure Enclave.

Cool fact: Richard Rashid and Avie Tevanian co-developed Mach. Rashid went on to lead MS Research and the developments for NT while Tevanian went to NeXT and then Apple after the merger. Tevanian being able to effectively manage software engineering at Apple was one of the key tentpoles that kept Apple alive and enabled them to get iPhone.

dewme said:

I really hope Apple doesn't go with an "iPad on a Stump" design.

Well, it's basically different versions of iPad+HomePod combos. Amazon has like 5 different versions. A straight up tablet mounted on a wall to serve as a hub for connected devices, a small screen tablet+speaker, a mid-sized screen+speaker, a large size screen+speaker, and a large wall tablet as well. I'm sure I'm missing several, as Amazon is employing the "throwing spaghetti at the wall" strategy.

Mystifying set of rumors. I tend to think that Apple's entry into the Internet of Things devices or Home devices is a defensive act or to add  moat for their mainline devices, to counter the threat of exclusivity, like Windows only compatibility, from popular devices. Or, some IoT vender encroaching on Apple's mainline products.

Home video cameras, smart speakers, smart displays, mix-n-match combos, looks like they selling enough, and warrant Apple to have a branded version. Hence, the rumors of Apple developing a home video camera, tablet+speaker camera, and a wall display. It's a level of gadgetry that "traditional" computer companies don't do. The tablet on a robotic arm product rumor is now saying 2026, so, not a real product yet.

I do hope that Apple features voice, eye tracking, and hand tracking for these devices.