timmillea

I bought a used MessagePad 120 around a year after it was discontinued. I was severely underwhelmed by it and sold it on pretty quickly. To suggest it was the forerunner of the iPhone or even iPod is mistaken. It was not a phone nor a media device. The iPod and iPhone never had handwriting recognition as their primary input interface. They are different product categories. 

When Jobs returned to Apple he cancelled a whole load of projects, including some he should not have, because they were not his. The Newton platform was ahead of its time but not ready for commercial release. We also lost OpenDoc - a philosophical extension of ClarisWorks to the OS - and the World is much the poorer for it. Jobs wanted to use his Next OS based on Unix and that was that, we still do. A radical branch of progress was simply severed because it did not suit the vanity of one man. 

The MBA 13" is the perfect first candidate for the M3. The 3nM process will bring significant, 5nM/3nM = 67% approx improvement in performance to power ratio. How Apple decides to share performance to power out in the M3 we don't know. Given the fan-less heat-throttling design, I imagine it will be a large ramp up in speed, for a minute or so, then extended battery life. There would be the opportunity to make it thinner or even to introduce the much-missed 11" version but that is not the direction of travel of Apple since Jony Ive departed. 

I have the M1 MBA with BTO 2TB storage and exquisite (and expensive with all the tiered batteries) wedge shape. It's aesthetics are superior to the current M2 MBA. It supports an external 6k display - reaching the limit of human usefulness. An M3 'block' MBA won't sway me to upgrade. Apple will have to up its MBA design to make me upgrade. Perhaps ask Sir Jony for a hand?

rob53 said:

It's about time Apple drew a line in the sand. I'm sick and tired of countries dictating how a product is designed especially when those countries have nothing worthwhile to offer. Yes, the UK and EU make some cellular devices but nothing compared to what Apple produces. The removal of end-to-end encryption is simply a ploy to allow governments to capture all kinds of personal information without even having a warrant. The UK wants to go back to the days of the telephone party line so they can snoop constantly. 

Apple produces most of its products in China - a country not exactly known for its free speech, unfettered access to the WWW or any encrypted communications. 

As a UK citizen, I would like to make it clear that the current Conservative party government is in its dying days looking for provocative, popularist legislation to minimise the scale of its defeat at the forthcoming general election. This unworkable piece of legalisation is carefully designed to make the opposition parties appear to support child pornography if they oppose it. The British Conservative Party are historically the most successful political party in the World. Their means are ruthless and for only one purpose - to be in power and reward their financial supporters. Usually this is blatantly by giving titles and membership of The House of Lords. Only power, not morality or anything sensible matters. To put a bookend on this, the House of Lords has the most members of any governing assembly in the World after the Chinese National People's Congress. The House of Lords is always stuffed with as many 'friends' of the Conservative Party as they can get away with in any year - there are currently around double the numbers of members than there are even seats for in their chamber. 

This stupid piece of legalisation is unworkable and has nothing to do with its content. It is about painting the opposition as supporters of child pornography as we go in to the election season. 

Apple is foolish for pursuing an anti-union strategy. Collectivisation has numerous benefits for employer and employee despite the employer's misgivings.

Top management meeting representatives of the workforce means much ground can be covered in little time, compared to meeting every employee with a grievance, or worse, firing them and having to replace them.

Pay can be harmonised to save individual negotiation. So, when a worker finds they are being paid considerably less for doing the same or better job as a co-worker, they don't just leave in disgust for a fairer employer and take their knowledge, skills and training with them.

Collectivisation is fairer, seen to be fairer and is proven to increase both morale and productivity. 

mayfly said:

Other than that, you're right, I'm probably unqualified to opine about the resources necessary to advance AI to pass the Imitation Game.

Yes, Alan Turing is considered the father of computer science, created the first actual computer, shortened WW2 by at least a year and set the goals and tests for artificial intelligence before he was convicted of homosexuality, chemically castrated, shunned by society and committed suicide.

Even now, the mathematical proof required to demonstrate that something is a 'computer' is if it can implement the purely theoretical 'Turing Machine' - published decades before any actual computer existed - 'Turing Machine Equivalence' is the necessary proof. In AI, the 'Turing Test' is whether a human cannot discern whether they are interacting with a human or a computer. 

The adage regarding computers goes, "junk-in, junk out" and that is precisely what current machine learning is - it learns from junk. ML is a tiny branch of AI which can at its very optimum, perform at an average level but is very unlikely to ever get even to that level. There is so much more to AI that can theoretically do so much better than ML. Let the big corporates exploit rather ancient tech for profit but they will never produce a Beethoven, a Shakespeare or a Da Vinci. AI theoretically can but not with neural nets and big data.