timmillea

I am sure an AI lawyer would be cheaper and more effective. 

I don't regard 'flat and square' as 'modernisation'. It is a hark back to the awful past. Can you imagine how expensive the more ergonomic 'wedge' MBA was to develop and produce? Layer upon layer of custom lithium-ion flat cells to fit the shape. 

Fan-less changes recording studio architecture. There suddenly is no need for a separate booth for the engineer. The MBA is silent. 

The M1 MBA, the first Apple Silicon and the last 'wedge' is likely to be a priceless classic. 

Just how many years can Apple go on thinking that 256GB is sufficient, even for an entry-level model? I know streaming is removing much of the need for storage but most people have a large back-catalogue of DVDs and Blu-rays which we want stored at high quality plus our lives' music and photo collections. Then there is the requirement for working storage. Even if you just want to make a Youtube video to share with friends, there is a large amount of space required during editing. 

I would have thought Apple would have upped the entry-level storage by now, before its reputation is (further) tarnished. 

There is hardly any difference between the MacBook Pro and Air since Apple silicon. One has a fan and the other doesn't. All other differences are purely down to marketing and deliberate product placement. Improved heat sinking would remove the need for a fan, the display could be made premium and suddenly there is no need for two product lines. Ive was right. 

"because Apple calls it Machine Learning instead of AI"

Machine learning is a minuscule sub-field of the field of AI! It so happens that the speed of devices affordable to consumers have made ML feasible in recent years so it is currently making all the headlines. Neural networks, upon which ML runs, have been around for many decades. Their uses and limitations are well understood but that doesn't stop billion-dollar valuations of startups claiming a new 'AI'-based application. 

The best ML app will never approach the best equivalent human behaviour, even with learning supervised by the best human expertise. Most ML is not supervised so ML apps are fast, impressive at the moment but they will never be 'intelligent'. The real potential of AI is in evolutionary algorithms (a.k.a. artificial evolution) whose results can exceed those of humans. And to think I was 'growing' neural nets within an evolutionary algorithm almost 30 years ago and no one, not even in the field of computer science, was remotely interested :-(