blastdoor

When the M1 came out, intel was two full nodes behind TSMC — a huge and embarrassing gap.

today Intel is maybe a half node behind, so they made progress. But with Gelsinger fired and the new management slashing spending, it seems unlikely that Intel will catch up. 

ssfe11 said:

Yes definitely Apple News alone is worth it. There are paywalls with everything but most not with Apple News. Also luv Apple Music. 

Agreed. At this point I get the vast majority of my news from Apple News. It's kind of crept up on me as other sources have declined in quality and availability (ie, going behind paywalls). 

In addition to News, I also get a lot of use from TV and Music. I also like the 2TB of storage. 

I get almost no use from Fitness+ and Arcade. 

tht said:

These mature 300mm fabs can produce chips at scale, with predictable yields, and without the constant churn of process shrink cycles.

300 nanometers, right?

Or are they talking about 300 millimeter diameter wafers?

Yeah, the wafers are 300mm. 

The processes are 28nm to 130nm.

MassiveAttack said:

blastdoor said:

Typically the point of an acquisition is to gain technology, productive assets (like factories), employees, or customers. But I don't see Apple as falling short in any of those areas. 

Apple's problem really is with their senior management's failure of vision and strategy. Either senior management needs to self-correct or the board will have to get involved. 

Apple is not a technology company. The technology plays in the background. Apple is a design company.

Twenty years ago this statement was definitely true. But in the last ten or so years I think Apple has been more innovative as a tech company. By far the most exciting thing they’ve accomplished in that period is Apple Silicon. They still make iterative design improvements to existing products but they seem to be having some real difficulty designing new successful products. The car project was killed after spending a ton on it. AVP made it out the door, and is technologically very strong, but at least so far it hasn’t come together as a compelling product outside of a few niche cases.

This is a really nice illustration that Apple's claim about not building a chat bot is just a distraction based on semantics. 

The "chatbot" is just a product that provides a light-weight interface for using a combination of integrated tools, the most notable of which is the LLM. But if you have any experience using ChatGPT, you know that it's not just an LLM -- there are other tools in play, such as tools for creating various types of files for download (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .csv, .md, etc). 

So all Apple is really saying is that they want to integrate the LLM along with other components into a product that they will not call a 'chat bot' but instead whatever it is that they end up calling it (Siri, Siri+, or whatever). And I could imagine that Apple's product(s) that integrate the LLM end up being truly much better than the current chatbots out there, because Apple has control of multiple platforms. 

I guess what it boils down to is that Apple is behind in two respects. First, they do not have a home-grown LLM that is as capable as other competitors. Second, they have not yet figured out how to integrate an LLM with other components into products that customers value. 

It's the second thing that's the bigger deal, because they could always use somebody else's LLM until their own is up to snuff (just like they used Intel processors for many years). ChatGPT offers a product (the chatbot) that businesses and consumers alike are willing to pay actual $$ for. Apple is not offering an LLM-based product -- whatever they might call it -- that anybody would pay for.