It can be useful at letting you know of things that might be bugs. Like maybe you intended to use x in a calculation but forgot. Or maybe you intended to call func2() but actually called func1() instead. I feel like it should be a warning more than a hard error though.
It just says they have to give equal time, not prevent someone from coming on the show completely. But the other candidates have to make a request to be included and no-one made any requests.
Don’t act like this FCC’s actions should be taken in good faith.
> not prevent someone from coming on the show completely.
No, they weren't prevented from coming on, as the article poorly points out. It appears that CBS sees equal airtime as a very serious threat to their programming. This makes complete sense, if you've watched an intentionally biased show like Colbert.
edit: downvotes, please explain. This is the stated reason from TFA!:
> "CC Chairman Brendan Carr recently issued a warning to late-night and daytime talk shows that they may no longer qualify for the bona fide news exemption to the equal-time rule, and subsequently opened an investigation into ABC’s The View after an interview with Talarico."
> Colbert played audio of a recent Carr interview in which the FCC chairman said, “If [Jimmy] Kimmel and Colbert want to continue to do their programming, they don’t want to have to comply with this requirement, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service and that’s fine.”
> Colbert said he “decided to take Brendan Carr’s advice” and interviewed Talarico for a segment posted on his show’s YouTube channel.
Help me understand if I'm missing something here. And the show is, clearly, intentionally biased. It targets a left wing audience, with its jokes specifically written around that (always has, that's fine), and nearly exclusively, has left wing political guests.
> It appears that CBS sees equal airtime as a very serious threat to their programming.
This seems very dubious given the recent ownership change of CBS and the lack of reason behind the decision. The point the parent comment brings up is that "equal airtime" requires that someone actually request to go on the show and be refused. There is no legitimate cover for CBS' decision as this did not occur. It seems incredibly likely to be one made in fear of political liability rather than legal.
> The point the parent comment brings up is that "equal airtime" requires that someone actually request to go on the show and be refused.
Their lawyers recommendation, and Colbert's response and behavior, aligns with the case if they did refuse guests.
Is there some reference you're going off of related to this, that makes it clear they didn't? Or does Carr possibly have knowledge that they did, as part of the (as the article points out) ongoing investigation, resulting in their lawyers making the recommendation?
Call me a crazy conspiracy theorist but, a strongly left leaning show, with a strong left leaning audience, whose whole routine is making fun of republicans, refusing republican guests does NOT seem all that crazy. I would personally expect it, just to prevent their staff from the usual Twitter mob death threats for "platforming nazis"! I also think this whole thing is unreasonable, but I also think it's unreasonable to have 6 companies control 90% of the media, giving them the domination where their guests choices can even be considered a problem.
CBS is now run by a right-wing billionaire. The equal time rule is being used as cover to kill an interview that the Republican administration doesn't like. Same way CBS keeps killing 60 Minutes reporting that does the same.
What evidence is there that OpenAI will be more benevolent than Salesforce? Perhaps we shouldn’t give large corporations more opportunities for data mining.
> Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.
That doesn’t sound like “we’re cancelling this because our customers let us know loud and clear that they were ethically against this”. If the only thing keeping them from doing this is time and money, what guarantee do we have that they won’t do it again if time and money allow?
Amazing how often people do that. Corporations have very little incentive to be truthful and often have good reason to be dishonest. I notice it particularly wrt video games, gamers are always taking studio’s messaging as gospel and not corporate comms.
I see this all the time at work. Folks treat their relationship with employer like a personal relationship. Be loyal to company and it will be loyal to you. But everyone lies. Your managers will stab you in the back and throw to the ditch anytime they can gain something from it.
One needs to only witness an exec team or board meeting to realise that loyalty as a concept doesn't exist at the top for the vast majority of companies. You're 1.8% of the accounts department budget, or 0.02% of the head office budget. Which is looking a bit high in the face of our projected earnings this quarter. Best get HR to trim that by 10% to free up some cashflow for sales and initiatives. Actually, make that 20%. Bonuses were a bit thin last round and I need a new yacht.
And with Elon Musk! If he says we're going to Mars, then we're going to Mars. If he says full self driving next year, we're getting full self driving next year. He said that every year for 10 years? So what?
At the end of day, Amazon is a business, not an extension of the police or the FBI.
They initially partnered with Flock because they thought this would be a feature people would want. They literally bought a crazy expensive Super Bowl ad to show it off.
Turns out people didn't. So now they're not doing it.
It’s like when you don’t like someone’s friends but you’re not actually going to say that out loud. Instead you say “I'm just too tired to go out” — it’s a “diplomatic out.” Yes it’s a lie at face value but you leave people with their dignity while simultaneously signal your intent. Your friend, who presumably has social skills, picks up the subtext and you successfully communicate two layers of meaning with one sentence.
You're absolutely right, this is basic courtesy, and the sort of polite awareness that everyone should have when dealing in public. If you can't understand why you would often softpedal criticisms in public (while forthrightly addressing them privately!), you're hurting youself.
No, what you call "basic human social skills" is literally opposite of it. Having good social skills also involves saying "this person/institution is lying". Or even "this person/institution is harming people".
Having social skills means also being able to distinguish between innocent nicer phrase, outright enabling and being coconspirator.
I’m sure this is also cultural, but that approach is terrible. Your friend can’t automatically guess you’re lying, not for the first few times, anyway. Of course they’ll believe you if you say you’re too tired to go out. Then they inadvertently catch you or you reject them so many times they start to believe you don’t want to go out with them, not the other friend. All the while they became closer with the other person, who actually did hang out with them.
Stop lying. You’re hurting the friendship. If you care about the person, eventually you’ll have to be an adult and explain why you’re not comfortable with the third person.
You don’t get it. We are all extremely good friends and there is no friendship being hurt.
Talking in private is different where we are bluntly truthful.
This is how we talk in public.
It’s like doing steganography[1] on language. I can pass a secret message to my friend plainly in front of someone else using subtext.
And it’s not even contrived most of the time. Sometimes someone inadvertently leaks out subtext by their posture or tone and an observant person can read that the person is uncomfortable or comfortable.
So what you’re describing is a situation where the three of you are together and you want to cut the evening short for yourself because you don’t like one of the people? If that’s the case, I don’t think that was at all clear in your original post. Judging from the downvotes and the other responses, I think everyone assumed a situation like your friend calling you up and saying “hey, want to hang out with me and <person you dislike>?”.
And press releases are the same way. There is a literal message but often times there is subtext. They can’t say the subtext literally because it is inherently hurtful and burns a bridge (just like me saying “this guy sucks let’s leave”) so you read between the lines.
Outright lying in press releases is different. That’s a company saying “AI caused our company to fail” but actually you invested in the wrong product and don’t want to admit it.
It may even be that they have no alternative but to lie in their press release. Like say hypothetically they went to Flock and said “I know we have a contract saying we’re gonna do this partnership but given the optics and the amount of heat we’re getting we have to cancel”.
Flock may well have agreed on a break to the contract but stipulated that Flock had to agree to the wording of the press statement and Amazon was not going to disparage Flock yadda yadda.
Saying good things can get you sued. The truth doesn't need to be disparaging. If you are uncomfortable about the privacy implications of some action, just say that. You don't have to use words like "evil" or "villian" to express that you are not comfortable with a particular path.
That public statement could easily be an open negotiation tactic saying they'll do it, but want more money to do it. Especially if it is gov't money which would be paying for that feed.
I think it’s also for practical reasons: your dog needs to be near a person with an iPhone. If the dog is in the middle of the woods it won’t show up. Generally most objects require a person to move them and so the chances of them being near an iPhone are much higher.
I feel like the difference between Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s leadership styles is that Cook is really good at optimizing existing processes, but does not have the vision to capitalize on what’s next.
Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big seller. It's why they're investing in their own silicon. This strategy tends to yield unexpected wins, like the Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud, or the Mac Studio becoming arguably the best way to run local AI models (a nascent space that is on the cusp of becoming genuinely relevant), or the MacBook Pro becoming by far the best laptop in the world for productivity in the AI age (and it's not even close).
Your conclusion is that they're going to be left behind, but the evidence is that they're already well ahead in the areas that are core to their business. They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. Nobody else can do what they can in the fusion of hardware, software, and materials as long as they stay focused.
Where they genuinely slipped up was their marketing -- an unusual mistake for Apple. And that does indeed lie with the CEO.
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.
This was true maybe a decade ago, but not so now (under the watch of Tim Cook).
You listed Mac hardware becoming popular in the age of AI as examples of "unexpected wins". Maybe that's true (I don't know if it is) - but Macs were only 8% of Apple's 2025 revenue. Apple has become an iPhone company (50% of revenue) that sells services (26% of revenue).
And AI can eat away at both. If Siri sucks so hard that people switch away, that would also reduce Services revenue from lost App Store revenue cuts. If Google bundles Gemini with YouTube and Google Photos storage, people might cancel their iCloud subscriptions.
I think the parent comment was making the point that Tim Cook's Apple has missed the boat and it doesn't show signs that it's going to catch the next wave.
I have an iPhone 16 and I'm locked in because of all my photos being on my iCloud subscription. But in 2030, if my colleague can use their Pixel phone to record a work meeting, have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting, and Siri can still only set a timer for 5 minutes, then I might actually switch.
If the Mac were its own standalone business, it would rank at no. 134 on the Fortune 500 with $33.7 billion in revenue. Also, that's a 12% increase in revenue compared to 2024.
If anything, AI has brought more attention to the Mac. Just about every major AI app is released for the Mac first. I've seen complaints about it on HN.
The latest is Claude Cowork. It was released for macOS on January 12th; it didn't ship for Windows until February 10th; it's still not available for Windows running on ARM.
It's been nearly a year since Dia launched [1], the first AI browser, and it's still not available for Windows.
We just had the frenzy over OpenClaw [2] with AI enthusiasts lining up at Apple Stores to buy a Mac mini just to run it!
The most popular AI channels on YouTube are almost exclusively using Macs. Apple seems to have enough runway until they get their act together.
Outside US, most people that buy Macs do so because they are developers targeting iDevices, or can afford Apple and want the ecosystem that comes with their iDevice.
An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.
Where you live, maybe. It really depends on the country even outside the US. A lot of it is, to this day, because of things like Final Cut and Logic. Either because they dabble in it as a hobby or professionally.
A lot of the recent growth is developers in general, there's really been a huge shift there. 2010 developers using Macs vs 2026 developers using Macs, if you look at personal devices or workplaces that give them a choice. Biggest driver being Apple Silicon.
I live in one of those 70% market share Windows world region, where Apple gear is taken from a devices pool when required for project delivery, or bundled with cable TV subscriptions with credit payment scattered across several years.
> An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.
For businesses and pro users, it isn't the Apple ecosystem that's the main driver.
Since Apple silicon a lot of laptops are just so far behind in battery life, speed and usability that you wouldn't get it. Often Apple ecosystem was a net negative since most things worked better on Windows but that has shifted.
Until the Apple tax goes away, most folks will put up with Windows flaws, unless Apple changes their pricing policy for countries that cannot afford G8 level salaries.
> No, as in the entire PC market for the past two decades
Is this why AI is winning? People aren't doing better. You pick a random stat and somehow make it support what you're arguing.
The link says DESKTOP. I said LAPTOP. Laptop after M1. Why are we going back 2 decades? They have >15% registered as unknown. Sure, "accurate". Cough cough. It doesn't differentiate new or old and IF (the original discussion) that Apple is gaining market share and NEW sales.
> and they're not gaining very quickly
This is just as bad as speculative stock trading e.g. with software stocks. They're losing to AI. Oh no. Dump. Oh they're actually not too bad. Buy it back. Apple doesn't have AI. Sell. Apple doesn't have AI. Buy. Are you ok?
Laptops are desktops in 2026, and without needing Apple style dongles to make out of missing ports, yet another Apple "improvement" in expensive hardware.
Tried an android phone given by my company. Gemini is at your fingertips, with a single button press.
That’s INCREDIBLE!
[everything Siri never delivered].
Put that into a headphone or headphone-enabled glasses. Plus a ring.
And the need for an advanced UI-based phone fades away for many usages.
I have a Pixel besides my iPhone (for reasons). When I got a Pixel 9 about a year ago, my feeling was the same (Gemini as at your fingertips. INCREDIBLE!). A few months later after the novelty wore off, I just found the push of AI everywhere in Pixel OS and Google apps just annoying. I now use GrapheneOS on my Pixel. One of the many reasons is that it does not try to push AI anywhere.
Now I just have a single LLM (Le Chat) isolated in its own little app sandbox, never getting in my face unless I choose to open it myself.
I’m not sure how to say it without sounding like an Apple fanboy, but Tim Cook has been the CEO for the past 15 years. Every single year people have been whining how “he’s not visionary and etc.”, but at some point you have to give him some credit. Apple of 2026 has completely different landscape versus apple of 2010/earlier. Scaling from millions to billions of sales is incredibly hard, and he’s been able to accomplish it.
Would you feel the same if in 2030, all the actions you describe, work most of the time but still produce questionable output requiring time to verify and fact check due to the probabilistic nature of the LLM engine? This is unsolvable with LLMs. I don't want an embedded or agentic AI but do give me the option to pick a model of my choice and accept the risks when I want to. I don't want tainted generated summaries, replies or code in certain critical areas.
Also, since AI will mean most are just let go, why would they need meeting minutes? AI would be so crucial as to be the make or break phone/laptop feature, but people would still have meetings?
At best they will use it to tell them for special offers that they can buy with food coupons.
You're not thinking ahead. AI isn't just chat bots and image editing. I want to tell my phone:
I'm road tripping to XYZ tomorrow, 10 am to 5 pm.
and have my phone become a guide for the day, including stops it knows I like and hotel in my price range with the amenities it knows I need. If I get hungry it just slips in a stop wherever I ask.
This can come as an "everything app" or it can be a "new OS". Either way it will change how people interact with their phone.
If Android becomes this OS, which it may very well happen, iOS is toast. Apple's branding moat isn't that deep.
The moment this is automated and overseen by an AI implementation it'll turn into a marketing game like SEO did. You'll end up staying at the hotel which spends the most money on getting itself into the training data and forcing reviews on people immediately before the stay is up.
It's bad enough already. But I do not want someone making decisions for me on that and booking things, which is the only uplift that an AI implementation can give over the current situation.
>You'll end up staying at the hotel which spends the most money on getting itself into the training data and forcing reviews on people immediately before the stay is up
...and how does your "by hand" process solve this problem? You are influenced by the same SEO crap regardless of AI intervention.
I think that sounds like an incredible feature, but like so many things my phone can already do I'd never actually use it. I just don't want to become someone who does what their phone suggests.
Plus I have a partner and friends, so unless we all want to follow my phone's instructions it's not going to work.
It should easily be able to understand a user's personality well enough to know how to manipulate them. E.g., 4 suggestions that user avoids directing user to the remaining 5th location that wasn't suggested.
How do you find those 5 locations? You open Google Maps and search for them. Too bad the app already selects 4 places to show you and hide the 5th.
So often I look for a business but Google Maps won't show it because it has no reviews. An AI assistant wouldn't change that, as long as it's still interactively programmable (i.e. give me 5 options, I'll pick 3)
I'm not arguing that the feature wouldn't be used at all, just that I believe I'm fairly typical in not using clever phone features. It'd be used by a small number of people but that wouldn't make a noticeable change in marketshare if Android had it and iOS didn't.
To be honest, there probably isn't any feature of a phone OS would make a difference these days. People have decided which camp they're in and they're not going to change.
I saw a video of a Chinese phone that did something like that. Their implementation was a privacy and security nightmare but basically it shared a active feed of your screen with an LLM and would literally tap, type and swipe to achieve your objective. Like order these oodles from this app, it would only interrupt it's actions at payment processing screens.
Looked really cool and like the AI I've always imagined.
This is why Apple (and Google) is in a privileged position to tackle this issue at the OS level. If you currently trust your OS, then having a local agent use your apps wouldn't be terribly different (prompt injection risk aside)
After having given Openclaw a try as my "personal assistant" for a day when traveling, I 100% want this to be one possible way I can interact with my computer going forward.
Of course it's failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private (I want local inference before giving it access to anything material, or it'll indeed be a privacy nightmare), and crashes all the time, but the fact that a (not yet) walking, talking CVE can do a better job at this than one of the most wealthy corporations in the world after several years of trying should give them some serious pause.
The “failing hilariously” bit is critical for this road-tripping use case.
It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation to lose faith in simply handing over a whole day’s itinerary to an LLM. Honestly that can go so bad very easily.
We are decades into the GPS navigation era and I still don’t trust the route my vehicle suggests. I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
> I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
I heard this often but what has been the issue in practice? The worst that happened to me is Google Maps suggesting I cross a bridge that was washed away by the last typhoon, but that's hardly Google's fault.
Only in very remote places has Google Maps failed me, at least for driving directions (for trails it's another story...)
> It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation
I feel like if one bad suggestion can leave somebody in a dangerous situation, many other things must have failed before, such as informing oneself of the general condition of roads in a given place and the current season, having a fallback plan in case digital navigation fails or a road is unexpectedly closed etc.
> failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private, and crashes all the time, a (not yet) walking, talking CVE
Is actually doing a better job than not doing any of that at all? This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation. Sometimes if you can’t do it right it’s better to not do it at all. Better to wait for the full meal instead of having a “slop snack”.
I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies. Terrible. Which is more than any company can do so yay?
Some things are worse than nothing in terms of quality or liability.
Yes, it's significantly better than nobody doing any of this for me, and the important thing for the purpose of this prediction is that the error rate still seems to be going down exponentially with time.
> This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation.
That's exactly where it would make sense to try a new thing then, no?
> I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies.
Sounds like a much more high stakes activity than telling me factoids around my travel itinerary, so I agree that we shouldn't have you run the neurosurgery department yet, yes.
Disregarding for a moment whether that's what HN-greybeards want or not, being behind in this area doesn't necessarily preclude Apple from catching up later. There's enough of a market that they can buy it from one of Google's competitors if they have to.
Can you not already do nearly that right now with Gemini on any device, iOS or not? I just gave a similar prompt to Gemini. It activated Gemini's "personal intelligence" feature and gave me the kind of highly personalized itinerary and advice you just suggested. It's not quite as seamless as being built directly into the OS, but I actually prefer it this way -- it's mildly sandboxed for safety while still giving me almost everything you just described if I want it. I certainly wouldn't switch away from my iPhone just to remove that sandboxing.
It doesn't even need to be coming from a single AI vendor either. For instance, I can already use Grok's voice mode inside our Model Y to add stops along the route if we're hungry.
I get what you want, its pretty sophisticated and yes probably a huge added value if it works reliably.
And there is no fucking way I want that in my life or my family's lives, ever. I will fight this very actively, with my wallet, voting and voice. Thats far beyond 1984 and at this point, in 2026, we know all that info will be weaponized against me, will try to manipulate me into decisions I would not do otherwise, for ads and other purposes. Also, it removes a lot of joy from one's life with discovering places and just being an adult and deciding for oneself, but that can be subjective.
If I dare to speak out, if I dare to disagree with official opinions, if I dare to have higher morals than those at the power at given moment. Look at all the shit happening even former bastion of democracy - US. Do you really think this is the bottom? We/You are still far from that and who knows if you bounce back. Past performance doesnt indicate future and all that.
Even when I am well shielded in proper bastion of true democracy and freedom - Switzerland in my case, nobody is immune. EU hates additional freedoms Swiss have and push hard for their dissolution, a reminder in their heart how better a very diverse European country can be run compared to mess EU is. US, at least current gov, hates this place too based on their moves.
Its not really helpful to leave snarky comments in bad taste neither, is it. I suggest you read up a bit on this country, its history (I mean proper history not some primitive blahs on qanon level) and educate yourself, its not that hard or long if you care about the topic.
You're here, right? How much of your life is already stored on digital devices one warrant away from the state?
I read your comment as someone from the 80s complaining about digitalization and it all applied. And yet here we are, my WHOLE photo library on my phone, most of communication with everyone on my phone, and AI isn't even part of it.
Thats your phone, I have no cloud storage and no most of my photos are not on my phone. Its not my first nor second account here, I don't care about some meaningless reward points. Same goes for everything else, very little of my life is stored digitally and connected/shared to internet. I see simply no reason for that, not cruising on some paranoia.
Its a fight worth fighting or behavior to adhere to, for me. Natural and logical. You seemingly gave up, thats fine as long as you are happy with your choices and consequences.
Why would you ever want to do that? Why wont' you stop and live life for a moment?, stop delegating stuff to your phone, especially when it comes to personal trips. Really bleak, this "always optimizing stuff" thing, really, really bleak. Tech-bro culture has done a good one to mainstream culture, because I see the same mindset seeping through to mainstream life.
I travel a lot and it's extremely time consuming. I don't even do much research beforehand anymore. I really wish I got a notification like "I know you're heading that way, how about this waterfall? It only adds 15 minutes of driving."
The reality is that I do not enjoy at all sorting through tickets and booking emails and apps, I just want to ask my phone "show me tonight's booking" and then hand the phone to the hotel's front desk.
There's so much an assistant can do and Siri is just so far from it.
It doesn't, but I'd rather book a hotel with full confidence and go to a restaurant that will be actually open, given all the information that is available to me at the time of planning, than having my trip ruined by a dumb bot because it cannot tell imagination from reality. All you get is "you're absolutely right".
Yeah what I do when I'm on a holiday is just walk out and see what's around, what places look good and have a good vibe. Maybe then check their rating but usually I don't bother do do even that. I'm not a minmaxer, I care more about living in the moment.
I do have pretty bad ADHD though and as such I thrive on chaos and hate planning so there's that...
Even if that worked, how do you know it will choose the stops you like and not the ones that paid Apple more to be featured?
How much data about you does an application like that need to store? Do you really think it can be stored and processed locally or will it have to go to some server that's a secret court order away - or a bribe away - from leaking it?
And last, why do you think a LLM - which is what "AI" means this year - can do that?
Oh and last last thing, honest guv, do read the chapter in Accelerando where the main character loses his smart glasses and is basically crippled because he can't remember anything on his own. (Don't ask an "AI" for a summary because Stross books aren't as popular as React and it will make a mish mash of all he has ever published, I just checked.)
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business
Perhaps, but it depends on what business they are really in...
One classic business failure ("Marketing Myopia") is to define the business you are in as the product or service you sell, rather than the customer need that you fill.
It's certainly been a long time since Apple was in the "phone business", and Nokia is an example of what happened to a company that thought that was the business they were in.
For now, AI is largely being packaged in a way that is somewhat orthogonal to what a smartphone does - as a service (e.g. AI chat) that it can consume - but as AI becomes more pervasive that will change, and it seems that increasingly the mobile device in your pocket will become more like your do-it-all personal assistant rather than a pocket computer that you use to run different applications do to different things.
So, do Apple think they are in the smartphone business, with AI as someone else's business, a service that their phones can consume, or are they correctly anticipating where things are heading?
My take is that the future will look something like this:
- You pay for a personal AI assistant from a cloud vendor (most people) or you run it yourself on your own hardware (not yet common, likely somewhat common in the future as hardware becomes cheaper and open weight models keep getting better). This assistant won't be a chatbot but an autonomous agent (like OpenClaw today). Some of these will be free but heavily subsidized through aggressive ads.
- This AI assistant has hooks into whatever personal services you want (email, cloud storage, photos, messages, etc.).
- You own a variety of devices in different form factors, each of which increasingly acts as a way of interacting with the same AI assistant, which exists independent of device. Some of these form factors will be new ones that don't meaningfully exist yet today, like true high-end AR glasses.
- Many apps and websites will eventually just become on-demand generative interfaces spawned by your AI assistant. Some "fixed" or "pre-programmed" interfaces will still exist, though.
For Apple, there are really two questions: (1) do they need to create their own frontier AI assistant to play a significant role in this future long-term? (2) if the answer to the former is "yes", when do they need that by, and how does it strategically weigh against creating the next generation of compute form factors that show up in the third item above?
Given that Apple has openly stated that they intend to create personalized intelligence across their ecosystem and that they don't know that the smartphone will be the dominant form factor in a decade, I think their answers are: (1) yes; (2) they need to have one eventually, but it's even more important that they prepare for next-gen form factors, and so they're okay being late to the game on AI assistants as long as they get there soon enough.
I'm personally not convinced about "next-gen form factors", although I know that's what many companies are focusing on - some type of smart glasses, or whatever kind of (screen-less?) device Jony Ive and OpenAI are working on.
Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face, and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them), so, seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
I think Apple's brand loyalty buys them some lead time in being a fast-follower, but the danger to them would be if things change so fast and profoundly that they get left behind a la Nokia. What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)? I wouldn't expect it to kill Apple overnight, but it seems that they are in effect gambling that "we can always pay for AI if we have to", and "someone will always license it to run on-device if we need to".
> Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face
Have you seen the Ray Ban meta glasses? They already look pretty close to existing fashionable sunglasses, albeit with a visible camera.
> and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them)
They already do; plenty of people carry a smart phone, a smart watch, and airpods.
> seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
People use smartphones to avoid being bored, but there are situations when it's unacceptable to use them (i.e. in a meeting); I could see smart glasses being used for that niche.
> What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)?
Knowing Google, that personal assistant would probably be shut down within a year.
> This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI
They aren’t. Mixed reality is getting little attention. It is in the “it remains a product in our line-up” phase. They are virtually all-in on AI. Their acquisitions have been AI-focused.
It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with are the same issues their competitors are dealing with and is isn’t stopping them from releasing.
> Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud
This isn’t why people are buying Mac minis. They’re buying them because that’s what the OpenClaw author was using, they’re cheap, and they run macOS, so the tools within OpenClaw can get deeper Apple API access to Calendar, iMessage, etc.
In the vast majority of cases, OpenClaw users aren’t using local models. They’re using “cloud” models like GPT and Claude.
>It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with aren’t stopping their competitors from releasing.
No, it’s a good sign that Apple has re-learned the lessons they used to take to heart but sometimes forget when they panic and scramble. Apple used to always be late to most changes but when they arrived, if it was with a cohesive answer that worked well. They’ve been scrambling instead and hopefully this is a sign they’ve realized that.
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.
And they’re failing at that too! I purchased an iPhone 16e thinking it would be like the iPhone SE, but what I got was worse than an SE. They used an old chip and I can tell you this phone cannot keep up with liquid glass, which they forced me to use and did not let me roll back.
And now we have the iPhone 17 suffering from chipping on the back of the phones.
The only reason Apple is succeeding is the only other thing is worse. And yes, I’m talking about android.
What? It has the same RAM size, same RAM speed, and same chip[0] (minus one (1) GPU core [6c, 4g, 16n]) as the iPhone 16 [6c, 5g, 16n] (and almost the same as the A18 Pro [6c, 5g, 16n] minus the enhanced memory bandwidth and video encoding, afaict.)
(I mean, sure, it's an old chip compared to the 17 but then it's a generation older and saying "they used an old chip" is a nonsense truism.)
>They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.
But they can’t vertically integrate the feature, not with acceptable levels of reliability and security.
That’s the key issue here, an apple AI would be something that can read and interact with your mail, pictures, contacts, location, and so on, but right now giving such access to an LLM would be a ticking timebomb. And those kind of integrated products are probably coming to competitors, even if their security plan is just YOLO.
You're not wrong, but you can also get most (or even nearly all) of that right now today on any device by just getting a Google AI subscription. Gemini already does most of that through its own personal intelligence feature. You do need to use Gmail at minimum for it to be useful, but the vast majority of iPhone users do already.
Those Macs you are talking about are still very niche and mostly used by loyal customers that do basic/common things or very vocal fanboys who always find a way to shill for whatever Apple comes up with, no matter how flawed and lackluster the product is.
Even if you want to run local AI, Macs are not really a good deal when you account for the price of soldered RAM and the limitations of AI tools on macOS.
But as always, the minority is very vocal, so it looks like it's all the rage but for the most part, people doing work are still using PCs and they don't have that much time to argue about it on the internet.
I think you’re underestimating or not understanding why Macs have taken off so much for AI. It has nothing to do with fanboys shilling for Apple. You can get a MBP today with 128GB of unified memory or a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. Then you get to run MacOS, which is vastly superior to Windows for AI productivity and far more accessible/convenient than Linux even today. There’s a reason so many AI apps are Mac native first (or exclusively). No other company offers so much memory and convenience in a consumer product for these purposes. These have become genuinely unique products with almost no competition, and by all accounts it seems Apple is just getting started in this direction.
Your statements are a couple months out of date. The space is evolving rapidly. It's definitely not a cost-efficient approach today, but models like Kimi K2.5 can be run on dual 512GB Mac Studios with performance rivaling (though still not fully matching) cloud frontier models. That's $20k of hardware, so it's certainly not going to be common today. My point is more about the trend: hardware to run serious models is starting to become more affordable, and open weight models are slowly but surely closing the gap with cloud models. Project this forward in time a couple years, and I think you'll be surprised how many folks will be interested in running AI locally outside of cloud environments. This trajectory will also intersect and interact with the trajectory of advertising and other monetization methods with cloud-based vendors necessarily becoming far more aggressive over time.
I'm not contesting that AI will become worthwhile on local hardware at some point. With software optimization and hardware costs falling over time, that's pretty much a given.
But I'm arguing that it's not going to be worthwhile doing on Apple hardware.
GPU sharding is already a thing for PCs, and you don't need to stupidly buy multiple full computers for it to work.
Apple has put themselves into a corner with their Apple Silicon strategy. It's good for efficiency and thus quite nice for mobile usage, but it makes no sense for desktops that do not need to be power/space constrained.
Their GPUs are still weak, and their strategy of gluing 2 together gives poor results in general workloads. They are limited by the die size and the RAM bandwidth they can allocate to the whole thing because of physics.
If Apple manages to get good results by aggregating multiple computers, PCs will get even better results by using multiple GPUs in the same box, interconnected by the PCIe bus, which will always be faster than Thunderbolt no matter what, because of physics.
In fact, they could even come up with a new interconnect if need be.
There is just no realistic way for Apple to become a dominant player in AI. They cannot compete properly on the hardware side because they won't get the cash flow/key players NVidia and AMD are getting, and they cannot compete properly on software because it will always be ports of stuff made to run on better/faster hardware. They'll lose AI basically for the same reason they have lost gaming: uncompetitive performance for the price. People who actually want to do stuff care less about how things look and a lot more about how good/fast they run.
And whenever datacenters start offloading older GPUs, their price will fall, making it the cheapest way to do local AI. Apple hardware keeps a stupidly high price even when it's completely obsolete because of the status it confers; it will never be cost competitive.
It's basically a replay of their PPC mistake, where they thought they could compete by going at it alone but in the end fell pretty hard because they couldn't compete against the volume PCs were getting.
Now Apple has money but cannot attract enough talent because they have no vision, and the management style is basically mean girls running the show.
You are arguing about purchasing a solution that would cover 8 years of top-tier AI subscription. Seriously, who in their right mind would do that?
Apple hardware for AI makes no sense; either you have prosumer-level needs that are going to be served just fine with cheaper hardware (like, for example, Ryzen AI) or you have large needs, and investing in a real AI solution is going to be better because it's going to be much faster. Being able to fit large models is useless if they run too slow.
I think this is wrong. Google is a competitor both in devices and in the OS for mobile devices. Apple charge a premium that they justify by superior features, ease of use, effortless integration with other Apple products and so on. I wonder how well they will be able to produce differentiating iOS AI features whilst they use Gemini. I suspect it will more or less have parity with Android devices. If more and more interactions with the device occur through this AI interface I wonder what that does to the perception of Apple products. I suppose they already have the worst AI voice assistant and it hasn't damaged them all that much.
Google is not really a competitor to Apple in devices. I mean, they sell devices, but at a way lower volume. The Pixel phone is essentially a tech demo that exists to push their Android partners into making more competitive devices themselves.
The corporate strategies are not directly comparable. The entire Android project is essentially a loss leader to feed data back into Google’s centralized platform, which makes money on ads and services. Whereas Apple makes money directly from the device sales, supported by decentralized services.
Apple never produced a differentiated experience in search or social, two of the largest tech industries by revenue. Yet Apple grew dramatically during that time. Siri might never be any better than Google’s own assistant, and it might never matter.
Your framing fits well for the Nexus era and even the earliest Pixel iterations, where Google’s hardware largely functioned as a reference implementation and ecosystem lever, nudging OEMs into making better devices.
However, the current Pixel strategy appears materially (no pun intended) different. Rather than serving as an “early adopter” pathfinder for the broader ecosystem, Pixel increasingly positions itself as the canonical expression of Android—the device on which the “true” Android experience is defined and delivered. Far from nudging OEMs, it's Google desperately reclaiming strategic control over their own platform.
By tightening the integration between hardware, software, and first-party silicon, Google appears to be pursuing the same structural advantages that underpin Apple’s hardware–software symbiosis. The last few generations of Pixel are, effectively, Google becoming more like Apple.
I think you're assuming that no durable or at-scale changes in compute form factor will occur, so that their success pretty much just solely comes down to differentiated iPhone software features. That seems unlikely to me. I don't see phones going away in the next decade like some have predicted, but I do think new compute form factors are going to start proliferating once a certain technological "take off" point is reached.
The broader point I'm making is that Apple likely couldn't do all the other things they're excelling at right now and compete head-on with Google / OpenAI / Anthropic on frontier AI. Strategically, I think they have more wiggle room on the latter for now than many give them credit for so long as they continue innovating in their core space, and I think those core innovations are yielding synergies with AI that they would've lost out on if they'd pivoted years ago to just training frontier LLMs. There's a very real risk that if they'd poured resources into LLMs too early, they would've ended up liquidating their reserves in a race-to-the-bottom on AI against competitors who specialize in it, while losing their advantages in fundamental devices and compute form factors over time.
Maybe have a look at this video from 1987. After sidelining Steve, John Sculley came up with the term PDA and intended to evolve that vision as the mission of Apple, beginning with the breakthrough Apple Newton that ran on DEC's revolutionary StrongARM chip (that was based on ARM's IP that Apple co-developed).
https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.)
PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.
Counterpoint the iPad has been brilliant with it’s software and implementation and that is the reason it essentially has the tablet market to itself, is the only tablet with a third-party ecosystem, and it continues to grow.
The original PDA wasn’t a mniaturized laptop or desktop, it was a new device category and the iPhone is the current flagship for that, not the iPad.
I agree on that they should focus on hardware, software, UX, etc.
I think the problem of current Apple management and especially Tim Cook is that they want to squeeze out as much profit as possible and they see AI as another _Services_ profit center.
A better Apple would say AI is just an app and provide extension points into the OS so that users can plug their favorite LLM, anything from ChatGPT to Mistral, but in a privacy-preserving way if the user wants.
While that would lead to less profit in the short term, Apple's moat was its UX and halo effects (cynically: social signalling). The draw to Apple may last for a bit during enshittification of the platform, but long-term the brand value is more important than short-term profits.
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
Apple's core business is providing well-crafted products and user interfaces for all kinds of interactions. Do you really think AI/LLMs won't change the way we use computers?
> They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.
I'd be willing to bet that in less than 5 years, this will sound like saying "they can trivially pay Accenture a billion a year for slightly better UX design" today.
If your high-profile misses become the subject of both memes and major news stories I'd say you are still the benchmark in UX, yes.
Even "Apple design has peaked" is a meme if you've been following this stuff for more than just one decade. (Sure, one day it'll most likely be true, but that doesn't make everyone predicting it now a prophet retroactively.)
I think the issue here is the public promises that were made. Jobs tended not to do that. Things were announced and released when they were ready, which gave them the time to do it right, without any delays.
Sure, there were things like AirPower and the MobileMe widgets… things that were announced, but never shipped. However, by and large, a big new thing was announced, and a week later it would ship. The iPhone was only announced 6 months early to avoid it being leaked by compliance filing (or maybe it was patents).
Cook would be wise to go back to this instead of promising the shareholders things he can’t deliver on.
I think slow playing AI is the right move for Apple. Third party apps give their customers access today, and Apple can take the time to figure out how AI fits into a large cohesive vision for their products and ecosystem… or if it fits at all. Rushing something out doesn’t do anyone any favors, and has never been Apple’s competitive advantage.
> The iPhone was only announced 6 months early to avoid it being leaked by compliance filing (or maybe it was patents).
Is there evidence of this? I think the phone and watch were announced early because Apples vertical integration strategy and quality standards require them to reveal the existence to the rest of the company so they can get everything else working well with the new product category on release. It wouldn't be possible to keep it secret after revealing it internally so they did a simultaneous internal/external reveal to control the message, to maximize impact, to deny rumor sites, etc...
Yes, or at least that’s the reason Jobs gave in the original Jan 2007 keynote:
> We’re going to be shipping these in June. We’re announcing it today because with products like this we’ve got to go ahead and get FCC approval which takes a few months, and we thought it would be better if we introduced this rather than ask the FCC to introduce it for us. So here we are.
I think comparisons between Jobs and Cook are trite and cliche by now, and also pointless. Jobs was a generational talent; everyone looked up to him when it came to defining products. Of course Cook is not able to do what Jobs did. No one can.
Apple has already been left behind by many tech shifts: web, search, social, crypto, metaverse, etc. At various times popular opinion had them left behind by netbooks, by tablets, by smart phones, by Windows, by web browsers… until they weren’t.
Apple does not have to lead all categories of tech to be a very successful company.
I'd say that after the Apple Maps launch, Tim Cook learned a lesson about allowing features that need additional work the time they need to fully bake.
Google just launched the Pixel 10 with several promised AI features broken, and could really stand to learn the same lesson.
Apple Maps is still such a sucky service, at least where I live and where I travel to.
It regularly directs me to incorrect addresses and businesses and labels places obviously incorrectly.
Every use of the search function promotes guide content for a single city I'm not currently in, with no way to configure or turn them off. Good products should go out of their way to annoy you IMHO.
They only managed to get their cycle routing for the UK and Ireland working in 2025 after years and years of complaints.
I'm not a fan of Google but I feel compelled to keep Google Maps because Apple Maps is still so unreliable.
I'd offer the balance here that I still don't enjoy using Android and generally prefer iOS to it, warts and all.
Google Maps regularly sends contractors, delivery drivers, etc to a blocked off utility "road" that has never allowed traffic. Apple Maps doesn't. I've given up reporting the problem to Google. (And besides, Google eventually took away the report feature from either desktop or mobile, I forget which, telling me their engineers don't care at all about quality.)
It's about product specification. There's no way it fits into their ecosystem without compromising it. Everyone else has compromised theirs and their customers. Apple do not want to do this. I suspect they will fail on AI but will win in the long run as competitors screw their customers over.
I suspect they'll win on AI by not investing $200Bn in CapEx and waiting 5 years until good enough models can be trained for <$1Bn and then just doing that - blocking all other AI models on their hardware beside their own (which their users seem to like) - and saving $200Bn and getting an experience that's good enough for almost everyone and spending enough on marketing to convince everyone it's 10x better.
Apple has BY FAR the best chips at this level. I don't see anything changing that in less than 5 years. That will be a pretty big advantage in the near future.
That's feasible but I think the whole thing will collapse in a heap when the obviously iffy funding structures fall apart due to a mix of lack of declinging investor interest and drunk assery by the US gov resulting in distrust and higher risk profiling of the associated investments.
At least Apple has other products that make money.
My prediction is that Apple is the hardware and platform provider (like it’s always been). We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.
I think their proprietary chips and GPUs are being undervalued.
My feeling is that they’re letting everyone move fast and break things while trailing behind and making safe bets.
Funny you should mention social media in the context of Apple, because they seem to have been attempting that with iTunes Ping[1] and then Apple Music.
iTunes Ping was a Jobs-era attempt to create a social network for music. It seems that they were trying to rely on integrating with Facebook, who pulled out of the collaboration in the last minute before Ping's release.
Apple hasn't seem to have given up on social networks for music. Apple Music presents a nascent networking feature where users can see what their friends are listening to.[2] It seems that Apple has learned their lesson from Ping and does not rely on a third-party for a social graph, which is instead powered by iOS contacts.
While social media is not Apple's bread and butter, they have maintained their interest in having presence in this market. I would assume that this stems from Apple's overall desire to maintain influence over on-the-top services that define the iOS experience. If they let third parties flourish even further, thirds parties gain leverage that they can use during negotiations with Apple. If third parties successfully negotiate for more features that creates parity with apps on non-Apple devices, Apple loses its differentiation on the device markets, thereby losing revenue.
(I think Stratechery wrote about Apple's service strategy that was motivated by its past relationships with Adobe and Spotify. Couldn't find the link.)
> We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.
You're right that we haven't asked them for better on-the-top services. But it seems to be in Apple's interest to compete with third party services providers and make sure they do not supersede Apple in terms of their influence over on-the-top experiences.
Just as an aside, I do not get a social media platform for music. I don’t need a separate social network to manage, and certainly wouldn’t care what 99% of the people I know are listening to 99.9% of the time.
Of course they jumped into the race as soon as possible by mentioning ‘Apple Intelligence’ and working on it. But, I think this was more peer pressure than anything else.
Apple’s reliably late to the party most of the time, but they also reliably steal the show. I’m doubtful about OpenAI’s hardware just taking over.
I rather wait and keep using 3rd party models that keep leap frogging themselves and adding features every once in a while, than them just publicly beta testing a bunch of things on my iPhone. If this was the case, we’d see a bunch of people complaining about how terrible the product is and how Claude or GPT or OpenClaw is so much better.
All I really want from Apple is to continue perfecting their computers, phones and tablets to be the absolute best computing devices possible. As long as they keep iteratively improving those things I don’t care if they’re thought or innovation leaders in whatever hot new thing comes along.
100% agreed. You speak the truth, but already the apologists are writing textbooks justifying Apple's failed strategy :)) and this is why the company thrives. Just blind loyalty to a company that couldn't care less about them.
That is a delusional take on why millions continue to purchase Apple
products and services. They expect Apple to provide services that work well and are not willing to put up with the terrible products other companies produce.
That is even more delusional than the parent comment. There is no dialectic law of business that guarantees a better experience with a competitor's product. If you traded your Nintendo Switch for a gaming iPad, for example, you'd be making a horrible mistake. The iPad's presence as a gaming machine is synonymous with online gambling.
If Apple's products and services were heads-and-shoulder above their competition, we'd know. The iPhone is the only modern example, and it relies on lock-in that is considered illegally anticompetitive in multiple jurisdictions worldwide.
Simple diversity of what people want means lots of people buy Apple because it is better for them. It isn't like anyone gets what they really want across many features, whatever they buy.
And iPad's are optimized for different uses than the switch. Those are entirely different form factors. (You can turn an iPad mini into a switch like device with controller add ons. But those are add ons so the software does not put that form factor first.)
It seems to me that people have been saying that Apple will be left behind since the Apple II. That they keep doing non-obvious things that somehow succeed is what makes them an interesting company.
I don't know that Apple will dominate AI, personally I dislike Siri and iOS, but I think Apple have a very good shot at delivering workable local AI for professionals.
If Apple can lift the inference performance of their forthcoming M5 Ultra chip I think they may become an off the shelf standard for those that want to run large models locally.
That in itself is probably enough to keep them relevant until actual useful uses of Apple Intelligence come to light.
I don’t think Apple or Microsoft (via Windows) will dominate AI. There’s just too much value in the AI being in the cloud (big powerful models vs local) and across your devices (more context on you, running on low powered edge devices like watches, glasses, smart home devices), and the idea of an OS being a decisive factor is already fading with how much work people do in a browser or cloud app.
I don’t see how AI won’t end up running on personal devices. It’s like how mainframes were the original computing platform and then we had the PC revolution. If anything, I think Apple is uniquely positioned to pull the rug on a lot of these cloud models. It might take ten or 15 years, but eventually we’ll see an arms race to do so. There’s too much money on the table, and once cloud providers are tapped out the next logical step is home users. It also makes scaling a lot easier because you don’t need increasingly expensive, complex, and power hungry data centers.
It wasn’t that long ago (ignoring the current DRAM market shenanigans) that it was unthinkable to have a single machine with over terabyte of RAM and 192 physical cores. Now that’s absolutely doable in a single workstation. Heck even my comparatively paltry 96GB of RAM would’ve been absurd in 2010, now there are single prosumer GPUs with that.
With the rate of progress (and in the opposite direction, the physical limitations Intel/AMD/TSMC/ETC are bumping into), there's no guarantees about what a machine will look like a decade from now. But, simple logic applies: if the user's machine scales to X amounts of RAM, the hyperscaler's rack scales to X*Y RAM and assuming the performance/scaling relationship we've seen holds true, it will be correspondingly far smarter/better/powerful compared to the user's AI.
Maybe that won't matter when the user is asking it a 5th grade question, but for any more complex application of AI than "what's the weather" or "turn on a light", users should want a better AI, particularly if they don't have to pay for all that silicon sitting around unused in their machine for most of the day?
This argument would sound nearly identical if you made it in the 70s or early 80s about mainframes and personal computers.
It's not that mainframes (or supercomputers, or servers, or the cloud) stopped existing, it's that there was a "good enough" point where the personal computer was powerful enough to do all the things that people care about. Why would this be different?*
And aren't we all paying for a bunch of silicon that sits mostly unused? I have a full modern GPU in my Apple SoC capable of throwing a ridiculous number of polygons per second at the screen and I'm using it to display two terminal emulator windows.
* (I can think of a number of reasons why it would in fact turn out different, but none of them have to do with the limits of technology -- they are all about control or economic incentives)
It’s different because of the ubiquity of the internet and the financial incentives of the companies involved.
Right now you can get 20TB hard drives for cheap and setup your own NAS, but way more people spend money every month on Dropbox/iCloud/onedrive - people value convenience and accessibility over “owning” the product.
Companies also lean into this. Just consider Photoshop. It used to be a one-time purchase, then it became a cloud subscription, now virtually every new AI feature uses paid credits. Despite having that fast SoC, Photoshop will still throw your request to their cloud and charge you for it.
The big point still remains: by the time you can run that trillion parameter model at home, it’s old news. If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one? AI on edge devices will exist, but will forever remain behind data center AI.
Right now you can get 20TB hard drives for cheap and setup your own NAS, but way more people spend money every month on Dropbox/iCloud/onedrive - people value convenience and accessibility over “owning” the product.
Yes, this is a convenience argument, not a technical one. It's not that your PC doesn't have or could have more than enough storage -- it likely does -- it's that there are other factors that make you use Dropbox.
So now the question becomes: do we not believe that personal devices will ever become good enough to run a "good enough" LLM (technical barrier), or do we believe that other factors will make it seem less desirable to do so (social/financial/legal barrier)?
I think there's a very decent chance that the latter will be true, but the original argument was a technical one -- that good-enough LLMs will always require so much compute that you wouldn't want to run one locally even if you could.
If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one?
What people want to do changes with time, and therefore your PC XT will no longer hack it in the modern workplace, but the point is that from the point that a personal computer of any kind was good enough, people kept using personal computers. The parallel argument here would be that if there is a plateau where LLM improvement slows and converges with ability to run something good enough on consumer hardware, why would people not then just keep running those good enough models on their hardware? The models would get better with time, sure, but so would the hardware running them.
The original point that I was making was never purely a technical one. Performance, economics, convenience, and business trends all play a part in what I think will happen.
Even if LLM improvement slows, it’ll probably result in the same treadmill effect we see in other software.
Consider MS Office, Adobe Creative (Cloud), or just about any pro level software. The older versions aren’t really used, for various reasons, including performance, features, compatibility, etc. Why would LLMs, which seem to be on an even faster trajectory than conventional software, be any different? Users will want to continue upgrading, and in the case of AI, that’ll mean continuing to access the latest cloud model.
No doubt that someone can run gpt-oss-120b five years from now on device, but outside of privacy, why would they when you can get a faster, smarter answer (for free, likely) from a service?
I think there's room for multiple approaches here.
Cloud based AI obviously has a lot of advantages e.g. batched proccessing on the best hardward, low power edge devices, data sharing, etc.
There's still room for local inference though. I don't know that I want "more context on me" all the time. I want some context, some of the time and I want to be in full control of it.
I'd pay for that. I don't think it will be for everyone but a number of people would pay a premium for an off shelf product that provides privacy and control that cloud vendors by their nature just can't offer.
Definitely room for multiple approaches, including local LLMs.
But I just don't think for most users that local LLM capabilities will be a deciding factor in either hardware or OS choices.
A cloud subscription model will be the premium offering ($20 for consumers, $100 to $1000 or pay-per-token for businesses), and inevitably something ad-supported at a lower price or free for low-end consumers.
Once Joe Consumer has access to that subscription ChatGPT or free tier, are they really going to run a far-less-powerful model on their laptop? Outside of a few simple tasks like semantic search in your email, notes, photos; or localized transcription, local models will just be too far behind the curve for the public to make much use of them.
Right or wrong, at least he takes risks. Apple Vision Pro was launched two years too early, but you can’t say that he just realized on existing products.
My point is that the product they marketed only matches the product they released recently.
In terms of something that adults want, you’re right. It would take about 10 years before the only generation who is into it, Gen Alpha, would come of age and be able to make that transition to AR/VR like how Gen X did with high speed internet.
Was he taking risks or just reactionary after Facebook going all-in on the Metaverse (and by the time the product was done, the Metaverse was pretty dead already)?
They have a software issue (I mean who doesn’t) but Cook has tried his hand in lots of products. Some worked like the airpod, airtag and watch; and a particular one flopped: vision. It’s a marvelous tech device that unfortunately had no demand.
Also the m series can be attributed to him and it’s as good as innovation can get.
The other difference between Steve and Tim is Steve would have never been caught dead giving a gold gift to a sitting president. It comes off as desperate and evil, two things Steve would have hated associating with Apple.
You're dreaming. I'm not an Apple fanboy, but Apple have an almost infinite runway to get AI right if they wanted to ... but just like they haven't invested billions to chase Search, so they'd be fine riding the AI wave getting paid billions to have third party AI put on their device.
I feel like, today, most of the other LLM providers can do what "Apple Intelligence" promised - it'll link with my email/calendar/etc and it can find stuff I ask with a fuzzy search.
That said, I don't really use this functionality all that often, because it didn't really (effortlessly) solve a big need for me. Apple sitting out LLMs means they didn't build this competency along the way, even when the technology is now proven.
I think the same thing is true was VR - except Apple did invest heavily in it and bring a product to market. Maybe we won't see anything big for a while, and Silicon Valley becomes the next Detroit.
Wait, how does that work? I've never heard of this outside of closed ecosystems (iPhone is obviously the best at this, but I guess also google crap if you're invested into gmail/gcal/etc)
Gemini can read your personal info if you use google products, obviously.
Beyond that, Claude and ChatGPT (the other major chat providers) both support integrations that let you link your email etc. to allow the chat bot to search through them.
i have said it before: the Vision Pro with Mac screen linking is a tease for a complete Mac-superior spacial interface. The new high end device from Apple for the future. An interface that levels up a MacBook Pro’s or Studio’s power and productivity.
Except no. After getting the hardware right, Tim gave us an another iOS toy / media kiosk (in 3D!) for $3500.
I would have paid $5000 if it was the new developer friendly, macOS spacial, pro software, room-scale interface machine.
I would have thought Tim Cook would have been proud to push the product line / user interface, bicycle-for-the-mind bar higher during his tour of duty. An historic computing advancement.
But I guess raising the media kiosk, novelty apps and purchases, third party creator tax, service subscriptions and scammy ads with no ad-free tier revenue bar, is what he wants to be remembered for.
Uh, I think Apple had proven themselves many times that they're the one to bring something new and advanced. It started with MacBooks, then iPhones, a digital assistant, TouchID, Airpods, FaceID, fan-less MacBooks and probably more stuff. Is it not enough?
TBH, though, if all they ever do is provide hardware that runs software designed just for that hardware ecosystem, consistently, securely and with decent UX, I'll be happy. That's better than any other consumer computing HW vendor has proven to be able to do.
I have heard of Siri, I would never expect anyone to mention Siri while enumerating "new and advanced" things Apple developed.
OP said whatever the next shift in technology, Apple will be left behind. You said Apple actually developed new advanced products, but only mentioned hardware examples. If the new big shift in technology is in software (such as AI), we have no reason to predict Apple will fare well there.
AI is not only software but also hardware. Apple were the first to develop a (good) chip specifically for AI computation (ANE), and their MacBooks are very good for running AI models locally.
Apple are not like Google or Facebook (they're mainly software, and Apple are titled more towards hardware), their vision isn't the same as theirs, but their vision will hold for a very long time.
> it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
I think it's exactly the opposite, actually. They've integrated AI flawlessly into existing products to an extent nobody else has even come close to. Photos, for instance, makes better use of AI than any other photo management app in existence. If anything, ChatGPT/Microsoft/Google/etc are absolutely crippled because they don't have access to the data people actually use on a day to day basis—instead, it's scattered across a million browser apps and private silos.
And, you don't have to use an asinine chatbot integration looking like a fool to use it.
Perhaps Google comes the closest to being able to capitalize on this, but I can't say I can remember using any AI integration they have, and I stopped giving them my data over a decade ago.
"I think it's exactly the opposite, actually. They've integrated AI flawlessly into existing products to an extent nobody else has even come close to. Photos, for instance"
Have you used a Samsung? Apple's AI miserably fails in every comparison out there in the photos app.
There's also Google Photos with Gemini which helps you find any photo you want with AI better than anyone else.
I have been using Apple devices and supporting many of their users for over 20 years, and they are all extremely invested in their choice of computing device. It's really a source of pride for many of them, weirdly.
For this reason, anything Apple does is necessarily better than everything else on the market.
It's a bit pointless to argue because they come from an emotional standpoint; if you point at the many things not working properly, they always have an excuse to handwave it away.
It's really funny because I use Apple stuff, and I find many qualities in it, but I'm unwilling to be blind to the faults and weaknesses.
This sort of ego investment exists for other brands as well; I think it is a lack of emotional maturity and an inability to realize that a brand does not care if you do not fully "love" their products.
I agree completely. This sort of emotional immaturity was acceptable a decade ago. But today? They are behind everything. I have 3 Macs, 2 iPads and 1 iPhone and their software is sh*t. iPad pro is a joke. It should be illegal to use the label pro as it constitutes false marketing. It's such a dumb OS for the kind of hardware you get. What's the use if it has M3 Pro or whatever if the OS can't keep up. Half the time, it's filled with bugs. Same story for iOS. Mac OS is great..so far. But, their phones are garbage. I have to save my documents into Google drive just so they work fine. What a joke.
Most definitely Windows, but that's basically a factor of their past hegemony.
Hilariously, you are going to argue that Apple is good because they sell a lot of stuff, but somehow Microsoft is bad because they sell a lot of stuff (a lot more, in fact).
If you haven't used any of Google's services with your actual data for over a decade, there's a pretty simple explanation about why you don't remember any times you've interacted with one of their AI integrations for those services, and it has nothing do with the relative quality of them.
1. Apparently what happens is that the AI scans the videos of surrounding cameras and pings the owner to ask if they can share the footage. So no video is shared unless the owner chooses.
2. Ring is indeed working on being able to detect people.
It's more that police will use it for their own personal inquiries- to track their girlfriends, potential girlfriends etc. This happens enough already with license plate readers:
- Sedgwick, Kansas (2024): Former Police Chief Lee Nygaard resigned after it was discovered he used Flock cameras to track his ex-girlfriend and her new partner 228 times over four months, according to The Wichita Eagle and KAKE.
- Menasha, Wisconsin (Jan 2026): Officer Cristian Morales was charged with misconduct in office for allegedly using the Flock system to track his ex-girlfriend, WLUK-TV reported. Morales admitted to using the system due to "desperation" and "bad judgment".
- Orange City, Florida (2025): Officer Jarmarus Brown was charged with stalking after reportedly running his girlfriend's license plate 69 times, her mother's 24 times, and her brother's 15 times over seven months, the Miami Herald reported.
- San Diego, California (2021): Sergeant Mariusz Czas was arrested for stalking his ex-girlfriend using police resources
> It's more that police will use it for their own personal inquiries- to track their girlfriends, potential girlfriends etc.
That's far from my biggest concern. Sure, cops stalking people/carrying out personal vendettas is not good.
But a little creativity will allow far far greater abuses. Here's one: imagine the current administration deciding they need to debank the great and powerful terrorist organization Antifa. Ring data on protest attendance is a great help in building a list of those rotten domestic terrorists.
All of these seem like examples of oversight working, and penalties being applied? We obviously don't know the rate at which abuse like this is detected, but if it's high, this seems like a healthy system working as intended?
More likely - a quiet update changing opt-in to opt-out. They can repeat this update as many times as they want and each time, a few more people will miss the email. They can also hold your data hostage, i.e. "All data now and historical will be included in our partner sharing unless you delete it all."
It's already happening. Someone local to me seems to be spray-painting over ring cameras and leaving flyers about the ring-flock-ice connection. I can't say I agree with the methods, but it is sending a message.
Some of these companies have (local) law enforcement subscriptions, and default opt-in disclaimers throughout their ToS to make it all tidy and legal.
None of them have contracts with, nor can they sell to, federal agencies. Agencies have to provide a warrant, and the processes are verified through each of the companies' respective legal teams.
Their recordings data is not generally available for sale; that's a legal minefield, but there are official channels to go through. Geofence warrants and things like that aren't conducive to real-time surveillance, and the practice of using those types of reverse-search , differential analysis uses of sensitive data is under review by the Supreme Court; it's thought that they're going to weigh in on the side of the 4th amendment and prohibit overbroad fishing expeditions, even if there's snazzy math behind it.
TLDR; They need to pay the company, either via subscription or direct charge for T&M, require warrants, and the use is limited in scope. It's burdensome and expensive enough that they're not going to be using it for arbitrary random "let's scan everyone's doorbell cams in case there's an illegal immigrant!" situations, but if there's a drug dealer, violent offender, or some specific high value target, they're going to use the broad surveillance tools wherever they can.
"computer, search the entire flock database (which in partnership with ring also includes everybody's doorbell and security cameras[0]) for this minority, and plot a map of their whereabouts over time[1]"
At this point, I don't mind the methods. Shit is far gone if you're actively enabling the surveillance state, people have a right to fight back. I'm sure this won't go over well here.
I’m not sure destroying other people’s property is the best way to make them sympathetic to your cause.
I don’t own a Ring camera (or any similar device), but the idea that someone could spend time unnoticed on my porch, messing with my stuff, right where my daughter likes to play on weekends, makes my skin crawl.
If that happened to me, I’d probably just double down on security to be honest. Knowing that some people actually feel it's the right thing to do makes me wonder if I shouldn't start today.
To be clear, I have no issue with someone peacefully informing people in their neighborhood about the potential dire consequences of enabling "share images of my doorbell with the government or other private agencies", that's all fine to me. But if you feel the need to impose your views by harassing me about it or by breaking the law to get your point across, you won't get an ally in me.
It's always the same. Go back and think about the history you read and stories you've loved. Were you upset when the Rebels destroyed the Empire's property? Should they not have blown up the death star? Should they have gone through "proper channels". Go look at any revolution that you side with, tell me they didn't destroy property. I understand your comfortable but there are literally minorities, often times US citizens, getting rounded up and denied their rights. So you can sit idly by and criticize those that fight this system. However, you are so obviously on the wrong side of history and you would recognize it in any other era except your own.
> I’m not sure destroying other people’s property is the best way to make them sympathetic to your cause.
We're in a slow moving civil war at this point. Looking for sympathy stopped making sense a long time ago. You're either pro humanity or pro property tbh
>We're in a slow moving civil war at this point [...] You're either pro humanity or pro property tbh
You don't realize this type of thinking is exactly what contributes to the "civil war"? Same with all this virtue signaling where if you're even slightly for some sort of immigration enforcement you're labeled as not being "pro humanity" or whatever, and then a populist gets in power because the other side's rallying cry is "there's no illegal on stolen land". In the wake of the killing of Renée Good, Trump's approval on immigration was 48% approve to 52% disapprove. In the same survey, who do you think voters trusted more on immigration? Still Republicans, 44% to 33%.
> You don't realize this type of thinking is exactly what contributes to the "civil war"?
Of course. But we need meaning and values in our lives, both of which have been absent from politics my entire life. At some point we're due for course correction, or I can't bear to live here anymore.
> if you're even slightly for some sort of immigration enforcement you're labeled as not being "pro humanity" or whatever, and then a populist gets in power because the other side's rallying cry is "there's no illegal on stolen land".
Both of these people are liberals detached from reality. The opposing side would stand for better material conditions for everyone.
If you're not going to ally with the people fighting the surveillance systems that are currently being used by the secret police to disappear and kill people what does that make you. My cause doesn't need your sympathy it needs to stop this horror. I'm not quite saying "with or against" but you are saying "against."
>If you're not going to ally with the people fighting the surveillance systems that are currently being used by the secret police to disappear and kill people what does that make you.
1990s Ireland:
A: "hey guys, maybe it's a bad idea to set off bombs in public places to promote Irish independence. You won't get an ally in me."
B: "If you're not going to ally with the people fighting British that are currently subjugating the Irish what does that make you. My cause doesn't need your sympathy it needs to stop this horror. I'm not quite saying "with or against" but you are saying "against.""
Just something to point out I think, by being out in public you basically implicitly consent to being surveilled You can't have an expectation of privacy while in the public.
This is usually the rule that's used to avoid getting the general public's consent to he photographed when you are out taking pictures of buildings or something.
"Be a hero by using our survelliance cameras to turn your neighbours in to the Gestapo [X]" just doesn't have the same wholesome ring though even if it's more accurate.
[X] I'm referring to Bovino's uniform and ICE here.
Ring's marketing is almost comically wholesome, but what's to stop someone like an abusive ex or stranger trolling my Instagram page from uploading a photo of my dog and tracking our daily walk patterns?
Small companies often have much better technical support than large companies where you just get lost in the system. One of the reasons I moved away from R2 was that it was impossible to contact anyone about the serious issues I had with the product. I’m using Bunny for CDN and have found them to be very responsive.
> With these changes and reinforcements, I believe the situation has been fully resolved. Fingers crossed.
I get that this is a difficult situation for a small developer, but ending with this line did not fill me with confidence that the problem is actually resolved and make me trust their software on my system.
That's the most honest assessment you can expect from any small-scale developer. What do you expect them to say or do? Their adversary is presumably a national intelligence agency of a superpower.
The odds may be better if you operate the way OpenSSH does: move slow, security first, architect everything to be very difficult to attack. But if you're building a text editor, it's not your mindset, and probably never will be.
> The odds may be better if you operate the way OpenSSH does: move slow, security first, architect everything to be very difficult to attack. But if you're building a text editor, it's not your mindset, and probably never will be.
I mean, if you look at the Notepad++ website this developer seems just as concerned at spamming political messaging all over everything as much as he is with writing the software he's distributing. It's pretty crazy he apparently didn't think to take more basic precautions given he is basically permatrolling Russia and China with his messaging. Big brain moment for him. And meanwhile, after reading that disclosure nonsense none of us even know what's going on - like, should we be formatting machines that were affecting during that timeframe? Was the attack targeted and specific only? Who the fuck knows!
First, you're getting upset at a random person on the internet for expressing their political views. Second, your objection almost certainly has nothing to do with this attack. It targeted some specific subset of users of Notepad++, not the maintainer.
You think the developer/publisher/maintainer of software as ubiquitous as Notepad++ is some 'random person on the internet'? Or are you referring to the commenter I was replying to?
I definitely am not upset at the commenter I replied to, and while I'm definitely upset at the maker of Notepad++ I don't think he qualifies as some random person on the internet. If you publish software that security conscious people use (and certainly Notepad++ is used by tech savvy security-conscious people) then you, really by definition, aren't some random person - that's kinda the whole point. Security conscious and tech savvy people tend not to install things from random people on the internet.
Notepad++ was a trusted website/trusted developer, and they got caught with their pants down doing some truly dumb and lazy shit, and then they published a blogpost that doesn't explain much of anything. So yeah, that's pretty infuriating my friend.
Binaries or source, it's pretty much the same unless you thoroughly vet the entire source code. Malicious code isn't advertised and commented and found by looking at a couple of functions. It's carefully hidden and obfuscated.
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