Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

Pixel is Google being aware of their handicap in this in-house hardware prototyping and research area, and ironically and obviously and predictably for Google, they apply ML to it too.

Apple can come at this same problem from the hardware and software sides all at once, with their own internal dev cycles aligning with the yearly iOS/iPadOS software drops, and iPhone/iPad hardware drops timed to a month or two of each other, year after year. Sure, it’s buggy as hell, but it still works better than Android. One would hope so, since you can’t do proper sideloading, as Android natively supports.

Apple’s security argument is a childlike excuse for not doing one’s homework, not a reasonable justification for Apple unreasonably and intentionally feature-gating iOS and iPadOS devices. I’m an owner and I’m root. I fully control devices I own because that is a Natural Right of exclusive ownership of hardware devices under American First Sale Doctrine, which has also been recognized by the Library of Congress as Constitutionally-protected usage to preserve inalienable rights to nondiscrimination in computing devices.

So Apple can take a hike. We’re getting what we need, and we’re getting bugs fixed. Jailbreaking has surfaced more 0days than jailbreak devs squirrel away for the next rainy day after iOS updates. We need native full root support, full stop.

These research phones have landmines everywhere in the license agreements to get one, and I’m not re-buying an iPhone I already own to get half-assed fakeroot, especially when I’m already running as root on all the iPhones I ever bought. It’s not hard to avoid updates and save blobs, but should we really have to intentionally run old, known-insecure builds just to have r/w and root? Is this a mainframe? This is a joke.

https://developer.apple.com/programs/security-research-devic...

What is Apple even arguing against? It’s not reality, that ought to be clear. They’re arguing for increased and continued profits for Apple, at the cost of our rights being trampled and violated, and were supposed to accept that they had our best interests at heart via increased security? Tell me another joke. Benjamin Franklin and me’ll be here all life.

The lack of free sideloading without a $99/year dev ticket is a joke. The scraps we get with 7 days between resigning apps is a joke. Devs are forced to abuse TestFlight to distribute apps which would otherwise be listed on App Store, if not for developers’ fears of App Store rejection, and potentially TestFlight revokes.

There’s gotta be a better way, but jailbreaking is the best we’ve got, for now. To that point, the Jailbreak Bot on Telegram is a public service, as is saurik himself and the entire reddit community r/jailbreak.

https://t.me/rJailbreakBot

https://old.reddit.com/r/jailbreak

All that being said, Apple really is in a league of its own, with the market capitalization to back it up; Apple has features found in other companies while simultaneously being unlike every other company on Earth.

[Current]

https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/vision/object-detection...

[2018]

https://www.fastcompany.com/90247454/the-pixel-3-puts-google...

When it comes to machine learning, the subtlety here is that there are at least two sides or facets to machine learning: (1) training and (2) inference.

It's fair to say that there are multiple areas for AI leadership.

It is generally believed that:

Model Creation

(1) Those with the access to the best (which is not necessarily the most, but often believed to be) data have a strong starting point for training models; because of this Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have often been attributed to have this advantage due to the nature of their businesses.

Model Application

(2) Inference/prediction at the edge, e.g. on-device, is believed to be the best point for applying those models; this can be for a variety of reasons, including latency and other costs associated with sending model input data from edge sensors/devices. Some applications are entirely impractical or likely impossible to achieve without conducting inference on-device. Privacy-preservation is also a property of this approach. Depending on how you want to view this, this property could be a core design principle or a side-effect. Apple's hardware ecosystem approach and marketshare (i.e. iPhones) provide a strong starting point for making the technology ubiquitous for consumer experiences.

Yes, but also no. It's a less convenient flow, and indexing and such would be trickier than either centralized or on device, since you'd need to encrypt and distribute the index as well (or do homomorphic encryption, but I don't think it's ready for the limelight.)

I think most people are probably fine with the tradeoff between convenience and features that centralization offers, so unfortunately people that aren't are stuck with more niche products (or Apple, I suppose, although I don't think i-cloud is end to end encrypted?). I say they're stuck with niche products because I don't think it makes sense to try and offer a slider between convenience and privacy in one product, since the interface and feature sets would be so different.

Did you read the article? The whole point was that Apple has innovated but that they don’t make a big deal out of it. Marketing, basically.

As someone that bought the first Android phone and now has an iPhone...it is extremely noticeable how much better Android is on these fronts. But depending on the person that gap may not be important. For me, it is night and day. I felt Google had a long way to go on these fronts, so I was stunned at just how bad Apple was :(.