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The iPhone's Last Stand?

stratechery.com

181–190 of 245 posts

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#181

i was under the impression that the 2024 apple intelligence rollout was something of a victory: Apple realized that the majority of people don't actually want this stuff forced on them at the os level, and the ai maximalists all used apple anyways via clawbot (including purchasing an additional apple device, the mini!) because of apples non-ai-specific commitment to phone computer interop. Certainly the copilot butto…

> copilot button in ms paint

things there don't seem to be going well

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure you thought this through. Why would G-d want to or care to make one have thoughts.

why are you censoring the word 'God'?

It's common in many religious communities to not write the name of God out. I think it likely comes from the Jewish tradition.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#183
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP's argument is essentially this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon Perhaps you might think this is bullshit because * obviously* this world is real and not an illusion and there is * obviously* no evil demon to deceive us into thinking the Earth is spherical instead of flat. And yes this is what philosophers do. Nobody here is arguing that such demon exists and is actually deceiving us, but since you've acce…

This is an incredibly patronizing and just generally annoying comment.

Sounds like a you problem. I didn’t find it to be either.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#184
Long-winded article. I’ll give you my take: people like their phones. They identity with them. It’s a singular piece of tech that isn’t cumbersome. It does multiple things well and sometimes at once. Why would I want a duplicity of devices to do similar things at the cost of more stuff?! Answer me that riddle.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#185
What I don't see anyone talking about is how Private Cloud Compute is behind an iCloud subscription.

From what I can tell, this means any app that is using their foundation model is sharing against a user's pooled usage quota & Apple takes all the revenue upside if a user chooses to upgrade their plan.

Why would an app developer choose their model which has a minuscule 32K context window, might get throttled because of usage in another app, and doesn't share revenue over any frontier model vendor (where you can package/pass along token costs to your customers)?

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#186

iPhone's last stand? More like Microsoft's last stand. Nobody wants their garbage hardware and software outside of enterprise shmucks more interested in filling their pockets with fat contract money than delivering value. > The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive Is that wh…

That last quote is when I stopped reading the article. The opening with the premonition of personal computing moving to the cloud, followed by the heavy use of the word "consumer", made it clear that the author has a cynical view of humanity, but at that point it went too far.

I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#187
post #164

You cannot trust companies to communicate an unbiased vision of the future, because they will always build what they're capable of selling. Microsoft and Meta are incapable of selling phones and laptops; they're certainly capable of building them, but few people will buy them. So instead Meta builds smart-glasses and Microsoft presents this weird vision of "connected thin devices" by keeping the hardware itself very…

Based on Microsoft's ever-more-fetid output over the last two decades, they can't sell self-respecting people jack squat.

IMO there's an even more real story at the heart of this idea than stratechery's predictable, banal attempt to compare Microsoft and Apple's competing visions of the future, and its part of why I've become so bored of stratechery's articles lately. He glances against that Microsoft video, recognizes that the video does a horrible job of communicating their vision, and then carries water for Microsoft by working overtime clarifying their vision for them; instead of doing the obvious and totally reasonable thing of asking: Why the fuck is that video so incomprehensible? Microsoft used to be pretty good at aligning themselves and their customers around a shared vision of their future, but since the advent of AI the company has seemed more-and-more adrift at sea without a bearing.

Much more needs to be said and discussed about this; in comparison, Siri AI is boring and predictable. Siri AI is Apple being Classic Apple: shipping a solid, decent product that works as advertised and isn't that surprising. That's Apple. They lost their bearing as well for a couple years, but they re-found it. Good on them. Meanwhile Microsoft is in meltdown mode behind them shrieking buzzwords and everyone is pretending that everything is fine because they're microsoft, they'll figure it out.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#188
Microsoft has a bad reputation for hardware. Back in the late 90s you could trust them for mice/keyboards, not fancy but they worked. Some swore by that ms natural (it gave me RSI that it took a special keyboard that made people look at me like I was crazy to fix). The xbox eventually helped them build some trust. However then there was the surface series and the phone. They dropped support for certain surface tables/laptops very quickly, they got deeply mixed reviews. The phone was back to front a disaster. Recently they had that AR headset, total miss, a miss that makes the Apple Vision Pro look like a wildly successful product.

I don't trust microsoft with hardware anymore, nor do i trust them with software.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#189
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not consumers wanted it, Apple failed to deliver. And that wasn't because they were listening or anything - they just couldn't deliver. Apple doesn't leak much but there has been coverage of this: https://spyglass.org/apple-ai-fail/ (April 2025) https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-... (paywalled) https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/06/07/one-fateful-meeti... (2 days ago)

They couldn't deliver because they are not a startup and thus have something to lose in a way that OpenAI/Anthropic don't. If Siri starts telling people to self-destruct themselves it would be a major PR disaster, whereas Apple Intelligence being late is not. Arguably the technology they needed (strong guardrails) didn't really exist at the time and the extra couple of years is what made the difference.

Are you saying that Google is a startup?

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#190

I am still convinced that Apple is slowly working its way to smart glasses. And that *this* is the Next Big Thing . Frankly, the future is very good AR glasses that just work. - iPhone Air to cram everything into a small space - Vision pro - a new OS for looking at things and interacting - Better Siri and AI that works with voice - Smart local model / routing to big models in the cloud - integration with wearables (a…

Smart glasses aren't well-liked by the mainstream population. The term "glasshole" exists for a reason.

Smart glasses WITH cameras and microphones aren't well liked by the mainstream population.

What if the glasses are display only and paired to an iphone for most of it's 'senses'?

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