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Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

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Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#361
post #359
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US could largely walk away and be fine The US can't walk away, otherwise, Trump would have done so. That part of the world is part of the US system and "walking away" is basically giving it to anybody who is willing to exert control over it. They'll certainly be opposed to the US system (sanctions will be reverse imposed at that time). And then what's next? Walk out of the pacific?

Some of your logic isn't exactly wrong, though just because someone can walk away doesn't mean they have to or want to. I simply mean that for the US alone from an isolationist stance, a lot of the primary and secondary goals are already achieved. If we walked away it would have already largely been worth it. Yes, Trump repeats something akin to this, but just because he said something doesn't automatically make it i…

> a lot of the primary and secondary goals are already achieved.

Which ones? FONAV is not restored to the Strait, attacks on shipping have not been eliminated, and Iran still possesses credible nuclear materiel according to recent Israeli and CIA reports. I'd like to hear you list explicitly what has been achieved from the United States' original goals.

> Iran has to redefine what winning means to save face. Russia has to do the same with Ukraine

The Russian Federation has a GDP that is ~10x larger than Iran, so you also have to redefine what "losing" means to make that analogy. America has a GDP that is ~100x larger than Iran, even more prestigious and strong, and it still cannot restore the status quo ante bellum. In terms of asymmetrical warfare, the US is much closer to Russia's strategy, and Iran much closer to Ukraine's tactics.

> and establishing fake islands to claim control over an expanded area of water which upsets many of their other neighbors.

It is awful. America has tried to escalate the issue in the UN Security Council, but their support for the military annexation of Syrian and Lebanese territories has cost them too much credibility to force the issue. Everyone knows that the US government doesn't care, including China. Such a shame that this double-standard costs so many people their livelihood and home.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#363
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's it "quite short sighted"? Are you saying the math _does_ make sense? if so, how?

Back of a very tiny envelope: suppose there are 100 million jobs that benefit from spending $10k/year in tokens. That's a trillion in annual revenue; at a 30% margin that's $300 billion in profits, which can easily support $6 trillion in valuation.

numbers are fun.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#364
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sold the Xserve for ten years, across the PowerPC and Intel eras.

Still, in the scheme of Apple stuff it was a failed experiment--even if a worthwile one.

We were one of the first Xserve customers (Xserve and Xserve RAID).

I do agree it was an experiment. Unless someone has firsthand knowledge, we won’t know if it was someone’s pet project, a market they wanted to be in to dominate Dell, IBM, etc.

However, I would not call it a failed experiment. One of the largest supercomputers (at the time) was an Xserve cluster. Nothing about the experiment failed.

I will tell you that Steve Jobs was not a fan of the Xserve product line. He did not support it, which meant its days were numbered. He stated Apple was a consumer company. Not a business enterprise company. The Xserve teams were soon disbanded not soon afterwards.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#365
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like you said, they don't believe there is a viable business yet.

But they already have a billion devices with NPUs doing essentially nothing. I don't see any strategy at all, other than outsourcing a potentially core function to Google.

If you think your competitors are committing financial suicide by borrowing money they don’t have to fund a project with a dubious rate of return, you wait and see.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#366
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of your logic isn't exactly wrong, though just because someone can walk away doesn't mean they have to or want to. I simply mean that for the US alone from an isolationist stance, a lot of the primary and secondary goals are already achieved. If we walked away it would have already largely been worth it. Yes, Trump repeats something akin to this, but just because he said something doesn't automatically make it i…

> a lot of the primary and secondary goals are already achieved. Which ones? FONAV is not restored to the Strait, attacks on shipping have not been eliminated, and Iran still possesses credible nuclear materiel according to recent Israeli and CIA reports. I'd like to hear you list explicitly what has been achieved from the United States' original goals. > Iran has to redefine what winning means to save face. Russia h…

> Which ones? FONAV is not restored to the Strait, attacks on shipping have not been eliminated

Neither of those were primary or secondary goals, we didn't even attack Iran for those reasons. Those only arose after the fact.

The highest goal overall was to stop World War 3 from happening or at least delay it until the metrics can shift so dramatically that China cannot deny that the environment is not in its favor. Even though there are critical differences, there are also dangerous similarities in what China is doing today to what the Soviet Union was doing that sparked World War 2. Huge military build-up, purging its military and weaponizing communism abroad. The Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Iran chain was a message that we see the network. Expanding our military operations aggressively in South America to unwind China's leftist expansion there was a message.

One aspect of that is to reduce the capacity of these countries to engage in coordinated interference or conventional attacks. All of these countries are heavily involved in interference inside the US, but they were also attacking their neighbors or threatening to.

Another aspect is simply re-establishing deterrence. There had been so much propaganda spreading that the US is worthless, evil and in decline when in relative terms none of those are true. If countries think they won't face any real opposition, they feel emboldened to do whatever they want. Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela were all establishing themselves to feel invincible. It was their time and the US is done. The international order is done. Plenty of this propaganda still exists, but the propagandists themselves now mostly know better when before they were drinking their own kool-aid.

Next, Iran attempted to assassinate the US president numerous times and even again recently. They also made attempts to assassinate Netanyahu. In addition, Iranian leadership engaged in indiscriminate mass killing of their own civilians. There was also intelligence gathering that contradicts the stated position of Iranian leadership not wanting to obtain a nuclear bomb. There has historically been an even more radical element in Iran that believed they needed to bring about something akin to the end times to cause the resurrection of their prophet. Officially they were suppressed and deinfluenced.

Beyond that, they were involved in countless assassinations around the world and essentially caught red handed, yet still denied it. So a critical primary objective was to take out multiple layers of leadership to demonstrate "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". I think everyone agrees you shouldn't be running around indiscriminately killing world leaders, so usually when it does occur it is the result of them attempting to kill other leaders or engaging in some other kind of deeply condemned actions.

A follow on primary objective is to disrupt their nuclear program and ballistic missile program to prevent them from establishing a North Korea style nuclear immunity. An extension of that was to set back their space program for developing long range ballistic missiles and launching military satellites which would further allow them to identify targets and deliver nuclear weapons. Their nuclear material is buried and whenever they try to dig things up we blow them up. That can continue without requiring carrier groups. While their nuclear program was already bombed, there were other nuclear related labs and facilities which were intentionally not bombed to leave something to discuss, but that wasn't fruitful and now those have been hit too.

Neither their navy or air force were really much of a threat and they were largely useless outside of their neighborhood or managing the strait, but destroying them does reduce their conventional options for harassing their neighbors, weakens morale, deflates their internal prestige narrative and so on. Using a submarine to destroy one of the ships was unnecessary, but intentionally communicates that our silent service does still exist and have the experience to act. It was historic and would make undeniable news.

There were more primary and plenty of secondary objectives like weakening capacity to fund their radical militias abroad, attacking regime financing, complicating their industrial supply chain, slowing their drone production and supply to Russia, increasing public understanding of the links between Iran and China and so many more.

Something comprehensive would probably be many pages long.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#367
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, in the scheme of Apple stuff it was a failed experiment--even if a worthwile one.

We were one of the first Xserve customers (Xserve and Xserve RAID). I do agree it was an experiment. Unless someone has firsthand knowledge, we won’t know if it was someone’s pet project, a market they wanted to be in to dominate Dell, IBM, etc. However, I would not call it a failed experiment. One of the largest supercomputers (at the time) was an Xserve cluster. Nothing about the experiment failed. I will tell you…

Without any inside knowledge--and I'd have to revisit a piece I wrote at the time during my prior analyst stint--it always felt like a bit of a sideline/experiment. There were a lot of dynamics going on at the time. Linux was really exploding (and improving). There was a lot of consumerization (especially on mobile) happening within enterprise IT; Apple didn't need to become an enterprise IT company to effectively reap a lot of the benefits both directly and indirectly. Servers were increasingly commoditizing onto dual socket x86 (with some outliers).

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#368
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they already have a billion devices with NPUs doing essentially nothing. I don't see any strategy at all, other than outsourcing a potentially core function to Google.

If you think your competitors are committing financial suicide by borrowing money they don’t have to fund a project with a dubious rate of return, you wait and see.

Fine, but then why put specialized silicon in a billion devices, and then leave it totally unused by outsourcing their intended functionality to a competitor? And what do you do when that competitor (and others) release agents to manage users' personal while Siri is still a laughingstock? And then when that competitors (and others) are starting to build super-apps, how long would you continue to block super-apps and sue their makers to protect your App Store moat?

To me, the "wait and see" approach looks more like "we have no strategy for the hottest technology revolution in decades that threatens a bunch of our moats." Maybe they're hoping that the bubble pops and then they can pick up a suitable AI company on the cheap -- thankfully they have buttloads of cash -- but you know what they say about hope and strategies...

Personally I'm hoping for strong on-device AI capabilities to reduce dependency on the clouds / AI labs, but I'm losing hope that it'll be from Apple.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#369
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think your competitors are committing financial suicide by borrowing money they don’t have to fund a project with a dubious rate of return, you wait and see.

Fine, but then why put specialized silicon in a billion devices, and then leave it totally unused by outsourcing their intended functionality to a competitor? And what do you do when that competitor (and others) release agents to manage users' personal while Siri is still a laughingstock? And then when that competitors (and others) are starting to build super-apps, how long would you continue to block super-apps and…

I don’t see how any of your arguments threaten the iPhones stranglehold on mobile phones market. Siri sucks and has been for many years. I don’t believe users will ditch the iPhone because Siri sucks and they love ChatGPT. They will install the ChatGPT app.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#370
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to read this take seriously, when you promoted a company spending $1k per engineer per day on LLM usage.

You mean Strong DM? I stand by what I said about them at the time: they're an interesting case-study in extreme AI-assisted software development, and they have a bunch of ideas that are worth learning from even if you're not going to spend that (absurd) kind of money. One of the hot topics since then has been how to validate software without reviewing every line of code by hand, which is exactly the kind of thing the…

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