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The iPhone's Last Stand?

stratechery.com

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Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#101

Post by adjejmxbdjdn »

yladiz wrote: post #66
koolba wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge. If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them. But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.

This doesn’t make any sense. We have more access to entertainment, be it comics, porn, or films, than any period in history, yet we continue to make more substantial scientific progress than any point in history.

We have one of the most incredible vaccine technologies in mRNA and yet vaccination rates are going down.

We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries.

We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations.

We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less.

We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever.

The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#102

Post by grvdrm »

analogpixel wrote: post #87
grvdrm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently canceled my Stratechery Plus subscription. Don’t miss it to be honest - once a week free is plenty.

I canceled mine; I thought it would be a good way to stay updated on tech news without having to read other news, but then they over-extended the service to a bunch of other things instead of just focusing on the one news letter. I don't care about a twice a week podcast about the NBA and national parks, or the other 5? podcasts about random stuff.

The podcast I listened to the most: Dithering. Primary reason? 15 mins. Sometimes listened to Stratechery Interviews if/when the guest intrigued me outside of the Stratechery ecosystem.

My problem is part style, and part content. Stratechery reads like it's written to be narrated - rather than exist first as writing. There's verbosity, pauses, long sentences, etc. And then you listen to the narration it makes sense.

But that complexity makes reading harder. Not saying everything needs to be 5th-grade-level, but complexity isn't required. Paste a Stratechery article into Hemingway Editor to visualize my point.

The stats below:

Readibility - Post-Graduate (aim for 9)

26 of 44 sentences very hard to read

8 of 88 sentences hard to read

31 weakeners

6 words with simpler alternatives

What a chore to cover, and that's without commenting on the ideas/concepts in the content.

I'm sure some folks like this writing style but I don't. And try hard to write my newsletter and other prose with far less complexity.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#103

Post by hylaride »

parpfish wrote: post #92
wongarsu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If enterprises were really focused on saving employee's time, Jira wouldn't sell. At least not the bog slow SaaS version Saving time (==saving money) is something you can sell to companies. But above all, they are willing to spend on saving their managers time. The higher up the hierarchy, the better. If that involves wasting a lot more time for the underlings, then so be it. The underlings aren't the ones making the…

i dont think jira (or linear or any other ticketing platform) is about saving anybody time. they know on some level that they are all a burden. but they will gladly take the productivity hit from that time sink because it gives them teh ability to track employees. they'd rather know that everybody is working at 80% productivity than release that burden and just trust them. it's either this or filling out frustrating…

The previous place I worked had the Head of Product become VP of Engineering after the CTO left (don't ask, it's a long story).

They literally implemented the most orthodox scrum you can imagine, with the one exception that they could sit on the sprint planning meetings and override the teams pulling tickets off the backlog into sprints (technical debt of course started to pile up).

The kicker is that after a few months of this, productivity slowed to a crawl. The retrospectives showed that the planning wasn't working because the planned work rarely got done - because we were always fighting fires. Work also slowed due to all the overhead that was added to implement scrum (I also had to participate, despite being in an DevOps role - that at the best of times is inherently interrupt driven and I'm servicing the work of developers). Despite the fact that the powers that be knew things were not working as well as they used to, no amount of feedback could loosen the reigns - probably because it inherently meant losing some control. We had to try everything else to get back to where we were, when empowered developers could make decisions. Things got worse of course as within 6 months we lost half our most experienced talent that wasn't going to put up with it (this was the peak 2022 tech hiring levels).

Eventually there was some mild "improvement" as we were allowed a "15% time" to work on what we thought was best, which still had to be justified and it was still the lowest priority during any given sprint. I still shake my head at the whole situation.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#104

Post by trumpdong »

imglorp wrote: post #39
engineer_22 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different than using a calculator

Kids are absolutely using chat for calculator tasks. There was a meme going around last week where a child saw a phone calculator app and remarked "wow there's an AI just for math". Generalizing, they're using chat for everything else, like search. Actually reading a source is not on their radar. This is frightening. A whole generation that will not, and can not, think. At all. "Do it for me."

If you want to get rich quick there's a huge lesson here: sell to children early. If you can get 5-year-olds hooked on your product and growing up thinking it's the only way to do things, they will give you a huge amount of money later in life. Such as paying ChatGPT to be a calculator.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#105

Post by trumpdong »

mg wrote: post #25

you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents I would be really happy with my phone + headphones as the device I use most. But only if I could use Gemini (or ChatGPT or Grok or any other chat agent) in voice mode and say "SSH into my GitHub Codespace soandso and implement feature soandso.". And it replies "Did it. I told copilot (o…

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#106

Post by zarzavat »

nl wrote: post #81
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #7

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…

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.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#107

Post by hnfong »

technothrasher wrote: post #42
Forgeties79 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not religious but there’s a significant difference here. Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false. Put another way: You can concretely observe withou…

I don't think you've thought through what you're trying to assert. A god could make you believe anything they wanted to about the earth. So if you cannot disprove a god, then you cannot disprove the theory that the earth is flat.

Don't know why you're downvoted so much, but your observation is spot on.

This is essentially Descartes evil demon issue. If you can't disprove that an evil demon (with god-level powers) is deceiving you at everything you perceive, then how are you going to be sure about anything? (including that the Earth is not flat?)

It has always been a difficult philosophical issue about how much we can trust reality itself.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#108

Post by mg »

jazzypants wrote: post #95
mg wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would tell me about the changes like a human would. "It changed the plot function so it takes another parameter called linewidth. It also added an input field in the stylecontrols section where the user can ...".

How would you detect the presence of bugs in this scenario? How would you make sure the LLM isn't adding yet another useless, redundant function to the code base? Even if there isn't a bug in this PR, do you not want to be familiar with the actual shape of the code in case you need to dig through it while bug hunting later? Every time I try to take a hands-off approach to the code like this, I come to regret it later…

    How would you detect the
    presence of bugs in this
    scenario?
I would ask AI. "Did the last commit introduce any bugs or unintended consequences?". In fact I already use this prompt after every change I make manually.

    How would you make sure the LLM
    isn't adding yet another
    useless, redundant function to
    the code base?
By asking AI. In fact, I already run a long "Can you refactor anything in this codebase to reduce redundancy, improve readability, performance or maintainability" pretty regularly.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#109

Post by MisterTea »

derwiki wrote: post #72
wett wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of a meme https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ

I heard it with the voice of Macho Man Randy Savage

Let me tell you something, brother - whatcha gonna do when a thousand Hulkamaniacs come tell you Macho Man was known for his Oh Yeah!

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#110

Post by e28eta »

mitkebes wrote: post #98
analogpixel wrote: post #80

Who is paying for all of this AI usage on the Iphone? I didn't see anything about a new AI subscription (maybe I missed it?), and I doubt Apple will want to pay million/billions a year to do it indefinitely.

Supposedly they're going to do a fair bit of it on device for privacy reasons, so the only payment for that will be RAM and battery power. For stuff that can't be run on phones, some of it will be run on Apple's servers, which I'm assuming Apple is eating the cost of for the time being. Stuff that needs heavy reasoning or external knowledge will be processed by google, in exchange for $1 billion a year. However Googl…

I think the server-side stuff will be a mix of users & developers paying. I have seen this info in several places:

> PCC delivers a powerful server model without compromising privacy: data is never stored, used only for the request, and independently verified. It's integrated with the OS and iCloud, so there's no authentication or API keys, no token cost to developers, a daily per-user limit (higher with iCloud+), and eligibility for apps under 2M downloads.

Source: summary on https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/319/

I haven’t seen any information about what’s happening with apps over 2M downloads, who graduate from the Small Business Program. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...

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