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I clicked hoping this would be about how old graphing calculators are generally better math companions than a phone. The best way to do math on my phone I know of is the HP Prime emulator.
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Well it seems that, those days, instead of SUM(expense1,expense2) you ask an LLM to "make an app that will compute the total of multiple expenses". If I read most of the news on this very website, this is "way more efficient" and "it saves time" (and those who don’t do it will lose their job) Then, when it produces wrong output AND it is obvious enough for you to notice, you blame the hardware.
The LLM that malfunctioned was there to slap categories on things. And something was going wrong in either the hardware or the compiler.
Methodology is one thing; I can't really agree that deploying an LLM to do sums is great. Almost as hilarious as asking "What's moon plus sun?" But phenomenon is another thing. Apple's numerical APIs are producing inconsistent results on a minority of devices. This is something worth Apple's attention.
(This is a total digression, so apologies) My mind instantly answered that with "bright", which is what you get when you combine the sun and moon radicals to make 明( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%98%8E ) Anyway, that question is not without reasonable answers. "Full Moon" might make sense too. No obvious deterministic answer, though, naturally.
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Macbooks and iPhones are good devices though, saying this as a primarily linux user. There is no way a company could exist purely on marketing, Apple backs it up with tech.
Not really. They back it up with "good enough tech" that looks pretty and sucks people in with marketing, and then locks them into a closed ecosystem. Admittedly, some of their tech is actually very good (e.g. M-series ARM-based CPUs), but much of it is nothing special, or worse, just copying something else that competitors have been doing for years, presenting it as brand-new, and claiming credit for it. They did th…
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I severely doubt your thesis around iPhones being Veblen goods. You are claiming that if the price of the iPhone went down, apple would sell fewer phones? Correspondingly, you are arguing that if they increased prices they could increase sales? You are claiming that 100s of millions of people have all made the decision that the price of an iPhone is more than it is worth to them as a device, but is made up for by bei…
>Correspondingly, you are arguing that if they increased prices they could increase sales? Veblen goods aren't like this. If they were, everything would be priced at infinity. Veblen goods have to take into account the amount of spending money their target customers have, and how much they're willing to spend. Apple products are priced this way. They're not targeted just at people who can afford Rolls-Royce Silver Sh…
Increasing demand with increasing prices is the very definition of a Veblen good. I never said anything like pricing them at infinity (an exceptionally stupid way of saying that something is not for sale).
I simply pointed out that there isn’t really any reason to believe that a mass produced easily available phone that holds a massive percentage of the entire global cell phone market would see increased demand from increased prices. It is an extraordinary claim with nothing resembling evidence. The most damning evidence is that the most expensive iPhone, the Pro Max, is outsold 2:1 by the base model for the last three generations, despite being visually distinguishable. (The 17 saw initial sales of Pro Maxes higher than base, but that appears to have corrected. Easily understandable that early adopters are more willing to pay for the best version of new tech)
There is an argument to be made that the Pro Max flirts with Veblen for small parts of the market, or that certain submarkets in poorer countries treat the iPhone that way, but that all looks more like conspicuous consumption. I still don’t believe that Pro Max sales increase if the price increases. A few individuals or submarket will not have the ability to invert a demand curve for an Apple device.
Again, I think that you are confusing conspicuous consumption with a Veblen good. This sentence is the giveaway:
> Those people have limited money, but they're willing to overpay, but only so much.
What you are describing is a normal demand curve. As price rises fewer people are willing to pay. People being unable to pay for something they still want does not make something a Veblen good (that would make insulin a Veblen good). You are describing a steep demand curve, not a reversed one.
Just because you perceive that an equivalent android can be purchased for half the price does not mean that everyone uses your criteria. I tried switching to a lower priced android made by google. In no way was it equivalent for my purposes. and I still wouldn’t want it. I am happy to pay the price, not because I care about being seen with an iPhone, but because it is the tool that I have determined to best suit my purposes. Many people refuse to believe this, but many people like the Apple ecosystem.
I wish he would have tried on a different iPhone 16 Pro Max to see if the defect was specific to that individual device.
"Well, now it's Feb. 1st and I have an iPhone 17 Pro Max to test with and... everything works as expected. So it's pretty safe to say that THAT specific instance of iPhone 16 Pro Max was hardware-defective."