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The iPhone's Last Stand?

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Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#111

Post by komali2 »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #101
yladiz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The things you describe may be problems in your country, but they're not universal.

Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#112

Post by thewebguyd »

imglorp wrote: post #23
wiseowise wrote: post #2

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…

I think Microsoft does have a point here: hosted services and thin clients are going to make money. (1) Their main focus is selling services, selling you, selling your data, and showing you ads. Children are being raised to think that asking chat to add two numbers is normal; they will enter the workplace in this state. Everything for MS is a service: this is going to work for them. And (2) because those hosted servi…

Microsoft winning here requires them to actually execute well which they have a long storied history of completely missing the window. Tablets, phones, MP3 players, they were always either too early or too late and their consumer marketing is terrible.

You could be right, but I don’t think it’s going to be Microsoft that’ll be the leader here.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#113

Post by simonh »

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)

I think you're quite right in a sense, but let's say it had been Samsung making these promises. Do you think the system not working properly or producing weird and unacceptable results would have prevented them releasing it anyway?

Well, the results[1] are[2] actually[3] in. Samsung of course did do that and the results are what you'd expect.

So in a sense Apple 'could' have released what they had, after all Samsung and others have, but almost certainly not at the level of quality Apple expects. In which case arguably not releasing until it is capable of reaching that quality bar is the right call. The wrong call was announcing it in the first place when it wasn't ready.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/1b4zc1j/new_ai_tex... [2] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/awful-galaxy-s24-feature-... [3] https://www.androidauthority.com/im-tired-pretending-galaxy-...

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#114

Post by hnfong »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #70
technothrasher wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because you think I am wrong does not mean I have failed to think through the various components/implications of my statement. I can disprove that the Earth is flat with the incredibly varied, concrete, observable evidence that it is not. It comes in many forms and is undeniable, hence the lengths flat earthers have to go to to “prove” the evidence is all just a collection of lies that serve some nebulous, nefar…

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 accepted you can't prove god doesn't exist (maybe mis-step for you since you're probably not the philosopher type), well, can you prove such demon doesn't exist? Seems to me the same thing.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#115

Post by jazzypants »

mg wrote: post #108
jazzypants wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 red…

Are you ever reading the code? What do you do when the LLM can't fix a bug? Do you not wish you had a more intimate first-hand knowledge of the code when fixing things yourself?

Please don't tell me that never happens-- I've had one just in the last week and I use both OpenAI and Anthropic foundation models.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#117

Post by SllX »

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.

Pricing is looking to be complicated and not clear cut.

Some of it is free on-device. Some of it is free & rate limited per day. They mentioned in the WWDC infomercial that users with iCloud+ (the storage tier subscriptions, Apple likes to throw random things in with that) will be able to get more uses per day. And some of it developers will pay for.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#118

Post by jmuguy »

wiseowise wrote: post #2

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…

Thompson is speaking broadly about markets, not trying to put anyone down. The point he's getting at is that Apple and MS are just playing (or trying to play) to their strengths. Did you see anything in the new Siri AI demos that looked all that much like someone getting work done? I didn't. And that's fine, for Apple and the iPhone. Microsoft for better or for worse is what a large part of the American business world is using to get work done, and so Microsoft is trying to position their AI strategy towards that.

For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#119

Post by komali2 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #100
iamnothere wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7. There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, b…

Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the peo…

> Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly

But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants.

Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2].

> but nobody believed in communism either

I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy

[2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016...

Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...

Re: The iPhone's Last Stand?

#120

Post by simonh »

deltarholamda wrote: post #78

After the blowout success of the Macbook Neo, I'd think the bet would be on a cheap iPhone. Maybe not, as so many people finance their expensive phone through their carrier, but I suspect a $300 iPhone would eat the mid-range Android market.

I really doubt it, for several reasons. The Neo is cheap because it mainly leverages a compute core that already existed, consisting mainly of binned parts.

Yes the chassis had to be designed, but that can be used in common for future iterations. That's much harder for phones where the chassis is very tightly coupled to the specific circuit board design.

The 17e already is the cheap iPhone and it's $599. Putting it's internals in a different shell is one thing. Designing and building a half price internal board is quite another, especially as it would either require an entirely new SOC, or mean continuing production of a legacy SOC thus taking up valuable die production pipeline capacity.

Even if they did use an older SOC. Now they'd have to continue supporting that anaemic underpowered SOC with OS updates for years to come, and these future OS updates would have to run well on it.

I don't see it happening.

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