131–140 of 200 posts
There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.
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It makes a lot of strategic sense but if you have so much money on the bank, then who wouldn't buy a silicon design firm to design your CPUs in house? I bet everyone here on HN would have suggested to do that if asked in a board meeting. The big surprise was how long it took Apple to bite the bullet. Anyway, despite this, Apple still has their castle built in someone else's kingdom, namely TSMC.
Nothing wrong with being fabless. Plus Apple could switch to inferior silicon and probably convince its userbase that they are the creme de la creme.
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isn't the VR Scuba mask dead now? I think Apple is hitting a wall that most tech companies are hitting. New gadgets aren't really improving our lives. We have the internet on our phones, Now the internet is a wasteland. Probably the biggest cultural innovation of the last 5 years has been podcasts and that's just gussied up radio.
Podcasts were arguably mainstream back in 2014 with Serial.
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I would have loved to see an Apple iCar, just to see the soulless, sterile and inoffensive result, and the resulting magical marketing circus. Do you take it to an Apple Store to refill the windshield wiper fluid? Does it use another bullshit proprietary charging port, and will it refuse to charge if I'm not using the supplied Apple cable? Is the bonnet glued shut? Do I need to hold the keyfob just so to unlock the d…
When you turn the car on the radio blasts a U2 track. This feature cannot be disabled.
I'm convinced that Tim Cook's biggest mistake was not creating an EV. Just look at how Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and BYD have moved into the EV space and have created amazing experiences for their customers. CarPlay paired with American cars is simply few generations behind from what the Chinese companies have done. Yet Apple was early enough and had an EV team but Cook killed it. Even if the 1st gen was crap…
Cook's mistake is that they didn't make an Apple Internet, a version of the Internet that exists entirely within the walls of Apple's walled garden. Think of the 30% tax that could be collected from online shopping!
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Yes but the software wasn’t selling until it was forced upon the Apple customer base. You could buy NeXTSTEP for an Intel PC in the 1990s but nobody did.
The right people bought NeXT though. Carmack and his team developed Doom on NeXT computers [1], and the result has profoundly changed the mass-market PC scene. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Engine
It’s conceivable that had Apple not purchased NeXT, even though NeXT probably would’ve ended up getting purchased by another company, its technology would’ve likely lived on. Perhaps a 1998 or 1999 NeXT could have open-sourced the OpenStep API and WebObjects as a Hail Mary move…talk about a completely different “what if” path for the Linux desktop and server!
There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.
Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago. Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish…
I don't think this is true. If anything, we'd have ipads with no stylus. Steve Jobs was a visionary, but most importantly a good business man. It's not like everything that made the iPhone was in house and strictly an Apple invention. Apple was lucky in that it bought a company that had developed the multi-touch technology the phone so heavily relied on. Without that, the iPhone wasn't going to happen when it did.
Additionally, a lot was sacrificed to make the iPhone happen. People took some serious physical and mental tolls in order to help ship that product. Marriages crumbled. The pressure was ruthless.
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And the Apple Silicon chips even include specialized cores that allow LLMs to run locally on both iPhones and MacBooks. (See the "Foundation Models Framework".)
Which was a day late and a dollar short, even at release. Those ANEs are only really good at inference, and even then you get faster results using your Apple Silicon GPU. They're slow, incomplete, not integrated into the GPU architecture (like Nvidia's) therefore killing any chance of Apple Silicon seeing serious AI server usage. If you want to brag about Apple's AI hardware prowess, talk about MLX. The ANE was a pre…
It's designed to have optimal performance/power ratios. The GPU is faster but it uses more power.