Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gross Apple Marketing

jonathanbuys.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 270 posts

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#151

Post by paul7986 »

ryandrake wrote: post #148
devin wrote: post #43

I think this is mostly just a problem of not having good reasons to sell AI products to consumers in the first place. I recently saw some Ray Ban Meta glasses ads. One of them had a guy ask the glasses to describe what was in front of his face, and then he remarked “wow that’s accurate” (there are people skateboarding). The guy wasn’t blind. His use of the glasses made little sense. Another ad has a young man asking…

This is what always happens when you have a technology and then desperately try to find problems to solve with it. Rather than starting with a problem and then applying the most appropriate technology to solve it. The exact same thing happened with Blockchain, but "AI" has about 100x more hype behind it.

I think people present day do not understand how to really use AI.. understand how it can benefit their life. The commercial the OP speaks and the ad agency sounds lame as they arent helping.

Personally Ive been enjoying wearing my Ray Bans for the past year and have used them to do things no other glasses can like...

- Translate.... was in Canada recently and a sign about Jasper the town i was in was in French. I asked Meta to translate it... it took a pic and audibly translated it for me.

- Was in Harpers Ferry WV on an overlook ..looking down into the town of Harpers Ferry which has a huge church which i have no idea it's name yet ask Meta what church is that over there. Took a pic and told me.

- Was in line at HersheyPark up on a platform and my friend wondered how many people you think are in line so i asked Meta and it took a pic and gave me an estimate.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#152

Post by luxuryballs »

I installed 18.1 last night and after finishing waitlist I promptly asked Siri if she could answer questions like chatGPT now, didn’t understand. I said what questions can I ask you then? She said “Ask away!” I asked the difference between watts and volts, “I don’t understand”, she understood nothing, I’m so confused!

I was upgrading for these features so now I’m thinking of selling this 16 pro and buying a drum set because my 13 mini was easier to hold and apparently Siri isn’t getting any smarter according a the WSJ article yesterday.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#153

Post by vundercind »

foobarian wrote: post #16
thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #8

> I’ve watched that little animation several times, and they tell a better story in a minute twenty-five than all of Apple’s AI commercials combined. If I showed that video to someone who isn't steeped in decades of Linux, I suspect they'd ask me what an Ubuntu is. As compared to the "schlub writes an email" video, which was compelling, funny, and actually shows the product they're marketing.

Heh. That "little animation" is so generic, you could have substituted Ubuntu with Windows or MacOS and everything they showed would have been valid.

Right—what "story"? "The appearance of desktop computers has changed over the period of time that Ubuntu has existed"? What does this thing do for me? Especially, what does it do for me that other platforms don't, or that I might not expect it would do for me?

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#154

Post by ceejayoz »

epcoa wrote: post #125
thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #8

> I’ve watched that little animation several times, and they tell a better story in a minute twenty-five than all of Apple’s AI commercials combined. If I showed that video to someone who isn't steeped in decades of Linux, I suspect they'd ask me what an Ubuntu is. As compared to the "schlub writes an email" video, which was compelling, funny, and actually shows the product they're marketing.

Forget about lying, this is just amorally stupid and pandering. I find the hypothetical universe where that guy is going to get anywhere good suggesting what his boss should “undertake” unbelievable. (Also not a good demo). And we’ve been in this GPT world nearly 2 years. The boss is obviously supposed to be smart, he’s a black guy in a suit after all. Is this the first time he’s ever received something that was obvi…

> The boss is obviously supposed to be smart, he’s a black guy in a suit after all. Is this the first time he’s ever received something that was obviously from an AI. What’s he confused about?

Ironically, you're doing the same thing as the actor in the skit - pretending to be confused, for effect.

Obviously, the boss is used to receiving unprofessional responses from the employee in question. Obviously, the boss is thrown as a result. Obviously, this is a contrived situation for the purpose of humor that in real life wouldn't go like this.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#155

Post by neilv »

The consumer use cases of "AI" right now are mostly about cheating at work that one is still really supposed to do themselves.

Maybe the ad people tried to come up with relatively palatable ones?

Note that no one is cheating on their school homework, which is a huge consumer use case category. And no creative work was detectably plagiarized (art, code). Though they still did do employment slacking/incompetence gaining advantage, by increasing deceptive and time-wasting noise for everyone else.

Or maybe that's the actual use cases of their target audience?

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#156

Post by makeitdouble »

dagmx wrote: post #51

This article is a prime example of why tech literate people aren’t inherently strong marketers for tech. What does the Ubuntu ad say to the user? How does it capture someone’s attention? None of the ad tells me why this is something worth paying attention to versus other distros or OSs, it doesn’t even tell me it’s about the OS at all unless I already know what Ubuntu is. Contrast with the Apple ads that tell you exa…

> it doesn’t even tell me it’s about the OS at all unless I already know what Ubuntu is.

Try watching the iPhone ads assuming you don't know what Apple does nor what an iPhone is. They make absolutely no sense.

Ads are targeted at a market, and these in particular assume some degree of familiarity. I guess the Ubuntu one in particular is to celebrate the 20 years, so it's a different vibe from a sheer call to action spot.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#157

Post by amatecha »

Zanfa wrote: post #63
thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #8

> I’ve watched that little animation several times, and they tell a better story in a minute twenty-five than all of Apple’s AI commercials combined. If I showed that video to someone who isn't steeped in decades of Linux, I suspect they'd ask me what an Ubuntu is. As compared to the "schlub writes an email" video, which was compelling, funny, and actually shows the product they're marketing.

It was exactly like every other enterprise animated product video. Random words with some electronic music. I was actually expecting "synergy" to pop up.

At least they got one noteworthy "hit" on the jargon bingo card: "performant" -_-

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#158

Post by [deleted] »

devin wrote: post #43

I think this is mostly just a problem of not having good reasons to sell AI products to consumers in the first place. I recently saw some Ray Ban Meta glasses ads. One of them had a guy ask the glasses to describe what was in front of his face, and then he remarked “wow that’s accurate” (there are people skateboarding). The guy wasn’t blind. His use of the glasses made little sense. Another ad has a young man asking…

[deleted]

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#159

Post by [deleted] »

Alex3917 wrote: post #79
windexh8er wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the write up seems to bring the indirect point that AI has limited use cases currently. So instead of taking the traditional Apple approach with showcasing the technical aspects of the product (an example being Apple has highlighted photography and video a lot in the last few generations of iPhone), instead Apple falls back on cheeky ads, which to be fair, are also not new to Apple marketing. I do think that…

> I'm, personally not a fan of the current generation or implementation of AI and do not want to use it. Why not? It gives vastly better than human performance across a wide range of problems. Just this morning I asked Chat GPT to find me the smallest set of positive integers whose median is 2 and whose average is 3.75, and it just spit out the correct answer instantly. That would have been an enormous pain in the as…

[deleted]

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#160

Post by CharlieDigital »

empath75 wrote: post #77
CharlieDigital wrote: post #61

I work at a startup in the AI space. We've been working with it for over a year now and I'm of the mind that AI, in it's current state, really isn't a tool meant for an end user to interact with. It feels like it's the most useful when it's transparent and you -- as an end user -- don't know that there's an LLM in the process. The best use cases seem to be those that don't require an end consumer to directly interact…

There's basically two places where I see it as being useful -- as part of an automation pipeline where you need some translation layer from natural language to structured data or vice versa, and when the user knows it's an LLM and _wants to interact with an LLM_. I never want to see LLM generated content as an end user when I haven't specifically asked for it.

I agree with those.

The use case our startup is working is one more that I think really works well: why are you showing me these results?

Our product basically takes any search output and uses our internal knowledge graph for our clients to "explain" to the customer "why these results for this query/question?"

We use the same knowledge graph to then extend our client's native search results with much more relevant results using the LLM to better match results to the semantic intent of the question.

It's all quite nifty and transparent; the user wouldn't know that there's an AI involved without labeling it as AI generated.

Post reply on HN