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Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

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Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#351

Post by SirMaster »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #296
SirMaster wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple waited on smartphones? I thought the original iPhone was basically first. Do you count blackberry and palm pilot as Apple waiting to see?

Apple was considered very late to the smartphone game at the time. Windows CE was introduced on PDAs around 1996, and was on phones by 2003, so the iPhone was arguably between four and eleven years late depending on how you define the space. Microsoft’s dominance was a safe bet because they had never really failed to dominate any market at that point in history. Also nobody imagined that the size of the mobile market…

I guess it's just hard for me to consider those even "smartphones" with such small screens without capacitive multi-touch and with web browsers that didn't work properly on so many websites, at least compared to safari on the iPhone.

And even other factors like the music and videos was so poor, granted they were built for business use which didn't really need a good media consumption experience.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#352

Post by adrian_b »

alwillis wrote: post #344
adrian_b wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree that this is the right solution, because for a locally-hosted model I value more the quality of the output than the speed with which it is produced, so I prefer the models as they were originally trained, not with further quantizations. While that paper praises the Apple advantage in SSD speed, which allows a decent performance for inference with huge models, nowadays SSD speeds equal or greater than tha…

> While that paper praises the Apple advantage in SSD speed, which allows a decent performance for inference with huge models, nowadays SSD speeds equal or greater than that can be achieved in any desktop PC that has dual PCIe 5.0 SSDs, or even one PCIe 5.0 and one PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Apple’s advantage is their unified memory architecture where the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine share the same memory and the SSD is directly c…

In an optimized implementation of model inference, the latency of SSD access has no importance, because no random accesses are done.

The purpose of optimizing model inference for weights stored on SSDs is to achieve a continuous reading from SSDs at the maximum throughput provided by hardware, taking care that any computations and any accesses to the main memory are overlapped over the SSDs reading.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#353

Post by grtteee »

SirMaster wrote: post #351
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was considered very late to the smartphone game at the time. Windows CE was introduced on PDAs around 1996, and was on phones by 2003, so the iPhone was arguably between four and eleven years late depending on how you define the space. Microsoft’s dominance was a safe bet because they had never really failed to dominate any market at that point in history. Also nobody imagined that the size of the mobile market…

I guess it's just hard for me to consider those even "smartphones" with such small screens without capacitive multi-touch and with web browsers that didn't work properly on so many websites, at least compared to safari on the iPhone. And even other factors like the music and videos was so poor, granted they were built for business use which didn't really need a good media consumption experience.

I suggest you watch the original iPhone video launch - Steve compares the iPhone with the existing smartphones of the time.

You’re taking for granted that we know how things panned out in hindsight. A complete touch screen phone with no fixed buttons at that time seemed nuts.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#354

Post by npunt »

smt88 wrote: post #53
tiffanyh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- AirPods - Apple Watch - AirTag Those are a few that come to mind. All do multi-billions in revenue per year.

None of those are the best product in their category, and all are only huge sellers because Apple anti-competitively privileges them in its ecosystem.

Bad take. Each of these offered novel user experience improvements at launch. Yes they leveraged ecosystem (and yes I agree ecosystem lock-in does move devices) but thats also exactly what unlocked the better UX.

In your other thread you mentioned people don't necessarily want iPhones but they buy them to not be excluded from iMessage. I think you vastly underestimate how much regular people want low-bullshit tech experiences and are willing to pay for that.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#355

Post by waffletower »

I wouldn't characterize Apple's AI strategy as "smart". "Accidental" is a perfect descriptor here. "Apple Intelligence" and "Liquid Glass" show they are asleep at the wheel. I wrote an email to Tim last year imploring him to leverage Apple Silicon and its unified memory for private AI. I didn't tell him that I had dumped 95% of my Apple shares.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#356

Post by prmoustache »

carefree-bob wrote: post #330
prmoustache wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sum of all these smaller markets is still bigger than the US one.

When measured in terms of mouths, yes, but when measured in terms of surplus spending power than can go to Apple, certainly not. India has 1.3 Billion people in terms of counting mouths, but not wallets with $1000 to send to Apple for a new iphone.

The biggest region in term of revenues for Apple revenues is all americas but it is still only around 43%, which means Apple still makes money from Africa, Europe, Asia and Ocenia combined than the whole american continent. So that is even less for the USA.

https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-geography

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#357

Post by socalgal2 »

Krutonium wrote: post #94
socalgal2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, they nailed that with the Newton, Apple Pippin, and the Apple Vision Pro

The Vision Pro was a Development Kit; Just like the first generation Apple Watch. It's not meant for the consumers, it's meant for the developers among the consumers. We will see if they ever release a new VisionOS device, but it's not the first time they did that; see also the Apple Watch.

A development kit wouldn't have a dedicated section of sofas in Apple stores for demoing them.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#358

Post by ebbi »

I think introducing the MacBook Neo now, at that price point, was a genius move. While they're playing the waiting game on AI, they're cementing the next generation into the Apple ecosystem and getting them to not sway towards whatever device(s) OpenAI is cooking up.

The MacBook Neo feels like the iPod of this generation.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#359

Post by SirMaster »

grtteee wrote: post #353
SirMaster wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's just hard for me to consider those even "smartphones" with such small screens without capacitive multi-touch and with web browsers that didn't work properly on so many websites, at least compared to safari on the iPhone. And even other factors like the music and videos was so poor, granted they were built for business use which didn't really need a good media consumption experience.

I suggest you watch the original iPhone video launch - Steve compares the iPhone with the existing smartphones of the time. You’re taking for granted that we know how things panned out in hindsight. A complete touch screen phone with no fixed buttons at that time seemed nuts.

That's exactly my point. It seemed like a new futuristic product category, first of it's kind.

I watched it live and I bought one right when they came available. To me it delivered a user experience unlike anything else that existed.

And yes I had used some palm pilots and blackberries as well.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#360

Post by carefree-bob »

prmoustache wrote: post #356
carefree-bob wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When measured in terms of mouths, yes, but when measured in terms of surplus spending power than can go to Apple, certainly not. India has 1.3 Billion people in terms of counting mouths, but not wallets with $1000 to send to Apple for a new iphone.

The biggest region in term of revenues for Apple revenues is all americas but it is still only around 43%, which means Apple still makes money from Africa, Europe, Asia and Ocenia combined than the whole american continent. So that is even less for the USA. https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-geography

You are doing a lot of heavy lifting lumping Europe and Asia together, and inserting Africa and Oceana, which is so small Apple doesn't even report revenue for it.

   North America is 43%
   Europe is 27%
   China 15%
   Japan 7%
   Rest of Asia: 8%
   Africa, middle east, oceania effective round to 0%
Basically North America and Japan make up 50% of Apple's revenue, but are nowhere near 50% of global GDP or population.
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