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

Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 438 posts

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#361

Post by FireBeyond »

ezst wrote: post #273
jmyeet wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Tim Apple [sic] has made 3 major errors, 2 of which got corrected: 1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected; 2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple…

3. Is what I call a smart move. Sometimes the game is won by not playing, and it's increasingly obvious that the LLM race leads to nowhere (there is no moat, there is nothing unique or clever that Apple can build out of it that can't be mimicked by others, made better, with Apple looking bad as a result, the tech is flawed, with clear diminishing returns, ...). If anything worth of the Apple logo comes out of this, i…

Okay, so assume that's the hypothesis...

Siri is STILL utter garbage. It's like a POC so many times. Its accent recognition for me is horrible, and it feels like so many of its interaction types are hardcoded, like "Do X at this time" "Sure". "Do Y (very similar thing) at this time" "I can't do that".

And while I get (but don't necessarily always agree with) per-app isolation, it leads to absolutely comical things. My fiance has Siri turned off. Uses CarPlay. Can text me with voice commands. But she can be navigating somewhere, and say "Hey, find me the nearest Starbucks" and Siri will say, with a straight face, while the phone is navigating her somewhere, "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are".

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#362

Post by FireBeyond »

rootusrootus wrote: post #176
retired wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Should I use a 3.5% or a 4% safe withdrawal rate? My house is paid off and I got a company pension, two dogs and a partner. Cars are paid off but our iPhones are on a payment plan till 2028. Net worth around $2.5 billion but highly concentrated in one company"

> Should I use a 3.5% or a 4% safe withdrawal rate? Well... > My house is paid off and I got a company pension, two dogs and a partner. Kids? What are you planning for your estate after you croak? You can do a little better than 4% with an lifetime joint annuity for you and your partner, so long as you don't care about leaving anything to family...

> You can do a little better than 4% with an lifetime joint annuity for you and your partner, so long as you don't care about leaving anything to family...

"How are you spending your retirement with all that free time?"

"SKIing"

"Aren't you a bit old for that... wait, what?"

"Spending Kids' Inheritance"

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#363

Post by FireBeyond »

grey-area wrote: post #271
mattcantstop wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a tiresome perspective. The value of the quote from Thiel should be based on how true/predictive/helpful the quote is. Not the political leanings of the person who said it. Someone locally said they wouldn't listen to anything Strong Towns wrote because they are pro-housing. Even though the article from Strong Towns directly addressed the question the person was asking about quite well. Tribalism is goin…

I agree it's good not to be tribalistic, but it's also good to be wary of the source of an opinion, particularly if it is from someone quite extreme, Thiel has openly supported fascism, "Democracy and Freedom are not compatible" is a pretty extreme position, so we should be wary of what he says and does. Here's another quote for you from Graham Greene: "Sooner or later," Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Troui…

> Thiel has openly supported fascism, "Democracy and Freedom are not compatible" is a pretty extreme position, so we should be wary of what he says and does.

Precisely, because we should be thinking about why he's saying and doing it. It's not just because he likes the sound of his own voice.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#364

Post by reddit_clone »

csunbird wrote: post #168
alex7o wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fight me but I miss the touchbar, it was customizable to be super useful with better touch tool

I think the problem with touch bar was that, it completely replaced the function keys, instead of complementing them. Other than that, I actually liked it.

That.

And I had to look down every time I had use it. I am glad to see it go.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#365

Post by Aeroi »

bigyabai wrote: post #297
Aeroi wrote: post #49

Apple owns the hardware, they own the ecosystem, and as mathematics and compression prevail, smaller param models will live on device via purpose built chips. The lack of action will in the end be apples saving grace. Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet. Anyway you shake it str…

> the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet. Apple mass-produces raster GPUs and bakes them into an expensive ARM SOC. They are not a drop-in replacement for CUDA or any of the expensive GPGPU hardware. Apple Silicon runs compute shaders just like the GPUs from 2012. You could call them a "frontier competitor that ju…

Then why is Apple Silicon the best for OpenClaw?

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#366

Post by Aeroi »

davedx wrote: post #200
Aeroi wrote: post #49

Apple owns the hardware, they own the ecosystem, and as mathematics and compression prevail, smaller param models will live on device via purpose built chips. The lack of action will in the end be apples saving grace. Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet. Anyway you shake it str…

Huh, if you don't own the models then you don't own the ecosystem end to end though?

If you're using an apple phone to download the chatgpt app on the apple app store. That's still pretty much owning the ecosystem.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#367

Post by daotoad »

heroicmailman wrote: post #25
steveBK123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form. Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but f…

I'm honestly shocked they haven't done more with HomeKit and in-home devices. Give me a low-power, always-on, iPad-mini style display on my nightstand, on my fridge, on my kitchen countertop, as a desk companion... there are so many things they could do with that form factor. They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that.…

I think the home automation market is waiting on things that most people really want and a lower barrier to entry.

Alfred North Whitehead famously noted that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

What has household automation really given us so far? Dimmable lights? Whatever. If I cared, I'd already have rheostats on all my light switches. Thermostat? My digital thermostat is already good enough.

The thing that would sell like crazy is a robot valet.

In other words, the ability to navigate carelessly through your home, dropping items when you are no longer interested in them and have them "magically" return to their proper homes.

Such a thing would need to be able to roam around your home and pick things up and store them, and then retrieve them when appropriate (when asked or based on schedules and other automations). Maybe even do a little light dusting.

If you can make it take out the trash, fold laundry, and empty the dishwasher, you're looking at a ridiculously popular system. Even if it costs thousands of dollars.

Thing is, the tech isn't really ready to give us a household robot that can pick your jacket up off the couch and put it away. When we can do that, it will be huge.

Once we are there, we've grown so used to the idea of an adversarial relationship with the businesses that provide our services, that we are being spied on and our data sold, would we even trust the systems that would be needed to enable such products?

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#368

Post by geodel »

doitLP wrote: post #57
bradleyankrom wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else? Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?

Yes but those are outcomes — what did he do that got him there? Lots of people want preferential production and lower cost; Was it that he had the budget to pay more and dictate standards? If that’s the case that’s not genius as much as having the balls to make bets that paid off.

To be honest no genius every existed under sun. What did Newton do? Just applied some common sense. If apple is not flying away there has to be some force pulling it down, he just named it gravity. What did Einstein do? Using Riemann geometry to already prevailing ideas. Not much of genius, using already invented things I'd say. What did Edison do? If one conducts thousand failed experiment a few might succeed. It doesn't take a genius to get that. And so on and on.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#369

Post by bigyabai »

Aeroi wrote: post #365
bigyabai wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet. Apple mass-produces raster GPUs and bakes them into an expensive ARM SOC. They are not a drop-in replacement for CUDA or any of the expensive GPGPU hardware. Apple Silicon runs compute shaders just like the GPUs from 2012. You could call them a "frontier competitor that ju…

Then why is Apple Silicon the best for OpenClaw?

Citation?

Apple Silicon is not used for inference in the majority of OpenClaw setups. macOS is popular for OpenClaw, but you can get the same results on a Linux, Windows or even ChromeOS client. There are OpenClaw desktops that run on a Raspberry Pi.

In the broader inference/training market, Apple Silicon is a non-entity compared to systems like the GB100.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#370

Post by bigyabai »

geodel wrote: post #359
bigyabai wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple doesn’t see factories purely as stores At Apple's scale, you basically can't operate like this. Placing an order for 50 million iPhone screens is not a consumer-grade request, you have to customize and coordinate your orders to get all 50 million delivered. It's hard to see the genius in this, the advantages you've listed are all courtesy of scale and liquidity.

Huh, courtesy of scale is because of 50 million customers were convinced that iPhone has quality enough to pay premium over 100s of other phone models. No one is stopping Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung etc of the world to put order of 50 million widgets and get best quality at cut throat price.

Indeed, and if we pay that courtesy to it's original owner then Steve Jobs was the "genius" behind that. Tim Cook inherited the empire, and steered the resources Jobs left for him.

> No one is stopping Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung etc of the world to put order of 50 million widgets and get best quality at cut throat price.

I don't think you are familiar with Samsung's ball game, including them in a list like this.

Post reply on HN