The event has been in motion with every action from the administration just cementing it more. Forget about the dollar’s dominance, at this point I am not forked that he will usher in ww3, or at the very least a war between Europe as the US seems very likely
There's no point in a war between US and Europe, it's not gonna happen. However bad a war would be, the current situation isn't much better. There's definitely a rift going on and will cause irreversible changes to the US - EU partnership. Oh well, not only EU, it seems like US is losing friends at a very fast rate with Trump at the whelm of the country.
Services business is a slippery slope, everyone succumbs to the YoY revenue growth push and they all gravitate towards the same dirty tactics. They even tried turning the hardware into a subscription model but I guess it didn’t gain much traction.
Ah! The illusion of predictability (for the organisation, of course, because that's what only counts nowadays). Then users get tired/upset of the crap and walk away.
Like long lasting customers of my employer.
Still, the new investor pushes the method further, into infinity, price strategy 'modernization' and whatnot, so numbers and charts in categories of buzzwords look as they want in the sheets. For a while.
Functionality? Secondary, tertiary, or even lower priority annoyance.
I wonder why they invest in troublesome R&D and not in selling sugary water or something from that beatifully simple alley instead, that would be better playfield for them.
Apple annual gross profit for 2025 was $195.201B, a 8.04% increase from 2024.
Apple annual gross profit for 2024 was $180.683B, a 6.82% increase from 2023.
Apple annual gross profit for 2023 was $169.148B, a 0.96% decline from 2022.
This leads me to believe that most boycotts gain traction only if another corporation stands to benefit from that. Nowadays pretty much all of the big players are in bed with the current administration, so there's little surprise that boycotts aren't noticeable.
Yeah but the average cult voter doesn’t care. Let alone the cult voter, most voters won’t see it as they may not tie the price increases directly to tariffs. We are already in an inflationary cycle when the tariffs are put so the administration will just claim the issue is not tariffs and that the tariffs are helping somehow and the base will believe it. We are in a world where the administration has fully doubled down on “never accept failure, never apologize and always double down” strategy and unfortunately it’s working
OpenAI has to be in panic mode, because google is stealing its market. Google for the big apple slice. Anthropic’s got the coding market mindshare. OpenAI has a decent chatbot share but I am sure it’s a declining business. They have fully squeezed everything out of the trump alignment, not sure there is much left there either. Also musk is probably going to get the federal government llm service money. They have to go vertical, and that is the reason why they are throwing shit at the wall with Johnny Ive and hardware.
I was initially rooting for OpenAI hoping it can challenge google and Apple. However they showed to being unscrupulous and seem to have a moral compass at the same level as meta.
> throwing shit at the wall with Johnny Ive and hardware.
Damn, I already forgot about that. You'd think a company who has the smartest people on Earth building a "product" that is "intelligence" would be able to... you know, make something out of it. Somehow despite ALL that, despite all the press too, they can't ship? Something does not add up, it's as if, and I know I'm going to sound like a crazy person, they were just... a normal company! /s
> I was initially rooting for OpenAI hoping it can challenge google and Apple. However they showed to being unscrupulous and seem to have a moral compass at the same level as meta.
OK ok well this is weird to me, I didn't think I'd be the one to defend Meta here ... but Meta at least never hid it's intention : it was a for-profit VC backed startup which only goal was to make money from day 1. OpenAI though started as a non-profit, collected goodwill from everyone to get the best talent because it's 1 thing, what made it special : it's mission WAS safety. Then they did 1 thing that actually got popular, GPT2, thanks to some pretty damn good marketing "Oh no, it's too risky to release!... but ok OK here it is anyway, but like don't destroy the World please." then exclusive partnership, etc, etc. Meta was "We want money." so at least they didn't lie about it.
Interesting to see that he did not issue an executive order to ban this but called on congress to do so. This is just pandering to the base and election signaling and nothing else, at least for now.
He's issued plenty of other executive orders that aren't legal in order to continue to bullshit his base. The reason why he's deferring to congress now (instead of trying to take credit) is because he knows it's not possible and can use that as leverage against members of Congress.
Just think of the shit he's going to throw against the wall when it's only a few months away. I bet he'll wade into "Cancelling all student loans" or "Legalizing Marijuana" knowing his base is too stupid to understand his intentions.
How is Wall Street defined? How would they enforce it? What is preventing a large corporation from registering a new company to buy every house? Also this is just a call to action, nothing written up in a law yet. We will see how it goes, if at all it's implemented.
They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time. The current froth is all about AI infrastructure not consumer devices.
Apple’s AI powered image editor (like removing something from the background) is near unusable. Samsung’s is near magic, Google’s seems great. So there’s a big gap here.
That is rather funny because I think Google's and Samsung's AI image actions are completely garbage, butchering things to the point where I'd rather do it manually on my desktop or use prompt editing (which to Google's credit Gemini is fantastic at). Whereas Apple's is flawless in discerning everything within a scene or allowing me to extract single items from within a picture. For example say, a backpack in the background.
> had these features 2-5 years before Android did.
"first" isn't always more important than "best". Apple has historically been ok with not being first, as long as it was either best or very obviously "much better". It always, well, USED TO focus on best. It has lost its way in that lately.
TTS is absolutely horrible on iOS. I have nearly driven into a wall when trying to use it whilst driving and it goofs up what I've said terribly. For the love of all things holy, will someone at Apple finally fix text to speech? It feels like they last touched it in 2016. My phone can run offline LLMs and generate images but it can't understand my words.
> I have nearly driven into a wall when trying to use it whilst driving and it goofs up what I've said terribly.
People should not be using their phones while driving anyways. My iPhone disables all notifications, except for Find My notifications, while driving. Bluetooth speaker calls are an exception.
You're right, in my rage I typod, its really frustrating, even friends will text me and their text makes no sense, and 2 minutes later "STUPID VOICE TO TEXT" I have a few friends who drive trucks, so they need to be able to use their voice to communicate.
Better speech transcription is cool, but that feels kinda contrived. Phone calls exist, so do voice messages sent via texting apps, and professional drivers can also just wait a bit to send messages if they really must be text; they're on the job, but if it's really that urgent they can pull over.
I have to say that OpenAI's Whisper model is excellent. If you could leverage that somehow I think it would really improve. I run it locally myself on an old PC with 3060 card. This way I can run whisper large which is still speedy on a GPU especially with faster-whisper. Added bonus is the language autodetection which is great because I speak 3 languages regularly.
I think there's even better models now but Whisper still works fine for me. And there's a big ecosystem around it.
When I'm driving and tell Siri, "Call <family member name>", sometimes instead of calling, it says, "To who?", and I can't get it to call no matter what I do.
All of the reporting about Apple being behind on AI is driving me insane and I hope that what Dell is doing is finally going to be the reversal of this pattern.
The only thing that Apple is really behind on is shoving the word (word?) "AI" in your face at every moment when ML has been silently running in many parts of their platforms well before ChatGPT.
Sure we can argue about Siri all day long and some of that is warranted but even the more advanced voice assistants are still largely used for the basics.
I am just hoping that this bubble pops or the marketing turns around before Apple feels "forced" to do a copilot or recall like disaster.
LLM tech isn't going away and it shouldn't, it has its valid use cases. But we will be much better when it finally goes back into the background like ML always was.
Right! Also I don’t think Siri is that important to the overall user experience on the ecosystem. Sure it’s one of the most visible use cases but how many people really care about that? I don’t want to talk out loud to do tasks usually, it’s helpful in some specific scenarios but not the primary use case. The text counterpart of understanding user context on the phone is more important even in the context of llms, and that what plays into the success of their stack going forward
are you really asking why someone would like a much better siri?
- truck drivers that are driving for hours.
- commuters driving to work
- ANYONE with a homepod at home that likes to do things hands free (cooking, dishes, etc).
- ANYONE with airpods in their ears that is not in an awkward social setting (bicycle, walking alone on the sidewalk, on a trail, etc)
every one of these interaction modes benefits from a smart siri.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Why can’t I have a siri that can intelligently do multi step actions for me? “siri please add milk and eggs to my Target order. Also let my wife know that i’ll pick up the order on my way home from work. Lastly, we’re hosting some friends for dinner this weekend. I’m thinking Italian. Can you suggest 5 recipes i might like? [siri sends me the recipes ASYNC after a web search]”
All of this is TECHNICALLY possible. There’s no reason apple couldn’t build out, or work with, various retailers to create useful MCP-like integrations into siri. Just omit dangerous or destructive actions and require the user to manually confirm or perform those actions. Having an LLM add/remove items in my cart is not dangerous. Importantly, siri should be able to do some tasks for me in the background. Like on my mac…i’m able to launch Cursor and have it work in agent mode to implement some small feature in my project, while i do something else on my computer. Why must i stare at my phone while siri “thinks” and replies with something stupid lol. Similarly, why can’t my phone draft a reply to an email ASYNC and let me review it later at my leisure? Everything about siri is so synchronous. It sucks.
It’s just soooo sooo bad when you consider how good it could be. I think we’re just conditioned to expect it to suck. It doesn’t need to.
I doubt that anyone is actually suggesting that Siri should not be better, but to me I think the issues with it are very much overblown when it does what I actually ask it to do the vast majority of the time since the reality is most of the time what I actually want to ask it to do are basic things.
I have a several homepods, and it does what I ask it to do. This includes being the hub of all of my home automation.
Yes there are areas it can improve but I think the important question is how much use would those things actually get vs making a cool announcement, a fun party trick, and then never used again.
We have also seen the failures that have been done by trying to treat LLM as a magic box that can just do things for you so while these things are "Technically" possible they are far from being reliable.
We have a home pod, we use it a lot for simple things like timers when cooking or playing a particular kind of music. They are simple and dumb, but they have become part of our lives. It's just a hands free way to doing simple things we might do on the phone.
We are looking forward to being able to ask Siri to pipe some speech through to an AI
Even customers who care about AI (or perhaps should...) have other concerns. With the RAM shortage coming up many customers may choose to do without AI features to save money even though they want it at a lower price.
You can sort of remap it on windows, but it's somewhat limited in my experience. It shows up as a keyboard chord rather than a simple button press. I think it's LWin+LShift+F23. I ended up simply disabling it entirely on my gaming laptop. I've been meaning to see if it's easier to make it useful on KDE Plasma desktop but haven't yet (though I did remap the HP Omen button to pull down Yakuake instead).
I have one laptop with a Copilot key in my business. (I didn't even realize that when I bought it.) It takes the place of a modifier key, I think the menu key. Except it outputs a specific keypress (Ctrl+Shift+F23). So it can't be mapped to anything useful like a modifier key. But you can reassign the meaning of Ctrl+Shift+F23.
Wonder how much this would cost out the door. If figure’s optimistic target is 150k per robot after mass manufacturing. This level of dexterity is only needed for personal robots. I would love this to be sub 10k
What's strange is I just saw a TikTok video in my Waymo earlier.
"a perfect explanation of quantum tunneling"
It was a baseball game. A pitcher had thrown a pitch, and there was some optical illusion of the ball appearing to go through the batter's swing. It looked like the ball went through the bat. Apparently this is quantum tunneling. The atoms aligned perfectly and the ball passed through.
This is just sad. We have a long history and lots of data to know this will be catastrophic for the Venezuela. Hope it doesn’t go that way but feels inevitable. The us is never expected to learn from its mistakes so nothing new there, with the administration desperate to distract from the Epstein files has decided war is the way.
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