To be a bit critical, haven’t Apple software and hardware quality been getting worse for years even before the new CEO?
Apple Silicon was the exception, that was truly transformative. But other things, like how polished and snappy the OS feels, seems to have been getting steadily worse.
I think the hardware has improved a lot over the past decade, not always in visible ways. I think this is true even if you disregard the replacement of the butterfly keyboard.
Hardware has been improving a lot since the low point of butterfly keyboards and no ports. Jony Ive went out the door and things improved. Then on the software side they course corrected recently after Alan Dye left. I have hope the software improvements will start to accellerate.
The ads show they are out of ideas and with everything enshitifying, and a duopoly, they don't need to serve customers. just be slightly less shitty than google.
This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.
We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5
Honestly I don't think lack of new ideas is the problem, it's the bad execution/design of their existing products. Like look at Time Machine on macOS. The basic idea (backups) is almost not an idea at all, but the first implementation was amazing for its time, and the current implementation is a total mess and basically unusable. The idea is not the issue.
Or look at Spotlight. Same deal really, the idea is trivial but they've let it languish and slowly rot. With macOS 27 they've gone back and rebuilt it. That's what we want to see. Go back to the basics and make it work great not just work mostly.
When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine – at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that’s what I use on Linux.)
Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ sec delays from pressing Cmd-Space to the thing actually popping up, and it would sometimes reorder entries right before I clicked Enter, causing me to open the wrong thing. Alfred uses the same Spotlight index AFAIK, but lightning fast.
Those are both things that I agree should… Just work.
I had my iPhone XR (bought 2019) until last year. At that point an upgrade made it so slow it was barely usable, while the lack of further updates made it impossible to install or upgrade apps after the device and OS went EOL.
A lot of times, it’s the battery age causing this issue though. Once the total battery capacity drops below 80% performance just collapses. Luckily, battery replacements aren’t totally crazy expensive and end up being worth it a lot of the time.
I’m not convinced that was the issue in this case, as the battery still lasted all day with my normal usage, and the phone became slow overnight after a major OS upgrade.
My wife's SE 2020 is on its third battery. It was fine until she accidentally upgraded to iOS 26, but now it's a mega lagfest. Apple's refusal to allow OS downgrades is infuriating, because it's still a perfectly adequate device otherwise.
I'd say this would be Depraved Heart Hacking. Technically, OpenAi didn't intend for their agent to hack anyone, but it's the obvious consequence of what they are doing.
Intent matters, and this is intentional. They didn't accidentally deploy these AI agents, and they didn't accidentally give them the tools required to send arbitrary requests to third party websites.
If you walk out onto a busy street, pull out a gun, close your eyes and start randomly shooting around you until you hit someone, you don't get to go "whoops, didn't mean to" afterwards, it's still murder.
There is also incentives to adapt the message to the outlet. If you send that data to peer review and say we found 40% increase, the reviewers would reject it, so they have to moderate themselves. But if you send a summary to the university’s outreach outlet saying that we found something or nothing we don’t know, then they would also reject putting it out. So even for the authors, the incentive is to send a careful conclusion to peer review and an overblown one to popsci.
Btw, I also think a 95% confidence interval is just the wrong statistic to look at given that data, and that they could probably have analyzed it better.
Another one can be iron, depending on your genes. There’s plenty of iron-rich vegetarian options, but heme iron in animal sources typically is absorbed at rates of ~40% while non-heme iron in plant sources is absorbed at 1-10% depending on the specific source. Non-heme iron absorption is also blocked by calcium and magnesium that compete for the same receptors. It’s not impossible to get enough iron in a vegan diet without supplementation, but it requires some careful planning of what sources you eat and how you cook it, and if you’re genetically predisposed to anemia it can be risky without monitoring your bloodwork.
> how do they, for example, have a tool call that gives the customer a discount, without it getting used when it shouldn’t?
One possibility is that the company and the user both have AI agents, and that these are able to negotiate with each other. Then I talk to my local customized agent, which knows my preferences, and it explains the required context if the company’s agent does something that won’t make sense to me. But the company’s agent is still privy to the details required to offer discounts, say.
I believe there is a large market of consumers in the US who can afford a $2000 premium phone compared to the $1300 iPhone Pro Max.
In China, reportedly JD.com's Apple store received more than 1.13 million registrations of interest for the Duo, at a starting price of ~$2400.
I could be wrong also, but I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone Duo sells like hot cakes.
I could imagine that premium smartphone buyers, instead of upgrading their phones for minor camera and battery improvements, go for the device that unfolds into a tablet.
Yeah I think East Asia will drive alot here. That's where the large screen phone trend started as well. I'm also suspect of a $2k phone that also has had to make a number of compromises to support the new format. But the market will tell us who's right and it was worth it for Apple to try. If they fail it's really not the end of the world and they can pivot back to traditional form factors or find another.
JOSS is great, I’ve both published with and reviewed for them, and enjoyed it more than traditional journals. The process felt more constructive than destructive, in a sense.
I believe they’re always looking for new volunteers to review papers, so please do volunteer if you are able.
Apple Silicon was the exception, that was truly transformative. But other things, like how polished and snappy the OS feels, seems to have been getting steadily worse.
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