Apparently Mac sales are seeing a big growth spurt lately. This isnt obvious at the Apple bottom line because iPhone dominates, but they are growing that market segment!
The apple silicon has driven a ton of people to laptops, and the windows 11 migration nightmare has given people an option: why bother buying a new pc laptop to run windows 11, just switch to the apple macbook air.
> Apparently Mac sales are seeing a big growth spurt lately.
That's not really clear. Mac sales actually peaked during the pandemic, around 2022.
Apparently there was also some tariff fear-driven buying this year. Indeed, I purchased a new MacBook Pro earlier this year for that very reason.
If you compare, say, 2024 Mac revenue to 2014 Mac revenue, there was an increase of 25% over that period, but inflation increased even more over the same period. (Unfortunately, Apple no longer announces unit sales.)
There was a quote recently where Nadella was trash talking the apple AI stuff, and like yes sure, but also do we not realize that Nadella isn't a random third party CEO, he's literally financially incentivized to maximize AI usage because Microsoft is selling the stuff?
It's like listening to the Intel CEO saying that the new apple silicon is alright, but what would REALLY make them go is to migrate back to Intel x86.
I'm not really upset at Nadella for this, because it's what he should do. But for everyone else to breathlessly be obsessed with his word and forget his real job as salesman in chief is what's pathetic.
I think the reason why Apple hasnt come out with such a useful personal assistant AI is because the underlying technology just doesn't make this so easy.
Apple is the only company so far that seems to be unwilling to accept a poor user experience with generative AI, so their efforts have been "lackluster" in terms of "AI integration" - as if "maximally integrating generative LLMs" is the goal in and of itself!
Of course Nadella is critical of Apple's efforts: he selling the goods! It's like a Steel CEO complementing a new bridge but then "they should have used more steel" - well duh, but since when do we trust the purveyors of components as to what should be added?
The bottom line is "Agentic AI" is just unreliable. If you thought you hated Apple Intelligence now, then if they had gone whole hog, the unreliability would be astounding.
> their efforts have been "lackluster" in terms of "AI integration" - as if "maximally integrating generative LLMs" is the goal in and of itself!
That does feel like the ultimate goal with many of these AI initiatives. I have a suspicion that a lot of the negativity thrown towards Apple's AI integration comes from people hoping Apple will legitimize their product, not from people wanting their phone to be better.
As a long time Mac and iPhone user, I just don't get all the complaints about innovation. Macs are as innovative as they ever have been, maybe more. Apple silicon has been an absolute powerhouse and godsend for battery life.
iPhones are great, and continue to be awesome. Airpods are so good they make bluetooth headphones look like the garbage they are.
When you look at the grand scope of thing, the primary thing the commenters are missing are the Jobs' pageantry and showmanship. Which I also miss. But in terms of capability, I am quite happy with what we have.
Apple is a fantastic iterator and polisher. They are not innovators. What was the last apple product that was truly innovative, i.e. something no-one else has done before?
That is not what ”innovate” means, you’re mixing it up with ”invent”. You could argue that they never invented anything, but not that they haven’t had, and continue to have, plenty of innovations the past decades.
Think every product that was one way, then Apple did it differently and suddenly every product on the market looked like theirs. That’s a long list of both hardware and software.
On the other hand, when was the last time any mass market tech product was _invented_ by that definition (something no one else has done before)? Most products are incremental improvements, even innovations are rare when it comes to mass market products.
I think there are parallels with functional languages on the JVM. The parts that are the worst are the parts that were built for maximum interoperability. Not to mention that the JVM forces classes on you at the deepest opcode levels.
Compatibility with C++ is fine, but so far it seems carbon's safety story is entirely a wishlist rather than anything yet. Seems like Carbon might be a more of a place to demonstrate features for C++ committees than a real language?
Personally I have hand it up to here with lousy programmingn languages that make it easy for me to write bugs.
Now this isn’t to say the current programming languages are good, they are generally not. They don’t offer good abstraction powers, typically. You pay for this in extra lines of code.
But having to restate everything in English, then hoping that the LLM will fill in enough details, then iterating until you can close the gaps, well it doesn’t seem super efficient to me. You either cede control to what the LLM guesses or you spend a lot of natural language.
Certainly in a language with great abstractions you’d be fine already.
Exactly, and translating business requirements into code is so frustrating and error-prone that entire philosophies (and consulting firms) have been built around it. LLMs are no silver bullet, they are just faster to come up with _something_.
True but this only works well if the natural language "processor" was reliable enough to properly translate business requirements into code. LLMs aren't there yet.
This article is literally the definition of TL;DR. It's fairly hard to get thru, I spaced and skipped the conclusion, that the treatment isn't permanent and can be undone.
I was interested through the first 20-25 paragraphs, and then the thing just kept going and going and going. It would have been fine, though, if it had some sub-headings and stuff to help guide one through.
The apple silicon has driven a ton of people to laptops, and the windows 11 migration nightmare has given people an option: why bother buying a new pc laptop to run windows 11, just switch to the apple macbook air.