
IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple - robinhowlett
https://developer.apple.com/ibm/
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brokencode
This makes me worried for Apple. IBM is not a company that comes to mind when
I think of cutting edge cloud services, and Watson in particular has seemed to
be a pretty mediocre product with heavy marketing and gimmicks (Jeopardy and
H&R Block come to mind).

Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to
IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in
their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.

~~~
jedberg
> Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services
> to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence
> in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.

I think it's a good move. At the very least, they can learn a bit from someone
else on how to run a cloud service.

Let me ask you this -- if you didn't already have the Apple hardware that was
integrated with iCloud et al, would you pay money to use any of the Apple
internet services? Like if they build Windows clients and you had Windows,
would you pay to use any of their services?

I can't think of a single Apple service I would pay for if I wasn't on Apple
hardware. And even worse, despite the free services from Apple, I will pay to
use competitors that offer a worse integration, just to not use the Apple
services.

~~~
awakeasleep
The user experiences of Notes and Contacts are both perfect, and they're an
enormous part of what I do with a computing device

~~~
tomduncalf
Agreed, Notes is now fully featured enough that it’s the only app I use for
any kind of note taking.

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mark_l_watson
How do you backup Apple Notes? I reluctantly stopped using Notes because there
is no easy way to back up all Notes.

~~~
Moto7451
They backup to iCloud. Just toggle the sync on in th iCloud preferences on
your Mac/iDevice.

~~~
mark_l_watson
But the format is opaque. I would like to archive as html, pdf, etc. - and not
by saving them one at a time.

~~~
tinus_hn
Backup is not archive.

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zhyan7109
Just spent a few minutes playing with the Watson Custom Model for vision flow
and let's just say I am totally disappointed is an understatement, few things
I noticed: 1\. You first need to register an account, and to my surprise there
is no command line tool or REST APIs, the entire interface is written in HTML.
Hmmm, are they expecting me to specify the network structure by pressing
buttons 2\. Okay next, after choosing the visual model, it leads you directly
to a web page with a bunch of widgets where you can add classes and negatives.
To a seasoned ML engineers, this whole interface is useless. The
classification has to be done at a full image level, no way to define the
layers, the loss function, or any knobs to play around with the network. To an
amateur, this is also very confusing. What are they expecting us to drag in to
the negatives, if it's a logistic classifier, I could understand but for
classifying an image, what exactly do you expect us to put? 3\. Btw, to upload
images, they expect .zip format, and this is where i stopped. Do they
seriously think I will now export this so-called "model" to CoreML and load it
to my Xcode?

If they came up with this 5 years ago I might play with it a little longer,
but don't the IBM engineers keep up with what's going on at GOOGL, FB or AMZN.
I can't possibly imagine anyone using this to develop iPhone apps for the
purpose of image recognition, even if it's an offline flow.

~~~
Intrepidy
Of course you can't imagine anyone using it because (a) you are not the target
audience and (b) you are being deliberately contemptuous about the product
because it was built by IBM.

If you simply re-read all your own points from an objective standpoint, it
should be apparent that this is geared towards individuals who have minimal or
no machine learning (much less deep learning) experience; but nevertheless
feel they need features like custom image recognition in their application.
Rather than spending time and money hiring a 'seasoned ML engineer' such as
yourself, they can try this and see if it works well enough for their
purposes. Everything from the HTML interface, dearth of model customization,
no parameter tuning, etc. points to this use case. Yes, it will be tedious,
time consuming, and perhaps a bit unintuitive at first but it will be nowhere
near as difficult for them than if they were to build an equivalent data
pipeline, neural network, and evaluation setup on specialized hardware using
Tensorflow. From that perspective, this could be a great product for
application developers.

Finally, there are tons of REST APIs that enumerate all the functionality
found here. They are all part of the Watson Cloud catalog. This includes
loading data, training, and deploying models. Moreover, is it really necessary
to insult IBM engineers by insinuating that they haven't kept up with the
broader paradigm shifts in the field? They build what they are told to build
by management (just like at the Big 4).

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zhyan7109
Perhaps I'm not understanding the intent of this collaboration between Apple
and IBM but I would like to think that anyone who can write/publish iOS apps
should have the aptitude to spend a couple hours understand the basics of deep
learning. Would you honestly use an app that was contains an image-
classification model that's trained using this flow. Please enlighten me. Or
am I the only person who DD'd on their product? Have you tried other web
interface versions of online models trainers like SageMaker, Rekognition? Do
you work for IBM?

~~~
pjmlp
I graduated with honours, did 3D graphics programming in the past, systems
programming is one of my favourite areas, worked at few well known names
internationally.

Yet I can't get my head around neural networks and related concepts.

Just because it is easy for you, don't assume the same for everyone else.

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bwang29
I don't understand why most of the comment here are negative. On the bright
side, being able to train a model in any sort of cloud (doesn't matter if it
is Azure, Google, AWS, or IBM) and then directly create CoreML models, and
iterate from model feedback, is a pretty special and unique position. It's a
hybrid edge + cloud approach to running A.I. for end applications, and I do
see it to benefit developers who want to roll their own models and create new
applications particularly to computer vision, photography, and videos.

~~~
yvsong
Wish competing service providers appear soon. The need is real.

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wpasc
I wonder if Apple's choice of IBM for AI integration is motivated by the fact
that IBM does not compete with them on any level?

Outside of that, IBM/Watson seems like a comparatively bad choice of partners.

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jaxondu
Tim Cook was with IBM for 12 years before Apple.

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mrpippy
True, although it was from 1982-1994.

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nik736
I think it's probably the worst idea to partner with IBM.

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david-cako
Seeking out possible moves to keep Apple on the leading edge of technology and
user experience, a determined Tim Cook arrived at page 103 of his Strategic
Decision Making in Information Technology textbook, and came across what some
may call ancient wisdom -- such wisdom that seemed peculiarly familiar, as
though it was encoded into his subconscious from birth. Left alone in center
aligned bold text along the top of the page was scribed "NO ONE GETS FIRED FOR
PARTNERING WITH IBM".

Tim, being the savvy executive and decision maker he will always be, concluded
that the only logical choice is to make the decision which will virtually
nullify his chance of getting fired. "Your legacy shall not go to waste,
Steve...", he said under his breath as he picked up the phone.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
That's hilarious. Seriously. If you want to right a longer Tim Cook fan
fiction, I'd be the first one to buy your e-book.

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brisance
This FAQ list is actually more informative than the press release which is
targeted towards marketing/media.

[https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple-
developer/faq](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple-developer/faq)

Resources here.

[https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple-
developer/resources](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple-developer/resources)

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CodeSheikh
Is that a printer jam example? If yes, then is Apple using a "printer jam"
example to showcase it's ML chops in-collab with the Big Blue?

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michaericalribo
Good marketing for struggling Watson, I wonder what Apple gets—ie, how useful
it is to the developer.

It's a shame Watson's been so disappointing (eg MD Anderson Cancer platform),
maybe it can start a support group with Stephen Wolfram...

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tzahola
Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, I guess... On a more serious note:
why??

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edko
There is no pricing information easily available. Is it free, or are people
supposed to invest time into learning, and then find out what it costs to go
live?

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binarytide
I'm curious what benefit this actually offers to devs.

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gaius
Remember this?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I)

Can you imagine the company that made this getting into bed with IBM!?

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jdboyd
Yes. I can imagine it because they've already done so repeatedly. The first
case I can think of was Apple working with IBM on the Taligent operating
system (designed to compete with what became NT and NeXTStep) circa 1988. Then
the PowerPC chip at the center of Macs for years was co-developed with Apple,
IBM, and Motorola, and in later years IBM supplied the actual chips. Also, the
Apple Network Server machines (circa 1996) ran AIX.

