This was I think effective early on but now there are many systems to detect this "fraud". I say "fraud" because I honestly have zero sympathy for these companies who are doing anything but paying people a living wage to do a job and that goes for Walmart in particular.
I've had opportunity to hear many stories from people who have had largely unintended encounters with law enforcement. Many of these are for "shoplifting". That can be something as simple as forgetting something on the bottom of the cart. Walmart are super aggressive about this and rather than saying "sir, did you forget that thing or not want it anymore?" they prosecute.
Walmart is one of those publicly subsidized companies in the country. They don't pay employees enough so the government gives them food stamps. Those food stamps are largely spent at Walmart so Walmart is profiting on both ends. And then they displace checkout workers with self-checkout and pay for fraud detection systems and when people either intentionally or unintentionally didn't scan something correctly (or at all), they offload the costs of loss prevention onto the state by prosecuting. Walmart doesn't pay for that prosecution. TAxpayers do.
Walmart is a trillion dollar company. The stock has almost 3x'ed in less than 4 years. How long did it take to 3x to that level? About 23 years.
At least the Vision Pro wasn't a $70 billion boondoggle like the Metaverse was.
The flops include the mid-to-late 2010s thinness era of Macbooks. Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air. At least this got corrected but it was a flop era.
I think AI is Tim Apple's biggest flop. Apple can make their own hardware. Apple could've invested in their own hardware like Google's TPUs. Siri has really stagnated. If anybody should be doubling down on an AI assistant, it's Apple.
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 Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and
3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.
3. Is an interesting perspective, because it’s not at all how I see it. There really isn’t anything for Apple there right now except that they stumbled into making hardware that is perfect for the technology right now. They could a.) burn all their cash and go into massive debt chasing a big foggy question mark that may be entirely overvalued or b.) focus on the hardware right now, wait for the technology to mature and apply it judiciously as applications for it come to light, rather than racing to hamfist it in unnecessary, expensive, and ultimately broken ways.
Siri is useless, so is Alexa and Hey Google or whatever they are calling that. LLMs will change that but cost has to come down to make that feasible. On-device AI would be the gold standard there, I hope that’s not a pipe dream. Apple seems to be positioned niceley for that outcome, if it comes to pass.
I think there’s a happy medium between doing nothing and burning cash faster than the US military like OpenAI. If I had to pick one company who walking that line the best, it’s Google.
You can wait until improving hardware eventually solves the local LLM problem but imho that’s too passive.
What if someone cracks the problem of splitting LLM inference effectively between local device and server? Think about it. ChatGPT can do calculus. Is that useful to most people? No. Can you currently effectively modularize an LLM and load knowledge on demand? No.
I’m fairly bearish on the use cases for current AI. The biggest is actually just firing people and suppressing labor costs.
But a personas assistant, at least in theory, is something people want, even if it’s just to effectively obey voice commands. If Apple loses to Google here it’s going to be bad for Apple. I think they have to do more than they’re seemingly doing.
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, it will be bought for scraps after the unsustainable race has run its course.
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".
Aerenhart’s biggest task was combining the online store with the physical. That was my understanding of why she was hired. Before that there were many walls between the two retail arms of online and physical.
Ive was the one behind the 15k watches. He wanted the in store experience to be like a jewelry store. They also brought in his friend that had been doing hi end watches and bands to help with the watch design. Beonce got an 18kt gold link band along with her watch. You can only imagine Ive’s glee at the watches being on the cover of Vogue.
1. Flat UI is the other side of Johnny Ive’s legacy—arguably an error as well, never corrected.
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3. Agreed that Siri stagnated, was already surpassed by Alexa a decade ago, and even moreso by LLMs today. However, some advantages of Apple Silicon have panned out for AI—e.g., using unified memory to run ML models, instead of requiring dedicated VRAM for a separate GPU.
I suspect that long-term, 3 might not be the wrong choice.
Apple seems to be moving towards running AI on-device while the other big tech companies want to run inference on their data centers and sell AI as a service. Once those companies start enshittifying and jacking up costs, I wouldn't be surprised if people move towards preferring local AI. If that happens, Apple will be well-positioned.
I haven't seen anyone else mention this but... vendor financing.
Being a manufacturer is capital intensive. As lithography shrinks, it has generally required building a new fab. Intel in it's heyday used to do it this way, for example. But this goes for everything in Apple's supply chain. Even the new generations of glass on an iPhone are probably capital intensive to develop and make production-ready.
As most here would know, you can raise money by borrowing it or by selling equity. These suppliers generally borrowed money. You can do that directly from a bank or, if you're big enough, by issuing bonds. So you might borrow $1 billion to make a new factory and then have to pay that back. You might need to prove to banks and/or investors that they'll get their money back.
So Apple has for decades now been sitting on an unimaginable pile of cash. I believe it was Tim Cook who pioneered this approach where Apple went to these suppliers and said "we'll lend you the money for this but in exchange we get 2 years of exclusive supply to what you produce". Apple was still getting paid back. And since Apople was the buyer there was almost no risk to any of it.
So in one fell swoop, Apple gave a better deal to suppliers who needed capital, got a competitive advantage over other companies with exclusive supply and got a return on the huge pile of cash.
Apple didn't invent vendor financing. That's why it has a name. But Tim Apple [sic] turned it into a locked-in competitive advantage at basically zero cost and zero risk.
This was the last gasp of Johnny Ive. And yes, it was terrible. It got us ending the incredibly successful Macbook Air for the too-compromised 12" Macbook (1 port, remember?), the pointless Touch Bar and the terrible butterly keyboard (remember how dust could kill it and I'm sure Apple spent a fortune on replacements?).
Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price ("ASP"). Someone at Apple decided the ASP was too low.
Ultimately the Macbook Air came back and it's really the SKU the most people should buy.
They did not take the MacBook Air off the market when the retina Macbook 12" was released. The MacBookAir7,1 was released a month before the MacBook8,1. The 7,2 came out 2 years later as a spec bump not because Apple abandoned the product, but because this was the same time Intel's tick-tock schedule went completely off the rails.
That 2016-2018 Macbook Air had a 2010 dispaly ie 1440x900. That was ridiculous for the time, given that the Macbook Pro first got a retina display (2560x1600) in 2012. No there was no technical reason for excluding the MBA. It was a product decision all along.
I distinctly remember thinking in 2013-2014 "will they just update the screen already?" as it was kept me from buying a new one. I also remember thinking in 2015 when the 12" Macbook launched "oh the MBA is abandonware now". The Retina MBA launched in 2018, the 12" Macbook was discontinued in 2019 and 2020+ was the M series processor era. And here we are.
But they didn't. Just because they didn't update the screen for free doesn't mean the discontinued the Air. They sold likely millions of Airs from 2015 to 2018, likely in no small part due to the fact you could get a barebones 11" Air for $899, $799 if you were a school. When the Retina Air came out in 2018 the prices jumped to $1199.
I collect the 12" macbooks, even today. It really only needs one port; the vast majority of people never plug anything but power into their computer ever. I would pay huge sums for a modern Mx 11-12" ultralight macbook with a reliable keyboard.
Same. Using my MacBook 12" of Theseus still at home. It's a fantastic machine for travel or field work if configured to 16GB. That 1" down from Air makes a huge difference on a seat tray.
The Neo's targetting a different market. The MacBook was a premium ultraportable product. If you were buying it, you were willing to make all kinds of sacrifices for a thin and light laptop. The Neo is a general purpose consumer laptop that just happens to be fairly small.
Any advice for finding them other than partaking in whatever premimum drugs eBay sellers smoke to make the prices they are charging for essentially e-waste make sense? God I want to pick up one so bad but $150, $200, $300, hell there's one out there asking $1200! For a computer that was pretty crap when it was new?
I absolutely loved the one I used from 2017-2021. It was a maxed out 2017 model in gold. Some bozo director bought it for himself with his budget then quit a month later, so this thing no one really wanted ended up on the spares pile. I grabbed it to replace my 2012 13" MacBook Pro as my "going to town" computer, i.e. the one I'd take when I needed to step away from my desk and my desktop workstation. And whaddya know, the 7Y75 i7 benchmarked about the same as the Ivy Bridge i5 it was replacing.
The wedge shape is so undeniably more humanistic and comfortable than the current MacBook Air/Neo slab. 0.14" at its thinnest, rounded at the bottom to make it easier to pick up. An excellent screen. Great trackpad. Full size keyboard, and yes, I liked the butterfly keys! Key travel is dumb! I never had issues with it and I took it into network closets and steam tunnels and ate greasy lunches next to it and all kinds of dusty, dirty places, and never had a key failure. God, what a wonderful portable computer! It was like carrying an empty clipboard around, you'd barely notice it in a stack of papers or notebooks, but open the screen and bam, full-fat macOS!
Honestly it was the last Mac I think I've used that physically delighted me. I usually cringe when I hear executives talking about wanting to "delight" customers, but that shitty little slow, overpriced Macbook with one USB-C port, absolutely delightful. Like sure, Apple Silicon was amazing but in a different sort of way, in a "wow that V12 engine sure is powerful" and not "this entire car is amazing" way. The Retina MacBook was delightful even though my nerd brain knew that as a computer, looking at raw specs, was a complete dud (though mine had 16GB of RAM, nyah nyah, take that Macbook Neo!)
And now that the vision Apple had for that device actually came true?? That we live in a mostly mobile, USB-C world where my company's conference rooms all have AirPlay and most monitors have built-in USB-C input/hubs? That they could put an ultra cut down iPhone chip in it and even if it was only as fast as a 5 year old Macbook that would still make it as fast as an M1? Oh well, now we don't get one! You will have a brutalist cold slab of a Macbook Air or a pathetically locked down iPad appliance and be happy!
Perhaps it was a great product because of those flaws, those horrible compromises they had to make to get it that small. All I can hope is that there is some skunkworks project somewhere in Cupertino, maybe even unsanctioned, of hardware designers asking themselves "what would we have to figure out if we made it 0.25 inches thick?" or "Could we get a Macbook down to 1 pound?". I want a product whose development team were told "Make a Macbook. Priority 1. light, priority 2. thin, priority 3. there is no priority 3"
Joz, Ternus, if you're reading this, I would also pay huge sums of money for a modern 11-12" ultralight Macbook. I would write Apple a blank check for one, name your price.
People may not know how long the F-35 program has been going on. It's over 30 years. Discussions about what a next generation figher would be began in the Clinton administration. From the very start it was a series of compromises to be an all-in-one fighter. There are different needs in the military: air-to-air, ground bombardment, etc. Even stealth is a variable need. You just don't need it when you have air superiority. But having it also means not mounting weapons on the exterior of the airframe (as, say, the F-16 and F-14 did), which reduces how much ordinance it can deliver and indirectly how much fuel it can carry. F-35 operations are pretty much entirely dependent on in-air refuelling as a result.
Another fun fact in all this is the F-14. Did you the Navy has a policy of shredding all F-14s? Why? Because they were sold to Iran in the 1970s (pre-Islamic Revolution obviously) and the US wanted to make sure they could never get spare parts.
Anyway, as a result of that the US didn't want a repeat of selling the F-35 to a country that became an enemy so the US effectively has the ability to turn off the F-35 for every buyer... except one: Israel. Technically I think the avionics require daily activation and the US is the only supplier of those codes.
So, one nit I have about this article is the operational record of the F-35 in this current war. I don't think that's entirely correct. Iran's fairly primitive air defense has managed to damage the F-35 in at least one incident [1]. Also, you can assess the risk by how a fighter is used. As in, does the military use them with stand-off weapons [2] or not? This means using precision-guided munitions from a distance, possibly over-the-horizon. This wastes more payload on fuel. Those munitions are more expensive. The only reason you do it is because you fear the air defenses or otherwise can't guarantee air superiority. There have been a lot of reports the US military still primarily relies on standoff weapons in Iran. This is of course unconfirmed.
The bigger issue here is that post-Vietnam, and particularly since the 1990s, the US military has adopted a Strategic Air Doctrine. Rather than putting boots on the ground, the US projects military power by the ability to bombard. Unfortunately, that has limited utility. No regime has ever been overthrown by air power alone. And we're seeing that now. The entire Iranian military is built to resist strategic bombardment.
So yes, in this sense, the F-35 is built for Strategic Air Power and that's just not that relevant anymore.
So how do you put boots on the ground? Well, in Iran's case, it's like the country was specifically designed in a map editor to make this near-impossible. Iran is 5 times the size of Texas and has a population of ~93M people. It's surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and on the other by the Persian Gulf, which itself is bottlenecked by the Strait of Hormuz, which no US military ship has even approached in this conflict.
People just don't understand how complicated the logistics of this are and how many soldiers are required. You need, for example, tanks. You can't air lift multiple tank battalions. A plane can carry one, maybe two, tanks. They need fuel, munitions and maintenance. You need air defense and to establish bases. You need people to do all those things. Those people need to be fed.
Logistically, it's as complicated and large as D-Day.
It's also why I find the Taiwan question (also in this article) so frustrating, for two reasons:
1. China doesn't have the amphibious capability to cross 100 miles of ocean to land on Taiwan, establish a beach head and suppress a military of hundreds of thousands (as well as an insurgency) and to occupy the island. If you think they do, you have no idea what this takes;
2. More importantly, China has absolutely no reason to invade Taiwan and has shown no inclination to do so. this is the part that gets people mad for some reason. All but 10 countries on Earth have what's called the One China policy. This includes the US and Europe. That policy is that Taiwan is part of China and the question can simply remain unresolved. China belives the situation will be resolved eventually and there's absolutely no rush to do anything. The US agrees, policy-wise.
So any talk of a Taiwan invasion is just scaremongering to sell weapons. Like the F-35.
Maybe, just maybe, you should take with a grain of salt when the guy who sells you weapons tells you there's an imminent threat that requires you to buy the weapons they sell.
I agree with you but the funny thing about this comment is that fake Internet points is how decisions are made in many areas, including casting for TV shows and movies.
If you want to make it as an actor today, you need a social media following [1]. It is directly relevant to you getting cast. It also helps you connect with other actors, with producers and directors, etc.
Thing is, this isn't new. before social media, your influence was measured in "tear sheets" [2], basically any published story that you're in. This could be something as simple as going to Cannes or Sundance or even just to the hottest club.
Sports also uses a points system (kind of) but it's meant to reflect ability. Take the NFL, for example. Going from high school to college and college to the NFL, you will have stats relevant to whatever position(s) you play. For a QB it's things like interceptions, passing years, running yards, completed throw percentages, etc. You then have the NFL Combine [3]. This is an intensive camp where certain metrics are taken like how much you can lift, 40 yard dash, etc.
All of this tries to make it a science, or at least quantitative. But what I find funny is that despite all this work, it can still fail spectacularly. Like, being the #1 draft pick for the NFL is kind of a curse [4].
And then there's Tom Brady. For people unfamiliar with American sportsball, Tom Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback in the game's history, having 7 Superbowl rings. Thing is, he was a 6th round draft pick in the 2000 NFL draft. For anyone not familiar with what that means, 6th (and especially 7th) round draft picks are like the bottom of the barrel. You're not expected to take a starting position. You may not even play unless 1-2 people get injured. Nobody expects you to be a great.
It's interesting to see how the ideas of interstellar civilization have evolved over the last almost 50 years.
I'm glad it was rejected that returns should be calculated based on Earth or Trantor time rather than perceived time. I mean if a ship disappears for 2N years, you need to consider the return over 2N years regardless of perceived time because you're comparing investments that locally would take 2N years.
This paper assumes essentially perfect information. It has to because otherwise it has to deal with the issue of how would an interstellar currency work? Or rather, how would an interstellar financial system work? This is a surprisingly difficult problem. You can't support a centralized currency over such distances. And metals like gold may be otherwise worthless as a store of value. You also can't maintain a blockchain over light years.
One thing that isn't touched on here, which also dovetails into my assertion that gold would be worthless, is the energy budget for interstellar travel.
If we assume reaction mass-less, infinite energy travel where you can accelerate to a high fraction of c for essentially zero cost then this is all fine but that's likely not the case.
Gemini tells me that the energy cost to accelerate to 0.1c, travel to Alpha Centauri and decelerate at 1g is ~10^15J/kg. That's a travel time of approximately 42 years each way. Time dilation doesn't really kick in until a high fraction of c. The energy budget from this is orders of magnitude higher and the drag of the interstellar medium actually becomes a real problem.
So your spaceship looks a lot like a colony. That means it has to be big. The building block for a space-based civilization in a Dyson Swarm is considered by many to be the O'Neil Cylinder, which is wide enough to have spin gravity. Think a diameter of about 8km and a length of 10-40km. A colony ship looks a lot like this. Such a cylinder weights 10-100 billion tons.
10B tons is 10^13kg so at 10^15J/kg that means the energy budget is 10^28J. The Sun's solar output is ~10^25W, which is 10^25J/s. So we're talking 300 seconds of the entire Sun's output for such a journey. Currently we receive about a billionth of that so it's about 10,000 years of the Sun's output hitting Earth.
Our civilization is estimated to use 10^11W of energy so if we devoted our entire energy budget towards this project, that's 10^17 seconds of output or ~3 billion years.
Each way. And that also assumes perfect energy-to-acceleration so it's likely 1-2 orders of magnitude higher.
This is partly why I consider a Dyson Swarm inevitable because interstellar travel is basically impossible without getting access to that amount of energy.
So, back to gold being worthless. Well, 1kg of anything is about 10^17J of energy. Going the other way, 10^28J of energy is 10^11kg of whatever element you want. That's 100 million tons.
My own hesitation with HM echo chamberification is federation. Nobody cares. And until you can point to a concrete benefit to end users, you should stop and think about why you’re pushing it this hard.
But I don’t think this is the case with phone batteries. I’ve had many conversations with friends and family that came down to replace the battery or upgrade the phone.
I feel the same way about soldered on CPUs, RAM and SSDs in laptops and other computers. The benefits of doing this are marginal at best. We all know the real reason is forced obsolescence.
We all know this is why battery replacement is hard too.
An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen.
A physical book has to be typeset, printed, shipped to stores, shipped to customers, marketed in store, etc etc etc.
If a physical book is sold for $10 at least half that is printing, distribution and retail.
Like the GP, the price fixing of ebooks at the Dane price as physical books mothers me as well, particularly because physical books can be sold, lent or given away.
The exact same thing happened when CDs launched. They were cheaper to produce than vinyl or cassette very quickly but they sold at a premium for no reason at all.
I, too, was once naive and thought that the price of goods is largely determined by the cost of production.
But as anyone who has taken Econ 101 knows, the price is based on what people are willing to pay for it. The cost of production merely dictates whether it is viable to sell in the market.
If most people are willing to pay $10 for an ebook, when the hardcopy is also $10, then $10 is what they'll sell it for.
Whatever the rationale: People will pay what people are willing to pay. If the price is too high, competition should bring it down. The price clearly wasn't too high.
When I purchase a book, I decide how much I'll pay based on what the book will do for me. I'll get the same entertainment/info whether it is printed or electronic. For some types of books I prefer printed, so I won't pay much for the ebook. For fiction, I prefer electronic (already have too many physical books in the house), so I'll happily pay for it.
These are all fixed costs not per-unit costs. If you sell 10,000 ebooks or 10 million ebooks, the costs are basically the same.
And book themselves are 500k-5MB in size typically, which is a single HTTP request, basically. Actual costs of storage and distribution are basically zero (per unit). And sure 10M books is more traffic than 10k books but we're talking $0.10/GB or less in baseline traffic. This is like Cloudfare free tier levels of traffic. And while the traffic costs do scale, it's completely dwarfed by the amortization of fixed costs like editing, formatting and cover design.
As for tech support, it's not the same. Publishers have to handle returns from retailers. Ebooks don't. It's no more complicated than revoking a key and the actual process of requesting a refund requires no human intervention either.
This really feels like I made some blanket statement than offended your sensibilities so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.
>> This really feels like I made some blanket statement than offended your sensibilities so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.
Because you said this:
"An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen."
and then said this:
"These are all fixed costs not per-unit costs."
Which are two different arguments.
This really feels like you made two different arguments, then I offended your sensibilities by pointing it out, so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.
Sure, it's easy to evaluate anything if you make up plausible-sounding numbers about it.
The costs of printing and retail are definitely less than half the sales price: https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... Publishers say it's 10%; Derrico thinks they are underestimating certain logistical costs but no way it's 50%.
Ok, then the other thing you're missing is that distributors also get a chunk of the ebook. You said ebooks have "no middlemen" but that's blatantly false, Amazon is the emperor of ebook middlemen. I suppose publishers could try selling ebooks directly but then they lose the Kindle platform + Amazon's reach, so Amazon charges for that service. They are a middleman.
And in some sense the publisher is a middleman. While authors can sell directly, they rarely do. All of the books I have read had editors, publishers, etc. Not just the author writing and uploading.
I've had opportunity to hear many stories from people who have had largely unintended encounters with law enforcement. Many of these are for "shoplifting". That can be something as simple as forgetting something on the bottom of the cart. Walmart are super aggressive about this and rather than saying "sir, did you forget that thing or not want it anymore?" they prosecute.
Walmart is one of those publicly subsidized companies in the country. They don't pay employees enough so the government gives them food stamps. Those food stamps are largely spent at Walmart so Walmart is profiting on both ends. And then they displace checkout workers with self-checkout and pay for fraud detection systems and when people either intentionally or unintentionally didn't scan something correctly (or at all), they offload the costs of loss prevention onto the state by prosecuting. Walmart doesn't pay for that prosecution. TAxpayers do.
Walmart is a trillion dollar company. The stock has almost 3x'ed in less than 4 years. How long did it take to 3x to that level? About 23 years.
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