No one rich enough flying what the average person would consider a "private jet" or private plane would be flying VFR from uncontrolled airport to uncontrolled airport. The "ultra rich" are not puttering around in single-engine Cessnas
This is Open AI's fault (and literally every AI company is guilty of the same horrid naming schemes). Codex was an old model based on GPT-3, but then they reused the same name for both their Codex CLI and this Codex tool...
I mean, just look at the updates to their own blog post, I can see why people are confused.
Google just did it too. "Gemini Ultra" is both a model (https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/ultra/) and their new top-tier subscription plan (a la Open AI's Pro plan). Why is this so difficult?
Confusing people is the best way to get them to throw their hands up, stop thinking critically, and start paying. all businesses do this. Mega corps have resources to enforce clarity, but they dont because theyre stupid? Ill eat my words if thats the case....
Given that there's a dozen agentic coding IDEs, I only use Cursor because of the few features they have like auto-identification of the next cursor location (I find myself hitting tab-tab-tab-tab a lot, it speeds up repetitive edits). Are there any other IDEs that implement these QOL features, including Void (given it touts itself specifically as a Cursor alternative)?
I think QOL will shift away from your keyboard. Give Claude Code a try and you’ll understand what I mean. Developer UX will shift away from traditional IDEs. At this point I could use notepad for the the type of manual work I do vs how I orchestrate Claude Code.
The reason I have never bothered with Claude Code (or even other agentic tools), is that I still code mostly by hand.
When I am using LLMs, I know exactly what the code should be and just am using it as a way to produce it faster (my Cursor rules are extremely extensive and focused on my personal architecture and code style, and I share them across all my personal projects), rather than producing a whole feature. When I try and use just the agent in Cursor, it always needs significant modifications and reorganization to meet my standards, even with the extensive rules I have set up.
Cursor appeals to me because those QOL features don't take away the actual code writing part, but instead augment it and get rid of some of the tedium.
Hahaha wow I just checked Apple UK and the base 16GB/256GB is £600. 32GB upgrade is +£400, 512GB upgrade is +£200.
It should not cost that much! 2x Mac mini M4 16GB/256GB should not cost the same as 1x Mac mini M4 32GB/512GB!
Can someone help explain this in a way that isn’t just absolute price gauging of the higher end customer base? Are the components genuinely that much more expensive?
>Price gouging is a pejorative term used to refer to the practice of increasing the prices of goods, services, or commodities to a level much higher than is considered reasonable or fair by some. This commonly applies to price increases of basic necessities after natural disasters. Usually, this event occurs after a demand or supply shock.
Using the term "price gouging" anytime a potential buyer thinks a seller is asking for too much money renders it meaningless. I ask for as much money as the buyers for my labor will pay, as I assume the people selling to me do also.
It's just business, you try to earn as much as possible (and that could involve not maximizing in a specific transaction to incentivize repeat business in the future). But in no way is anyone under any duress when deciding to buy an Apple device, so if a buyer does not feel like being price gouged, they should buy something else.
> Can someone help explain this in a way that isn’t just absolute price gauging of the higher end customer base?
It's a pretty normal pricing strategy. It's more common than not. Most products or services you buy anywhere will be sold at higher margins for more premium offerings.
It might seem strange when compared to legacy PCs with socketed components, but this isn't that, nor are most products. Even among PCs this isn't strange anymore: go take a look at MS's pricing on their first-party PCs.
Calling this "price gouging" is not really the right use of the term -- usually it refers to price increases of basic necessities in emergency situations.
Microsoft isn't a great example. They basically just crib Apple's approach. And they do at least still have socketed storage so that's very cheap to upgrade if you do it that way.
All of the big OEMs are soldering memory on at least some (if not all) of their thin-and-lights, and I haven't seen a single one priced at margins that weren't significantly above the cost of materials.
Either way, my point is that flat margin pricing is exceedingly rare. Everywhere from the grocery store to the car dealer is charging higher margins on more premium products.
Luxury cars have higher margins than economy cars. Organic milk has higher profit margins than regular milk. And Macs with 32GB of memory have higher profit margins than Macs with 16GB of RAM. The fact that the desktops PCs of our past priced RAM upgrades nearly at cost was an outlier; a courtesy, not anything normal.
It is basic microeconomics that a seller wants to be able to get as high of a price as buyers are willing to pay, but since different buyers have different abilities and willingnesses to pay, a seller can maximize their revenue by providing options at different price points.
Especially with societal wealth gaps, the people able and willing to pay higher prices are going to be able to pay higher price premiums, resulting in higher profit margins.
The reason why the change to 16gb was such a big deal was at least in part because it meant people didn't feel forced into shelling out 200 dollars (or whatever it was) for an extra 8gb of RAM.
It creates this weird dichotomy of having arguably the best value computer on the market in the base mac mini with 16gb of RAM and 256gb of storage and some of the absolutely worse value upgrades (like spending $400 on 16gb of RAM or $200 on 256gb of storage).
There's not much to explain here; they price gouge upgrades because they can. People that want/need MacOS for their work will pay for it, even if begrudgingly. I'm not necessarily happy about paying that much for these spec bumps but the benefits of using a Mac still outweigh the cons for me.
Data privacy-- some stuff, like all my personal notes I use with a RAG system, just don't need to be sent to some cloud provider to be data mined and/or have AI trained on them
It's currently optional for sellers, Etsy says "This info won’t change what buyers see for now, but will be used to improve the shopping experience in the future."
If Apple's "Private Cloud Compute" is used even on the latest devices for some tasks that are too computationally complex to be done on-device, then is there some reason (other than money) that they can't launch Apple Intelligence on all iOS 18 devices but use the cloud for all "AI" requests that would be "too slow" because of the older chips?
