Haven't heard much from my family in Japan. Layoffs are rare in Japan in general and unemployment is generally always in the 2% range there. I'm sure startups are struggling there though as that seems to be the global trend, but the software engineers I know there at bigger companies haven't mentioned anything about layoffs and seem to be doing fine.
I have no direct experience with the situation in Japan, so take with a grain of salt: my understanding was that, as with much of Asia, the issue is not so much layoffs as burnout and the difficulty of getting one's foot in the door. "Low unemployment" where a significant portion of the youth population is working one or two arubaito or has landed a plum corporate gig that requires 12 hours in the office a day. I don't know how much I'd trust casual conversation about the situation, since it's not kosher to complain so forwardly.
Apple just needs to do SOMETHING exciting with AI. Vision Pro looks great, but it's only a small piece of a much larger puzzle. I'm not sure if they're just too big to move at the speed they need to move or if it's something more damning about their internal culture but they need to do something in this space faster than I think most people realize.
Apple is rarely first to release new tech. They watch and develop quietly in the lab, then release an implementation that everyone else seems to copy.
So far their approach has been different, but their last keynote mentioned ML countless times. We can only assume they have more in the pipeline, and it will run locally on-device, which seems preferable to all the data collection being done with most companies working on AI.
That's true, and Apple has the capital to do pretty much whatever they want. I just think as we've seen with Google/Gemini it doesn't seem that easy to beat what OpenAI has going even with a lot of money to throw behind it. And I don't think Tim Cook is that much of a visionary but that's just my personal opinion.
I hope Apple does succeed though because I love their hardware and their silicon is great for AI applications.
They don’t need to beat OpenAI if they plan to play a different game.
The biggest question mark, like you mention, is how innovative can Apple be under Tim Cook? Are there systems and people in place to serve as those visionaries when the CEO is an operator at heart? I often wonder how much of what we’ve seen was in the pipeline when Jobs was still around, or is simply taken from what is popular in the moment vs having a vision for the future.
That's sarcasm, right? Surely you're not lauding this asinine peripheral that is supposed to be jammed into a fragile port to recharge while sticking out like a chopstick waiting to be snapped off.
Surely you're not lauding a near-useless gimmick that inexplicably doesn't work on the (defectively) giant trackpads of Apple's own computers... or most of their iPads.
Im referring to the 2nd gen, never really saw the first gen until now but the charging method now is quite nice.
First gen still is no worse than first-gen Magic Mouse, which launched under jobs though. Which is my main point, I don’t think Jobs was solely responsible for apple’s focus on design
> Near-useless gimmick
Man, millions of procreate enthusiasts would beg to disagree
> doesn’t work on the giant trackpads
Does anyone who stops to think about this for more than 2 seconds actually want this? What would you use it for besides digital signatures? Writing-to-text is just barely usable on tablets, I can’t see it being viable when you can’t see what you’re writing.
>First gen still is no worse than first-gen Magic Mouse, which launched under jobs though. Which is my main point, I don’t think Jobs was solely responsible for apple’s focus on design
The first-gen Magic Mouse used AA batteries and did not have the charging issue of the current Magic Mouse. The second-gen Magic Mouse, with an internal battery and the horribly designed charging port, was released in 2015, 4 years after Jobs died.
Jobs was largely responsible for Apple's obsessive focus on design, even if he didn't design everything himself. He positioned Jony Ive to be #2 at the top of the company, no other company (other than maybe a strict design firm) is going to have a design person be 2nd in command after the CEO. He also famously reviewed each thing that was going out the door and it had to meet his standard of design. This goes far back, here is a story from when they were designing the original Macintosh, they handed the design to Jobs, because he kept rejecting all their designs.
Of course there were misses under Jobs well, no one is perfect. The mouse the shipped with the G3 iMac, while it may have looked good in a press photo, was not great to use. That said, I have a hard time believing Jobs would have let the changing of the first Apple Pencil or the second-gen Magic Mouse out the door. They are so awkward. Even the newest pencil, plugging it in with a cord is weird compared the elegance of the second-gen Pencil.
Jony Ive presided over the worst usefulness/usability regressions and design blunders in the history of Apple. That guy is a pompous hack who, in the end, had no ideas for the advancement of products. His only M.O. was to take functionality away, with the excuse of making whatever the product was "thinner."
For sure, the "Magic" mouse is another Apple entry in the Hall of Peripheral Shame.
"Does anyone who stops to think about this for more than 2 seconds actually want this?"
Really? Have you ever heard of Wacom? They built an entire company on people who want this, and it has been in business for decades. And of course you can see what you're writing, right there on the screen! The surface area of current Apple laptop trackpads is 33% larger than that of a Wacom Intuos tablet: https://i.imgur.com/D8pmsTC.jpeg
It has nothing to do with handwriting recognition, either. That's another area where Apple failed spectacularly to make the Pencil useful. All they had to do is add a single-character writing area to the standard keyboard on the iPad, as was nailed in the '90s by Palm. That way, ALL applications would have immediately have gotten handwriting-entry capability. Instead, Apple left it up to every application developer to implement it separately. Baffling.
Wacom is a totally separate device from a laptop, and can be positioned so that you can comfortably write/draw while looking straight on at your screen.
It's woefully impractical for a laptop, specifically because it CAN'T be flexibly positioned where many people would want it. Plus, you'd have to lug an additional and cumbersome device around with you, occupy a USB port with it, and deal with a wire.
All of that makes the trackpad a much better option.
I'm just waiting for Siri to reliably set timers when I'm cooking. Between my watch and my phone, it's a damn nightmare to actually do the most basic thing with what should be a ubiquitous AI platform. They've had ages to make it better and some great minds in their employ, and yet they've really not done much. That said, if and when they do, they have immediate distribution and proof points to sell oodles more of their AI-enabled products and wearables...
Funny you raise that, as this is one of the very few tasks that Siri does do reliably for me :)
(Along with just-about-good-enough speech-to-text, if I speak clearly, and checking on the weather outside.)
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But yes, totally agree with your underlying point about the huge opportunity that Apple is leaving on the table with their lackluster approach to Siri.
Well, when I’m doing something and I need a timer, especially cooking and my hands are occupied or dirty, rummaging for a timer to manually set makes no sense when I should have a voice assistant on my wrist/in earshot.
They do lots of things with AI, it’s just that most of it is transparent to the user. Voice recognition, OCR, image classification, recommendation algorithms, FaceID etc. It’s all baked into the hardware or some other service.
Apple is also mostly a consumer oriented business. I can’t see them selling AI as a stand alone service.
There are so many reasons why this is happening and I personally think it's only tangentially related to AI. The internet has now become the home of "hustle culture" and is no longer serving the purpose of why it was first created.
Covid only accelerated this trend as people began to look for other ways to generate income online. Just look at the Gamestop and AMC amateur stock trading craze or the explosion of flipping sneakers or Pokemon cards for income.
A huge percentage of the internet consists solely of people looking to make a quick buck and/or establish some channel of passive income. The internet itself has been redefined as this weird vehicle for capitalism because we're careening towards a weird transitionary period in history as the rise of AI takes hold.
The only thing that can solve this is UBI or some kind of shared equity system where huge megacorps primarily operated by AI generate trillions and trillions of dollars in wealth that needs to be distributed to the populace somehow.
idk why you're getting downvoted, but I kinda feel the same too. I've been gradually abandoning all social media sites bc it's all hustlers and fake antics (fake news, fake tiktok 'hidden cameras', fake articles, fake everything!), vying for a second of fame to sell you on something. The fact that it's 99% video also compounds it, I feel like
And this time it's not only driven by larger media organizations, but also by random people who now have a chance to propagate their views from decreased barriers to entry.
I believe it wasn't only journalistic gatekeeping that prevented this for so long, but simply a lack of affordance for willing parties to do those things. High-speed Internet has made everything so much easier.
My feelings about the rise of streaming video are also conflicted. It has given us high-quality longform content on topics that hadn't been covered before, but all those other people's passions and hobbies take up way too much time if you as a consumer become deeply invested in them (not even counting the conspiracy genre and its implications). It's easy to do partially because YouTube facilitates that, but I think in the end people want to consume all this information in the end, for some definition of "want". And dozens of 6-hour streams of the latest game or another will keep being uploaded every day.
And there's this other thing that I keep coming back to. Someone I know was really into this engineer creating fake Apple product boxes that recorded thieves stealing them and being glitterbombed. They found it hilarious, but I was sort of confounded. It was the conversion of a few people's bad choices into entertainment and ad revenue, coated over with the intellectual sheen of detailed makerspace engineering diagrams and wit mixed with a moral high ground. Though what the thieves did was not right, there was something smug and passive aggressive about the entire thing that rubbed me the wrong way. And this was presented as just a humble guy with engineering experience creating his content and getting people interested in STEM. Anyone has the capability to do this sort of thing now, not just a media machine with questionable motives. It's just regular, driven people with questionable motives now.
I think what you're describing ("the long tail") has been a phenomenon for a decade or so - tons of youtubers, tons of bloggers, tons of twitter personalities, etc. I see it as a good thing, people definitely want to consume it.
What's been bothering is the layers of skimmers that are dominating all those mediums - the top youtube channels now are repeaters, the top tiktok channels are fake accounts copying the content, there's layers of "reactors" (they call themselves that) that add absolutely no value, but polute the whole timeline, and so on. This is mostly a newer phenomenon - as if the internet is quickly turning into a multimedia version of the mail system - it'll snuff out actual creativity/usefulness and slowly decay into spam spam spam spam.
If I'm the kinda guy who's into the hustle, and I can hustle $800/mo (or similar) out of the government with no effort, a) why wouldn't I also keep up my other hustles, and, b) why do you expect that the cost of living won't rise to meet there new level of basic income?
That's a completely fair point and it's why I don't really think UBI is the answer. But, what is the answer? I don't think anyone has this figured out yet. Capitalism is by far the best system we've come up with but I just don't know what happens when/if AGI happens. And maybe it won't ever happen but I'd rather be brainstorming about what to do if it does happen now than wait until it's too late.
