The iPhone's Last Stand? | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone's Last Stand?

stratechery.com

191 pointsswolpers230 comments

You cannot trust companies to communicate an unbiased vision of the future, because they will always build what they're capable of selling. Microsoft and Meta are incapable of selling phones and laptops; they're certainly capable of building them, but few people will buy them. So instead Meta builds smart-glasses and Microsoft presents this weird vision of "connected thin devices" by keeping the hardware itself very abstract and unknowable. The hardware doesn't matter to Microsoft, not because the hardware doesn't actually matter, but because it cannot matter, because Microsoft cannot win in hardware. Its not a vision of the future; its a vision of what Microsoft can meaningfully sell. Microsoft can meaningfully sell their weird constellation of 365 subscriptions that no one knows what they do or if they remotely do what you buy them for; thus their marketing now wears that idea of "unknowable capability" like a mask.

"You cannot trust companies to communicate an unbiased vision of the future, because they will always build what they're capable of selling." This just rewrote my brain, thank you.

Based on Microsoft's ever-more-fetid output over the last two decades, they can't sell self-respecting people jack squat.

IMO there's an even more real story at the heart of this idea than stratechery's predictable, banal attempt to compare Microsoft and Apple's competing visions of the future, and its part of why I've become so bored of stratechery's articles lately. He glances against that Microsoft video, recognizes that the video does a horrible job of communicating their vision, and then carries water for Microsoft by working overtime clarifying their vision for them; instead of doing the obvious and totally reasonable thing of asking: Why the fuck is that video so incomprehensible? Microsoft used to be pretty good at aligning themselves and their customers around a shared vision of their future, but since the advent of AI the company has seemed more-and-more adrift at sea without a bearing.

Much more needs to be said and discussed about this; in comparison, Siri AI is boring and predictable. Siri AI is Apple being Classic Apple: shipping a solid, decent product that works as advertised and isn't that surprising. That's Apple. They lost their bearing as well for a couple years, but they re-found it. Good on them. Meanwhile Microsoft is in meltdown mode behind them shrieking buzzwords and everyone is pretending that everything is fine because they're microsoft, they'll figure it out.

He really missed something - Nvidia's video. Microsoft isn't the brand in front of the next AI on device. Nvidia and Microsoft are trying to figure that out, but it's likely (based on recent acquisitions) to be Nvidia on Windows.

I thought we’re done with Windows. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

Still over 60% of the laptop and desktop market. I'm hopeful that if the number drops, Microsoft gets their head out of their ass on usability. In the meantime I'll be on a Mac...

Nice analysis.

> Much more needs to be said and discussed about this; in comparison, Siri AI is boring and predictable. Siri AI is Apple being Classic Apple: shipping a solid, decent product that works as advertised and isn't that surprising. That's Apple. They lost their bearing as well for a couple years, but they re-found it. Good on them. Meanwhile Microsoft is in meltdown mode behind them shrieking buzzwords and everyone is pretending that everything is fine because they're microsoft, they'll figure it out.

I think your description doesn't fit the iphone. For some people it was surprising, at least

"Classic Apple" in this sense means "Tim Cook's Apple", as timelines for all things have accelerated and pre-iPhone is beyond the classical era and well into ancient history.

lol thats actually funny and kinda spot on. some of my coworkers regularly move goal posts to double down on windows in the face of microsoft doing absurdly hostile shit and it feels like watching some kinda stockholm syndrome. i sort of get it like many i was born and raised in a windows computer household and it wasnt until i dunno 7 years ago or so i started dinking with other stuff, i think if i try to remember hard enough there was some perceived inner feelings of tribalism there. but really once you start getting proficient in another OS it's hard to make the case for windows, windows just feels kinda dirty.

so yeah, it's interesting to watch microsoft pitch a piece of hardware or something, see a couple coworkers gawk at it, sometimes buy it, only to have it repeatedly turn into vaporware rarely with a refresh from microsoft or to end up in another line of products thats sunset forever. microsoft appreciates their business tho, i'm sure. i just wish they could see how funny their relentless hope looks from the outside that microsoft might someday reign supreme and be everyones computer sweetheart again. i had a coworker actually express frustration because we didn't select the microsoft fabric solution or whatever for a datalake. took a hot minute to just get him to relent on trying to only champion microsoft services and products at every corner it's wild to me that someone should have so much allegience to a massive tech company. especially one that is not just hostile to it's users but the industry at large, microsoft has kinda always been a hostile part of the computing history story.

You haven't listed the competing company that does not make one feel "some kinda stockholm syndrome".

I love my Surface laptop. I use arch, BTW.

Does the btw version have a changelog published somewhere?

Surface Pro with Debian KDE here. I just dressed it up like Windows 7, because I need more Fruitiger Aero in my life.

At the same time, the only things that get built and sold are the things that someone is capable of building and selling

There is a presupposition in this statement, that someone in these companies even cares about being unbiased. I don't think this is true.

Eh I agree mostly, but Microsoft was doing well with Lumia, at least in other markets. The 520 was a loss leader but it had really good penetration.

I almost reverse this. Its not that Microsoft cant sell hardware, its that no one trusts them to keep making it long term. Everyone is just waiting for the end of XBox, Surface is presumed to have a ticking clock. They bought a phone company and ended all the products they purchased. They set up a concept lab to create an iPad Killer, in the Courier, hired a fancy apple hardware guy and killed the project because the office team was worried about competition. All they need to do is support a product long term and the market will start to accept them as hardware guys again.

Last Stand? This is rather strong language and overselling the situation, for clicks I guess.

You might re-title the article instead, "The iPhone holds its ground", and it would be a more realistic title. But perhaps garnering less clicks.

I've always thought Ben Thompson is strong on enterprise and b2b topics but super weak on everything consumer related, he simply doesn't seem to understand consumer behavior (he has zero empathy or ability to project his mind into the average person's mind)

E.g. Ben was sure iPhone air would be a massive hit because he himself loved it. (It's struggled as people don't like the smaller battery life).

Ben was sure the Vision Pro would be a huge hit because he himself loved it. (It was a total failure as the average person doesnt want to pay huge amounts for a ridiculous looking dork helmet).

Ben raving about Meta's hand controller which he was sure was going to be the future of consumer electronics (The Neural Band). He was discussing how you could use it while your hand is in your jeans/pants pocket. Not quite thinking about how this would look while you're sat on the subway with someone sat opposite you.

Ben discussing how the future of watching sports is in VR. Not considering how weird it would be to go to a friends house to watch the game and everyone has their own VR headset. Also not considering the fun of watching sports is doing it with other people.

Basically, he has a huge issue with extracting his own liking of techy products to the average consumer who are basically nothing like Ben Thompson.

This. Not sure why it it downvoted. The same with Patrick Moorhead, or in similar stance DED from Apple Insider etc.

Just because you like something, doesn't mean it will succeed. These people will more likely using some sort of industry knowledge to form conclusion which conforms with their bias.

On the flip side, just because you hated something doesn't mean it will fail. There are plenty of Apple haters who will write things that seems to make sense but completely misses the mark every single time.

I get the criticism and all your previous judgments samples are valid. I also agree that title is click-bait BUT:

I know people are desperate for a Siri that works. The convince of just talking to your phone is priceless. If Apple gets this right, this is a huge deal – which it seems they are on the right track.

People are still talking to Siri for basic stuff like timers and alarms because it works, doesn't need an app, works when phone is locked or even away from you. If this works for more complex tasks like texting and general questions Apple will have the upper hand over Meta and Google in this new way of using computers/internet.

Apple also took a very clever approach for Capex and general AI strategy. Everyone knows that the best intelligence will eventually become a commodity and Apple decided to step aside from this expensive experiment. That's worth pointing out too.

Personally I hope you can also type to Siri, which is what I'll use WAY more than voice. I work from home and live alone, but even then I don't want to basically be talking to myself all day. I also live in a major urban city and while random people talking to themselves on the sidewalks certainly isn't unheard of it's not a great look, much less on a subway or cafe.

Yes, they showed the Siri app, typing, reviewing conversations etc.

That would be a huge deal. I’m wondering how current android is being received because as far as the reporting goes it has already delivered LLM voice assistant with personal context. But I haven’t seen any reporting about the consumer market reaction. Android phones already sell better so are thry just miles ahead now?

> E.g. Ben was sure iPhone air would be a massive hit because he himself loved it.

The Air was interesting because everyone I've seen hold it, loves it. But, everyone also loves battery life and the best camera more. The Air is proof of that (similar with the mini lovers).

They see "thin is in" and I see remote servers now watching everything on your screen or within audio visual range. Eventually the only jobs will be at the intel agencies watching the data feeds from all the rabble so they can ascertain who is mouthy enough to whack and charge the others by the word for what used to be processed locally for free.

Of all the things they could build, why must they pick this future...

Seen from this perspective, the GDR was prescient: They had more than half of their population engaged in spying on all the rest. We can now take our cues from them an reshape our economies in their image.

> the GDR was prescient: They had more than half of their population engaged in spying on all the rest.

Wrong. It definitely wasn't 50%. This number seems to grow each time I see it referenced. The Stasi directly or indirectly employed about 2% of the population, which is still huge. But /The Lives of Others/ takes a lot of artistic license. The true levels will never be known, but the largest and most widely quoted figure is 1 in 6.5 or about 15%. That derives from one historian's estimate, which was that at the upper bound, 1 in 6.5 people had in some way made a report to the government that in some way made it to the Stasi. I'm sure 15% of the people in any developed country have called the police at some point in their life.

This is also assuming no duplicates, you really think the Stasi could uniquely identify and disambiguate informants at this scale? And that every Stasi low level officer tasked with recruiting new informants or else actually recruited new informants instead of making them up and keeping the payouts for themselves?

And because I have to say it: authoritarian surveillance is bad, the Stasi was bad, this is not an apology or minimization, but a correction of historical facts.

What does it mean to say Apple is behind in AI or back in 2024, when Apple is not trying to build AI models, and no one else is nearly as evolved as their local architecture?

Is Microsoft's device "vaporware" even comparable to a live demo?

iPhone AI comes via AI-safe pipes: private by design, on device or not, accelerated via MLX. Given that vectoring an AI request to GPU/NPU/CPU/private cloud takes non-trivial engineering, is anyone else as advanced as Apple? It seems wishful to believe interactive UI's will be superseded by untethered, non-interactive (pay by the token) workflows.

iPhone AI is last-mile; the value depends entirely on what you're trying to do. Apple can demo features for their own apps (esp. with personal knowledge), but the real question is what independent developers can do with Apple pipes.

He can say enterprise (not consumers) is the only way to recoup the Nvidia capex, but free local coding models run well enough now on mid-range Apple Macs to make me doubt the business model of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft, and the upside for Nvidia.

I'm glad Apple will be investing that capex into their own chips.

i was under the impression that the 2024 apple intelligence rollout was something of a victory: Apple realized that the majority of people don't actually want this stuff forced on them at the os level, and the ai maximalists all used apple anyways via clawbot (including purchasing an additional apple device, the mini!) because of apples non-ai-specific commitment to phone computer interop.

Certainly the copilot button in ms paint did nothing to attract the clawbot ecosystem to windows

I say this every time: the average person never wants to hear the letters A and I. Not because it has a negative connotation, but because they don’t care how their phone gets them an answer to “when is my dentist appointment” they just want it to do it.

At least for consumer software, AI is synonymous with annoying nagware forcing itself in your way.

I think you're trying to say, the term 'AI' is _associated_ with chatbots being added in places (websites mostly) where they are more of a nuisance than added value.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is AI consumer software and is a hit, albeit mostly free tier users.

And that's the thing, 90% of people's interactions with "AI" is negatives in places it didn't belong, Klarna had to roll back "AI" customer service, useless chatbots everywhere "because AI", copilot this and that and so on.

And yes, ChatGPT is a hit but who will subsidize the hardware for freeloaders, Google's (cheap to run) AI is good enough now that I don't need to move over to ChatGPT for simple answers, thus the Google moat will probably remain intact denying OpenAI the search revenue stream all whilst OpenAI proposals/trials to add ADs were met with annoyance.

AI where useful is becoming a commodity, Apple did the correct thing in waiting and using the commodity parts and we're otherwise also quickly heading to the bubble's pop, HN even censoring articles on the topic sure seems to be an indicator that those in power are afraid.

Don’t forget Google search and Copilot giving you wrong answers. The first time someone gets graded poorly or called out at work for obviously not checking what they sent tends to reframe their perspective.

I think this is the jaded HN way of seeing AI in products. It's not reality.

I work on a popular consumer product (from well before AI existed) which is incorporating more and more AI features. When we release AI features they receive far more attention and usage than traditional features.

Users who interact with AI features are much "stickier" (more likely to still be users months from now). Free users who interact with AI features are much more likely to convert to paid users. AI features get more press, more online comments, more usage, more conversions. If this wasn't true we wouldn't be spending so much money on it.

I keep hearing that "the average person hates AI", but their revealed preference is different. Any time they need to make anything that takes effort a lot of people immediately turn to ChatGPT.

People don't like to consume AI-made things but they sure like to use it.

Deep, deep down, the average person wants to be controlled and told what to do, just so long as they don't have to acknowledge it to themselves. Clinging to the garment of a Daddy or a Mommy or a god or priest or a Great Leader is the usual way to do this.

Buying brands that advertising has told us will make the anxiety go away, or equivalently believing ideologies that propaganda has told us the same, is another.

Note that I count myself among this number - I'm not holding myself out as a superior free-thinker, I think it's likely that I'm just as unaware of my personal flavour of self-deception as anyone else.

Clinging to chatbots is just a new version of the same thing.

That sounds like an untestable hypothesis, aka conspiracy theory.

Or, more charitably, they don't want to be controlled but rather want guidance and wisdom in a difficult and confusing world.

Exactly. Even though Siri is completely lost today, my friend asks it a number of random things, all she wants is an answer. Currently it redirects to the web, it’s enough for her. I told her “next year it’ll work!” And boom. We’re in the EU. Sad.

Yep, by using the terms intelligence, and occasionally Apple Intelligence and not AI[1], they get to talk about these features in a way that don't trigger an automatic mental gag reflex. The fact they cottoned on to this 2 years ago is actually pretty impressive.

[1] https://x.com/ArtemR/status/2056961743142957143

Is it impressive though?

I wrote this in another thread recently: AI is a technology, not a product. Consumers don't care about technologies, they care about products.

This is pretty elementary stuff. SV has a propensity for conflating technology and products, I'll give you that, but Apple's product management has always been relatively good about this kind of thing.

AI's not a technology, though. LLMs are a technology. AI is a marketing term.

"Mental gag reflex" is exactly right. I'm running two different instances of Claude Opus 4.8 on xhigh right now, and I'm absolutely fine with it because that's what _I_ want to do.

AI features on my toothbrush, toaster, refrigerator, doorbell, washing machine, word processing software, TV, whatever, without my actually asking for them first are THINGS I DO NOT WANT, and adding those features to those devices will cause me either to have go to great lengths not to use them, or - much more likely - just not to buy them at all if I can.

But also because it has a negative connotation. Not with everyone, but with a lot of people. If someone says "That looks like AI", do you think they are intending to make a compliment?

Yeah that comment is making it seem like people don't care if they are using AI only the results, but they not only do care they actively hate AI and tech companies associated with it too.

There is a reason why there is a massive backlash against data center buildouts across the US.

While I agree with your assessment, these data centers cause substantial noise and water pollution-- even if people didn't have a problem with AI the data centers would be a problem for people.

Exactly this. I want a system that can understand basic instructions like this, in context, with all the necessary unspoken assumptions implicit in natural language and the problem domain, and get it right _every single time without fail_. A bit like AppleScript, but in natural language and smarter.

Most definitely _not_ a cleverer system that sometimes hallucinates or goes off on tangents, or sends my personal information to parties unknown.

Whether or not consumers wanted it, Apple failed to deliver. And that wasn't because they were listening or anything - they just couldn't deliver.

Apple doesn't leak much but there has been coverage of this:

https://spyglass.org/apple-ai-fail/ (April 2025)

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-... (paywalled)

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/06/07/one-fateful-meeti... (2 days ago)

They couldn't deliver because they are not a startup and thus have something to lose in a way that OpenAI/Anthropic don't. If Siri starts telling people to self-destruct themselves it would be a major PR disaster, whereas Apple Intelligence being late is not. Arguably the technology they needed (strong guardrails) didn't really exist at the time and the extra couple of years is what made the difference.

Are you saying that Google is a startup?

Google doesn't care about reputation the way Apple does. People are used to Google shipping broken features and shutting down products when they don't immediately sell. Apple is a premium brand and it's expected to be more stable, and to deliver solutions that actually work.

Yeah, that's exactly why Apple is paying money to Google now to fix the shitshow that is Siri

Well they're paying Google for access to their model, which I think makes sense. I've been saying for a while that models are commodities, the integration or harness is what really matters. There's a lot of good models available, many open weight these days!

What took Anthropic to the top wasn't their models, which are good. It's Claude Code, everything around the model that delivers value for their customers. Gone are the days of slapping a model behind a chatbox and hoping for the best. We need, like, actual software, that does actual things. Siri could be that... maybe. Apple has a lot going for them in regards to how much of their consumer base's software experience they control.

I think you're quite right in a sense, but let's say it had been Samsung making these promises. Do you think the system not working properly or producing weird and unacceptable results would have prevented them releasing it anyway?

Well, the results[1] are[2] actually[3] in. Samsung of course did do that and the results are what you'd expect.

So in a sense Apple 'could' have released what they had, after all Samsung and others have, but almost certainly not at the level of quality Apple expects. In which case arguably not releasing until it is capable of reaching that quality bar is the right call. The wrong call was announcing it in the first place when it wasn't ready.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/1b4zc1j/new_ai_tex... [2] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/awful-galaxy-s24-feature-... [3] https://www.androidauthority.com/im-tired-pretending-galaxy-...

Their most recent iPhone which had no major AI advertisements associated with it GAINED market share over competition[1]

They have no ground to make up on AI, and changing their operating system to center on AI would piss off every iPhone user I know outside of tech, and probably half of them within tech.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/13/apple-q1-market-share-g...

> copilot button in ms paint

things there don't seem to be going well

Genuinely, the day they start shoving "AI features" into my iPhone is the day I switch to a fairphone or something I can actually own. I don't care if they include optional features, but I am so tired of seeing chatbots and text manglers shoved into every fucking app. I can write my own emails, thanks google.

Avie Tevanian told the parable of not needing to outrun the bear if you can outrun your friend. These companies aren’t competing to be perfect, they’re competing for our money.

If Apple had to be the best at AI, it would be out of business already. But it just has to make things people want and the customers will use them to run local or remote LLMs.

What I don't see anyone talking about is how Private Cloud Compute is behind an iCloud subscription.

From what I can tell, this means any app that is using their foundation model is sharing against a user's pooled usage quota & Apple takes all the revenue upside if a user chooses to upgrade their plan.

Why would an app developer choose their model which has a minuscule 32K context window, might get throttled because of usage in another app, and doesn't share revenue over any frontier model vendor (where you can package/pass along token costs to your customers)?

I have consumed a decent amount of literature coming out of WWDC and I do not understand how the billing and model availability side of things will work.

Its definitely the case that Apple said that some AI capabilities will rely on cloud hosted models; and that some of these capabilities will be metered; and that "some paid iCloud+ plans" include increased usage. Its unclear what the full extent of capabilities that rely on cloud models are. We know that Spatial Reframing is a capability that relies on cloud models and will be metered; this was stated on-stage. The typical conversations with Siri are, supposedly, a mix, possibly based on how complex the query is? We know there are two cloud-hosted models (what they call internally "Cloud" and "Cloud Pro"); are both of these metered? Does it depend on the use-case (e.g. is Spatial Reframing metered because of its use-case or because of which model it uses?)

A lot of this would be easier to figure out if there was, somewhere, a "meter" you could see drop every time you used a metered feature; but there isn't. There is zero indication of metered AI usage anywhere in the settings that I have found (I am on the 27 dev beta). There is also zero indication that any of the iCloud+ plans include metered AI usage. It is also of note that Apple very specifically said on-stage that "some iCloud+ plans" include increased usage; implying that the $2.99/mo plan likely does not.

Apple has also announced that developers under a certain revenue number can use their foundation models in private cloud compute for free [1]. This implies: third party developers will pay for it. In other words: it might be the case that your shared iCloud+ pool of AI usage only applies to AI capabilities from first-party Apple apps, while in third-party apps the developers are expected to front the bill. Which further reinforces your point: Why would anyone choose to integrate with these cloud models?

Strange situation, and unlike Apple; they seem very frantic.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/08/apple-bets-cheaper-ai-will...

Freemium is a potentially interesting model for app developers. If you're small enough to be in the free tier, you can avoid the risk of someone turning your app into the next backend for Chipotlai Max and running up your AI bill.

Once you get enough downloads to where Apple starts wanting to charge you money, you can consider switching to OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or Deepseek or whatever. Sounds like they've even made that relatively easy to do in the Foundation Models framework -- just implement the LanguageModel protocol. I expect open-source or provider-written adapters to pop up that would let you use your vendor of choice.

Motra, my workout app on iPhone (with great Apple Watch support, including counting reps), uses Apple foundation models to build a workout.

Not all use cases will be big agentic coding things that will use millions of tokens.

Some on device (or on server) stuff might be small one shot calls that just use what’s the OS provides.

Apple will deploy the same security/ privacy / ease of use /packaging strategy they have done for every other product.

Same reason developers continue to use Apple payments even when they have to shell out 30% of the revenue.

I can see Apple, setting App store rules around declaring AI usage, or could start labeling apps not using their models with strong language designed to amplify the increasing user concerns around AI and so on.

The product strategy has to be better the product itself does not have to be objectively better for the developer for them to have to choose it.

Long-winded article. I’ll give you my take: people like their phones. They identity with them. It’s a singular piece of tech that isn’t cumbersome. It does multiple things well and sometimes at once. Why would I want a duplicity of devices to do similar things at the cost of more stuff?! Answer me that riddle.

> Microsoft put forth a vision for a new ecosystem of hardware devices under the banner of Project Solara

While I don't necessarily disagree with their vision but if implemented like "Copilot for Windows" I don't see me or anyone wanting to go anywhere near it.

Apple being slow is just fine, at least they didn't launch "Copilot for Mac".

Sometimes the lack of certain feature is the feature.

> Apple being slow is just fine, at least they didn't launch "Copilot for Mac".

Is this not what Apple Intelligence is?

Maybe, but I've never interacted with it on my 5+ apple devices, so I'm blissfully unaware.

No, they don't force it down your throat. You can click "no" once in a while and it looks like it does not exist. Try that with Copilot.

> Sometimes the lack of certain feature is the feature.

Sometimes it's a curse. Apple might be a 2-3 trillion dollar business right now, if they didn't refuse to sign CUDA drivers for their ARM servers.

Apple's market cap would have dropped by 30-50% if they had signed CUDA drivers? How would that have played out?

    you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of
    devices, none of which stand alone, but are
    more like portals to interact with your agents

I would be really happy with my phone + headphones as the device I use most. But only if I could use Gemini (or ChatGPT or Grok or any other chat agent) in voice mode and say "SSH into my GitHub Codespace soandso and implement feature soandso.". And it replies "Did it. I told copilot (or codex or whatever coding agent lives on that VM) to implement the feature".

And then a minute later I could ask it "Is copilot done yet?" and it replies "No, looks like it is still working on it". And then a minute later I ask again. It replies "Yes, it finished. It changed chart.py and styles.css. Do you want me to tell you what specific changes it made to the files?".

But it looks like none of the chat agents with voice interface have such a connector at the moment? An SSH connector would be the most useful. But a "GitHub Codespace connector" or something like that would also do.

I wonder if that will be a missing piece for long. If so, I would build an agent with voice mode and ssh connector myself. But I guess it should come out from the big guys any moment now?

> Yes, it finished. It changed chart.py and styles.css. Do you want me to tell you what specific changes it made to the files?"

A verbal diff sounds practically useless. Does it first read out the entire left-hand base, and then read out the entire right-hand target? Does it say loudly "REMOVING ... ADDING ... "? How would it read out something like Struct->Field? This seems lower fidelity than a visual confirmation, and I just don't think that voice commands make sense with this kind of work.

It would tell me about the changes like a human would.

"It changed the plot function so it takes another parameter called linewidth. It also added an input field in the stylecontrols section where the user can ...".

How would you detect the presence of bugs in this scenario? How would you make sure the LLM isn't adding yet another useless, redundant function to the code base? Even if there isn't a bug in this PR, do you not want to be familiar with the actual shape of the code in case you need to dig through it while bug hunting later?

Every time I try to take a hands-off approach to the code like this, I come to regret it later. The code ends up bloated and labyrinthine. When I let it grow unabated, it becomes gradually more difficult for the LLM to understand the intended structure as the project becomes too big for the model to keep the whole thing in its context.

    How would you detect the
    presence of bugs in this
    scenario?

I would ask AI. "Did the last commit introduce any bugs or unintended consequences?". In fact I already use this prompt after every change I make manually.

    How would you make sure the LLM
    isn't adding yet another
    useless, redundant function to
    the code base?

By asking AI. In fact, I already run a long "Can you refactor anything in this codebase to reduce redundancy, improve readability, performance or maintainability" pretty regularly.

Are you ever reading the code? What do you do when the LLM can't fix a bug? Do you not wish you had a more intimate first-hand knowledge of the code when fixing things yourself?

Please don't tell me that never happens-- I've had one just in the last week and I use both OpenAI and Anthropic foundation models.

In my current workflow, yes, I read all code.

In fact, I usually let multiple LLMs implement the same feature, and then I compare them. I even run my own arena in which I calculate Elo scores for LLMs from my perspective of which one implemented features better.

Having the ability to control code agents via voice would not take away my ability to do that. But I think in the future, that will become less and less necessary. If we look back at this conversation in five years, it will look very archaic, and we will be used to having superhuman AI do everything for us. In 10 years, it will sound like a strange idea that humans were once fiddling with code to improve the quality.

Fair enough. Thank you for sating my curiosity. I'm not quite as optimistic as you, but I'm excited at the potential to be proven wrong. :)

Something something wasting machine cycles with a compiler.

Something something taking the crafts and the man out of craftsmanship to just get it out the door as quickly as possible.

All jest aside I mostly agree with you but I'd tack on another 20 years for a total of 30.

Though in this technological jump I don't think people are as excited (understandably) as when the teletype came on scene. I too like the potential but dislike the whole discourse around it, the ethics involved and the way it's deployed. Such is life I suppose.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

I like how people think that if LLMs get to the point where they write code you can ship without reviewing it, that humans will still be in the loop "sshing into a code space" and "implementing features". Do you really think you'll even know what files are in that repo? Or that you'll be a necessary part of the process whatsoever?

Microsoft has a bad reputation for hardware. Back in the late 90s you could trust them for mice/keyboards, not fancy but they worked. Some swore by that ms natural (it gave me RSI that it took a special keyboard that made people look at me like I was crazy to fix). The xbox eventually helped them build some trust. However then there was the surface series and the phone. They dropped support for certain surface tables/laptops very quickly, they got deeply mixed reviews. The phone was back to front a disaster. Recently they had that AR headset, total miss, a miss that makes the Apple Vision Pro look like a wildly successful product.

I don't trust microsoft with hardware anymore, nor do i trust them with software.

> [C]onsumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention- harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.

I came here to talk about this, like some other commenters did, too :) I think that this _is_ a predominant view amongst most of Silicon Valley but I think it's kind of a local maxima view... Easy to agree with, easy to see that it's a functional idea, but... people... (i.e. consumers) do lots more than just waste time on their phones even though I bet that's a huge amount of what people are doing across the US right now.

I guess the thing that _is_ true about this nugget is the "at scale" part. It's hard to find things _at scale_ that people would pay for on a phone. So the phone sort of falls back into this easy to monetize thing via advertising. But I think people (qua consumers) probably can clearly be a sustainable market for way more than attention harvesting (or dopamine fracking!) but it requires a lot more effort to think of things that you can build a market out of there. So people sort of lazy-back into attention harvesting via ads.

Not sure why the article is titled the way it is. Ben’s take on Siri AI being just good enough for the vast majority of consumers makes sense. The iPhone is the most consumer facing product because it’s a consumption platform. Some folks use it to create stuff, but most people use it to consume media or interact with another human.

iPadOS also did not receive any product specific updates because I think Apple understands that device well: it’s also a consumption device with a bit more productivity capability. They know they can ship a full macOS on iPad, as witnessed by the lower performance A18 chip in the Neo running the full OS, but what’s the point? Using a desktop UI with a touch interface is terrible. So you’d need a mouse and keyboard. By the time you get that accessory, you’ve already exceeded the cost of a Neo or MacBook Air. There’s also no size, weight or space difference between a fully accessorized iPad and MacBook Neo, Air or 14” Pro.

I think Apple will be fine regardless of whether this new Siri AI stuff actually works well or not. I think deep down they don’t really care because they don’t have to. All of their devices are perfect clients that can interact perfectly fine with cloud inference. And their devices are such a joy to use. That’s what Apple is good at.

Now the confusing part is the new Microsoft hardware project. Is Solara a laptop? Tablet? 2-in-1? Phone? They already have a great hardware run with Surface, so I wonder if this new project is a more powerful local inference push?

I've valued Ben Thompson's opinions less over time. He was super into goggle-like devices and remote meetings. I own Apple Vision Pro. It's a technical achievement, but not compelling beyond immersive video (too bad). He harps on Dems trying to clean up monopolies (Lina Khan during Biden, who had good principles but didn't get much done; probably blame her boss) and is quiet through republican bullshit (T2). He seems to interview huge tech figures as though he was the was the Verge or Nilay Patel does: with a soft touch.

Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says.

Edit: missing words, thinking faster than typing

Yeah I've been noticing the same trends. In my opinion, when analyzing B2B topics, or in general enterprise software and hardware, he is pretty good.

But when it comes to anything around consumer behavior, individuals, etc, i.e. the average family in America, he is often completely and utterly wrong in all his takes and predictions. In fact, so wrong it's often laughable, and amazes me that he is so confident in his predictions.

Also, in the podcast I've noticed that he talks almost every podcast about his "hits", i.e. his times in the past where he predicted something accurately. But never, ever mentions the times where he was completely wrong. He's like the dictionary definition of confirmation bias (or survivorship bias).

It's like he's gotten overly confident (or a little arrogant) as he's become more of a tech celebrity, to the point where he thinks he's some sort of Nostradamus now and doesn't recognize his weaknesses or failures. And I've personally stopped listening to the podcasts as much as it's getting a little tiresome.

BTW, I also noticed how often he is wrong on deep tech topics, e.g. his explanation of IP addresses and routing in one podcast. It's like he thinks his business knowledge + Claude is enough for him to authoritatively discuss how technical systems work, and he often is mistaken...

I recently canceled my Stratechery Plus subscription. Don’t miss it to be honest - once a week free is plenty.

I canceled mine; I thought it would be a good way to stay updated on tech news without having to read other news, but then they over-extended the service to a bunch of other things instead of just focusing on the one news letter.

I don't care about a twice a week podcast about the NBA and national parks, or the other 5? podcasts about random stuff.

The podcast I listened to the most: Dithering. Primary reason? 15 mins. Sometimes listened to Stratechery Interviews if/when the guest intrigued me outside of the Stratechery ecosystem.

My problem is part style, and part content. Stratechery reads like it's written to be narrated - rather than exist first as writing. There's verbosity, pauses, long sentences, etc. And then you listen to the narration it makes sense.

But that complexity makes reading harder. Not saying everything needs to be 5th-grade-level, but complexity isn't required. Paste a Stratechery article into Hemingway Editor to visualize my point.

The stats below:

Readibility - Post-Graduate (aim for 9)

26 of 44 sentences very hard to read

8 of 88 sentences hard to read

31 weakeners

6 words with simpler alternatives

What a chore to cover, and that's without commenting on the ideas/concepts in the content.

I'm sure some folks like this writing style but I don't. And try hard to write my newsletter and other prose with far less complexity.

I think some of his advantage analyzing where tech can go is because he pushed the limits of it (eg working remotely early early).

He was disappointed in the Apple vision pro for just being an entertainment device (it seems like you two agree there?)

And then the interviews by media of tech should be viewed as an iterated game. He can ask interesting questions for an analyst, but he (and Nilay) do depend on access and that fundamentally constrains what types of questions they can ask if they want continued access

> Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says.

Pretty sane take tbh

“Lina Khan had good principles”??

Yeah might as well cancel your subscription if you’re not gonna read it

I am still convinced that Apple is slowly working its way to smart glasses. And that *this* is the Next Big Thing. Frankly, the future is very good AR glasses that just work.

- iPhone Air to cram everything into a small space

- Vision pro - a new OS for looking at things and interacting

- Better Siri and AI that works with voice

- Smart local model / routing to big models in the cloud

- integration with wearables (air pods and watches)

Smart glasses aren't well-liked by the mainstream population. The term "glasshole" exists for a reason.

Never have even heard of the word before.

The term is nearly old enough to have a driving license - google glass came out 14 years ago

Ahh maybe that’s it. Old slang that’s not used often enough these days.

Good luck reading an article about Meta Raybans without running into the term. That said, the whole smartglasses thing seems to be pretty dead as a concept - at least in part because public opinion is not on the side of folks wandering around with stealthy cameras on their faces

I have actually looked into meta glasses a number of times. Never saw the term. Learn something new everyday thanks for sharing this old term with the group!

Then you haven't been paying attention.

Maybe you are in bubble? Looks like it’s really old slang and I have not heard that word in the last decade in Silicon Valley or elsewhere.

It was never common slang. A few journalists tried to force it to be “a thing” but it never caught on, because forced memes never work.

(I do hate camera glasses though.)

It has had a revival with the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. I don't know about Silicon Valley, but you frequently see it in tech-oriented forums when the topic comes up.

Smart glasses WITH cameras and microphones aren't well liked by the mainstream population.

What if the glasses are display only and paired to an iphone for most of it's 'senses'?

This would not be a net benefit to society.

It’s amazing how people post with such confidence - exhibiting the behaviour that they just posted something of immense value.

lol no you did not. A whole lot of nothing.

I have 0 interest in wearing glasses on my head all the time though.

People spend several thousand on Lasik so they don't have to wear glasses all the time.

I don't see glasses as the ultimate form factor that everyone uses.

I'm not sure Apple will provide it or not, but I don't see a future that doesn't have nearly ubiquitous smart glasses. The potential usefulness is too great.

Obviously it'll be a big cultural conflict for a while. But again... the usefulness is too great for it not to happen. Cultural objections will give way, I think. Maybe it'll have to wait for a generation to die off.

They’ve been working towards this since the introduction of ARKit in iOS back in 2016. Maybe even earlier.

They’ve done a very good job at proving the required tech with stuff like putting LiDAR in iPhones which is key to the Vision Pro….which is their AR interaction model testing ground. They are taking a pretty measured approach.

I just don’t think the physical tech is ready for AR glasses that reach a level of polish that Apple would ship mass market. But all the other pieces are there.

Who is paying for all of this AI usage on the Iphone? I didn't see anything about a new AI subscription (maybe I missed it?), and I doubt Apple will want to pay million/billions a year to do it indefinitely.

There will be ads/our data.

Supposedly they're going to do a fair bit of it on device for privacy reasons, so the only payment for that will be RAM and battery power.

For stuff that can't be run on phones, some of it will be run on Apple's servers, which I'm assuming Apple is eating the cost of for the time being.

Stuff that needs heavy reasoning or external knowledge will be processed by google, in exchange for $1 billion a year. However Google already pays Apple $20 billion a year for google to be the default iOS search engine, so you could view this as just changing to google paying $19 billion a year instead.

I think the server-side stuff will be a mix of users & developers paying. I have seen this info in several places:

> PCC delivers a powerful server model without compromising privacy: data is never stored, used only for the request, and independently verified. It's integrated with the OS and iCloud, so there's no authentication or API keys, no token cost to developers, a daily per-user limit (higher with iCloud+), and eligibility for apps under 2M downloads.

Source: summary on https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/319/

I haven’t seen any information about what’s happening with apps over 2M downloads, who graduate from the Small Business Program. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...

Pricing is looking to be complicated and not clear cut.

Some of it is free on-device. Some of it is free & rate limited per day. They mentioned in the WWDC infomercial that users with iCloud+ (the storage tier subscriptions, Apple likes to throw random things in with that) will be able to get more uses per day. And some of it developers will pay for.

From Apple's press release: "Some features, including image generation, have daily usage limits because they rely on powerful server models. Increased access is available with most iCloud+ subscription plans, which also include Apple Intelligence support for compatible Home cameras." (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/apple-intelligence-br...)

Isn't it obvious? They bet on the same level of intelligence will get cheaper and cheaper and it'll be a smaller and smaller fraction of iPhone's profit.

And even if the assumption turns out to be wrong, they can just scale down and serve dumber and cheaper models. Shrinkflation is not a novel idea.

They briefly mentioned getting more access to some AI feature with an iCloud subscription so it isn't completely unlimited. Sorry I don't remember exactly what it is.

I mean, they're already subsidizing some of the phone services (e.g. maps) that users expect to have.

Op said himself there's no money selling chatbots to users... The money is in enterprise.

After the blowout success of the Macbook Neo, I'd think the bet would be on a cheap iPhone. Maybe not, as so many people finance their expensive phone through their carrier, but I suspect a $300 iPhone would eat the mid-range Android market.

Not sure about this- Windows laptops have been a disaster for a decade- consumers have basically no clue of what they're buying and how it will work- will it be a piece of cheap, creaky plastic; will the basics actually work (e.g. audio in and out); will the speed be acceptable, will its fans constantly sound like a jet taking off, etc. A well made cheap laptop with guaranteed quality is a godsend.

The case of smartphones is completely different: Android is actually a good OS and there's plenty of excellent devices and high quality brands in the mid range.

I really doubt it, for several reasons. The Neo is cheap because it mainly leverages a compute core that already existed, consisting mainly of binned parts.

Yes the chassis had to be designed, but that can be used in common for future iterations. That's much harder for phones where the chassis is very tightly coupled to the specific circuit board design.

The 17e already is the cheap iPhone and it's $599. Putting it's internals in a different shell is one thing. Designing and building a half price internal board is quite another, especially as it would either require an entirely new SOC, or mean continuing production of a legacy SOC thus taking up valuable die production pipeline capacity.

Even if they did use an older SOC. Now they'd have to continue supporting that anaemic underpowered SOC with OS updates for years to come, and these future OS updates would have to run well on it.

I don't see it happening.

iOS 27 supports devices all the way down to the iPhone 11, so I think they're doing pretty well here.

People would buy a $400 iPhone even if it's fatter than the competition. They most definitely have the ability to create a cheap phone from binned parts, even if they have to go as far as being unapologetically pastic.

Nobody would have guessed that Apple could ever produce the Neo, so you can't say Apple isn't looking into an iPhone Neo.

They had to replace the iPhone SE with a much more expensive iPhone 16e because of tariffs so I don’t think iPhones will get any cheaper.

In some regions. I am yet to see how much of a success it is when the euro based prices.

Side note, this page really likes to jiggle horizontally as you scroll.

Not on my phone. Ah the web, such a beautiful place.

This Microsoft notion of “devices that don’t stand alone but surround you” sounds an awful lot like Google’s “ambient computing” of yonder.

"The network is the computer." - Sun Microsystems, 1984

"Everything's computer" - Trump, 2025

Ambient computing goes back far further than that... and we are getting there. I have digital control over most of the lighting in my apartment as well as several other items through various iot adapters (button pushers, stepper motors attached to my blinds, power outlet relays). Audio reactive agents like alexa/bedpodsiri/whateverrunsheygoogle can put you in control of all of that. Nothing is stopping anyone from building a audio reactive agent that dumps input into their AI model or models of their choice if they want it.

With the right set-top-box, you tvs become just another display for whatever you want to send their way. We are extremely close to startrek tng style spaces. I'm sure there is a github repo out there that may even be there.

Why do you think apple has the appletv, the apple watch, the phone itself is essentially a pocketwatch with an addressable display.

I think we have all the parts it's just now about knitting them all together and building up a ux that works for normal people.

iPhone will always lead as long as iOS is the standard. To be honest, most companies do good phone frames. But they all run on Android.

Apple has been smart by keeping iOS only for them and not work with partners as Android does, it helps keeping it optimized.

If someone could do the same, it'd be a game changer in the next 10 years.

It kind of reminds me of Windows mobile and blackberry and palm os where apple was clearly behind but they eventually caught up. The first iPhone didn’t even have apps!

I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket. It’s okay and apple can easily simplify and eventually win. The mainstream hasn’t really started using agents yet and no one has come close to delivering a platform that will get them there.

> I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket

These ones also seem really weird because the baseline is most often someone using the iOS app to do the same thing, and the agent demos are usually slower in addition to being riskier. One of the Chrome demos had someone buying groceries at pretty hefty markup, which seemed to be targeting a narrow demographic of people who a) don’t worry about paying 50% more for produce and b) can spend time writing a prompt but not 30 second opening an app and just doing it with zero chance of getting scammed.

Something that I thought when reading this was that I'm not willing to buy groceries remotely, because when I had covid during the pandemic I had grocery delivery and I ended up with milk that expired in a few days and produce that was very subpar neither or which I would have bought in person.

I would actually be willing to use AI to purchase groceries if it could provide me with some assurance that it would choose the items better than a shopping cart.

As for now, I'm only willing to purchase non-perishable goods that are difficult to screw up online.

Might be a service idea for AI.

Shopping carts don't choose items, you do, you [redacted].

I agree but I also think this end up a case of "worse is better". Sure it sucks that doing things with AI is slower and more prone to issues, but now you can be more lazy and still mostly accomplish the same things.

I don't expect to go for that, but other people might. Especially if AI stuff continues to improve.

> I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket.

Once again, early 1990's General Magic looks prescient.

They were working on smartphones with agents capable of completing remote transactions before we had wireless data networks.

> General Magic: The Greatest Tech Company You’ve Never Heard Of

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tuFl4WEXBrk

> allowing end-user equipment with limited capabilities to upload Telescript programs to servers to allow them to take advantage of the server's capabilities. Telescript could even migrate a running program... transfer it to another Telescript engine (on a device or a server) to continue execution, and finally return to the originating client or server device to deliver its output.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langu...

> Apple is targeting consumers, for whom traditional chatbot functionality is probably sufficient for the vast majority of their AI needs.

I disagree strongly here. The chatbot is the furthest thing from sufficient for the average consumer. Take the newly announced feature that groups your compromised passwords together and offers to agentically change them all for you. Really cool! Could you do that via a chatbot interface? Sure. Would the average consumer? No.

I doubt the ‘average consumer’ is even using a password manager, let alone going to change their password because of something so common place as it being compromised.

On step into the markets in Shenzhen and you will know it is not over. That new foldy iphone is a bit dodgy tho..

title is too biased and sensational

first paragraph begins the article upon 2 very big and flawed statements:

> Apple fans would, for years and years, sneer at Microsoft’s penchant for talking about products that may or may not ship, deriding them as vaporware.

maybe some would, but as a whole I would say this is not a common thing

> After Apple’s bungled 2024 launch of Apple Intelligence and new Siri, however, vaporware is fair game

no it's not

I didn't know about Project Solara so learned a new thing from the article, but I got the impression that it's not as big as the author tried to make it seem, felt very distant and forced.

It only gets worse from there.

I stopped reading when he mentioned "..beyond the fact that billions.." I looked it up and iphone users are much less than two billions. I can't expect much axcuracy from this opinion.

I noticed the same thing. "The fact that billions of consumers already have iPhones" is a hallucination, not a fact. Billions of consumers have Android phones, but that's not the case for iPhones. (Billions of iPhones have been sold, though.)

> The concept — which isn’t entirely clear from that video, but was more fully explained on stage — is that in the future you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents, which live in the cloud.

The fuck I will.

There is no cloud, only other people's hard drives.

-- your increasingly crusty and curmudgeonly old Unix admin who is not paranoid because they are out to get you

> in the future you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents, which live in the cloud

Ewww, that's fucking gross. Please don't say such things when I'm about to eat.

I just know I'm going to end up having to pay more for a phone that doesn't have all this AI bullshit on it.

Wait what, is this a Microsoft ad in disguise?

Weirdly, despite the headline and how the article starts off, it’s pretty pro-Apple by the last paragraph?

iPhone's last stand? More like Microsoft's last stand. Nobody wants their garbage hardware and software outside of enterprise shmucks more interested in filling their pockets with fat contract money than delivering value.

> The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive

Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services?

> consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.

What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

> What they do want to do is watch short-form video

Yeah, it seems so.

> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

This hurts.

> brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?

I’m not religious but there’s a significant difference here.

Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false.

Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.

I don't think you've thought through what you're trying to assert. A god could make you believe anything they wanted to about the earth. So if you cannot disprove a god, then you cannot disprove the theory that the earth is flat.

I’m not sure you thought this through. Why would G-d want to or care to make one have thoughts.

why are you censoring the word 'God'?

It's common in many religious communities to not write the name of God out. I think it likely comes from the Jewish tradition.

The idea of not naming G-d is based on the concept of being human comprehension and not within realm of human language. G-d can name things in our world but it’s a one way street. For humans it’s presumptions to assign a name to G-d. it implies an understanding that can’t exist.

You can still believe that the scientific method works; and might leads you to 2 conclusions:

(a) "I can prove earth is not flat" (using this methodology) (b) I cannot prove there is no God, though I may believe the prevalence of evidence does not support the hypothesis, there's no scientific test that I can design.

The scientific method is partly inspired by belief in a God who is good (so no deceit) and created a universe that runs on laws. If you have particular beliefs about God, you can build a lot on that (as Descartes did).

Just because you think I am wrong does not mean I have failed to think through the various components/implications of my statement.

I can disprove that the Earth is flat with the incredibly varied, concrete, observable evidence that it is not. It comes in many forms and is undeniable, hence the lengths flat earthers have to go to to “prove” the evidence is all just a collection of lies that serve some nebulous, nefarious purpose (they don’t even agree on what that is) that serves some faceless evil group they prop up (usually “the deep state” or Jewish people). On the other hand, I do not have concrete, observable evidence that God does not exist. That’s the thrust of my point.

GP's argument is essentially this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon

Perhaps you might think this is bullshit because *obviously* this world is real and not an illusion and there is *obviously* no evil demon to deceive us into thinking the Earth is spherical instead of flat.

And yes this is what philosophers do. Nobody here is arguing that such demon exists and is actually deceiving us, but since you've accepted you can't prove god doesn't exist (maybe mis-step for you since you're probably not the philosopher type), well, can you prove such demon doesn't exist? Seems to me the same thing.

This is an incredibly patronizing and just generally annoying comment.

Sounds like a you problem. I didn’t find it to be either.

Don't know why you're downvoted so much, but your observation is spot on.

This is essentially Descartes evil demon issue. If you can't disprove that an evil demon (with god-level powers) is deceiving you at everything you perceive, then how are you going to be sure about anything? (including that the Earth is not flat?)

It has always been a difficult philosophical issue about how much we can trust reality itself.

That’s an interesting big picture philosophical question with big picture implications, but it’s not really what we are talking about here. We are confirming the things we can about our shared reality, not questioning its very nature.

and most people who believe in God will cite some evidence - religious experiences, or philosophical proofs or whatever. Whether you accept that evidence is sufficient or not, it is in an entirely different class.

Sure but I’m just not even opening that can of worms. I’m just focusing on the very clear cut difference here

That is a strawman. Who believes in an old man on a cloud judging everyone? Far fewer people believe anything like that than believe. Even online I have never come across anyone whose beliefs could be reasonably characterised that way.

>and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!

Access to knowledge doesn’t mean you automatically acquire that knowledge.

Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge.

If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them.

But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.

This doesn’t make any sense. We have more access to entertainment, be it comics, porn, or films, than any period in history, yet we continue to make more substantial scientific progress than any point in history.

Scientific progress is typically the result of outliers at the upper end of the normal distribution which doesn't inherently contradict a decrease in average knowledge. (i.e. a larger standard deviation could overcome a lower average)

Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.

We have one of the most incredible vaccine technologies in mRNA and yet vaccination rates are going down.

We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries.

We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations.

We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less.

We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever.

The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.

The things you describe may be problems in your country, but they're not universal.

Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.

I think you have the causation backwards: we have people thinking the world is flat because they can access the sum total of human knowledge, both true and false. There’s so much available, with similar production values, that going down brainwashing rabbit holes like flat earth, anti-vax, and more is a lot easier than it has ever been before.

Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7.

There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures.

Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!

Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the people - and at least Marx tried to put some rational thought into the idea by extrapolating from history - but how does one get from at least 2300 years of knowing that the Earth is round back to believing the Earth is flat?

> Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly

But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants.

Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2].

> but nobody believed in communism either

I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy

[2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016...

Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...

The 79% and 99.7% literacy numbers are tracking completely different concepts —- reading comprehension versus being able to read/write a sentence.

This should be obvious if you’ve ever been to a restaurant or airport in the USA, do you really think 1 in 5 adults can’t read a menu?

True, the USSR just had Lysenkoism (quite mainstream!), abiotic oil, deep research into psychics and telepathy, ufology, and Pamyat.

You can’t escape fringe beliefs, but admittedly it seems like there were fewer of them in the USSR. Or maybe they were just ignored, poorly documented, or still untranslated.

Ok yes, true. I guess Lysenkoism qualifies at best as 'pseudoscience'.

I'm talking mostly from a East German perspective in the late 70s and 80s (so quite late). I actually need to find out whether Lysenkoism was taken seriously in 1950's East Germany or whether it was silently ignored (open rebellion wouldn't have gone well with the 'Big Brother' in the East).

I've been slowly coming to the realization that a large percentage of people are just counter-cultural, be they smart or stupid. We think of the term in 1960s hippy movements, but some people want or need to believe there is a conspiracy or that everybody is wrong and they have some truth to believe in. Ignoring the people profiting off of these movements, I'd be curious to know if they just crave some kind of intellectual stimulation, are looking for an alternative to religion, or if it's something else.

> brother,

Why am seeing "brother" a lot recently?

Tiktok addicted kids, brother.

It’s kind of a meme

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ

I heard it with the voice of Macho Man Randy Savage

That's the only way I hear it. I wonder if that gives away our age?

When I was a teenager WWF came to my town. The day before the event a bunch of the wrestlers randomly showed up to my local gym to get a workout in. None of the guys, and especially Macho Man ever broke character the entire workout. They were super nice and after a bit of handshakes with us there we all just went back to our workouts.

Annyong hermano

Let me tell you something, brother - whatcha gonna do when a thousand Hulkamaniacs come tell you Macho Man was known for his Oh Yeah!

Kind of, but younger generation will prefix every sentence with "bro" so you can kind of see a generational difference.

But also, Warhammer 40K is popular.

"Bröther, may I have some öats?"

It enters your vocabulary three weeks into growing a handlebar mustache.

right???

The kids have made it come back over the last few years and it is finally filtering into adult lingo. My dude.

> capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge

No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.

Plenty has already been lost due to being buried in search, removed for lack of interest, or simplified so far as to be too generalized.

> yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life.

Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.

but, the earth is flatter than it looks … since, according to GR, spacetime is convex around it gravity well

Nice snark, but they're not all convinced of that via short form video. You can reach the same conclusion from 4-hour podcasts. Your point is kind of irrelevant.

My pet peeve is that every flat earther there are 1000 people complaining about them and keeping the meme alive at every chance possible.

At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.

Mate, I was buying a kebab and the guy was convincing me that the Earth is flat, there's no Moon. And it's proven by... something with shadows. At least I got a real kebab in the end.

> Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services?

Microsoft is still simply one of the very best at enterprise dealmaking.

I think Microsoft does have a point here: hosted services and thin clients are going to make money. (1) Their main focus is selling services, selling you, selling your data, and showing you ads. Children are being raised to think that asking chat to add two numbers is normal; they will enter the workplace in this state. Everything for MS is a service: this is going to work for them. And (2) because those hosted services will also replace some jobs, as the enterprise schmucks want.

How is that different than using a calculator

It's less likely to be accurate, it's slower, and far less efficient as a bonus.

Kids are absolutely using chat for calculator tasks.

There was a meme going around last week where a child saw a phone calculator app and remarked "wow there's an AI just for math".

Generalizing, they're using chat for everything else, like search. Actually reading a source is not on their radar.

This is frightening. A whole generation that will not, and can not, think. At all. "Do it for me."

If you want to get rich quick there's a huge lesson here: sell to children early. If you can get 5-year-olds hooked on your product and growing up thinking it's the only way to do things, they will give you a huge amount of money later in life. Such as paying ChatGPT to be a calculator.

I still can't get over people calling ChatGPT "chat" instead of it referring to a stream chat.

Microsoft winning here requires them to actually execute well which they have a long storied history of completely missing the window. Tablets, phones, MP3 players, they were always either too early or too late and their consumer marketing is terrible.

You could be right, but I don’t think it’s going to be Microsoft that’ll be the leader here.

The anger is real, but it's misguided (as anger mostly is). The benchmark is reality. Everyone is more "TikTok addicted kids" than not and the analysis is quite apt.

If enterprises were really focused on saving employee's time, Jira wouldn't sell. At least not the bog slow SaaS version

Saving time (==saving money) is something you can sell to companies. But above all, they are willing to spend on saving their managers time. The higher up the hierarchy, the better. If that involves wasting a lot more time for the underlings, then so be it. The underlings aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions after all

i dont think jira (or linear or any other ticketing platform) is about saving anybody time. they know on some level that they are all a burden.

but they will gladly take the productivity hit from that time sink because it gives them teh ability to track employees. they'd rather know that everybody is working at 80% productivity than release that burden and just trust them. it's either this or filling out frustrating timesheets.

The previous place I worked had the Head of Product become VP of Engineering after the CTO left (don't ask, it's a long story).

They literally implemented the most orthodox scrum you can imagine, with the one exception that they could sit on the sprint planning meetings and override the teams pulling tickets off the backlog into sprints (technical debt of course started to pile up).

The kicker is that after a few months of this, productivity slowed to a crawl. The retrospectives showed that the planning wasn't working because the planned work rarely got done - because we were always fighting fires. Work also slowed due to all the overhead that was added to implement scrum (I also had to participate, despite being in an DevOps role - that at the best of times is inherently interrupt driven and I'm servicing the work of developers). Despite the fact that the powers that be knew things were not working as well as they used to, no amount of feedback could loosen the reigns - probably because it inherently meant losing some control. We had to try everything else to get back to where we were, when empowered developers could make decisions. Things got worse of course as within 6 months we lost half our most experienced talent that wasn't going to put up with it (this was the peak 2022 tech hiring levels).

Eventually there was some mild "improvement" as we were allowed a "15% time" to work on what we thought was best, which still had to be justified and it was still the lowest priority during any given sprint. I still shake my head at the whole situation.

Thompson is speaking broadly about markets, not trying to put anyone down. The point he's getting at is that Apple and MS are just playing (or trying to play) to their strengths. Did you see anything in the new Siri AI demos that looked all that much like someone getting work done? I didn't. And that's fine, for Apple and the iPhone. Microsoft for better or for worse is what a large part of the American business world is using to get work done, and so Microsoft is trying to position their AI strategy towards that.

For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.

> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

It's not a "callous view," it's reality. Social media, entertainment/streaming/media, gaming, and porn make up the vast majority of minutes spent on the internet, and it's not even close.

Can you please not post to HN in the denunciatory/indignant style? I know it's popular on the internet but we're trying for curious conversation here, and those things can't co-exist.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

That last quote is when I stopped reading the article. The opening with the premonition of personal computing moving to the cloud, followed by the heavy use of the word "consumer", made it clear that the author has a cynical view of humanity, but at that point it went too far.

I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.

What struck me reading this is that everyone seems focused on who gets to own the next computing platform: Apple, AI companies, the cloud, agents, whatever comes next.

I wonder if the bigger question is what happens to us.

Convenience is great, but if we optimize away every moment of reflection, tradeoff, and decision-making, we risk becoming passengers in our own lives. The goal shouldn’t be to hand over our judgment to increasingly capable systems. It should be to use those systems to help us think more clearly and act more intentionally.

The future I want isn’t one where AI lives my life for me. It’s one where it helps me live it better.

Having watched Microsoft try and fail to launch countless new ideas into the market over the past couple decades, I have 0 faith in their ability to deliver something people actually use. Others, often Apple, seem to succeed where Microsoft had previously tried and repeatedly failed.

At least with Microsoft it’s more likely to not be a walled garden.

At least a walled garden exists. Microsoft pulls the products that don't work in the market. So either you're left with nothing, or endless migrations as they keep trying different things without traction.

If Windows Mobile* and maybe the Catapult FPGAs** are any indication, those are relatively lower walls than Apple.

The still unbroken(?) Zune and Windows RT are two rare exceptions.

* - from the HTC HD2 to the latter Lumias like the 1020 and 950/XL

** - buy a Quartus license and you have boatloads of small-ish DIY networkable Arria 10 GX accelerators at your disposal.

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