MBCook

No self-driving system of any kind should be allowed on the roads without some sort of federal testing. Allowing otherwise is insanity.

But here we are.

They hate being under someone else’s thumb and Qualcomm had real control over that. They couldn’t stand it and wanted out. Which is just as well, because clearly Qualcomm could’ve been doing better. Apple cut the power usage of the chip and it’s reportedly better than the Qualcomm one.

I’m glad we’re finally getting more competitors to Intel/AMD.

Better for everyone. Apple gets lazy on top. And for those who don’t want a Mac, they should be able to have something great too. And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors, I’d like to see what they try.

It wasn’t about dropping PPC. It was a project that was killed because they moved to PPC instead of Intel.

Right. I know they used the BIOS rewrite and way of keeping it in memory to base the PPC code on to get a jumpstart because it was already done and useful.

But it was never released as an x86 version, not even to developers. And by the time OS X went to Intel they were on a totally different codebase so I expect little if any code survived that.

Oh really? I had assumed it lost long long ago. Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways) I just didn’t think there would be enough copies of it to not get lost very quickly.

I’d kill to see Project Star Trek but well never see that.

For those who don’t know it was Apple’s port to Intel before they decided that PPC was the way forward after m68k.

Swift is not heavily tied to the Apple ecosystem anymore, and it’s getting better every year.

However that perception tends to mean it’s only heavily used there.

Home charging us a reasonably thick cable. It’s not bad by any stretch but it’s more than an appliance cord.

Plus you just got home. You probably want to go inside and may be carrying packages or such, which you might have to juggle or put down to get the cable and plug in.

When it’s time to leave you have to unplug and then store the cable, leave it on the floor (trip hazard for others), or have installed an overhead cable system.

With wireless it’s all gone. Pull into you’re garage? You’re done. You were doing that anyway, so it’s no different. Ready to leave? Just back out. Again, same thing. Nothing extra.

Yeah it’s convenience. But it’s not a small win, it’s big. And it’s every time you use your car. Twice.

Your car can always charge. It can always precondition. You used to have to go to gas stations, now you don’t even have to plug in. It’s fully automatic and taken care of for you.

“You don’t need a remote. You can just get up to change the volume”. How well did that argument go over? Every TV has remotes. Buttons are hidden and effectively dead.

They could have just talked out of both sides of their mouths. Tell the public it’s to curb abuse, tell the police in private “we all know what it’s really for” wink-wink-nudge-nudge.

Maybe offer up a few token cases where they caught abuse and the cop got in trouble or something changed as proof.

Nope. You’re right, they ran right into that wall.

Well put, they had a delicate line.

Those departments buy their products. If they took that angle publicly I bet many departments would suddenly been much less interested in buying/renewing. Accountability seems to be super unpopular (which says A LOT) with their customers.

I’ve been following kernel development for something like three years using LWN and other sources.

I can’t remember anyone earning the level of hostile treatment he did and getting kicked out.

I don’t see how it would ever happen.

So even if this does release pressure with no negative side effects anywhere it isn’t actually useful for preventing “the big one”.

They’ve been through this a few times before, and they absolutely know how important it is.

If they had tried to move to Apple Silicon and said “but none of your old software will work“ it would’ve been dead in the water. Look at how well the early Windows on ARM efforts went, although they were also hamstrung by hardware.

Yeah, I thought that was interesting. Knowing Apple they must’ve profiled a ton of code and decided the hit from not “fixing“ that wasn’t worth enough.

The M chips were already so much faster then the Intel chips Apple was using before (except on Mac Pro maybe) that it was probably still a net win.

> If they’re not selling tokens (and why would I want them to)

That’s one of the two things that has stood out most to me. Siri AI answers my questions. And that’s it. She stops.

Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic all constantly try and get you to answer follow-up questions. Because if you do that, you’ll use up more tokens and get more “addicted“ and end up buying a plan.

Apple doesn’t have one. I guess iCloud, but let’s face it, they already pushed that a ton anyway. They’re not trying to get you to use it for the sake of use. It’s not trying to be your friend.

And just like David Pogue says, it doesn’t lie. I just asked it an incredibly stupid question. Can you get pregnant from a picture?

“While I'm not a doctor, no, you cannot get pregnant from looking at a picture of someone. Pregnancy requires physical contact and the transfer of sperm to an egg. For accurate information regarding reproduction, consult a healthcare professional.”

Look at that! It immediately says it’s not a doctor. It gives a good answer, and then it says you need to seek out real advice to be sure things are accurate. Of the summer, I also got responses that ended with something along the lines of “I am an AI, please check information for accuracy.”

I’ve gotten incorrect answers, but they come with disclaimers and it doesn’t act like some omnipotent god that is desperate to be your friend.

I seriously doubt they’re going to give anyone else access. They’re fighting the EU over it. But I guess we’ll see.

More than once has has told me something, and I had to ask how it knew. And it would tell me exactly how and what do you know it was there somewhere on my phone.

You realize this isn’t an Apple marketing piece, it’s an extremely well known tech reviewer who used to work for the NYT and was one of the two(?) who was allowed to test the iPhone before its release.

I wonder if it would start to make sense for SRAM caches to shrink (or not grow as fast) in favor of adding on chip DRAM cache at some tier.

Some of it is. He did the classic “book an entire vacation for me“ except he only asked it to plan.

No one is ever going to just tell a phone to book a vacation for them. It won’t know what you want well enough. Planning is much more reasonable because then you can just adjust whatever you don’t like.

But as a demonstration, it certainly shows how far Siri has come. It probably would’ve just offered to do a web search before.

The things I’ve found it really useful for so far is the “find this piece of information that must exist on my phone somewhere, but I don’t have the slightest clue where“ kind of query.

I’ve been using it off and on since DB2.

David Pogue is right, it’s very impressive. He and basically everyone else make the same comment, and I fully agree: it’s hard to remember to even use it.

I used Siri a ton before, but always for basically the same four commands. Create reminder, call X, send a text to Y, set a timer for Z minutes.

And after years of that, it’s hard to remember to do more. But when I do it can often shock me.

It’s not fast. Which is quite annoying for those quick actions I used to do. But I’m OK with that on my phone. Not happy with it on my watch.

It’s not ChatGPT 5.6. And I’m sure they’ll get it faster over time. But in my mind they finally delivered.

I don’t see what those two have to do with each other. Could you explain?

Oh, people already do that here too. The storage unit is the next bucket of overflow.

IDK. We’d already had plenty of spying by companies, the government, police abuse, etc.

It was all quite plain then. And the very heavy rhetoric made it very obvious which direction things would go.

Yeah, that was kind of odd.

Maybe they also mean suicidality after ending up in a ton of debt? Or just other self-harm because of it?

Personally, I really don’t like the expansion of legalized gambling. I’m not surprised it’s causing serious issues.

I would at least be more OK if it happened but advertising was heavily restricted/banned in context. The fact that every professional sport seems to be nothing but a thin wrapper around gambling ads now can’t possibly be good for us as a society.

It’s not like this stuff wasn’t known to be a problem 10 years ago. We were already in Trump’s first term, it’s not like it was part of the early post 9/11 “secure everything” push. It was WAY after that.

10 years ago is no excuse.

It is authentic, in a way. It’s exactly what you took a picture of.

I do wonder how easy that would be to detect, but I can’t help but think some sort of artefacting or something would show up.

Wasn’t that exactly the legal standard Compaq had to prove when they did a clean room implementation of the IBM BIOS?

I’m sure it’s really easy when you can get help from the people who made the chip or write the Apple drivers.

It’s taint. Anyone who looks at it can’t work on a real open source driver because they will have had access to information they’re not supposed to.

It won’t be clean room like the stuff Alyssa did.