This is an ill-informed take. My lifetime has seen transformative, inexpensive medications dramatically increase the healthspans of literally billions of people. Atorvastatins have reduced heart disease and extended lives across the globe for pennies a day, and GLP-1 drugs are helping countless people overcome an epidemic of obesity - those, too, will fall in price over time.
I’m sorry, but a major home improvement investment of $6,500 per room relying on a small VC-backed startup is a recipe for disaster, given its cloud-connected nature. If it shipped with Matter/HomeKit/etc support out of the box, I might feel more confident knowing I can still configure it long after the company goes belly up, or Google buys in and inevitably kills the product 10 years from now.
Stock buybacks are an illegal stock manipulation that were routinely prosecuted as such before the Reagan administration waved a magic wand and decided it was kosher. If Google has $70 billion for stock buybacks, then Google has $70 for taxes, and strong pro-unionization rules are called for to tip the balance of power towards workers. Why did we create rules of the road where corporations and shareholders became the guiding force of our economy, when workers’ spending power keeps us afloat?
More or less same with me. I wore mine for years, and upgraded a couple of times. But interacting with it is awkward, and my Apple Watches have easily been the most glitchy Apple products I’ve ever owned. I stopped wearing mine about 6 months ago and I don’t miss it. In fact, I starting buying watches I like - vintage digital watches and mechanical watches, and I’m much happier.
When I saw the backlash, I thought it was silly. Until I saw the ad. It really was in poor taste. It shows Apple’s total lack of engagement with the real world, with art and artists and their instruments and tools. In Apple’s universe, those are all distilled to digital facsimiles that can fit on a glass slab.
A much better ad! Showing the iPad as so much more than the some of its parts, instead of Apple’s original ad, which is to take all the charm and joy and talent required to make art in real life and discard it for a lifeless slab of glass.
I love how people compare products like this or Apple Vision Pro to the original iPhone to make the point that products with limited appeal can flourish into something incredibly useful. The comparison is bad. The iPhone promised to be three things: a phone, an iPod, and a web browser. And it performed these tasks well! It didn’t oversell what it was, and it was a revelation. I owned the first gen shortly after it came out, and I fell in love.
None of these products fit that bill. Hell, Apple Watch still doesn’t, nearly a decade later.
Apple is a corporation that exists to make money for its shareholders. It spent $10 billion to develop an Apple Car because it thought it would make a nice ROI by doing so, but failed. Do you think the money was spent altruistically? LOL
If my comment didn't make sense to you, read it again, slowly. "Open markets" is not an Orwellian phrase - it's well-understood by anyone with any economic literacy that competition in markets requires those markets to be regulated in order to avoid monopolies and other trusts. Apple introduced a great product in the iPhone, no question about that. And Apple is rewarded through its efforts by enjoying large profit margins on the handsets it sells. This should be obvious. What Apple isn't entitled to is to charge rents for the right to simply exist on its devices. Anyone who understands the power of open systems in the technological revolution over the last thirty years can grasp this easily. It's what gave us the web, and spawned trillions of dollars in economic growth as companies developed for the web and for hundreds of millions of personal computers. It isn't economically productive to have one or two or three gatekeeping companies capture a slice of that revenue just because they can. That 30% revenue that's lost to Apple is paid for directly by the consumer, obviously.
To help unmuddle your thinking, Apple doesn't subsidize the cost of the iPhone with its services revenue. Apple makes blockbuster profits on every phone it sells, and always has. I'm not an app developer, and I'm not even in the technology industry. But I understand economics and antitrust law, and don't wear my ignorance of either as a badge of honor while shitposting replies to people's comments.
I feel like you didn’t understand my comment in the historical content in which I intended it. Government spending is directly responsible for huge technological leaps in the 20th century, and not today. Obama’s stimulus act funded loans to clean energy companies and was pilloried when bets failed. The country that I grew up in tossed billions into cool shit and nobody ever said boo about it, and we ended up world leaders for decades. The Chinese are doing that now, while we dicker around.
Of course it can replicate existing workflows and show existing content. The exciting potential of this class of device lies in the immersive experiences that exist only as demos. This is content that must be tailor-made for VR/AR/XR. Honestly, I own a Quest 2, and I barely use it. Not because of the resolution, but because the immersive content just isn’t there. There are demos, but nothing I can sink my teeth into. Apple is in a prime position to change that, it they don’t really even acknowledge the problem.
And yet, in Apple’s preferred world, they suck up 30% of all of the revenue made by developers who develop for their devices. The Mac model may not exist in 10 years if Apple can get rid of it and replace it with a locked down App Store from which they charge rents.
Guess what? Joe Consumer lives in a society that has an economy. And that economy thrives on open markets and competition. US antitrust law knew this from Teddy Roosevelt all the way until Ronald Reagan gutted that notion, and began to focus only on consumer harm. But consumers aren’t the only part of an economy! They’re probably not even the most important part. Open competition is vital for a diverse and open economy where all sorts of market entrants can participate, and create companies that pay taxes, and create jobs for people who are also, in turn, consumers. Sometimes higher prices are worth it if an economic sector is open and thriving. We know this intuitively when it comes to trade protections, as countries like Germany go to great lengths to protect domestic manufacturing at the expense of cheaper cars.
The iPhone did exactly what it set out to do. Steve Jobs sold it as three devices in one - a phone, iPod, and web browser. It delivered beautifully. I owned it shortly after launch and immediately fell in love. I don’t know anyone who can say the same for Apple Vision Pro.
There was a lot of breathless coverage about how Steve Jobs was irreplaceable, and Apple hummed along for years after his death and seemed to do not only fine, but achieved heights Jobs maybe never even dreamed of. But the columns were right - Apple is completely rudderless and has been for years. Apple literally prints money increasingly from “services,” which is made up in large part of rent-seeking. It’s why they’re willing to burn their reputation by fighting antitrust regulation until the bitter end.
Steve Jobs was Walt Disney - Apple didn’t invent products to make money, they made money to invent more products. Now, the bean counters are in charge. I’m an Apple fanboy for 25 years now, and I find their latest products, and the company itself, now completely charmless. Apple Vision was always going to be a flop because nobody gives two shits about how many pixels you can strap to your face; they care about the experience. And Apple Vision gives you precious little content to experience. Jobs would have never shipped this product without the content to make it shine. But he died a lifetime ago in tech…
This is what happens when government sets clear goals for technological advancement and subsidizes industry to meet those goals. The US used to do that, and we made huge leaps in technology and science for decades with that approach. And then some movie actor came in and convinced Americans to divert the tax money to do that back to the pockets of the super rich, by saying that government was the enemy. And we’ve stagnated ever since.
You mean the brilliant plan of going to the literally middle of nowhere, in a state run by revanchist anti-government lunatics, that alternates between staggering heat and debilitating ice storms, all to escape taxes, didn’t work out as planned? Color me shocked.
Amtrak from NYC to DC fluctuates in pricing but can be $35 each way, if booked booked far enough in advance. That’s about the same distance from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas. So I think it’s a similar ballpark to a plane ticket.
Awesome! Now I can drive an hour+ to Rancho Cucamonga, park, wait for the train, pay the equivalent of four plane tickets for my family, then take a 2 hour+ train ride, instead of driving for 4 hours from my house for the cost of half a tank of gas ($35). So cool!
Google Plus had 100 million active users. Wouldn't have called that mainstream either. Apple's iMessage has 1 billion MAU - that's the kind of scale that Apple can achieve, instead of being a niche novelty for most people, or as others have brought up, the go-to tool to write essays for English 207.
The most glaring issue facing China today is the concentration of power in Xi. Not that the CCP has ever been known for its transparency or openness, but there was a time not too long ago where the party elevated technocrats and had ruling cabals with some (limited) diversity of opinion and thought. Xi upended that system by making himself central to China's governance, and has filled out the ranks of the CCP with yes men. NYT had a good write up on this months ago with organizational charts that showed how dramatic his consolidation of power has been.
China's newfound adversarial tone with its neighbors, and with the US and Europe, is more a product of Xi's whim and worldview than it is the product of a deliberative strategic process. Among the failures in China that can be attributed to Xi and his yes men has been the COVID containment strategy - rather than developing state of the art vaccines and embarking on a program of convincing the population to get vaccinated and take other precautions, China was handling COVID through draconian lockdowns months, and even years, after other countries found other ways to contain COVID spread and treat the illnesses it caused. By mid-2022, the Chinese populace was up in arms over the lockdowns, and the vaccine uptake (of a vaccine that wasn't even close to matching the efficacy of mRNA vaccines) was dismal. Xi finally relented, but that episode showed that nobody was willing to challenge Xi's vision, and so he ruled from a bubble.
Democracy is important, not only from a human rights perspective, but it keeps government accountable in important ways. China under Hu Jintao wasn't democratic, obviously, but it's easy to see that his government made more attempts to have its ear to the ground and not get too far beyond public sentiment.
Which is all to say, I'm not optimistic for China's future given Xi's continued poor judgment, and the lack of a functioning ruling committee that could pivot based on data, instead of being beholden to one man's whim.
I really don’t think that’s true at all. ChatGPT is absolutely not mainstream. It’s pierced the consciousness of the tech-savvy, which maybe be our world, but is decidedly not mainstream. Most people would have no idea how to even use it, they hear about it from headlines. Having it in your pocket and interacting with it on a near-daily basis would be that mainstream moment, whether Apple gets there this year or Google manages to get that feature in tens of millions of phones through an update to its essential services through the Play Store. But your comment definitely shows what it means to be in a bubble.