I've always thought letting the free market decide everything is not an optimal strategy. Protecting sovereignty of key industries like this is a good example.
What IMO is a bad strategy is the aversion to nationalization that exists in the USA. They buy billions worth of shares in key companies to inject capital during times of crisis, to later divest and refuse to be a player in industry.
China's model is much more complex. There's state-owned companies, companies where the state is a major stake-holder, and private companies too. It seems to afford them more tools to push and steer industries as they see important.
The USA is no stranger to this at smaller scales; airports are state run (at the municipal or state level). This rids them of the burden of profit, and allows them to be strategically use for the broader benefit when it makes sense.
Some are profitable; state-run doesn't necessarily mean unprofitable. But some can written off as infrastructure investments that don't make money but make other industries in the region competitive. At some point this makes sense if you want to keep pushing forward; let's stop worrying too much about making money on X, because if X is a widely-available commodity, we can instead make money on Y and Z.
I see it in Mexico too. Mexico's private healthcare is affordable and good because it has huge state-run healthcare system to compete with. State-provided healthcare isn't the best or fastest healthcare you can get, but it is free. This certainly puts competitive pressure on private healthcare companies, and in a way gives the Mexican government the best regulatory tool: the market itself. The Mexican government isn't trying to destroy private health, but via the state health enterprise it gains tools to steer and push the health industry in ways it may deem important.
Looking at the state of EVs and the car industry, I think it's clear whatever the Chinese government did to incentivize EV innovation was more effective than the federal incentives the USA government provided. At one point the USA government had a 60% stake in General Motors [1]; meaning it was nationalized, before being privatized again by 2013.
I just wonder what the USA could've done with that machinery; could they have offered a cheap EV, even if it's low quality, to push adoption, competitive pressure and get supply chains going? Could they have further commoditized certain parts to lower costs? Could they have strategically opened factories in certain locations to lower the risk and investment cost of future companies, and this way get the ball rolling on creating new auto-industry regions? We will never know, but we do know the USA's auto industry is now on the defense playing catch-up to China, and there seems to be little the USA government can do except placing tariffs and offering subsidies.
Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products. IMO as long as it remains that way, the incentives for its developers will remain fairly aligned with the incentives of people who use it outside the company.
A good example is React. Facebook's interest is that React be performant (website performance is correlated with time spent on said website), reliable (also correlated to time spent), quick to build on (features ship faster) and popular (helps new recruits hit the ground running). That's fairly well aligned with what developers outside of Facebook want too.
Sure, since Facebook's server is written in Hack it means we'll never get a truly full-stack React, and instead we'll need third parties for the back-end (Next.js, Tanstack Start, etc). But Facebook building react also means it will always be someone's job to make sure this Framework works well in codebases with millions of modules.
This is all independent of any shitty practices with their other software. And this has been for decades at this point.
> Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products.
Doesn't that just make it even worse? If Anthropic can't even afford to spend the engineering effort on making sure their core product functions properly, why should we assume that they'll be investing serious resource into what is essentially some upper manager's loss-leader pet project?
If Anthropic is financially hurting, why shouldn't they put Bun on the bare minimum of life support?
Because they need it to work, so that everything built on it works too.
Building developers sell you the apartment, not the elevator room, the electrical room, mechanical room, etc. They will make all sorts of controversial decisions with the apartments; odd layouts, ugly flooring, weird pricing, tacky finishes, etc. The "core product" is the money-maker, that's where the egos clash, priorities change, and where they try to charge as much as possible while they cut costs as much they can.
No one is buying the electrical room though. It just has to work. Yes, you'll make it as cheaply as possible; no flooring, no paint on the walls, no interior designer meetings to argue what's the right tone beige for the walls. But it'll do what it needs to do. It'll keep the lights on. Otherwise you can't sell any of the apartments.
Same thing with Facebook; there's active incentive to introduce all sorts of dark patterns over their app, to ignore certain bugs, to unnecessarily change things, etc. But none of those incentives are present with React. The incentive is to keep React reliable and performant, and to keep the team lean. I'm sure it's similar with Bun in Anthropic.
And to be clear, Anthropic definitely spends most of it's engineering effort making sure their core product "functions properly". This "functions properly" is just different for us as clients vs them as a corporation. There is high overlap, since they need to keep us clients happy. But a well-functioning product at a company is one that leads to money. I'm sure very capable engineers pushing the okrs they care about.
I think they're doing too much vibe coding and not enough QC... I don't think it's a matter of not having the resources so much as running while juggling multiple sets of scissors..
I think this can be true at the IC level and in situations where the organization's success depends on the product being good, but that's not always the case. Big companies with market control can go years, or perhaps even indefinitely make bad product decisions and still print money. Product development comes to revolve less around merit and more about appearances.
I've worked in big tech and had the sort of conversations with my managers where they say: "The work you're doing in X is great. I use it and it really needs work. But it's not a priority, or even 'impactful'. Your work on X is effectively equivalent to doing no work".
Sometimes it isn't even about getting a promotion, sometimes the implication is you should be worried about keeping your job. You can still do X which everyone knows is great and someone should do, but "on your spare time, as an extra" because Y is what your performance review will really revolve around.
The sad part is I can tell they mean it, and do agree someone needs to work on X, but it isn't their decision to make, because they have to show face and explain to their manager why an engineer earning XXX,XXX didn't meaningfully work on Y. Ultimately someone up the chain who you've never talked to is the person who decided X is unimportant; they don't want to kill it they just don't use it, or have a strategic reason to not care about it.
In the politics of upper management perhaps it was something an adversary used to vouch for, and now you have to prove the org can do without it. Or perhaps it's the ace in your pocket, and you wan't it to be lack-luster so when the big boss above you starts talking about retirement, you can show amazing wins in the area and be first in line for succession. Companies are not democracies. For better or for worse big companies are not democracies, they are feuds, so if the kingdom isn't in danger its future comes to depend a lot not on what's the best decision, but how a decision fits the game of thrones.
I grew up with this animation so I didn't consider it annoying until I bought a new Macbook a couple years ago.
I noticed sometimes I would press keyboard shortcuts before my system's focus had switched. Just little stumbles here and there, some inoffensive, some annoying, but who knows maybe I didn't catch enough sleep.
Over time it happened often enough that I decided to google it, and it turns out my muscle memory wasn't failing me; the animation speed did change ever so slightly and was slower in new Macs with 120Hz displays [1][2] (newer MacBooks, 2021+). If you switch your screen to 60Hz it goes back to the faster animation.
Why is this animation slower now, and why does it depend on screen refresh rate? I have some technical theories but can't think of an organizational reason it happened and hasn't been fixed 5 years later at a 3.82 trillion market cap company. If you Google it there's plenty of discussions online about this. It's noticeable and annoying to people who have used the feature often enough.
I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever.
I'd like to see them make some costly signalling to indicate that they are going to turn it around like maybe buy two Superbowl ads in a row and let the CEO make a personal apology.
Isn't going to happen because the competition is Microsoft and Intel and Dell who won't hold them accountable and it is just too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.
> I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI
I'm pretty confident many Apple employees have eyes, and thus are aware of how absurd Liquid Glass is (wtf, my iPhone capitalizes that but not a standalone i?!?!)
So assuming everyone at Apple isn't deaf (it's all over public discourse), blind (it looks bad), and dumb (no genius needed), then how does it get through? I can only see a few scenarios, none of which are good.
Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management?
Maybe management isn't receptive to their employees who voiced concerns?
Maybe key decision makers have pushed themselves into an echo chamber where it's difficult to hear concerns.
One of these has to be true, or some combination. But none of these are good, they are incredibly destructive to companies. Though also unfortunately common across monopolies. Iron Law of Bureaucracy hard at work...
I often think of that scene in Pantheon where they basically say they don't know what to do after Steve died. You can only laptops so small... and they're so small that anyone that puts on lotion is going to have an imprint of their keyboard on their screens... Steve wouldn't have accepted that
It gets through because Cook has no eye for design or usability (he's a supply chain guy) and Alan Dye, who Cook put in charge of software design, wanted it that way. I'm sure there are designers who hated it, but they don't have the final say.
Apple is hurt by being so centralized Cupertino IMO. A company that big in city that small and frankly, boring, isn't going to have the best hiring pool.
I know plenty of very talented people who simply won't apply to Apple. They don't want to live in Cupertino or have to commute 2+ hours each day to go to work.
Steve Jobs was a middle-class guy trying to find his place in the world; the kind to travel India to to meet Neem Karoli Baba, shaved head, barefoot, wearing kurtas [1]. 50 years later, who grows up in Cupertino? It's no longer "middle-class". I'm sure Cupertino produces some excellent talent that did great at some top university, but I'm also sure it's not the kind that rocks the boat, or the kind that will push a "dumb decision" out of principle at work and get fired, like Jobs did back in 1985.
When I think Cupertino, the city, I don't think vibrancy of the built environment, diversity of professions, or wealth of ideas. I think comfort, complacency and quiet. The type of place that repels the kind of people who want to fight in the trenches, and slowly milds the fight out of those who do move there.
I can only assume Apple, like a lot of the Bay at this point, survives from imported talent. The kind that is hungry enough to move across the country, or across the globe, to achieve something. But if you're in demand, why would you want to work in Cupertino and not San Francisco? Or better yet New York, Shenzhen, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, etc. Money only motivates people so much, and people who are in it for the money don't stand up for or against things in the same way.
I think a lot of Bay Area companies don’t come to their full potential because of their location. I think Apple does so well though that I couldn’t tell them to change anything,
They are singular in a lot of ways. I was working with a business development guy on something that could have been “like Palantir but 10x potential TAM” and we seemed to have a knack for getting people to tell us more than they should have. Like instead of breaking up we should have gone into industrial espionage but I’ve seen just enough of that world to know better.
We heard from all sorts of places where “people never talk” but never Apple.
> Steve Jobs was a middle-class guy trying to find his place in the world; the kind to travel India to to meet Neem Karoli Baba, shaved head, barefoot, wearing kurtas
I'm gonna be real: I've seen guys with shaved heads and kurtas at Apple Park. Admittedly they did have shoes but Indian people aren't "exotic", they're just people.
This isn’t unique to Apple. The Windows developers were very vocal about a full screen start menu in Windows 8 being a bad change. We were told that we weren’t allowed to talk about it anymore on the large mailing list about the product. The decision had been made and complaints would no longer be read or responded to.
It's significantly worse on Mac than iOS, which gives you the answer. On iOS it's fine, even good. I prefer it, as a designer. On Mac it's a mess, and obviously spent less time baking.
> Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management?
I can tell you with confidence that this isn't the issue. HIG (Human Interface Guidelines: a design spec that became a department / org) overrides them.
> too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.
You mean the flagship chip from their former pro phones? I was with you until you said this. Makes you sound out of touch or ideological.
I think they've been on the worst design tear since they went to OSX for the past eight-ish years. At no point does their awful software design intrude on their awesome chip designs.
My partner's first Mac is a MacBook Neo and she loves it. Pink. Looks pretty good. Does what she needs. Not right for me, probably not right for you, but what I'd tell my mother to buy if it existed when I told her to buy a regular MacBook Air.
It's not meant to be an insult, I have a phone in my pocket with one of those chips. back when I was using Android I was like "why do people get so excited about apps?" but the iPhone experience is all different. They are "rejects" because a lot of them have a busted core which can be fused off.
If there's a problem w/ the Neo in it's current incarnation is that are going to run out of those chips and find something else. It takes an advantage of the opportunity and might be the beginning of a new market segment for Mac which will hold PC and Chromebooks accountable.
(Funny a pink netbook served me really well back in the day! I remember using one to log ham radio contacts from a mountaintop near San Luis Obispo into a sqlite database and then using it as the best ever car computer in the passenger seat of a car with Microsoft Streets & Trips and a music player)
My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs.
From my experience, "annoying but not blockers" bugs are often very neglected compared to (1) bugs that actually break things and (2) feature work. Neglecting quality of life issues leads to the "do you even use your product??" kinds of experiences.
Soo many things either work buggy, laggy, inconsistent, or don’t work at all
Filling bugs doesn’t help. And I don’t think anyone is inventive to fix bugs. Resolving sure. But closing WONTFIX or NEEDSINFO is also a resolution.
Most of what I do is chrome +Linux terminals and vscode anyway
And the only reason I’m on Mac is because of hardware, encryption, and ease of backup/restore/wipe, and the power struggle of Linux distros. freeBSD is not really an option
There's a windowing bug that was introduced in 2009 that I'm confident will persist until MacOS has another MacOSX-style transition to something entirely new. They need someone who cares about fit&finish more than features driving the ship. That's not what gets promoted to the top, unfortunately.
Steve Jobs knew what he wanted and was willing to put his foot down in order to get it. Yea, I’m sure he was difficult to work with and drove people insane, but he was the plumb line that kept Apple driving in (mostly) the right direction. Now, it seems like they have bored designers trying to make a name for themselves with a “new” and “revolutionary” interface in Liquid Glass, which nobody likes and is less usable than its predecessor. But nobody ever got promoted for maintaining the status quo, so they are going to push forward. Steve’s advantage was that he never needed to be promoted.
Well, the UI leader behind Liquid Glass is no longer with the company, replaced by a long time Apple employee known for his eye for detail.
I do t think Liquid Glass is going to go away soon, Apple doesn’t seem to reverse itself ever, but I do expect Liquid Glass to become better over time. We’ll see what WWDC brings on that front I guess.
My take on it is that in my own work I really like transparency effects but it is always a chore to tune up the foregrounds, backgrounds and alpha blending to keep everything legible. If you control all the content it is one thing, but for a general-purpose OS where the content is supplied by the user and applications you have to dial the intensity way back.
When I first saw the prototype images I thought they were really cool and it was a bold idea though people on this site were complaining about it already for the predictable reasons.
When it came out I was thinking that they dealt with the legibility of the content by dialing down the legibility of the design -- like it looks like "anti-anti-aliasing" more than it looks like "bold transparent vision"
One reason I don't think I read it as "refraction" is that one of my tells for refraction is chromatic aberration and without that it doesn't seem real to me. I think it would triple the texture lookup rate (at least) and make content legibility worse and I think you would see a lot of people say it is was an ugly gimmick.
Technically, I’m awed by it. Very cool visually. It’s just when you go to use it that it all falls apart. As you say, they can’t control the content it’s flying over, and thus sometimes it does bad things. But also they rearranged navigation and some other things. I try to keep from rejecting new things just because they are new, but there were some serious usability gaffes in both iOS and iPadOS. Interestingly, macOS doesn’t have the same issues and I’m actually somewhat ambivalent about it.
I agree, but also they broke that rule very recently when they lowered the price of a display and issued refunds one month after intro. The VESA price dropped $400. I learned about it from Accidental Tech Podcast.
I have not been impressed with Cook in the slightest. He came from Compaq, if I am not mistaken, and in many ways, I feel like Apple has become more Compaq-like during his tenure.
Interesting. I have worked with a CEO that did exactly that.
The product quality was just insane.
I have also worked with people in power who believed they were doing the same, but actually just had weird taste in interfaces and ended up screwing up the product.
The thing / issue at this point is though: how much is Jobs still responsible for Apple's ongoing success? He died 15 years ago, two years after Apple introduced "flat design" (to much criticism at the time but people got used to it). But after his passing, Apple's market value went from ~500 billion to ~4 trillion today, more than an 8-fold multiplication.
I find it hard to believe that his influence was so strong that it had an inertia that lasted for 15 years. Ive left his mark on it for longer.
Apple had a few near death experiences and might not have survived.
One of those early near death experiences might have been Jobs fault (going at the Apple /// and the Mac when, in retrospect, the Apple ][ could have been evolved more aggressively) but he helped bring it back from the brink later on.
Android deserves a lot of credit for the success of iOS in that a zombie mobile OS that doesn't have to be profitable has displaced a competitive mobile OS. A similar kind of fragmentation has bedeviled the Windows (and Linux) PC as well as (from the viewpoint of Windows) distractions such as Azure (good business) and XBOX (bad business.)
Intel deserves a lot of credit for the success of Apple too because for 15 years Intel has had no strategy to translate architectural improvements to experienced performance for client PCs. The way they've gone about SIMD is an absolute disaster, like by the time we can use AVX-512 in mainstream software everybody will have moved on to ARM. Charlie Demerjian would talk your ear off about how the tech press has been uncritical about their hyperscaler/HPC patter, never reminding you that client PCs are still the bread and butter of their business -- pander to the likes of Amazon and they will use any cost savings they get to invest in ARM. It's suicide.
I guess that depends on what you put into the word "success". I dont believe that great design work or great products and high market cap has ever been that related to each other.
With that said I dont think Steve built Apple alone either. And i think they have done some great things after his death as well.
> My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs.
I think you are right. He was not perfect and not always nice, but man that dude CARED. Nobody at Apple cares any more.
I… think that actually Liquid Glass was put on the iPhones to make sure that older iPhones that still have relatively fast chips can show up finally slower than the brand new ones, and that with this stress there’s again a much larger slope in difference between an older iPhone and a newer one which causes enough nagging in users to upgrade = buy a new one.
I mean, their damn phone keyboards are so bad I'm 100% confident that Tim only does voice to text on his phone. There's no way that the CEO of a company could use a keyboard that horrible and not want to fix it.
It’s SO bad. It makes me not want to use my phone anymore and physically go get my laptop if I’m chatting/messaging someone.
It’s probably the worst typing experience I’ve had since resistive-touch screens on PDAs. At least with them you could still type what you intended to though, just slowly.
I've heard this advice before and I've tried it, and I really didn't notice a difference. I also, unfortunately, use swipe to type a lot. If I'm typing one handed I'm pretty much always using swipe. Sure it barely works, but that's the same as if I was typing normally so feels like a wash.
Keyboard works fine. Always has. iPhone just has so many users that there's going to be a plethora of passionate unpleasable nerds for every single facet of it. Even in your ideal virtual keyboard version, there was an army of people complaining that it wasn't a hardware keyboard.
I’ve never really disliked the keyboard. I’m not entirely sure what they’re talking about. That being said I’ve never used swipe to text so maybe that factors in, or never having had a smartphone other than an iPhone.
If you had ever used Swype on Android (it was only briefly on iOS, and wasn't as good as the Android version yet), you would understand how good keyboards could be 10-12 years ago. Perfect precise cursor placement. Cut, copy, paste, and select shortcuts. It was not perfect, but it was rapidly getting there.
Microsoft bought and killed it without, apparently, learning from it. Maybe there was a good reason why, but I've never seen one.
Nice strawman, and unnecessary attack. I'm using iPhones since the 3GS, and from time to time type on an Android and the keyboard on iOS _sucks_. As someone else wrote, I am loathing to chat with someone on the phone and rather switch to my laptop.
I'm on 26.4 on a brand new 17 Pro Max, recently upgraded from a 13 Pro Max, and I have noticed absolutely no difference in the keyboard. It's still awful.
was only dumb for a month or few, now that it's max blacked out as best it can be I can redirect my focus... and be annoyed by the STUPID hiding bottom menus like in Photos.
Literally ZERO times did I complain I was missing seven pixels of "real estate", thanks Apple, love the extra tap to see what I need
Essentially all Apple engineers use macOS ~exclusively (at least in the SWE org). That these bugs persist is in spite of that fact.
Frankly there's just a lot going on, and between all the kinds of bugs that have higher priority -- crashers, panics, memory regressions (your app gets Jetsam'd), power bugs (your phone runs out of battery mid-day), perf regressions (could violate EU regulations against planned obsolescence), security bugs (people can lose their money, journalists can get killed) -- bugs like this often fall by the wayside for quite some time until they're fixed.
Wow I never realized I had this problem until now! I never even considered the reason keys would dispatch to the wrong window was because of the animation. I just knew that sometimes when switching workspaces I'd have to wait until whatever window I'm switching to has focus before typing.
Fun aside, I'm pretty sure that my mention of a system issue that I read about that morning on MacOSXHints.com was a helper in landing a job in an interview that afternoon. What I mean is, I said, oh are you talking about "whatever thing on that site today…?" and it demonstrated that I was familiar with whatever internals.
Don't know about customizability on MacOS but I've always been very accustomed to animations and recently I just turned them off on Android and Linux and I... Don't miss anything. Turned out they don't add anything other than an initial wow factor.
Personally, I think some animations can help add context to what is happening. For example, when using QuickLook, there is an animation when opening/closing QuickLook that zooms out from, and then back to the file location. If doing something with that file after the QL, that little visual clue helps find it faster and know where it opened from.
The closest thing you can do on macOS is to turn on "reduced motion". This doesn't remove any animations, it just replaces them all with fade animations which take the same amount of time.
I noticed this immediately when I first used a 120Hz macbook in 2021. As a vanilla MacOS UI feature that I'm sure many people use, I can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet.
I also have a 120Hz Mac, and the animation is indeed slower in 120Hz mode. In my opinion, the animation crossed the line from "too slow but bearable" to "unbearable" with 120Hz. It is as you say; it's not really the animation itself that's the problem, but the delay from when I tell my machine "switch to this other workspace" until the focus switches to a window on that other workspace. The animation has this horrible ease-out effect where the last few centimeters take what feels like forever.
Getting a 120Hz Mac actually completely changed my whole macOS philosophy. I used to use spaces extremely heavily. I now almost don't use them at all, preferring window switching with cmd+tab instead.
The infuriating thing is that almost all discussion on this on the web just says "turn on reduced motion". Not only should that be unnecessary; it doesn't even fix the problem! Sure, there's no longer a sliding animation, but there's now a fade animation instead which takes just as long.
It's completely incomprehensible that Apple hasn't fixed this.
Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.
> Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.
One of BetterTouchTool's first features ~17 years ago was trackpad gesture customization, it is still one of the most important things you can do with BTT! ;-) You'd just need to assign the "Move Right a Space (without animation)" and "Move Left a Space (without animation)" actions to trackpad gestures in BTT.
I don't want it "without animation", I like that the animation tracks my fingers and that the response is instant and doesn't wait until a "gesture" is "triggered". I just want it to wait a second after I let go until the target workspace starts receiving input.
I would assume it’s something based around whatever deacceleration animation it is calculating? So in the inverse of what you would see in games that don’t support uncapped framerates. It would at least explain why the refresh rate has an inverted relationship
I've been having the same problem, entering keystrokes in the wrong windows when changing spaces. I'm so glad to know it's not just me, it's the fact that I just a couple months ago bought a new MBP. Thank you!
I have noticed this bug years before Apple started selling 120hz displays. I thought for sure they would fix it after that, but to my surprise it has persisted...
I think it must go back to High Sierra or Mojave at least.
I think the biggest issue with classes is subclassing, it looks like a good feature to have, but ends up being a problem.
If one avoids subclassing, I think classes can be quite useful as a tool to organize code and to "name" structures. In terms of performance, they offer some good optimizations (hidden class, optimized instantiation), not to mention using the memory profiler when all your objects are just instances of "Object" can be a huge pain.
First and most importantly is the fact they have a lot of very valuable data they wouldn't want to siphon to a competitor. This data is a key strategic asset in the space where they do business.
Secondly though, I think it has to do with the fact Meta is big enough to worry about vertical integration and full control of their business.
The whole reason they've been trying to make AR/VR happen for over a decade now is the assumption of a worst case and best case scenario. The worst case is Apple and Google wants them gone. This isn't as far fetched as it seems, Google has historically been Meta's biggest competitor and even tried to release its own social network back when Meta was threatening them. If either pulls Meta apps from their respective stores, it'd be an immense blow to Meta; their whole trillion-dollar business depends on competitor's platforms.
Meta tried making inroads into the phone business but failed; it is a very crowded market after all. So they changed their strategy. Instead of playing catch-up, they'd invent "the next iPhone" and be the first to a brand new market. This is the best case scenario; they invent a new platform where they can be dominant from day 1 and stop depending on competitor's hardware, not only removing that risk factor for them, but also unlocking a new market they can control.
AI ties into all this because it appears to be key for this next platform to happen. You will communicate with these smart glasses via voice, hand gestures, or subtle movements that a model will have to interpret. The features that could make them stand out as more than just a screen on your face are all AI related; object detection, world understanding, context awareness, etc. If all this were done via a 3rd party Meta would effectively be back on square one: a competitor could easily yank away its model access, or sell it to a competitor. Meta would be again at the mercy of others.
Compared to other big-tech players, I think it's easy to see how Meta is in a riskier position. There's little Google or Microsoft can do to kill the iPhone. There's little Apple or Google can do to kill Amazon's online store. There's little Amazon or Apple can do to kill Microsoft's business deals. Google and Meta are primarily in the business of capturing people's data, attention, and selling ads, and both Google and Apple could do quite some damage to Meta. Beyond expanding it, it's important for them to invest in ways to protect their money-printing machine.
I've worked with text and in my experience all of these things (soft hyphens, emoji correction, non-latin languages, etc) are not exceptions you can easily incorporate later, but rather the rules that end up foundational parts of the codebase.
That is to say, I wouldn't be so quick to call a library that only handles latin characters comparable to one that handles all this breath of things, and I also wouldn't be so quick to blame the performance delta on the assumption of greenfield AI-generated code.
no disagreement. i never claimed uWrap did anything more than it does. it was not meant for typography/text-layout but for line count estimation. it never needed to be perfect, and i did not claim equivalence to pretext. however, for the use case of virtualization of data tables -- a use case pretext is also targeted at -- and in the common case of latin alphabets, right now pretext is significantly slower. i hope that it can become faster despite its much more thorough support for "rest of the owl".
Do people really have a choice though? Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less productive is often hard to afford.
Another instance where companies can have more leverage than consumers is gaming. Console exclusives are a thing because they work; not giving consumers the option to play Pokemon on anything but the Nintendo Switch drives switch sales. Microsoft is better off working with other gaming companies to ensure Windows keeps being dominant, than building an OS to gamer's preferences.
I think time has proven many times that consumers aren't always good regulators for the market. The market is best regulated by organized entities.
Not even companies have a choice, for the most part. Their choice of operating system is dictated by the applications they need to run, and only the smallest and most unsophisticated businesses can generally get away with nothing but a web browser.
There is a whole ecosystem that needs to move before they can move.
> Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less productive is often hard to afford.
Sure, but I also think that a lot of the issues with Windows 11 don't really matter much if its just used as a work OS. For example, I refuse to upgrade my home PC to 11, because I don't want Microsoft to spy on me; however, when I am using my work computer, I know that I am already being spied upon, so that's not a concern for me.
IMO it's telling that the lineup here is bucketized by screen size and not model. Screen size, processor performance, storage, sensors, etc are ambiguous concepts that don't mean much in their own merit. People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"; people think in terms of use cases and cost.
For laptops the buckets are portability and performance. These two will always be at odds, and people will gladly prioritize one over the other; these are the ingredients you need for creating a model lineup. Each model prioritizes something different:
- Affordability, MacBook Neo
- Portability, MacBook Air
- Performance, MacBook Pro
There's people who will be carry this machine everywhere and will gladly sacrifice performance for portability. There's people who will gladly use a laptop as essentially a desktop they can occasionally move if it means maximum power. You even see this in the wider market; there's a clear category of laptops praised by their portability (ultrabooks), and another group praised by their power (gaming laptops).
I don't think there's an equivalent for tablets, since people don't really seem to need them for that much (lol). Apple has been focusing a lot on portability, but the market of people who carry their tablet everywhere isn't really that big, most people use them at home [1]. Digital nomads, students, PMs hopping around meetings: they're on laptops. Same with performance; people who need performance are on laptops.
The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen. A single dimension for improvement doesn't give you the ingredients for creating a model lineup, it gives you the ingredients for a price ladder where more money just gets you a bigger, better screen.
I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone. In that case, I think like the iPhone, the iPad could do with less overlap:
- 8.3", $ (iPad mini, affordable)
- 11", $$ (iPad, standard)
- 13", $$$ (iPad Pro, better in pretty much every way)
And keep the iPad Air in the same space as the iPhone Air, a novelty luxurious product that isn't the fastest nor the most affordable, but showcases premium hardware and what the future could look like.
I think Apple doesn't do this because it hopes to discover what people want through the grid of different screen size, thinness, performance, etc permutations that currently exist, but oh well.
> People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"
Disagree, at least coming from a current iPad owner. I’m on an 8 year old 12.9” iPad Pro and if I bought a new iPad today it would be 11” because that’s the size I’d rather have at this point.
So hypothetically it’s between the Regular, Air, and Pro, and I would get the Air because I want the better screen and stylus compatibility but wouldn’t spend $1000 for it.
> People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"
I have 12.9" iPad Pro, my priority was thunderbolt and screen size, but mainly screen size (battery life is given on Apple devices).
I also have iPad Mini where my priority was...bigger than the biggest iPhone, smaller than regular iPad.
> The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen.
It's like all-season tires, does not exceed in any particular field. I use my iPad for casual CAD with 3d printing in mind, it works great. I also use it as a bedroom screen on stand by the bed. Can two separate devices do a better job? Yes, but I don't need
> For laptops the buckets are portability and performance.
iPads not bucketed like this because you're not buying iPad for performance.
> I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone
Sure they can. This would lead to less overall sales. Right now 11" buyer have whole 3 feature set selections to choose from. I'd get rid of Pro, but not everyone needs 11" and Air features.
They're suggesting a hypothetical lineup would be cleaner if that weren't the case.
I don't disagree, but Apple seems to treat the Mini as an afterthought side project that gets updated every 3 years or so, compared to the mainline iPad being updated yearly from 2017 to 2022. Then it had a gap until 2025, apparently taking a while to get the slim bezel redesign down to the affordable model.
If the mini were the default affordable entry point they'd need to keep it up to date but they've decided not enough people want a mini for it to be worth that effort.
> I can only imagine there some level of employee discontent.
The rank and file mutinied for the return of Altman after his board fired him for deception. They knew what they were getting, though they may find it shameful to admit that their morals have a price.
How many people who reacted that way then are still at OpenAI? It seems that they have lost key people in several waves.
How many people have joined since? I don’t think the people who lobbied for that are all still there, and I’m not sure a majority of people now at OpenAI were there when it happened.
This is one of the reasons Anthropic can stay competitive with OpenAI on a fraction of the budget and with less than half the headcount.
The smartest people, that actually believe they have the skillset to take us to AGI, understand the importance of safety. They have largely joined Anthropic. The talent density at Anthropic is unmatched.
Things have changed since two years ago. There are probably over 500 employees who have an equity package which makes them worth $5 million dollars. Thats only $2.5bn out of a $750bn valuation or 0.33%
Actually that is too conservative. If they have a 5% employee equity pool, there is $37.5bn of equity based compensation divided by say 5000 employees which is $7.5m each. $3.75m @ 10,000 employees.
and trust me, when people start getting liquid and comfortable they stop caring about things like ethics pretty fast. humans are marvellous at that
What IMO is a bad strategy is the aversion to nationalization that exists in the USA. They buy billions worth of shares in key companies to inject capital during times of crisis, to later divest and refuse to be a player in industry.
China's model is much more complex. There's state-owned companies, companies where the state is a major stake-holder, and private companies too. It seems to afford them more tools to push and steer industries as they see important.
The USA is no stranger to this at smaller scales; airports are state run (at the municipal or state level). This rids them of the burden of profit, and allows them to be strategically use for the broader benefit when it makes sense.
Some are profitable; state-run doesn't necessarily mean unprofitable. But some can written off as infrastructure investments that don't make money but make other industries in the region competitive. At some point this makes sense if you want to keep pushing forward; let's stop worrying too much about making money on X, because if X is a widely-available commodity, we can instead make money on Y and Z.
I see it in Mexico too. Mexico's private healthcare is affordable and good because it has huge state-run healthcare system to compete with. State-provided healthcare isn't the best or fastest healthcare you can get, but it is free. This certainly puts competitive pressure on private healthcare companies, and in a way gives the Mexican government the best regulatory tool: the market itself. The Mexican government isn't trying to destroy private health, but via the state health enterprise it gains tools to steer and push the health industry in ways it may deem important.
Looking at the state of EVs and the car industry, I think it's clear whatever the Chinese government did to incentivize EV innovation was more effective than the federal incentives the USA government provided. At one point the USA government had a 60% stake in General Motors [1]; meaning it was nationalized, before being privatized again by 2013.
I just wonder what the USA could've done with that machinery; could they have offered a cheap EV, even if it's low quality, to push adoption, competitive pressure and get supply chains going? Could they have further commoditized certain parts to lower costs? Could they have strategically opened factories in certain locations to lower the risk and investment cost of future companies, and this way get the ball rolling on creating new auto-industry regions? We will never know, but we do know the USA's auto industry is now on the defense playing catch-up to China, and there seems to be little the USA government can do except placing tariffs and offering subsidies.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/09/government-sells-the-last-of...
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