This is a real pain in the ass in Belgium. Many websites assume I speak French while my native language is Dutch. Some websites only offer a French version of their Belgian storefront, even though Dutch accounts for ~60% of Belgians. I can't imagine what it's like for German-speaking Belgians.
This is not only an issue on websites but also on apps. For example, the Books and Podcasts apps on iOS show me both Dutch-speaking and French-speaking titles. I tried to raise this issue back when I worked at Apple but they only have 1 storefront per country and didn't feel like changing it.
Once upon a time French was used even in the Dutch speaking parts, in government, economy, high society. That was long before the internet got popular though. We've had a long fight to get rid of French in Flanders. Dutch is the only official language in Flanders, and it's the language people speak (except expats, or migrants who haven't learned the language yet).
So when companies still assume Belgium == French, it's not only wrong, but it comes across as very condescending. It feels like they haven't outgrown the times where Dutch was suppressed in favor of French.
And why? If a company wants to use only one language for the whole country, it's better of choosing Dutch (as we indeed account for about 60% of the population). Many of those companies do have a perfectly good Dutch translation, which they use for their site when viewed from the Netherlands. Even if they don't, I much prefer English over French.
You'll be glad to hear (I guess) that the pain is shared by french speaking Belgians.
It happens all the god damn time that the websites render in Dutch (or I guess Flemish) instead of the set Accept Language I have (EN then FR). Google is regularly showing me results in Dutch, most online stores default to Dutch even if they have English and French versions available.
Just imagine, all the websites that correctly (for you) display in Dutch, are websites that we have to change to French. I would guess there are more Dutch-defaulting websites than French ones, but I can't know for sure.
Btw, our neighbor is huge and french speaking too, so I'm not surprised companies coming from there favor French on their site. The same way that NL companies operate in Flanders but less so in Wallonia have their default to Dutch.
Also I'd argue that companies operating in Belgium should default to asking the language instead of guessing, otherwise you'll always anger half of the population.
If the energy efficiency of things like Face ID was indeed so far so bad that you need a more efficient M3 Ultra, how come Face ID was integrated into smartphones years ago, apparently without significant negative impact on battery life?
FaceID was just one example they gave (which is probably faster and more energy efficient now).
Image recognition, OCR, AR and more are applications of the NPU that didn’t exist at all on older iPhones because they have would be too intensive for the chips and batteries.
That's false. Face ID is in fact a complex form of image recognition, so image recognition was definitely possible on older NPUs. OCR is the simplest form of image recognition (OCR was literally the first application of LeCun's CNN), so this was definitely possible as well. "AR" is an extremely vague term. If you refer to Snapchat style video overlays, those have been possible for a long time as well.
The original question was asking what features have taken advantage of a NPU. Face ID was introduced with Apple's first "Neural Engine" CPU, the A11 Bionic.
You're confusing this with what features/enhancements new generations of NPUs bring, which nobody else was talking about. Everyone else in the conversation is comparing pre- and post-NPU.
The original question was clearly about the NPU of the currently discussed M3 Ultra, which is twice as large as the previous one. The question is what this one is good for, not what much, much smaller NPUs are good for which have nothing to do with the M3 Ultra topic.
Indeed, but the neural engine does this faster and using heavier models. For example, on-device Siri was not possible until the introduction of the neural engine in 2017.
For people with their iDevice set to the Swiss/Austrian German or Belgian Dutch locales, Apple Translate initially didn't even offer their languages in Apple Translate (i.e. not even German or Dutch). Only after internal complaining did they allow Swiss/Austrian German users to use German in Apple Translate.
Cervélo is not an Italian company, they're Canadian. Its name is partially Italian as it's a portmanteau of cervello (brain in Italian) and vélo (bike in French).
That is the paper Krapivin read in ~2023 and inspired him. The actual paper with the breakthrough is from January 2025: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02305.
This is not only an issue on websites but also on apps. For example, the Books and Podcasts apps on iOS show me both Dutch-speaking and French-speaking titles. I tried to raise this issue back when I worked at Apple but they only have 1 storefront per country and didn't feel like changing it.
reply