I don't think it promised less work. In a vacuum of 10 people it now enables less than 10 people to do the same amount of work, assuming there is a limit to the amount of work to be done in a work day.
AI allows me to do more work within the same time, not less work given I work in a field where the amount of work doesn't seem to have a limit.
As someone who hit the PC gaming world in around 2008 online, we started with TeamSpeak and Ventrilo which were hosted platforms that allowed you to voice chat with your friends. They had cost money and weren't that great on audio quality (from that time).
Then we went to separate game specific voice chat platforms which were inconsistent, but meant you struggled to find a way to chat with mates outside of something like Skype at the time.
Discord was one of the first platforms that was firstly free and allowed you one place to chat with friends and communities about games AND had very good quality audio.
People use it for all sorts of things, however I use it fairly minimally and only to be able to voice chat with friends either when gaming together or playing separate games. I don't get understand some peoples problems with it, it works better than anything else out there for what I use it for.
There are plenty of excellent engineering products that Apple have engineered themselves. Starting with the iPhone itself which was an enormous cut above the competition.
Yes Apple has "copied" or brought out its own version of particular products before, usually in a much better state.
> Starting with the iPhone itself which was an enormous cut above the competition
I wouldn't say that at all. Correct me if I misremember, but the original iPhone didn't even have an ecosystem of apps outside a few Apple-sanctioned ones. I was thoroughly unimpressed when it came out, at the missed (in retrospect, deferred) opportunity.
My older Palm device felt superior in nearly every way I cared about.
Considering practically every smartphone to this day is derivative of the 2007 glass slab hardware design (and software UX), I'd say they were on to something even if it didn't launch with the App Store immediately.
> Considering practically every smartphone to this day is derivative of the 2007 glass slab hardware design (and software UX), I'd say they were on to something
Lowest cost of production is what that formfactor provides.
Palm's devices, by contrast, felt like a polished river stone in the pocket. I know which I prefer.
> Lowest cost of production is what that formfactor provides.
Maybe, but to compete with the iPhone everything else that goes into the production of a smartphone would have been way more expensive. More compute requirements, better screens, way more software engineering headcount.
Palm's Pre[1] supported multi-tasking, having multiple emails open at the same time to read and compose, unified instant messaging, copy/paste and myriad other features iPhone didn't have at the time.
I went from a Palm Treo to the iPhone in 2007, these devices were not in the same league. Years apart in all aspects. I had an external box for tomtom gps on the treo and a janky mp3 player and some crappy apps on a resistive touch screen that looked like it had a permanent hazy film over it as all resistive ones do.
The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps.
I'm not an apple fanboy but they were the first to really understand and solve touch screen phones - they went with capacitive tech when everyone was doing resistive and they went all-in on the UX and studied how touch should feel and how the UI should reflect it.
They were by no means the first smartphone nor were they the first touch phone but the "iphone moment" was coined because they figured out how to make frontier tech mainstream.
They also weren't the first to make an MP3 player but it sure felt that way with the ipod. I don't know how people have rewritten this history in their minds
This is true, but I felt the same with the HTC Dream, although I guess Apple was first, they were more than a year apart. I don't miss typing 'reboot\n' in any app, or at any time, and the phone rebooting, because the first release had a left-open root session.
So the Android polish wasn't quite there on release either.
Your older Palm device was almost certainly much worse at browsing the web both in fidelity and interactivity. Loading a full desktop website on a device that small and being able to pinch to zoom in to sections was pretty novel at the time.
Yeah arguably the biggest innovation the iPhone had was the capacitive touch screen - they weren't the first (that was the LG Prada) and the various interactions like pinch zooming and inertial scrolling were done before, but they did have a 2004 patent on capacitive multi-touch screens.
Yeah as I recall it, the iPhone was the first device where touch felt really natural and fun. They nailed that feeling that you’re actually interacting directly with what is under your finger. Previous touch devices I tried felt kind of disconnected because they hadn’t sweated the details in the same way.
but this discussion always has the tendency to go completely off teh rails because there are so many people unable to talk rationally about apple products.
innovation basically never happens in a vacuum, and especially apple products have historically "come second" into a product category -- and just nail the implementation so well that they just felt great to use.
(and yes, smartphones were well established by the time the iphone was released. thats what i'd call the product category there. dialing in to ever narrower definitions to make it into a "new" category is exactly the reason why this can never be settled - because you can call _every_ product a new product category like that)
So now we got endless discussions about "who was first" even though its completely meaningless to ask this question -- because that "previous product" also took inspiration from other products, and if you squinted enough, could also be called "just an iteration" vs a "innovation".
It’s not really a different narrative, though: They started with the idea that the phone should be nearly all screen (which was very controversial at the time) and designed the software around that. No one had a UI or UX that was as fully committed to this idea as the iPhone, although they certainly got inspiration from others.
You’re right that Apple isn’t usually a first mover within a product segment. But that have a tendency to nail what they consider to be a better execution of that product.
I'm so glad someone else remembers and values their contributions here.
That full package of capacitive touch, a UI and UX optimised for touch, inertial scrolling with pinch and zoom came together to form something much greater than the sum of the individual parts: an experience that could convince you to part with physical buttons
Also I think it took me almost a decade to find a touch keyboard (fleksy) I liked as much as the iOS keyboard. I think people also take for granted how far ahead their quiet innovations in the touch keyboard were without fanfare.
The ones in 2007 were unusable, the original android ones were terrible and I didn't much like swiftkey. Google Keyboard came much later but lacked some of the smoothing and tappiness of the Apple one
Nokia was dominating the smartphone market when iPhone was released. There was no ecosystem there. All these "pocket PC" devices were very cool for their time, but they were really really far from mass market adoption.
There was the “sweet solution” :) When reading the stories about how the first iPhone came to be, had they tried to also have an sdk with the first release, it would not have shipped on time. And although Jobs was famously stubborn, this is something he changed his mind quite quickly on. In no small part due to the ecosystem that popped up despite him thanks to jailbreaking.
Mate you are only 25, those people getting married and having kids are doing it early. You have another 10+ years before you could even think about the childless uncle phase as a construct.
But I have a HomePod mini that I use for all of my Matter devices, why would I need a massive device with a screen just for that?
The only difference I can see is multiuser support of which Siri works just fine for me controlling the matter devices in the house that are on my partners Apple account. I can't justify buying a product just for multi user support and have another bulky device sitting in the house.
Apple would've been better off putting a FaceID camera in a Homepod mini or Homepod to get the same functionality.
Just purely based on the headline and its part in the article, it's an odd statement.
Milk is consumed almost everywhere in copious amounts, if it isn't produced properly it can create significant illness and potentially death in some. Washing machines can also kill when pets get put in them, or children climb themselves into them.
The reason they are regulated is based on decades of safety incidents.
AI hasn't reached that yet, or to the general public. Yes its has potential, but we just don't have the actual incidents occurring to require it.
But I do like his statement of "Let's start today" which I read that as, lets do it before we realised we should've, which is a good thing.
My thoughts are similarly to SOC 2 type 2, which is that you can do different types of independent audits, whether it be financial, internal controls, cyber security.
But you still need to build the bounds of what you want and what the expectations are.
If you're going to audit software, you need to know what the expectations were when building the software.
Also, AI Assurance is becoming a large field in where these issues are being addressed and it is being performed by independent people.
Part of this auditing story is that it has also introduced lines of defense, so large companies have line 1, line 2 and line 3, all being different degrees of independence.
Basically this article is simply reminding us that you need independent review and verification and you can't trust the product to verify itself. It's nothing new, you need to review the outputs and the mechanics of everything that is important to the organisation. You must trust but verify all outputs and the tools should be able to provide you with that information AND someone must check it.
reply