You may notice that luxury brands are making stuff by hand now. It's already painfully uncool to use AI images, regardless of how "real" they look – because they're cheap
Read Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death"
> Feeling that death had become much too sentimentalized, highly commercialized, and, above all, excessively expensive, Mitford published her research, which, she argues, documents the ways in which funeral directors took advantage of the shock and grief of loved ones' friends and relatives to convince them to pay far more than necessary for the funeral and other related services, such as availability of so-called "grief counselors", a title she claimed was unmerited. The book became a major bestseller and led to Congressional hearings on the funeral industry.
It is honourable but it is also linguistic abuse that drains the phrase of its full semantic meaning. “Take full responsibility” must remain a stricture of the highest regard. He is not fully responsible nor should he be held to be nor should we demand that he be and most importantly we must not dilute that phrase of its full semantic import, or else we shall have to come up with another one once this one is devalued to mean essentially nothing beyond “I fucked up in good faith and with a lack of information that was concealed for me for decisions taken by others in good faith way upstream of myself”.
It makes no sense, it is used/abused by politicians and corporations all the time. There are no consequences for the responsible party (of course, if there were then this phrase would not be abused so much)
A guy I knew was a mechanical engineer for Apple, did some really innovative stuff. The level of care and detail and attention they give to every element is like nothing you've ever seen. A good dude and was one of the best engineers I ever met but the pressure and the corporate games made him a permanent emotional headcase!
There is a reason the hinges on all their laptops have the perfect tension and weight. they put the work in. My laptop quality test is to hold it shut flat in the palm of one hand, and try to open the screen with out having to hold down the bottom half. All Apple laptops have passed this test. Not many other brands come close. my e590 thinkpad feels like you're prying it open.
I hear this a lot, but I have personally had terrible luck with Apple hardware. The most notable was the butterfly keyboard, but thermal issues were a fairly notable problem on several bits of kit as well.
Mind you, I've not owned any apple hardware in probably 5 or 7 years, but that's just been my luck when I did.
I think you just happen to have the worst era in MacBook hardware. Happening 2015 - 2020. It has gotten better or back on track since then.
Keyboard is finally back to semi decent now. The old scissor is still better. But I think 2024 or 2025 they finally make some minor changes that is closer to old scissors.
The two issues I have had in 20 years of Apple laptops is the butterfly keyboard and the GPU causing discoloration of the screen, both on the same MacBook Pro.
That said, I think over the years I have gotten three or four random checks in the mail from Apple over the keyboard, and they fixed it outside of warranty. With those MacBooks, you have replace the entire bottom assembly (keyboard, battery, speakers, etc.) and it isn't cheap.
The MBPs were a lot more reliable before and after the 2016-2018 model years. It was so bad that I deliberately bought the previous 2015 model in 2016.
First, everyone copies. In computing space, let me give you a funny example. Apple iOS home screen is a copy and evolution of PalmOS user interface, down to four buttons, pages, graffiti area and so on.
Palm's phone (Android running one) copies Apple Watch's user interface as home screen like a revenge, with a iPhone X-esque camera bump. Funny, ironic, real.
Second, Apple is a slow moving company. They don't rush things. They are the last company to move OLEDs on their phone, because they want to implement without any apparent flaws and with a long life. i.e.: My parent's Samsung A9 2018 phones have screen burn-in, but my iPhone X doesn't. They are at a similar age.
Like them or not, their engineering is solid and novel. At least give them that. My 18 year old Mac still boots despite being dropped (I fell on top of it) and bent badly, and gone through three batteries.
My 12 year old MacBook Pro still runs like day one despite being hammered for years for high performance computing, and its disk still shows ~10% wear.
Like every company, Apple makes mistake (these keyboards were bad, yes), but they are sometimes misunderstood (you can only charge that upside down, but charging it for 2 minutes gives you 8 hours of use, so get a coffee and flex at least).
As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development. In hardware, you give a lot of thought to potential failure modes and contingencies before building something, which takes time. In software, I’ve rarely seen a product whose first version is completely free of bugs. Shipping with some bugs and fixing them through iterations is standard industry practice, whereas it’s less acceptable in hardware.
I think Apple is more of a hardware company than a software company these days. They invested enough time, resources, and patience in ARM for it to now compete with the once-mighty Intel x86 architecture. That kind of progress requires patience, so I don’t think we can simply call Apple a slow company or say it isn’t innovating.
> As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development.
A sloppy mechanical engineer can be sued for malpractice and lose their license to practice. If they do something unethical they can't blame it all on management and could end up being held personally responsible with fines and even jail time.
Sometimes I think it we might be better off if the same held for software engineers.
That is, if they're licensed. Most hardware engineers, at least in the US, are not licensed PEs; you only need a PE license if you're signing off on engineering work under government contract or public safety is a concern or its some otherwise regulated industry where the regulations require it.
It wasn't always the case with software, before the internet era and updates. Software were done with a lot more cares because burning discs and distribution were costly. Exactly the same reason why Hardware put a lot of thoughts into it for failure because recalling product is expensive.
Apple is always a hardware company first, they always have been. The software is supposed to be a reflection of their hardware perfection and passion (we can discuss this later).
I didn’t use slow in a negative way. On the contrary, my context behind that “slow” was “patient, detail obsessed and immaculate”. Also I didn’t mean that they are not innovating. Again, they innovate and bake well, then release things, which is how I like my hardware.
Thanks for your reply though. Seems like I missed the point I was trying to make by a mile.
Android as a whole is basically the store-brand version of iPhone. There were a lot of controversial decisions made on the first couple of iPhones that ended up being industry standard. (And yes I know Android is technically only the OS, but idc)
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.
Yes, Apple reliably lets other manufacturers discover the hard problems, and then Apple solves them. And then residents of HN and Reddit think this is a great zinger every time.
That puts me in mind of Google paying Apple billions per year to have Google as the default search engine and (maybe more importantly) discourage Apple from building their own search engine.
Knowing what we know today, probably a good choice as search engines themselves are quickly getting less usage due to AIs. (I for one would never have predicted there would be something that could replace search engines, but then I also thought Facebook was here to stay forever for everyone. Happy to be wrong)
Possibly. It's complicated. It's not uncommon for Company A to produce a design based on Company B's proprietary R&D. Just because Samsung is making those displays for Apple doesn't mean that Apple didn't do major parts of the R&D. Nor does it mean that Samsung can make the same displays for Samsung, or for their other customers.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean we can deny ground truth. Apple did not invent folded screens by any stretch of the imagination, and is the latest one to the party, even for Apples standard of "freshness" it is late.
Their ambitions are to sell products that work. I’m a customer because I want the newest stuff that has the kinks worked out.
Idk if you’ve ever worked on… anything… but the last 10% of the apparent work is the hardest. It’s incredibly ambitious to take an idea from 90% to 100%.
Pros already know all about this, but but cool artifact to have if you're doing any sort of visual/design/UI work is a Pantone color swatch books. I like having the little tear-out chips when I want to match paint colors for a paint job or just to hand out to my kids, who use them like trading cards.
I've seen plenty of negative (and legitimate) sentiment around this merger but I'm cautiously optimistic that David Ellison, being half the age of anyone else with greenlight authority, will do something different/better.
Skydance/Paramount has had plenty of success attracting young audiences via UFC & gaming partnerships, so I'm not sure that's a counterpoint. Re forumulaic/bland that's a personal taste thing and not worth arguing.
The key contributor to Hollywood's waning influence is the generation gap; it's a cultural institution that is supposed to be culturally salient. Take the Mandalorian movie as an example; the biggest studio using the biggest IP to spend $300M on a movie... which lost $100M. That movie was competing at the box office at the same time with Obsession, which was made for $750k by a young Youtuber has made over half a billion worldwide.
As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older. He can shake things up if he wants to, and I hope he does.
Being formulaic and bland is an important aspect of expecting someone to “do something different” or “shake things up”. If the owner of a film studio has so much green light power but the studio has primarily produced film following a single formula, which the audiences have grown bored with (hence bland), then how can there be an expectation of that owner suddenly doing something different simply because they bought another studio?
> As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older.
Who do you think he has more in common with? An average consumer his own age, or adult members of any age from the elite class that hes likely spent most of his time around?
'Fair play' is a dimension of competition. They aren't orthogonal attributes.
You can compete fairly or unfairly.
In any event, distillation seems to be in a grey enough area that reasonable people can disagree (IMO). It strikes me as more akin to theft than to fair competition, but it doesn't seem like it should be treated as criminal. Rather, I think the onus should be on the labs to defend themselves against it.
All that said, Jensen's take is clearly quite biased.
Hasn’t it already been ruled by a court that LLM outputs are not subject to copyright? It opens a can of worms to say that LLM companies can dictate what their outputs are used for.
I think copyright is mostly not relevant. Contracts operate mostly independent of copyright law (in the U.S.). If OpenAI puts in their license something to the effect of "you may not train your LLMs on these outputs" and/or "your access is limited in these ways", but you violate the license, they can and should block your access and sue you. These are things that can be monitored and enforced under existing law.
And, in fact, they already do this:
- OpenAI [1]: "[you may not] Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI."
- Google [2]: "You may not use the Services to develop machine learning models or related technology."
- Anthropic [3]: "[You may not use our services] to develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services"
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