kirklennon

You’re leaving out the most import part. Class members are:

Individual persons who are United States residents and who own or owned an Apple iPhone 7 or 7 Plus between September 16, 2016 and January 3, 2023, and reported to Apple in the United States issues reflected in Apple’s records as Sound-Speaker, Sound-Microphone, Sound – Receiver, Unexpected Restart / Shutdown, or Power On – Device Unresponsive

Based on the amount of money allocated for the settlement, the class members represent significantly less than 1% of iPhone 7 owners.

Honestly I don’t get why they apologized at all. This was a lame story yesterday. The apology stretches the story an extra day. Say nothing and nobody remembers the pearl-clutching next week.

I think it’s pretty wild that criticizing something as ill-conceived, arbitrary, and protectionist government overreach will get you labeled as a fascist by some people.

I agree that it seems like inconsistent thinking though. (EU vs China)

The EU is ostensibly capitalist democracies. Publicly criticizing arbitrary and ill-conceived regulations, that can perhaps be improved, is useful. China makes no pretense about being a free country and I think the moral calculus is rather simple: are Chinese citizens better off with Apple there, doing the bare minimum to comply with Chinese law, or with Apple taking the “principled” stand of leaving?

China banned Signal and WhatsApp but has not banned iMessage. If you want secure end-to-end encrypted messaging, iPhones offer that built right in. Apple could leave, but the inevitable result of that is less privacy for Chinese citizens. It’s a binary choice. Apple can’t make China free, but they can at least offer services without bending over backwards to go above and beyond the CCP’s demands, as Chinese companies do.

I think Apple’s position is quite consistent: it tries to change the things it can change, fights the things it can fight, and does the bare minimum to comply with things that it doesn’t want to but must.

Do not install any third-party antivirus software. It’s unnecessary and is itself a massive security risk. You have to literally override the built-in protections in order to allow the antivirus application to scan the other applications and files.

I think this is one step in ongoing efforts to further enhance the security of iMessage and has nothing at all to do with random topics that the tech press happened to focus on. Contact Key Verification came out in October. Beeper Mini came out in December. One of the third-party security analyses Apple provided for this PQ3 enhancement is dated January 15. I think it’s pretty clear that PQ3’s development long preceded Beeper Mini.

Apple didn’t stop; this report is a just made up rumors.

This “report” is beyond sketchy and isn’t worth repeating. The source is a Korean blogger who just reads supply chain rumors posted on Chinese social media.

Do you know what kind of products supply chain sources can’t leak anything about? New chips that are, by more credible reports, still 2+ years away from release at the earliest. The supply chain doesn’t know anything about Apple’s progress on chips until it’s actually close to time to start manufacturing them. The only sources who can know the current status of Apple’s modem developments are internal ones working in their never-leaked-anything chip development labs. The supply chain will learn about it when Apple needs to start preparing for manufacturing.

how much of ARM’s work are they actually using?

Apple doesn’t use Arm’s designs for their chips. They have a license to the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and use that to make their own designs.

Tethering burns through battery and a laptop’s battery is much bigger. I believe Apple’s smallest laptop battery has roughly three times the capacity as their biggest iPhone battery. Tethering works well for occasional use but if you’ve got a job where spend pretty much your whole work day roaming around to different locations, having it built in can be quite useful.

RCS does not support end-to-end encryption, only Google’s proprietary extension does. Google has been simultaneously promoting RCS as a “standard” while prominently advertising a non-standard feature.

the ending years of apple’s golden era

When exactly was that? Apple’s never been more popular than they are now.

There’s been no indication at all that the savings accounts themselves are unprofitable. This article combined a journalistically negligent misquote from a single person at the internal announcement of the savings accounts with fuzzy numbers about previous provisions for future losses from the credit card. If they had any integrity, they’d just delete the whole article.

The article doesn’t actually have any data at all regarding the savings accounts. It combines losses on credit cards with a pessimistic quote from someone at the launch of the savings accounts. The credit card losses also look worse than they are. Goldman Sachs definitely seems to think they made a mistake, so I don’t doubt they’re losing money, but the numbers themselves are primarily paper “losses.” They’re setting aside a huge amount of money for theoretical future defaults on repayment. My understanding is the numbers are extra high right now precisely because they’re brand new and haven’t previously been provisioning for future losses. I don’t know the exact numbers involved but it seems like they’re recording extra losses last year and this year that would cover several years of future losses (cynically, I’m just going to assume this is some sort of strategic tax dodge).

The headline isn’t an accurate quote. 9to5Mac, quoting the Wall Street Journal:

When Goldman Sachs and Apple launched their joint savings account in April, Goldman held a town hall at its headquarters, where bank executives talked it up. One executive had a different message shortly afterward. “We should have never done this f—ing thing,” the Goldman partner told colleagues.

“Mistake” isn’t actually even part of the quote. The headline also implies that this is an observation made by looking back on it, rather than a comment made at launch by someone who may not have even been involved in the project.

In the meantime, LLMs have changed the game when it comes to language understanding

I don’t think this is true at all, nor do I think we’re any closer than we were several years ago. LLMs don’t understand anything at all. Given a prompt, they assemble portions of words into something that is likely to resemble what a desired response might look like, based on whatever corpus of text they’ve been fed.

They do not actually comprehend the question and then answer it.

Siri actually answers questions using a curated knowledge database. If it doesn’t have an answer, it doesn’t pretend to have. LLMs don’t really have a concept of knowing the answer or not knowing the answer since they’re not based around a repository of facts in the first place. If they have enough training data to assemble something that looks like a response that answers it, they’ll output that response. Whether it’s true or not isn’t even relevant to how they work.

If I ask Siri a question, I want the response to be reliable, or just tell me it doesn’t know. If I ask it to complete a specific task, it needs to have been programmed for that task anyway, so LLMs don’t add anything there. Either it recognizes (meaning matches keywords in its database of functions) a task it knows how to do or it doesn’t.

It can always gain new functions or new knowledge sources, but none of that involves adding a bullshit generator.

I have a hard time believing they ever had plans for a low-cost version, though I’m sure they expect to be able to eventually bring down the price of the current version. The problem with current AR/VR headsets is that they suck. They’re not powerful enough to track motion at actual speed, or display in sufficient resolution and with properly adjusted lenses, so people get motion sickness while wearing them, or at least find it uncomfortable. The breakthrough of the Vision Pro is that it establishes a baseline experience where you can stick a virtual item in real space and it stays exactly there, and really looks like it’s actually there in the space. This requires hideously expensive, absolute bleeding-edge of silicon design hardware to make possible. A budget version would be a different category of product entirely, with a terrible user experience.

At some point they’ll get the price point for 2024’s technology down, while presumably still charging a premium for the then-current bleeding-edge technology, but I don’t think we’re anywhere close enough to that point to think about it as a distinct product yet. It’ll just be an older Vision Pro.

It’s not a remotely accurate statement. They just pointed out that holding a phone, any phone, lowers the signal strength, and some grips will lower more than others. It also wasn’t a “campaign”; it was a Q&A response to a ludicrously overblown “problem.” The next year’s phone kept the same antenna design but the drama had passed already.

What a terrible idea. I’m glad they shelved this project. It also runs counter to Apple’s other projects with Goldman Sachs. The Apple Card was supposed to make it easy to see what you were spending your money on and encourages you to pay off your debt and avoid paying interest. The savings account obviously encourages saving money. Encouraging people to invest in individual stocks is grossly irresponsible. Humans are not high-frequency trading computers; we’re terrible at actively choosing stocks. Even full-time professionals are really bad at it. Broad portfolio index funds and similar instruments are not fun, but they are a sound place to actually invest your money.

With the switch to Apple Silicon, it’s pretty much impossible to justify buying a Windows PC unless you have specific needs that absolutely require it; the Mac hardware is just that much better. Shop around for the best discounts on an M1 or M2 MacBook Air and just buy it. I suspect she’ll especially appreciate how much better Apple’s trackpads are, plus the super long battery life that comes from power-efficient chips.