10 ms·

The iPhone's Last Stand?

• wiseowise 4mo ago
  iPhone's last stand? More like Microsoft's last stand. Nobody wants their garbage hardware and software outside of enterprise shmucks more interested in filling their pockets with fat contract money than delivering value. > The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services? > consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services. What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? > What they do want to do is watch short-form video Yeah, it seems so.
  • deleted 4mo ago
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  • cultofmetatron 4mo ago
    > What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.
    • yladiz 4mo ago
      Access to knowledge doesn’t mean you automatically acquire that knowledge.
      • koolba 4mo ago
        Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge. If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them. But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.
        • yladiz 4mo ago
          This doesn’t make any sense. We have more access to entertainment, be it comics, porn, or films, than any period in history, yet we continue to make more substantial scientific progress than any point in history.
          • angiolillo 4mo ago
            Scientific progress is typically the result of outliers at the upper end of the normal distribution which doesn't inherently contradict a decrease in average knowledge. (i.e. a larger standard deviation could overcome a lower average) Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.
          • adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
            We have one of the most incredible vaccine technologies in mRNA and yet vaccination rates are going down. We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries. We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations. We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less. We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever. The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.
            • komali2 4mo ago
              The things you describe may be problems in your country, but they're not universal. Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.
    • baal80spam 4mo ago
      This hurts.
    • wiseowise 4mo ago
      > brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?
      • deleted 4mo ago
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      • Forgeties79 4mo ago
        I’m not religious but there’s a significant difference here. Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false. Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.
        • technothrasher 4mo ago
          I don't think you've thought through what you're trying to assert. A god could make you believe anything they wanted to about the earth. So if you cannot disprove a god, then you cannot disprove the theory that the earth is flat.
          • detourdog 4mo ago
            I’m not sure you thought this through. Why would G-d want to or care to make one have thoughts.
            • DiggyJohnson 4mo ago
              why are you censoring the word 'God'?
    • coldtea 4mo ago
      >and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!
    • skywhopper 4mo ago
      I think you have the causation backwards: we have people thinking the world is flat because they can access the sum total of human knowledge, both true and false. There’s so much available, with similar production values, that going down brainwashing rabbit holes like flat earth, anti-vax, and more is a lot easier than it has ever been before.
      • iamnothere 4mo ago
        Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7. There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures. Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!
        • flohofwoe 4mo ago
          Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the people - and at least Marx tried to put some rational thought into the idea by extrapolating from history - but how does one get from at least 2300 years of knowing that the Earth is round back to believing the Earth is flat?
          • komali2 4mo ago
            > Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants. Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2]. > but nobody believed in communism either I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy [2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016-0127/html https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016... Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?locations=CU https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...
    • thunky 4mo ago
      > brother, Why am seeing "brother" a lot recently?
      • sanex 4mo ago
        Tiktok addicted kids, brother.
      • wett 4mo ago
        It’s kind of a meme https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ
        • derwiki 4mo ago
          I heard it with the voice of Macho Man Randy Savage
          • matwood 4mo ago
            That's the only way I hear it. I wonder if that gives away our age? When I was a teenager WWF came to my town. The day before the event a bunch of the wrestlers randomly showed up to my local gym to get a workout in. None of the guys, and especially Macho Man ever broke character the entire workout. They were super nice and after a bit of handshakes with us there we all just went back to our workouts.
          • parpfish 4mo ago
            Annyong hermano
          • MisterTea 4mo ago
            Let me tell you something, brother - whatcha gonna do when a thousand Hulkamaniacs come tell you Macho Man was known for his Oh Yeah!
        • Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
          Kind of, but younger generation will prefix every sentence with "bro" so you can kind of see a generational difference. But also, Warhammer 40K is popular.
    • mcculley 4mo ago
      > capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.
      • alnwlsn 4mo ago
        Plenty has already been lost due to being buried in search, removed for lack of interest, or simplified so far as to be too generalized.
    • graemep 4mo ago
      > yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life. Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.
      • librasteve 4mo ago
        but, the earth is flatter than it looks … since, according to GR, spacetime is convex around it gravity well
    • jollyllama 4mo ago
      Nice snark, but they're not all convinced of that via short form video. You can reach the same conclusion from 4-hour podcasts. Your point is kind of irrelevant.
    • sph 4mo ago
      My pet peeve is that every flat earther there are 1000 people complaining about them and keeping the meme alive at every chance possible. At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.
      • cicko 4mo ago
        Mate, I was buying a kebab and the guy was convincing me that the Earth is flat, there's no Moon. And it's proven by... something with shadows. At least I got a real kebab in the end.
  • Traubenfuchs 4mo ago
    > Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services? Microsoft is still simply one of the very best at enterprise dealmaking.
  • imglorp 4mo ago
    I think Microsoft does have a point here: hosted services and thin clients are going to make money. (1) Their main focus is selling services, selling you, selling your data, and showing you ads. Children are being raised to think that asking chat to add two numbers is normal; they will enter the workplace in this state. Everything for MS is a service: this is going to work for them. And (2) because those hosted services will also replace some jobs, as the enterprise schmucks want.
    • engineer_22 4mo ago
      How is that different than using a calculator
      • ceejayoz 4mo ago
        It's less likely to be accurate, it's slower, and far less efficient as a bonus.
      • imglorp 4mo ago
        Kids are absolutely using chat for calculator tasks. There was a meme going around last week where a child saw a phone calculator app and remarked "wow there's an AI just for math". Generalizing, they're using chat for everything else, like search. Actually reading a source is not on their radar. This is frightening. A whole generation that will not, and can not, think. At all. "Do it for me."
        • trumpdong 4mo ago
          If you want to get rich quick there's a huge lesson here: sell to children early. If you can get 5-year-olds hooked on your product and growing up thinking it's the only way to do things, they will give you a huge amount of money later in life. Such as paying ChatGPT to be a calculator.
    • debugnik 4mo ago
      I still can't get over people calling ChatGPT "chat" instead of it referring to a stream chat.
  • jstummbillig 4mo ago
    The anger is real, but it's misguided (as anger mostly is). The benchmark is reality. Everyone is more "TikTok addicted kids" than not and the analysis is quite apt.
  • wongarsu 4mo ago
    If enterprises were really focused on saving employee's time, Jira wouldn't sell. At least not the bog slow SaaS version Saving time (==saving money) is something you can sell to companies. But above all, they are willing to spend on saving their managers time. The higher up the hierarchy, the better. If that involves wasting a lot more time for the underlings, then so be it. The underlings aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions after all
    • parpfish 4mo ago
      i dont think jira (or linear or any other ticketing platform) is about saving anybody time. they know on some level that they are all a burden. but they will gladly take the productivity hit from that time sink because it gives them teh ability to track employees. they'd rather know that everybody is working at 80% productivity than release that burden and just trust them. it's either this or filling out frustrating timesheets.
      • hylaride 4mo ago
        The previous place I worked had the Head of Product become VP of Engineering after the CTO left (don't ask, it's a long story). They literally implemented the most orthodox scrum you can imagine, with the one exception that they could sit on the sprint planning meetings and override the teams pulling tickets off the backlog into sprints (technical debt of course started to pile up). The kicker is that after a few months of this, productivity slowed to a crawl. The retrospectives showed that the planning wasn't working because the planned work rarely got done - because we were always fighting fires. Work also slowed due to all the overhead that was added to implement scrum (I also had to participate, despite being in an DevOps role - that at the best of times is inherently interrupt driven and I'm servicing the work of developers). Despite the fact that the powers that be knew things were not working as well as they used to, no amount of feedback could loosen the reigns - probably because it inherently meant losing some control. We had to try everything else to get back to where we were, when empowered developers could make decisions. Things got worse of course as within 6 months we lost half our most experienced talent that wasn't going to put up with it (this was the peak 2022 tech hiring levels). Eventually there was some mild "improvement" as we were allowed a "15% time" to work on what we thought was best, which still had to be justified and it was still the lowest priority during any given sprint. I still shake my head at the whole situation.
  • jmuguy 4mo ago
    Thompson is speaking broadly about markets, not trying to put anyone down. The point he's getting at is that Apple and MS are just playing (or trying to play) to their strengths. Did you see anything in the new Siri AI demos that looked all that much like someone getting work done? I didn't. And that's fine, for Apple and the iPhone. Microsoft for better or for worse is what a large part of the American business world is using to get work done, and so Microsoft is trying to position their AI strategy towards that. For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.
  • csallen 4mo ago
    > What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? It's not a "callous view," it's reality. Social media, entertainment/streaming/media, gaming, and porn make up the vast majority of minutes spent on the internet, and it's not even close.
  • dang 4mo ago
    Can you please not post to HN in the denunciatory/indignant style? I know it's popular on the internet but we're trying for curious conversation here, and those things can't co-exist. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  • gradientsrneat 4mo ago
    That last quote is when I stopped reading the article. The opening with the premonition of personal computing moving to the cloud, followed by the heavy use of the word "consumer", made it clear that the author has a cynical view of humanity, but at that point it went too far. I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.
• gohome190 4mo ago
  > Apple is targeting consumers, for whom traditional chatbot functionality is probably sufficient for the vast majority of their AI needs. I disagree strongly here. The chatbot is the furthest thing from sufficient for the average consumer. Take the newly announced feature that groups your compromised passwords together and offers to agentically change them all for you. Really cool! Could you do that via a chatbot interface? Sure. Would the average consumer? No.
  • move-on-by 4mo ago
    I doubt the ‘average consumer’ is even using a password manager, let alone going to change their password because of something so common place as it being compromised.
• eschatology 4mo ago
  title is too biased and sensational first paragraph begins the article upon 2 very big and flawed statements: > Apple fans would, for years and years, sneer at Microsoft’s penchant for talking about products that may or may not ship, deriding them as vaporware. maybe some would, but as a whole I would say this is not a common thing > After Apple’s bungled 2024 launch of Apple Intelligence and new Siri, however, vaporware is fair game no it's not I didn't know about Project Solara so learned a new thing from the article, but I got the impression that it's not as big as the author tried to make it seem, felt very distant and forced.
  • drcongo 4mo ago
    It only gets worse from there.
• deleted 4mo ago
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• QuadmasterXLII 4mo ago
  i was under the impression that the 2024 apple intelligence rollout was something of a victory: Apple realized that the majority of people don't actually want this stuff forced on them at the os level, and the ai maximalists all used apple anyways via clawbot (including purchasing an additional apple device, the mini!) because of apples non-ai-specific commitment to phone computer interop. Certainly the copilot button in ms paint did nothing to attract the clawbot ecosystem to windows
  • threetonesun 4mo ago
    I say this every time: the average person never wants to hear the letters A and I. Not because it has a negative connotation, but because they don’t care how their phone gets them an answer to “when is my dentist appointment” they just want it to do it.
    • Gigachad 4mo ago
      At least for consumer software, AI is synonymous with annoying nagware forcing itself in your way.
      • jorisw 4mo ago
        I think you're trying to say, the term 'AI' is _associated_ with chatbots being added in places (websites mostly) where they are more of a nuisance than added value. OpenAI's ChatGPT is AI consumer software and is a hit, albeit mostly free tier users.
        • whizzter 4mo ago
          And that's the thing, 90% of people's interactions with "AI" is negatives in places it didn't belong, Klarna had to roll back "AI" customer service, useless chatbots everywhere "because AI", copilot this and that and so on. And yes, ChatGPT is a hit but who will subsidize the hardware for freeloaders, Google's (cheap to run) AI is good enough now that I don't need to move over to ChatGPT for simple answers, thus the Google moat will probably remain intact denying OpenAI the search revenue stream all whilst OpenAI proposals/trials to add ADs were met with annoyance. AI where useful is becoming a commodity, Apple did the correct thing in waiting and using the commodity parts and we're otherwise also quickly heading to the bubble's pop, HN even censoring articles on the topic sure seems to be an indicator that those in power are afraid.
• saberience 4mo ago
  Last Stand? This is rather strong language and overselling the situation, for clicks I guess. You might re-title the article instead, "The iPhone holds its ground", and it would be a more realistic title. But perhaps garnering less clicks. I've always thought Ben Thompson is strong on enterprise and b2b topics but super weak on everything consumer related, he simply doesn't seem to understand consumer behavior (he has zero empathy or ability to project his mind into the average person's mind) E.g. Ben was sure iPhone air would be a massive hit because he himself loved it. (It's struggled as people don't like the smaller battery life). Ben was sure the Vision Pro would be a huge hit because he himself loved it. (It was a total failure as the average person doesnt want to pay huge amounts for a ridiculous looking dork helmet). Ben raving about Meta's hand controller which he was sure was going to be the future of consumer electronics (The Neural Band). He was discussing how you could use it while your hand is in your jeans/pants pocket. Not quite thinking about how this would look while you're sat on the subway with someone sat opposite you. Ben discussing how the future of watching sports is in VR. Not considering how weird it would be to go to a friends house to watch the game and everyone has their own VR headset. Also not considering the fun of watching sports is doing it with other people. Basically, he has a huge issue with extracting his own liking of techy products to the average consumer who are basically nothing like Ben Thompson.
  • ksec 4mo ago
    This. Not sure why it it downvoted. The same with Patrick Moorhead, or in similar stance DED from Apple Insider etc. Just because you like something, doesn't mean it will succeed. These people will more likely using some sort of industry knowledge to form conclusion which conforms with their bias. On the flip side, just because you hated something doesn't mean it will fail. There are plenty of Apple haters who will write things that seems to make sense but completely misses the mark every single time.
  • sharpshift 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • mohsen1 4mo ago
    I get the criticism and all your previous judgments samples are valid. I also agree that title is click-bait BUT: I know people are desperate for a Siri that works. The convince of just talking to your phone is priceless. If Apple gets this right, this is a huge deal – which it seems they are on the right track. People are still talking to Siri for basic stuff like timers and alarms because it works, doesn't need an app, works when phone is locked or even away from you. If this works for more complex tasks like texting and general questions Apple will have the upper hand over Meta and Google in this new way of using computers/internet. Apple also took a very clever approach for Capex and general AI strategy. Everyone knows that the best intelligence will eventually become a commodity and Apple decided to step aside from this expensive experiment. That's worth pointing out too.
• ramon156 4mo ago
  Wait what, is this a Microsoft ad in disguise?
  • swiftcoder 4mo ago
    Weirdly, despite the headline and how the article starts off, it’s pretty pro-Apple by the last paragraph?
• shazeubaa 4mo ago
  What struck me reading this is that everyone seems focused on who gets to own the next computing platform: Apple, AI companies, the cloud, agents, whatever comes next. I wonder if the bigger question is what happens to us. Convenience is great, but if we optimize away every moment of reflection, tradeoff, and decision-making, we risk becoming passengers in our own lives. The goal shouldn’t be to hand over our judgment to increasingly capable systems. It should be to use those systems to help us think more clearly and act more intentionally. The future I want isn’t one where AI lives my life for me. It’s one where it helps me live it better.
• kilroy123 4mo ago
  I am still convinced that Apple is slowly working its way to smart glasses. And that *this* is the Next Big Thing. Frankly, the future is very good AR glasses that just work. - iPhone Air to cram everything into a small space - Vision pro - a new OS for looking at things and interacting - Better Siri and AI that works with voice - Smart local model / routing to big models in the cloud - integration with wearables (air pods and watches)
  • mschuster91 4mo ago
    Smart glasses aren't well-liked by the mainstream population. The term "glasshole" exists for a reason.
    • infecto 4mo ago
      Never have even heard of the word before.
      • swiftcoder 4mo ago
        The term is nearly old enough to have a driving license - google glass came out 14 years ago
        • infecto 4mo ago
          Ahh maybe that’s it. Old slang that’s not used often enough these days.
          • swiftcoder 4mo ago
            Good luck reading an article about Meta Raybans without running into the term. That said, the whole smartglasses thing seems to be pretty dead as a concept - at least in part because public opinion is not on the side of folks wandering around with stealthy cameras on their faces
            • 4mo ago
• shazeubaa 4mo ago
  [dead]
• thenthenthen 4mo ago
  On step into the markets in Shenzhen and you will know it is not over. That new foldy iphone is a bit dodgy tho..
• mg 4mo ago
  you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents I would be really happy with my phone + headphones as the device I use most. But only if I could use Gemini (or ChatGPT or Grok or any other chat agent) in voice mode and say "SSH into my GitHub Codespace soandso and implement feature soandso.". And it replies "Did it. I told copilot (or codex or whatever coding agent lives on that VM) to implement the feature". And then a minute later I could ask it "Is copilot done yet?" and it replies "No, looks like it is still working on it". And then a minute later I ask again. It replies "Yes, it finished. It changed chart.py and styles.css. Do you want me to tell you what specific changes it made to the files?". But it looks like none of the chat agents with voice interface have such a connector at the moment? An SSH connector would be the most useful. But a "GitHub Codespace connector" or something like that would also do. I wonder if that will be a missing piece for long. If so, I would build an agent with voice mode and ssh connector myself. But I guess it should come out from the big guys any moment now?
  • deleted 4mo ago
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  • jazzypants 4mo ago
    > Yes, it finished. It changed chart.py and styles.css. Do you want me to tell you what specific changes it made to the files?" A verbal diff sounds practically useless. Does it first read out the entire left-hand base, and then read out the entire right-hand target? Does it say loudly "REMOVING ... ADDING ... "? How would it read out something like Struct->Field? This seems lower fidelity than a visual confirmation, and I just don't think that voice commands make sense with this kind of work.
    • mg 4mo ago
      It would tell me about the changes like a human would. "It changed the plot function so it takes another parameter called linewidth. It also added an input field in the stylecontrols section where the user can ...".
      • 4mo ago
• MyelinatedT 4mo ago
  This Microsoft notion of “devices that don’t stand alone but surround you” sounds an awful lot like Google’s “ambient computing” of yonder.
  • Thrymr 4mo ago
    "The network is the computer." - Sun Microsystems, 1984
    • spogbiper 4mo ago
      "Everything's computer" - Trump, 2025
  • sleepybrett 4mo ago
    Ambient computing goes back far further than that... and we are getting there. I have digital control over most of the lighting in my apartment as well as several other items through various iot adapters (button pushers, stepper motors attached to my blinds, power outlet relays). Audio reactive agents like alexa/bedpodsiri/whateverrunsheygoogle can put you in control of all of that. Nothing is stopping anyone from building a audio reactive agent that dumps input into their AI model or models of their choice if they want it. With the right set-top-box, you tvs become just another display for whatever you want to send their way. We are extremely close to startrek tng style spaces. I'm sure there is a github repo out there that may even be there. Why do you think apple has the appletv, the apple watch, the phone itself is essentially a pocketwatch with an addressable display. I think we have all the parts it's just now about knitting them all together and building up a ux that works for normal people.
• economistbob 4mo ago
  They see "thin is in" and I see remote servers now watching everything on your screen or within audio visual range. Eventually the only jobs will be at the intel agencies watching the data feeds from all the rabble so they can ascertain who is mouthy enough to whack and charge the others by the word for what used to be processed locally for free. Of all the things they could build, why must they pick this future...
  • zombot 4mo ago
    Seen from this perspective, the GDR was prescient: They had more than half of their population engaged in spying on all the rest. We can now take our cues from them an reshape our economies in their image.
    • jubilanti 4mo ago
      > the GDR was prescient: They had more than half of their population engaged in spying on all the rest. Wrong. It definitely wasn't 50%. This number seems to grow each time I see it referenced. The Stasi directly or indirectly employed about 2% of the population, which is still huge. But /The Lives of Others/ takes a lot of artistic license. The true levels will never be known, but the largest and most widely quoted figure is 1 in 6.5 or about 15%. That derives from one historian's estimate, which was that at the upper bound, 1 in 6.5 people had in some way made a report to the government that in some way made it to the Stasi. I'm sure 15% of the people in any developed country have called the police at some point in their life. This is also assuming no duplicates, you really think the Stasi could uniquely identify and disambiguate informants at this scale? And that every Stasi low level officer tasked with recruiting new informants or else actually recruited new informants instead of making them up and keeping the payouts for themselves? And because I have to say it: authoritarian surveillance is bad, the Stasi was bad, this is not an apology or minimization, but a correction of historical facts.
• al_borland 4mo ago
  Having watched Microsoft try and fail to launch countless new ideas into the market over the past couple decades, I have 0 faith in their ability to deliver something people actually use. Others, often Apple, seem to succeed where Microsoft had previously tried and repeatedly failed.
  • cmxch 4mo ago
    At least with Microsoft it’s more likely to not be a walled garden.
    • al_borland 4mo ago
      At least a walled garden exists. Microsoft pulls the products that don't work in the market. So either you're left with nothing, or endless migrations as they keep trying different things without traction.
      • cmxch 4mo ago
        If Windows Mobile* and maybe the Catapult FPGAs** are any indication, those are relatively lower walls than Apple. The still unbroken(?) Zune and Windows RT are two rare exceptions. * - from the HTC HD2 to the latter Lumias like the 1020 and 950/XL ** - buy a Quartus license and you have boatloads of small-ish DIY networkable Arria 10 GX accelerators at your disposal.
• deleted 4mo ago
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• alsetmusic 4mo ago
  I've valued Ben Thompson's opinions less over time. He was super into goggle-like devices and remote meetings. I own Apple Vision Pro. It's a technical achievement, but not compelling beyond immersive video (too bad). He harps on Dems trying to clean up monopolies (Lina Khan during Biden, who had good principles but didn't get much done; probably blame her boss) and is quiet through republican bullshit (T2). He seems to interview huge tech figures as though he was the was the Verge or Nilay Patel does: with a soft touch. Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says. Edit: missing words, thinking faster than typing
  • saberience 4mo ago
    Yeah I've been noticing the same trends. In my opinion, when analyzing B2B topics, or in general enterprise software and hardware, he is pretty good. But when it comes to anything around consumer behavior, individuals, etc, i.e. the average family in America, he is often completely and utterly wrong in all his takes and predictions. In fact, so wrong it's often laughable, and amazes me that he is so confident in his predictions. Also, in the podcast I've noticed that he talks almost every podcast about his "hits", i.e. his times in the past where he predicted something accurately. But never, ever mentions the times where he was completely wrong. He's like the dictionary definition of confirmation bias (or survivorship bias). It's like he's gotten overly confident (or a little arrogant) as he's become more of a tech celebrity, to the point where he thinks he's some sort of Nostradamus now and doesn't recognize his weaknesses or failures. And I've personally stopped listening to the podcasts as much as it's getting a little tiresome. BTW, I also noticed how often he is wrong on deep tech topics, e.g. his explanation of IP addresses and routing in one podcast. It's like he thinks his business knowledge + Claude is enough for him to authoritatively discuss how technical systems work, and he often is mistaken...
  • grvdrm 4mo ago
    I recently canceled my Stratechery Plus subscription. Don’t miss it to be honest - once a week free is plenty.
    • analogpixel 4mo ago
• deltarholamda 4mo ago
  After the blowout success of the Macbook Neo, I'd think the bet would be on a cheap iPhone. Maybe not, as so many people finance their expensive phone through their carrier, but I suspect a $300 iPhone would eat the mid-range Android market.
  • throw310822 4mo ago
    Not sure about this- Windows laptops have been a disaster for a decade- consumers have basically no clue of what they're buying and how it will work- will it be a piece of cheap, creaky plastic; will the basics actually work (e.g. audio in and out); will the speed be acceptable, will its fans constantly sound like a jet taking off, etc. A well made cheap laptop with guaranteed quality is a godsend. The case of smartphones is completely different: Android is actually a good OS and there's plenty of excellent devices and high quality brands in the mid range.
  • simonh 4mo ago
    I really doubt it, for several reasons. The Neo is cheap because it mainly leverages a compute core that already existed, consisting mainly of binned parts. Yes the chassis had to be designed, but that can be used in common for future iterations. That's much harder for phones where the chassis is very tightly coupled to the specific circuit board design. The 17e already is the cheap iPhone and it's $599. Putting it's internals in a different shell is one thing. Designing and building a half price internal board is quite another, especially as it would either require an entirely new SOC, or mean continuing production of a legacy SOC thus taking up valuable die production pipeline capacity. Even if they did use an older SOC. Now they'd have to continue supporting that anaemic underpowered SOC with OS updates for years to come, and these future OS updates would have to run well on it. I don't see it happening.
    • maherbeg 4mo ago
      iOS 27 supports devices all the way down to the iPhone 11, so I think they're doing pretty well here.
    • flyingshelf 4mo ago
• analogpixel 4mo ago
  Who is paying for all of this AI usage on the Iphone? I didn't see anything about a new AI subscription (maybe I missed it?), and I doubt Apple will want to pay million/billions a year to do it indefinitely.
  • gottagocode 4mo ago
    There will be ads/our data.
  • mitkebes 4mo ago
    Supposedly they're going to do a fair bit of it on device for privacy reasons, so the only payment for that will be RAM and battery power. For stuff that can't be run on phones, some of it will be run on Apple's servers, which I'm assuming Apple is eating the cost of for the time being. Stuff that needs heavy reasoning or external knowledge will be processed by google, in exchange for $1 billion a year. However Google already pays Apple $20 billion a year for google to be the default iOS search engine, so you could view this as just changing to google paying $19 billion a year instead.
    • e28eta 4mo ago
      I think the server-side stuff will be a mix of users & developers paying. I have seen this info in several places: > PCC delivers a powerful server model without compromising privacy: data is never stored, used only for the request, and independently verified. It's integrated with the OS and iCloud, so there's no authentication or API keys, no token cost to developers, a daily per-user limit (higher with iCloud+), and eligibility for apps under 2M downloads. Source: summary on https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/319/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/319/ I haven’t seen any information about what’s happening with apps over 2M downloads, who graduate from the Small Business Program. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
  • SllX 4mo ago
    Pricing is looking to be complicated and not clear cut. Some of it is free on-device. Some of it is free & rate limited per day. They mentioned in the WWDC infomercial that users with iCloud+ (the storage tier subscriptions, Apple likes to throw random things in with that) will be able to get more uses per day. And some of it developers will pay for.
• thraway3837 4mo ago
  Not sure why the article is titled the way it is. Ben’s take on Siri AI being just good enough for the vast majority of consumers makes sense. The iPhone is the most consumer facing product because it’s a consumption platform. Some folks use it to create stuff, but most people use it to consume media or interact with another human. iPadOS also did not receive any product specific updates because I think Apple understands that device well: it’s also a consumption device with a bit more productivity capability. They know they can ship a full macOS on iPad, as witnessed by the lower performance A18 chip in the Neo running the full OS, but what’s the point? Using a desktop UI with a touch interface is terrible. So you’d need a mouse and keyboard. By the time you get that accessory, you’ve already exceeded the cost of a Neo or MacBook Air. There’s also no size, weight or space difference between a fully accessorized iPad and MacBook Neo, Air or 14” Pro. I think Apple will be fine regardless of whether this new Siri AI stuff actually works well or not. I think deep down they don’t really care because they don’t have to. All of their devices are perfect clients that can interact perfectly fine with cloud inference. And their devices are such a joy to use. That’s what Apple is good at. Now the confusing part is the new Microsoft hardware project. Is Solara a laptop? Tablet? 2-in-1? Phone? They already have a great hardware run with Surface, so I wonder if this new project is a more powerful local inference push?
• motyar 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • dan-g 4mo ago
    This is irrelevant and it’s clear from your comment history you’re just spamming your company; please read the HN guidelines again.
• catlikesshrimp 4mo ago
  I stopped reading when he mentioned "..beyond the fact that billions.." I looked it up and iphone users are much less than two billions. I can't expect much axcuracy from this opinion.
  • kens 4mo ago
    I noticed the same thing. "The fact that billions of consumers already have iPhones" is a hallucination, not a fact. Billions of consumers have Android phones, but that's not the case for iPhones. (Billions of iPhones have been sold, though.)
• phuff 4mo ago
  > [C]onsumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention- harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services. I came here to talk about this, like some other commenters did, too :) I think that this _is_ a predominant view amongst most of Silicon Valley but I think it's kind of a local maxima view... Easy to agree with, easy to see that it's a functional idea, but... people... (i.e. consumers) do lots more than just waste time on their phones even though I bet that's a huge amount of what people are doing across the US right now. I guess the thing that _is_ true about this nugget is the "at scale" part. It's hard to find things _at scale_ that people would pay for on a phone. So the phone sort of falls back into this easy to monetize thing via advertising. But I think people (qua consumers) probably can clearly be a sustainable market for way more than attention harvesting (or dopamine fracking!) but it requires a lot more effort to think of things that you can build a market out of there. So people sort of lazy-back into attention harvesting via ads.
• daft_pink 4mo ago
  It kind of reminds me of Windows mobile and blackberry and palm os where apple was clearly behind but they eventually caught up. The first iPhone didn’t even have apps! I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket. It’s okay and apple can easily simplify and eventually win. The mainstream hasn’t really started using agents yet and no one has come close to delivering a platform that will get them there.
  • acdha 4mo ago
    > I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket These ones also seem really weird because the baseline is most often someone using the iOS app to do the same thing, and the agent demos are usually slower in addition to being riskier. One of the Chrome demos had someone buying groceries at pretty hefty markup, which seemed to be targeting a narrow demographic of people who a) don’t worry about paying 50% more for produce and b) can spend time writing a prompt but not 30 second opening an app and just doing it with zero chance of getting scammed.
    • daft_pink 4mo ago
      Something that I thought when reading this was that I'm not willing to buy groceries remotely, because when I had covid during the pandemic I had grocery delivery and I ended up with milk that expired in a few days and produce that was very subpar neither or which I would have bought in person. I would actually be willing to use AI to purchase groceries if it could provide me with some assurance that it would choose the items better than a shopping cart. As for now, I'm only willing to purchase non-perishable goods that are difficult to screw up online. Might be a service idea for AI.
      • simulator5g 4mo ago
        Shopping carts don't choose items, you do, you [redacted].
    • 4mo ago
• JellyPlan 4mo ago
  Side note, this page really likes to jiggle horizontally as you scroll.
  • DontBreakAlex 4mo ago
    Not on my phone. Ah the web, such a beautiful place.
• dcdevito 4mo ago
  [dead]
• 827a 4mo ago
  You cannot trust companies to communicate an unbiased vision of the future, because they will always build what they're capable of selling. Microsoft and Meta are incapable of selling phones and laptops; they're certainly capable of building them, but few people will buy them. So instead Meta builds smart-glasses and Microsoft presents this weird vision of "connected thin devices" by keeping the hardware itself very abstract and unknowable. The hardware doesn't matter to Microsoft, not because the hardware doesn't actually matter, but because it cannot matter, because Microsoft cannot win in hardware. Its not a vision of the future; its a vision of what Microsoft can meaningfully sell. Microsoft can meaningfully sell their weird constellation of 365 subscriptions that no one knows what they do or if they remotely do what you buy them for; thus their marketing now wears that idea of "unknowable capability" like a mask.
  • jamothy 4mo ago
    "You cannot trust companies to communicate an unbiased vision of the future, because they will always build what they're capable of selling." This just rewrote my brain, thank you.
  • MoonWalk 4mo ago
    Based on Microsoft's ever-more-fetid output over the last two decades, they can't sell self-respecting people jack squat.
    • 827a 4mo ago
      IMO there's an even more real story at the heart of this idea than stratechery's predictable, banal attempt to compare Microsoft and Apple's competing visions of the future, and its part of why I've become so bored of stratechery's articles lately. He glances against that Microsoft video, recognizes that the video does a horrible job of communicating their vision, and then carries water for Microsoft by working overtime clarifying their vision for them; instead of doing the obvious and totally reasonable thing of asking: Why the fuck is that video so incomprehensible? Microsoft used to be pretty good at aligning themselves and their customers around a shared vision of their future, but since the advent of AI the company has seemed more-and-more adrift at sea without a bearing. Much more needs to be said and discussed about this; in comparison, Siri AI is boring and predictable. Siri AI is Apple being Classic Apple: shipping a solid, decent product that works as advertised and isn't that surprising. That's Apple. They lost their bearing as well for a couple years, but they re-found it. Good on them. Meanwhile Microsoft is in meltdown mode behind them shrieking buzzwords and everyone is pretending that everything is fine because they're microsoft, they'll figure it out.
• Aperocky 4mo ago
  > Microsoft put forth a vision for a new ecosystem of hardware devices under the banner of Project Solara While I don't necessarily disagree with their vision but if implemented like "Copilot for Windows" I don't see me or anyone wanting to go anywhere near it. Apple being slow is just fine, at least they didn't launch "Copilot for Mac". Sometimes the lack of certain feature is the feature.
  • throwaway27448 4mo ago
    > Apple being slow is just fine, at least they didn't launch "Copilot for Mac". Is this not what Apple Intelligence is?
    • Aperocky 4mo ago
      Maybe, but I've never interacted with it on my 5+ apple devices, so I'm blissfully unaware.
    • chrisandchris 4mo ago
      No, they don't force it down your throat. You can click "no" once in a while and it looks like it does not exist. Try that with Copilot.
  • bigyabai 4mo ago
    > Sometimes the lack of certain feature is the feature. Sometimes it's a curse. Apple might be a 2-3 trillion dollar business right now, if they didn't refuse to sign CUDA drivers for their ARM servers.
    • bjustin 4mo ago
      Apple's market cap would have dropped by 30-50% if they had signed CUDA drivers? How would that have played out?
• _HMCB_ 4mo ago
  Long-winded article. I’ll give you my take: people like their phones. They identity with them. It’s a singular piece of tech that isn’t cumbersome. It does multiple things well and sometimes at once. Why would I want a duplicity of devices to do similar things at the cost of more stuff?! Answer me that riddle.
• billdybas 4mo ago
  What I don't see anyone talking about is how Private Cloud Compute is behind an iCloud subscription. From what I can tell, this means any app that is using their foundation model is sharing against a user's pooled usage quota & Apple takes all the revenue upside if a user chooses to upgrade their plan. Why would an app developer choose their model which has a minuscule 32K context window, might get throttled because of usage in another app, and doesn't share revenue over any frontier model vendor (where you can package/pass along token costs to your customers)?
  • 827a 4mo ago
    I have consumed a decent amount of literature coming out of WWDC and I do not understand how the billing and model availability side of things will work. Its definitely the case that Apple said that some AI capabilities will rely on cloud hosted models; and that some of these capabilities will be metered; and that "some paid iCloud+ plans" include increased usage. Its unclear what the full extent of capabilities that rely on cloud models are. We know that Spatial Reframing is a capability that relies on cloud models and will be metered; this was stated on-stage. The typical conversations with Siri are, supposedly, a mix, possibly based on how complex the query is? We know there are two cloud-hosted models (what they call internally "Cloud" and "Cloud Pro"); are both of these metered? Does it depend on the use-case (e.g. is Spatial Reframing metered because of its use-case or because of which model it uses?) A lot of this would be easier to figure out if there was, somewhere, a "meter" you could see drop every time you used a metered feature; but there isn't. There is zero indication of metered AI usage anywhere in the settings that I have found (I am on the 27 dev beta). There is also zero indication that any of the iCloud+ plans include metered AI usage. It is also of note that Apple very specifically said on-stage that "some iCloud+ plans" include increased usage; implying that the $2.99/mo plan likely does not. Apple has also announced that developers under a certain revenue number can use their foundation models in private cloud compute for free [1]. This implies: third party developers will pay for it. In other words: it might be the case that your shared iCloud+ pool of AI usage only applies to AI capabilities from first-party Apple apps, while in third-party apps the developers are expected to front the bill. Which further reinforces your point: Why would anyone choose to integrate with these cloud models? Strange situation, and unlike Apple; they seem very frantic. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/08/apple-bets-cheaper-ai-will-woo-small-developers/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/08/apple-bets-cheaper-ai-will...
• sleepybrett 4mo ago
  Microsoft has a bad reputation for hardware. Back in the late 90s you could trust them for mice/keyboards, not fancy but they worked. Some swore by that ms natural (it gave me RSI that it took a special keyboard that made people look at me like I was crazy to fix). The xbox eventually helped them build some trust. However then there was the surface series and the phone. They dropped support for certain surface tables/laptops very quickly, they got deeply mixed reviews. The phone was back to front a disaster. Recently they had that AR headset, total miss, a miss that makes the Apple Vision Pro look like a wildly successful product. I don't trust microsoft with hardware anymore, nor do i trust them with software.
• qmr 4mo ago
  > The concept — which isn’t entirely clear from that video, but was more fully explained on stage — is that in the future you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents, which live in the cloud. The fuck I will. There is no cloud, only other people's hard drives. -- your increasingly crusty and curmudgeonly old Unix admin who is not paranoid because they are out to get you
• w10-1 4mo ago
  What does it mean to say Apple is behind in AI or back in 2024, when Apple is not trying to build AI models, and no one else is nearly as evolved as their local architecture? Is Microsoft's device "vaporware" even comparable to a live demo? iPhone AI comes via AI-safe pipes: private by design, on device or not, accelerated via MLX. Given that vectoring an AI request to GPU/NPU/CPU/private cloud takes non-trivial engineering, is anyone else as advanced as Apple? It seems wishful to believe interactive UI's will be superseded by untethered, non-interactive (pay by the token) workflows. iPhone AI is last-mile; the value depends entirely on what you're trying to do. Apple can demo features for their own apps (esp. with personal knowledge), but the real question is what independent developers can do with Apple pipes. He can say enterprise (not consumers) is the only way to recoup the Nvidia capex, but free local coding models run well enough now on mid-range Apple Macs to make me doubt the business model of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft, and the upside for Nvidia. I'm glad Apple will be investing that capex into their own chips.
• paradox242 4mo ago
  I just know I'm going to end up having to pay more for a phone that doesn't have all this AI bullshit on it.
• bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
  Op said himself there's no money selling chatbots to users... The money is in enterprise.
• ahartmetz 4mo ago
  > in the future you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents, which live in the cloud Ewww, that's fucking gross. Please don't say such things when I'm about to eat.
• dmzxnico 4mo ago
  iPhone will always lead as long as iOS is the standard. To be honest, most companies do good phone frames. But they all run on Android. Apple has been smart by keeping iOS only for them and not work with partners as Android does, it helps keeping it optimized. If someone could do the same, it'd be a game changer in the next 10 years.