People will also say they will pay more for a ephemeral good like privacy or patriotism, so I think you'd be surprised if you ask them your question. Where you're right is will they actually do it, and even if they will how much?
I'd guess that if you ask people about a broad right to privacy, they will mostly express support for it. You could ask:
"Would you pay extra for a guarantee your personal data is kept private?"
vs
"Would you pay extra for a guarantee your data isn't sold for marketing purposes?"
...and I would guess the first would have a higher "yes" rate, although still low. But I also expect a chunk of people would ask you to define "private" before answering the first question...
One might argue "private" implies more than can truly be promised, for example no US company can promise to ignore subpoenas and actually follow through.
I'd say it mirrors for patriotism: "do you support $OUR_COUNTRY" will get more "yes" responses than almost any more specific question about support for anything tangible. Precisely because it's sort of meaningless and unobjectionable... (well except in the US, where I'm sure it's correlated with whether or not one's favored party is in power)
this doesn't ring true; TV has always been deeply linked with ads, it just seems that they moved to fractional ownership of a show via many advertisers vs. the (perhaps less intrusive) show sponsor where the advertising was woven into the plot.
I think I'm older than most HN commenters. I can't Google up a citation, but "no or fewer ads" was part of the pitch in the early-mid 1970s in my recollection. You are correct about TV and ads, so maybe I'm wrong.
if you looked at the underlying = economics - even a quick review - you'd see that paying customers is a relatively trivial portion. This is much closer to the dotcom race to maximum eyeballs; figure out the money part later.
what alternatives in ride sharing / streaming / whatever are you suggesting I vote for with my money that doesn't do this? They all follow the same playbook.
Not giving them money is a start, and for alternatives I'd recommend finding another taxi service. Either the traditional yellow cabs or another private company/single owner-operator ones (like the ones that drive black SUVs/cars)
For streaming, I'm not sure since I don't watch much, and YT+adblocker is sufficient for me. Again, not giving them money is enough of a signal if you don't find the product good.
maybe this is also part of the problem? Once I learn the idiosyncrasies of a person I don't expect them to dramatically change overnight, I know their conversational rhythms and beat; how to ask / prompt / respond. LLMs are like a eager sycophantic intern how completely changes their personality from conversation to conversation, or - surprise - exactly like a machine
>> Note: please help, because I’d like to preserve this website forever and there’s no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot.
This makes zero sense from a preservation perspective, and basic logic follows that if you wait it will be easier to recreate it when and if you actually need it for some reason.
If you're giving 5:1 against Ive I'll take that in a heartbeat. He has zero historical record to show he can somehow capitalize on AI; even his design contributions are overall meh. Apple will have to do "something" but the beauty of mountains of cash and a business that doesn't need AI everywhere is that they can wait and see what something is, and then execute. They've actually been really good at figuring out implementation after the conceptual heavy lifting is done; it's deep in their DNA
3 retirements and a VP taking an obvious promotion at Meta: not really the "sky is falling" event they try to paint. Tim Cook stepping down would (if it even happens) be a big deal, but he's not the heart of the company. He's been an extremely compentent accountant; enjoy your retirement party and gold watch. And to suggest they are falling behind because they're not investing hundreds of billions in an AI "strategy" that shows no pay-off - while the other tech companies start to scale back their capital investments? I've never been a huge Apple fan as a company but their current situation makes me more bullish than ever.
I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon, but Siri seems to have stagnated. The big "Apple Intelligence" capabilities of the iPhone 16 haven't exactly landed. The Vision Pro seems to be on at least a partial depreciation path.
The only real innovation I've seen in the last decade has been the M line of chips. Mind you, these are undeniably really good; but even that hasn't changed the market share that much (though it is going up and trending well).
Unless you want to turn it off, which I haven't been able to figure out how to do. Every now and then my phone will randomly prompt me to "ask Gemini", which is really annoying. When I want to use the LLM, I will go to it, stop shoving it in my face over and over.
I can't turn it off on my Samsung Galaxy S23 which I originally bought, because it was not marketed with AI. The patched it in later and ever since it just randomly starts as if it was listening all the time.
Apple’s analytics probably support this which is exactly why siri still sucks. But ya, everyone will continue to think they somehow know better and apple is wrong and poorly executing
I can count on one hand, the number of times where I have gone “gosh, I so wish my voice assistant was better”.
It queues up music correctly, and picks the right destination on maps in my car. 98% use case satisfied. Would I like it to be better? Don’t really care. Is it a purchasing point? Nope. Would I miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? Also nope.
A better voice assistant is a major selling point for me. I need glasses to use my phone. Messages, email, purchases, directions, constantly. A good voice commands would be godsend. Siri doesn’t work very well
I use the phone voice assistants to set timers, and call people when I'm driving.
It is objectively worse at calling people than Assistant was. If I ask you to call someone, don't come up with a scolling list of phone numbers that I have to pick from. At least Assistant called the primary designated number for someone, Gemini just froze and wouldn't take voice commands to pick the number but forced my to pick up my phone.
I turned that bullshit off a couple of days after they forced it on me without asking.
I still feel like they are in an incredible position when it comes to AI because of their hardware integration/advantage across all of their devices. I think they see immense value in getting things on-device and not having to rely on any of these other companies.
When it comes to AI, there's ~5 trillion dollars of datacenter revenue Apple could be competing for, but isn't. That's not good.
Now, maybe it would be justifiable if there were great local AI experiences on iPhone, or an easy $5 trillion to be made elsewhere. Until then, Apple is bleeding money hand-over-fist by refusing to sign the CUDA UNIX drivers and sell the rackmount Mac as a cutting-edge TSMC inference box. The Grace superchip is absolutely eating Apple's ARM lunch right now.
Yes Siri has stagnated. But both Google and Amazon tried to add LLMs to their assistants and they are both worse now than they were before according to reports.
Siri could be better if Apple just threw 10000 monkeys at it and configure it more phrases (utterances) to match on.
This is what bothers me about most voice assistants, I think maybe the Amazon one finally got an upgrade to modern LLM capabilities? I don't know about the Google one.
I assume the cost is too high, but I don't expect ChatGPT / Grok / Claude level of knowledge from a voice assistant LLM, if they can run a drastically small enough model that doesn't cost an arm and a leg at scale, I would be okay with that. Definitely would have to cache some of the responses when viral events happen.
> I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon
it actually turned out to be the greatest boon in the milky way for me: joe consumer, apple device user.
been watching the copilot saga (in my head the lore is that this is clippy hes back and hes pissed everyone treated him like buttcheeks over a decade ago) over on windows & new samsung fold phones (which look really cool) having no way to fully disable that stuff and man.. i dunno im gonna be kind of pissed if this whole shakeup is just a move to make apple start doing that same shenanigans (please no)
You make it sound like Cook does everything at Apple.
His job has been to keep the train rolling and on the tracks. He's very competent at that but the slow atrophy of Apple shows he's not doing anything more than that.
Apple was doing great before he became CEO and it'll do great after he leaves.
While Cook isn't a product visionary, and never pretended to be, he's also not a mere caretaker: before he was CEO, he was responsible for the design and implementation of Apple's global supply chain and manufacturing operations as they exist today.
To torture your analogy, he designed and built the tracks and related infrastructure that kept Jobs' trains running on time.
Delivering products to customers, as you may recall, was always as important to Jobs as the design of the products themselves.
Part of the reason Apple was doing great before he became CEO is because Tim Cook was the COO. A huge part of their success was getting good deals on the non standard parts they needed at massive scale.
Not sure there was a clear better candidate for CEO after Jobs died.
He did, along with a lot of earlier decisions. The underlying problem is that neither he nor Jony Ive had experience doing user interface design—Ive was a hardware designer, and Dye was the packaging guy—so they kept making things which looked good in demos and the screenshots on boxes, but aren’t usable and flagrantly violated Apple own Human Interface Guidelines in ways which weren’t just “we tried to do something innovative” but more like “I never knew this concept in someone else’s field existed”.
There’s a bit more here but I think this opens the possibility of actual UX professionals fixing decisions without the problem of having to avoid saying their boss made a mistake.
I would worry if I worked at Facebook since their VR work is likely to get the same “looked awesome in the demo” demands which will push the hardware budget and lower usability.
The more worrying aspect is that the Apple leadership continued with Dye even as he kept pushing terrible interfaces. In fact, according to all reports, they seem distraught by this move which indicates they aren’t really in alignment with the broader ecosystem that didn’t like Dye’s output at all.
Agreed. It suggests they were swayed by demos more than using their own products, which is scary. Using iOS 26 makes me wonder if Cook even uses an iPhone or has an assistant do everything - it’s not unusable but there are so many little glitches which would’ve had Steve Jobs chewing out an entire room full of managers.
i don't really care about dye (or liquid glass) but i do feel like it's an alarm of sorts that Srouji stated he'd probably take off without tim cook at the helm. I dunno what that signals, i'm less inclined to think it's a "i just really like tim, man" and more of a "this incoming leadership can get bent". Apple also just picked up the meta lady that helped draft the patriot act. i dunno. What remains to be seen is whether or not Apple maintains its core tenets or if they start slipping on things like privacy, ads, and forcing AI in everyone's face. They undoubtedly leave a buttload of money on the table never pursuing these things.
whole shakeup feels like it was driven by wall street earlier in the year, there were headlines about apple being in serious trouble for missing out on AI. I dunno feels like some game of thrones opportunism within apple leadership just played out.
apple fans are dorks in that they think such a shakeup is in response to liquid glass and the iphone air being a boring phone.
i like apple devices, this is kinda freaky i can't lie. it would actually suck if their chip division started stalling if srouji bounces, it would suck infinitely more if a new leadership was here to redefine apple values and suddenly we have a proverbial apple version of satya nadella at the helm who's here to blast you with ads and subscriptions and forced AI.
Yeah it seems pretty obvious that we’re in the mainframe era of transformer models and we’ll soon transition to the personal computer era where these all run on your device, which Apple stands to benefit from the most. Their FoundationModels are actually pretty good at certain tasks
I don't think that's obvious. The marginal return on additional units of compute seems to fall pretty quickly for the vast majority of applications, which increases the benefit of decentralization over the cost of reduced compute. It isn't clear the same is true of intelligence.
Tim Cook is a safe CEO who should have stayed a COO. I like Tim but I think what Apple needs is someone like Tim as COO and a visionary the way Steve Jobs was a visionary. For all his flaws he paved the way to where Apple is today.
it is still better to give a range though because 1. it explicitly states the degree of unknown and 2. no boss is going to accept 4-20 weeks, which means you start talking about how you can estimate with better accuracy and the work required to do so, which is a major goal of planning & estimation.
reply