I really don’t know how you can say he wouldn’t do this things.
The Air particularly - the thinnest, lightest feeling, nicest to hold iPhone ever made, I think that might have been his favorite.
The Vision Pro is clearly an interesting category of device, Apple needs to be in, if it would have seen the light of day under Steve Jobs is unknowable.
He was ruthless at Apple because back then he had to be - now they can run Vision Pro and it not impact their ability run the business, if Apple had
A product that did not succeed in the 90s it might have sank them.
The iPhone 5 size was designed for people who use smartphones a healthy amount, ie not very much, usually in pocket and often one-handed for a small task. At some point, that was no longer how smartphones were most often used.
I kept my 5S as long as possible, until my carrier wouldn't even provide cell service to it.
Yep, this form factor was the peak. Like others said, if you run your life on your smartphone I guess it might not be sufficient. I just feel sorry for the people actually ruining their lives on their phones though. What shitty typing and multitasking experiences they must have...
90s Apple also coasted on the tailwinds of what Jobs accomplished in the 80s. Same with today. Jobs set things up in the 00s and now Apple is coasting again.
Jobs had products getting people out of their seats and applauding. New products, new industries. As opposed to now where Apple is following the herd and not leading it.
It feels aimless, and Vision Pro ironically is the best representation of Apple's complete lack of vision.
I disagree with it feeling aimless - other than the Vision Pro, you can’t really point to a weak point in their lineup?
You can only invent the modern smartphone once then everything else is iterative. The iPhone, iPhone Pro, Air and now Duo is a crazy strong lineup. Same for the watches, same for the AirPods.
Vision Pro is super interesting but just not ready for prime time yet, but as a demonstration of what is technically possible it is fascinating. Immersive entertainment is a huge opportunity, watching a gig or a sports game like you are there. If they can repackage and get it down to $500-750 then they could have another hit category that largely doesn’t exist (like Bluetooth headphones pre AirPods - around but no one had nailed it).
You think VR is a technology problem, and phones were the same way - they’re not. The iPhone was Jobs taking existing technology combined with vision to create an entirely new market.
VR is the same, you mentioned getting price down, Meta’s is $500. It’s not a tech problem, it’s a vision problem and Apple no longer has the vision needed to make a new industry like VR be successful.
And yet Apple is doing exceptionally well financially, the MacBooks with M series chips are clearly the pinnacle of Mac laptop engineering, and most of the devices are more reliable and more durable than they ever have been. (As someone who was repairing iPhone 4/5 screens multiple times a year for friends and family.)
What you’re noticing is consumers being desensitized to tech. It transformed from bulky computers to slick hand-helds. It’s not like Apple made the first product in all those categories, they just made a decent ones that were easy to use.
Comments like this I think are just missing that Apple is actually doing extremely well without Jobs.
Nothing wrong with the Vision Pro it’s just a little bit before it’s time functionally it needs to be at least three or four times faster and the battery life needs to be as good as the flagship iPhone and it needs to be half of the weight and half the price.
As a technology demonstration it’s amazing, as a product it isn’t particularly compelling. It’s to expensive, to heavy, and just a pain to put on and take off.
A $500 light weight version that lifts on and off more like glasses than a headset, would be revolutionary. I know a lot of companies are racing towards this but Apple with their custom silicon and almost limitless reserves of cash, feel like the most likely to get there.
Meta also has 50k engineers. Not to mention that tons of meta infrastructure - including ads! - use AI. Would you want that sort of business be this dependent on someone else?
Yeah, but there was a time when running Linux on a laptop was one of the most complex ways of running Linux. Now I just expect everything to work, especially if I buy from Lenovo, Dell, or HP.
There was a time when Wi-Fi, or Wayland, or XComposite, or Linux gaming, or just accelerated graphics at all or, or, or... People get excited, they work on it, other people get excited and mess about, and eventually it just works.
I would love to one day pick up a decommissioned M1 Ultra and use my OS of choice on it, and I'm grateful for the people who are doing the hard thing now.
I still struggle with local llm being a reason to drop insane money on one of these - they are targeting people who want high performance local LLMs, that value privacy over using 3rd party api, but also dont want to use Nvidia? small part of the pie by any reckoning?
This feels like paying a lot for something that is just not very good yet - cloud models are too good vs local models (may change in the future..)
cables can get pretty big, you could run maybe 75-90MW through a 66kV 1200mm2 Cu offshore wind array cable, maybe 500MW through a 275kV 2000mm2 cu export cable and 1.3GW through a 320kV hvdc bipole set of cables (2GW through 525kv HVDC!) - you would just have the minor inconvenience of convertors and or substations to deal with at either end ;)
Once a thief, always a thief. I would not trust them to not have the communications buried deep in some log files in cold storage, to be digested when suitable.
I think the lure to have/keep an edge at all costs to keep those stock prices high is too big to ignore. They can then pick up costs after series of trials down the line, money and bonuses are now.
MS ain't some altruistic company having core mission the good of humanity, as they proven across decades.
I have no idea about smaller cables but HV power cables (grid / offshore renewables etc) are consistently designed and produced using aluminum conductors. If you want to get really fancy I think you can even buy them with aluminum produced from geothermal power in Iceland (could just be an industry story though).
Not saying it’s not a problem but may not be as challenging as thought (and in debt-financed infrastructure land the price stability of aluminum is as much of a benefit as its low cost).
Underground conductors for wind and solar plants are typically aluminum with copper concentric neutrals. Ground wires are often copper, but copper-clad aluminum is becoming more common.
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