But Intel has never been in worse shape. So I think it’s less about Intel considering it and more about if it gets forced on them either by activist investors (I remember seeing an article that Intel prepares to defend against that) or necessity.
I don’t think so. The degrading processors are certainly bad, but in the grand scheme of things won’t move the needle. The reputation loss is probably worse than whatever fine they end up paying (and they will drag it out).
The split would be between design and manufacturing. And it would mean a massive shift, not business as usual.
The design side is probably in better shape and would increase their use of TSMC instead of using the now spun off Intel fabs.
The manufacturing side would have it rough. But we are talking about only one of 3 manufacturers of leading edge chips here (together with tsmc and samsung), not something you “conveniently let go bankrupt”. They’d try to raise more money to finish their new fabs and secure customers (while trying to make up for the lost volume from the design side). But realistically I’d say that similar to Global foundries they would drop out of the expensive leading edge race.
Photo manipulation has been around as long as the medium itself. And throughout the decades, people have worried about the veracity of images. When PhotoShop became popular, some decried it as the end of truthful photography. And now here’s AI, making things up entirely.
I actually think it isn’t the AI photo or video manipulation part that makes it a bigger issue nowadays (at least not primarily), but the way in which they are consumed. AI making things easier is just another puzzle piece in this trend.
Information volume and speed has increased dramatically, resulting in an overflow that significantly shortens the timespan that is dedicated to each piece of content. If i slowly read my sunday newspaper during breakfast, then i’ll give it much more attention, compared to scrolling through my social media feed. That lack of engagement makes it much easier for missinformation to have the desired effect.
There’s also the increased complexity of the world. Things can on the surface seem reasonable and true, but have knock on consequences that aren’t immediately apparent or only hold true within a narrow picture, but fall appart once viewed from a wider perspective. This just gets worse combined with the point above.
Then there’s the downfall of high profile leading newsoutlets in relevance and the increased fragmentation of the information landscape. Instead of carefully curated and verified content, immediacy and clickbait take priority. And this imo also has a negative effect on those more classical outlets, which have to compete with it.
You also have increased populism especially in politics and many more trends, all compounding on the same issue of missinformation.
And even if caught and corrected, usually the damage is done and the correction reaches far fewer people.
If once you do not succeed, just try again next year. They tried and backtracked putting heated seats behind a paywall not even a year ago see here.
Unless laws are made to make this fundamentally illegal, they’ll just keep pushing until it sticks. And once one manufacturer succeeds, they’ll all follow.
Since he mentions enshittification, I assume he means Plex.
However I am pretty sure both will have some bugs. I use jellyfin, so I can only speak about that. But one annoyance is that the androidTV app sometimes doesn’t have the best subtitle support. However it allows you to open movies in external players, which is a workaround.
I always like this answer by Steve Jobs on the topic (here it’s xerox, but this also fits Intel pretty well).
F
Not just people, but importantly also corporations running their services on Microsoft azure or Google cloud.
HDR vs no HDR makes a big difference in colours to me. And if you compare compressed low Bitrate footage vs higher Bitrate there will often be artifacts or color banding, particularly in darker scenes or wherever you have gradients.
It ofc also depends on what device you are watching it on. But I would say that yes if you have a movie (made up example) that is compressed to 5gb total size vs 25gb vs 70gb for the uncompressed Blu-ray quality, then the first jump will be a very noticeable difference assuming you have capable hardware. Whereas the second one will be much much less noticeable and also come with other drawbacks that need to weighted off, e.g. storage requirements.
Is that actually the case? I was under the impression that at least under US teenagers the iPhone usage was insanely high. And those are far from cheap, so at least there parents seem fine in spending big.
Also the cited article mentions $250 for the se watch vs $200 for the Samsung (although I guess that one might have bigger discounts). $50 difference doesn’t seem large for the “Apple tax”.
To me the plastic part would just seem like a risky gamble. Apple has the premium image and it might cheapen it. Especially on a device that is constantly visible, has skin contact and isn’t used with any case.
Doesn’t look great:
No progress with health features, which seem like the most exciting evolution.
Who truly needs the larger screen and faster chip. Especially the former will presumably reduce battery life, something that very much matters with watches.
The company is also working on a new version of its lower-cost Apple Watch SE model, which it last updated in 2022. One idea the company has tested is swapping the aluminium shell for rigid plastic. It’s likely to lower the cost to something that could better rival Samsung’s cheapest watch, the $199 Galaxy Watch FE. The SE currently starts at $249.
That really doesn’t sound like Apple.
But are those notifications and pop ups directly saying something like “from now on we will start to train ai on your information”?
Or is is one of the hundredth change of terms and conditions that people usually just skip, which mentions the major change in some fine print. Or a pop up designed with dark patterns to influence people into just accepting without actual informed consent?
I wonder if this method doesn’t overproportionally eliminates valuable workers, who can easily switch companies.
You are right, Apple also has some legit professional staff. And if the person using it gets paid a lot, then a one time hardware purchase becomes negligible.
Accurate fine motor control and even basic stuff like typing does seem not quite fleshed out, so that is indeed an issue. But I don’t think it’s a deal breaker that you can’t do long shifts with it, since you’d probably only use it for certain tasks.
Even more of a niche, but I could see it for something like architects. Both for work and to maybe even present to clients.
Performance and bettery is good, but they’re barely better than what Intel and AMD offer.
And both AMD and Intel have pretty exciting new architectures coming soon with zen5 and lunar lake.
Meanwhile, on Vive, you could stand up, walk around, and manipulate the world with two tracked remotes.
Issue is that if I remember correctly the vive was an outside-in concept that required base stations to be setup. So you lose the cable, but are still bound by location. And importantly also needs a pc aswell. So still far away from standalone.
I think the core issue is that every piece of new technology so far has helped us get lazier. People used to walk around an office, then they sat at a computer, now they carry their computer with them and do things from the couch.
Nobody wants to get up to do things if they can avoid it, and that’s the only real benefit VR/AR provides
But I think VR/AR could make us lazier:
For VR the promise is immersion. You get to experience a concert, sport event, unique experience or exotic place from your own living room. And for many of that it is just fine to sit on a couch and still have a benefit from the technology.
For AR i think it’s a bit more productivity focused. For example less need to train personel, if you can project every instruction into their field of view.
Ordinarily, Apple is good at throwing its weight (money) around to make things like this happen, but it seems like there weren’t many takers this go-round, so we just got an overpriced, beautiful and fascinating paperweight.
Yeah normally Apple is maybe the only company that has the scale and control over their ecosystem to force rapid adoption. But this was clearly not a consumer product aimed at capturing the masses, but more or less a dev kit sold to anyone willing to shell out the price.
The PS VR2 sounds nice, but feels like it is only aimed at the gaming market and even there sony only captures a fraction.
The Quest as a standalone device imo really would have the best shot at mass market adoption, but Facebook rightfully has an image problem. And despite spending so much on development doesn’t seem to create any content or incentivize others to do so.
Edit: actually kind of forgot “bigscreenVR”. I am somewhat surprised that the default is to cram all hardware into the headset making it much bulkier instead of a seperate piece on a belt, back, or maybe strap on your upper arm.
but it’s utterly useless.
That imo has been the issue with VR/AR for a while now. The Hardware as you said is pretty good by now and looking at something like the quest even afforable. What’s lacking is content and use cases.
Smartphones had an easier time being adopted, since it was just moving from a larger to a smaller screen. But VR/AR actually needs a new type of content to make use of it’s capabilities. And there you run into a chicken/egg problem, where no one is putting in the effort (and vr content is harder to produce) without a large user base.
Just games and some office stuff (that you can do just as well on a regular pc) aren’t cutting it. You’d need stuff like every major sport event being broadcast with unique content, e.g. formula one with the ability to put yourself into the driver seat of any car.
Sounds like what Apple is trying to do…
Yeah, although sadly Apple isn’t quite the good guy either. I feel like in a way instead of ads they use their walled garden approach to achieve a similar result.
They’ll make it really annoying or even impossible to use alternatives and mix things. This way they you are by design drawn to use their desired solutions.
Does make for a better user experience as long as you pay the price and play by their rules. And probably also better for privacy, because with the closed system approach they don’t need the data as much to target you.
But imo still problematic and Apple doesn’t want to just sell good Hardware, but also services.
Unfortunately I think without some kind of regulation that makes personal info a liability / hot potato, it will still be treated as an asset to be collected:(
Agreed, this is one of those problems where it is much easier to legislate from the top down, rather than trying to get each individual consumer to make fully conscious decisions.
The issue is that would at best “reset” their reputation to zero. But the state that they’d like to go back to would be similar to “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, which ofc only works with the existing name. And this line of thinking is what got damaged by the degrading processors (and maybe how they handle it).