In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing).

Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity and hence minimal latency.

If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips it's a strategy that I personally really really welcome as I don't want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.

Their primary business goal is to sell hardware. Yes, they’ve diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all, but it is about selling luxury hardware.

The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.

Somewhat true but things are changing. While there are plenty of “luxury” Apple devices like Vision Pro or fully decked out MacBooks for web browsing we no longer live in a world where tech are just lifestyle gadgets. People spend hours a day on their phones, and often run their life and businesses through it. Even with the $1000+/2-3y price tag, it’s simply not that much given how central role it serves in your life. This is especially true for younger generations who often don't have laptops or desktops at home, and also increasingly in poorer-but-not-poor countries (say eg Eastern Europe). So the iPhone (their best selling product) is far, far, far more a commodity utility than typical luxury consumption like watches, purses, sports cars etc.

Even in the higher end products like the MacBooks you see a lot of professionals (engineers included) who choose it because of its price-performance-value, and who don’t give a shit about luxury. Especially since the M1 launched, where performance and battery life took a giant leap.

I am the one paying for my MacBook Pro, because my company is a self-funded business. I run my entire business on this machine and I love it. I always buy the fastest CPU possible, although I don't max out the RAM and SSD.

Amusingly enough, I talked to someone recently about compilation speeds and that person asked my why I don't compile my software (Clojure and ClojureScript) on "powerful cloud servers". Well, according to Geekbench, which always correlates very well with my compilation speeds, there are very few CPUs out there that can beat my M3 Max, and those aren't easily rentable as bare-metal cloud servers. Any virtual server will be slower.

So please, don't repeat the "MacBooks are for spoiled people who don't have to pay for them" trope. There are people for whom this is simply the best machine for the job at hand.

Incidentally, I checked my financials: a 16" MBP with M3 and 64GB RAM, amortized over 18 months (very short!) comes out to around $150/month. That is not expensive at all for your main development machine that you run your business on!

I think engineers using software should not be seen as an endorsement. They seem to have an incredible tolerance for bad UI.

Irelevant.

Firstly, it's a tool, not a social media platform designed to sell ads and farm clicks, it needs to be utilitarian and that's it, like a power drill or a pickup truck, not look pretty since they're not targeting consumers but solving a niche set of engineering problems.

Secondly, the engineers are not the ones paying for that software so their individual tolerance is irelevant since their company pays for the tools and for their tolerance to those tools, being part of the job description and the pay.

Unless you run your own business , you're not gonna turn down lucrative employment because on site they provide BOSCH tools and GM trucks while you personally prefer the UX of Makita and Toyota. If those tools' UX slows down the process and makes the project take longer it's not my problem, my job is to clock in at 9 and clock out at 5, that's it, it's the company's problem to provide the best possible tools for the job, if they can.

People hate software that they're forced to use. Professionals are better at tolerating crapware, because there's usually sunk cost fallacy involved.

> where non-Apple monitors and other 3rd party hardware just stops working after minor updates and then starts working again after another update, without any official statement from Apple that there was a problem and a fix?

At least my WiFi doesn't turn off indefinitely during sleep until I power cycle whole laptop because of a shitty driver.

With Apple, it's usually just crickets... nothing in the release notes, no official statements, nothing. It's just trial and error for the users to see if a particular update fixed the issue.

I.e the same functionality exists with no draw backs and money was no object.

And they chose Windows? Seriously why?

I don't know what to say except resign to the fact that the world is fundamentally unfair, and you won't ever get to run the A/B experiment that you want. So yes, Windows it is !

There was brief sidestep from late 1980s to early 2010s (~2012) where the term "software engineer" came into vogue and completely ran orthogonal to "proficiency in calculus". I mean, literally 99% of software engineers never learned calculus!

But it's nice to see that ever since ~2015 or so (and perhaps even going forward) proficiency in calculus is rising to the fore. We call those "software engineers" "ML Engineers" nowadays, ehh fine by me. And all those "computers" are not people anymore -- looks like carefully arranged sand (silicon) in metal took over.

I wonder if it's just a matter of time before the carefully-arranged-sand-in-metal form factor will take over the "engineer" role too. One of those Tesla/Figure robots becomes "proficient at calculus" and "proficient at calculations" better than "people".

Reference: [1]: I took the terms "engineer" and "computer" literally out of the movie "Hidden Figures" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#Plot

It looks like ever since humankind learned calculus there was an enormous benefit to applying it in the engineering of rockets, aeroplanes, bridges, houses, and eventually "the careful arrangement of sand (silicon)". Literally every one of those jobs required learning calculus at school and applying calculus at work.

Might be just my Eastern Europe background where it was all just "Math" and both equations (that's Algebra I guess) and simpler functions/analysis (Calculus?) are taught in elementary school around age 14 or 15.

Maybe I'm missing/forgetting something - I think I used Calculus more during electrical engineering than for computer/software engineering.

>I think I used Calculus more during electrical engineering than for computer/software engineering.

I think that was OPs point - most engineering disciplines teach it.

I've come to appreciate the fact that domain knowledge has a more dominant role in solving a problem than technical/programming knowledge. I often wonder how s/w could align with other engineering practices in terms of approach design in a standardized way so we can just churn out code w/o an excessive reliance on quality assurance. I'm really hoping visual programming is going to be the savior here. It might allow SMEs and Domain experts to utilize a visual interface to implement their ideas.

Its interesting how python dominated C/C++ in the case of the NumPy community. One would have assumed C/C++ to be a more a natural fit for performance oriented code. But the domain knowledge overpowered technical knowledge and eventually people started asking funny questions like

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41365723/why-is-my-pytho...

I guess I just enjoy things more when I can count them.

Calculus was important during the world wars because it means we could throw shells to the enemy army better, and that was an important issue during that period.

Nowadays, calculus is just a stepping stone to more relevant mathematics.

Both are math, and both are still incredibly important. Rockets haven't gone out of style.

There's little things too, like some people using gaming peripherals (multi-button MMO mice and left hand controllers, etc.) for editing, which might not be compatible with OSX.

And also, if you're mucking around with two 32 inch 4k monitors and a 16 inch Wacom it might start to feel a little ridiculous trying to save space with a Mac Pro.

Once it works, Linux is more reliable than Windows. And virtual desktops have always worked better on Linux than on Windows. So I disagree with you on that front.

* In my case, this means I had to get an Anker HDMI adapter, instead of any random brand.

Maybe as long as you don't need working fractional scaling with different DPI monitors, which is nothing fancy now.

When I started doing this "Internet stuff" we were called "webmasters", and job would actually include what today we call: - DevOps - Server/Linux sysadmin - DB admin - Full stack (backend and frontend) engineer

And I might have forgot some things.

Windows requires a VM, like WSL, for a lot of people, and Linux lacks commercial support. macOS strikes a good balance in the middle that makes it a pretty compelling choice.

Sure, Wine exists, but it’s not something I’d want to rely on for a business when there are alternatives like macOS which will offer native support.

Apple fanboys like to talk about how cool and long lasting a MacBook Air is but a 500 bucks Chromebook will do just as well while allowing pretty much 90% of the use cases. Sure, the top end power is much lower but at the same time considering the base RAM/storage combo Apple gives it is not that relevant. If you starting loading it up, that puts the pricing in an entirely different category and in my opinion the MacBook Air becomes seriously irrelevant when compared to serious computing devices in the same price range...

A Chromebook "does the job" but it's closer to a thin client than a workstation. A lot of the job is done remotely and you may not want that.

I would love to buy Apple hardware, but not from Apple. I mean: M2 13 inch notebook with access to swap/extend memory and storage, regular US keyboard layout and proper desktop Linux (Debian, Alpine, Mint, PopOS!, Fedora Cinamon) or windows. MacOS and the Apple eco system just gets in your way when you're just trying to maintain a multi-platform C++/Java/Rust code base.

WSL is also nice for Bash scripting, but it's not necessary.

It is a check box in the "Add Features" panel. There is nothing to install or setup. Certainly not for linting, unless, again, you're using a Linux tool chain.

But if you are, just check the box. No setup beyond VS Code, bashrc, vimrc, and your tool chain. Same as you would do on Mac.

If anything, all the Mac specific quirks make setting up the Linux tool chains much harder. At least on WSL the entire directory structure matches Linux out of the box. The tool chains just work.

While some of the documentation is in its infancy, the workflow and versatility of cross platform development on Windows, I think, is unmatched.

I know engineers from a FANG that picked MacBook pros in spite of the specs and only because of the bling/price tag. Them they spent their whole time using it as a remote terminal for Linux servers, and they still complained about the thing being extremely short on RAM and HD.

One of them even tried to convince their managers to give the vision pro a try, even though there was zero use cases for it.

Granted, they drive multiple monitors well with a single USB-C plug, at least with specific combinations of monitors and hubs.

It's high time that the "Apple sells high end gear" shtick is put to rest. Even their macOS treadmill is becoming tiring.

Yes, there are 2k+ laptops from Dell/Lenovo that match and exceed a similarly priced MacBook in pure power, but usually lack battery life and/or build quality.

I owned a MacBook Pro with the dreaded butterfly keyboard. It was shit.

How many USB ports do the new MacBook air have? The old ones had two. And shipped with 8GB of RAM? These are shit-tier specs.

The 2020 MacBook pros had a nice thing: USB-C charging, and you could charge the from either side. Current models went back to MagSafe, only on one side. The number of USB ports is still very low.

But the are shiny. I guess that counts as quality.

in case Apple would come up with the idea to take an ipad as external compute unit that would be amazing... just double your ram, compute and screen with it in such a lightweight form factor... should be possible if they want

I do networking stuff and macOS is on par with Windows - I can't live on it without running into bugs or very questionable behavior for longer than a week. Same as Windows.

> I do networking stuff

Me too, but probably very different stuff. I’m doing p2p stuff over tcp and am affected mostly by sock options, buffer sizes, tcp options etc.

It's great having a chip that is so much different than what our production infrastructure uses.

I actually rejected a job offer when heard I will be given a macbook pro.

Apple, been the most closed company these days, should be avoided as much as you can, not to mention its macos is useless for linux developers like me, anything else is better.

its keyboard is dumb to me(that stupid command/ctrl key difference), can not even mouse-select and paste is enough for me to avoid Macos at all costs.

Literally best keyboard shortcuts out of all major OSes. I don't know what weird crab hands you need to have to comfortably use shortcuts on Windows/Linux. CMD maps PERFECTLY on my thumb.

For what it's worth, I've had a good success rate at politely asking to be given an equivalent laptop I can put linux on, or provide my own device. I've never had to outright reject an offer due to being required to use a Mac. At worst I get "you'll be responsible for making our dev environment work on your setup".

Now the performance of Mx Macs convinced me to switch, and I'll die on the hill of Android for life

Pretty much everything going wrong with provisioning involves going extra weird on hw (usually for cheap supplier) and/or pushing weird third party "security" crapware.

Then there's Docker. Running amd64 containers on Apple silicon is slow for obvious reasons. Running arm64 containers is fast, but the actual environment you will be deploying to is almost certainly amd64, so if you're using that locally for dev & test purposes, you can get some surprises in prod. Windows, of course, will happily run amd64 natively.

Very quickly remedied by installing the GNU versions of those commands, ie: "brew install coreutils findutils" (etc)

Then you'll have exactly the same command line switches as on Linux.

that’s up to your team of course, but graviton is generally cheaper than x86 instances nowadays and afaik the same is true on google and the other clouds.

For most devs, doing crud stuff or writing high-level scripting languages, this isn't really a problem. For some devs, working on time-sensitive problems or with strict baseline performance requirements, this is important. For devs developing device drivers, emulation can only get you so far.

Presumably they mean linux-style text select & paste, which is done by selecting text and then clicking the middle mouse button to paste it (no explicit "copy" command).

macOS doesn't have built-in support for this, but there are some third-party scripts/apps to enable it.

For example: https://github.com/lodestone/macpaste

(In fact I DO have a spare 13 year old laptop hanging around that still gets used for web browsing, mail and stuff. It is not slow.)

It's fascinating to me how people are still attached to the hardware upgrade cycle as an idea that matters, and yet for a huge chunk of people and scenarios, basically an SSD, 8gb of RAM and an Intel i5 from a decade ago could have been the end of computing history with no real loss to productivity.

I honestly look at people who use Apple or Windows with a bit of pity, because those ecosystems would just give me more stuff to worry about.

Still doesn't take a minute to launch Outlook, but I understand your pain.

I keep hoping it will die, because it would be replaced with an M-series MBP and they are way, way, WAY faster than even the best Intel MBP.

It is Microsoft. I could rant all day about the dumpster fire that is the "NEW Microsoft Teams (Work or School)"

It's like the perfect shining example of how MS doesn't give a flaming fuck about their end users.

It looks like Apple's silicon and software is really good for those doing audio/video. Why people like it for dev is mostly a mystery to me. Though I know a few people who don't really like it but are just intimidated by Linux or just can't handle the small UX differences.

The UX differences are absolutely massive. Even after daily-driving that thinkpad for months, Gnome always felt kinda not quite finished. Maybe KDE is better, but it didn't have Wayland support when I was setting that machine up, which made it a non-starter.

The real killer though is battery life. I can work literally all day unplugged on the mbp and finish up with 40-50% remaining. When i'm traveling these days, i don't even bring a power cable with me during the day. The thinkpad, despite my best efforts with powertop, the most aggressive frequency scaling i could get, and a bunch of other little tricks, lasts 2 hours.

There are niceties about Linux too. Package management is better and the docker experience is _way_ better. Overall though, i'd take the apple silicon macbook 10 times out of 10.

My first gen ThinkPad Nano X1 would be an excellent laptop, if it weren’t for the terrible battery life even in power save mode (which as an aside, slows it down a lot) and its need to spin up a fan to do something as trivial as driving a rather pedestrian 2560x1440 60hz display.

It feels almost like priorities are totally upside down for x86 laptop manufacturers. I totally understand and appreciate that there are performance oriented laptops that aren’t supposed to be good with battery life, but there’s no good reason for there being so few ultraportable and midrange x86 laptops that have good battery life and won’t fry your lap or sound like a jet taking off when pushed a little. It’s an endless sea of mediocrity.

This echoes my experiences for anything that needs power management. Not just that the battery life is worse, but that it degrades quickly. In two years it’s barely usable. I’ve seen this with non-Apple phones and laptops. iPhone otoh is so good these days you don’t need to upgrade until EOL of ~6 years (and even if you need it battery is not more expensive than any other proprietary battery). My last MacBook from 2011 failed a couple of years ago only because of a Radeon GPU inside with a known hw error.

> There are niceties about Linux too.

Yes! If you haven’t tried in years, the Linux desktop experience is awesome (at least close enough) for me – a dev who CAN configure stuff if I need to but find it excruciatingly menial if it isn't related to my core work. It’s really an improvement from a decade ago.

I think the culprit is more likely the power hungry intel CPU in your yoga?

Going on a slight tangent; I've tried but do not like the mac keyboards, they feel very shallow to me, hence why I'm still using my old T480s. The newer thinkpad laptop keyboards all seem to be going that way though (going thinner), much to my dismay. Perhaps a P14s is my next purchase, despite it's bulk.

Anybody with a framework 13 want to comment on their keyboard?

I used a Mac for awhile back in 2015 but it never really stood out to me UX-wise, even compared to Gnome. All I really need to do is open a few windows and then switch between them. In i3 or Sway, opening and switching between windows is very fast and I never have to drag stuff around.

Modern language tooling (Go, Rust et al) allows one to build and test on any architecture, and the native macOS virtualization (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization) provides remarkably better performance compared to Docker (which is a better explanation for its fading from daily use).

Your "trend" may, in fact, not actually reflect the reality of how cloud development works at scale.

And I don't know a single macOS developer that "lean(s) on the team member who is on Linux" to leverage tools that are already present on their local machine. My own development environments are IDENTICAL across all three major platforms.

If you deploy on docker (or Kubernetes) on Linux in production, then ideally you should be using docker on your local system as well. Which, for Windows or MacOS users, requires a Linux VM as well.

I know you mean well, though.

There is no Docker on macOS without a hypervisor layer - period - and a VM, though there are multiple possible container runtimes not named Docker that are suitable for devops-y local development deployments (which will always, of course, be constrained in comparison to the scale of lab / staging / production environments). Some of these can better leverage the Rosetta 2 translation layer that Apple provides, than others.

My builds are faster, laptop stays cooler, and battery lasts longer. I love it.

If I was building desktop apps I assume it would be a less pleasant experience like you mention.

There’s quirks to either OS.

Eg when on Gnome it drives me mad that it won’t focus a recently launched apps.

On macOS it annoys me that I have install a 3rd party util to move windows around.

Meh, you just adapt after a while.

So even if all developers of your team are using Linux, unless you want to waste money by ignoring arm64 instances on cloud computing, you'll have to setup cross compilation.

Asahi Linux is shockingly great on Apple Silicon hardware, though.

Most CS professionals who write code have no idea what it takes to build a desktop, so the hardware that they chose is pretty much irrelevant because they aren't specifically choosing for hardware. The reason Apple gets bought is mostly by anyone, including tech people, is because of ecosystem. The truth is, nobody really care that much about actual specs as long as its good enough to do basic stuff, and when you are indifferent to the actual difference but all your friends are in the ecosystem, the choice is obvious.

You can easily see this yourself: ask these "professionals" about the details of the Apple Neural engine, and its a very high chance that they will repeat some marketing material, while failing to mention that Apple does not publish any real docs for ANE, you have to sign your code to run on ANE, and you have to basically use Core ML to utilize the ANE. I.e if they really cared about inference, all of them would be buying laptops with discrete 4090s for almost the same price.

Meanwhile, if you look at people who came from EE/ECE (who btw on the average are far better coders than people with CS background, based on my 500+ interviews in the industry across several sectors), you see a way larger skew towards Android/custom built desktops/windows laptops running Linux. If you lived and breathed Linux and low level OS, you tend appreciate all the power and customization that it gives you because you don't have to go learn how to do things.

The signing of binaries is a part of adult developer life, and is certainly required for the platforms you mention as well.

Unquestionably, battery life on 4090-based laptops sucks on a good day, and if you're working long hours, the last thing you want to have to do is park yourself next to your 350W adapter just to get basic work done.

Apple is selling hardware and scaling AI by utilizing it is simply a smart move.

Instead of building huge GPU clusters, having to deal with NVIDIA for GOUs (Apple kicked NVIDIA out years ago because of disagreements), Apple is building mainly on existing hardware.

This is in other terms utilizing CPU power.

On the other hand this helps their marketing keeping high price points when Apple now is going to differentiate their COU power and therefore hardware prices over AI functionality correlating with CPU power. This is also consistent with Apple stopping the MHz comparisons years ago.

Also, Siri, and consider: you’re scaling AI on apple’s hardware, too, you can develop your own local custom AI on it, there’s more memory available for linear algebra in a maxed out MBP than the biggest GPUs you can buy.

They scale the VRAM capacity with unified memory and that plus a ton of software is enough to make the Apple stuff plenty competitive with the corresponding NVIDIA stuff for the specific task of running big AI models locally.

Fiddler on windows works flawlessly.

I own a MacBook Air, I won't be buying another purely because the moment I need to upgrade anything or repair anything it's effectively ewaste.

I notice your use of the weasel word "just".

We undoubtedly live in a world where Apple products are sold as lifestyle gadgets. Arguably it's more true today than it ever was. It's also a world where Apple's range of Veblen goods managed to gain footing in social circles to an extent that we have kids being bullied for owning Android phones.

Apple's lifestyle angle is becoming specially relevant because they can no longer claim they sell high-end hardware, as the difference in specs between Apple's hardware and product ranges from other OEMs is no longer noticeable. Apple's laughable insistence on shipping laptops with 8GB of RAM is a good example.

> Even in the higher end products like the MacBooks you see a lot of professionals (engineers included) who choose it because of its price-performance-value, and who don’t give a shit about luxury.

I don't think so, and that contrasts with my personal experience. All my previous roles offered a mix of MacBooks and windows laptops, and MacBooks were opted by new arrivals because they were seen as perks and the particular choice of windows ones in comparison were not as impressive, even though they out-specced Apple's offering (mid-range HP and Dell). In fact in a recent employee's review their main feedback was that the MacBook pro line was under-specced because at best it shipped with only 16GB of RAM while the less impressive HP ones already came with 32GB. In previous years, they called for the replacement of the MacBook line due to the rate of keyboard malfunctions. Meaning, engineers were purposely picking the underperforming option for non-technical reasons.

The cheap Windows PCs suck just like a cheap car sucks (ok, they suck more), but they still get the job done. You can still browse the web, read your email, watch a youtube video, post a youtube video, write a blog, etc.. My dad got some HP celeron. It took 4 minutes to boot. It still ran though and he paid probably $300 for it vs $999 for a mac. He didn't have $999.

> The cheap Windows PCs suck […], but they still get the job done

For desktop, totally. Although I would still wipe it with Ubuntu or so because Windows is so horrible these days even my mom is having a shit time with only browsing and video calls.

A random laptop however is a different story. Except for premium brands (closer to Apple prices) they tend to have garbage battery life, infuriating track pad, massive thermal issues, and preloaded with bloatware. Apple was always better here, but now with the lower power/heat of the ARM chips, they got soooo much better overnight.

Heck now I see even Vietnam iPhone is #1 vendor with a 28% market penetration according to statcounter. That’s more than I thought, even though I was just there…

Speaking of India, they’re at 4% there. That’s closer to being luxury.

> doesn't mind using WhatsApp for messaging

Well WhatsApp was super early and way ahead of any competition, and the countries where it penetrated had no reason to leave, so it’s not exactly like they settle for less. It has been a consistently great service (in the category of proprietary messaging apps), even after Zuck took over.

Apple is popular in the US because a) luxury brands hold sway b) they goad customers into bullying non-customers (blue/green chats) and c) they limit features and customizability in favor of simpler interfaces.

It's popular with developers because a) performance is valuable even at Apples steep cost b) it's Unix-based unlike Windows so shares more with the Linux systems most engineers are targeting.

> Their primary business goal is to sell hardware.

There is no contradiction here. No need for luxury. Efficient hardware scales, Moore's law has just been rewritten, not defeated.

Power efficiency combined with shared and extremely fast RAM, it is still a formula for success as long as they are able to deliver.

By the way, M-series MacBooks have crossed bargain territory by now compared to WinTel in some specific (but large) niches, e.g. the M2 Air.

They are still technically superior in power efficiency and still competitive in performance in many common uses, be it traditional media decoding and processing, GPU-heavy tasks (including AI), single-core performance...

By the way, this includes web technologies / JS.

If you're into AI, there's objectively literally no other laptop on the planet that is competitive with the GPU memory available on an MBP.

The alternative is Google / Android devices and OpenAI wrapper apps, both of which usually offer a half baked UI, poor privacy practices, and a completely broken UX when the internet connection isn't perfect.

Pair this with the completely subpar Android apps, Google dropping support for an app about once a month, and suddenly I'm okay with the lesser of two evils.

I know they aren't running a charity, I even hypothesized that Apple just can't build good services so they pivoted to focusing on this fake "privacy" angle. In the end, iPhones are likely going to be better for edge AI than whatever is out there, so I'm looking forward to this.

No, the alternative is Android devices with everything except firmware built from source and signed by myself. And at the same time, being secure, too.

You just can't have this on Apple devices. On Android side choices are limited too, I don't like Google and especially their disastrous hardware design, but their Pixel line is the most approachable one able to do all these.

Heck, you can't even build your own app for your own iPhone without buying another hardware (a Mac, this is not a software issue, this is a legal issue, iOS SDK is licensed to you on the condition of using on Apple hardware only) and a yearly subscription. How is this acceptable at all?

Normal users will not do this. Just because many of the people here can build and sign a custom Android build doesn't mean that is a viable commercial alternative. It is great that is an option for those of us who can do it, but don't present it as a viable alternative to the iOS/Google ecosystems. The fraction of people who can and will be willing to do this is really small. And even if you can do it, how many people will want to maintain their custom built OSes?

Unfortunately a lot of the "freedom" crowd think that unless you want to be an 80s sysadmin you don't deserve security or privacy. Or computers.

a maxim that seems to hold true at every level of computing is that users will not care about security unless forced into caring

with privacy they may care more, but they are easily conditioned to assume it's there or that nothing can be realistically be done about losing it

There are a couple caveats:

1. It is still a bit tricky for a non-technical person to install. Should not be a problem if they know somebody who can help, though. There's been some progress making the process more user friendly recently (e.g. WebUSB-based GrapheneOS installer).

2. There are some papercuts if you don't install Google services on your phone. microG [2] helps with most but some still remain. My main concern with this setup is that I can't use Google Pay this way, but having to bring my card with me every time seems like an acceptable trade off to me.

[1]: https://divestos.org/

[2]: https://microg.org/

There are people who don't know how to use file explorer, new generation grows up in a world of iPhones without ever seeing file system. Any other bright ideas?

These features work on all the modern desktop browsers and on Android tho!

WebGPU isn't standardized yet. Hell, most of the features people complain about aren't part of any standard, but for some reason there's this sense that if it's in Chrome, it's standard - as if Google dictates standards.

Realistically, given the market share of Chrome and Chromium based browsers, they kind of do.

Because as you described, the only alternatives that exist are terrible experiences for basically everyone, so people are happy to pay to license a solution that solves their problems with minimal fuss.

Any number of people could respond to “use Android devices with everything except firmware built from source and signed by myself” with the same question.

I wouldn't bet on this long term, since it fully relies on Google hardware, and Google's long-term strategy is to remove your freedom piece by piece, cash on it, not to support it.

The real alternative is GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, without any ties to greedy, anti-freedom corporations.

Because they set the terms of use of the SDK? You're not required to use it. You aren't required to develop for iOS. Just because Google gives it all away for free doesn't mean Apple has to.

Sure, as a SWE I'm not going to buy a computer unable to run my own code. A smartphone is an ergonomic portable computer, so I say no to iPhone and would like to remind others who didn't have a deep think into this about it.

I've never heard of such a thing. Ideally I'd like that, but I don't have such freedoms with the computers in my cars, for example, or the one that operates my furnace, or even for certain parts of my PC.

You aren't allowed to repair the "thing' because the software can detect you changed something and will refuse to boot. And whenever it suits the manufacturer, they will decide when the 'thing' is declared out of support and stops functioning.

I would say you are not an owner then, you (and me) and just suckers that are paying for the party. Maybe it's a lease. But then we also pay when it breaks, so it more of a digital feudalism.

No, obviously not. Do you have a right to run a custom OS on your PS5? Do you have a right to run a custom application on your cable set-top box? Etc. Such a right obviously doesn’t exist and most people generally are somewhere between “don’t care” and actively rejecting it for various reasons (hacking in games, content DRM, etc).

It’s fine if you think there should be, but it continues this weird trend of using apple as a foil for complaining about random other issues that other vendors tend to be just as bad or oftentimes even worse about, simply because they’re a large company with a large group of anti-fans/haters who will readily nod along.

Remember when the complaint was that the pelican case of factory OEM tools you could rent (or buy) to install your factory replacement screen was too big and bulky, meaning it was really just a plot to sabotage right to repair?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/21/23079058/apple-self-servi...

Yes, I do. That was and continues to be a valid complaint, among all other anti-repair schemes Apple have come up with over the years. DRM for parts, complete unavailability of some commonly repaired parts, deliberate kneecapping of "Apple authorized service providers", leveraging the US customs to seize shipments of legitimate and/or unlabeled replacement parts as "counterfeits", gaslighting by official representatives on Apple's own forums about data recovery, sabotaging right to repair laws, and even denial of design issues[1] to weasel out of warranty repair just to name a few.

All with the simple anti-competitive goal of making third party repair (both authorized and independent) a less attractive option due to artificially increased prices, timelines to repair, or scaremongering about privacy.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/weakened-right-to-re...

https://www.pcgamer.com/ifixit-says-apples-iphone-14-is-lite...

[1] Butterfly keyboards, display cables that were too short and failed over time

Apple's definitely pulling a "Heinz" move with privacy, and it is true that they're doing a better job of it overall, but Google's not completely horrible either.

What exactly are you expecting? The current hype for AI is large language models. The word 'large' has a certain meaning in that context. Much larger that can fit on your phone. Everyone is going crazy about edge AI, what am I missing?

If you clone a model and then bake in a more expensive model's correct/appropriate responses to your queries, you now have the functionality of the expensive model in your clone. For your specific use case.

The size of the resulting case-specific models are small enough to run on all kinds of hardware, so everyone's seeing how much work can be done on their laptop right now. One incentive for doing so is that your approaches to problems are constrained by the cost and security of the Q&A roundtrip.

No point asking GPT4 “what time does John’s party start?”, but a local LLM can do better.

Distributed mixture of experts sounds like an idea. Is anyone doing that?

I’m imagining a lot of these LLM products on phones will be used for live translation. Imagine a large crowd event of folks utilizing live AI translation services being told completely false translations because an actor deployed a 51% attack.

Care to cite these subpar Android apps? The app store is filled to the brim with subpar and garbage apps.

>Google dropping support for an app about once a month

I mean if you're going to lie why not go bigger

>I'm okay with the lesser of two evils.

So the more evil company is the one that pulled out of China because they refused to hand over their users data to the Chinese government on a fiber optic silver plate?

They also had project DragonFly if you remember.

The lesser of two evils is that one company doesn’t try to actively profile me (in order for their ads business to be better) with every piece of data it can find and forces me to share all possible data with them.

Google is famously known to kill apps that are good and used by customers: https://killedbygoogle.com/

As for the subpar apps: there is a massive difference between the network traffic when on the Home Screen between iOS and Android.

Most of the "Services" on that list are effectively apps, too:

VPN by Google One, Album Archive, Hangouts, all the way back to Answers, Writely, and Deskbar.

I didn't touch hardware, because I think that should be considered separately.

The first of 211 services on that site was killed in 2006.

The first of the 60 apps on that site was killed in 2012.

So even apps alone, 4.28 a year.

But more inclusively, 271 apps or services in 17 years is ~16/year, over one a month.

You need to remind yourself of the site guidelines about assuming the worst. Your comments just come across condescendingly.

Even with the additional apps you've selected it still doesn't come close to the one app per month claim.

>I didn't touch hardware, because I think that should be considered separately.

So why even mention it? Is Apple impervious to discontinuing hardware?

>The first of 211 services on that site was killed in 2006.

So we're talking about services now? Or apps? Or apps and services? The goal posts keep moving.

>You need to remind yourself of the site guidelines about assuming the worst. Your comments just come across condescendingly.

I suggest you also consult the guidelines in regards to calling people names. My comments were never intended to be inferred that way.

Tim Cook unfortunately is so captured in that quarterly mindset of 'please the share holders' that it is only a matter of time.

What matters to me is that they continue to see privacy as something they can sell in order to make money.

I do hope that those working in these companies actually building the tools do care. But unfortunately, it seems that corruption is an emergent property of complexity.

Apple is in the position to build a competing search product, but the amount Google pays is the amount of money they would have to earn from it, and that is improbable even if it means they can set their own search engine as default.

Indeed.

Privacy starts with architectural fundamentals that are very difficult to retrofit...

If a supplier of products has not built the products this way, it would be naive to bet bank or farm on the supplier. Even if there were profound motivation to retrofit.

Add to this the general tendency of the market to exploit its customers.

While Apple is first and foremost a hardware company, it has more or less always been about the "Apple experience". They've never "just" been a hardware company.

For as long as Apple has existed, they've done things "their way" both with hardware and software, though they tend to want to abstract the software away.

If it was merely a question of selling hardware, why does iCloud exist ? or AppleTV+, or Handoff ? or iMessage, or the countless other seemingly small life improvements that somehow the remainder of the industry cannot seem to figure out how to do well.

Just a "simple" thing as switching headphones seamlessly between devices is something i no longer think about, it just happens, and it takes a trip with a Windows computer and a regular bluetooth headset to remind me how things used to be.

As part of their "privacy first" strategy, iMessage also fits in nicely. Apple doesn't have to operate a huge instant messaging network, which undoubtedly is not making a profit, but they do, because having one entry to secure, encrypted communication fits well with the Apple Experience. iMessage did so well at abstracting the ugly details of encryption that few people even think about that that's what the blue bubble is actually about, it more or less only means your message is end to end encrypted. As a side effect you can also send full resolution images (and more), but that's in no way unique to iMessage.

How is something that is twice as expensive as the competition not a luxury device?

EDIT: Because there's repeated confusion in the replies: I am not saying that a MacBook Air is not objectively a better device. I'm saying it is better by metrics that fall strictly into the "luxury" category.

Better build quality, system-on-a-chip, better OS, better battery life, aluminum case—all of these are luxury characteristics that someone who is looking for a functional device that meets their needs at a decent price won't have as dealbreakers.

You can buy a version of from Walmart at 1/2 price of a "normal" retailer. Does that mean every "normal" retailer is actually a luxury goods dealer?

Is my diner a luxury restaurant because a burger costs twice as much as McDonald's?

Stop the silliness.

Equivalent device?! Find me Windows laptop in ANY price category that can match weight, fanless design, screen quality, battery life, speakers quality and battery life of Air.

> 3.92 lb

Battery life

> 6.5 h

Probably half of that.

Fans that sound like jet engine, screen quality which would force me to stab my eyes, speakers sounding worse than a toilet, plastic build.

I'm not convinced.

$999 amortized over 3 years is $30/mo which is less than what even middle class people spend on coffee.

I think you unjustifiably downplay how much of a selling point a screen that looks great (or at least decent) on the floor is. And I know tons of devs that put up with the 45% NTSC abominations on Thinkpads that aren’t even suitable for casual photo editing or web media, just because you make do with that doesn’t automatically make a halfway decent display on a laptop a “luxury”.

Sorry, but don’t buy the “everything that isn’t a $300 econo shit laptop is luxury” thesis repeated ad nauseum.

But the definition of luxury varies a lot by product category. Still, high-end and luxury are separate concepts, which ven when they do overlap.

Most people, when given the pitch you just gave me for a 2x increase in price, will choose the cheaper item, just like they choose the cheaper car.

[edit] I mean sure there are people who just want the Apple logo, I’m not saying there are zero of those, but they’re also excellent, reliable tools (by the standards of computers—so, still bad) and a good chunk of their buyers are there for that. Even the ones who only have a phone.

The equivalent from Apple would currently run me $3200. If I'm willing to compromise to 24GB of RAM I can get one for $2200.

What makes an Apple device a luxury item isn't that it's more expensive, it's that no matter what specs you pick it will always be much more expensive than equivalent specs from a non-luxury provider. The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people.

Note that there's nothing wrong with buying a luxury item! It's entirely unsurprising that most people on HN looking at the latest M4 chip prefer luxury computers, and that's fine!

How much does it weight? Battery life? Screen quality? Keyboard? Speakers?

On the phone side, I guess you would call Samsung and Google luxury providers? On the laptop side there are a number of differentiating features that are of general interest.

> The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people

Things that might matter to regular people (and tool users):

- design and build for something you use all day

- mic and speakers that don't sound like garbage (very noticeable and relevant in the zoom/hybrid work era)

- excellent display

- excellent battery life

- seamless integration with iPhone, iPad, AirPods

- whole widget: fewer headaches vs. Windows (ymmv); better app consistency vs. Linux

- in-person service/support at Apple stores

It's hard to argue that Apple didn't reset expectations for laptop battery life (and fanless performance) with the M1 MacBook Air. If Ryzen has caught up, then competition is a good thing for all of us (maybe not intel though...) In general Apple isn't bleeding edge, but they innovate with high quality, very usable implementations (wi-fi (1999), gigabit ethernet (2001), modern MacBook Pro design (2001), "air"/ultrabook form factors (2008), thunderbolt (2011), "retina" display and standard ssd (2012), usb-c (2016), M1: SoC/SiP/unified memory/ARM/asymmetric cores/neural engine/power efficiency/battery life (2020) ...and occasionally with dubious features like the touchbar and butterfly keyboard (2016).)

Got a job in dual-platform mobile dev and was issued a MacBook. Exposure to dozens of phones and tablets from both ecosystem. I was converted within a year.

(I barely customize anything these days, fwiw—hit the toggle for “caps as an extra ctrl”, brew install spectacle, done. Used to have opinions about my graphical login manager, use custom icon sets, all that stuff)

Im a Linux guy but am forced to use Mac's and windows every now and then.

Windows has outpaced macos for a decade straight.

Macos looks like it hasn't been updated in years. It's constantly bugging me for passwords for random things. It is objectively the worst OS. I'd rather work on a Chromebook.

These products may not offer you much value and you don't have to buy them. Clearly plenty of people and institutions bought them because they believed they offered the best value to them.

As I said in another comment:

The point isn't that the MacBook Air isn't better by some metrics than PC laptops. A Rolls-Royce is "better" by certain metrics than a Toyota, too. What makes a device luxury is if it costs substantially more than competing products that the average person would consider a valid replacement.

Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the base price already included 1TB).

Instead, I bought a 4xM.2 PCI card, and 4 2TB Samsung Pro SSDs.

I paid $1,300 for it, got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD.

And I get faster speeds from it, 6.8GBps versus 5.5GBps off the system drive.

For $2,000 I could have got the PCI 4.0 version and SSDs, and get 26GBps.

... for an eye watering $3,000 over the exact same spec Mac Studio.

I liked my cheesegrater, though I didn't like the heat output.

And I cannot justify that. I sacrificed half the throughput (2800MBps) for $379 and got an external 4 x M.2 TB3 enclosure.

Oh, and a USB 3 hub to replace one I had installed in the cheesegrater to augment the built in ports. $400 give or take.

Nobody is away from a power source for longer than 18 hours. MOST people don't need the performance that a macbook air has, their NEEDS would be met by a raspberry pi... that is, basic finances, logging into various services, online banking, things that first world citizens "rely" on.

The definition of luxury is "great comfort and extravagance", and every current Apple product fits that definition. Past Apple definitely had non-luxury products, as recently as the iPhone C (discontinued 10 years ago)... but Apple has eliminated all low-value options from their lineup.

M-series Macs is when MacBooks stopped sucking at battery life without sleeping and wrecking state every moment they could.

Like I say Audi is a luxury car because a Toyota costs less than half as much, and you ask "what about a Toyota with leather seats"?

My experiences (multiple) with Genius Bar have been decidedly more "meh" to outright frustrating, versus "luxury", oftentimes where I know more than the Genius.

Logic Board issues where on a brand new macOS install I could reproducibly cause a kernel panic around graphics hardware. There was an open recall (finally, after waiting MONTHS) on this. It covered my Mac. But because it passed their diagnostic tool, they would only offer to replace the board on a time and materials basis.

I had a screen delamination issue. "It's not that bad - you can't see it when the screen is on, and you have to look for it". Huh. Great "luxury" experience.

And then the multiple "we are going to price this so outrageously, and use that as an excuse to try to upsell". Like the MBA that wouldn't charge due to a circuit issue. Battery fine, healthy. Laptop, fine, healthy, on AC. Just couldn't deliver current to the battery. Me, thinking sure, $300ish maybe with a little effort.

"That's going to be $899 to repair. That's only $100 less than a new MBA, maybe we should take a look at some of the new models?" Uh, no. I'm not paying $900 for a laptop that spends 99% (well, 100% now) of its life on AC power.

No one calls a Toyota Camry with base options luxury but it works well for a long time and has good quality.

The features that Apple adds on top of that are strictly optional. You can very much prefer them and think that they're essential, but that doesn't make it so. Some people feel that way about leather seats.

Providing services is arguably at odds with privacy since a service with access to all the data can provide a better service than one without so there will be a tension between trying to provide the best services, fueling their growth, and privacy.

My point was that it's interesting how we can frame a service business "extracting fees" to imply wrongdoing. When it's pretty normal for all services to charge ongoing fees for ongoing delivery.

And as someone who presumably provides services for a living, what additional regulations would you like to be subject to?

Everybody so quick to forget Apple was/is part of PRISM like any other company.

I have very little faith in apple in this respect.

For clarity, just install little snitch on your machine, and watch what happens with your system. Even without being signed in with an apple id and everything turned off, apple phones home all the time.

They failed with their ad-business so this is a nice pivot. I'll take it, I'm not usually a cheerleader for Apple, but I'll support anyone who can erode Google's surveillance dominance.

(FWIW my opinion is it is a human right, I just think Tim Cook is full of shit.)

What Apple calls privacy more often than not is just putting lipstick on the pig that is their anticompetitive walled garden.

Pretty much everybody in SV who works in privacy rolls their eyes at Apple. They talk a big game but they are as full of shit as Meta and Google - and there’s receipts to prove it thanks to this DoJ case.

Apple want to sell high end hardware. On-device computation is a better user experience, hands down.

That said, Siri is utter dogshit so on-device dogshit is just faster dogshit.

The idea that user behavior or consumer choice will change any of this is basically discredited in practice. It will always been cat and mouse until the point that CEOs go to jail, then it will stop.

Until we figure out how to have guarantees of forever, the best we can realistically do is evaluate companies and their products by their behavior now weighted by their behavior in the past.

Source: I'm an Android user with a lot of iPhones on my in-laws side.

Who’s at fault for not having built-in messaging that works with rich text, photos, videos, etc?

Google has abandoned more messaging products than I can remember while Apple focused on literally the main function of a phone in the 21st century. And they get shit for it

Seems even more unlikely for non technical users.

It's just their latest market campaign, as far as I can tell. The vast majority of people buy iPhones because of the status it gives.

Rich people ask for the latest most expensive iPhone even if they're only going to use WhatsApp and Instagram on it. It's not because of privacy or functionality, it's simply to show off to everyone they can purchase it. Also to not stand out within their peers as the only one without it.

As another content said: it's not an argument, it's a fact here.

There's obviously tons of people who see iPhone as a status item. They're right, because iPhone is expensive and only the rich can buy them. This doesn't mean iPhone is not the best option out there for a person who doesn't want to extensively customize his phone and just use it.

It’s not about if you’ve used android, it’s about if you’ve beeen poor-ish or stingy

To some people those are luxuries- the most expensive phone they buy is a mid-range Motorola for $300 with snapdragon 750g or whatever. They run all the same apps after all, they take photos.

iPhones are simply outside of your budget.

Granted, you may have been leaning very heavily on the dictionary definition of "comparable", in that the two numbers are able to be compared. However, when the conclusion of that comparison is "More than twice the price", I think you should lead with that.

Keep in mind, the iPhone SE is using a 3 year old processor, the Samsung A15 was released 5 months ago with a brand new processor.

It’s like how people who don’t like US and want nothing to do with US still discuss US politics, because it has so much effect everywhere.

(Ironically no enough people discuss China in any coherent level of understanding)

Apple doesn't release new products, they wait until the actual brave and innovating companies have done the exploration and then capitalize on all of their learnings. Because they are never the first movers and they have mountains of cash, they're able to enter the market without the baggage of early adopters. They don't have to worry about maintaining their early prototypes.

Apple doesn't innovate or show leadership, they wait until the innovators have proven that the market is big enough to handle Apple, then they swoop in with a product that combines the visions of the companies that were competing.

Apple is great at what they do, don't get me wrong. And swooping in when the market is right is just good business. Just don't mistake that for innovation or leadership.

Marketing aside, all indications point to the iOS platform being the most secure mobile option (imo).

But not only that, Apple CPUs are objectively leagues ahead of their competition in the mobile space. I am still using a IPhone released in 2020 with absolutely no appreciable slow down or losses in perceived performance. Because even a 4 years old IPhone still has specs that don't lag behind by much the equivalent Android phones, I still receive the latest OS updates, and because frankly, Android OS is mess.

If I cared about status, I would have changed my phone already for a new one.

My Pixel 4a here is also going strong, only the battery is slowly getting worse. I mean, it's 2024, do phones really still get slow? The 4a is now past android updates, but that was promised after 3 years. But at 350 bucks, it was like 40% less than the cheapest iPhone mini at that time.

Only because Apple lost a lawsuit otherwise they'd have kept intentionally slowing it down.

This is a lie. The latest Android SoCs are just as powerful as the A series.

>Because even a 4 years old IPhone still has specs that don't lag behind by much the equivalent Android phones, I still receive the latest OS updates, and because frankly, Android OS is mess.

Samsung and Google offer 7 years of OS and security updates. I believe that beats the Apple policy.

On the second part:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPadOS_version_history

The last iPads to stop getting OS updates (including security, to be consistent with what Samsung and Google are pledging) got 7 and 9 years of updates each (5th gen iPad and 1st gen iPad Pro). The last iPhones to lose support got about 7 years each (iPhone 8 and X). 6S, SE (1st), and 7 got 9 and 8 years of OS support with security updates. The 5S (released in 2013) last got a security update in early 2023, so also about 9 years, the 6 (2014) ended at the same time so let's call it 8 years. The 4S, 2011, got 8 years of OS support. 5 and 5C got 7 and 6 years of support (5C was 5 in a new case, so was always going to get a year less in support).

Apple has not, that I've seen at least, ever established a long term support policy on iPhones and iPads, but the numbers show they're doing at least as well as what Samsung and Google are promising to do, but have not yet done. And they've been doing this for more than a decade now.

EDIT:

Reworked the iOS numbers a bit, down to the month (I was looking at years above and rounding, so this is more accurate). iOS support time by device for devices that cannot use the current iOS 17 (so the XS and above are not counted here) in months:

  1st - 32
  3G  - 37
  3GS - 56
  4   - 48
  4S  - 93
  5   - 81
  5C  - 69
  5S  - 112
  6   - 100
  6S  - 102
  SE  - 96
  7   - 90
  8   - 78
  X   - 76

The 8 and X look like regressions, but their last updates were just 2 months ago (March 21, 2024) so still a good chance their support period will increase and exceed the 7 year mark like every model since the 5S. We'll have to see if they get any more updates in November 2024 or later to see if they can hit the 7 year mark.

These are very disingenuous numbers that don't tell the complete story. An iPhone 7 getting a single critical security patch does not take into account the hundreds of security patches it did not receive when it stopped receiving support. It received that special update because Apple likely was told or discovered it was being exploited in the wild.

Google and Samsung now offer 7 years of OS upgrades and 84 months of full security patches. Selectively patching a phone that is out of the support window with a single security patch does not automatically increase its EOL support date.

Neither of these hopes retroactively invalidates the fact that Apple has had a much better track record of supporting old phone models up to this point. Even if you do split hairs about the level of patching some models got in their later years, they still got full iOS updates for years longer than most Android phones got any patches at all, regardless of severity.

This is not an argument that somehow puts Android on top, at best it adds nuance to just how much better iOS support has been up to this point.

Let's also not forget that if Apple wasn't putting this kind of pressure on Google, they wouldn't have even made the promise to begin with, because it's clear how long they actually care to support products with no outside pressure.

BTW, my daily driver is an iPhone 13 and I was coming from an iPhone X. So I'm well aware of the incredible support Apple provides its phones. Although, I would still like to see an 8+ year promise from them.

[1] in 2013 they even marketed their “eBeacon” technology as a way for retail stores to monitor and track their customers which…

Privacy wasn’t really a concern because most people didn’t have the privacy eroding device yet. In the years following the Nexus 5 is where smartphones went into geometric growth and the slow realization of the privacy nightmare became apparent

Imho I was really excited to get a Nexus 4 at the time, just a few short years later the shine wore off and I was horrified at the smartphone enabled future. And I have a 40 year background in computers and understand them better than 99 out of 100 users – if I didn’t see it, I can’t blame them either

What a strange statement. I was late to the game with a Nexus S in 2010, and it was really usable.

Everyone seems to have forgotten about the Celebrity iCloud photo leak.

I think they'll have another LLM on a server (maybe a deal for openai/gemini) that the one on the device can use like ChatGPT uses plugins.

But on device Apple have a gigantic advantage. Rabbit and Humane are good ideas humbled by shitty hardware that runs out of battery, gets too hot, has to connect to the internet to do literally anything.

Apple is in a brilliant position to solve all those things.

I hope they announce something good at WWDC

Humane had lag and they used voice chat which is a bad UX paradigm. VUI is bad because it adds lag to the information within the medium. Listening to preambles and lists are always slower than a human eyes ability to scan a page of text. Their lag is not due to LLMs, which can be much faster than whatever they did.

We should remind ourselves that an iPhone can likely suffer similar battery and heat issues - especially if it’s running models locally.

User: "What is this thing?"

Pin: "I'll have a look what that is" (It feels this response has to come from a server)

Pin: "It's a " (The actual answer)

We're still a bit away from iPhone running anything viable locally, even small models today you can almost feel the chip creaking under the load they're incurring on it and the whole phone begins to choke.

I'm curious to hear more about this. My experience has been that inference speeds are the #1 cause of delay by orders of magnitude, and I'd assume those won't go down substantially on edge devices because the cloud will be getting faster at approximately the same rate.

Have people outside the US benchmarked OpenAI's response times and found network lag to be a substantial contributor to slowness?

Or at least, a good enough internet connection to send plaintext.

> * when you live in the USA

Even from Australia to USA is just ~300ms of latency for first token and then the whole thing can finish in ~1s. And making that faster doesn't require on-device deployment, it just requires a server in Australia - which is obviously going to be coming if it hasn't already for many providers.

So many of these are only deployed in US and so if you're say in country Australia not only do you have all your traffic going to the US but it will be via slow and intermittent cellular connections.

It makes using services like LLMs unusably slow.

I miss the 90s and having applications and data reside locally.

Generally an LLM seems to take about 3s or more to respond, and the network delay to the US is a couple of hundred milliseconds.

The network delay seems minimal compared to the actual delay of the LLM.

> "Apple defines high-quality credits as those from projects that are real, additional, measurable, and quantified, with systems in place to avoid double-counting, and that ensure permanence."

Apple then pledged to buy carbon credits from a company called Verra. In 2023, an investigation found that more than 90% of Verra's carbon credits are a sham. Notably, Apple made their pledge after the results of this investigation were known - so much for their greenwashing.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...

At the end of the day, AI workloads in the cloud will always be a lot more compute effective however, meaning lowered combined footprint. However, in the server based model, there is more incentive to pre-compute (waste inference) things to make them appear snappy on device. Analogous would be all that energy spent doing video encoding for YouTube videos that never get watched. Although, it's "idle" resources for budgeting purposes.

Apple doesn’t have to build the data centers. Apple doesn’t have to buy the AI capacity themselves (even if from TSMC for Apple designed chips). Apple doesn’t have to have the personnel for the data centers or the air conditioning. They don’t have to pay for all the network bandwidth.

There are benefits to the user to having the AI run on their own devices in terms of privacy and latency as mentioned by the GP.

But there are also benefits to Apple simply because it means it’s no longer their resources being used up above and beyond electricity.

I keep reading about companies having trouble getting GPUs from the cloud providers and that some crypto networks have pivoted to selling GPU access for AI work as crypto profits fall.

Apple doesn’t have to deal with any of that. They have underused silicon sitting out there ready to light up to make their customers happy (and perhaps interested in buying a faster device).

That work needs to be done anyways and Apple is doing it in the cleanest way possible. What’s an alternative in your mind, just don’t do the processing? That sounds like making progress towards being green. If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.

This doesn't make any sense.

> If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.

Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether it's real or fake.

Though in this case using renewable energy can help.

The random ads in most phone games are much worse on my battery life.

Keep downloadin' those ads. This is what Apple wants from you, a helpless and docile revenue stream. Think Different or stay mad.

Not much of a gamer anyway, just an observation when I tried a couple apparently dodgy games.

Not sure why your reply wasn’t related to your original comment. Felt rather knee-jerk reactionary to me instead. Oh well.

If you're on battery, you don't want to do LLM inference on a laptop. Hell, you don't really want to do transcription inference for that long - but would be nice not to have to send it to a data center.

I'm curious: is anyone seriously using apple hardware to train Ai models at the moment? Obviously not the big players, but I imagine it might be a viable option for Ai engineers in smaller, less ambitious companies.

"No, we should be use cheap commodity abundantly available cpus and orchestrate then behind cloud magic to write our nl translation apps"

or maybe "no we should build purpose built high performance computing hardware to write our nl translation apps"

Or perhaps in the early 70s "is anyone seriously considering personal computer hardware to ...". "no, we should just buy IBM mainframes ..."

I don't know. Im probably super biased. I like the idea of all this training work breaking the shackles of cloud/mainframe/servers/off-end-user-device and migrating to run on peoples devices. It feels "democratic".

An older example is the “Hey Siri” model, which is fine tuned to your specific voice.

But with regards to on device training, I don’t think anyone is seriously looking at training a model from scratch on device, that doesn’t make much sense. But taking models and fine tuning them to specific users makes a whole ton of sense, and an obvious approach to producing “personal” AI assistants.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/104993

A few years ago it wasn’t shared between devices so each device had to do it themselves. I don’t know if it’s shared at this point.

I agree you’re not going to be training an LLM or anything. But smaller tasks limited and scope may prove a good fit.

That said, inference on apple products is a different story. There's definitely interest in inference on the edge. So far though, nearly everyone is still opting for inference in the cloud for two reasons:

1. There's a lot of extra work involved in getting ML/AI models ready for mobile inference. And this work is different for iOS vs. Android 2. You're limited on which exact device models will run the thing optimally. Most of your customers won't necessarily have that. So you need some kind of fallback. 3. You're limited on what kind of models you can actually run. You have way more flexibility running inference in the cloud.

But you can get an M2 Ultra with 192GB of UMA for $6k or so. It's very hard to get that much GPU memory at all, let alone at that price. Of course the GPU processing power is anemic compared to a DGX Station 100 cluster, but the mac is $143,000 less.

You want your developers to be able to do training locally and they already use Macs? Maybe an upgrade would make business sense. Even if you have beefy servers or the cloud for large jobs.

Honestly, you can train basic models just fine on M-Series Max MacBook Pros.

Do you also compare cars by looking at only the super expensive limited editions, with every single option box ticked?

I'd also point out that said 3 year old $1999 Mac Studio that I'm typing this on already runs ML models usefully, maybe 40-50% of the old 3000-series Nvidia machine it replaces, while using literally less than 10% of the power and making a tiny tiny fraction of the noise.

Oh, and it was cheaper. And not running Windows.

For training the Macs do have some interesting advantages due to the unified memory. The GPU cores have access to all of system RAM (and also the system RAM is ridiculously fast - 400GB/sec when DDR4 is barely 30GB/sec, which has a lot of little fringe benefits of it's own, part of why the Studio feels like an even more powerful machine than it actually is. It's just super snappy and responsive, even under heavy load.)

The largest consumer NVidia card has 22GB of useable RAM.

The $1999 Mac has 32GB, and for $400 more you get 64GB.

$3200 gets you 96GB, and more GPU cores. You can hit the system max of 192GB for $5500 on an Ultra, albeit it with the lessor GPU.

Even the recently announced 6000-series AI-oriented NVidia cards max out at 48GB.

My understanding is a that a lot of enthusiasts are using Macs for training because for certain things having more RAM is just enabling.

I keep hearing this meme of Mac's being a big deal in LLM training, but I have seen zero evidence of it, and I am deeply immersed in the world of LLM training, including training from scratch.

Stop trying to meme apple M chips as AI accelerators. I'll believe it when unsloth starts to support a single non-nvidia chip.

And while the Mac Studio has a lot of memory bandwidth compared to most desktops CPUs, it isn't comparable to consumer GPUs (the 3090 has a bandwidth of ~936GBps) let alone those with HBM.

I really don't hear about anyone training on anything besides NVIDIA GPUs. There are too many useful features like mixed-precision training, and don't even get me started on software issues.

But for individual developers it’s an interesting proposition.

And a bigger question is: what if you already have (or were going to buy) a Mac? You prefer them or maybe are developing for Apple platforms.

Upping the chip or memory could easily be cheaper than getting a PC rig that’s faster for training. That may be worth it to you.

Not everyone is starting from zero or wants the fastest possible performance money can buy ignoring all other factors.

I simply want to point out that these folks don't really care about that. They want a Mac for more reasons than "performance per watt/dollar" and if it's "good enough", they'll pay that Apple tax.

Yes, yes, I know, it's frustrating and they could get better Linux + GPU goodness with an nVidia PC running Ubuntu/Arch/Debian, but macOS is painless for the average science AI/ML training person to set up and work with. There are also known enterprise OS management solutions that business folks will happily sign off on.

Also, $7000 is chump change in the land of "can I get this AI/ML dev to just get to work on my GPT model I'm using to convince some VC's to give me $25-500 million?"

tldr; they're gonna buy a Mac cause it's a Mac and they want a Mac and their business uses Mac's. No amount of "but my nVidia GPU = better" is ever going to convince them otherwise as long as there is a "sort of" reasonable price point inside Apple's ecosystem.

I am honestly shocked Nvidia has been allowed to maintain their moat with cuda. It seems like AMD would have a ton to gain just spending a couple million a year to implement all the relevant ML libraries with a non-cuda back-end.

Intel seems like they could have some interesting stuff in the annoyingly named “OneAPI” suite but I ran it on my iGPU so I have no idea if it is actually good. It was easy to use, though!

Multimodal agent setups are going to be data center/home-lab only for at least the next five years.

Apple isn't about to put 80GB on VRAM in an iPad for about 15 reasons.

I happen to think they wouldn't, simply because sending this data back to Apple in any form that they could digest it is not aligned with their current privacy-first strategies. But if they make a device that still works if it stays disconnected, the neat thing is that you can just...keep it disconnected. You don't have to trust them.

It would have to be a huge conspiracy with all Apples employees. And you can easily just listen to the network and see if they do it or not.

Of course we can then worry that companies are breaking the law, but you have to draw the line somewhere… and what have they to gain anyway?

Google did some of that on Android, which means open-sourcing their on-device TEE implementation, publishing a paper about it etc.

On second thought.. maybe it isn't "just like you've been doing on Nvidia cards for a while"

At minimum, laws around the world prevent companies from knowingly communicating false information to consumers.

And in many countries the rules around privacy are much more stringent.

Because Boeing's issues have nothing to do with privacy or security and since they are not consumer facing have no relevance to what we are talking about.

I can see a smaller model trained to do that may work well enough, however, I've never seen any real working examples of this work, that rabit device is heading in that direction, but it's mostly vaporware now.

With the ai cores on phones they can cover your average user use cases with a light model without the server expense.

The big differences today that stood out to me were adopting AI as a term (they used machine learning before) and repeating the term AI everywhere they could shove it in since that’s obviously what the street wants to hear.

That’s all that was different. And I’m not surprised they emphasized it given all the weird “Apple is behind on AI“ articles that have been going around.

That's one particular set of trade-offs, but not necessarily the best. Eg if your network connection and server processing speed is sufficiently faster than your local processing speed, the latency would be higher for doing it locally.

Local inference can also use more battery power. And you need a more beefy device, all else being equal.

It could, if it chose to, continue to recognize all voices but at the same time limit the things the non-owner could ask for based on owner preferences.

Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices...only for Apple stuff.

There is a big difference. ANE right now is next to useless for anything not Apple.

Agreed on the UX improvements though.

Google and Samsung have been building it too, at different speeds.

Intel and AMD seem further behind (at the moment) unless the user has a strong GPU, which is especially uncommon on the most popular kind of computer: laptops.

And if you’re not one of those four companies… you probably don’t have much capable consumer edge hardware.

Apple is an amazing powerhouse but also disgustingly elitist and wasteful if not straight up vulgar in its profit motives. There's really zero idealism there despite their romantic and creative legacy.

There's always some straight idiotic limitations in their otherwise incredible machines, with no other purpose than to create planned obsolescence, "PRO" exclusivity and piles e-waste.

I can't even find a way to resume playing whatever Audible book I was last playing. "Siri play audible" or something. As far as I know, this is impossible to do.

You’re trusting the third party at training time, to build the model. But you’re not trusting it at inference time (or at least, you don’t have to, since you can airgap inference).

> Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices

This is pretty much everyone's strategy. Model distillation is huge because of this. This goes in line with federated learning. This goes in line with model pruning too. And parameter efficient tuning and fine tuning and prompt learning etc.

> This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy

Apple's marketing for their current approach is privacy-first. They are not privacy first. If they were privacy first, you would not be able to use app tracking data on their first party ad platform. They shut it off for everyone else but themselves. Apple's approach is walled garden first.

> Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity

as long as you don't depend on graph centric problems where keeping a local copy of that graph is prohibitive. Graph problems will become more common. Not sure if this is a problem for apple though. I am just commenting in general.

> If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips

Apple does not have a good track record of this; they are quite antagonistic when it comes to this topic. Gaming on apple was dead for nearly a decade (and pretty much still is) because steve jobs did not want people gaming on macs. Apple has eased up on this, but it very much seems that if they want you to use their devices (not yours) in a certain way, then they make it expensive to do anything else.

Tbf, I don't blame apple for any of this. It is their strategy. Whether it works or not, it doesn't matter. I just found this comment really odd since it almost seemed like evangelism.

edit: weird to praise apple for on device training when it is not publicly known if they have trained any substantial model even on cloud.

The biggest players in commercial AI models at the moment - OpenAI and Google - have made absolutely no noise about pushing inference to end user devices at all. Microsoft, Adobe, other players who are going big on embedding ML models into their products, are not pushing those models to the edge, they’re investing in cloud GPU.

Where are you picking up that this is everyone’s strategy?

Read what their engineers say in public. Unless I hallucinated years of federated learning.

Also apple isn't even a player yet and everyone is discussing how they are moving stuff to the edge lol. Can't critique companies for not being on the edge yet when apple doesn't have anything out there.

So are other companies, with their many year strategy of actually building models that accessible to the public.

yet Apple is "actively" achieving the goal without any distinct models.

You can already run those open weight models on Apple devices, on edge, with huge improvements on the newer hardware. Why is a distinct model required? Do the rumors appease these thoughts?

If others are making models, with no way to actually run them, that's not a viable "on edge" strategy, since it involves waiting for someone else to actually accomplish the goal first (as is being done by Apple).

I'm sorry, but we're talking about "on edge" here though. Those other companies have no flipping hardware to run it "on edge", in a "generic" way, which is the goal. Apple's strategy involves the generic.

> If apple wants to use open weights

This doesn't make sense. Apple doesn't dictate the models you can use with their hardware. You can already accelerate LLAMA with the neural engines. You can download the app right now. You can already deploy your models on edge, on their hardware. That is the success they're achieving. You cannot effectively do this on competitor hardware, with good performance, from "budget" to "Pro" lineup, which is a requirement of the goal.

> they will still be behind other companies have done model distillation and federated learning for years.

What hardware are they running it on? Are they taking advantage of Apple (or other) hardware in their strategy? Federated learning is an application of "on edge", it doesn't *enable* on edge, which is part of Apple's strategy.

> Ask apple's newly poached AI hires this question. Doesn't seem like you would take an answer from me.

Integrating AI in their apps/experience is not the same as enabling a generic "on edge", default, capability in all Apple devices (which they have been working towards for years now). This is the end goal for "on edge". You seem to be talking about OS integration, or something else.

> People have been running distilled llamas on rPis with pretty good throughput.

Yes, the fundamental limitation there being hardware performance, not the model, with that "pretty good" making the "pretty terrible" user experience. But, there's also nothing stopping anyone from running these distilled (a requirement of limited hardware) models on Apple hardware, taking advantage of Apples fully defined "on edge" strategy. ;) Again, you can run llamas on Apple silicon, accelerated, as I do.

Maybe? This is why I responded to:

> It's everyone's goal. Apple is actively achieving that goal

This is is the issue I found disagreeable. Other organizations and individual people are achieving that goal too. Google says GPT-Nano is going to device, and if the benchmarks are to be believed, if it runs at that level, their work so far is also actively achieving that goal. Meta has released multiple distilled models that people have already proven to run inference at the device level. It cannot be argued that meta is not actively achieving that goal either. They don't have to release the hardware because they went a different route. I applaud Apple for the M chips. They are super cool. People are still working on using them so Apple can realize that goal too.

So when you go to the statement that started this

> Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices

Multiple orgs also share this. And I can't say that one particular org is super ahead of the others. And I can't elevate apple in that race because it is not clear that they are truly privacy-focused or that they will keep APIs open.

> You cannot effectively do this on competitor hardware, with good performance, from "budget" to "Pro" lineup, which is a requirement of the goal

Why do you say you cannot do this with good performance? How many tokens do you want for a device? Is 30T/s enough? You can do that on laptops running small mixtral.

> What hardware are they running it on? Are they taking advantage of Apple (or other) hardware in their strategy?

I don't know. I have nothing indicating necessarily apple or nvidia or otherwise. Do you?

> [Regarding the rest]

Sure, my point is that they definitely have an intent for bespoke models. And why I raised the point that not all computation will be feasible on edge for the time being. My point with what raised this particular line of inquiry is whether a pure edge experience truly enables the best user experience. And also why I raised the point about Apple's track record of open APIs. Which is why "actively achieving" is something that I put doubt on. And I also cast doubt on apple being privacy focused. Just emphasize tying it back to the reason I even commented.

I mean yeah, that makes good marketing copy, but its more due to reducing latency and keeping running costs down.

but as this is mostly marketing fluff we'll need to actually see how it performs before casting judgment on how "revolutionary" it is.

It will take a long time before you can put performant inference on edge device.

Just download one of the various open source large(st) langage model and test it on your desktop...

Compute power and memory and storage requirements are insane if you want decent result... I mean not just Llama gibberish.

Until such requirement are satisfied, distant model are the way to go, at least for conversational model.

Aside llm, AlphaGo would not run on any end user device, by a long shot, even if it is an already 'old' technology.

I think 'neural engine' on end user device is just marketing nonsense at this current state of the art.

Watch out for being able to using ai on your local machine and those ai services using telemetry to send your data (recorded conversations, for instance) to their motherships.

Now the subscription is 20$ a month and the API price is accessible. What will happen when they all decide to x100 or x1000 the price of their API ? All the companies that got rid of people in favor of AI, might have lost the knowledge as well. This is dangerous and might kill a lot of companies no ?

This doesn’t require Ai and I am not aware of any instances of this happening today, so what exactly are we watching out for?

It can even be third party services sending ad candidates directly to your phone and then the on-device AI chooses which is relevant.

Privacy is a contract not the absence of a clear business opportunity. Just look at how Apple does testing internally today. They have no more respect for human privacy than any of their competitors. They just differentiate through marketing and design.

How can they have a privacy first strategy when they operate an Ad network and have their Chinese data centers run by state controlled companies?

Apple has never been privacy-first in practice. They give you the illusion of privacy but in reality it's a closed-source system and you are forced to trust Apple with your data.

They also make it a LOT harder than Android to execute your own MITM proxies to inspect what exact data is being sent about you by all of your apps including the OS itself.

The reality is, there's too much to verify, and not enough interest for the "many eyeballs make all bugs shallow" argument.

We are, all of us, forced to trust, forced to go without the genuine capacity to verify. It's not great, and the best we can do is look for incentives and try to keep those aligned.

I agree; unfortunately it feels as if this ship has not only sailed, but the metaphor would have to be expanded to involve the port at well.

Is it even possible, these days, to have a functioning experience with no surprise network requests? I've tried to limit mine via an extensive hosts file list, but that did break stuff even a decade ago, and the latest version of MacOS doesn't seem to fully respect the hosts file (weirdly it partially respects it?)

> A screen on my wall that flashes every JSON that gets sent out of hardware that I own should be my right.

I remember reading a tale about someone, I think it was a court case or an audit, who wanted every IP packet to be printed out on paper. Only backed down when the volume was given in articulated lorries per hour.

I sympathise, but you're reminding me of that.

I would think ease of MITM and privacy are opposing concerns

If Apple enabled RCS in messages back then, but the recipient was not using RCS, then Google now has the decrypted text message, even when RCS advertises itself as E2EE. With iMessage, at least I know all of my messages are E2EE when I see a blue bubble.

Even now, RCS is available on Android if using Google Messages. Yes, it's pre-installed on all phones, but OEMs aren't required to use it as the default. It opens up more privacy concerns because now I don't know if my messages are secure. At least with the green bubbles, I can assume that anything I send is not encrypted. With RCS, I can't be certain unless I verify the messaging app the recipient is using and hope they don't replace it with something else that doesn't support RCS.

Having iMessage available to everyone regardless of their mobile OS.

By what? It's impossible for a process to know for sure if the system is rooted or not. A rooted system can present itself to a process to look like a non-rooted system if it's engineered well enough.

I'd bet that most of these apps probably just check if "su" returns a shell, in which case perhaps all that's needed is to modify the "su" executable to require "su --magic-phrase foobar" before it drops into a root shell, and returns "bash: su: not found" or whatever if called with no arguments.

That was true 20 years ago, but most smartphones these days have cryptograhically-verified boot chains and remote attestation of how the boot went.

I'm not saying this to trash Apple - I think it's true of any corporation. If Apple starts losing revenue in 5 years because their LLM isn't good enough because they don't have enough data, they are still going to take it and have some reason justifying why theirs is privacy focused and everyone else is not.

The future is always fungible. Anyone can break whatever trust they've built very quickly. But, like the post you are replying to, I have no qualms about supporting companies that are currently doing things in my interest and don't have any clear strategic incentive to violate that trust.

Edit: that same incentive structure would apply to NVIDIA, afaik

The logic is exactly same as ie Meta claims - we will pseudoanonymize your data, so technically your specific privacy is just yours, see nothing changed. But you are in various target groups for ads, plus we know how 'good' those anon efforts are when money are at play and corporations are only there to earn as much money as possible. Rest is PR.

And Apple's privacy stance is a moat against these other companies making money off of their customer base. So for the cost of pennies on the dollar, they protect their customer base and ward off competition. That's a pretty strong incentive.

Make no mistake, they're just waiting for the right MBA to walk through the door, see the sky high value of their users and start chop shopping that.

Enshitiffication is always available to the next CEO, and this is just going to be more and more tempting as the value of the walled garden increases.

One thing to remember is that they understand the value of long-term investments. They aren’t going to beat Google and Facebook at advertising and have invested billions in a different model those companies can’t easily adopt, and I’m sure someone has done the math on how expensive it would be to switch.

Does it matter that each token takes additional milliseconds on the network if the local inference isn't fast? I don't think it does.

The privacy argument makes some sense, if there's no telemetry leaking data.

I think you're trying too hard to rationalize this move as pro-privacy and pro-consumer.

Apple is charging a premium for hardware based on performance claims, which they need to create relevance and demand for it.

There is zero demand for the capacity for running computationally demanding workloads beyond very niche applications, for what classifies as demanding for the consumer-grade hardware being sold for the past two decades.

If Apple offloads these workloads to the customer's own hardware, they don't have to provide this computing capacity themselves. This means no global network of data centers, no infrastructure, no staff, no customer support, no lawyer, nothing.

More importantly, Apple claims to be pro privacy but their business moves are in reality in the direction of ensuring that they are in sole control of their users' data. Call it what you want but leveraging their position to ensure they hold a monopoly over a market created over their userbase is not a pro privacy move, just like Apple's abuse of their control over the app store is not a security move.