You're right a $3600 graphics card is worse than a $2600 laptop; but from my perspectives they're very different products. Not least of all because even at $3600 for a RTX 5090 you still have the whole rest of the computer left to purchase.
I strongly agree. People see local "GPT-4 level" responses, and get excited, which I totally get. But how quickly is the fall-off as the context size grows? Because if it cannot hold and reference a single source-code file in its context, the efficiency will absolutely crater.
That's actually the biggest growth area in LLMs, it is no longer about smart, it is about context windows (usable ones, note spec-sheet hypotheticals). Smart enough is mostly solved, combating larger problems is slowly improving with every major release (but there is no ceiling).
Apple's AI strategy really kind of threads the needle cleverly.
"AI" (LLMs) may or may not have a bubble-pop moment, but until it does Apple get to ride it on these press releases and claims. But if the big-pop occurs, then Apple winds up with really fantastic hardware that just happens to be good at AI workloads (as well as general computing).
For example, image classification (e.g. face recognition/photo tagging), ASR+vocoders, image enhancement, OCR, et al, were popular before the current boom, and will likely remain popular after. Even if LLM usage dries up/falls out of vogue, this hardware still offers a significant user benefit.
What is more likely to happen though is that it doesn't take multiple $10B of datacenter and capital to build out models--and the performance against LLM benchmarks starts to max out to the point where throwing more capital at it doesn't make enough of a difference to matter.
Once the costs shrink below $1B then Apple could start building their own models with the $139B in cash and marketable securities that they have--while everyone else has burned through $100B trying to be first.
Of course the problem with this strategy right now is that Siri really, really sucks. They do need to come up with some product improvements now so that they don't get completely lapped.
And they will most likely also be the last to benefit from hypothetical efficiency gains because they haven't been building up expertise (by burning billions) yet.
They could run fine on the CPU too. But these are mobile devices, therefore battery usage is another significant metric. Dedicated hardware is more energy efficient than general hardware, and GPU in particular is a power-hog.
Exactly. It's the same thing as video or audio encoding and decoding. Sure the CPU could do it, potentially use the GPU, but having actual hardware encoders and decoders for the most common codecs will save a lot of energy.
Not if GPU RAM is a limiter. Which it is for most models.
Unified memory is a serious architectural improvement.
How many GPUs does it take to match the RAM, and make up for the additional communication overhead, of a RAM-maxed Mac? Whatever the answer, it won’t fit in a MacBook Pro’s physical and energy envelopes. Or that of an all-in-one like the Studio.
It is worth noting that both products have had "student" tiers or similar, that had fixed credit limits with a cliff.
Therefore, they've implemented hard-limits. So not offering hard-limits is a business decision, NOT a technical one. They're essentially hiding functionality they have.
Make of that as you will. Anyone justifying it, should be me with skepticism.
They're using the harnesses provided by the respective underlying Operating Systems to do virtualization.
I'd like to explore that topic more too, but I feel like the context of "we deferred to MacOS/Windows" is highly relevant context here. I'd even argue that should be the default position and that "extensive justification" is required to NOT do that.
> As of October 2025, passkey login has been fully rolled out and is now required for members with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Reimbursement Accounts (RAs) who use the HealthEquity Mobile app and web experience.
The FAQ is a little misleading by saying WHEN your account has a passkey this and that, but reality is that after October they made them completely mandatory, no bypass, no exceptions. 100% coverage.
Oh, and by the way, passkeys have been broken on PC/Linux when using Firefox for months:
> There Was A Problem: We encountered an error contacting the login service. Please try again in a few minutes.
Neat. You have to use Chrome or Edge.... For months, after making it mandatory...
That's weird, I can login to my HealthEquity account (which contains HSA) without any issues and I don't have passkey setup. I confirmed it just now just in case.
That article does say "HealthEquity Mobile and web experience" so maybe it's just for customers who use both, I only use web.
Topics like this are where I struggle with HN philosophy. Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.
But how do you even begin to discuss that Tweet or this topic without talking about ideology and to contextualize this with other seemingly unrelated things currently going on in the US?
I genuinely don't think I'm conversationally agile enough to both discuss this topic while still able to avoid the political/ideological rabbit-hole.
You can't discuss this topic without broaching the idea that the government is acting in bad faith — that they don't actually believe that Anthropic is a supply-chain risk and that this action is meant to punish the company. But this is in the HN guidelines regarding comments:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
If a commenter who supports the government makes the same argument that the government is making, the guidelines tell us to assume good faith.
My conclusion is that any topic where a commenter might be making a bad faith argument is outside the scope of Hacker News.
My interpretation of that is that I’m required to assume good faith on behalf of other commenters. So, if someone makes the same argument as the government, I’m supposed to assume good faith there, but nothing requires me to assume good faith on behalf of the government. So I can say that this is obviously a shakedown without breaking the rules.
I've been on hn for years and I see this kind of sentiment raised all the time. It is not my understanding of the guidelines.
Politics and ideology are not off topic, provided the subject matter is of interest, or "gratifying", to colleagues in the tech/start-up space.
What's important is that we don't use rhetoric, bad faith or argumentation to force our views on others. But expressing our opinions about how policy affects technology and vice versa has always been welcome, in my observation.
So, what do you think about the US government's decision, and why?
>Topics like this are where I struggle with HN philosophy. Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.
Our whole society runs on technology. All tech is inherently political.
A "no politics" stance is merely an endorsement of the status quo.
Everything is political. All of our tech exists within society, and the actions of the government shape the incentives of every actor and the framework we exist in.
HN likes to pretend otherwise, especially when it's inconvenient.
If the last ten years have taught us anything it's that politics just isn't a topic isolated to the halls of government. It's real life. Political alignment has never so starkly indicative of your position on fundamental human morality. At the same time we've never had a government be so directly involved in private businesses.
Being a hacker used to be an extremely political and ideological movement. Then capitalism came along and bought the term. It's about time we take that word back where it belongs.
Tell me, oh sage, how it was possible to become a hacker before "capitalism" created the computers needed to do so? And no, hacking was not "an extremely political and ideological movement", it was (and is) the a[c,r]t of going down as deep the rabbit hole of whatever the was to be hacked as time and the hole allowed to see what lurks there. The term was eventually co-opted by the media - not "capitalism" - to identify those who broke into networks and computers but that does not need to bother you. There have been and are those who combine - usually anti-authoritarian - politics with hacking but they were and are only a part of the whole.
Don't you ever get tired of spouting that grade school "muh capitalism bad" pablum, of being what Lenin supposedly called a "useful idiot"? Also, who are the "we" who you think should "take back" the word hacking? In what way would this be "taking back" instead of "taking over"? If you think it should be "extremely political and ideological" it would surely be the latter. Would your definition of hacking have room for those who dared to venture beyond your "extremely political and ideological" boundaries or those who just want to hack without needing to wear the right buttons, pins and clothes?
The hacker philosophy did not even start with computers, it started with rail models and lock picking. Read a book every now and then.
And please don't fall in the trap that capitalism created things. Science and engineering creates things. Capitalism makes them more accessible, at a price that is often heavily confounded by externalities.
Ah yes, I knew someone would go there, though 'shall I mention that hacking did not start with computers nor with railways but when the first person with a suitable frame of mind dedicated himself to getting the best axe or arrow head out of a piece of flint no matter how much effort it would take' but decided against it, surely they'd understand? Clearly not. Read a book indeed, preferably more than one.
How does 'science and engineering' create things without the funds and the drive to do so? How do you think science-as-a-profession got started?
Stop throwing about those silly slogans - muh capitalism bad - and start thinking for real. Realise that you're able to discuss on this here site thanks to 'capitalism'. If you want to play revolutionary that's fine but at least realise what it is that gives you the opportunity do to so.
Why would you want to be non-political in 2026? The current administration is awful in ways we couldn't have imagined. There's no sense in not talking about it.
I appreciate your restraint, and keeping this a high quality discussion space. As a political dissident myself, I don't mind some threads going political, I expect them to. The best ones are when there is a lot of disagreement or debate. As long as its not in every unrelated thread....
Welcome to reality. HN likes to pretend politics is something you can just look away from and ignore. That’s a mighty big privilege, which makes sense since HN skews cis-white-het-male. That’s not a lie. It is easy to ignore this when it doesn’t touch them. But now it DOES touch them, and you’ve just discovered what every oppressed group in history has to live with: politics doesn’t just go away if you ignore it.
The issue Notepad++ is having, is the same as a lot of open source projects: They don't have a ton of money, don't have a business entity, and are struggling to get/keep a software-signing key in those circumstances.
So the people taking pot shots at the developers, I guess, maybe be more specific with what they did wrong and what they should have done instead. Because if you actually understand the history/circumstances (and the fact it was a third-party hosting provider compromised), one would expect more blame on the systemic under-funding of OSS than "developers bad."
Are people wanting them to create a business, monetize Notepad++, so that they no longer have issues with hosting/certificates? I'm guessing not.
And yet notepad++ is installed by default on millions of development machines across the globe. This one of those cases that Microsoft should take over the project, keep as open source and give it proper prime time attention.
Oh it's still pretty stupid, and I think they should have simply resurrected the Wordpad name for this, and maybe a conversion utility for opening doc/rtf files to markdown in the editor for older file support.
[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-macb...
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