100% agreed. This is going to be the point in history that people will remember when Apple went too far and how it destroyed the company...or destroyed the Apple as we know it today.
I've understood every single Apple product so far (with some small exceptions) but this is just DOA. People are used to thinking that Apple doesn't go into a product space unless they can really nail it in terms of implementation and pricing.
There is no excuse for 3499. This product is dead. If they can't manufacture it any cheaper they should have never done it.
It may or may not be a dud but I’ve no idea how even a resounding failure could ‘destroy’ a company as profitable and with as successful a product as the iPhone.
What makes you think they can’t manufacture it cheaper?
I see this price as a way of earning a healthy profit off early adopters and allowing them time to get third party apps developed before they announce a Vision (non pro) for $1000-2000 that flys off the shelves
I think this is very point on. This is not the sweet spot on the supply demand curve that maximizes the units sold * price per unit. But at this point in time, that's not actually what Apple would want/need with this new "innovation". They need a limited set of people who are zealous enough to jump in at that price, and help refine the product. Apple gets feedback and a publicity that will be biased positively. "Let's drop 3500+ and then pan this thing" will not fit the majority of reviewers. But "I spent discretionary money that you didn't/don't have and I want you to know it, and I'm certainly going to paint it as a wise first mover type experience" is more likely. People who pay more for seats at a game, always make a bigger deal about how awesome the game was.
A Valve Index will run you $1000, for less resolution and no onboard computing. Lenovo has $1700 AR glasses. Both of these seem like much better comparison points than a budget product like the Oculus Quest.
A high end VR/XR display like Varjo does feel like a new ux paradigm if the device has low latency and high resolution and good software. Given how long Apple has been at this I would bet they’ve come up with something that is of expected quality.
Some of the stuff on display felt gimmicky, but I would imagine as bare minimum there are lot of people who are happy to have a private huge 4k screen they can move anywhere.
It might be, but you still need the MacBook Pro if you want to use this as a Mac. So this is just the display, that can access some iPad apps.
Although I still think it's pretty awesome, need to give it a few years and see the price come down and a few versions later, this tech will be very interesting in the 5-10 year time space, what a crazy time that is going to be with AI and all this stuff.
Into an ecosystem where people buy a $1000 watch, $1000 phone, $200 earphones, and a $2000 computer.
There is absolutely a market for this, the demo experiences are extraordinary.
I have no idea what the Meta experience is like, but even in ignorance, it's not like what this thing is doing.
They were correct in saying this is something only Apple can do.
There are a lot of isolated technophiles with money to burn to put into something like this. The idea of lifting your mac into space with nothing but a keyboard and mouse in front of you alone is enough for many to pop for this. Talk about bringing your office into the local Starbucks, this moves it to the next level.
No. But it's an outrageous price for a redundant product that most people will not purchase. I don't see any meaningful market leverage for Apple here relative to Meta - if the selling point for this is "experiences, plus iPhone apps" then everyone with an iPhone will get a Quest or similar and save a few thousand bucks.
There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the dislike count was "abused by troll hordes". Your arguments are very weak and remind me of the rhetoric used by totalitarian regimes in justifying their censorship.
"Public shaming" is the result of creating content that most likely deserves to be publicly shamed. This has also not disappeared, but is now in the comment section. This is just as "elegant solution" as SWAT team shooting all the hostages in order to be able to injure one hostage taker.
Most likely the reason to remove the dislikes is either because
a) YouTube for some reason wants more user engagement in the comment section
b) To protect American corporations (advertisers) from the uncomfortable reality that 95-99% of the people don't like their woke-content.
Whether AI comes for our jobs or not is not really relevant. Whenever there is technical revolution some jobs will vanish, new jobs will be born and some existing jobs will remain but they will also change.
In regards to software engineering, automation and abstraction in our industry (compilers, high level languages etc.) has always increased the demand for software and people working in the industry. This is very unlikely to be any different unless we'll come up with ultimate general purpose AI that can solve any problem humanity can ever face.
There may be more jobs overall but I think inequality will grow even more. Since the 70s we were seeing a disconnect between worker productivity and worker wages and I see this trend to accelerate with tools like AI.
Most people don't seem to mind inequality (the difference between the lowest-earning and the highest-earning cohort) as long the average (or more likely the median) person is able to prosper and even grow wealthier over time.
When you look at housing we already have reached the pint where things have gotten worse for the median due to inequality. We have a few percent of the population that can afford very high prices and raise the prices for everybody that way. This is clearly a problem of inequality.
> Whether AI comes for our jobs or not is not really relevant. Whenever there is technical revolution some jobs will vanish, new jobs will be born and some existing jobs will remain but they will also change.
Except that one of the major problems is that the people who built their lives and careers around those jobs are historically hung out to dry.
It is looking like software and most white collar work will be replaced before the trades. How many 45-yr senior software workers will be happy to give it all up to become a plumber? Don't forget they will be competing with all of the other displaced workers which will drive down wages. Will they be happy begging for minimum wage jobs unclogging sewers?
More points:
Reskilling will become increasingly impossible as it becomes faster and faster to train an AI model than a human on new types of work.
Net job creation is far from guaranteed. Most law work is competed by paralegals and other staff, but replacing them doesn't mean there will be a natural growth in legal cases. A lawyer might be able to process cases 10x as fast, but that doesn't mean there 10x as many lawsuits and criminal cases will magically appear - at least I certainly hope not.
It's a significant advantage for developers to ask AI to solve technical problems, get right answers right away and move to a next task vs keep on scratching your head for the next 5h wondering "why it doesn't work".
I think equal advantage lies in getting multiple approaches fleshed out, even if the answer isn't right, as in, may not compile as-is. That is more than sufficient advantage a developer gets because most of the time usually spent isn't actually typing the code but finding out how to design/combine things.
E.g. I was working on a rust problem and asked ChatGPT for a solution. What it provided didn't compile (incorrect functions etc) but it provided me information in terms of the crates to use, general outline of the functionality and the approach to combine them - that proved to be more than enough for me to get going (to be clear, I didn't blindly copy the code; I understood it first and wrote tests for the finished product). I think that is where the real advantage lies. I see it as an imperfect but very powerful assistant.
Have you ever tried to solve a difficult technical problem with ChatGPT (any version)? I have. It worked about as well as Google search. Which is to say, I had to keep refining my ask after every answer it gave failed until it ultimately told me my task was impossible. Which isn't strictly true, as I could contribute changes to the libraries that weren't able to solve my problems.
Funny enough, the answers gpt4 gave were basically taken wholesale from the first Google result from stackoverflow each time. It's like the return of the I'm Feeling Lucky button.
There are many developers who are unable to do that and need to be spoon-fed. This is the market for ChatGPT and that's why they heavily promote it.
I doubt though that corporations that employ these developers will have any advantage. To the contrary, their code bases will suffer and secrets will leak.
This is very much my experience too. Occasionally ChatGPT can give me something quickly that I wasn't able to find quickly (because I was looking in the wrong place, likely). But most of the time, it's just a more interactive (and excessively verbose) web search. In fact, search tends to be more optimized for code problems; I can scan results and SO answers much faster than I can scan a generated LLM answer.
Use the edit button if you get an incorrect answer. The whole conversation is fed back in as part of the prompt so leaving incorrect text in there will influence all future answers. Editing creates a new branch allowing you to refine your prompt without using up valuable context space on garbage.
That doesn't change anything in terms of the flow. It's still refining the input over and over. This is exactly how searching on google works as well.
For the case I last tested, there was no correct answer. I asked it to do something that is not currently possible within the programming framework I asked it to use. Many people had tried to solve the problem, so chaptgpt followed the same path as that's what was in its data set and provided solutions that did not actually solve the problem. There wasn't any problem with the prompts, it's the answers that were incorrect. Having those initial prompts influence the results was desired (and usually is, imo).
I haven't actually seen that advantage in action. That is, I haven't seen a case where an LLM has actually given a solution right away for a problem that would have stumped a dev for multiple hours.
In my workplace, two devs are using chatgpt -- and so far, neither has exhibited an increase in productivity or code quality.
That's a sample size of two, of course, so statistically meaningless. But given the hype, I expected to see something.
ChatGPT is a godsend for junior developers, it isn't very great at providing coherent answers to more complex or codebase specific questions. Maybe that will change with time but right now it's mostly useful as a learning aid.
For complex codebases it’s better to use copilot since they do the work of providing context to gpt for you. CopilotX will do a lot more but it’s still waitlist signup. You could hack something together yourself using the API. The quickest option is just to paste the relevant code in to the chat along with your prompt.
I tend to use both. Copilot is vastly better for helping scaffold out code and saves me time as a fancy autocomplete, while I use ChatGPT as a "living" rubber duck debugger. But I find that ChatGPT isn't good at debugging anything that isn't a common issue that you can find answers for by Googling (it's usually faster and more tailored to my specific situation, though). That's why I think it's mostly beneficial in that way to junior devs. More experienced devs are going to find that they can't get good answers to their issues and they just aren't running into the stuff ChatGPT is good at resolving because they already know how to avoid it in the first place.
And this gets into why companies are banning it, at least for the time being; developers and especially junior developers in general think nothing of uploading the sum total contents of the internal code base to the AI if it gets them a better answer. It isn't just what it can do right this very second that has companies worried.
It isn't even about the AI itself; the problem is uploading your code base or whatever other IP anywhere not approved. If mere corporate policy seems like a fuddy-duddy reason to be concerned, there's a lot of regulations in a lot of various places too, and up to this point while employees had to be educated to some extent, there wasn't this attractive nuisance sitting out there on the internet asking to be fed swathes of data with the promise of making your job easier, so it was generally not an issue. Now there is this text box just begging to be loaded with customer medical data, or your internal finance reports, or random data that happen to have information the GDPR requires special treatment for even if that wasn't what the employee "meant" to use it for. You can break a lot of laws very quickly with this textbox.
(I mean, when it comes down to it, the companies have every motivation for you to go ahead and proactively do all the work to figure out how to replace your job with ChatGPT or a similar technology. They're not banning it out of fear or something.)
It depends heavily on what you do. When working with proprietary/non-public software stacks, or anything requiring knowledge of your internal codebase, ChatGPT is of little help.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
A great quote, but not applicable. The problem with LLMs is that they are non-deterministic, and you can ask the exact correct question and get the wrong answer.
Lol. This clearly shows it's made by Samsung/Android manufacturer. They just don't understand why people use iOS.
After scanning the code this happens:
1) Hey! Please copy this page URL and open it in Safari!
I open it in safari
2) Hey! Please add this to your home screen!
sigh...I add it to home screen and open it
3) Now I'm greeted with mandatory 5-10 seconds long UI tutorial
4) Finally I can start using it
This is exactly why I use iOS despite Apple being asshole company. After I scan the code I want end result IMMEDIATELY. No bullshit. I don't wanna press 20 buttons and change browsers, add stuff to homescreen etc.
Next time open it right away in whatever browser I choose to use and then add additional option: "Hey! Wanna get a full screen experience? Add this to your iOS homescreen in Safari and try out. Click here to start!"
"Spotify would consistently "rabbithole" me into the same ~150 songs, most of which I didn't even like."
They do that because their fake top/featured/popular now playlists are crafted by major record labels and other influential people/companies in the music industry. Those 150 songs are what they wanna push right now and what are at least remotely close to your taste. The trick is to find custom and good quality playlists made by others.
I listen to a lot of thrash metal and I just found "New thrash 2022+ only" playlist (or something like that) and it's full of awesome small never-heard bands that have only 50-5000 listeners per month. I would have never discovered any of them if I just followed the algorithm.
What I've found is that the trick with Spotify is to listen to the user-curated playlists, not the Spotify-created playlists. I've discovered a lot more music, and a wider variety of music, that way.
”If they take a stance, they will be banned from China completely.”
Unlikely as that kind of a move would have a huge global impact. That might lead to all Chinese companies (Bytedance, Xiaomi etc.) being banned in the west/US etc.
Laying off staff of a company that has barely added any new features during the last 10 years and has always been operating at a loss is not necessarily a bad thing for the future of the platform.
You are right about the chaotic way things are added/removed right now, but I personally prefer it to what Twitter was before Musk: Force login on the main page and unfair ideological censorship.
I've understood every single Apple product so far (with some small exceptions) but this is just DOA. People are used to thinking that Apple doesn't go into a product space unless they can really nail it in terms of implementation and pricing.
There is no excuse for 3499. This product is dead. If they can't manufacture it any cheaper they should have never done it.