This is up there with "Easy-Bake Oven" among plastic doodads that will be used for ~40 minutes and then added to a pile of plastic garbage many adults keep in their basement.
I don't oppose to the open backend of the device (it should be table-stakes for this kinda thing), but the concept seems really zero-sum and disposable. It relies on a form-factor that most kids don't use and depends on the novelty of AI which will wear off pretty fast. As much as I hate to say it, this should have been an app or a website.
Great concept, sharp looking website, and the marketing video looks amazing!
Personally, I've got some fatigue from most AI solutions being less than half baked. I'd love to see a long form video of letting frigade loose on something like Survey Monkey or whatever. Like... what does indexing look like? Does it produce artifacts? Can I see what users are asking? etc
With Apple/iOS, I can’t help but think of the Joker’s quote, “You have nothing… Nothing to do with all your strength.” The efficiency half is excellent but what with the power? AR? Gaming? AI seems the first broad fit. And where was Apple? Literally chasing cars and an ill conceived VR headset.
I say this as a massive Apple fanboy. AI was heavily advertised as a selling point of iPhone 15 Pro and is completely MIA 6 months later. It’s a major letdown. It’s not the end of the world, but let’s just call it what it is.
For those saying Apple doesn’t release imperfect products, may I introduce to you Siri? It was average when they bought it and it’s become a punch line.
And there are so many uses of AI that don’t have to be at the risk level of, “Oops, AI left grandma at LeGuardia.” Apple should go back to its roots and provide high quality LLM/MCP and other API sdks to developers and let them go nuts. Then just clone or buy the apps that work like they always do.
A long time ago I came up with a dozen or so “camouflage” ringtones designed to blend in. One was just a vibration sound effect. Others just slowly faded in. The idea was if you accidentally left your ringer on it would sound like your phone was silenced.
But it’s so dang hard to install a custom ringtone. I thought someday Apple would provide an api, but nope.
Love the idea of the vibration sound effect as a ringtone! I might add it actually, great suggestion :)
Adding the ringtone on iOS is a pain in the ass, I was thinking to add a step by step guide right on the website... Apple provides a guide in their support articles (https://support.apple.com/en-us/120692), it's not difficult but I don't understand the reason honestly. It should be simple with a .m4a file from the Music app, but you need the computer
I very strongly disagree with the dark sky example. Apple forced developers to completely reintegrate with the new API and released a vastly inferior weather app for consumers. Soooo many third party weather apps were killed.
I think Dark Sky firmly belongs in the "Aquihire" category. While I can't say Apple "did me dirty", I think they did themselves dirty by buying a great weather app, scuttling it, and then not doing a good job (any job?) of integrating what made the original app great. I don't feel like I - as a user - got anything out of that deal, and, frankly, I don't understand what Apple got out of that deal.
Is there a way to "vote" on these types of proposals? (Just asking for a friend who sees this as bloat and does not want to deal with other people's code which uses this unnecessarily)
I’ve always wished a movie hacker would hack a CDN to take over every web page in the world. I don’t know what the real percentage would be, but it’d be more believable than a lot of the hacks in movies.
If you feel like you have decent math chops, i would use that time and money on online training, hardware, develop a portfolio of projects that demonstrate your new skills, and make contributions to open source ML libs to pad your resume. But also, many of the new AI startups are just using ML as a service where expertise is not necessarily needed.
Is M3 the same single core speed on all platforms (e.g. air vs pro vs mini, etc)? In other words, would m3 mbpro single core benchmarks be basically the same as this new air?
Yes, basically. If you’re running long-term heavy load, the lack of fans in the Air will of course throttle it. But for short bursts they will perform the same.
The thermal situation is sort of interesting. The lowest spec macbook pro has 1 fan. The middle spec and the max have the same 2 fan setup though. This would imply the coolest running one is probably the 11 core. You could probably pin those p cores all day.
