[HN Gopher] Apple squandered the Holy Grail
___________________________________________________________________
Apple squandered the Holy Grail
Author : caust1c
Score : 286 points
Date : 2025-01-06 02:55 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (xeiaso.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (xeiaso.net)
| bitpush wrote:
| Apple was always going to fail this, and even more so going
| forward.
|
| LLM are built on data, and copious amounts of it. Apple has been
| on a decade long marketing campaign to make data radio active. It
| has now permeated the culture so much so that, Apple CANNOT build
| a proprietary, world-class AI product without compromising on
| their outspoken positions.
|
| It is a losing battle because the more apple wants to do it, the
| users are gonna punish them and meanwhile, other companies
| (ChatGPT, anthropic) are gonna extract maximum value.
| wmf wrote:
| LLMs are mostly trained on public data while Apple's privacy
| stance applies to private data. There's no conflict between
| them.
|
| (Meta can probably train on private data but OpenAI and
| Anthropic seem to be doing OK without it as far as we know.)
| shuckles wrote:
| No, Apple's privacy stance is about giving users control over
| data in ways they understand. Posting on Reddit or Arxiv is
| not a blank check to have your words be reused for LLM
| training, even if it's technically public.
| jitl wrote:
| Apple's slogan is "what happens on your iPhone stays on
| your iPhone". I think "I published a paper" or "I posted on
| Reddit" are clearly out of scope - those things are
| happening in public.
| astrange wrote:
| All the LLM advances these days are from synthetic or
| explicitly created data too. You need public data mostly
| because it contains facts about the world, or because it's
| easier to talk about a book when it's "read" the book. But
| for a known topic area (as opposed to open Q&A) it's not
| critical since you can go and create or license it.
| october8140 wrote:
| It's ok to just say you don't like Apple Intelligence.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Author isn't being reductive.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| Author has strong opinion of where GenAI should be used vs not,
| eg they doesn't like the feature to remove a person from a
| photo. That's respectable but I see many people may feel
| differently.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's a big difference between features that journalists
| should never use vs. consumers cleaning up their vacation
| snaps.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Article definitely has a lot more depth of meaning that this
| gives credit for
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Apple has started going downhill from the time they released
| Vision Pro.
|
| So that means all of the big tech companies are going down:
| Facebook, Google, Apple.
|
| Only Microsoft remains strong though for how much longer remains
| to be seen.
|
| A great time for startups.
| FreePalestine1 wrote:
| Doomposting aside, why do you actually think all these
| companies are going downhill?
|
| I think they're all doing pretty well at the moment.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Yea I mean they are financially doing better than any group
| of companies at any time in human history, kind of like the
| exact opposite of this downhill claim
|
| Even with Googles monopoly legal issues, they are more
| valuable than ever.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Is Microsoft that strong? They've got a stranglehold on medium
| to large businesses but that's about it. Very few people
| actually _want_ to use their products, they just think they
| have to...
|
| But yes, it's a great time for startups. I'd argue it always is
| and always has been.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| > that's about it
|
| Just 3 trillion or so dollars, that's about it
| dismalaf wrote:
| All the companies the parent was talking about have
| similarly massive valuations, yet none seem to have
| unassailable positions.
|
| Which is what the whole thread seems to be about (Apple
| squandering an opportunity and naturally others who are
| doing the same), not their current market cap.
| adamc wrote:
| There are a very large number of steam games that were
| written for Windows. There are similarly large numbers of
| commercial products with value for particular companies.
|
| Could they be emulated? Sure. Maybe not 100% (see Linux),
| but mostly yes. But then you have to make that work,
| ensure that the emulations keep working, etc.
|
| That is the real wall around Windows. Office has similar
| walls -- large numbers of spreadsheets, for example, many
| of which are critical and which do complex things. There
| are lots of programs that can read Excel spreadsheets,
| but perfect compatibility is difficult.
|
| And there are lots of people who know these products --
| re-educating them is a secondary wall, because it
| represents a lot of work for the customers.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Oh I know all about the Excel wall... It's hard to
| convince boomers there's something better because it's
| all they know but when I was in university most of my
| professors only accepted Google Sheets/Docs documents
| lol.
|
| Microsoft cloud syncing is absolutely atrocious and when
| people pass around Excel spreadsheets they inevitably get
| messed up or half the information is lost because there's
| no single source of truth that everyone adds to. One can
| argue Google Docs probably isn't technically better but
| collaboration is 100x easier.
|
| > large numbers of spreadsheets, for example, many of
| which are critical and which do complex things
|
| And which all need to be rewritten into database backed
| apps, IMO.
|
| > There are a very large number of steam games that were
| written for Windows. There are similarly large numbers of
| commercial products with value for particular companies.
| Could they be emulated? Sure. Maybe not 100% (see Linux),
| but mostly yes. But then you have to make that work,
| ensure that the emulations keep working, etc.
|
| Wine and Proton do an excellent job at emulating to keep
| old binaries alive.
|
| For new apps, Android and iOS are now enormous markets.
| Consoles are huge. Windows gaming is big enough, but I
| don't think targeting only Windows is worthwhile. Is it
| really more difficult to use SDL + Vulkan (or insert any
| other multi-platform graphics API) versus Windows APIs +
| D3D12? When everyone is building for multiple platforms
| it makes that moat a lot thinner...
|
| For me, the success of the Steam Deck shows that
| "desktop" Linux can be successful, can be used by the
| masses. Game companies are even tweaking their games to
| work better on Proton or straight up porting them, very
| few are philosophically Windows-only.
|
| And remember how Android absolutely destroyed Windows
| Phone even though Microsoft bought the largest cell phone
| manufacturer in the world... Not saying it will happen to
| Windows but I think it's a possibility...
| adamc wrote:
| You might see a need, but it isn't going to happen,
| especially in small and medium sized businesses.
|
| Wine and Proton work for many things, but far from
| everything. Plenty of games don't work well on the Steam
| Deck.
|
| Ergo, Windows isn't in any near-term danger. As far as
| Android and iOS being markets, sure. So what? It doesn't
| threaten Microsoft that there are additional markets.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _Plenty of games don 't work well on the Steam Deck_
|
| Are you just referring to the games with anti-cheat? If
| so, I do agree, though I think with the success of the
| Steam Deck the anti-cheat providers are (or better be if
| they don't want to get their asses kicked) going to be
| looking seriously into options.
|
| Outside of anti-cheat, I've yet to find a game that
| _doesn 't_ work on Steam Deck. Even the ones with the
| worst ratings will usually launch and you can play if you
| plug in a mouse and keyboard. Obviously not a great
| experience, but those games would have the exact same
| problem on any PC, Windows or Linux. It just happens that
| most Windows PCs have a keyboard and mouse already
| plugged in.
| leptons wrote:
| Apple wishes they had anything close to Windows (or
| Android's) market share. Yes, people want PCs because a lot
| of software just won't run on Apple hardware, and Apple
| hardware is too expensive.
| timomaxgalvin wrote:
| Nothing comes close to Microsoft Excel. It's bizarre to be
| honest how bad the competition is in core business
| applications.
| karlgkk wrote:
| You know, there's a lot to be said about this topic, but....
| "Microsoft is strong"???? Lmao
| ghaff wrote:
| Outside of various bubbles, Microsoft still dominates desktop
| computing and Azure has pretty strong market share itself. I
| actually find it fairly remarkable that, in spite of the
| Windows OS not mattering as much any longer--especially on
| the server--and Microsoft absolutely tanking in mobile, the
| company is still very strong and relevant.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I don't get the "Math Notes" example. Why does this need AI?
| Isn't this just Calca[1] but with extra steps?
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calca/id635757879
| krackers wrote:
| Also seen in Soulver.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Soulver is text entry not drawn
| krackers wrote:
| But this still doesn't need AI, unless we're calling OCR
| "AI" now
| fragmede wrote:
| How else do you get the O and 0's correct? Building a
| handwriting recognizer is one of the first things you
| learn to do in AI-writing class.
| jasomill wrote:
| Assume words don't contain numbers and numbers don't
| contain words, then provide a convenient UI for selecting
| alternatives?
|
| For fielded input matching known patterns, recognition
| can also be constrained by pattern matching and general
| validation rules (e.g., VINs are 17 characters long,
| cannot contain the letters I, O, or Q, and, given prior
| information in other fields, can be further constrained
| by manufacturer code, model year, and by requiring a
| correct check digit).
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Show us any prior OCR that can read hand drawn formulas
| beyond the most basic single line expressions
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Calca is text entry not drawn
| bathtub365 wrote:
| Math notes also works with text entry.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Indeed, but that's obviously not the impressive part.
| Wolfram alpha demonstrated the text-entry version a decade
| ago...
| bigiain wrote:
| Why does this need AI? Isn't this just dividing by two, which
| you can easily do in your head?
|
| (I get that not everybody bothers doing vaguely complex mental
| arithmetic, but dividing by two? Come on!)
| jitl wrote:
| The point is algebra system, it's quite good for unit
| conversion, budgeting, etc - lots of things a spreadsheet
| does great but seems a bit overkill for. Algebra big
| improvement over basic arithmetic calculator power.
| anon7000 wrote:
| Cala with less steps, technically. No extra apps or text syntax
| to learn. Just drawing the math you learned in school as if on
| paper
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The extra steps are the (probably at least) 10x compute this
| requires to do the same thing.
| cornstalks wrote:
| The "Math Notes" thing is absolutely infuriating to me. I use
| TextEdit on macOS for various notes and the forced math
| autocomplete (with no way to turn it off) has pushed me away
| from TextEdit entirely.
| dmd wrote:
| Do you mean Notes? TextEdit doesn't support this
| functionality at all.
| cornstalks wrote:
| I mean TextEdit. It definitely supports this to some
| degree, at least. Try typing "4 * 2 =" on a new line.
|
| Heck even Safari on my phone autofilled "8" when typing
| this comment.
| dmd wrote:
| Ah - you can turn this off with keyboard - text input -
| input sources - edit - show inline predictive text
| cornstalks wrote:
| Sweet mercy I don't know how I didn't find that or how to
| thank you enough!
| cornstalks wrote:
| Wait actually that doesn't work. TextEdit still
| autocompletes the friggin' math.
| ifyouwantto wrote:
| This _smelled_ like one of those things where they 've
| applied a certain behavior to an entire class of widget
| for consistency's sake, and TextEdit just happens to use
| that widget. If so, it'd be controlled at the system
| settings level.
|
| Sure enough: System Settings -> Keyboard -> (under the
| "text input" area) Edit... (button next to your primary
| keyboard language) -> toggle "Show Inline Predictive
| Text"
|
| If you want to easily switch between having it and not, I
| bet you can set a second keyboard with the same language
| but a different setting there and use the quick keyboard
| switcher widget/shortcuts (I did not try this, though).
| Or there's probably a way to shortcut it with AppleScript
| or some other automation thingy with ten minutes of
| effort (mostly googling).
| cornstalks wrote:
| But that still doesn't disable it. I can type in "cos(23
| deg) =" and it will autocomplete it, even though I have
| "Show inline predictive text" disabled. I can post a
| screencast if anyone would like.
| ifyouwantto wrote:
| Weird, I tried "1+1=" before and after and it disabled it
| for me.
|
| [EDIT] A quirk: I do have to hit "done" on the window
| before it seems to apply the change, toggling doesn't do
| it until I hit "done" (I just tried again to double-check
| and noticed this)
|
| [EDIT 2] Nb I don't not-believe you, we could be on
| different OS versions (I'm on 15.1) or something else
| could be causing the difference.
| cornstalks wrote:
| I'm on macOS 15.2.
|
| Currently it's not autocompleting some simple algebra.
| But if I enter more "complex" equations ("3 / 4 =", "3 *
| 5 - 2 - 1 =", "tan(pi) =", etc.) then it autocompletes
| those. I can't figure out why it's inconsistent. And I've
| definitely checked and confirmed "Show inline predictive
| text" is disabled and I've rebooted to try and give
| everything a fresh start.
|
| One thing I've noticed is that if I enter the same
| equation multiple times it might stop suggesting for that
| specific equation, so I suggest trying multiple different
| equations.
| ifyouwantto wrote:
| Oh god, that's deeply weird.
|
| I've felt for some time they're overdue for an "almost
| nothing but bug fixes and performance improvements" major
| release like we got a couple times in the 20-teens :-/
| ferbivore wrote:
| Forced AI garbage seems to be Notes team's SOP at this point.
| They destroyed the handwriting experience on iPads, in iOS
| 18, with an incompetent spellchecker that can't be turned
| off. At least this math thing is somewhat unobtrusive, the
| spellchecker straight-up destroys notes. No acknowledgement
| of radars and no fix in sight, as expected of Apple I
| suppose.
| deergomoo wrote:
| Anecdotally even palm rejection seems to have gone to
| absolute shit in Notes with iOS 18. When I go to write now
| there's like a 50% chance the scroll position flies up the
| document.
|
| I also tried their "handwriting improvement" feature that
| claims to clean up lines a bit while still looking like
| your own writing. All it did was turn legible writing into
| total gibberish.
| musesum wrote:
| Apple also squandered maps ... until they didn't.
| nxobject wrote:
| I agree. I think we believe that Apple's days of long-term
| skunkworks development is over... I don't think it's as
| dramatic as, say, the years since the PA Semi acquisition, or
| the "secret" Intel port, but they do some long-term planning.
|
| (Apple Originals, their production house, is also an example. A
| huge bank of original prestige TV, subsidized by iPhones...
| they're just still finding a way to market it.)
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Years ago I remember a detailed comparison of Apple and Google
| maps, showing a lot of flaws with Apple Maps around contrast,
| lack of detail, misleading iconography, and other issues.
|
| Has it improved that much? Does anyone remember what I'm
| talking about?
| astrange wrote:
| That's Justin O'Beirne's site. It has mostly improved but he
| wasn't really that negative on it. He just used to work there
| so he was being extra critical since he knew them.
|
| On the contrary he often seemed undeservedly uncritical when
| he talked about Google, like going "wow this is so detailed,
| they must be super geniuses who did this with computers"
| about something like POI locations they'd actually done by
| hiring a ton of contractors to do by hand.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It still sucks. No amount of fancier graphics can make up for
| their lack of ground truth in terms of opened and closed
| businesses. I just spot-checked the newest cafe in my
| neighborhood, which opened 3 weeks ago, and it's still not
| present on Apple Maps, and another place that closed months
| ago remains on Apple Maps. It is a demonstration of the fact
| that you can abuse your monopoly to push a third-rate product
| on 10% of your users.
| jiehong wrote:
| I think businesses update Google maps, but don't care for
| Apple Maps, and it leads to this state.
| ghaff wrote:
| Google Maps does seem to be more complete with respect to
| businesses although I prefer Apple Maps for in-car
| navigation. OSM has both way beat with respect to hiking
| trails and the like.
| ValentineC wrote:
| I submitted an address update for a hackerspace to Apple
| Maps last week, which only got the business marked as
| "permanently closed".
|
| Whichever firm Apple's contracting out to review Apple
| Maps reports isn't doing a good job.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| In your other comment [0] you mentioned you also updated
| the name and location of the business. I've never had a
| single issue with Maps review and I find my corrections
| are usually accepted in under a week.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42611345
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Big business hours have always been reliable for me in
| Apple Maps.
|
| I always call small businesses to ensure they are open. Why
| trust a small business operator to update Google/Apple in
| real time when I can spend 20 seconds to press the listed
| phone number and confirm it?
| jeffbee wrote:
| And you would find the business's phone number on Google
| I assume, because the business I mentioned is simply not
| present on Apple Maps.
| briandear wrote:
| The small business has even more incentive to keep it
| updated. I don't speak the language of every place I go
| and it's a huge waste of time to hope they're open. And
| updating business hours might take a few minutes, but
| fielding phone calls takes a lot more effort and time. If
| I have to call a business to find out basic information,
| I'm not going there.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They have the incentive, but not the technical capability
| or trust for line level staff to be able to login to the
| business's Apple or Google account and change the hours.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| This is because a) Google is a data-harvesting company and
| Apple is not, and b) the vast majority of businesses only
| update their info on Google due to market share (if they
| update their info anywhere).
|
| You can verify this for yourself by looking up a business
| on Apple Maps and seeing if there's a "Claim this Place"
| button.
|
| It is very easy to submit corrections to Apple Maps and
| they usually accept them within a week.
|
| For me personally, I would much rather use a superior
| _maps_ app for _maps_ , and use the data
| harvesting/advertising company's website as a business
| directory, or ideally get the hours directly from the
| business' website or social media profile since, like I
| mentioned previously, they often fail to update their info
| even on the data harvesting website.
| plonq wrote:
| My hypothesis is that certain products need users and feedback
| to be good. Maps is one of those, hence why they had to release
| it in a 'bad' state. Apple AI I think is another such product.
| ragazzina wrote:
| Or Siri.. no wait.
| ghaff wrote:
| Though, in fairness, I don't find any of the voice assistants
| very useful. Siri is probably not quite as good as Alexa
| though. I mostly care more about Siri because I use CarPlay
| when driving.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Apple needs to review whichever firm they outsourced review of
| Maps locations to, because my report got my local hackerspace
| marked "permanently closed" when all I did was correct the
| address, map pointer, and capitalisation of the name.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| I haven't had any issues with the Maps review. Seems like
| perhaps you submitted a change that was normalized as an
| entirely new business due to having a different address,
| location and name. Have you tried to zoom in and see if
| there's a new marker with the info you submitted?
|
| You can imagine, if a business has changed its address,
| location, and name, that users would appreciate a "Closed"
| pin for the previous name and location instead of wondering
| what happened to the business that used to be there.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > * Seems like perhaps you submitted a change that was
| normalized as an entirely new business due to having a
| different address, location and name. Have you tried to
| zoom in and see if there's a new marker with the info you
| submitted?*
|
| Nope, no new marker at all.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I wish they'd sort out the rendering of road names (and this
| isn't specific to Apple, mind) - they're still seemingly stuck
| in the olden times rules for rendering street names ("only put
| a road name if the road is wide enough and only every N inches
| and starting at M inches from a junction") rather than "can we
| put a road name on this road that's visible on screen without
| it going over something else?" which would be 500% more useful.
|
| e.g. https://imgur.com/a/1Y7HviK - what rules govern this half-
| arsed speckling of road names?
| eviks wrote:
| They still "did"
| ripped_britches wrote:
| > The core of why ChatGPT works as a product isn't the AI. It's
| the experience of each word being typed one at a time by the AI
| and saving your conversations with the AI for later.
|
| Really loved this article overall, but I have to super-disagree
| here. The core of ChatGPT is you can have a conversation with a
| computer program.
|
| Take away saving history and you can still have a conversation
| with a computer program (see ephemeral chats).
|
| Take away typing one word at a time and you still have a
| conversation with a computer program (see non-streaming API /
| batch API).
|
| But major props for writing this live on a twitch stream, benefit
| of the doubt there my friend.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Yep you can tell it that it gave you the wrong answer and it
| will apologise and give you a different wrong answer.
| xena wrote:
| Article author here. Thanks! I've found writing on stream to be
| really hard, but it's getting easier with practice. One of the
| more frustrating parts is trying to get the pure thought nuance
| out onto the page in a way that reflects the nuance as it is in
| my head. I think I'm getting closer to it, but who knows.
| trash_cat wrote:
| I agree with the premise that it is not the text stream or the
| coversation history that makes the ChatGPT useful - It is
| multifaceted. It's an interface, and also a intelligence at
| your disposal. Even if you took some abilities away from
| ChatGPT, such as spitting out real world facts, it could still
| be used for summarizing text.
| hb-robo wrote:
| These models are stochastic though, so saving conversations
| with elaborate context so they're actually useful in the domain
| you need them to be useful in is a fundamental feature. The
| alternative to that is saving a document to copy-paste in as a
| "startup prompt" of things it needs to know contextually, which
| is kind of silly.
| vachina wrote:
| Apple shipped "Apple Intelligence" before Apple even invented the
| term.
|
| Before the AI craze you could search Photos on iOS based on
| content and metadata. You could lift subjects off photos with a
| long tap and copy them, recognize faces and make montages based
| on inferred relationship with them. And all of this is done on-
| prem, on your device.
|
| These are very subtle, nice features. Apple had to put a name on
| all these otherwise there would be no marketing material.
| nxobject wrote:
| Yes, Apple does a lot of feature-related marketing these days,
| which changes their naming priorities.
|
| I remember reading it was a post-Jobs transition thing, where
| the key message about products transitioned away from vibes and
| overarching slogans ("shuffle", "the internet comuter"), to
| features ("iPhone X", "iPhone XS", "iPhone XR", "iPhone XS Pro
| (??)").
|
| I'm sure that a lot of the old-guard exec team knows it's a
| loss... I'm sure how they feel about it or why.
| wtmt wrote:
| This is true. Craig Federighi and others have said in the past
| that they've added machine learning based features for a long
| time in the OS (with examples). It's just that generative AI
| took off very quickly and now some people are imagining that
| it's the only (or major) AI.
| ghaff wrote:
| Aspects of AI normalize over time. There was a time when the
| route finding in digital maps would have been considered
| almost magic.
| WillAdams wrote:
| They also (poorly) implemented address recognition in their app
| --- c.f., an application which had this at its core:
|
| https://simson.net/ref/sbook5/
|
| (and the source of which is available)
| layer8 wrote:
| They have now released half-baked features they only released
| to fill "Apple Intelligence" with something, and that they
| likely wouldn't have released in the current state otherwise.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > If this OS were shipped to consumers, you would have a nearly
| unhackable system that would make it basically impossible to
| tinker with.
|
| I mean you can hack it the same way you would hack any other
| Darwin platform
| xena wrote:
| I more meant untinkerable than unhackable. Oops, oh well.
| 015a wrote:
| I think it is concerning that every single Apple Intelligence
| feature they've shipped thus far has been not just mediocre; but
| bad. Being last to the party is a very normal Apple thing;
| quality and Doing The Right Thing takes time. Announcing
| something then taking months to ship it is very not-Apple, but it
| has happened a few times. That thing they finally ship being bad
| is, geeze, horribly un-Apple.
|
| One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And
| it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps
| nowadays. So I generally do have hope for Apple Intelligence. At
| the end of the day, there are some disparate competing utilities
| in this class on the Samsung and Google phones, but no one is
| shipping something that is obviously game-changing and in first
| place; they all kinda suck, they're all tech demos, and it'll
| inevitably take many years to get this technology honed in to
| something that is truly useful to consumers.
| wtmt wrote:
| > One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps.
| And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than
| Google Maps nowadays.
|
| This depends on where (which country) you live. For all the
| ways Apple has been vocal about the Indian market and local
| production, Apple Maps literally sucks even in major cities in
| India. Google Maps is decades ahead and gets updated very
| quickly. Apple Maps cannot even find regular addresses or
| places.
|
| Apple has its share of incompetencies and willful blind spots,
| and that shows up in specific areas often related to its
| services (Apple Intelligence is also a service). The
| organization and its people are not built for handling these
| effectively or quickly.
|
| That said, I have more hope in Apple Intelligence improving
| quicker (at least in English, while competitors are already
| ahead in other languages, including several Indian languages)
| than I have in Apple Maps improving in India.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Google maps also sucked in India until a couple of engineers
| flew there to figure out all the idiosyncrasies of
| mapping/routing and spent a bunch of time implementing
| regionalized fixes for them. Apple expresses some very clear
| preferences in what regions they support well in Apple maps,
| which exclude most "difficult" areas.
| dcrazy wrote:
| The common wisdom is that Apple Maps works significantly
| better in the Bay Area than anywhere else on Earth, because
| the engineers file bugs they encounter on their commute.
| AliAbdoli wrote:
| Gemini is pretty good on Android nowadays. No real complaints
| SebFender wrote:
| Can't talk for all regions of Apple Maps, but here in Canada I
| still get many errors when using it - especially when using
| bikes, buses and so on. It remains impossible to confidently
| use compared to Google Maps. When it comes to Apple AI stuff -
| too much work was put on Apple Vision and this was a tragically
| bad strategic decision from Executives at Apple. I wouldn't be
| surprised it will be presented in the future as one of the
| greatest miss from Tim and his gang.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > too much work was put on Apple Vision and this was a
| tragically bad strategic decision from Executives at Apple.
|
| I think it is more complicated than that. I think the Apple
| Vision is a kind of albatross. No one wanted this thing. I
| happen to think the executives didn't want it either. For all
| the years and effort put into it (and, well, there was
| project "Titan" before that) killing it might have hurt worse
| than their lackluster shipping of it.
|
| Flush with cash (and I can't think of a phrase that really
| carries the weight of just how flush with cash they are --
| embarrassingly wealthy?) it was a rounding error for Apple to
| hire everyone they could in The Valley and keep them busy
| (and filing patent applications as they worked). It kept them
| from the competitors.
|
| And I don't believe you could have instead put the
| engineering hires to "fixing Maps" or whatever pet peeve you
| and I have about the current Apple ecosystem. You're 1)
| likely not hiring the type of engineers for those tasks and
| 2) just throwing more people on the thing is not necessarily
| going to be the right answer (The Mythical Man-Month, too
| many cooks (ha ha) and all that).
|
| On the whole I think Tim has steered the Apple ship to align
| with the times we have been living in.
| philistine wrote:
| I think the only reason the Vision Pro exists is for the
| OS. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple internally considers
| it _the final OS_ , since it's the one that exists in the
| physical world. Their task for the next two decades will be
| to bring that OS to invisible devices like glasses.
| nfca wrote:
| In Metro Vancouver, Los Angeles and the state of Washington,
| my experience with Apple Maps has been far better than Google
| Maps; the latter seems to have stagnated completely.
|
| Apple Maps provides me with more accessible info. e.g. "turn
| right at the next traffic light", "stay in the second lane
| from the left" vs. "In 200 metres, turn right onto 1st
| Avenue" (where it's always off by 50m) and nothing about
| lanes
| hobs wrote:
| MobileMe/iCloud sucked for half a decade at least, it was well
| known internally and was something Jobs supposedly bitched
| about a lot.
| kace91 wrote:
| Apple has a potentially interesting use case for generative AI
| in their professional creative apps: heavy integration in logic
| pro or in final cut. Perhaps even create simpler tools with
| similar functionality but aimed at non professional users.
|
| The problem is that this risks antagonising the everyone in
| arts/humanities, and most other use cases are really unneeded -
| who needs text summarizing for something as simple as personal
| texts from friends? casual use is not really complex enough to
| warrant an assistance.
| xena wrote:
| Author of the article here. I do video work occasionally and
| I use Davinci Resolve to do it. Davinci resolve uses
| generative AI as tools to help you. It makes all my subtitles
| and if I'm not going into domain specific terminology that
| often, it'll be 95% of the way there in about 15 minutes.
| This is massive, especially when combined with "edit by word"
| editing.
| CharlesW wrote:
| FWIW: Speech-to-text falls under "AI", but is not
| considered generative AI. (Note that systems with
| capabilities that go _beyond_ STT with capabilities such as
| summaries or translation may incorporate generative AI.)
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > The problem is that this risks antagonising the everyone in
| arts/humanities
|
| I don't anticipate this being a problem. Have you used
| generative fill in photoshop or lightroom? It's a complete
| game changer. In Egyptian mythology they weigh your soul
| against a feather when you entered the afterlife, and with
| professional tools I think moral hangups about AI are going
| to get about the same weight. It's just too good not to use.
| duped wrote:
| I have this deep feeling that engineers have a fundamental
| misunderstanding of the arts, which is reinforced when there
| is a suggestion that "heavy integration" of generative AI
| into multimedia production apps is somehow desirable. It's
| not just contrary to the design and use of these
| applications, but contrary to art as an endeavor - and users
| find it revolting.
|
| Apple already has simpler tools aimed at non professionals,
| they don't need generative AI either.
| kace91 wrote:
| >It's not just contrary to the design and use of these
| applications, but contrary to art as an endeavor - and
| users find it revolting.
|
| As far as speaking purely about art goes, I think there is
| a wide debate to be had there - a ruler helping a line be
| straight is help to an artist but not seen as contrary to
| his work, while pressing a button and getting a full
| painting is clearly not art creation. But where in the
| middle lies the spot where automation stops being ok? I
| think it's a spectrum and we'll see a shift in perception
| there, gradually.
|
| But that debate completely sidesteps the elephant in the
| room - most artists nowadays don't make a living making
| art, just making art-adjacent content, where the artistic
| value is not really super appreciated by the buyer -
| photographers creating stock photos, graphic designers
| making app icons, background music for ads and the like.
|
| Artists hate tools that automate this process because it
| significantly removes that source of income, but they're
| not the main target of these products. The target is the
| clients currently paying them and seeing an opportunity to
| get a product that, while lacking artistic quality, works
| for them just as well.
| duped wrote:
| This is another place where I think technologists miss
| the forest for the trees. You're looking the outputs and
| results looking for a middle ground, but misunderstanding
| the problem of generative AI in art is _the act of
| creation itself_.
|
| People don't generally take issue with tools that
| automate or make their jobs easier, even if it may reduce
| the value of the output. However if the tools limit what
| they can create themselves and make it difficult to fix
| or fine tune when something is not how they envision
| things in their mind before creating it, then they're not
| good tools. Even worse are the tools that take away their
| ability to create at all.
|
| Really I think what technologists don't understand about
| art is that in engineering tools are a means to an end
| and only the outputs matter. If you can get a program to
| spit something out and say "look, isn't that good
| enough?" you have missed the entire point of art.
| kace91 wrote:
| >However if the tools limit what they can create
| themselves and make it difficult to fix or fine tune when
| something is not how they envision things in their mind
| before creating it, then they're not good tools. Even
| worse are the tools that take away their ability to
| create at all.
|
| I might be wrong, but I think you're picturing all-or-
| nothing use cases here. It's not all just 'draw me a
| picture'; Think smaller scope and maybe you see that
| middle ground. Take as an example, for a writer, clicking
| on a phrase like 'he raised his eyebrows' and being
| suggested alternative wordings so he can avoid
| repetition. Is that interfering with his act of creation
| any differently than checking a thesaurus?
|
| Consider being able to have an interaction with an LLM to
| whom you can ask 'is the plot of my thriller so far
| leaving any plot hole?'. That does not seem so different
| with a back-and-forth with an editor or an early reader,
| in terms of affecting creative freedom.
|
| >If you can get a program to spit something out and say
| "look, isn't that good enough?" you have missed the
| entire point of art.
|
| Again, I get that but art is not what tech companies are
| trying to substitute. If a music generator can give you
| background music for studying there is no art creation
| involved, but neither the owner of the youtube channel
| making ad money nor the listeners give a shit.
|
| I'm not defending that position necessarily, mind you,
| just pointing out that the business interests in 'not
| art, but just content, that happens to need artist's
| skills to create' far surpasses the interest in actual
| art.
|
| As an analogy: Many musicians will scoff at mainstream
| pop artists and how every song is just the same four
| chords. But is the business in pop or in avant garde
| jazz?
| jiehong wrote:
| While I do like Apple Maps, and I agree it has improved, it
| constantly get the speed limits very wrong in France (just 2
| weeks ago).
|
| The public transport part of Maps got much better in Germany,
| though.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It's the same in the UK. Also I have been trying to get them
| to list my address for two years now. Google were able to
| update it but any requests to Apple seem to go into a black
| hole.
| selykg wrote:
| I can't speak to Europe, but in the US in a very rural
| location, I never have speed limit issues to begin with. I
| believe I have also submitted a couple of changes for small
| things, and they've all been handled so far as I can tell
| as I have not run into them again.
|
| Probably typical in that Apple's services in the US are
| generally better than elsewhere, but just wanted to add a
| positive with my experience and acknowledge that it's
| likely better here due to location within the US.
| iTokio wrote:
| What I want is simple :
|
| A smart assistant, that can understand and speak to me like
| Advanced Voice Mode, use a vast knowledge database, is tailored
| to my needs and can act on my behalf.
|
| And it would be great if it's able to run locally.
| Someone wrote:
| If that is simple, start a company to build it and become a
| billionaire.
|
| I don't think any company has a smart assistant that's
| reliable enough to act on your behalf except for some very
| constrained tasks (examples: dish washers, auto-parking cars)
| tmzt wrote:
| I would say Gemini Live is getting there. It's lacking
| integration with NotebookLM and Keep. It would be amazing if
| I started a project conceptually and wanted to move to code
| it could fire up VS Code and let me get to work.
|
| Gemini's home automation works nicely and it can understand
| comments like it's too dark in here or it's cold inside and
| act appropriately. This is using the Android app as an
| assistant, not live mode.
|
| OpenAI's implementation is apparently similar but I haven't
| tried the voice mode as a free user.
|
| I haven't tried Apple Intelligence yet on my M1 and don't
| have an iPhone, so I can't compare.
|
| I've been looking at offline capabilities with open weight
| models but they aren't there either. A full speech-to-speech
| model [1] working on an M1 Mac would be incredible.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00037
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Whisper is pretty good if you take the large model with gpu
| acceleration. But it's not instant like advanced voice
| mode.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is a lot in the Apple universe that is shoddy. iTunes,
| for instance.
|
| iOS has a refinement that Android lacks but I am unimpressed
| with MacOS. Windows is stuffed full of terrible crapplets and
| Windows users largely recognize that these are terrible
| crapplets and don't use them. Apple users have a fixed belief
| that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they
| _do_ use them which has a deadly effect on the market for
| third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for
| instance)
|
| Even Apple fans lately claim it's been getting worse in the
| last few years.
|
| (That said, I love the innovation in the M-series chips from
| Apple just as much as I appreciate Microsoft's commitment to
| the long-term viability of Windows for all of us who invest in
| it. Occasionally at work we still use Access '98 to handle old
| files and it works great, the installer works great, in fact
| Office still tries to take the desktop over the way it did back
| in the day. Clippy still works. The borderless windows look
| just a little funny because the compositor changed. No way you
| could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98)
| dangus wrote:
| Mentioning "iTunes is bad" is like a trigger word for me
| because it's so misinformed at this point.
|
| For one thing, the iTunes name doesn't technically exist
| anymore except on Windows. And anyone complaining about it
| being bad on Windows...I mean, that's like complaining that
| Microsoft Remote Desktop (Now called the Windows app for some
| reason) sucks on Mac, right? Like, can we just put the
| Windows version aside please? Even then, I'm not really sure
| what specific thing iTunes for Windows sucks at besides not
| looking like a Windows app. People just say that because they
| were saying it in 2005.
|
| On Mac, the Music app (not to be confused with the streaming
| service) is fantastic and has supported Apple's "classic"
| digital music workflow longer than anyone else has been
| willing to support their users. The Apple TV app (again, not
| to be confused with TV+ subsciption service) is now the home
| for the music/TV show store/rental place and the home of your
| TV/movie library, which is a big improvement from shoving
| that functionality in iTunes. in that sense, Apple has
| cleanly separated use cases and functionality in a way that
| iTunes didn't previously, which is one reason why a lot of
| people said "iTunes sucks."
|
| I have a family member who recently switched to Android
| because of frustration with Apple as a whole. They are a big
| digital music collector, they don't believe in streaming or
| "renting" their content.
|
| I tried to help them with their music collection on Android.
| Theoretically it should be easier right? No weird
| restrictions on sync direction, basically dump your stuff on
| an SD card/transfer over USB-C and you're off to the races.
|
| But still, they switched back to Apple secondarily because
| it's the only place left that actually makes that "purchased
| digital music" experience user-friendly, or possible at all.
| (Primarily they switched back to iPhone because the modem in
| their Google Pixel sucks and/or is poorly tested with their
| major US carrier and would drop international calls every 15
| minutes exactly for no reason)
|
| Google Play's music store doesn't exist anymore. Every
| jukebox app on Android depends on 100% manual file
| management. None of them have the polish of the Music app
| (the app not the service). Almost none of them have decent
| jukebox companion apps available on desktop computers. A
| whole bunch of other digital music stores have closed
| entirely.
|
| Apple's system for synchronizing content is actually pretty
| amazing for continuing to support an offline cloudless
| workflow. You still just hit one button/plug in your device
| to sync your music, movies, audiobooks, ebooks, and photos
| content. It also supports WiFi syncing, and it furthermore
| supports every iPod that ever existed so long as you have the
| right cable/adapter.
|
| You can back up your iPhone's full image to your computer if
| you don't want to use iCloud backups just like it was an
| iPod. You can synchronize your Photos library and avoid
| iCloud storage fees, deleting synchronized photos from your
| phone to free up space to take new photos and videos. It
| works just like you were using a digital camera in 2005. Yep,
| you can still rip and burn CDs!
|
| Furthermore, the way Apple moved device synchronization
| functions to Finder and split out Music from Podcasts and
| Audiobooks is helpful for organizing the whole process. It
| used to be that iTunes was the home for all this
| synchronizing of non-music-related content, but now it more
| sensibly exists in Finder.
|
| I think a lot of people don't realize that Apple basically
| still allows you to send over personally owned non-DRMed or
| even pirated content to Apple's own modern apps very easily
| this way, you just have to be willing to synchronize using
| "the old way" like your iPhone is an iPod. They've even kept
| ancient hosted services like iTunes Match going just in case
| you still need that sort of thing (it essentially allows you
| to sync music to your iPhone that is either pirated or not
| part of a known label music catalog via a cloud service
| rather than having to do a local sync via cable or WiFi).
|
| And this workflow is very simple for non-technical users who
| don't really know how to traverse complicated file management
| structures. Yes, I would really like if apps like Photos was
| more flexible on file management, but on the other hand if
| you follow the prescribed workflow the results are quite user
| friendly for someone who really doesn't want the cloud but
| also can't handle setting up a home NAS. In this use case you
| have a reasonable photo storage system by syncing your device
| and then backing up your computer in a relatively hands-off
| manner using Time Machine.
|
| One final point here is that Apple Music _the subscription
| service_ can be hidden entirely from the app. Apple will just
| give you a 100% owned music jukebox app. Google doesn 't do
| that, and with Microsoft you're probably using a legacy app
| like Windows Media Player that looks like it belongs on
| Windows Vista.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Microsoft Remote Desktop is 100% great on iOS (if not
| MacOS) in my opinion. I never feel so stylish as when I
| show up at a hackathon with a tablet + $20 bluetooth mouse
| and $30 bluetooth keyboard (how did they convince people to
| spend a few hundred on a special keyboard or to buy a
| 'hybrid' computer that will leave the airline stewardess at
| a loss to know if you can stuff it in the pouch in front of
| you?) and the mac books and gaming laptops look clunky in
| comparison. And that's backed with a 16 core machine with
| 128GB of RAM and a 4080 if it's my home machine and I can
| rent something much larger for a few $ an hour in the
| cloud. My only beef is they want to call it the "Windows
| App" now.
|
| (At the least the Apple AAC encoder is good. That plus a
| Python script can copy music files to a USB stick in the
| right order so they display properly in the music app for
| my car... And that's what a good music app is to me, not
| something that wants to push me to buy a $1000 phone and
| $100 a month plan so I can crash my car screwing around
| with my phone.)
| skydhash wrote:
| That tablet is $500+. I bought a 2019 dell latitude for
| 140$. Not as nice, but I don't have to remote for
| anything. And it's fully supported by Linux.
| dcrazy wrote:
| FWIW iTunes on Windows has finally been replaced by a true
| Apple Music app.
| Clamchop wrote:
| The iTunes functionality carried over to Apple Music is
| just as slow and confusing and non-portable as it ever was,
| now with added cloud sync that will mysteriously tell you
| that anything it doesn't recognize isn't available in your
| region.
|
| The streaming bit may be good but the rest is not.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| > On Mac, the Music app (not to be confused with the
| streaming service) is fantastic
|
| I'd love to live in your alternate reality, not in mine
| where Music.app is slow, doesn't do filtering to find
| specific content very well, doesn't let you view album
| covers in a reasonable size, and shortcuts and buttons are
| inconsistent with the rest of the OS.
|
| Also, syncing (about 350GB of) content to my iPhone has
| been hit and miss for at least 9 years now, where
| consistently the same tracks just disappear from the phone
| and maybe - just maybe - eventually get synced again,
| taking a few hours in the process. This has been going on
| across at least three Macs and about six iPhones.
|
| I understand that streaming via Apple Music is the thing
| now, and us users from the "Rip, Mix, Burn" era are
| considered legacy now. I'd love to switch to something
| better, but haven't found anything yet.
| sillywalk wrote:
| > On Mac, the Music app (not to be confused with the
| streaming service) is fantastic
|
| Strong disagree. I find Apple Music (the app) on MacOS to
| be terrible.
|
| A good 1/2 of the main screen is taken up by a view with a
| random mix of artwork from the playlist. I find it useless,
| and it can't be hidden. . Also, there is no way to set the
| default view to just show songs, instead of the crappy
| "playlist view".
|
| Search. It's hidden on the sidebar of playlists/sources and
| you have to scroll to the top to get to it. And then, the
| choice of whether to search local/Apple Music is on a
| toggle button on the other side of the screen.
|
| Lyrics - you can't change the font, or adjust the size in
| normal mode, and when played in fullscreen, the background
| colours often obscure the lyrics so they're unreadable.
|
| And finally Apple can't seem to decide between a Heart or a
| Star for songs that you love.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| The severe bad-ness of itunes on windows halted any
| momentum I may have had in migration from a windows
| ecosystem towards apple.
|
| It was just so horribly bad. Apple's disrespect for the
| dominant competing operating system made apple look
| incompetent. I liked the ipads until I had to work out how
| to transfer files on and off them to and from my existing
| infrastructure. It was goddamn painful, like going back to
| a previous era of esoteric computer usability.
| azeirah wrote:
| > No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic
| binaries from '98
|
| Can you give me a few examples of linux binaries from 98? I
| would like to give this a go, I think I have a pretty
| reasonable way to go about achieving this.
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| I'd just use an old game (for a really hard test). Like
| Quake maybe:
| https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive Or
| the server for easy mode.
|
| Let us know how it went. ;)
| arm wrote:
| > (No good music players for MacOS for instance)
|
| Have to _strongly_ disagree on this point. Cog1 is my music
| player of choice on macOS; not only does it have a clean GUI,
| but it supports almost every format2 I've ever wanted to
| listen to audio in, including game music in formats like GBS
| (Game Boy Sound System) and 2SF (Nintendo DS Sound Format).
|
| ------------
|
| 1 -- https://github.com/losnoco/cog
|
| 2 -- https://cog.losno.co/
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| +1 for Cog, it's pretty awesome to be able to play N64
| music files natively!
| behnamoh wrote:
| > Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does
| is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a
| deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No
| good music players for MacOS for instance)
|
| Nah, Apple users knew from the beginning that Siri sucked and
| still sucks. Almost no one I know uses Siri except for
| setting alarms and asking for weather forecast.
| hb-robo wrote:
| It still really isn't that close to Google Maps, with public
| transit in particular Apple Maps is pretty much useless. GM is
| typically more complete with paths and building data outside of
| North America too.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Huh? Public transit has been better on Apple Maps. Does
| Google even have station entrances/exits yet?
| dcrazy wrote:
| I was able to navigate the transit systems in Tokyo, Osaka,
| and Yokohama near-flawlessly with Apple Maps in 2018. I only
| recall encountering one correctness issue.
| gazchop wrote:
| Huh. Just used it fine for public transport in 8 European
| cities recently.
|
| Google maps won't even work properly when there's no data.
| jmull wrote:
| I agree that Apple Intelligence generally stinks, but I'm not
| seeing anything actually generally more useful from anyone
| else.
|
| If no one is good enough, does it really matter who's the
| worst?
| behnamoh wrote:
| Google Assistant and Gemini have been great.
| ifyouwantto wrote:
| _Shrug_. If I had to go back to desktop Linux, and I could pay
| to have Preview, Safari, Terminal(! yep, I like it better than
| my Linux options), Digital Color Meter, Apple 's office-alike
| suite, Notes, and various other first-party Mac apps, on Linux,
| I'd absolutely click the "buy" button. And I spent 20 years on
| Windows and Linux before seriously giving Mac a shot, and still
| regularly use both for various reasons, so it's not that I
| don't know what else is out there--Apple's first-party apps are
| my favorites in their categories more often than not (big,
| glaring exception for Xcode, hahaha). They're mostly really
| good, stable, and don't eat my battery like it's free.
| robocat wrote:
| > concerning that every single Apple Intelligence feature
| they've shipped thus far has been not just mediocre; but bad
|
| The very initial success of Microsoft was that everything was
| _reliably_ mediocre. Most things Microsoft delivered that were
| truely bad were fixed within a few major versions. It was a
| superpower.
|
| The same model works for most purchases on a bad|average|best
| spectrum: we never want to buy bad, best is difficult to buy,
| so we settle for average quality.
|
| Aside: I think MS has gone downhill and is now bad on multiple
| dimensions for me
| r00fus wrote:
| There is also the possibility that LLM models (which is what
| Apple Intelligence is leveraging mainly) are overblown and
| honestly a local minima for AI.
| apricot13 wrote:
| I feel like they have a plan, get the backend up to scratch to
| appease the tech people and they're leaving the ways to interact
| with it purposely vague and incomplete for those non-tech folk.
|
| They don't want to scare any part of their audience away from
| future uses of Apple intelligence. Their audience is tech and
| non-tech folk alike.
|
| If the tech folk say it's safe and the non-tech folk get
| comfortable with the basic AI features then they're onto a
| winner.
|
| How many people's parents/grand parents have iPhones because
| they're simpler for them to understand who are also scared or
| don't understand this 'AI thing'. I think Apple have been quite
| savvy in introducing it slowly and are probably watching the
| metrics like a hawk!
|
| I suspect image playground is so creepy in an attempt to mark the
| images as clearly AI generated when they get posted to social
| media?
| daft_pink wrote:
| Their problem is that they are just behind now, because they
| released too early. They haven't finished iOS 18 yet. They are
| still working on it, which likely means that iOS 19 isn't going
| to get much attention either, because they should be working on
| iOS 19 now, not still developing iOS 18.
|
| They have set themselves up for a loser in the next year or two,
| because they can't double their resources to catch back up to a
| normal release schedule.
| yalogin wrote:
| They just built a trusted/secure backend to push compute to and
| it luckily coincided with the AI craze. They just packaged their
| backend as apple intelligence and exploited the situation. It
| doesnt look like they have anything worthwhile to showcase that
| backend though. They will get there eventually, this is apple
| after all
| VectorLock wrote:
| I find it super interesting that Apple is x-raying the PCBs for
| their compute nodes. Guess they took Supermicro inserting
| malicious devices into their servers very seriously.
| jsheard wrote:
| * allegedly inserting malicious devices according to a report
| that was never substantiated
| VectorLock wrote:
| I, personally, am convinced it has and is happening.
| xena wrote:
| It's really amusing to me that people are willing to
| believe it happened/is happening without proof to back it
| up.
| ghaff wrote:
| The whole episode is fascinating to me in that Bloomberg
| is a reasonable quality news organization and _something_
| obviously convinced editors there to stand their ground
| in spite of no obvious (presented) evidence. I agree
| though that absolutely no proof has come to light which
| makes me seriously question the whole thing.
| VectorLock wrote:
| There is abundant evidence that these type of hardware
| inserts exist and are being deployed. Why do you think it
| isn't happening?
| quesera wrote:
| This is the same argument that was used for decades to
| suggest that NSA was not hoovering up all voice
| communications though.
|
| It is technically possible. There is adequate motivation
| by capable parties to do so.
|
| Apple would be negligent if they did not make a serious
| effort to validate the hardware.
| armada651 wrote:
| > Word processors like MacWrite absolutely transformed the ways
| that everyone used computers.
|
| MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is
| predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this
| obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.
|
| Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what
| they're good at. Part of the reason people are disappointed with
| Apple these days is because of this fantasy image of Apple as an
| inventor.
| Clamchop wrote:
| Author does say word processors "like" MacWrite, so falls short
| of saying it was the first at anything (and it wasn't), but
| WordPerfect and WordStar are interesting choices for
| comparison. Of the three, only MacWrite is a GUI-based WYSIWYG
| word processor that would be immediately familiar to modern
| audiences. (WordPerfect wouldn't get GUI until 1991.)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah, this.
|
| I mean, look, WordStar was a _huge_ step up from a
| typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for
| people like me to write.
|
| WordStar let you get the _words_ right. WordPerfect let you
| do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step
| up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG
| layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to
| WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still
| more important, but the presentation also matters.)
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| I always wonder how many people actually _used_ typewriters
| before talking about them in comparison to word processors.
|
| By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had
| electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you
| could erase mistakes. You could set them to center or right
| justify text. You could create tables of justified text.
|
| Early word processing software was amazing because it gave
| you more memory to work with, and didn't force you to keep
| so much of what you previously wrote in your head. But it
| was only a large step forward compared to typewriters of
| the time.
|
| WYSIWYG blew all of that out of the water.
| matwood wrote:
| I learned to type on an electric typewriter :) It wasn't
| a fancy word processing one with memory, but just that
| the hammers struck the paper using a motor making it
| easier to type. It also made a very satisfying 'thunk'
| which I would randomly trigger while the teacher was
| talking that in turn caused me to get thrown out of class
| a number of times.
| phil21 wrote:
| It's also technology was much less ubiquitous back then
| and less evenly distributed, at least in my experience.
|
| I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the
| whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly
| to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I
| only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in
| life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and
| only for her accounting business as it was so expensive
| when they first bought it.
|
| As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for
| my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a
| kid in school, it was amazing going from having to
| totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some
| casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper,
| especially with the typing skills I had back then!
| wjnc wrote:
| Most 70s-80s advanced typewriter were just not regular
| household material. Even among white collar jobs. My
| parents (and mini me) worked on very mediocre type
| writers, until my dad got a PC from work with
| WordPerfect. Interesting from an economical perspective
| is that the 'top' typewriters were a lot more affordable
| than early pc's. People just didn't buy them. What they
| had was good enough, regardless of features. My dad ended
| up so enthusiastic for PC's to later spend more than a
| monthly wage on a PC for the family (actually: me). Every
| two years. Incredible, especially compared to the
| afforability of digital devices nowadays.
|
| Word processing software was to writing as smartphones
| were to photography, or as the book press was to writing.
| Perhaps not transformational on a per feature basis, but
| transformational on grounds of the possibilities and
| market it unlocked.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had
| electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so
| you could erase mistakes._
|
| Sure, there were electronic typewriters where you could
| type an entire line or two into memory before printing
| it. And, as you say, typewriters with whiteout reels that
| allowed you to backspace.
|
| But if you've started a new paragraph, and you realise
| you want to go back and edit the previous one, and
| everything else needs to move down a line to accommodate?
| Good chance you're throwing the page away and starting
| from scratch.
|
| Or you're cutting and pasting in the literal sense, using
| scissors and glue.
|
| Typewriters were difficult enough that "typist" was a
| professional job - and many workers wouldn't do their own
| typing, instead recording messages onto tiny tape
| cassettes for a typist to type up later on. There were
| even foot-pedal-controlled cassette players, so typists
| could type with their hands and control the dictaphone
| tape with their feet!
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Early word-processing software changed very little of
| that. I maintain that this kind of software was like
| typewriters on steroids, with a screen.
|
| WYSIWYG software was an entirely new paradigm, and
| changed everything.
| adamc wrote:
| Even Word Perfect was much, much better at this than a
| typewriter. What made it hard to use was that you had to
| memorize a bunch of special function keybindings, as I
| recall. Yes, GUI word processors were much better than
| this, but even Word Perfect looked compelling compared to
| using a typewriter.
|
| I wrote a bunch of papers using a typewriter. Standard
| operating procedure was to plan out the complete paper,
| basically as a tree of bullet points (I used index
| cards), and then turn those into sentences at the
| typewriter. All the writing/reorganization had to happen
| before you sat down to type.
| tiahura wrote:
| _you had to memorize a bunch of special function
| keybindings_
|
| Keyboard templates were pretty ubiquitous.
| taylodl wrote:
| _Early word-processing software changed very little of
| that_ - the problem was cultural, not technological. Big
| offices had a typing pool where professional typists
| would type up memos and documents. It took a while for
| that culture to change where people realized they could,
| and should, do their own typing. Small business led the
| way because they couldn 't afford a dedicated typing
| pool.
| adamc wrote:
| I wrote papers in graduate school using a typewriter
| before switching to a Mac Plus. It was a Smith-Corona and
| used a cartridge "ribbon" and a special "correction
| ribbon" that lifted off the text (instead of using white-
| out).
|
| It wasn't a Selectric, though, so mostly you just used it
| as a typewriter. Selectrics were expensive and mostly
| used in business rather than by individuals.
|
| Even the IBM Selectrics were _nothing_ like as good as
| having a word processor, which is why the transition was
| so fast. A friend of mine was in commercial real-estate
| in that period (mid-1980s) and discovered that with a
| computer, he could type his own offer letters and not
| have to bother with a secretary. My brother 's law firm
| went through something similar. In a handful of years,
| there was huge adoption.
| ghaff wrote:
| A student organization I was an officer in had a
| Selectric with a correcting ribbon and I ended up using
| it for a lot of papers latterly. The newspaper had Royal
| typewriters and I used those. We did a bunch of literal
| copy/pasting and then stuff was typed into a huge
| typesetting system.
|
| Grad school (starting 1979), there was a mainframe with
| DecWriter terminals and that was a big improvement but
| still nothing like terminal GUIs.
| Clamchop wrote:
| Selectrics never had any word processor-like
| functionality aside from the ability to erase. They were
| very expensive for being just amazing pieces of
| mechanical engineering but the daisy wheel products
| worked well enough and could be infused with a little
| computerized help because they were already electronic.
| xena wrote:
| Hi, author of the article here. I do most of my drafting
| of these longer articles on a Freewrite Alpha, which is
| effectively an electronic typewriter. When I use it I
| have one rule: the backspace key is banned. This makes me
| restate my thoughts if I make a typo or just bulldoze
| through it. I find that this makes me make better drafts
| in the process.
| quesera wrote:
| Yikes.
|
| You might be blessed with a brain for written
| communication.
|
| If I did not allow myself revision and improvement to my
| written text, everything I write would read like a spoken
| monologue, and be multiple times longer than necessary to
| convey my message.
| xena wrote:
| There is a reason I do _extensive_ editing after the
| fact, here's the draft for Soylent Green is people [1]: h
| ttps://gist.github.com/Xe/3fe0236412c1ce16389bfcd6c6562d7
| a The differences I added in editing are _vast_ and
| really transform the work from a ranty mess that
| approaches readability to something that's worthy of
| publishing.
|
| I have another article about AI coming out about how we
| could use generative AI to make art that we've never seen
| before, but it's mostly used for AI slop. I'm in the
| middle of ranting it out into the typewriter. It's bad
| currently, but I make it bad first so I can remake it
| better later. Here's an excerpt of the intro that I'm
| going to be rewriting. This is the "raw clay" that I mold
| in editing.
|
| > I like creating things. There's a lot of joy in being
| able to sit there, think about a thing, and then make
| that thing come into existence. This is something I
| really enjoy doing and I'm blessed to be able to do that
| as my job in DevRel.
|
| > One of the core conflicts that i end up having with the
| stuff I create is that I am a bit more artistically
| minded than people would expect out of the gate. I mean,
| I get it. Tech isn't really known for *art*, it's a lot
| more known for being the barrier between you and artists
| you want to follow.
|
| > Howeever I've ended up seeing kind of a disturbing
| pattern with AI tools that are meant or at least intended
| to aid people in the creation of art: they're almost
| always used to create infinite slop machines without a
| lick of art in the process. Today I'm going to talk about
| this fundamental conflict between two categories: art and
| content. Art is that which conveys, inspires and tells
| stories. Content is what goes between the ads so that
| media moguls can see their profit lines go up. I want to
| argue that a lot of what AI tools are actually being used
| for is content that is gussied up as if it is art.
|
| If you want to see what the entire writing process looks
| like after it festers for a while in my head, I wrote out
| the holy grail article on Twitch:
| https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8
|
| [1]: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/soylent-green-people/
| snowfarthing wrote:
| On the other hand, Xena might also have a brain broken
| for written communication, and this is the best way to
| deal with it!
|
| I have only recently learned that I have ADHD, and have
| been trying to iron out all the implications of that
| (well, that and autism, which I also only recently
| learned about) -- I cannot help but wonder if a workflow
| like this would help me in my writing....
| xena wrote:
| Lemme tell you, it functions like a gift but feels like a
| curse in terms of how it affects my daily life. ADHD
| medicine doesn't help consistently, it sucks lol
| analog31 wrote:
| I did. I used my mom's typewriter, which she typed her
| thesis on in the 1950s, and switched to word processing
| on a college owned TRS-80 before getting an MS-DOS
| machine of my own.
|
| The big breakthrough was editing. WYSIWIG didn't solve a
| problem in that space. College papers didn't need
| different fonts, and it was sufficient to let the
| computer take care of formatting, like using Markdown.
|
| I'm not dismissing the Apple, but it was priced out of my
| reach in 1984.
| solomonb wrote:
| > I used my mom's typewriter, which she typed her thesis
| on in the 1950s
|
| The point was that later typewriters had a features like
| memory, automatic indentation and erasing that were not
| available in 1950s era typewriters..
| analog31 wrote:
| Yes, but nobody was buying those for personal or student
| use, and the really cheap ones came later.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In Southern Europe Apple hardware has always been the
| most expensive one among systems for home users.
|
| Hence why I had to wait until university to actually see
| them outside computer magazines, and only one room had
| them on the computer labs, versus the whole campus filled
| with PCs and UNIX terminals.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone alive back then, they were also quite
| expensive, and only a few had them.
|
| I bought my typewriter around 1990, a plain classical
| one, where I threw lots of paper away, learn to use
| corrector tape and ink to save them.
| efitz wrote:
| I learned typing on an IBM Selectric, my parents made me
| take a typing course before they would buy a computer.
| White-out or correction tape was how we fixed typos (or
| just didn't make them). If you were smart you wrote your
| words out longhand before typing them; you didn't "think"
| while typing.
|
| The early computerized typewriters kinda sucked - you
| could do line level edits but the print quality was dot
| matrix or worse.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had
| electronic memory.
|
| Were such fancy machines actually common? I never saw
| one. For me, it was all "CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK oops!
| damn", until it was a whole new world with MacWrite and
| the ImageWriter.
| taylodl wrote:
| Such typewriters were used by business, not students or
| individuals at home. Those machines cost several thousand
| dollars in today's dollars, just to put a perspective on
| things. Whereas a "normal", manual typewriter cost
| several hundred dollars in today's dollars. Most of us
| therefore had a manual typewriter. Touch typing was out
| of the question! Let alone any fancy-schmancy word
| processing!
|
| Boy, oh boy were the early gen word processors a godsend!
| leptons wrote:
| And before Macwrite, or Macintosh computers existed, there
| was Xerox PARC and their GUI-based WYSIWYG editor called
| "Bravo", which Steve Jobs no doubt would have seen when he
| visited PARC.
| RichardCA wrote:
| That historic moment has been dramatized at least once.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI
| sgerenser wrote:
| I noticed Alan Kay himself in the comments, indicating
| about the only thing in the scene that is accurate is the
| guy playing Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) looks/sounds similar
| to the real Jobs. Everything else was pure Hollywood
| fluff.
| homarp wrote:
| 'Bravo' was produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson,
| Charles Simonyi and colleagues in 1974.
|
| Then Charles went to Microsoft where he started and led
| Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first
| versions of Microsoft Office
| WillAdams wrote:
| It's interesting to note that when WordPerfect got a GUI, it
| had to be worked up separately for each platform --- the
| NeXTstep version was quite nice, took full advantage of
| Display PostScript, and was coded up by a couple of
| programmers in six weeks or so.
| wat10000 wrote:
| That's how cross-platform apps were. Middleware libraries
| that you could use to put the same GUI code on different
| OSes didn't exist, and there wasn't room for them anyway.
| Even sharing the core could be a tough proposition. I know
| that at least MS Word for Mac vs Windows was two completely
| separate programs that happened to share a name and a
| feature set. That continued until Mac MS Word 6.0 in 1994.
| That was a port of the Windows version, and very much
| disliked among the Mac userbase for being poor performance
| and not really behaving like a Mac app should.
|
| I don't think cross-platform UI code really took off on the
| Mac until maybe 20 years later. Plenty of Mac apps were
| built that way before that point, but they tended to be
| ones in the "you're stuck using this, so it doesn't have to
| be very nice" category, like Word ended up being. It
| doesn't really seem to have tipped until Electron came
| along, and somehow web apps that use half a gigabyte of RAM
| to show some text became totally accepted as good enough.
|
| Incidentally, the Cocoa UI framework that macOS uses was
| originally a cross platform framework that could deploy to
| Windows and various other OSes, back when it was made by
| NeXT. Apple. Apple killed that off and it became Mac-
| exclusive. I wonder what the world would look like if they
| kept support for other OSes. Maybe we'd have a good
| selection of cross platform apps that actually look nice
| and perform well.
| mjevans wrote:
| Real damage of Microsoft's Monopoly power. They have a
| severe case of Not Invented Here syndrome and even for
| free Open Source Software refuse to ship any of it
| naively unless they can fork it and pretend they wrote it
| (early TCP code based off BSD IIRC).
|
| It's horrendously tough to target for a cross-platform
| application when you have to bring the entire GUI toolkit
| along and adapt it individually to every target, even the
| 95% of the market gorilla that is whatever versions of
| Desktop Windows are the most recent 3.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Real damage is called Electron.
| WillAdams wrote:
| To see that, look at the apps which almost were:
|
| - Pages.app by Pages --- amazing DTP tool which was
| bought by Anderson Financial Services, but then killed
| off when Rhapsody went away
|
| - Macromedia Freehand --- unfortunately, they continued
| with their in-house toolkit to make the Mac/Windows
| versions, since it would have been too much work to
| revive the old Altsys Virtuoso code
|
| - Quantrix Financial Modeller --- at least this still
| survived, but be sure to take a seat before looking up
| the cost per seat
|
| - FrameMaker --- the NeXT version was the nicest one I
| ever used, and with Display PostScript, was far nicer to
| work with
|
| - WordPerfect --- the NeXT version was far nicer than the
| Windows, would have been nice to see that come back
|
| - Stone Create (and the other Stone apps) --- nice
| assortment of various tools which would have been quite
| nice to have
|
| Lots of other way cool NeXT apps which should have done
| better in the market.
| efitz wrote:
| WordPerfect's GUI releases were yuck. Late to the scene and
| lost the essence of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. I'm not
| surprised that Word won that battle.
| ghaff wrote:
| WordPerfect and WordStar were always pretty yuck IMO once
| newer generation products came along. I was pretty much a
| fan of Microsoft word even in the DOS days. (Even
| Multimate which was basically a DOS clone of a Wang
| product.)
| efitz wrote:
| I loved WP5.1 for DOS because of one feature: "show
| codes" - it made it trivial to understand why the
| formatting looked the way it did, and to fix formatting
| problems. Other than that it was not outstanding software
| :-)
|
| I never used Word in the DOS days so I can't compare, but
| it was obvious that Word for Windows was written natively
| for Windows and it "felt" much more natural in the
| Windows of that time.
| ghaff wrote:
| Neither WordPerfect nor WordStar even connected for me.
| No disrespect for anyone for whom they did.
|
| Never really loved Word for Windows to be honest, though
| I used it a lot over the years. Though liked the DOS
| version.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The NeXTstep version was _very_ nice --- looked and felt
| like a native app, but still had "Reveal Codes" ---
| nicest version of WordPerfect I every used.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| But the example functionality is backspacing, which of course
| in no way requires a GUI. You could just as easily cite
| AtariWriter or Bank Street Writer, which came out before
| WordPerfect.
| blihp wrote:
| It was implied by the phrase 'transformed the ways everyone
| used computers'. True, to younger computer users MacWrite
| would be the most familiar of the three. However, in terms of
| total unit sales and percentage of users for their day,
| MacWrite was practically rounding error in the word processor
| market. It was WordStar and then WordPerfect that dominated
| (and therefore 'transformed...') until the early/mid-90's
| when MS Word took over.
| turnsout wrote:
| The point stands--we don't use the descendants of TUI word
| processors today. We essentially all use GUIs.
| ja27 wrote:
| WordPerfect for classic MacOS came out in 1988. It always
| felt like they bought someone else's product but apparently
| it was an in-house port.
| chongli wrote:
| MacWrite was a WYSIWYG word processor. You could change the
| fonts or other formatting and see the results updated on the
| screen.
|
| WordStar and WordPerfect were for DOS. They were not WYSIWYG.
| Sure they were powerful word processors for professionals, but
| they were not "like" MacWrite. MacWrite was a tool for regular
| people.
| shakna wrote:
| I absolutely would have described WordStar as a WYSIWYG
| editor. [0] You have no content markings, you do have pages
| in sight, and flowing text. You set the text to bold, and the
| font displayed is bold, etc.
|
| I don't think I'm alone in that judgement, as Wiki says:
|
| "WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer
| mail merge and textual WYSIWYG." [1]
|
| So... You might need to expand why you think that this is not
| true.
|
| [0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/03/words...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar
| quesera wrote:
| > _textual WYSIWYG_
|
| You said it.
|
| WordStar did not have fonts. MacWrite did.
|
| WYSIWYG without fonts is ... I don't know ... "textual
| WYSIWYG"? Whatever that is.
| shakna wrote:
| Textual means that it ran in text mode. That doesn't mean
| that it did not have fonts. It... Did. There's two fonts
| in the screenshot I linked beforehand.
| quesera wrote:
| I'd call those two "styles" of the same font family.
|
| The Macintosh system software shipped with about 12
| distinctly-different fonts. Most of which also had
| italic, bold, outline, etc styles.
|
| These fonts could also be rendered at different point
| sizes.
| shakna wrote:
| The main body text is Courier, and the titlebar text is
| generally called "CCSID 437" or the OEM font. Both
| standard IBM fonts from the era. They're not the same
| fontface.
|
| WordStar had full support for the PC-8 Graphic set. It is
| pre-TrueType Fonts, but so was the software. By the time
| WordStar landed on Windows, it had support for everything
| you'd expect from anyone else.
| quesera wrote:
| Honestly, I do not see the different fonts in the image.
| I see the status line showing the Courier font name. If
| it is different from the body text, I cannot distinguish
| it.
|
| Obviously WordStar was limited by what DOS could render,
| so the variety of fonts available had to work in a
| drastically constrained bitmap. I could also not find
| samples of the PC-8 graphic set.
|
| But for comparison, here are the original 1984 Macintosh
| system fonts:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Origi
| nal...
| shakna wrote:
| Okay... Let's try a different approach here.
| "DISPFONT.EXE" and "DISPFONT.OVR" are key files you'll
| find in WordStar's archive [0].
|
| I don't have a CP/M emulator on hand to fire up the
| original to show you an example, as WordStar pre-existed
| DOS.
|
| But this is a quote from v3, the first DOS version, from
| the manual:
|
| ---
|
| Screen Fonts for Preview
|
| At the Add or Remove a Feature screen, you can install
| three different types of screen fonts for Preview. The
| screen font options are Code page 437, Code page 850, and
| PostScript fonts. If you want to install PostScript
| fonts, install both PostScript and code page 850 fonts.
| (Be sure to set the code page to 850 in DOS. See your DOS
| manual for instructions.)
|
| [0] https://sfwriter.com/ws7.htm
| shakna wrote:
| Not the original version, because DosBox is simpler than
| CP/M, but here you go: [0]
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/CZxblEd
| quesera wrote:
| Thanks for this. I've never used WordStar, and my
| knowledge of early word processing software is certainly
| incomplete, but this is the first time I've seen such a
| screenshot that predates 1984.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Hi, actual WordStar-in-practice, wrote several hundred
| thousand words on it in both CP/M and DOS, user here
| (related: I am old). I think you're confusing WordStar's
| _preview_ display with its _editing_ display here. Later
| versions of WordStar for DOS (I think it started with
| version 5.0, but I wouldn 't swear to it) could generate
| a surprisingly good for the day print preview using
| PostScript fonts, as described above in the text you're
| quoting. But that was a specific read-only mode. When
| _editing_ , WordStar ran in DOS text modes and was
| limited to what DOS text modes were able to display:
| monospaced fonts, usually with the ability to display
| boldface text with "bright" text and sometimes -- not
| always -- with the ability to display underlined text
| with actual underlines. (This depended on your video
| hardware; IIRC, XyWrite seemed to be able to do that
| pretty reliably in DOS, but WordStar didn't). But you
| couldn't display proportional type in editing, or
| italics, or different typefaces.
|
| Now, you could argue that WordStar _anticipated_ WYSIWYG
| editors, because it did its best to faithfully reproduce
| margins, indents, line spacing, justification, etc. in
| its text editing mode -- but that attempt came from the
| era when _printers_ could only output monospaced type,
| usually just one typeface, no italics, etc. Once printers
| got better, WordStar really wasn 't WYSIWYG anymore, just
| "best effort within limitations". IIRC, the only major
| DOS-based word processor to actually attempt a WYSIWYG
| _editing_ display was WordPerfect 6.2 in the late 1990s.
| valleyer wrote:
| Without commenting on the rest: Courier, which is a serif
| font, does not appear in your screenshot.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/IBMCo
| uri...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Most printers at the time didn't have fonts either.
| quesera wrote:
| Consumer printers were dot matrix at the time, and they
| were not adequately high density to print fonts. That's
| correct.
|
| But the AppleWriter printer _was_ high DPI and could
| render fonts.
|
| And then of course the Apple LaserWriter came a few years
| later.
| dcrazy wrote:
| This is why the Apple LaserWriter was such a big deal. It
| came out 1 year after the Macintosh, merging Canon's
| laser printer engine, Adobe's PostScript, and the Mac's
| bitmapped display with proportional fonts.
| chongli wrote:
| WYSIWYG means "What You See Is What You Get." If you want
| the title to be Courier 24 point Bold then that's what you
| see on the screen. If you are writing in a proportional
| font with proper kerning then that's what you see on the
| screen. You don't see a fixed width substitute.
|
| This is what enables you to do proper typesetting and page
| layout for a document, and using a PostScript printer such
| as the Apple LaserWriter you could do desktop publishing
| [1]. Desktop publishing was invented by Xerox PARC but the
| revolution began when Apple made it available to the masses
| with the Macintosh and LaserWriter.
|
| Apple didn't invent any of these technologies but they were
| the first to put them all together into a package for the
| mass market and made them incredibly easy to use. Suddenly,
| grandma had a tool she could use to write and typeset the
| weekly church newsletter from home, and even print it on
| her LaserWriter at home. If she wanted to do a newsletter
| like that just two years prior she would have had to hire
| the services of a print shop to do both typesetting and
| layout as well as printing.
|
| She could still have used WordStar or WordPerfect and
| printed with a dot matrix printer, but that doesn't get you
| large, proportional fonts or layout.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_publishing
| tokinonagare wrote:
| > Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what
| they're good at.
|
| Exactly. And often the first version is often kind of meh
| (iPhone, Watch, Vision Pro) but they keep iterating and later
| versions become really good. Sometimes it's a hit directly
| (M1), it's still very iterative on whatever came before.
| tim333 wrote:
| And of course the M1 Air is basically another in the line of
| Macbook Airs but with a better processor.
| EGreg wrote:
| Didn't you know? Apple's Safari invented the omnibox. I heard
| Steve present it on stage as if that was the case. Also,
| Apple's processors were always the best, until they switched to
| Intel, then those were the best.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5HhT_cMhvo
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| >Also, Apple's processors were always the best, until they
| switched to Intel, then those were the best.
|
| That can be true...
| wat10000 wrote:
| PowerPC was pretty great for a while. Then Motorola and IBM
| started dropped the ball (or rather, stopped putting
| resources into what was not a particularly big customer)
| and Apple switched away.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Wasn't Apple _part of_ the PowerPC alliance?
| wat10000 wrote:
| They were, but Motorola and IBM designed and manufactured
| the CPUs. Apple presumably had some input, and they
| designed hardware platforms for the alliance, and of
| course software.
| leptons wrote:
| > I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with
| pretending Apple invents these things.
|
| This is the famous "reality distortion field" you may have
| heard of. It's basically a form of tribalism taken to an absurd
| level.
| bennythomsson wrote:
| It goes on.
|
| > the new standard that companies like Samsung and Google would
| clone the same way they cloned the hardware and software design
| of the iPhone.
|
| That's misrepresenting history in ways it's not even funny.
|
| Stopped reading at that point. The article took too long to
| even sketch it's main point anyway.
| Clubber wrote:
| IIRC, all the Google/Samsung phones had keyboards because
| they copied the Blackberry. Once the iPhone was released with
| the screen keyboard, all the Google phones changed to that.
|
| They didn't clone everything, but they cloned a lot in the
| early days. Rounded corners was another one. Now it seems
| like Apple is cloning Google/Samsung more.
| tmzt wrote:
| The first versions of Android that the public saw were very
| similar to the OS on a BlackBerry or Danger HipTop. The G1
| even used the same mechanism to deploy the keyboard.
|
| As far as the rounded corners, I remember seeing a reduced
| Google Reader view of Engadget later that year that had
| every device looking the same from the top third up. I
| really wish I had a screenshot.
|
| There is now a lot of cross inspriation and features that
| are copied in both directions, as well as both implementing
| the same thing at around the same time (Intelligence and
| Gemini).
|
| On the Android side, Pixel gets most new features first
| while Samsung offers their own take. Samsung is generally
| ahead of their direct competitors in terms of hardware.
| scosman wrote:
| Nit: the Danger mechanism was waaaaay cooler than the
| G1's. It did this amazing spin I've always missed. The G1
| was a little 2-hinge flip-up that was satisfying, but
| didn't do the amazing 180 that the sidekick did.
| scosman wrote:
| I get not loving the "Apple invented everything" mantra some
| people have, but the iPhone genuinely redefined the smart
| phone category. The industry has 100% coalesced on the model
| invented by Apple. Nothing like this existed as a full
| package before the iPhone and now are almost universal:
|
| - No physical keyboard + touch keyboard
|
| - Modern OS kernel (not embedded specific kernel)
|
| - Desktop browser engine
|
| - Capacitive touchscreen + finger instead of stylus - one or
| two phones had capTouch before, but they were far from
| standard, and they still had physical keyboards for typing
|
| - Vertical by default orientation
|
| - Short 1 day battery life in favour of more power/features
| (weird to list, but was a bold move everyone mocked then
| followed)
|
| They totally took out the existing market (Blackberry,
| Windows Mobile, Symbian, a variety of OEM OSs). Android
| succeeded but came after, still had keyboards on its
| flagships the years after iPhone came out (G1, Droid), and
| took these design cues from iPhone.
|
| The Mac GUI with mouse+keyboard+windows was also huge.
| Admittedly not first to invent it (Xerox PARC), but first to
| ship it as a package is still hugely impressive. Few people
| commercialize a new product before it existed in some lab.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _- No physical keyboard + touch keyboard_ (Windows Mobile
| had this first)
|
| _- Modern OS kernel (not embedded specific kernel)_
| (Blackberry had this first)
|
| _- Desktop browser engine_ (iOS didn 't have a "desktop"
| browser engine, it had a stripped-down mobile browser
| engine. But on this note, Windows Mobile did support
| desktop browser engines.)
|
| _- Capacitive touchscreen + finger instead of stylus - one
| or two phones had capTouch before, but they were far from
| standard, and they still had physical keyboards for typing_
| (LG Prada had the first capacitive touchscreen)
|
| _- Vertical by default orientation_ (Almost every
| smartphone at this point was vertical by default, with
| horizontal-by default being the exception.)
|
| _- Short 1 day battery life in favour of more power
| /features (weird to list, but was a bold move everyone
| mocked then followed)_ (Windows Mobile had this years
| before Apple)
|
| Literally everything that Apple is credited for with the
| iPhone...others had it first. The true genius of the iPhone
| was the marketing...Apple still gets credit today for
| "inventing" features that Android phones have had for years
| (zoom cameras? AI? notes? custom emojies? embedded
| fingerprint readers? integrated payment?)
|
| Apple has always been the follower: it copies what others
| have done, and makes minor improvements, then markets the
| hell out of those minor improvements to make them seem
| revolutionary.
| scosman wrote:
| None of the phones listed looks remotely like a modern
| smartphone. The iPhone does.
|
| I worked on WinMo at MSFT at that time. You are comparing
| devices with physical keyboard and a crappy virtual
| keyboard that required a stylus to modern smartphones?
|
| I mentioned the LG Prada - yes had cap touch, but not
| touch typing (physical slide out keyboard).
|
| Almost every WM, BB and Symbian SKU had horizon screens
| (over keyboards).
|
| Blackberry integrated QNX post iPhone.
|
| First iPhone had WebKit.
|
| All of these facts seem to be incorrect.
|
| Again: the combination of these was a huge shift, and
| every one followed it.
| n144q wrote:
| I started to have doubts about the article as soon as seeing
| the Samsung Galaxy vs iPhone comparison. The author
| exaggerates things and rewrites history too much.
| quesera wrote:
| Apple has _always_ done both -- invented and refined.
|
| Claiming that Apple does not invent is as gobsmackingly wrong
| as claiming that Apple invented everything.
| randunel wrote:
| What did apple invent? Is it really more than a couple of
| things? (Applying existing ideas to new systems isn't
| inventing)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Name a few things you consider to be inventions first to
| get the ball rolling.
|
| For example, you could claim that nothing new in CMOS
| manufacturing exists because it's all just the existing
| idea of a transistor. Or the transistor is just a quantum
| mechanic version of the vacuum tube. Or the vacuum tube
| just an electric version of the Babbage machine. Repeat for
| Internet vs packet switching.
|
| Basically come up with a definition that doesn't require a
| "I know it when I see it step" and I'll easily fit many
| things Apple did in there unless it's such a restrictive
| definition that no one invents anything.
|
| "If I have seen futher, it is by standing on the shoulders
| of giants"
| quesera wrote:
| On some level, all invention is a novel arrangement of
| existing components. All the way down to the physics, if
| you're willing. So, does anyone "invent" anything?
|
| But if we accept "patentable" as a proxy for "invented",
| then obviously Apple invents a lot.
| snowfarthing wrote:
| But those of us who think the entire idea of
| "patentability" is a joke in and of itself.
|
| All these fuzzy lines behind this "who invented what" is
| a major reason I consider patents to be evil -- the
| entire system sets up artificial and harmful barriers
| keeping ideas from fertilizing each other and growing
| beyond our wildest imaginations.
|
| (And as someone who strongly dislikes all things Apple --
| but not quite as much as all things Windows -- I cannot
| help but observe that both Apple and Microsoft
| simultaneously deserve both more and less
| acknowledgement, all depending on how one looks at
| things, for their inventiveness).
| adamc wrote:
| Yes, but having used both in that time period... tools on the
| mac were graphical and easily explored (open a menu and see
| what was available). People made plastic keyboard templates for
| WordPerfect and WordStar just to remember the commands. On top
| of that, you could easily task switch on a Mac. There were some
| tools for doing that with DOS, but they were awful by
| comparison.
|
| I worked in a lab that used PCs while I owned a Mac Plus. There
| was no comparison.
| runjake wrote:
| MacWrite was released in 1984. 7 years before _comparable_
| graphical, WYSIWYG competitors.
|
| WordPerfect for Windows was released in 1991. Prior versions
| were MS-DOS and not graphical.
|
| WordStar for Windows was released in about 1991. Prior versions
| were MS-DOS and not graphical.
|
| What made MacWrite special, is that it was graphical, highly
| WYSIWYG (especially when paired with an Apple printer), had a
| lot of great fonts, and the software was intuitive.
|
| Of course Apple didn't invent any of it, but they made one of
| the best word processing products at the time.
| jpadkins wrote:
| How do you measure best? Based on usage, sales, or fraction
| of published text created - Wordperfect or Wordstar were way
| ahead of MacWrite.
|
| MacWrite was the best in a niche market of personal
| newsletters that wanted graphical elements. More professional
| desktop publishers used Aldus PageMaker. And big publishing
| houses didn't use PCs or software, they used offset
| lithography presses.
| philistine wrote:
| It's like you decided to completely disregard that the
| successor of MacWrite ended up completely eating all the
| use cases for making documents outside of the large-scale
| professional uses.
|
| MacWrite begat Microsoft Word 3.01, which is when Word
| overtook MacWrite on Mac and became truly competitive with
| WordPerfect on DOS.
| jpadkins wrote:
| So your basis for saying "one of the best word processing
| products at the time." is that a different company made a
| different product inspired by it (and WordPerfect)? I
| don't think that is a persuasive argument.
|
| If you said MacWrite was an innovative word processor, I
| would not have replied. Most innovative is not always the
| best product at the time.
| runjake wrote:
| You're replying to a commenter here, not the OP.
|
| I am the actual OP. If you're concerned by my use of the
| word "best", please replace that word with "innovative
| for consumers". If you have an issue with this new
| wording, then we'll have to agree to disagree.
|
| While MacWrite may or may not have been "niche" as you
| said, it most definitely heavily influenced another
| "niche" word processor available today: Microsoft Word.
| Word for Mac (1985) was the _first_ graphical version of
| Word and it was heavily inspired by MacWrite.
| deng wrote:
| > MacWrite was released in 1984. 7 years before comparable
| graphical, WYSIWYG competitors.
|
| You realize there were other systems besides PC and Mac?
|
| Signum for the Atari ST came out in 1986. It was a fully
| fledged WYSIWYG text processor with special printer drivers
| for regular dot matrix printers. Even with a 9-pin you could
| create great looking output, if you had the patience (a
| single page took minutes to print). Signum was way ahead of
| MacWrite and was very popular with people needing special
| fonts in science/math and the humanities (you could quite
| easily design your own fonts). Also, it allowed for Right-to-
| left text, and of course the Atari ST was way cheaper than
| the Mac.
| runjake wrote:
| *> You realize there were other systems besides PC and
| Mac?*
|
| Yep, I do. I was an Atari ST, then Amiga user until long
| past when those platforms were considered alive. :-)
|
| But in terms of influence, MacWrite had more (eg. Microsoft
| Word for Mac).
|
| For general consumer use, I found MacWrite much better than
| Signum. But I can see your point in terms of academics and
| non-English speakers.
|
| BTW, if anyone's curious, I _believe_ the actual first
| WYSIWYG word processor was probably Bravo[1]. And Bravo
| somewhat influenced MacWrite.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor)
| RichardCA wrote:
| With all due respect, I think you are falling into the
| nostalgia trap. MacWrite was never a true WYSIWYG editor
| because of the way it relied on Quickdraw for the on-screen
| rendering but the big deal at the time was the Laserwriter
| being the first Postscript printer (Adobe still had a
| proprietary lock on Postscript which lasted until around the
| end of the 80's). In 1985 Steve Jobs left Apple and started
| NeXT. One of their first products was the WriteNow word
| processor which was ported back to the Mac platform by a
| company called T/Maker (the Silicon Valley rumor mill of the
| time was that Steve Jobs and Heidi Roizen were an item for a
| while). WriteNow was the first one to offer a polished
| experience with proper font rendering and kerning that didn't
| look rasterized. God forbid you tried to print from MacWrite
| with font smoothing turned on, a one-page print job could
| take several minutes to render because of how the Laserwriter
| had to execute all that Postscript code in real-time.
| robenkleene wrote:
| > With all due respect, I think you are falling into the
| nostalgia trap. MacWrite was never a true WYSIWYG editor
| because of the way it relied on Quickdraw for the on-screen
| rendering
|
| I read your whole comment, but I still don't understand
| what this means. E.g., why does relying on Quickdraw for
| on-screen rendering not make it a "true WYSIWYG editor"?
| Aloisius wrote:
| It was WYSIWYG when used with an ImageWriter printer.
| Aloisius wrote:
| 7 years?
|
| Microsoft Word for Mac was released in 1985. It was
| comparable to MacWrite.
|
| Also Microsoft Write for Windows was released in 1985, but it
| was clunkier.
| runjake wrote:
| Yep, I goofed there. Important to note that Word for Mac
| was heavily inspired by MacWrite.
|
| Thanks for the correction.
| j45 wrote:
| Apple certainly doesn't invent everything.
|
| Calling what they do as mere refinement may be equally
| understating it in some cases.
|
| They get it right. For the masses. They create beginners.
|
| Anyone can start with an Apple, because it's what it's designed
| to do.
|
| I have my own biases that extreme usability started earlier
| with other movements like WebOS and Palm contributing to it as
| well.
|
| Still, if we look for watershed moments where huge numbers of
| people in the mainstream adopt technology, whether it's the
| iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, watch, laptops, they don't need to be
| the first, just the best for the most number of people.
|
| Being able to integrate hardware and software closely creates a
| different and reliable result for the many, as much as I might
| not like having complete agency.
|
| If anything, Apple helps invent beginners in the mainstream.
| philistine wrote:
| You're basically explaining why the Macintosh stayed niche when
| it came out. People saw the barebones WYSIWYG of WordPerfect
| 4.0 on PC in 1984 compared to the true WYSIWYG of MacWrite and
| they said: _It 's what we already have, why would I need a
| Mac?_
| jjulius wrote:
| >I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending
| Apple invents these things.
|
| This is entirely tangential and probably a pointless gripe in
| this thread, but...
|
| For some reason, it's always really annoyed me that Apple took
| MP3 players, called them an 'iPod' and suddenly everyone ate
| them up like they were the second coming of christ and we'd
| never had them ever before.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| As someone who was There At The Time, the UX of the iPod was
| really, _really_ good. There were few, if any, other
| companies that could match it. The vast majority of competing
| music players were what DankPods calls "nuggets" - i.e.
| barely functional e-waste that were either saddled down with
| horrible software (e.g. anything Sony made), had horrible
| controls, were bulky and painful to use, or some combination
| of those above dealbreakers. A lot of companies treated
| developing an MP3 player like any other kind of music player,
| and ignored the fact that these things could hold 100x as
| much music as anything else on the market, which necessitated
| a completely new UX.
|
| To be clear, there _were_ good non-Apple MP3 players, but
| they were either marketed poorly, or late arrivals (e.g. the
| Toshiba player that got rebadged into the Zune). By the time
| those existed (and tech companies started hiring UI /UX
| people), Apple was doing a complete reset of another product
| category: smartphones.
|
| I _suspect_ history would have been different had, say,
| MiniDisc hadn 't failed horribly in America[0]. Pre-iPod,
| portable music in the US was either compact cassettes with
| all the downsides of tape, or CD players that could just
| _barely_ fit in your pocket. The iPod was such a step up from
| either that it all but became a genericized trademark. Had we
| had a competing technology from not the 1980s, we probably
| wouldn 't have thought the iPod was so great. Or at least,
| people I knew who had MiniDisc looked at the iPod like I look
| at all the e-waste that was trying to compete with the iPod.
|
| [0] Yes, I know that Sony was basically trying to avoid a
| repeat of DAT getting banned
| MisterTea wrote:
| > the UX of the iPod was really, really good.
|
| The iPod is the only Apple product I have ever purchased. I
| could easily operate the iPod without having to looking at
| it constantly which was great for bike rides or car rides.
| No fiddling and taking eyes off road.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| The ipod was a very welcome step in the portable music
| player tech evolution at the time, but it also coincided
| with a bunch of people that were suddenly Very Into Music
| for a few years. I don't fault anyone for thinking the
| previous portables were just not good enough to every day
| carry, but they also never seemed to notice that the OG
| white earbuds were more painful and sounded much worse than
| a decent brand of $15 black earbuds. Maybe never finding
| good earbuds explains why they gave up on their Passion for
| portable music within a few years.
| alain94040 wrote:
| Have you used the previous generation of MP3 players? I had
| one with a tiny LCD screen that would only fit half the song
| title (no space for the artist). To go to then next song, you
| had to press the "next" button (which makes sense). Except
| that action would take at least 0.5s. You press next, you
| wait, you see the display refresh with the next song's
| partial song name. Not the song I want, press next again.
| Very quickly, to skip 10 songs takes 10 seconds of effort. It
| was a painful device to use.
|
| The iPod cam with a large screen and a click wheel. I could
| _find_ songs on it. That was a revolution for me.
|
| MP3 was the enabling technology (if you can't fit many songs
| on a small device, then this is moot).
| reginald78 wrote:
| > MP3 was the enabling technology (if you can't fit many
| songs on a small device, then this is moot).
|
| As others have eluded to, MP3 only didn't seem to be
| enough. I remember passing on early mp3 players because
| they only had 32-64mb of storage, not even really enough to
| store a single album. Snatching up those tiny 1.8" hard
| drives right away and integrating them is probably as
| important as the UI improvements because it solved that
| problem.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| In addition to the already very thorough and well-considered
| comment replying to this, I just wanted to say that the iPod
| was one of the first MP3 players that was widely available
| with a full-blown hard-drive. The vast majority of MP3
| players at the time had like 32-64MB of flash memory, if that
| (and still cost hundreds of dollars). The iPod had 5GB and
| 10GB models. Suddenly you could bring your entire CD
| collection with you anywhere. Yeah, there were a couple of
| competing models with similarly-sized hard drives, but the
| other comment covers why people spending >$400 on a fancy new
| gadget preferred the iPod at the time for its excellent
| UI/UX.
| 1-more wrote:
| I only remember the ones about the size of a discman with
| 2.5" laptop hard drives. The iPod was, I think, the first
| one with a 1.8" HDD. When the Macbook Air first came out it
| used the same 1.8" HDD
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| In 2006 I got myself one of these:
| https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_x830-review-123.php
|
| That 1G of flash storage at the time was _huge_ for a
| phone. This was before everybody had an iPod Touch or
| iPhone, of course. iPhones came out the next year but in
| my area hardly anyone had AT &T, so because of the
| exclusivity the iPod Touch became popular way before the
| iPhone in my area.
| vel0city wrote:
| My mp3 player around 2001 had 700MB of removeable storage.
| Buying additional storage was pretty cheap too and there
| were standardized cases to store a lot of that format.
| giantrobot wrote:
| In addition to the points made by the sibling comment, the
| iPod was a quality product well executed, early competing MP3
| players were not great.
|
| Flash based players were smaller but limited in size and
| expansion media was expensive. Hard drive players were
| hobbled with USB 1.1 connections and an obsession with drag
| and drop for management.
|
| The iPod by default just synched with your iTunes library.
| The FireWire (and eventually USB 2.0) did so quickly. The
| navigation was as good as the metadata which iTunes made easy
| to edit. The UX on the device made scrolling through long
| lists of songs very easy.
|
| The iPod made using an MP3 easy and approachable for normal
| people. The Rio, Nomad, and a multitude of others did not.
| They included a bunch of checklist features but didn't focus
| on usability until Apple dominated the market.
| wnevets wrote:
| > I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with
| pretending Apple invents these things.
|
| Happens all the time with the iPhone. Apple gets celebrated as
| an innovator for adding features that have existed for years on
| Android.
| jmull wrote:
| WordPerfect and WordStar were text-based at the time MacWrite
| came out as a WYSIWYG word processor.
|
| Not to say MacWrite wasn't based on prior work (it was, though
| not actual products that I know of), but it isn't really
| comparable to prior text-based word processors.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself
| is predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this
| obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.
|
| Um, hello, Wang OIS? WordStar and WordPerfect didn't invent
| anything. They were copies of terminal-based word processors.
|
| But MacWrite was different in two important ways. First, like
| Bravo and Gypsy before it, it was WYSIWYG, a million times
| better than WordStar/WordPerfect. And it worked with the
| LaserWriter. But more importantly: it was _free_. This made
| MacWrite _revolutionary_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| Siri had so many years to iterate and get refined that by now
| I'd assume it would have been as omnipresent assistant as in
| "Her" movie (without negative impact of course) but see where
| we are today: I am still using it for only weather and setting
| alarms and even in that it sometimes works and sometimes does
| not.
| buryat wrote:
| Inventions are pretty cheap without the refinement of the
| product that directly contributes to the customers' demand
| additionally backed by robust supply chains and delivery of
| cutting edge tech like the M-line up of chips, and the
| tremendous camera quality, battery life, reliability of the
| operating system, specially curated app store, security and
| privacy, etc. Inventions are not what people want to pay for,
| people want to pay for additional value added in all sorts of
| form. Apple creates products for humans and people pay back by
| seeing the offering as a higher valued product.
| robenkleene wrote:
| I think what Apple excels at is providing a set of software
| development tools, a platform, and an audience, for third-party
| developers to then use to build innovative products, the best
| of which either become platforms of their own if they're lucky
| (e.g., Adobe suite), or are copied by Apple and made part of
| their operating systems
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)).
|
| In addition to Watson
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), there's also
| Cover Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow),
| Shortcuts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortcuts_(Apple)),
| Konfabulator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Widgets),
| Growl (https://growl.github.io/growl/), and of course my
| favorite LaunchBar
| (https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html, LaunchBar
| would be my pick as the most innovative app of the last 25
| years), for apps that were incorporated into macOS.
|
| While Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Lightroom,
| Premiere, and PowerPoint are all examples of software developed
| and released first for the Mac that then went on to become
| software behemoths in their own right (too big to Sherlock).
| (Well Sketch turned out differently, because Figma happened,
| but it's still a great example of third-party innovation
| facilitated by "a set of software development tools, a
| platform, and an audience".)
|
| The point here being I think of Apple as more providing a
| platform for innovation rather than innovating themselves (but
| I'm aware that's probably a minority opinion).
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Apple fans do this to justify their decision to buy Apple
| products to their circles and most of all, to themselves. Or it
| is just delusion from not actually knowing better.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| This post makes the point that the foundations of Apple
| Intelligence are really well designed. I think anytime you make
| the right underlying technology choices, there is always hope for
| the product.
|
| It's also worth noting that Apple traditionally is not a first
| mover and looks for "inspiration" from smaller competitors. In
| this case, there is no comp to reference. There is no startup
| mobile OS innovating in integrated AI. That, and the supposedly
| rushed timetable, probably explains a lot.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| I wish the same. That being said, given how useless Apple
| Intelligence is, how it isn't deployed in the EU and how it's
| gatekept by newer hardware, it's still very easy to ignore it.
| It's even easier on Mac where new versions doesn't bring
| anything worth upgrading for a non Apple-only developper (still
| running Sonoma).
| dangus wrote:
| But the point is that the foundation gives it hope to be a
| class-leading product in the future.
|
| The lengths Apple went to build a secure and private system
| will make it stand out and help it hold up to regulatory
| scrutiny. Doing this now is better than doing it later.
|
| In, let's say, 3 years, the features are more legitimately
| useful, the gatekeeping on new hardware will be a non-issue.
| In 3 years the majority of Apple's users will have an iPhone
| 15 Pro/iPhone 16 or newer. They are probably already mostly
| on M1 or newer Macs.
|
| On the other hand, I totally agree that it's pretty useless
| as it stands right now. I also think that if their launch
| strategy is to have an amazing WWDC and then deliver 5-10% of
| the features in September, that's going to turn Apple into
| just another company that promises the moon and delivers
| gimmicks.
| oezi wrote:
| On the contrary, in three years we will be used to AI which
| requires much newer tech than available today. The current
| tech will be obsolete.
|
| We have seen that play out with all the previous AI chips
| (mostly Google).
|
| The software and its requirements are moving faster than
| devices can be shipped and accumulate significant
| marketshare.
|
| This is not to say thay Google and Apple haven't or won't
| be able to ship some minor models such as voice recognition
| or translation, but for frontier level AI the local chips
| just won't suffice.
| infecto wrote:
| I am hoping the foundation they built will lead to greater
| things. So far it definitely has fallen flat compared to their
| demos. All I wanted was a way to talk/text to siri in a natural
| way to get things done. It's better but far from perfect. I want
| to be able to easily create calendar events and interact with
| other native iOS APIs.
| furyofantares wrote:
| They could be doing a lot better but it's a bit of a cursed
| problem.
|
| Natural language as input doesn't give you any information
| about where the boundaries are or what's possible. Meanwhile
| natural language can express anything, most of which any
| current implementation won't be able to do.
|
| So the user gets a blank canvas and all the associated problems
| with learning what to do, except it's worse because many things
| they think up will fail.
|
| And the main tool we have to guide the user through this
| fraught path is LLM output. Oof.
|
| I am hopeful that Apple will demonstrate their expertise in
| using some traditional UI to help alleviate some of these
| problems.
| Someone wrote:
| > It's better but far from perfect.
|
| I'm not aware of any competition that's perfect.
|
| I guess you meant to say the competition is better. I think it
| is, but that doesn't mean their product isn't a huge
| improvement.
|
| A simple example is text search in Photos.app. It probably
| misses text in some photos, but it helps me find quite a few
| photos. Similarly, face recognition in Photos.app is far from
| perfect, but way better than not having that feature.
|
| > I want to be able to easily create calendar events and
| interact with other native iOS APIs
|
| It's not in Apple's DNA to release a product here that mostly
| works. Chances are they're working on something like that but
| don't find it good enough to release it yet.
|
| What surprises me, though, is that they released the "get an AI
| summary of this web page" feature. That definitely produces
| some results that are very bad.
| infecto wrote:
| Not talking about the competition. They failed to deliver
| what they had in demos. Clearly they were hoping to get it
| right in the last minute but seems far from the truth. All I
| wanted was a better Siri that played really well with native
| iOS apps. We dont have that yet and I am not sure if its
| purely a lack of power with on device models or if apple
| completely missed the mark in implementation.
| est31 wrote:
| I think part of this issue is that people expect a lot from
| Apple. They exposed the technology to many people who aren't
| early adopter types, but more "mainstream" types. With an
| entirely new product and brand, the tolerance for bugs is higher,
| but here the expectation is that of other Apple products.
|
| In the end, even if the features aren't perfect, they still raise
| the bar for competitors, so Apple is less in danger of being
| disrupted.
|
| Also, there is plenty of AI driven features that people do not
| talk about, but those "just work" so you don't see them as well.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > In the end, even if the features aren't perfect, they still
| raise the bar for competitors
|
| Honestly I'm not sure that they do. Everything I've seen with
| notification summaries for instance has given me the feelings
| of "wow I guess I'm really not missing much". LLMs as an answer
| engine has a big benefit that it feels fast and fluid even when
| its wrong (and many won't bother verifying) but with
| notification summaries most users in messaging contexts will
| eventually go back to the conversation and see the responses in
| full detail. Mistakes in that context are identifiable by
| mainstream users as having made the product worse.
| officeplant wrote:
| Sometimes I wish I could check an alternative universe where
| Apple refused to acknowledge AI slop and just doubled down on
| privacy and protections of the user. It almost feels like they
| could have just ignored the trend and let everyone else burn
| money until the hype dies down.
| chairhairair wrote:
| Several large companies could benefit from ignoring GenAI.
| Unfortunately, "benefit" would only mean "save money and
| produce better products for customers" instead of "make stock
| price go up".
|
| Instead, all of these companies are effectively forced to play
| hype ball.
| mjburgess wrote:
| To be honest, apple's approach to AI seems pretty close to this
| recommendation. I don't see much more than "here's a few nice
| features to some apps" -- vs., MS's "now all our machines must
| be AI capable so that we can scan 1000s of screeshots of your
| device"
| adamc wrote:
| As someone who has gone back and forth between Windows and
| Mac OS... if Apple would stop trying to force me to log-in to
| use features I don't need, they would have a more compelling
| case. Windows is indeed a horrific data mining operation, but
| Apple's own endless push to enmesh me in their ecosystem is
| about as irritating. And Windows has WSL, which has value to
| me at work.
|
| (And outside of work, Apple punted on games, which means I
| will always buy a Windows or Linux computer.)
| philistine wrote:
| I'm sorry to say, but logging in with a centralized account
| to use a device is a given in 2025. The benefits are far
| too good to disregard. Apple is no longer in the business
| of selling you devices, they're in the business of selling
| you add-ons to your Apple Account.
|
| And people always say that we risk our accounts being
| locked out, but when was the last time Apple was heard
| closing Apple Accounts?
| adamc wrote:
| No, this is garbage. I have plenty of real accounts I
| need to log into already, I don't need another one that
| is there just so the vendor can track me and try to
| enmesh me in their ecology.
| philistine wrote:
| > that is there just so the vendor can track me
|
| That's your point of view. I see access to so many
| services because I have a phone, laptop, watch and
| headphones. Apple doesn't use accounts only to track you,
| it uses accounts to do things like seamlessly switch your
| AirPods between devices.
| pishpash wrote:
| You do not need an internet account to coordinate
| devices.
| cma wrote:
| You couldn't just pair the device to all of them and then
| seamlessly switch? The only thing the account is adding
| is removing that initial step on first pairing, but even
| that could be done without an account if the new device C
| was paired to host A and came in proximity to host B that
| was in connected at some point with host A.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I'm sorry to say, but logging in with a centralized
| account to use a device is a given in 2025.
|
| It's really not. Of all the devices I own, the only one
| that really wants a centralized account is a Chromebook
| on its way out. Even Android is willing to work without a
| Google account.
| toast0 wrote:
| I mean, it's a given that it will be pushed, but I really
| don't see the benefit of logging into windows with a
| microsoft account for most people. I do it, because it
| makes it enables parental controls, but if I didn't want
| those, I don't see the point. The regular people in my
| life do it because Microsoft pushes it hard, and they
| don't care. The Windows app store works just as well
| (which is to say, not very well) if you log in to it in
| the app or through your windows account.
|
| It's basically required on a chrome OS device, although
| my MIL was using the guest account for months when she
| changed her password instead of referencing her password
| book and then later couldn't log in from her book. Chrome
| OS isn't awful with no persistent storage.
|
| Blessedly, I haven't had to use a mac in many years, but
| a local account didn't seem to impact anything of note
| --- you could login to the app store in the event you
| needed something from there, but there wasn't much that
| needed it other than Xcode; maybe that's changed.
|
| The iPhone with no app store is fairly useless, so yeah,
| you've got to login to that. An Android with no google
| play is a little bit less useless, depending on what apps
| you want to run, some of them distribute apks directly.
| vel0city wrote:
| I dunno, my family likes it. They largely standardized to
| storing all their stuff in their OneDrive. When they get
| a new device, they just log in with the same
| username/password as their other computer and a lot of
| their settings are already configured. All their stuff is
| just there in their OneDrive.
|
| For shared computers its really nice. I log in with my
| account, my wife logs in with hers, regardless of
| whatever computer we have handy. If I'm lounging on the
| couch I might grab her Surface, if she wants to sit down
| and work on a bigger project she can hop down at the
| bigger gaming PC, if we're on a trip and want to sync
| photos just grab the laptop. It's our same accounts, same
| username and passwords, same customization settings we
| like, regardless of whatever computer we use. The NAS at
| home has its permissions tied to our Microsoft accounts
| so our accounts log in seamlessly regardless of what
| computer we're on.
|
| Meanwhile all our devices are encrypted and have our
| backup keys to decrypt synced there.
|
| I probably would never want to have any personal Windows
| machine use a local account going forward.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| An Android without Google account is fine. I use Aurora
| store to download apps. Most of the features of Google
| Play Services (notification, cell location) still work
| when you're not logged in. I always use my android
| devices like this.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I 'm sorry to say, but logging in with a centralized
| account to use a device is a given in 2025._
|
| The plague was a given in 1666 too, doesn't necessarily
| means its a good thing.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| You're comparing eating unflavored oatmeal with eating
| bleach. One of these things is clearly in a league far and
| away worse than the other, and you're doing nobody any
| favors pretending otherwise.
| adamc wrote:
| No, I just don't agree. At work, that's a decision the
| corporate overlords make. At home, I will continue to
| prefer games + WSL over Apple's offering... despite
| having started in computing, back in the 1980s, on a Mac,
| and having owned a number of Macs over the years.
|
| Apple has consistently made choices that make having a
| Mac _less_ palatable to me -- killing all 32-bit binaries
| destroyed most of what _was_ available on Steam for the
| Mac. Hassling me to logon is another unforced error.
| Eventually I dumped my Macbook Air and bought a Windows
| laptop.
|
| Apple hardware is really good. I probably spend _more_ on
| Windows laptops because I replace them more often. But it
| 's a better experience. (And I can get a more adequate
| amount of memory.)
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Hassling me to logon is another unforced error.
|
| Sorry, but Macs require an online account only if you
| want to use optional online services offered by Apple,
| just as is the case with Microsoft and something like
| OneDrive or Office 365.
|
| You aren't required to use the optional services on
| either platform.
|
| The difference is that Microsoft wants to force you to
| use an online Microsoft account to log into your own
| local computer. Macs do not require that.
| dbtc wrote:
| Wouldn't you rather have a nice breakfast though?
| daedrdev wrote:
| I thought Microsoft has also been aggressive in pushing
| login using a Microsoft account.
| cma wrote:
| I think he's saying both are so aggressive that you end
| up almost having to for either of them. But MS's data
| collection is a lot worse.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Both make very sure you are aware of optional online
| services they offer.
|
| Only Microsoft has actively hidden the option to use your
| own computer without a Microsoft account.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Apple makes it way easier to use macOS without an Apple
| account than Microsoft does with Windows requiring a
| Microsoft account.
| coldtea wrote:
| Pretty low bar
| isodev wrote:
| Replacing emojis with stickers and no way to tell them apart
| didn't feel so nice.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > It almost feels like they could have just ignored the trend
|
| I wish they had but on the other hand, can you imagine how many
| think pieces there'd be about how Apple was stagnating and how
| they were "such, like, a 20th Century Company(tm)" and you'd
| probably get activist investors bleating about how Apple were
| leaving money on the table and and and etc.
| coldtea wrote:
| So? They had been getting 10 such pieces a day when Jobs run
| things too...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't doubt the pressure they are feeling at the upper levels
| at Apple is real -- but I agree, this initial rollout is also-
| ran and they underdelivered.
|
| I disagree that Apple should have sat on their hands. LLMs are
| already shipping apps that are beginning to integrate with the
| OS (looking at you, ChatGPT icon in my MacOS menu bar). How
| much user privacy should Apple allow me (well, their customers
| generally) to cede before they step in?
| officeplant wrote:
| Greatly prefer users installing these functions and apps
| themselves. Instead Apple me has double checking settings on
| every update so I can toggle off stuff that should have been
| opt-in. At least I can continue to refuse to opt into the
| MacOS AI implementation for now.
|
| Now they've gone and doubled[0] the recommended space AI
| needs on base model phones shipping with under spec'd storage
| in the first place. If it goes up any more you'll be looking
| at giving up nearly 10% of a base model 128gb phone's storage
| to AI.
|
| [0]https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/03/apple-intelligence-now-
| requir...
| philistine wrote:
| For the time being if you want an easy switch out of AI,
| you can just change the language of your device to
| English(CA).
| wang_li wrote:
| There needs to be a setting in the OS with a slider that
| allows you to set some value of 1-10 of your privacy
| preferences and all settings in all applications and future
| updates to a particular device are bound by. With each
| setting having well defined meanings, such as "1 - no
| interaction with internet based services at all. opt-out of
| everything", "2 - only security online services used. opt-
| out of everything", all the way up to "10 - this device is
| a loaner but i want all of my content to be available to me
| on any device anywhere and i want all of my content screen
| for 'safety'. opt-in to every thing."
| jacobsimon wrote:
| Honestly, I think Apple played their cards perfectly. They
| didn't try to be first to market with R&D, but they've launched
| just enough features to excite customers about new phones,
| while appeasing investors and subduing potential competitors
| like OpenAI who are rumored to be working on hardware devices,
| too.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm not sure, they've been revolving around "AI" stuff for
| ages; Siri, photo manipulation, identifying people and things
| in photos (but on your own device), all of which are widely
| popular. This feels like a logical next step for the path they
| were on for ages.
| kemayo wrote:
| Yeah, they've been a bit slow on LLMs, but "machine learning"
| has been one of their buzzwords for years now.
| philistine wrote:
| You hear other companies saying they're pivoting to making
| AI-ready CPUs soon and I'm like _dude, my iPhone SE 2 has
| machine learning processing!_
| layer8 wrote:
| It would have been okay if they continued to release features
| that just happened to use ML under the hood. But instead they
| are expressedly marketing "Apple Intelligence", with most of
| the features released under that umbrella so far not really
| working well (notification summaries, mail categories,
| Genmoji, ...).
| johan914 wrote:
| I do wish they continued on this track instead of apple
| intelligence. I should be enable to click generate audiobook
| in iBooks and have an audiobook made in any voice of my
| choosing. Open source solutions are far too slow on macOS,
| and subpar in other languages.
| liontwist wrote:
| Just last year everyone was saying they were "behind in
| technology" because they didn't "understand AI".
| philistine wrote:
| It's what people always say: when the 5S came out, pundits
| were saying that was the death of the iPhone because the
| Samsung Galaxy was much bigger. Next year, the 6 was bigger
| and somehow Apple survived a year with a smaller device.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
|
| It's that sentiment all over again. Specifically, a naive
| belief that the specs/tech of something are just as important
| than the execution. Maybe they are if you are very tech
| online, but for most people, tech/specs don't matter as much.
|
| Ultimately, this is another distortion of reality by the
| comment section.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The particularly strange thing about this is that Apple has
| been shipping neural network accelerators since the iPhone X.
| The one actual selling point of Microsoft's "Copilot PCs" is
| copying Apple and putting an NPU into Windows laptops so they
| can have all the AI features Apple had _already shipped_ way
| before they coined the term "Apple Intelligence".
|
| The LLM hype is so powerful that it got people to think the
| market leader in consumer-facing AI features was falling
| behind because you couldn't ask your iPhone to summarize
| notifications poorly.
| fragmede wrote:
| > Apple... doubled down on privacy and protections of the user
|
| You mean like is documented on
| https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/apple-intelligence-
| an...?
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| They keynote where they announced these features was pretty
| awkward. The typical conviction they delivered things with just
| wasn't there. You could almost feel that their hand was forced
| and they gave it a go, but they deeply resented not being the
| ones to make that choice.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Calling it a trend in a casual way is not going to make it go
| away.
| stocknoob wrote:
| At this point, anyone calling AI a trend sounds like someone
| calling electricity a trend.
|
| Believe it or not, there are paradigm shifts in technology
| every now and then. Not everything is 3D television.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| There are. But until the current crop of AI can actually
| _do something useful_ , it isn't one. Right now it's hype
| driven development in search of a compelling use case.
| kakapo1988 wrote:
| I hear this a lot, but don't understand it.
|
| In my own field (biomedical research), AI has already
| been a revolution. Everyone - and I mean everyone - is
| using AlphaFold, for example. It is a game changer, a
| true revolution.
|
| And everyday I use AI for mundane things, like
| summarization, transcribing, and language translation.
| All supremely useful. And there is a ton more. So I never
| understand the "hype" thing. It deserves to be hyped imo,
| as it is already become essential.
| bdangubic wrote:
| it boggles my mind this is still being written over and
| over here on HN. like an echochamber everyone like fears
| AI will replace them or some BS like that. I cannot even
| begin to tell you how much AI has been useful to me, to
| my entire team, to my wife, to my daughter and to most of
| my friends that are in various industries that I
| personally guided towards using it. on my end, roughly
| 50% of things that I used to have to do are now fully
| automated (some agents, some using my help along the
| way)...
|
| in every thread here on HN there will be X number of
| people posting exactly what you wrote and Y (where Y is
| much smaller than X) number of people posting "look, this
| shit is fucking amazing, I do amazing shit with it." if I
| was in group X I would stop and think long and hard what
| I need to do in order to get myself into group Y...
| CollinEMac wrote:
| I think AI tools will have a little less impact than
| electrification.
| coldtea wrote:
| Apple is so derivative and marketing-type driven now, that it
| even got into the VR shit, after it had already resulted in
| nothing for Facebook and others peddling it for years. Given
| that, there was zero chance that they'd skip AI slop.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I could pick on quite of few nits here but I'm going to focus on
| one in particular that I'm very familiar with as a photographer
| and mass media studies student.
|
| > I want the data coming off of the sensor to be the data that
| makes up the image. I want to avoid as much processing as
| possible and I want the photo to be a reflection of reality as it
| is, not reality as it should have been. Sure, sometimes I'll do
| some color correction or cropping in post, but that doesn't
| change the content of the image, only its presentation.
|
| First nit: the iPhone camera, and all digital cameras, are deeply
| influenced by computational photography techniques. What this
| means is that you essentially _never_ get the raw pixel values,
| although there are exceptions. The image you get is _already_
| significantly manipulated.
|
| Second nit: color correction, color in general, dynamic range,
| focus, depth of field, and more are all manipulations made by
| default, even long before digital cameras when film was king.
| There is no "correct" image version of what our eyes see, there
| is only pleasing to the photographer and the audience.
|
| An example: the negative for Ansel Adams' well known "Moonrise
| Over Hernandez , New Mexico" looks like, at first glance,
| something a professional would trash for lacking detail.
|
| Here's contact print vs the version most of use will probably
| recognize: https://images.squarespace-
| cdn.com/content/v1/5f5fe5ca8d6a35...
|
| Here are four different versions Adams printed over the course of
| 3 decades: https://images.squarespace-
| cdn.com/content/v1/5f5fe5ca8d6a35...
|
| I will mention, but won't even get into a topic that will surely
| bait HN commentors: Kodak designed and standardized its color
| film to represent Caucasian skin tones. It wasn't until chocolate
| and furniture makers complained that everything looked like the
| same gross mud in their expensively-produced product catalogs
| that Kodak took a look at rendering dark brown/red/yellow tones
| more pleasingly. Notice I said "more pleasingly", _not_
| "correctly".
| sbuk wrote:
| That quote intrigued me too. Surely RAW (which can be produced
| with an iPhone [and others...]) is what the author is looking
| for. Case of not RTFM'ing?
| xena wrote:
| I shoot in raw from my iPhone and Canon EOS R6 mark 2. For my
| iPhone I usually use Halide's Process Zero to remove all the
| computational photography garbage that I can from my images.
| LeicaLatte wrote:
| The biggest problem I have with Apple Intelligence is battery
| life. Since Apple has no software chops in building LLM models, I
| expect them to throw hardware solutions for the battery life
| problem.
|
| But the demands of intelligence and the general trajectory means
| no amount of hardware - storage, RAM or battery size would be
| enough to generate the high fidelity experiences or solutions
| that fans and customers have come to expect from the company.
| Hilift wrote:
| Power consumption is the defining characteristic of AI. The
| power consumption by the US had recently plateaued at 4,000
| billion kilowatt hours 2000 through 2023. That will likely
| accelerate by 20% or more with 2024/2025 data. It's probably
| one of the few guardrails. Electricity is about five times more
| expensive in the UK than the US. So the US is the natural home
| for the models and other regions are not.
| hb-robo wrote:
| I'm kind of skeptical the US grid can even handle this
| industry growth if it becomes the only realistic place these
| models are ran. A lot of the infrastructure is pretty wobbly.
| And forget the tax benefits and cheap land from Texas, their
| private grid is liable to bust at any time.
| jacobsimon wrote:
| Hah I've been having the same issue as the author with those
| scammy "package delay" texts getting summarized in my
| notifications.
|
| Didn't realize how widespread that type of spam was until now.
| Why hasn't someone implemented better spam detection at Apple
| like we have for email? It would be nice if they could classify
| texts as spam, promotions, etc and organize them the way Gmail
| does.
| xena wrote:
| My guess: that requires bigger models than can run on local
| hardware, and the appetite for sending emails out to a server
| for classification is negative zero.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| The spam filtering for texts in Google Messages is run on
| device and in my experience works pretty well
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| SpamBayes worked great as an Outlook plugin back in the day.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Hell, the iPhone is a fully capable cinema camera these days
|
| No, it's not. The sensor in an iPhone is AI/ML'd up the ass to
| hide all the noise because it has 1um sensor wells.
|
| A Panasonic video-oriented mirrorless micro 4/3rds (so not even
| anywhere near 35mm) like the GH5 is 3-4x that.
|
| A Sony Alpha 7 III? _six_ times the sensor well size.
|
| I don't care how many megabits of video bandwidth you throw at it
| or how fancy you think "raw" shooting is, or how fancy your
| sensor technology is; nobody these days has anything that is even
| close to 2x better than anyone else. The top sensor from all the
| major players are pushing the limits of physics, and have been
| for a long time.
|
| No amount of AI/ML shit will give you depth of field and bokeh
| that looks as nice as a big sensor and a fast lens with nice
| shutter leaf shape.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Well - while Apple has made rough starts in the past (Maps on iOS
| devices comes to mind) - they do have a solid track record.
|
| Having used "smart devices" since the Apple Newton 2.0 days,
| followed by Windows Mobile, a very brief Android excursion
| (Motorola Milestone - early enough Android that I was often
| frustrated trying to copy/paste text between apps), then another
| side-pivot into Windows Phone for awhile (mainly because the
| development was incredibly easy - and Microsoft gave me a free
| one), I have been in the iOS mobile phone ecosystem ever since
| the iPhone 6.
|
| And - the software has gotten increasingly better over time - I
| wouldn't have (for me) alot of content/subscribers on TikTok, if
| iMovie on my phone did not exist - attempting to edit videos
| using OpenShot was taking forever (While I have Davinci Resolve
| installed, it seems "daunting" for someone who doesn't want to be
| a professional videographer/editor).
|
| But then I tried iMovie "Magic Movie" on my phone and ... "it
| just works". Still not great for long-form YouTube style content,
| but for quick things, slice-of-life videos - it does the job
| rather well.
|
| ... I expect that Apple will improve these AI offerings
| dramatically over the next couple of years as people upgrade
| their devices.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Y'all know I'm a fast, if error prone, writer. I still enjoy
| using AI writing assistants to help me with the occasional phrase
| that's awkward, grammar detail ("it's lower g in 'god' if I am
| talking about Thor or Huxian right?") and choice of words ("I
| need a word for agriculture that starts with C...")
|
| LLMs make different mistakes than I do so I've thought about
| using one as a copy editor but I've had terrible experiences with
| copy editors: I've hired more than one when I was writing
| marketing copy who injected more errors than they fixed. (A
| friend of mine wrote an article for _The New York Times_ that got
| terribly mangled and barely made sense after the editors made it
| read like an _NYT_ article.)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| "Apple Intelligence failed"
|
| "Apple Intelligence" is less than a year old. Give it some time,
| for chripe's sakes.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| How about Vision Pro, did that fail?
| llm_nerd wrote:
| I'm going to admit that I just skimmed past 90% of this article.
| Being dismissive of AI is currently easy content, so there's too
| much noise in the space.
|
| Having said that, I actually paid attention to the image
| playground criticism. Image playground is _literally_ a
| playground. It is meant to make fun, low-effort images for
| friends and family, largely for social type interactions.
|
| "It uses a placid corporate artstyle and communicates nothing."
| It's a hot taco holding a beer. What is it SUPPOSED to
| communicate? Looks like a pretty great image to me. But of course
| this piece was leading into the anti- angle, so suddenly it's
| "horrifying". I guess I didn't get the special training to
| understand what was wrong with a clearly lighthearted, fun image.
|
| Similar asinine, overly-jaded complaints about the cartoonish,
| memoji style portrait generation. I think the image is actually
| pretty hilarious. Actually used image playground to make my
| social media image, and I care not what this guy thinks about it,
| or that it is "soulless" (as if a cartoonish representation is
| supposed to be soulful?)
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > as if a cartoonish representation is supposed to be soulful?
|
| That is basically the entire point of a cartoon, so yeah
| xena wrote:
| It's an AI generated taco smoking beer, I don't think it really
| needs defense. If I were to create such an illustration for my
| blog from scratch, I'd probably use that to communicate
| abusurdism in a light-hearted manner. I'd also probably make
| the hand-hooves consistent or at least plausibly cartoon-logic.
| At the very least it would mean:
|
| * The taco holding the beer glass to its lips and sipping on it
| to smoke it
|
| * Consistent eye shapes (likely the eyes would be closed to
| smoke the beer)
|
| * Better bokeh for the elements in the background (if that is
| the stylistic choice I'd go for)
|
| * Have the smoke coming out of the beer, not out of the taco
| "taco smoking beer"
|
| * Stylize the image such that it has individual flair, there's
| something about the Apple Intelligence artstyle that just has
| an unperson corporate vibe that I don't like.
|
| * The levity comes from "hey tacos don't have faces, hooves,
| arms, or legs and you can't smoke a beer", this would be used
| to communicate absurdism
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism, specifically by means
| of the taco smoking a beer whilst holding it in its hooves
|
| Maybe I've just been exposed to way more AI imagery than you,
| but guacamole does not look like that in the image. There's
| more fever dream images that I have locally, but I didn't want
| to saturate my article with them and haven't fully implemented
| "image gallery" support yet.
|
| And yes, a cartoon is normally meant to communicate something,
| quite literally the definition of soulful. Look at this for
| example:
| https://bsky.app/profile/yasomi.xeiaso.net/post/3ldgzieehjc2...
| When I made it, I was trying to communicate a lo-fi peaceful
| vibe accentuated through traditional artstyles. In a more
| finished piece I'd probably recreate this through watercolor in
| Procreate and apply a bokeh effect (emulating the depth of
| field for a subject with forward light being looked at from an
| 85mm portrait lens at about f/2.8).
|
| The point of art is to communicate something. If a work does
| not communicate something, it is categorically not art.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| "Apple Intelligence failed?" The far-reaching project that just
| had its initial release like 60 days ago? Why would anyone read
| beyond a first sentence like that?
| xena wrote:
| The purpose of a thesis statement is generally to establish a
| conclusion and then over the rest of the article, the goal is
| to build up evidence to support that conclusion.
| wat10000 wrote:
| There has to be some plausible path to actually doing so.
| Unless this person is writing in the future, there isn't.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The thing is for a product to fail means the failure is
| widely accepted, like how Stadia failed or how AirPower
| failed. The verb "to fail" is simply wrong in the case of a
| product when you really intend "to be bad". It can't be
| established yet if Apple Intelligence has failed.
| adamc wrote:
| Because it's true. When you ship a product and people look at
| it and go "meh", the product launch failed. There is literally
| no value in launching products people don't find value in.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Is there any actual empirical evidence that this is the case?
| fredsted wrote:
| It's what Apple does. The first version of a product often sucks
| somehow, but is generally usable. They're masters at iterating.
| srmatto wrote:
| I agree. Case in point is that the author jumped in at the
| iPhone 7 which is a lot closer to current era iPhones than the
| original iPhone and had been refined over that many
| generations. My first iPhone was the 5s, my first Apple Watch
| was the 6. I tend to hang back and wait a few generations
| before adopting a new product from Apple. I suspect Apple
| Intelligence will be a lot better 1-2 years from now.
| bitpush wrote:
| This is true, but sometimes the opposite is also true. Case in
| point, HomePod sucked so much they never became useful. It was
| discontinued
| sbuk wrote:
| Which one was discontinued?
|
| This one: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-homepod/homepod Or
| this one: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-homepod/homepod-mini
|
| I find them better than the multiple Echoes we have. Though
| they don't do as much, what HomePods do do is generally
| better than Amazon's attempts. Can't comment on Google's
| equivalent.
| lo_fye wrote:
| "Clean Up is best explained by this famous photo editing example
| . . . This tool allows you to capture a moment in time as you
| wish it happened, not as it actually happened."
|
| FALSE. Apple defines a photo as a record of something that
| actually happened. iPhones take photos. They doen't auto-swap a
| high-res moon in for the real one like Samsung phones do.
|
| Clean Up (like crop) is just an editing feature, manually applied
| after a photo already exists, and using it effectively changes
| the image from a photo into an "edited image", the same way using
| Photoshop does.
|
| Definitions of What a Photo Is:
|
| Apple - "Here's our view of what a photograph is. The way we like
| to think of it is that it's a personal celebration of something
| that really, actually happened. Whether that's a simple thing
| like a fancy cup of coffee that's got some cool design on it, all
| the way through to my kid's first steps, or my parents' last
| breath, It's something that really happened. It's something that
| is a marker in my life, and it's something that deserves to be
| celebrated." - John McCormack, VP of Camera Software Engineering
| @ Apple
|
| Samsung - "Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As
| soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce
| [what you're seeing], and it doesn't mean anything. There is no
| real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, 'I
| took that picture', but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the
| autofocus, the scene -- is it real? Or is it all filters? There
| is no real picture, full stop." - Patrick Chomet, Executive VP of
| Customer Experience @ Samsung
|
| Google - "It's about what you're remembering," he says. "When you
| define a memory as that there is a fallibility to it: You could
| have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt
| completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do
| is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it,
| that's authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but
| maybe isn't authentic to a particular millisecond." - Isaac
| Reynolds, Product Manager for Pixel Cameras @ Google
|
| Definitions via https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/23/24252231/lets-
| compare-app...
| arkensaw wrote:
| I hate that we have spent the last 20 or so advancing digital
| cameras to the point where a everyone has an amazing DSLR in
| their pocket and now we're at the point in history where we
| have to define what a photograph is, because everyone is trying
| to shoehorn some shitty AI image gen thing into our cameras for
| a quick profit
| selykg wrote:
| Frustrating to me, too, as someone who has recently gotten
| back into photography and it's difficult to know whether the
| photos I am using as inspiration are actually real or so
| highly edited that I'd never be able to achieve something
| similar.
|
| It's one thing to use masks to edit highlights/shadows/color
| balance for certain areas (skies, buildings, people, etc) but
| it's an entirely different thing to completely replace the
| sky, or remove objects because they aren't "appealing"
| arkensaw wrote:
| I don't mind so much if photoshop has these abilities but
| to put them inside the camera app is just such a backward
| step for creativity
| walterbell wrote:
| Camera app with RAW mode?
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > This tool allows you to capture a moment in time as you wish
| it happened, not as it actually happened.
|
| > the Clean Up tool gives users a way to remove distracting
| elements while staying true to the moment as they intended to
| capture it.
|
| idk, seems like the author described it the exact same way
| Apple does in their marketing copy.
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-intelligence-is...
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| I'd agree with your assessment of what Apple considers a
| photograph if I could turn off the post-processing that turns
| everything in the background into a smeary, blobby mess.
| xena wrote:
| https://halide.cam/ has Process Zero, which is about as close
| as you can get to straight off the sensor. Here's a photo I
| took with it:
| https://bsky.app/profile/xeiaso.net/post/3le3dd53zlk2c
|
| Easily the best camera app I've ever purchased. It makes me
| not want to pull out my mirrorless camera as much to get
| decent photos.
| dcrazy wrote:
| That's Portrait Mode. You only get that if you change from
| Photo mode to Portrait mode in the Camera app, or in later
| OSes by retroactively applying a Portrait effect in Edit
| mode. The addition of the latter feature also made it
| possible to retroactively _remove_ the Portrait Mode effect
| from a photo, as long as you have the actual source asset and
| not a rendered JPEG /HEIC with the effect baked in.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| If you mean the fake bokeh that blurs the background, turn
| off portrait mode.
|
| You can toggle "pro raw" in the default camera app. It
| captures a lot more information from the sensor. The files
| are a lot larger, it isn't throwing away information that
| isn't visible like in the shadows. This gives you more
| flexibility like changing color balance and exposure after
| the fact because of that extra data. But there is still some
| sharpening and post processing.
|
| You can use the camera app inside lightroom or "procamera" or
| other apps and take raw photos, where it records all of the
| sensor data without any post processing. Most people don't
| want this, you need to develop the images using software like
| lightroom to look good.
| hawkjo wrote:
| This comment and the article they came from are a perfect
| snapshot of this moment. The fact that major players at each
| company have made public statements about the philosophical
| definition of what a photo is. I mean, of course they have. Of
| course. The times be wild.
| adamc wrote:
| I was an early user of Macs; the first computer I owned was a Mac
| Plus. I didn't own a PC until the 1990s.
|
| Most of the intro to this is credulous hooey. Macs weren't
| "bicycles for the mind" in some magic way that was different from
| PCs. What the early ones had was 1) a better and much more
| standardized interface, and 2) task switching that worked.
|
| As for the AI tools, image generation might occasionally be
| useful for a D&D game, but otherwise nothing on offer at the
| moment has much value. And the value of image generation (for me)
| is pretty small.
| arkensaw wrote:
| I was giving this my attention until the author included a long
| quote from Steve Jobs _from the author 's own dream_
|
| Sorry, what?
|
| Apart from the level of dream-detail recalled being highly
| dubious, quoting your own hallucination of Steve Jobs to help
| with your argument about generative AI being useless (and missing
| the irony) is downright weird.
|
| Also Math notes is basically the same thing search engines have
| been able to do for over a decade now. Enter a sum, get an
| answer.
| xena wrote:
| No, I'm aware of the irony. I also wrote it down when I woke
| up, and you can see on stream that I copy it from a Discord
| message when I'm looking for it
| (https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8?t=14677).
|
| I figured you'd rather read something my brain made up (albeit
| unconsciously) than something a machine made up using linear
| algebra without understanding any of the words that it's using.
| arkensaw wrote:
| > I figured you'd rather read something my brain made up
| (albeit unconsciously) than something a machine made up using
| linear algebra without understanding any of the words that
| it's using.
|
| I mean, any article written by a human is something the brain
| made up. And I'm fine with that. But it reads like trying to
| give your opinion extra weight by associating it with Steve
| Jobs. It just came off weird.
|
| I'm with you on most points. I'm not an iphone user but I can
| certainly appreciate that Apple Intelligence does not match
| the hype. That seems to be a recurring theme with AI though.
| Release a thing, shout from the rooftops about how great it
| is, and then wait for people to start posting about glue in
| pizza recipes or urging people to kill themselves or
| generating fictional news alerts.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| the example he gave was multiline with variables. That's
| somewhat different than what search engines do.
|
| Also, it's almost exactly what Solver has done for years.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| It does seem a little sloppy, but the actually interesting part
| of Apple Intelligence isn't out yet so I'd withhold judgement,
| even on the initial release.
| gdubs wrote:
| So far it feels very unfinished, but having followed Apple for a
| long time I've seen many products launched and iterate over time.
| Maps, for instance, had a fairly disastrous early period but
| eventually became my preferred navigation app.
| adamc wrote:
| That used to be the standard apology for Microsoft products,
| where Mac OS app developers "sweated the pixels", i.e.,
| delivered products that were pretty much on target at launch.
| gdubs wrote:
| I mean, Apple Intelligence _looks_ good ha.
|
| Yea, I'm not saying it's great or that this is the preferred
| approach. Just highlighting that it's not the end of the
| world as many frame it every time something like this
| happens.
|
| Software sometimes takes a few iterations.
| robertoandred wrote:
| It is unfinished, several parts haven't shipped yet.
| gdubs wrote:
| Agreed - they've even said as much. But some of the marketing
| is conflicting there, and I've had friends IRL confused that
| their new phones don't contain all the Apple Intelligence
| features they've heard of.
| gigel82 wrote:
| > If you have any modicum of site reliability experience, this
| seems like an unsatisfiable set of constraints. It seems
| literally impossible, yet here they are claiming that they have
| done it.
|
| His first instinct was right. It seems impossible, because it is.
| Unless I can run the entirety of the "Private Cloud Compute" on
| my own hardware in my own firewalled network, I 100% believe that
| the pipeline is compromised; our data is siphoned off and sold
| off to advertisers, especially now that they know they can do it
| and get less than slap on the wrist:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578929
| hbn wrote:
| It's a bit funny his favourite "Apple Intelligence feature" is
| something that wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't even invoke the
| actual model at all under the hood.
|
| Parsing text for variables when it sees an equals sign and
| running basic calculations on them? I feel that could have been a
| novel feature 30 years ago.
| shadowfacts wrote:
| Soulver has indeed been doing this without large language
| models (so far as I know) for many years: https://soulver.app/
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I also struggled with this for similar reasons. His favorite AI
| feature is essentially writing valid js for calculations (his
| example is _literally_ valid js if you just drop the equals on
| the last line - you can paste it right into the console on his
| site and see the answer).
|
| The whole article feels like it suffers from a similar lack of
| coherence. Ex - I am hardly an apple fanboy (I strongly dislike
| the company) but the complaints here are basically
|
| The service sometimes has outages
|
| The image gen is not as customizable as he'd like
|
| He's morally opposed to cleanup in photos
|
| Notifications summaries are bad (and how dare I get my texts 5
| seconds slower).
|
| ---
|
| None of that is really related in any way to the security
| footprint of the tooling he discusses up front, and it's also
| hardly distinct from most other current AI offerings, and it's
| not really a consistent complaint about the tech.
|
| My opinion of Apple is that they do a crappy job with the vast
| majority of their apps...
|
| They build good hardware, and they abuse their small hardware
| footprint to make decent device experiences and a decent (but
| getting worse) OS - but their actual applications are generally
| mediocre at best (mediocre copies of a previously successful,
| usually better, app that they will put out of business through
| shady store practices if I'm being blunt).
|
| ---
|
| If anything, the failure here is that Apple marketed a thing
| that AI can't really do (yet, maybe at all), and most of the
| things AI _can_ do without being incredibly invasive aren 't
| actually all that useful to most folks. Very useful to a
| handful of power users in specific circumstances, but otherwise
| essentially novelty apps.
|
| So... it's not an implementation failure. It's a marketing
| failure. And this is hardly unique to Apple right now. The only
| difference is that usually Apple doesn't play their hand until
| this inflection point with new tech is over, so it's more
| obvious this time around just how bad the product fit is for
| general use.
| the-chitmonger wrote:
| Minor (in terms of how relevant this is to your comment, not
| in importance) correction: the author is a woman (actually
| prefers they/them according to their GitHub
| (https://github.com/Xe).
| the-chitmonger wrote:
| Minor (in terms of how relevant this is to your comment, not in
| importance) correction: the author is a woman (actually prefers
| they/them according to their GitHub (https://github.com/Xe).
| Multicomp wrote:
| I mean some of this Math Notes equation features have been in
| OneNote since what? 2007? Maybe all the way back in 2003?
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| I'm withholding judgement on Apple Intelligence until iOS 18.4 is
| shipped in May. That is when they plan to release a revamped Siri
| with better contextual and personalized responses. For instance,
| AI/Siri will be aware of what is currently on the screen when
| responding and also integrate personal data across apps.
|
| Ultimately Apple's strategy of a privacy focused AI will be a
| winner for a consumer device with access to sensitive personal
| information. It's a question of whether they can pull it off
| technically.
| asimpletune wrote:
| What's interesting is how I opened Safari's reader mode to digest
| this 5000+ word polemic, and then noticed for the first time a
| new option to summarize its contents. A few seconds later I had a
| clear idea of what the author's thesis is, without being under
| the false impression that it had conveyed its finer points.
| msangi wrote:
| I read the article. After reading this comment I tried to get
| it summarised. The result wasn't pretty. The summary claimed
| that there is skepticism over the security of Private Cloud
| computing, which the article actually praises.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Strange that we received two very different summaries. There
| was a part in the article where the author mentioned that
| Apple's private cloud compute claims were "literally
| impossible", but that was hardly the general takeaway of the
| article.
|
| Mine basically said Apple has fallen short of their vision
| because of the inherent limitations in relying on web
| services.
| tim333 wrote:
| >Then they casually dropped the holy grail of trusted compute...
|
| By which I think he means the AI stuff runs on your machine
| rather than the cloud. For me that's not a holy grail at all or
| even something I'm terribly interested in. I downloaded Apple AI
| on the macbook, found it quite meh and am now seeing if there is
| a way to remove it as it uses quite a lot of GB or memory. I can
| see for someone wanting to use LLMs on confidential corporate
| data that would be important but that's a specialist use case
| that I don't think Apple Intelligence is particually good for.
| hb-robo wrote:
| That corporate context is a good candidate, yes, but I think
| it's simpler than that. Assuming whatever Apple and Google cook
| up these next few years is essentially identical from a user
| standpoint, you can assume that Google's will be selling off
| every microscopic datum they collect from you, and know for a
| verifiable fact that Apple's will not (and cannot).
| eviks wrote:
| > They sell bicycles for the mind.
|
| Given the lack of a single good supporting example (what, did PCs
| have no word processors that reacted to backspace keys?) it seems
| like these are fantasy bicycles...
|
| And since no evidence is needed to believe, you can of course
| believe in Intelligence that can act better than your brain (what
| are "those pics from San Francisco", you've snapped a hundred
| there, which 5 would you like to post?)
|
| And yet the disillusionment comes a bit faster than expected, why
| not give Apple a few more decades to iron out some kinks on such
| a revolutionary fantasy path?
| djaouen wrote:
| This is why I switched to Guix lol
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Apple has a history of releasing early proofs of product concept
| or basic table stakes products built with a high enough quality
| they feel like they're "done," but then proceed to methodically
| iterate on them for years to decades until they fade into the
| background. It's hard to imagine the iPhone essentially started
| as a click wheel iPod - comparing the two is night and day in
| terms of capabilities, function, and form. They take weird side
| ways jaunts - but generally shift back into a path that is
| sensible. I was interested to see what they did with Apple
| intelligence, but assumed it would be establishing of a basic set
| of capabilities, the effective proposals for APIs, and the
| seeding of product discussions with their customers over a long
| time. People seem to think a few years into the current cycle of
| AI technology we are seeing the final fruits rather than seeing
| the infancy - for those who develop these sorts of tools it feels
| very much like iPhone gaming felt in 2009. At some point over the
| decade we will hit the nadir, then descend into total
| enshitification (and yes those who think AI has already reached
| peak enshitification you are totally wrong). Along the way though
| we will see a lot more truly stunning advances towards the final
| arrival at pervasive exploitation.
| xivusr wrote:
| Mac's being able to export PDF's for free was a huge deal back in
| the acrobat days :-P
|
| I'm hoping with what they've built in infrastructure and custom
| chips is a step towards making personal LLM also highly available
| to non-technical people. I think this is where Apple has always
| shined - making things not just better, but accessible and
| grokable for normal people.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| <glances at recent story reconfirming Apple as the most highly
| valued private company the world has ever known>
|
| This is sardonic, as yes, Apple could have chosen different
| monopolies than it currently has, at different points, and had a
| different (maybe not better?) trajectory, some of of us are old
| enough to remember the antipathy towards Microsoft when to the
| Office suite it added default Explorer,
|
| But also, maybe our system fundamentally rewards the "wrong"
| things if one's definition of "right" includes things like
| innovation. Or maybe, the welfare of the commons and the common
| good.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > Why Apple Intelligence failed even though everything it's built
| upon is nearly perfect
|
| Because that's a laughably false premise.
| deergomoo wrote:
| The "play the podcast my wife sent me the other day" example is
| interesting to me. That shouldn't be difficult to do _without_
| AI. Yeah asking a thing is always gonna be quicker (provided it
| works), but a well designed app should make that possible within
| like ten seconds.
|
| I can't help but wonder if the reason "agentic" systems seem so
| appealing to people is because as an industry we've spent the
| past fifteen years making software harder to use.
| teach wrote:
| I had a similar example the other day. I was visiting Arizona
| for the first time and was driving in a rental car from Phoenix
| south to Tucson.
|
| I have the latest Google Pixel, and was using Google Maps to
| navigate.
|
| I pressed the "voice search" button from within Google Maps and
| said "What is the name of the mountain on the left that I'm
| about to drive past?"
|
| Instead of a context-aware answer, my phone simply did a Google
| search for that exact phrase and showed the results to me. The
| top hit was a Reddit thread about some mountain near Seattle.
| :)
| viccis wrote:
| The "bicycle for the mind" goal, and the Steve Jobs quote that
| inspired it, is really just another restatement of McLuhan's idea
| of media as being extensions of man. The bicycle (or wheel, more
| generally) is an extension of the legs, a phone is an extension
| of your voice, etc.
|
| The problem with interpreting AI through that lens is that AI, as
| it is being used here, _is not an extension_ of your mind. Plenty
| of other things are (organizers for example), but AI does not
| extend your thoughts. It _replaces_ them. Its notification
| summary feature does not improve your ability to quickly digest
| lots of notification information, it replaces it with its own
| attempt, which, not being your own judgment, can and does easily
| err.
|
| There are some uses of AI that do act more like a McLuhanesque
| medium. Some copilot applications, in which suggestions are
| presented that a user accepts and refines them, are examples of
| this. But a lot of the uses of both image generation and LLM
| tools serve to limit what your mind does rather than expand it.
| voidfunc wrote:
| > Many companies want to make computers that you can use to do
| computer things. Apple makes tools that you use as an extension
| of your body in order to do creative things. They don't just sell
| computers, they sell something that helps enable you to create
| things that just so happen to be computers.
|
| An Apple marketing executive is smiling somewhere. Brainwashed
| another one!
| throitallaway wrote:
| Right, this is such cringe. Almost like Apple's "What's a
| computer?" kid come to life. Apple sells overpriced tech to
| people that don't know any better.
| jedberg wrote:
| A somewhat tangential observation:
|
| Apple has done such a good job with marketing that my 10 year old
| thinks that AI stands for Apple Intelligence.
|
| We live in the Bay Area so she's seen a bunch of billboards with
| that. I have to constantly remind her that that is not what it
| means in most cases.
| gwern wrote:
| It's astonishing to see Apple settle for DALL-E 3 (or worse?!
| these remind me of the Bing samples) for the image generator
| part. Hasn't the incredible extent of mode-collapse and the
| horrible DALL-E 3 style become universally known and disliked
| yet?
| xena wrote:
| No, it's worse than DALL-E 3, it's an on-device model that can
| only reproduce placid soulless images. The ones I put in the
| article have been heavily cherry-picked. The worst ones get far
| worse. DALL-E 3 can at least do text.
|
| Original prompt to Image Playground: "Enron logo" with the
| Enron logo as img2img input
| https://bsky.app/profile/yasomi.xeiaso.net/post/3lf472e2yfc2...
| zombiwoof wrote:
| The image playground app is an embarrassment
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