I installed an AppleTV recently, so I don't have much experience. But the first thing I saw after the initial setup was one/third of the display advertising a TV-show on a subscription service I had to purchase. Would that count as an ad?

But why the hell would I want to talk to the AI while on my daily commute? Do people do that?

> yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them

I don't buy this. The iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold 6 million units in a year. That's about half the rate of Google's entire Pixel lineup. The market is small, yeah, but it definitely exists. I think a company could quietly make a high quality, straightforward, small Android device with maybe every-other-year hardware updates, and run away with a whole corner of the market all to itself.

People choose Apple devices because they work well and let them do things they want to do (they don’t buy for the Corning name, they buy for durability). Google has a lot of marketing and we follow developments closely here on HN but I have never heard anyone other than nerds who already included Android in their personal identity say that Gemini does anything substantial for them, and they sound exactly like the way their grandfathers sounded having quasi-religious debates about Ford vs. Chevy while everyone else tried to change the subject.

That doesn’t mean that Apple shouldn’t be following the space closely but I think it’s a mistake to think that normal people are changing their buying decisions based on any of this yet. One trade off here is that Google is spending a ton of money but as of yet is massively in the red on that investment, which means they’ll stick with their own LLM while Apple is free to switch to whoever the market leader is without a large sunk cost factoring into the decision.

This is good stuff. While somebody could build a Trello clone or an image generator by typing “git clone “ followed by any number of existing projects, the code you’d get might’ve been written by a person, plus if you do that you’re not even spending any money, which just doesn’t seem right.

The future is vibe coding but what some people don’t yet appreciate what that vibe is, which is a Pachinko machine permanently inserted between the user and the computer. It’s wild to think that anybody got anything done without the thrill of feeding quarters into the computer and seeing if the ball lands on “post on Reddit” or “delete database”

It doesn’t even look particularly good? And I’m not even a design-Luddite – generally a fan of a lot of Apple visual design and I hate old windows 98-style buttons. I’m the type of person who should enjoy it. (Only speaking about the visuals here)

The only wow feeling I get is the refraction effect. Like, it’s a ”novel” effect in GUIs. But when elements are still it looks the same as regular glassomorphism which we already had years ago. Buttons look totally different depending on what’s underneath, and in 90% of cases it’s messy and blurs together. The wow feeling will fade quickly, but the clutter will remain…

The only thing I like is that it makes layering a bit clearer (groupings, buttons vs indicators) compared to ultra-flat design of the last years. But that could have been achieved with subtle 3d/parallax effects, eg based on gyro.

My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.

The liquid protection is nice. I never had it either because the only thing I was worried about was liquid and I'm quite careful with that, but last year someone spilled apple juice all over my stuff and it was an expensive bill, so I started to get applecare. The other thing is I got my wifes screen replaced in the mall last year and they said they replaced it with OEM apple but no way they did, it was junk, and no way for me to prove they used something that wasn't apple.

Of course.

Most of the AI cases (that turn out to be an actual success) focus around a few repeatable patterns and a limited use of "AI". Here are a few interesting ones:

(1) Data extraction. E.g. extracting specs of electronic components from data-sheets (it was applied to address a USA market with 300M per year size). Or parsing back Purchase Order specs from PDFs in fragmented and under-digitized EU construction market. Just a modern VLM and a couple of prompts under the hood.

(2) French company saved up to 10k EUR per month on translators for their niche content (they do a lot of organic content, translating it to 5 major languages). Switched from human translators to LLM-driven translation process (like DeepL but understanding the nuances of their business thanks to the domain vocabulary they through in the context). Just one prompt under the hood.

(3) Lead Generation for the manufacturing equipment - scanning a stream of newly registered companies in EU and automatically identifying companies that would actually be interested in hearing more about specific types of equipment. Just a pipeline with ~3-4 prompts and a web search under the hood.

(4) Finding compliance gaps in the internal documents for the EU fintech (DORA/Safeguarding/Outsourcing etc). This one is a bit tricky, but still boils down to careful document parsing with subsequent graph traversal and reasoning.

NB: There also are tons of chatbots, customer support automation or generic enterprise RAG systems. But I don't work much with such kinds of projects, since they have higher risks and lower RoI.