dereg

Young man me likely would have thought, “wow, cool tradition!”

Old man me thinks “$390 million? How are they funding this?! That seems like a massive sum of money to throw down the drain every 20 years.”

Then I did the back of envelope math. Assuming 20% comes from donations, then all you’d need is a $380m fund earning a real 3% to fund the building of the next temple. That’s very doable.

My main takeaway from this is that Luca Maestri was a blight on Apple. He steered this company into the most malicious of compliance schemes that only has increased their regulatory attack surface. On top of that, he's the one who discouraged apple from making huge investments in compute for LLMs that threatens to derail Apple and the iPhone's primacy as the gateway to information.

You’re only looking at one side of it. Consider how much value that excel adds, and how many use cases it enables. It’s incalculable. It’s always easy to poke at excel’s issues, but errors are almost always a skill issue.

From a financial perspective, there are many ways you could enforce checks to ensure the model is balanced - it just takes time. Data entry can be an issue, but you can automate that too. The deloitte report is saying the health department should benefit from adopting a gigantic erp system but you could get 90% of the benefit by employing a couple people that really know what they’re doing.

You could say that excel should allow those things to happen but the flexibility is precisely what makes it so valuable.

The people writing the reports are consultants. Consultants recommend things that benefit consultants. In their case, a multi year process and tens of millions of dollars trying to install ERP software is more a windfall for the vendors and not the companies.

Apple outsourced chips to IBM (PowerPC) for a long time and floundered all the while. They went into the game themselves w/ the PA Semi acquisition and now they have Apple Silicon to show for it.

If Apple wasn't selling privacy, I'd assume the other way around. Or if anything, OpenAI would give the service out for free. There's a reason why ChatGPT became free to the public, GPT-4o moreover. It's obvious that OpenAI needs whatever data it can get its hands on to train GPT-5.

I can't really dispute any of that.

It took almost a decade but the PA Semi acquisition showed that Apple was able to get out of the shadow of its PowerPC era.

Nvidia will remain a leader in this space for a long time. But things are going to play out wonky and Apple, when determined, are actually pretty good at executing on longer-term roadmaps.

Nvidia obviously has an enormous, enormous moat but I do think this is one of the areas in which Apple may actually GAF. The rollout of Apple Intelligence is going to make them the biggest provider of "edge" inference on day one. They're not going to be able to ride on optimism in services growth forever.

Learning how to write llm function calls.

Can't wait to attempt GUI automation on my iPhone using the mac.

If we know anything about Apple, they're going after Nvidia. If anyone can pull it off, it's going to be them.

Apple Intelligence stuff is going to be very big. iOS is clearly the right platform to marry great UX AI with. Latching LLMs onto Siri have allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins.

I think the private compute stuff to be really big. Beyond the obvious use the cloud servers for heavy computing type tasks, I suspect it means we're going to get our own private code interpreter (proper scripting on iOS) and this is probably Apple's path to eventually allowing development on iPad OS.

Not only that, Apple is using its own chips for their servers. I don't think the follow on question is whether it's enough or not. The right question to ask is what are they going to do bring things up to snuff with NVDIA on both the developer end and hardware end?

There's such a huge play here and I don't think people get it yet, all because they think that Apple should be in the frontier model game. I think I now understand the headlines of Nadella being worried about Apple's partnership with OpenAI.

Regarding Germany and large corporations, and somewhat of a tangent, I remember a decade ago a bunch of hedge funds had tried to sue Porsche, the parent company of VW, for cornering the market for VW’s open interest and cause the mother of all short squeezes.

They tried the case in New York but it got thrown out for lack of jurisdiction. They did try the case in Germany, but Porsche had fittingly cornered the market for the best and biggest law firms. All of the best law firms refused to take the case because it would mean that they’d be essentially blacklisted by the largest companies in Germany for bringing a case against a German company.

It’s taken a decade, but I now see a pattern.