thewebguyd

Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.

I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).

All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.

Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.

I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.

Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.

A backup without a restore test isn't a backup at all

Of course. At a certain point, it's just physics. There is only going to be so much you can get out of such a tiny sensor and lens. Software can only do so much without turning it into an AI photo.

Even just carrying around a small Micro 4/3 camera gets you 3x the sensor surface area of a smartphone. An APS-C Fujifilm like an x100V gets you 5.2x the sensor surface and is still mostly "pocketable" (in a bag).

What the iPhone has effectively replaced though are the old point and shoot digicams, which now have smaller sensors than the iPhone.

I'd suspect the average person won't notice much difference (on the main lens) until about iPhone 11 or older, with still photos. Computational image processing does a TON of heavy lifting with these tiny sensors.

With video OTOH, the improvements are much more noticeable. I also suspect that is why Apple focuses so much on video as its a harder problem to solve and so much easier to differentiate your hardware from competitors.

> only photographers care about that, to most people it's just pictures

This is largely true, when it comes to photos of other people/people they care about.

I'm a wedding & family photographer part time, and at nearly every wedding I shoot, the photos the clients and their guests favorite the most from the galleries are usually the quick candid snaps where the subject has an expression they like or are doing something fun. It could be a blurry, grainy, dark mess of a photo and it will consistently be their favorite photo of the day.

For most non-photographers, the subject of the photo is what matters and is all they will notice. Almost no one is making a distinction between bokeh shape, or noise (unless its so obvious as to completely ruin the photo), composition, etc.

All that to say, photo quality is only one very small part of the equation.

> I prefer physical books at home, but if I'm out and about travelling I always take my kindle.

Same. I prefer hardcovers, I usually look for first editions, etc. I'd prefer not to lug them around so I also have a kindle for if I want to read away from home. I usually borrow the ebooks from my library though when the ones I want are available so I'm not buying twice.

I don't think I could ever get rid of physical books entirely though. There's a somatic element to reading that I appreciate that you lose entirely with an ereader.

I suspect even some of the more "advanced" queries they demoed off, i.e., "what was that restaurant John and I talked about last week?" also not require LLMs whatsoever and could have been accomplished with a simple search.

Small claims is great in that in most states lawyers generally aren't allowed so right out the gate you remove the wealth asymmetry issue. The downside is the dollar amount is very small. I'd like to see small claims limits expanded tbh.

> Infinite investor dollars

This has another side effect in that it breaks the power that consumers have in the market to have a say in how resources get allocated, by voting with their wallet.

The entire AI buildout is non-consensual. Individuals have zero say. We could all refuse to buy AI subscriptions and it would not matter because businesses will still buy, and, investors have decided that we are moving forward with this no matter what, seemingly whether anyone is actually buying or not.

AI isn't necessarily unique here, but it is one of the biggest new examples of wealth inequality and how society at large are no longer the ones who get to decide how resources are allocated under a capitalist system, especially when the investor dollars behind it amounts to the GDP of a small nation.

> But it's an illusion

So is human consciousness. We are also dynamic and constantly changing, self awareness/consciousness is a conditioned process. There is no unchanging "you" or a little man inside controlling things, there's no narrator just the narration.

Do we care because we can reason and have meta cognition? Or are the narratives we build, built by our brains only after the fact to justify our biological actions? If an ecosystem's value is invalidated because its dynamic or ephemeral and lacking a permanent core then human consciousness also fails the same test. We can't dismiss nature as a naive projection while also treating our own post-hoc narrative making as the only real thing in the universe, its a double standard.

If the process that produces meaning is just another temporary biological phenomenon, which it likely is, then we (humans) are not special observers, we are then just one more thing shifting inside the same system we are trying to pave over.

> We just don't know.

That's the absurdity of this. We are trying to measure LLMs against something we don't even have an accurate definition of ourselves. If we don't fully know what consciousness is, how can we confidently determine whether or not an AI model has consciousness?

> Can this thing harm me back?

We extend moral considerations or legal protections to beings that have zero capacity to harm us back, though. The inability to fight back is the reason a lot of welfare protections exist in the first place.

That aside, if (and that's a really big if) we end up with a model that is sentient, as in has the capacity to suffer, using factory farming as justification to ignore model welfare is just admitting we intend to repeat the same abject moral failure again in the name of economic convenience.

I hope that we won't, but humans love cheap meat, and will probably love cheap intelligence as well.

> where we all are made to learn new stuff

Liquid glass didn't require any relearning at all, the iOS interface changed aesthetics, not functionality. The OS has worked largely the same for the past 10 years since the iPhone X.

But I fail to see how an AI generated interface would be any better. What if after several back and forth with the AI, it still can't get the design right for you just so? It's not deterministic, you might get a different result every time you open your phone. Expecting third party services to leave their APIs open just so OpenAI phones can consume them is awfully optimistic as the moment such a device becomes an existential threat to third parties, APIs will start getting locked down.

By all means, OpenAI should try, not saying they shouldn't, but I'm not optimistic it'll be a success. The smartphone is already basically peak form factor. No one is going to want to carry around a second device, which is why every other AI device/pin is DOA. It has to come out of the gate ready to fully replace someone's smartphone and the surrounding ecosystem of it or it also is DOA. Good camera? Support spotify/apple music? messaging, video calls, airdrop/nearbyshare, works with smartwatches and fitness trackers, etc. If it doesn't, it will fail.

And if it came to that, and that's how this OS worked, we'd see open APIs disappear real quick from all the popular services because of the support nightmare, and, services like Uber and others are going to want to maintain exclusivity with their first party app the moment vibe coding becomes that viable. APIs will get locked down, and we'll all be worse off for it.

If an "AI Phone" looks to be an existential threat to third party app devs and services, except everyone to do everything they can kill said AI Phone to protect their own products.