You might re-title the article instead, "The iPhone holds its ground", and it would be a more realistic title. But perhaps garnering less clicks.

I've always thought Ben Thompson is strong on enterprise and b2b topics but super weak on everything consumer related, he simply doesn't seem to understand consumer behavior (he has zero empathy or ability to project his mind into the average person's mind)

E.g. Ben was sure iPhone air would be a massive hit because he himself loved it. (It's struggled as people don't like the smaller battery life).

Ben was sure the Vision Pro would be a huge hit because he himself loved it. (It was a total failure as the average person doesnt want to pay huge amounts for a ridiculous looking dork helmet).

Ben raving about Meta's hand controller which he was sure was going to be the future of consumer electronics (The Neural Band). He was discussing how you could use it while your hand is in your jeans/pants pocket. Not quite thinking about how this would look while you're sat on the subway with someone sat opposite you.

Ben discussing how the future of watching sports is in VR. Not considering how weird it would be to go to a friends house to watch the game and everyone has their own VR headset. Also not considering the fun of watching sports is doing it with other people.

Basically, he has a huge issue with extracting his own liking of techy products to the average consumer who are basically nothing like Ben Thompson.

Is Microsoft's device "vaporware" even comparable to a live demo?

iPhone AI comes via AI-safe pipes: private by design, on device or not, accelerated via MLX. Given that vectoring an AI request to GPU/NPU/CPU/private cloud takes non-trivial engineering, is anyone else as advanced as Apple? It seems wishful to believe interactive UI's will be superseded by untethered, non-interactive (pay by the token) workflows.

iPhone AI is last-mile; the value depends entirely on what you're trying to do. Apple can demo features for their own apps (esp. with personal knowledge), but the real question is what independent developers can do with Apple pipes.

He can say enterprise (not consumers) is the only way to recoup the Nvidia capex, but free local coding models run well enough now on mid-range Apple Macs to make me doubt the business model of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft, and the upside for Nvidia.

I'm glad Apple will be investing that capex into their own chips.

Of all the things they could build, why must they pick this future...

Certainly the copilot button in ms paint did nothing to attract the clawbot ecosystem to windows

From what I can tell, this means any app that is using their foundation model is sharing against a user's pooled usage quota & Apple takes all the revenue upside if a user chooses to upgrade their plan.

Why would an app developer choose their model which has a minuscule 32K context window, might get throttled because of usage in another app, and doesn't share revenue over any frontier model vendor (where you can package/pass along token costs to your customers)?

While I don't necessarily disagree with their vision but if implemented like "Copilot for Windows" I don't see me or anyone wanting to go anywhere near it.

Apple being slow is just fine, at least they didn't launch "Copilot for Mac".

Sometimes the lack of certain feature is the feature.

    you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of
    devices, none of which stand alone, but are
    more like portals to interact with your agents

And then a minute later I could ask it "Is copilot done yet?" and it replies "No, looks like it is still working on it". And then a minute later I ask again. It replies "Yes, it finished. It changed chart.py and styles.css. Do you want me to tell you what specific changes it made to the files?".

But it looks like none of the chat agents with voice interface have such a connector at the moment? An SSH connector would be the most useful. But a "GitHub Codespace connector" or something like that would also do.

I wonder if that will be a missing piece for long. If so, I would build an agent with voice mode and ssh connector myself. But I guess it should come out from the big guys any moment now?

I don't trust microsoft with hardware anymore, nor do i trust them with software.

I came here to talk about this, like some other commenters did, too :) I think that this _is_ a predominant view amongst most of Silicon Valley but I think it's kind of a local maxima view... Easy to agree with, easy to see that it's a functional idea, but... people... (i.e. consumers) do lots more than just waste time on their phones even though I bet that's a huge amount of what people are doing across the US right now.

I guess the thing that _is_ true about this nugget is the "at scale" part. It's hard to find things _at scale_ that people would pay for on a phone. So the phone sort of falls back into this easy to monetize thing via advertising. But I think people (qua consumers) probably can clearly be a sustainable market for way more than attention harvesting (or dopamine fracking!) but it requires a lot more effort to think of things that you can build a market out of there. So people sort of lazy-back into attention harvesting via ads.

iPadOS also did not receive any product specific updates because I think Apple understands that device well: it’s also a consumption device with a bit more productivity capability. They know they can ship a full macOS on iPad, as witnessed by the lower performance A18 chip in the Neo running the full OS, but what’s the point? Using a desktop UI with a touch interface is terrible. So you’d need a mouse and keyboard. By the time you get that accessory, you’ve already exceeded the cost of a Neo or MacBook Air. There’s also no size, weight or space difference between a fully accessorized iPad and MacBook Neo, Air or 14” Pro.

I think Apple will be fine regardless of whether this new Siri AI stuff actually works well or not. I think deep down they don’t really care because they don’t have to. All of their devices are perfect clients that can interact perfectly fine with cloud inference. And their devices are such a joy to use. That’s what Apple is good at.

Now the confusing part is the new Microsoft hardware project. Is Solara a laptop? Tablet? 2-in-1? Phone? They already have a great hardware run with Surface, so I wonder if this new project is a more powerful local inference push?

Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says.

Edit: missing words, thinking faster than typing

- iPhone Air to cram everything into a small space

- Vision pro - a new OS for looking at things and interacting

- Better Siri and AI that works with voice

- Smart local model / routing to big models in the cloud

- integration with wearables (air pods and watches)

Apple has been smart by keeping iOS only for them and not work with partners as Android does, it helps keeping it optimized.

If someone could do the same, it'd be a game changer in the next 10 years.

I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket. It’s okay and apple can easily simplify and eventually win. The mainstream hasn’t really started using agents yet and no one has come close to delivering a platform that will get them there.

I disagree strongly here. The chatbot is the furthest thing from sufficient for the average consumer. Take the newly announced feature that groups your compromised passwords together and offers to agentically change them all for you. Really cool! Could you do that via a chatbot interface? Sure. Would the average consumer? No.

first paragraph begins the article upon 2 very big and flawed statements:

> Apple fans would, for years and years, sneer at Microsoft’s penchant for talking about products that may or may not ship, deriding them as vaporware.

maybe some would, but as a whole I would say this is not a common thing

> After Apple’s bungled 2024 launch of Apple Intelligence and new Siri, however, vaporware is fair game

no it's not

I didn't know about Project Solara so learned a new thing from the article, but I got the impression that it's not as big as the author tried to make it seem, felt very distant and forced.

The fuck I will.

There is no cloud, only other people's hard drives.

-- your increasingly crusty and curmudgeonly old Unix admin who is not paranoid because they are out to get you

Ewww, that's fucking gross. Please don't say such things when I'm about to eat.

> The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive

Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services?

> consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.

What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

> What they do want to do is watch short-form video

Yeah, it seems so.

I wonder if the bigger question is what happens to us.

Convenience is great, but if we optimize away every moment of reflection, tradeoff, and decision-making, we risk becoming passengers in our own lives. The goal shouldn’t be to hand over our judgment to increasingly capable systems. It should be to use those systems to help us think more clearly and act more intentionally.

The future I want isn’t one where AI lives my life for me. It’s one where it helps me live it better.