> 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.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.
At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.
Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life.
Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.
And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?
No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.
I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!
You could be right, but I don’t think it’s going to be Microsoft that’ll be the leader here.
Saving time (==saving money) is something you can sell to companies. But above all, they are willing to spend on saving their managers time. The higher up the hierarchy, the better. If that involves wasting a lot more time for the underlings, then so be it. The underlings aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions after all
but they will gladly take the productivity hit from that time sink because it gives them teh ability to track employees. they'd rather know that everybody is working at 80% productivity than release that burden and just trust them. it's either this or filling out frustrating timesheets.
It's not a "callous view," it's reality. Social media, entertainment/streaming/media, gaming, and porn make up the vast majority of minutes spent on the internet, and it's not even close.
Microsoft is still simply one of the very best at enterprise dealmaking.
For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.
I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.
Certainly the copilot button in ms paint did nothing to attract the clawbot ecosystem to windows
Most definitely _not_ a cleverer system that sometimes hallucinates or goes off on tangents, or sends my personal information to parties unknown.
They have no ground to make up on AI, and changing their operating system to center on AI would piss off every iPhone user I know outside of tech, and probably half of them within tech.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/13/apple-q1-market-share-g...
Apple doesn't leak much but there has been coverage of this:
https://spyglass.org/apple-ai-fail/ (April 2025)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-... (paywalled)
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/06/07/one-fateful-meeti... (2 days ago)
Well, the results[1] are[2] actually[3] in. Samsung of course did do that and the results are what you'd expect.
So in a sense Apple 'could' have released what they had, after all Samsung and others have, but almost certainly not at the level of quality Apple expects. In which case arguably not releasing until it is capable of reaching that quality bar is the right call. The wrong call was announcing it in the first place when it wasn't ready.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/1b4zc1j/new_ai_tex... [2] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/awful-galaxy-s24-feature-... [3] https://www.androidauthority.com/im-tired-pretending-galaxy-...
If Apple had to be the best at AI, it would be out of business already. But it just has to make things people want and the customers will use them to run local or remote LLMs.
things there don't seem to be going well
Much more needs to be said and discussed about this; in comparison, Siri AI is boring and predictable. Siri AI is Apple being Classic Apple: shipping a solid, decent product that works as advertised and isn't that surprising. That's Apple. They lost their bearing as well for a couple years, but they re-found it. Good on them. Meanwhile Microsoft is in meltdown mode behind them shrieking buzzwords and everyone is pretending that everything is fine because they're microsoft, they'll figure it out.
so yeah, it's interesting to watch microsoft pitch a piece of hardware or something, see a couple coworkers gawk at it, sometimes buy it, only to have it repeatedly turn into vaporware rarely with a refresh from microsoft or to end up in another line of products thats sunset forever. microsoft appreciates their business tho, i'm sure. i just wish they could see how funny their relentless hope looks from the outside that microsoft might someday reign supreme and be everyones computer sweetheart again. i had a coworker actually express frustration because we didn't select the microsoft fabric solution or whatever for a datalake. took a hot minute to just get him to relent on trying to only champion microsoft services and products at every corner it's wild to me that someone should have so much allegience to a massive tech company. especially one that is not just hostile to it's users but the industry at large, microsoft has kinda always been a hostile part of the computing history story.
I almost reverse this. Its not that Microsoft cant sell hardware, its that no one trusts them to keep making it long term. Everyone is just waiting for the end of XBox, Surface is presumed to have a ticking clock. They bought a phone company and ended all the products they purchased. They set up a concept lab to create an iPad Killer, in the Courier, hired a fancy apple hardware guy and killed the project because the office team was worried about competition. All they need to do is support a product long term and the market will start to accept them as hardware guys again.
- 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)
What if the glasses are display only and paired to an iphone for most of it's 'senses'?
They’ve done a very good job at proving the required tech with stuff like putting LiDAR in iPhones which is key to the Vision Pro….which is their AR interaction model testing ground. They are taking a pretty measured approach.
I just don’t think the physical tech is ready for AR glasses that reach a level of polish that Apple would ship mass market. But all the other pieces are there.
People spend several thousand on Lasik so they don't have to wear glasses all the time.
I don't see glasses as the ultimate form factor that everyone uses.
Obviously it'll be a big cultural conflict for a while. But again... the usefulness is too great for it not to happen. Cultural objections will give way, I think. Maybe it'll have to wait for a generation to die off.
lol no you did not. A whole lot of nothing.
For stuff that can't be run on phones, some of it will be run on Apple's servers, which I'm assuming Apple is eating the cost of for the time being.
Stuff that needs heavy reasoning or external knowledge will be processed by google, in exchange for $1 billion a year. However Google already pays Apple $20 billion a year for google to be the default iOS search engine, so you could view this as just changing to google paying $19 billion a year instead.
> PCC delivers a powerful server model without compromising privacy: data is never stored, used only for the request, and independently verified. It's integrated with the OS and iCloud, so there's no authentication or API keys, no token cost to developers, a daily per-user limit (higher with iCloud+), and eligibility for apps under 2M downloads.
Source: summary on https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/319/
I haven’t seen any information about what’s happening with apps over 2M downloads, who graduate from the Small Business Program. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
Some of it is free on-device. Some of it is free & rate limited per day. They mentioned in the WWDC infomercial that users with iCloud+ (the storage tier subscriptions, Apple likes to throw random things in with that) will be able to get more uses per day. And some of it developers will pay for.
And even if the assumption turns out to be wrong, they can just scale down and serve dumber and cheaper models. Shrinkflation is not a novel idea.
Yes the chassis had to be designed, but that can be used in common for future iterations. That's much harder for phones where the chassis is very tightly coupled to the specific circuit board design.
The 17e already is the cheap iPhone and it's $599. Putting it's internals in a different shell is one thing. Designing and building a half price internal board is quite another, especially as it would either require an entirely new SOC, or mean continuing production of a legacy SOC thus taking up valuable die production pipeline capacity.
Even if they did use an older SOC. Now they'd have to continue supporting that anaemic underpowered SOC with OS updates for years to come, and these future OS updates would have to run well on it.
I don't see it happening.
Nobody would have guessed that Apple could ever produce the Neo, so you can't say Apple isn't looking into an iPhone Neo.
The case of smartphones is completely different: Android is actually a good OS and there's plenty of excellent devices and high quality brands in the mid range.
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.
I know people are desperate for a Siri that works. The convince of just talking to your phone is priceless. If Apple gets this right, this is a huge deal – which it seems they are on the right track.
People are still talking to Siri for basic stuff like timers and alarms because it works, doesn't need an app, works when phone is locked or even away from you. If this works for more complex tasks like texting and general questions Apple will have the upper hand over Meta and Google in this new way of using computers/internet.
Apple also took a very clever approach for Capex and general AI strategy. Everyone knows that the best intelligence will eventually become a commodity and Apple decided to step aside from this expensive experiment. That's worth pointing out too.
The Air was interesting because everyone I've seen hold it, loves it. But, everyone also loves battery life and the best camera more. The Air is proof of that (similar with the mini lovers).
Just because you like something, doesn't mean it will succeed. These people will more likely using some sort of industry knowledge to form conclusion which conforms with their bias.
On the flip side, just because you hated something doesn't mean it will fail. There are plenty of Apple haters who will write things that seems to make sense but completely misses the mark every single time.
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.
Is this not what Apple Intelligence is?
Sometimes it's a curse. Apple might be a 2-3 trillion dollar business right now, if they didn't refuse to sign CUDA drivers for their ARM servers.
Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says.
Edit: missing words, thinking faster than typing
But when it comes to anything around consumer behavior, individuals, etc, i.e. the average family in America, he is often completely and utterly wrong in all his takes and predictions. In fact, so wrong it's often laughable, and amazes me that he is so confident in his predictions.
Also, in the podcast I've noticed that he talks almost every podcast about his "hits", i.e. his times in the past where he predicted something accurately. But never, ever mentions the times where he was completely wrong. He's like the dictionary definition of confirmation bias (or survivorship bias).
It's like he's gotten overly confident (or a little arrogant) as he's become more of a tech celebrity, to the point where he thinks he's some sort of Nostradamus now and doesn't recognize his weaknesses or failures. And I've personally stopped listening to the podcasts as much as it's getting a little tiresome.
BTW, I also noticed how often he is wrong on deep tech topics, e.g. his explanation of IP addresses and routing in one podcast. It's like he thinks his business knowledge + Claude is enough for him to authoritatively discuss how technical systems work, and he often is mistaken...
I don't care about a twice a week podcast about the NBA and national parks, or the other 5? podcasts about random stuff.
He was disappointed in the Apple vision pro for just being an entertainment device (it seems like you two agree there?)
And then the interviews by media of tech should be viewed as an iterated game. He can ask interesting questions for an analyst, but he (and Nilay) do depend on access and that fundamentally constrains what types of questions they can ask if they want continued access
> Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says.
Pretty sane take tbh
Yeah might as well cancel your subscription if you’re not gonna read it
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)?
Same reason developers continue to use Apple payments even when they have to shell out 30% of the revenue.
I can see Apple, setting App store rules around declaring AI usage, or could start labeling apps not using their models with strong language designed to amplify the increasing user concerns around AI and so on.
The product strategy has to be better the product itself does not have to be objectively better for the developer for them to have to choose it.
Its definitely the case that Apple said that some AI capabilities will rely on cloud hosted models; and that some of these capabilities will be metered; and that "some paid iCloud+ plans" include increased usage. Its unclear what the full extent of capabilities that rely on cloud models are. We know that Spatial Reframing is a capability that relies on cloud models and will be metered; this was stated on-stage. The typical conversations with Siri are, supposedly, a mix, possibly based on how complex the query is? We know there are two cloud-hosted models (what they call internally "Cloud" and "Cloud Pro"); are both of these metered? Does it depend on the use-case (e.g. is Spatial Reframing metered because of its use-case or because of which model it uses?)
A lot of this would be easier to figure out if there was, somewhere, a "meter" you could see drop every time you used a metered feature; but there isn't. There is zero indication of metered AI usage anywhere in the settings that I have found (I am on the 27 dev beta). There is also zero indication that any of the iCloud+ plans include metered AI usage. It is also of note that Apple very specifically said on-stage that "some iCloud+ plans" include increased usage; implying that the $2.99/mo plan likely does not.
Apple has also announced that developers under a certain revenue number can use their foundation models in private cloud compute for free [1]. This implies: third party developers will pay for it. In other words: it might be the case that your shared iCloud+ pool of AI usage only applies to AI capabilities from first-party Apple apps, while in third-party apps the developers are expected to front the bill. Which further reinforces your point: Why would anyone choose to integrate with these cloud models?
Strange situation, and unlike Apple; they seem very frantic.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/08/apple-bets-cheaper-ai-will...
Once you get enough downloads to where Apple starts wanting to charge you money, you can consider switching to OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or Deepseek or whatever. Sounds like they've even made that relatively easy to do in the Foundation Models framework -- just implement the LanguageModel protocol. I expect open-source or provider-written adapters to pop up that would let you use your vendor of choice.
Not all use cases will be big agentic coding things that will use millions of tokens.
Some on device (or on server) stuff might be small one shot calls that just use what’s the OS provides.
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?
A verbal diff sounds practically useless. Does it first read out the entire left-hand base, and then read out the entire right-hand target? Does it say loudly "REMOVING ... ADDING ... "? How would it read out something like Struct->Field? This seems lower fidelity than a visual confirmation, and I just don't think that voice commands make sense with this kind of work.
"It changed the plot function so it takes another parameter called linewidth. It also added an input field in the stylecontrols section where the user can ...".
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.
These ones also seem really weird because the baseline is most often someone using the iOS app to do the same thing, and the agent demos are usually slower in addition to being riskier. One of the Chrome demos had someone buying groceries at pretty hefty markup, which seemed to be targeting a narrow demographic of people who a) don’t worry about paying 50% more for produce and b) can spend time writing a prompt but not 30 second opening an app and just doing it with zero chance of getting scammed.
I would actually be willing to use AI to purchase groceries if it could provide me with some assurance that it would choose the items better than a shopping cart.
As for now, I'm only willing to purchase non-perishable goods that are difficult to screw up online.
Might be a service idea for AI.
I don't expect to go for that, but other people might. Especially if AI stuff continues to improve.
Once again, early 1990's General Magic looks prescient.
They were working on smartphones with agents capable of completing remote transactions before we had wireless data networks.
> General Magic: The Greatest Tech Company You’ve Never Heard Of
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tuFl4WEXBrk
> allowing end-user equipment with limited capabilities to upload Telescript programs to servers to allow them to take advantage of the server's capabilities. Telescript could even migrate a running program... transfer it to another Telescript engine (on a device or a server) to continue execution, and finally return to the originating client or server device to deliver its output.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langu...
With the right set-top-box, you tvs become just another display for whatever you want to send their way. We are extremely close to startrek tng style spaces. I'm sure there is a github repo out there that may even be there.
Why do you think apple has the appletv, the apple watch, the phone itself is essentially a pocketwatch with an addressable display.
I think we have all the parts it's just now about knitting them all together and building up a ux that works for normal people.
Of all the things they could build, why must they pick this future...
Wrong. It definitely wasn't 50%. This number seems to grow each time I see it referenced. The Stasi directly or indirectly employed about 2% of the population, which is still huge. But /The Lives of Others/ takes a lot of artistic license. The true levels will never be known, but the largest and most widely quoted figure is 1 in 6.5 or about 15%. That derives from one historian's estimate, which was that at the upper bound, 1 in 6.5 people had in some way made a report to the government that in some way made it to the Stasi. I'm sure 15% of the people in any developed country have called the police at some point in their life.
This is also assuming no duplicates, you really think the Stasi could uniquely identify and disambiguate informants at this scale? And that every Stasi low level officer tasked with recruiting new informants or else actually recruited new informants instead of making them up and keeping the payouts for themselves?
And because I have to say it: authoritarian surveillance is bad, the Stasi was bad, this is not an apology or minimization, but a correction of historical facts.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.