Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I’m gonna miss y’all these coming weeks. TWiT shows are habit forming
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An hour on a $30,000.00 camera? I thought for a moment I had mistakenly wandered into Office Hours. Oh, for the days of Lory Gill and Rene Ritchie, when most of the show was of use to schlubs like me, who have a difficult enough time justifying the money I lay out for the ProMax iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. I certainly appreciate Alex’s expertise in his craft, but honestly, it’s segments like the aforementioned hour which causes me to skip the show, something I never, ever used to do.
I know, I’m Mr. Negativity with this post (sorry!), but I hate it when I feel the need to skip large parts of the show, or even tune out after a few minutes.
Anyway, Happy Holidays everyone.
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I found it very interesting, especially as it puts the VisionPro into better perspective. When we listened to the launch, it was obvious that this was a long play and Apple would be selling relatively few of these devices to begin with.
Certainly it is well outside my price range, but the VP is also pretty close to what I envisioned in the mid 90s, where I saw us having virtual conferences and doing coding and debugging visually the code as coloured blocks, changing colour by the intensity by which they are called, from blue to orange, to red to white hot…
But the press ignored what Apple was saying and marked it as a failure.
I find it interesting to see in which direction this technology is going and how we are progressing. I also find the camera very interesting and how Alex is looking at these sorts of cameras to provide more information than we can possibly use now, so that it is there in the future, when the technology should be able to make use of it.
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I don’t know that I’d call the Vision Pro a failure, but I have a hard time justifying the expense. $3500 before tax, and that’s if you don’t need corrective lenses for vision. Add another $1000 on that if you don’t already own an iPhone (because it requires Face Id to scan your face as part of the Vision Pro set up process). And while it has a ‘guest mode’, it doesn’t support multiple accounts - which means they see this as a single-person device.
For a typical household, that’s way too much money to spend on, what is mostly, a niche device.
Alex keeps talking about how the people who get in early are the ones who can make money, but you’re only making money if there’s people who have the device. What small -scale developer can afford to shell out $30,000 for the camera that’s necessary to create the kind of content people are going to be willing to spend money on?
Had they tethered the device to the iPhone (even wirelessly) and removed the dumb digital eyes on the front, they could have made an affordable device that would be within reach of the kind of people who already buy Apple phones. But of course, Apple has to be Apple.
I don’t consider it a failure, but the tech press has generally called it a failure, because of its price and sub 500,000,000 annual sales… “It hasn’t outsold the iPad in its first year, let alone outselling the iPhone, QED it is a failure!”
Considering Tim Cook announced that it is an aspirational product and will see limited sales and its price tag, anyone with any common sense could see it was a technology demonstrator, but it seems the majority of the tech press hung up their common sense years ago.
The $30K for the camera is the sticking point, which is why even Alex was talking about renting them for particular projects, not buying them outright.
Tethering to the iPhone wouldn’t have been possible, the iPhone isn’t quick enough. Tethering it to an iPad Pro or a MacBook with M2-Series processor would have been more in the right direction, but would have missed on some of the special processing units needed for the 3D visualisation, probably, but would have been too clumsy.
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I don’t know about that. The iPhone has always been overpowered to begin with, and especially with the AI chips they are putting in, I think they could have done it. But I’m not sure it would work for all models of iPhone. But, then again, the kind of person with enough disposable income to purchase a Vision Pro would likely have a higher-end iPhone capable of this kind of load.
When talking about 18.2, I’m surprised they didn’t talk about the Categories “feature” in Apple Mail. When I first heard about it, I was thinking it might be similar to the features in the Spark Mail app. Sadly, that’s not the case. It seems buggy and very inconsistent in determining which category to apply to a message. Maybe they’ll correct things in 18.3?
I’m glad it’s not considered an AI feature, since I don’t have a newer phone. I wouldn’t hold my breath for any Apple Mail consistency. There are several senders that end up in junk, sometimes. Same kind of mailing that ends up in the inbox one week gets marked as spam the next, no matter how many times it gets moved back to the inbox. It’s not a learning system, it’s been this way forever. One of the many features that’s never gotten any better, that Apple has just forgotten about.
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It’s not just Apple Mail that can be quirky. Outlook on my work MBP will randomly put unread emails in the Deleted folder. I might be having a back and forth exchange with a customer or supplier and one message will end up in Deleted as unread without me ever seeing it.
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Is that iCloud Mail? Mail providers will often set the spam flags, before it gets anywhere near Apple Mail.
Outlook.com is currently displaying hundreds of spam and phishing mails as legitimate - booth online and in Apple Mail - but putting email from my notary about our house sale into spam!
Yes, I use iCloud as my mail provider and Apple Mail as the app. I do have a gmail that’s forwards to my @me.com address. I haven’t changed every account off of gmail yet though. But it still stands I can receive the same email from my bank 5 times, but the 6th time it goes to spam, as an example.
Lots of complaints from the family about Apple Mail changing and people missing emails and stuff. Haven’t got around to looking at it yet. This is gmail accessed via Apple Mail, although the mail app is the thing that has changed I think.
I use Apple Mail on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac mini for my Mac.com and Gmail accounts. Outlook is for my work account on my iPhone, iPad, and work MBP.
I see the BBC is reporting some more Apple Intelligence issues today. I’ve been very impressed with Copilot. Using it quite a bit on my new laptop that has a dedicated key for it.
'A news summary from Apple falsely claimed darts player Luke Littler won the PDC World Championship - before he has even played in the final.
The incorrect summary was written by artificial intelligence (AI) and is based on a BBC story about Littler winning the tournament semi-final on Thursday night.
Within hours, another AI notification summary falsely told some BBC Sport app users that Tennis great Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.’
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The nice part about Apple Intelligence is that you can always refer any question to ChatGPT. If something sounds off in teh Apple Intelligence answer, you can get confirmation. Trust, but verify.
Steve Gibson (of Security Now!) promised to read 2 AI books and Stephen Wolfram’s little ChatGPT book over the holidays. I look forward to what he has to say on Tuesday in SN #1006.
I’ve had enough experience with the AIs to not trust any of them. For me, Google Gemini was the worst. It decided that “Gerald Pollack” was a person it couldn’t talk about, but that it could talk about “G H Pollack”. This was fun, because it consistently explained to me that “G H Pollack” was “Gerald Pollack”. I wanted to [metaphorically] slap the AI. It was a profound teachable moment – just like SteveG’s epiphany with ChatGPT lying to him about MASM that he described in Security Now #1004.
What’s surprising with the Apple Intelligence fails is that it’s summarising information incorrectly. Summarising seems to be a strength of the others, and I’ve found that to be pretty reliable.
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The problem is, this is the part of Apple Intelligence you aren’t “using”, it is automatically trying to summarise headlines in the background. It seems really incapable of what it is trying to achieve. There are many examples of where the text it produces has absolutely nothing to do with the original story.
For example, a murderer arrested = murderer shot himself.
The real problem is that these text replacements aren’t shown as AI substitutions, they replace the original text, but leave the original source as the producer of the text, in this case the BBC, so users are probably not aware they are being fed AI gibberish from Apple, because it is still attributed to the BBC, New York Times etc.
The problem seems to be that it isn’t summarising the story, but the headline itself. That is already a concise summary of the story. It seems to be summarising the summary that is the weakness, it is trying to do something that doesn’t need to be done in the first place.
We are still spared from this, it isn’t due to appear on German devices until March or April.
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I turned off Apple Intelligence on my devices. I was worried the LLMs running locally would be killing my battery without giving me any benefits. I use an iPad Pro with M1 and an iPhone 15 Pro Max