I've seen Youtube videos of people growing citrus, among other things, in colder climates in "greenhouses" made of plastic sheeting heated by a thick layer of woodchips which slowly decompose and give off heat.
A number of the RISC processors have a special zero register, giving you a "mov reg, zero" instruction.
Of course many of the RISC processors also have fixed length instructions, with small literal values being encoded as part of the instruction, so "mov reg, #0" and "mov reg, zero" would both be same length.
The 6502 doesn't support XOR A or SUB A, and in fact doesn't have a SUB opcode at all, only SBC (subtract with carry, requiring an extra opcode to set the carry flag beforehand).
I was handwaving over the details, SBC is identical to SUB when the carry flag is clear, so it's understandable why the 6502 designers didn't waste an instruction slot.
EOR and SBC still have the same cycle counts though.
Sure, in some contexts you would know that the carry flag was set or clear (depending on what you needed), and it was common to take advantage of that and not add an explicit clc or sec, although you better comment the assumption/dependency on the preceding code.
However the 6502 doesn't support reg-reg ALU operations, only reg-mem, so there simply is no xor a,a or sbc a,a support. You'd either have to do the explicit lda #0, or maybe use txa/tya if there was a free zero to be had.
That's how i read it too - they want to test if people will still pay for pro plan if it doesn't include Claude Code. At the same time they are also saying that if you subscribe having been told it does include Claude Code, they may still change their mind later and take it away!
I don't know anything about Ternus other than WikiPedia saying he was VP of hardware engineering.
Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to).
I think Apple took some missteps with the iPhone in later models, maybe too much influenced by Jony Ive and form over function. It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.
I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. Maybe Ternus has a vision for that, but in any case the CEO can't be a one-man marketing dept - he just needs to know what he wants and hire the right people to get it accomplished.
Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish, but recovered nicely afterwards. My M4 is a glorious device built like a tank
I suspect that the touch bar served its likely real purpose: to ship an ARM CPU with a secure enclave in the machines so that we could have Touch ID without needing to wait for Apple Silicon. Everything other than that was gravy, an interesting experiment.
I think the problem with touch bar was that, it completely replaced the function keys, instead of complementing them. Other than that, I actually liked it.
Hah, that reminds me! My first work issued Mac didn't have the ESC key, just the touch bar. IIRC a program hung in fullscreen, freezing both the app and the touch bar. So I had to reboot to get out of it because the esc key didn't work.
Its interesting the touch bar was also hung up, as from what I recall the touchbar was actually driven by a separate processor (the T1/T2 chip) and had its own version of watchOS running. I would have thought it would have continued working, just unable to continue syncing with the rest of the Mac.
Yeah, it locked up on me every couple months or so. Very glad to see it gone (as the primary ESC + F-row input).
I also would not mind it in addition to regular keys, there are some great interactions in there. But it's an extremely poor keyboard-emulator. Splitting off the escape key made a huge improvement, but it's nowhere near enough.
Yeah Apple has had a few missteps like this over the last 5 to 10 years. They assert themselves with that Steve Jobs mentality of “we know what’s best for you,” but he got it right more often than the current iteration. The touch bar was definitely not properly assessed by users before shipping.
Those 2019-2020 models are absolute trash. I don’t know what happened. My 2016 MBPro smokes the few we have bouncing around at work. They started falling apart like year 3, and my MBPro was the first iteration of their newer builds with the butterfly keyboard/non-optional Touch Bar!
You should have been able to Cmd-Tab to a different app; if that wasn't working, something more serious was going on. Also, if you have Spaces enabled, you can three-finger swipe, since a full screen app gets its own Space.
Another issue with the touch bar is that part of the laptop gets quite hot (especially on Intel CPUs), and so did the touch bar. I recall a few times feeling like I burned my finger just pressing esc during video rendering.
I think the lack of haptic feedback is what doomed the Touch Bar. If they'd been able to solve that problem, it could have been an acceptable replacement for the function keys.
The thing is I have never used the function keys on my laptop so that was not a problem form me, but also some of the custom functions I hard can just be mapped to fn keys so it is bit like it it us a huge loss
I don't necessarily use the numbered function keys all the time (as in F1-F12), but I use those physical buttons constantly. Brightness, volume, play/pause, mic mute, are all buttons I press a good bit. Many of those I'd rather just have be a single quick button, especially things like speaker or mic mute.
Volume and brightness are exactly the place the touchbar shines: tap and start dragging and you're adjusting a slider, which is much better than mashing a button.
It utterly destroys the “quick incremental adjustment” that taps are better for. It makes it more involved to even complete maximal adjustments, which are just press and hold. It makes all adjustments more involved, it’s not merely a matter of locating a physical key, it’s orchestrating movements your eyes and hands have to track together toward a location that can’t be known , through touch detection that can get fussy for any number of reasons.
This is not theoretical. This was my experience with a touchbar MBP. The idea was just wrong for this kind of routine function.
Meanwhile, I can adjust volume blind by feel on a MPB with function keys. I never for a moment when doing this for audio or brightness think “I wish I had a slider” and even if I did I know how to find one for use with the touch interface every MBP ever has had.
Sure, a slider can make sense there, I agree. But now I've got a part of the screen dedicated to be the spot to tap to start changing the volume and a part dedicated to it being the brightness taking away from the other useful parts of the screen, or its hidden under a sub menu making it more annoying to rapidly change.
Imagine if on your phone to change the volume you had to swipe into a settings menu first and then change it on a slider versus just using the volume buttons on the side. Seems like a worse way for something you're potentially wanting to rapidly adjust, like when you accidentally start playing something way too loud.
That is what the touchbar did. It doesn't take two steps. You motion like you're dragging the volume button and the slider appears under you, already being dragged.
Interesting to hear a different perspective on the touchbar. I have yet to meet someone who liked it. Removes touch typing, requires you to refocus attention, etc. Changing the volume is easy, button same place always - but with touch bar I have to look down and do the slidey thing. If they implemented real keys with that display built in...now we're talking!
The touchbar was great when apps used it for useful things. It’s main sin was replacing the physical escape key and I suspect if even just that key had remained physical most people would have been fine with the touchbar because most people don’t really use the f-keys by touch. Most of the time when I’m using the f-keys, it’s to use the debugger for an IDE. And that’s where the touchbar really shined because instead of remembering whether f6 or f5 was step over, the touchbar could just display the expected symbol.
Personally I’d love to see the touchbar make a comeback either as an addition to the fkeys row, or as a set of e-ink/oled physical buttons where the fkeys are. Allow the displayed legends to update while still keeping the physicality.
Even without BTT, I liked the touchbar (especially on the Macbook “Esc” which restored the escape key). It was nice having keys that actually said what they did. Maybe someday, keycaps with an LCD-generated display will be feasible (or maybe e-paper for power consumption needs)
Yeah, I hated the keyboard but really did like the touchbar. Apple really dropped the ball there though. We shouldn't have needed Better Touch Tool to make it useful.
I didn't mind the touchbar, and enjoyed some of the added functionality. Would have been so much better if it had been an addition instead of a replacement for the top row of keys.
I thought it really excelled at displaying the timeline—it was quite novel to see a timeline for a video I was watching that didn't occlude any part of the screen—but quite annoyingly it would go black due to inactivity.
And of course the virtual function keys were awful.
He didn't flop. He's had a number of high-status bespoke projects, including the coronation logo for King Charles and a redesign of Christie's (auction house) podium.
He's not doing commoditised consumer design any more. He has enough money now, so he no longer needs to. The most consumer-oriented work recently has been an interior for the new Ferrari Luce EV.
I agree his post-Jobs years at Apple were somewhere between mediocre and hopeless (gradients...) and not many people seem to miss him.
Although to be fair, he wasn't responsible for Liquid Glass, which has set the bar for design failure at Apple to new depths.
Liquid Glass is fine for me and the people I talk to, I didn't even notice it happened when the upgrade happened and so many people have been complaining.
Ive got way more credit than he deserved. And he had to run all his ideas by Jobs. Once Jobs was gone we got to see Ive's true colors (it was garish pastels and a butterfly keyboard).
He has designed 4 consumer prodocts that a good portion of humanity use every day. By every measure he is the most successful product creator in the history of humanity, no single other product comes close to impact and quality. (Believe it or not the Dorritos Locos Taco is likely the closest 5th place product)
The arrogance on hacker news is insane, or the self agrandizement and misunderstanding of how rare that is.
You have likely never done 1/1,000,000,000th of the scale or impact of this designer and then make flippant remarks that belay your ignorance of the matter.
I really would like to understand what your thought process is here. This is quite litterally like saying Michael Jordan was a pretty poor Basketball player and claiming Jerry Reinsdorf was somehow the real reason he succeeded.
Big difference is comparing to sports is millions of people can see with their own eyes the performance of a player in arena. All motivated media can't create a narrative of brilliance when bad performance is there to see.
In case Jony Ive or others like him, we simply do not know how many dozens or hundreds of very talented engineers and designers worked relentlessly under him so he can do beautiful presentations in British English.
Another person comes to my mind is Marissa Meyers. "Brilliant Executive" known for keeping Google Home page clean that's visited by billion people. But we all know how great she was when ended up at Yahoo.
> He has designed 4 consumer prodocts that a good portion of humanity use every day.
Yes, but how much of that was luck and how was extraordinary talent?
It's like saying "Donald Trump is really rich, ergo he must be a financial genius"... getting really rich isn't that hard if you're born into money and invest in New York real estate.
Now someone like Jobs who had fairly working class parents and founded a multi-billion dollar (now trillion dollar) company that radically changed the modern world, that, I would argue, is extraordinary talent.
While I don't personally have much an opinion on Ives's skill as a designer, I understand the GP's point of view - any "good but not great" designer could have done what he did, Ives was just lucky enough to win the lottery w.r.t. what company he worked for.
For a similar example, consider the case of Hollywood - you'll have plenty actors as talented as Brad Pitt (or whatever big name you'd like to choose) that don't end up staring in massive blockbusters, not because they lack talent, but because they weren't quite as lucky to get that first big break, which led to more recognition, more job offers, all of which compounded into making him a proper movie star. Obviously Pitt is a really good actor, but part of his success is likely due to luck as much as it is acting talent - he has tons of talent, but others might have equal talent and less luck, and therefore be less successful/have fewer people influenced by their work.
To use a software metaphor, consider the relative popularity of FreeBSD and Linux. Both are good OSes, but Linux got "luckier" because they didn't have to deal with a lawsuit, which meant it got more attention, more features, which led to a compounding "Matthew effect" where it now has a far larger market share than FreeBSD, despite them originally having roughly the same 'quality'.
This take is so hardworkingly naive I dont even know where to start. After having the undesputed greatest set of products designed in a row, you dane to call it luck.
Asside from your complete ignorance of the history at play, (Ive refounded Apple with Jobs) you seem to not understand what a 'mediocre' designer is capable of and how mind-bendinly hard it was to design the imac, ipad, iphone and apple watch
I genuinely can't believe you could be so wild to beleive such a thing. It becomes frankly stupid to the point of disrespectful of the work individuals put into their craft and the success they can find.
There is no person in the world outside of someone in this forum who would claim that somehow this was 'luck'.
HN has truly become one of the most toxically stupid places on the web.
The products were not conceived/designed by Ive. He was VP of industrial design only, with a team of people under him, such as Richard Howarth who seems to have been lead designer on the original iPhone and replaced Ive when he left.
Your take on crediting Ive with the success of Apple's product line would be exactly like crediting some designer at Nike with the success of their never ending line of sneakers.
If your theory of Ive's design genius being such a game changer was true, then why has Apple continued to flourish since he left 7 years ago? It seems pretty apparent that it's the brand/image established by Jobs that is successful, just as it's the Nike brand (bootstrapped by MJ & Nike Air) that propels Nike, not the magic of their designs.
People age and change; Jony Ive overstayed his tenure at Apple, through no fault of his own. Cook, not being a product guy, kept Ive with massive incentives. Build Apple Park, take care of software, here's a bunch more stock. That led to very misguided products. Laptops without MagSafe. Ever so thin phones for no benefit. A pen that charges in the most insane way.
Ive should have left shortly after the death of Steve. He was creatively spent at Apple.
Apparently it required someone with the personality and product taste of Jobs to rein in Ivy. Cook on the other hand being a logistics/operations guy didn’t have the similar skills and we ended up getting absolute shitshow of hardware products from apple in late 2010s.
Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.
For what it's worth, the Intel MacBook Pro Espresso Machine and Milk Foamer Expansion Dock that water cooled the CPU while making you a hot fresh latte was pretty useful. The M4 just isn't capable of working up a proper head of steam.
I have one such mac. Things I like: the keyboard feels smooth, the speakers are great and the touchbar (yes you read correctly). Things that make me partially agree with this post I am responding to: annoying overheating, including when I plug an external monitor (!); the camera was really subpar, it always seemed as if I was facetiming using a 2002 cybershot rather than a 2019 MacBook Pro; the screen has nice colours but very easily feels smudgy. Other than this, I love using that computer as a secondary device.
This was the last gasp of Johnny Ive. And yes, it was terrible. It got us ending the incredibly successful Macbook Air for the too-compromised 12" Macbook (1 port, remember?), the pointless Touch Bar and the terrible butterly keyboard (remember how dust could kill it and I'm sure Apple spent a fortune on replacements?).
Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price ("ASP"). Someone at Apple decided the ASP was too low.
Ultimately the Macbook Air came back and it's really the SKU the most people should buy.
They did not take the MacBook Air off the market when the retina Macbook 12" was released. The MacBookAir7,1 was released a month before the MacBook8,1. The 7,2 came out 2 years later as a spec bump not because Apple abandoned the product, but because this was the same time Intel's tick-tock schedule went completely off the rails.
That 2016-2018 Macbook Air had a 2010 dispaly ie 1440x900. That was ridiculous for the time, given that the Macbook Pro first got a retina display (2560x1600) in 2012. No there was no technical reason for excluding the MBA. It was a product decision all along.
I distinctly remember thinking in 2013-2014 "will they just update the screen already?" as it was kept me from buying a new one. I also remember thinking in 2015 when the 12" Macbook launched "oh the MBA is abandonware now". The Retina MBA launched in 2018, the 12" Macbook was discontinued in 2019 and 2020+ was the M series processor era. And here we are.
But they didn't. Just because they didn't update the screen for free doesn't mean the discontinued the Air. They sold likely millions of Airs from 2015 to 2018, likely in no small part due to the fact you could get a barebones 11" Air for $899, $799 if you were a school. When the Retina Air came out in 2018 the prices jumped to $1199.
I collect the 12" macbooks, even today. It really only needs one port; the vast majority of people never plug anything but power into their computer ever. I would pay huge sums for a modern Mx 11-12" ultralight macbook with a reliable keyboard.
Same. Using my MacBook 12" of Theseus still at home. It's a fantastic machine for travel or field work if configured to 16GB. That 1" down from Air makes a huge difference on a seat tray.
The Neo's targetting a different market. The MacBook was a premium ultraportable product. If you were buying it, you were willing to make all kinds of sacrifices for a thin and light laptop. The Neo is a general purpose consumer laptop that just happens to be fairly small.
Any advice for finding them other than partaking in whatever premimum drugs eBay sellers smoke to make the prices they are charging for essentially e-waste make sense? God I want to pick up one so bad but $150, $200, $300, hell there's one out there asking $1200! For a computer that was pretty crap when it was new?
I absolutely loved the one I used from 2017-2021. It was a maxed out 2017 model in gold. Some bozo director bought it for himself with his budget then quit a month later, so this thing no one really wanted ended up on the spares pile. I grabbed it to replace my 2012 13" MacBook Pro as my "going to town" computer, i.e. the one I'd take when I needed to step away from my desk and my desktop workstation. And whaddya know, the 7Y75 i7 benchmarked about the same as the Ivy Bridge i5 it was replacing.
The wedge shape is so undeniably more humanistic and comfortable than the current MacBook Air/Neo slab. 0.14" at its thinnest, rounded at the bottom to make it easier to pick up. An excellent screen. Great trackpad. Full size keyboard, and yes, I liked the butterfly keys! Key travel is dumb! I never had issues with it and I took it into network closets and steam tunnels and ate greasy lunches next to it and all kinds of dusty, dirty places, and never had a key failure. God, what a wonderful portable computer! It was like carrying an empty clipboard around, you'd barely notice it in a stack of papers or notebooks, but open the screen and bam, full-fat macOS!
Honestly it was the last Mac I think I've used that physically delighted me. I usually cringe when I hear executives talking about wanting to "delight" customers, but that shitty little slow, overpriced Macbook with one USB-C port, absolutely delightful. Like sure, Apple Silicon was amazing but in a different sort of way, in a "wow that V12 engine sure is powerful" and not "this entire car is amazing" way. The Retina MacBook was delightful even though my nerd brain knew that as a computer, looking at raw specs, was a complete dud (though mine had 16GB of RAM, nyah nyah, take that Macbook Neo!)
And now that the vision Apple had for that device actually came true?? That we live in a mostly mobile, USB-C world where my company's conference rooms all have AirPlay and most monitors have built-in USB-C input/hubs? That they could put an ultra cut down iPhone chip in it and even if it was only as fast as a 5 year old Macbook that would still make it as fast as an M1? Oh well, now we don't get one! You will have a brutalist cold slab of a Macbook Air or a pathetically locked down iPad appliance and be happy!
Perhaps it was a great product because of those flaws, those horrible compromises they had to make to get it that small. All I can hope is that there is some skunkworks project somewhere in Cupertino, maybe even unsanctioned, of hardware designers asking themselves "what would we have to figure out if we made it 0.25 inches thick?" or "Could we get a Macbook down to 1 pound?". I want a product whose development team were told "Make a Macbook. Priority 1. light, priority 2. thin, priority 3. there is no priority 3"
Joz, Ternus, if you're reading this, I would also pay huge sums of money for a modern 11-12" ultralight Macbook. I would write Apple a blank check for one, name your price.
The Macbook equivalent of the iPhone Air. They’re already using the “air” moniker for a mac that won’t fit into a manila envelope, so they’d need a new name.
I’ve just been buying expensive parts on eBay. I have two 16GB motherboards now and a few bottom cases and screens. Shoot me an email.
Same deal with the blank check. I carry a $7k MBP, I would have paid that for a much lower spec machine if it were stupid tiny.
I dug out my old iPod from a drawer. Put the charger in - it took a couple days for it to charge. And then it was working just fine, except that the servers no longer supported the apps on it.
But the iPod is still so nice. I wish I could have a phone with that form factor. Even if it just had VOIP. The big phones are often just too much.
The missteps of those intel MacBooks are undeniable, but I also feel like the new design feels very safe and unambitious.
There is the huge notch.
The 16" model is (given screen and battery size) 35% heavier than competitors and not exactly a joy to lug around.
The keycaps continue to be made of subpar ABS getting a oily look within mere month of usage.
The use of space inside is not very efficient compared to previous models.
I generally agree, but I had the misfortune of having a tiny grain of something (it was truly microscopic) wedged between my screen and the tiny rubber gasket around the edge and that completely disabled my screen and cost $800 to repair. I'm glad they moved away from the thin obsession, and I generally agree that the new design gives the impression of robustness even if that wasn't my experience. :)
MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.
I don't want to think about how long I used that macbook where the keycaps would come off with my fingers as I typed, the switches were that broken.
It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.
That's a false dichotomy; there are plenty of keyboards that don't require recalls due to issues like the butterfly ones but also don't have the issues you're describing.
I think the preference is to have a battery that can run a CPU that's compiling, AI-ing, or rendering for an entire day (16+ hours) without having to worry about where an outlet is or being tethered to a wall or be thermal throttled. Right now that's a volume tradeoff. If there was something that ran as fast for as long and was MacBook Air (or the last Intel generation) thin, I don't think anyone would complain.
It's not exactly a decade-old issue when the problem started a decade ago and persisted for half a decade. The MacBook Pros from the tail end of that era are only just now starting to reach an age where they can reasonably be considered obsolete and due for replacement, because that kind of machine absolutely should be usable for 5+ years. From the perspective of Apple's current product offerings those laptops are many generations back, but from the perspective of the actual user base they're still recent history.
Reputational damage always outlasts the defective products. There's nothing HN-specific or even nerd-specific about that phenomenon.
> It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.
As long as they can go back to simplicity in the process. Apple has been shoving functionality into iOS for a long time now, but it's a haphazard mess. The settings app is a disaster of clutter, and searching for settings doesn't work half the time. It needs a complete rearchitecting before they start shoving more functionality into the phone.
Did you know that iPhones have tap, double tap, and triple tap (on the back of the phone) functionality that can be set to custom actions? I didn't until recently, its buried deep in the Accessibility options for...reasons? This could be promoted to a core feature, with a dedicated space in settings instead of buried.
I'm sure there's other useful functionality hidden behind the settings mess too.
Do you use a case? My guess would be that when you swipe up, you're not quite starting low enough, perhaps unconsciously, because of the case being in the way. See if a case with a thinner front or smaller bezels helps. Using your index finger also works better than the thumb.
If that doesn't help, there are some settings you can try:
1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch and turn on AssistiveTouch. Under Custom Actions, set Single-Tap to Home. Now you have a home button. You can move this button anywhere on your screen and adjust its "Idle Opacity" so it's less distracting when not in use.
2. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and choose Double Tap or Triple Tap. Select Home from the list of actions. Now you can tap on the back side of your phone to go home.
There's also Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Touch Accommodations, but that's more about preventing accidental touches and swipes, so that would probably make the situation worse for you.
> I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI.
IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it. They've shown you can still have a great company without chanting the "AI is the future" mantra day in and day out. It would be pretty disappointing for a new CEO to drag them into the cargo cult and declare "We, too, must find something that we can do with AI."
> IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it.
They both bought into hysteria and they've likely already wasted billions on it. Are you forgetting the interminable ads and announcements of "Apple Intelligence" from two years ago when even iPhones were marketed as AI-ready?
Honestly, I'm pretty bullish on Apple and AI. I think there move is in local, open source models. These are getting better and better for generic ChatGPT—type tasks. I'm kind of waiting for Apple to ship their own Ollama. And it's going to be a huge win for both them and consumers.
I just think the concept of an LLM is counter to how Apple treats content on their products. See [1] for more of my thoughts here. I think the only chance Apple embraces AI is if they manage to research a 1. local model that 2. is purely deterministic, whose output can be reliably constrained and controlled by Apple.
I don't see selling local LLM servers/software, as such, being something that makes sense for Apple, but selling an "Apple Intelligence" appliance that works with your Apple devices and/or provides home automation might do.
You can’t compare Apple to any other company. Apple is the only successful consumer hardware company (with Samsung being a distant second). They can afford to sit out the AI arms race.
You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.
Name one other successfully computer hardware company? PC makers are barely profitable commodities, other phone companies aside from Samsung are making pennies, the Microsoft XBox division is on life support, Sony sold off its TV division. The PS5 is going okay but doesn’t sell in near the numbers of iPhones. Who is left?
I would buy Mac hardware running Windows long before I would buy x86 hardware running MacOS. In fact Mac OS on x86 was really nothing remarkable. Macs were objectively worse than most Windows PCs during the last few years on x86 at least the laptops were.
Successful == decently profitable with decent profit margins. Someone else mentioned LG with an annual profit of $2.4 billion as a “successful” company.
Consumer electronics is a low margin business. Since low to mid single digit margin is typical and not every brand can be premium, like Apple, I'd say Sony and Samsung do pretty well, all things considered. "Success" is relative to the industry average.
Samsung both sells premium hardware and manufactures a lot of it own components in house and sales components to other manufacturers including Apple. I consider Samsung “successful”.
Every single low margin PC company that exists now like Dell, HP etc were much more profitable than an almost bankrupt Apple in 1997. They had no vision and decided to compete on price. It doesn’t matter why they are barely profitable low margin businesses.
Seeing there revenue vs profits, they should take Michael Dell’s (bad) advice to Jobs when he came back - “shut the company down and give the money back to shareholders” who could make more money in treasury bonds.
Only on hacker news would someone believe engineers would focus on the customer function.
Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship. Theres a reason why they almost always are shifted away from heading products.
> Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship
You must be working with shit engineers. Every product I've ever worked on, it's the engineers holding the line on quality while the side of the house that has to care about costs steadily cuts
I enjoy your contrarianism, tsunamifury, but I'd enjoy it more (and I think you'd get more thoughtful engagement) if you weren't quite so spiky about it. (This goes for a couple of your recent posts.)
I've worked at 2/3, and sure, there are shit product teams all over FAANG, but you can always decide to go work on one of the ones that does proper engineering
I'd take it at face value. Since they release open weights they would appear to genuinely want other providers to serve this as well as themselves, but the benefit of this depends on it being served accurately.
Kimi, GLM, and Minimax are the "Big Three" of open source Chinese AI startups. There's also Qwen and DeepSeek but they are all subsidized by other lines of business.
The Chinese AI models are generally 5-6 months behind high end SOTA western models (and as of the time of this comment it's Opus 4.7 and ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking, it's rumored however that the Mythos and Spud codename models are even better).
To gain market share, the Chinese startup use open source as a distribution strategy and essentially made mid-high end AI a commodity. The best models are still Western but for any application that doesn't require the highest performance in the market or if there's a need for extensive customization or alignment (imagine if you are an oil rich petro state and you don't want your national AI strategy to be tied to liberal international order ideology).
It creates a lot of pricing pressure on the low and mid end, and it's also why Anthropic is desperately trying to go full B2B instead.
However if the third parties hosting the Chinese models at near cost doesn't perform good quality control, it ruins the strategy because customers are not inclined to use chinese models anymore (and first party hosting on chinese infrastructure is out of the question because of geopolitical reasons, so everybody hides behind the polite fiction of using resellers like OpenRouter, Fal.ai, Wavespeed, fireworks AI etc.).
I've been burned on openrouter getting routed through terrible quants with equally terrible quality. While paying maybe 15% less.
Nearly a year ago it was impossible to avoid it due to silly openrouter routing algorithm and the api. You had to set multiple things just right to make it work.
Similar to their other api quirks. You want valid json format response? sure, set response_format to "json" just like our documentation suggests. Oh, it only works some of the time? How silly, why would you expect it to work all of the time? If you want it to work more often, set require_params to true. We may still use other providers that don't offer it, but you want that, right? You don't? Well, then set our "very_require_params" to "very_true". And then switch a few toggles in the frontend. Oh and also add these 7 lines just so your other config options don't break. Oh wait they will break, how silly of us Is there any way to make it work as advertised? Of course no!
Sorry for the semi-offtopic rant. I still use them every day though, but not for open models anymore.
For an interpreter / AST executor, I think a big win would be efficient parsing in the first place, in particular using a precedence parser for expressions vs recursive descent, which would avoid the need to optimize the AST to remove the 1:1 "unit productions" in the grammar.
Are you using malloc + GC in preference to smart pointers, and if so why? I thought Fil-C was just C not C++?
It doesn't seem like that is necessarily a performance win, especially since you could always use a smart pointer's raw pointer (preferably const) in a performance critical path.
Too bad they didn't put equal effort into the pelican's legs and feet. Left leg paralyzed and not moving, and right ankle flipping around in alarming fashion!
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