Swift is not heavily tied to the Apple ecosystem anymore, and it’s getting better every year.

However that perception tends to mean it’s only heavily used there.

Home charging us a reasonably thick cable. It’s not bad by any stretch but it’s more than an appliance cord.

Plus you just got home. You probably want to go inside and may be carrying packages or such, which you might have to juggle or put down to get the cable and plug in.

When it’s time to leave you have to unplug and then store the cable, leave it on the floor (trip hazard for others), or have installed an overhead cable system.

With wireless it’s all gone. Pull into you’re garage? You’re done. You were doing that anyway, so it’s no different. Ready to leave? Just back out. Again, same thing. Nothing extra.

Yeah it’s convenience. But it’s not a small win, it’s big. And it’s every time you use your car. Twice.

Your car can always charge. It can always precondition. You used to have to go to gas stations, now you don’t even have to plug in. It’s fully automatic and taken care of for you.

“You don’t need a remote. You can just get up to change the volume”. How well did that argument go over? Every TV has remotes. Buttons are hidden and effectively dead.

Well put, they had a delicate line.

Those departments buy their products. If they took that angle publicly I bet many departments would suddenly been much less interested in buying/renewing. Accountability seems to be super unpopular (which says A LOT) with their customers.

I get it, but I also just don't understand why they couldn't effectively explain to the police that they were a for-profit company. The police definitely understand that!

Like, when the police were saying "we can't turn on body cameras all the time because it might violate victims rights" the correct response from axon was "we also happen to sell a very expensive victim redaction software on a separate SKU, until you buy that probably just want to let your officers use discretion wink-nod."

(I am maybe unfairly assuming here that their actual intent was to make money rather than protect the public from police abuses. I'd love to hear from folks at Axon if that isn't true!)

They could have just talked out of both sides of their mouths. Tell the public it’s to curb abuse, tell the police in private “we all know what it’s really for” wink-wink-nudge-nudge.

Maybe offer up a few token cases where they caught abuse and the cop got in trouble or something changed as proof.

Nope. You’re right, they ran right into that wall.

I’ve been following kernel development for something like three years using LWN and other sources.

I can’t remember anyone earning the level of hostile treatment he did and getting kicked out.

I don’t see how it would ever happen.

So even if this does release pressure with no negative side effects anywhere it isn’t actually useful for preventing “the big one”.

They’ve been through this a few times before, and they absolutely know how important it is.

If they had tried to move to Apple Silicon and said “but none of your old software will work“ it would’ve been dead in the water. Look at how well the early Windows on ARM efforts went, although they were also hamstrung by hardware.

Yeah, I thought that was interesting. Knowing Apple they must’ve profiled a ton of code and decided the hit from not “fixing“ that wasn’t worth enough.

The M chips were already so much faster then the Intel chips Apple was using before (except on Mac Pro maybe) that it was probably still a net win.

> If they’re not selling tokens (and why would I want them to)

That’s one of the two things that has stood out most to me. Siri AI answers my questions. And that’s it. She stops.

Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic all constantly try and get you to answer follow-up questions. Because if you do that, you’ll use up more tokens and get more “addicted“ and end up buying a plan.

Apple doesn’t have one. I guess iCloud, but let’s face it, they already pushed that a ton anyway. They’re not trying to get you to use it for the sake of use. It’s not trying to be your friend.

And just like David Pogue says, it doesn’t lie. I just asked it an incredibly stupid question. Can you get pregnant from a picture?

“While I'm not a doctor, no, you cannot get pregnant from looking at a picture of someone. Pregnancy requires physical contact and the transfer of sperm to an egg. For accurate information regarding reproduction, consult a healthcare professional.”

Look at that! It immediately says it’s not a doctor. It gives a good answer, and then it says you need to seek out real advice to be sure things are accurate. Of the summer, I also got responses that ended with something along the lines of “I am an AI, please check information for accuracy.”

I’ve gotten incorrect answers, but they come with disclaimers and it doesn’t act like some omnipotent god that is desperate to be your friend.

You realize this isn’t an Apple marketing piece, it’s an extremely well known tech reviewer who used to work for the NYT and was one of the two(?) who was allowed to test the iPhone before its release.

I wonder if it would start to make sense for SRAM caches to shrink (or not grow as fast) in favor of adding on chip DRAM cache at some tier.

Or AMD’s putting sram on a separate chip. I’m surprised they didn’t go there yet except for extra L3 instead of all of it. At some point the costs will shift the decisions.