If you look at Apple's profits - it's about evenly split between 'Services' ( like music and app sales etc ) and hardware.
Now hardware gross revenue is about 3x the services - but the profit margin is much higher on services.
Apple don't break out the numbers so it's difficult to know how much of that service revenue is tied to people owning Apple hardware and how much is independent ( like Apple Music or Apple TV ).
yeah I think the key point is in your last sentence - maybe some people would buy Apple Music/TV without an iphone or an AppleTV? I don't think anyone would buy icloud without the hardware though. And presumably they're bundling applecare in the "services" as well :)
Why oh why for example can't you resize the System Settings window?
If you are in the wallpaper view - there is content off the screen to the right, but no visible scroll bar, nor ability to resize. The only way to scroll appears to use the keyboard to navigate the wallpapers ( which has the side effect of setting them ).
On the other hand - the transition from Intel to ARM, which has totally transformed their hardware offering, was pretty seamless and is down to large part good software.
Indeed - and given LLM's have made the 'command line' great again and voice isn't appropriate in every scenario ( far too public ), hard to see how text input isn't critical.
Not sure China actually needs to invade Taiwan - it just needs to be patient. cf Hong Kong.
Totally agree with you about the dangers of autonomous killing machines - I think the two key problems here are.
1. Reduces the political cost of going to war. Though as Iran has shown, there are other ways to exert political pressure even if the other military can hit you with almost impunity.
2. This is really a follow on from the first - low cost ( in all meanings of the word ) weapons makes asymmetric warfare available to all - and this won't be limited to governments.
On the positive side one of the potential outcomes of 2. is that countries and the world will need to operate on the principle of consent, as force will be nigh on impossible.
Depends how you define “technical requirement” but I’d say 404 for example is an indication of a failure to serve a given resource. If you don’t have logging you won’t know unless someone complains which means you’ll only catch the most visible issues. Same goes for performance - everywhere I’ve ever worked serving a resource was tightly coupled to “how fast can the user retrieve that resource”.
> I mean, that's what I'd do if I could afford to hire a person to operate those tools for me. That, again, is the best mental model for LLMs - they're little people on a chip, cheaper to employ than actual people.
Sounds like more of a threat to people than software then.
I get the point that if an agent could generate a presentation by directly writing to some open format with a free viewer then PowerPoint would be out of the picture.
However the tool has to be pretty close to 100% for that to work. If I have a presentation that's 90% there it's probably going to be a lot easier to finish it off manually in Powerpoint than try different variants of prompts. In which case I'll still need that Powerpoint license.
I think HVDC is a more important component in smoothing out demand/supply than you give it credit for, especially if you add wind into the mix.
In terms of security - one of the reasons nuclear power stations are so expensive is they have to survive a targeted plane crash etc - they are expensive high profile targets.
In the end the renewables model is a much more distributed model of generation, storage and consumption ( rather than a few massive power stations ) - so with a proper grid you could argue you would have fewer single points of failure, and increased resilence.
Nuclear power plants are not expensive per unit of power delivered.
"distributed" sounds good as long as you don't think about it too much, because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation: all these "distributed" plants produce very much in lockstep due to external factors (day/night, weather, seasons) that are extremely correlated, much more than any set of nuclear power plants ever could be.
Intermittent renewables do not increase resilience, they massively reduce resilience. In Germany, redispatch has increased more than tenfold in order to keep the grid stable in light of the destabilizing influence of intermittents that have been introduced. Spain just suffered their blackout last year with over a hundred deaths due to this destabilization (though the PR is trying everything to deflect the blame).
> because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation
It does it if your interconnects make the grid scale large enough, and it does if you consider distributed generation and storage as part of the overall system.
Sure if you take a grid designed for centralised on-demand generation, and apply that to renewable generation then you'll have problems. However I'm not suggesting that.
I'm also not suggesting something that has no emergency on-demand generation capacity.
> they massively reduce resilience.
I'm not talking about renewables alone - but in tandem with a grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones, multiple layers of distributed generation and storage.
Note nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline.
> grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones,
"Night" reaches across more time-zones than you can build your grid across.
Never mind "winter".
> nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline.
Define "often".
They are actually a lot more reliably than you seem to think: the capacity factor of the US fleet, for example, was >90% for the last decade(s). And that <10% offline time includes the planned refueling/inspection/maintenance times.
> Night" reaches across more time-zones than you can build your grid across.
> Never mind "winter".
Demand isn't at an even level across the night ( high early evening, low 3 am ) - if your grid spans time-zones you can smooth that out, and renewables span more than solar. Wind doesn't stop at night, hydro doesn't stop at night etc.
> nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline.
Maybe it's a UK thing with nuclear reactors operating beyond their initial design life - but there was a situtation last year where the majority of them were down at the same time and the UK had to make high use of our interconnect with france ( using their nuclear capacity ). In the UK the 2025 nuclear output was 12% down on the previous year due to outages.
The point here is that a grid that expands beyond national boundaries - helps in general, not just specifically for renewables. And before you go on about energy sovereignty - where do you think the Uranium comes from?
> VC by default are founder friendly in my experience.
Founders are only one stakeholder. There are employees ( I think they fall into that category ), customers, suppliers, and the wider society.
It all comes back to why does the company exist - and for which stakeholders. I think that's the point the original author is making.
I don't buy the argument that making money in the end is a perfect surrogate for overall good - it's not - it's an imperfect surrogate - and to pretend it is a perfect surrogate is just an excuse to behave like an arsehole.
To make that concrete, let's say you are a chemical company making paints - really important job, paints are needed the cheaper you can make them, the more people can have them etc, but if you knowingly pollute a local river just because you can get away with it and increase your profits - saying that increased profits justifies polluting the river based on the assumption that river pollution is correctly priced ( free ) is an obvious convenient excuse to be a selfish arsehole.
I dont this wisdom can be applied generically. Lets consider your example, if leader or founder comes across the fact that a river is getting polluted whether it makes profit or not, they will not take that decision as it would impact longer term.
What you are mixing is founder led business vs ceo led business. CEO often takes a short term view, when stakeholders are PE Firm, wall street, short term gains are prioritized. But for, a long term investor, would not incentivize you to take calls that would harm in long run.
What could be wrong is that, you wouldnt know all the consequences and causality of your decisions and thats very human thing in my opinion.
Not sure why you went the founder versus CEO route - wasn't particularly picking on founders.
The general point is that leaders are people and many CEO/founders are decent, hardworking, brave people, and some people are arseholes - and I just wanted to highlight one of the excuses arseholes make for their behaviour.
Also note I have no special insight into the specific situation the original poster talked about - I do know working out how to hand on a company you've grown and led to the next generation is one of the hardest challenges.
That's not to say there isn't a lot to say about the positive power of markets - it's just that simplifying that to 'if I'm making money therefore it must be a societal optimal outcome' kind of justification is BS.
Clearly LLMs are tools which can be used for good or ill. The supplier of raw chemicals to the paint factory isn't really responsible for the river pollution.
However you are right to point out there is a problem. Typically societies ( via governments ) try and fix by appropriately pricing the behaviours via regulation/laws ( fines or prison for the people doing it ).
However making regulation/laws is hard. What's your proposal to fix the problem you've identified?
Has anybody built a UI around the opposite? Shrinking?
ie rather that zooming in on the content of interest, shrinking the content not of interest?
Long time ago I used to use https://www.windowmaker.org/ as my X11 window manager and one of the features I really liked was the ability to shrink a window to an icon and place that icon on the desktop for future retrieval ( a bit like having the whole desktop like the MacOS dock ).
I find such an interface easier to navigate than one where you zoom in and out - where the it's too easy to lose overall context, and where navigation is a bit too linear/hierarchical.
Now hardware gross revenue is about 3x the services - but the profit margin is much higher on services.
Apple don't break out the numbers so it's difficult to know how much of that service revenue is tied to people owning Apple hardware and how much is independent ( like Apple Music or Apple TV ).
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