The link you posted does not support your conclusion at all.

There have been rumors of Cook retiring for the past five years, at least, and I’m pretty sure that shareholders are quite happy with Apple market cap at almost $4 trillion.

It has nothing to do with AI.

AI is a non essential tool. Anything that a chatbot produces, can and should be achievable by a human with access to the same sources of information. Anyone hired to do a specialist job, who cannot perform without access to AI, should be summarily fired because their output would be indistinguishable from that of their LLM of choice.

In contrast, the Internet (as massive interconnected network), computers, even books, enable humans to deal with information in ways impossible to achieve without them, and help augment us. Reading feeds your brain. Computers are a window to creativity. AI does nothing of the sort, in fact I believe it does the opposite, pushing us to outsource our thinking processes while making us feel smart, undeservedly.

We aren’t comparing humans to code.

Except for the bit where LLM behaviors aren’t deterministic, but those of most compilers in most situations are.

And before anyone says that LLVM in version X produced wildly different assembly from version Y, it is not remotely comparable to what LLMs do, not even close.

I would need a citation for that “2x-5x faster” with the same quality, because that hasn’t been my experience at all. Most of my colleagues treat LLMs as “better Google”, and agentic coding in production has been downsized, to the point where it may help with the least critical paths only. And we aren’t particularly AI skeptic, at all.

Also, I feel like progress has stalled in the past couple of years, e.g. Opus latest version doesn’t seem to provide me with any noticeable advantages over the previous one. Are they getting better on paper? I suppose they do, but I couldn’t care less about that if they don’t give me better results.

The thing is, writing code was never the issue, engineering it is. If a machine helps me write code 10 times faster, that saves me maybe a couple hours, which isn’t really meaningful. On the other hand, it increases my workload by forcing me to thoroughly check the work of less experienced devs who rely on them, just to make sure that there aren’t errors that could cause serious harm.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that AI is giving inexperienced people confidence they shouldn’t have in the first place, and that’s not a good thing.

What does it mean? Because just yesterday I saw this guy live streaming a vibe coding session, and he sounded exactly like “Bill”.

If you only need it for development, and will still host the final product in Vercel, why wouldn’t you just test locally?

There are no reputable sources for this.

It looks like for every item, a 20% pre-order discount is applied. If so, that’s just way too much money. The tenting set is just two bits of aluminum and it’s $49 after discount, that’s insane.

Anyone who is literate enough to use a random smartphone can do that

You clearly live in a different world from most of us. I’ll leave it here.

I think you are missing the bigger point here.

Most smartphone users cannot operate a local backup using a RPi. In fact, most users worldwide cannot afford to buy and run a RPi 24/7.

Most smartphone users are not able to afford a Google Drive plan that holds all their pics.

Most smartphone users are just not literate enough to even understand where they pics are, or that they may need a backup plan at all.

You cannot apply your life experiences to quite literally a billion people for whom smartphones are likely the only thing with a screen they own. And yeah, among those, plenty of iPhone users who bought it for cheap or got it for free with their cellular plan.

Yeah, we get it, you know what is needed and how it needs to be done, and you have the cash to do it. But maybe you should realize that you are the exception, a tiny minority.

Now you are assuming that most people are literate enough to do any of those things.

If that was true, repair stores making money off dirty phone USB connectors wouldn’t be a thing.

Regardless, cost is still a thing.

That seems to be a very North American point of view, as it ignores the fact that many people worldwide cannot afford not to own a smartphone.

There are billions out there who must use smartphones because entire economies run on apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, or Line, from government appointments to QR based payments. Slowly but surely, many countries are moving towards smartphone centric societies. Not saying it is good or bad, just the way it is.

A sizeable part of those societies have to weight the price of a backup plan, which is, let’s say, $2 a month forever, or else they will lose access to their backup data. And when they have spent $300-$500 on a device that will have to last them for 7 to 10 years, $24 a year is hard to justify.

That’s a terrible take, one you wouldn’t use if this was Google or Samsung.

I get that. I’m just saying that the sentence “this is the problem with apple ecosystem” isn’t accurate, since all mega corps behave the same.

I don’t think this is exclusive to Apple.

Not everyone can afford to have a back up plan.