It's still a steal, I'm really sad that european union settled on this terms.
15% cut on purchases outside the app store THAT'S CRAZY !!
I'm so shocked to read this "Each of these commissions reflects the many ways Apple creates value for developers’ apps, whether they use the App Store and/or Apple In-App Purchase." whereas it's app developpers that create value for Apple.
While the app store was a much better deal than ISP stores for the smartphones when it was introduced, Apple's hubris is too much and, almost no app developers care about VisionPro exactly because of that, it isn't only the price.
> Apple's hubris is too much and, almost no app developers care about VisionPro exactly because of that, it isn't only the price.
Ah, I think it probably is the price, though Apple's hubris may be the cause of them thinking a product at that price was ever a good idea.
If you're a developer, chase the users. AVP is extremely expensive, so there's not a lot of users, so not much reason for developers to care: even cheap VR hardware has problems getting enough users to justify the effort to make games (let alone other apps) work well on it. Even ignoring AVP, the whole category's sales are, what, mostly Beat Sabre? I think? You don't need a 3.5k device for a rhythm action game.
The extreme discomfort of eye tracking based interactions for power users is what kept it off of my head. You have to maintain eye contact with the ui element you want to touch throughout the entire gesture. It’s kind of miserable for someone who is fluent with computers.
This is just speculation, but I suppose it's because Apple is also collaborating/contributing in the EU Chat Control 2.0 legislation, so they may have some argument that completely opening the door for uncontrolled app installs may not allow them to comply with such legislation.
As I said, just speculation, but this is how most of the time these things go
A continuously running agent might require 100-500W for inference, so comparable to gaming or a small space heater. Not obscene, but also not negligible.
If we assume 250W for a continuously running agent, Grok 4 training run estimate would be around 50 million session-days, so a half-million people might consume as much running agents continuously for 100 days.
We might suspect the hardware used for the LLM is very similar to a graphics card and so the wattage would be extremely similar to using a graphics card to display a game's graphics in the first place. Which puts a certain ironic perspective on tokarf's original comment.
To serve a frontier model you need a lot more than one GPU... at least 8. But for better efficiency they batch multiple requests on one server. So it is sort of a coincidence that it ends up roughly in 1 consumer GPU range. A different architecture (e.g. linear attention / RNN) could end up with more peak power usage.
All of a sudden we are selectively squeamish with computer resource usage, when we were fine having all that fun with computers and hardware, 3 monitor setups, using graphic cards to play games (dear lord!) and tinkering around with home rigs of every proportion and wattage for no reason at all.
Driving a car consumes 25+ more energy per hour than gaming. So urban planning which encourages people to drive likely results in an order of magnitude more waste than all home computer use.
Presumably you're fine with using electricity to heat/cool your house, yes?
Would you, then, also be fine with running three extra air conditioners/space heaters that do nothing but sit outside on the lawn?
"People are OK with the energy usage already happening, so they should be OK with adding 32,767 AI datacenters too" doesn't make sense. It's essentially a reductio ad absurdum. Of course we're "selectively squeamish with computer resource usage"; some usage is obviously useful to us (with entertainment also in the "useful" category—we're not robots!), while for many, many of us, the extra datacenters are having anywhere from a neutral to a profoundly net-negative impact on our lives even before you consider the resource usage.
I mean, if you actually understood the scale of AI power usage, it would make sense. A TV can run 200 watts/hour, so this is equivalent to... watching TV?
Or, perhaps, watching TV in the background while you program.
We are not in a power crisis, and data centers have had basically no impact on our lives compared to previous technologies. There are more data centers used for the internet, but somehow you're still here, using a data center to complain about checks notes data centers? Really? Well that's a bit cheeky.
Sorry I'm a bit old school I don't watch tv when I program. What's the point of watching tv while programming anyway ? But can you really watch tv while programming ?
I can't
But maybe when you watch tv while programming you can watch documentaries about water crisis triggered by I datacenter usage, or maybe you can watch some reports about Elon using very poluting gas turbines to generate energy for their massive grok datacenter ...
I'm sorry, when individual datacenters are drawing more power than entire cities, and needing to build entire new fossil-fuel-burning power plants to service their needs, you'll excuse me if I'm skeptical of your "it's just like watching TV" excuse there.
You might find it enlightening to look at the power draw and environmental impact of other technologies, for a sense of scale.
LLMs didn't even exist when we started expressing concern about global warming, the internet still uses the vast majority of data centers and thus power, smartphone manufacturing is a nightmare on multiple levels, the environmental effects of factory farming are staggering even if you apply zero moral weight to the suffering, the existence of automobiles... what automobiles used to be like...
It just seems bizarre to care about these issues solely in the context of one particular technology, while giving a free pass to everything prior.
No one's saying we shouldn't care about the impact of other technologies and industries too.
But when the AI industry is sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into building a huge number of datacenters, many of which have already been proven to have environmental and legal problems, sitting there saying, "You didn't complain when we got TV!" or even "You didn't complain when the datacenters were for AWS!" is just transparently trying to change the subject without addressing the very real concerns.
It's hardly "changing the subject" to try and establish whether this is actually a proportional effort. Your concern should, in fact, be relative to the harm something does. A single car killing one person is not a reason to demand the abolishment of the automotive industry.
If you care about saving the environment, you could do vastly more by protesting a dozen different causes. You can't give any reason this cause is special - just vague "environmental and legal problems" that probably add up to a half-dozen anecdotes. Meanwhile, Google is out there spending hundreds of billions of dollars and racking up it's own record of proven environmental and legal problems, and you can't even bring yourself to say "yeah, and I condemn Google and all other data centers" - partly because you're using a data center to send the message in the first place
> It's hardly "changing the subject" to try and establish whether this is actually a proportional effort.
No, that's basically the definition of whataboutism.
We are talking about the problems with datacenters. You are trying to claim that we shouldn't be concerned with the problems of datacenters if we aren't at least equally concerned with the problems of X, Y, and Z other things.
There is no world in which that's a sound argument.
There is a world. In that world data centers are not a net problem, but net solution.
Looking at car exhaust and concluding that cars must be bad would be a questionable conclusion. We tolerate them despite the pollution they cause, not for it.
The same can go for data centers, again, if you conclude that they are net solution. If you don't, then it won't for you. The market simply disagrees with you in that case.
@vmaxmc2 Most sparkling waters are not naturally sparkling, co2 is injected.
On the contrary, Rozanna and St Yorre and it seems St Géron are natural sparkling water ... and are the less liked ...
You should add that info to your matrix
"we don’t need to know a lot about
you to deliver a great experience on Apple Maps."
-> so you still need to know a little about me ?
"Even if you choose to sign in, Maps keeps your data in sync across all your devices using end-to-end encryption — so where you go isn’t associated with your Apple Account at all."
-> looks like magic, data is synced accross all your devices but without using your apple account ...
For shop owners buying ads, they'll still need to provide statistics of view, clicks and conversions and that needs tracking. So that's not different from google. Apple claims to be the champion of privacy, that's just hypocritical. Just check the apple Advertising & Privacy page.
While letting Facebook, TikTok and others secretly track you for years, across devices AND DEVICE REINSTALLS, through Apple's iCloud Keychain API, to store data that users cannot see or delete on iOS, except through the macOS Keychain app, and even then it's dubious if that's all that's actually stored.
I'm not sure I follow, presumably if these are using the Keychain API they're doing so via the app, to which you must be logged in, so they are already tracking you and the keychain thing achieves... nothing?
Even if you delete and reinstall the app, it remembers your logins and who you are. Even after you wipe the iPhone/iPad and setup with the same Apple ID/iCloud account.
Discord automatically logged me in ON A NEW IPAD, because I signed into the same Apple ID/iCloud account.
and I assume all the other apps from a company can share that info, like Facebook ↔ WhatsApp
Funnily enough, Apple allowed users to delete that data when deleting an app, during an iOS beta, but removed that feature before release, heavily in favor of the spyware and against users.
The keychain data of an app on iOS is NEVER removed from your device, unless you completely wipe the device. This has been the behavior since the beginning.
I've been ranting about this since 5 years, and every time it mostly just gets ignored. You can Google or ask ChatGPT about the iCloud Keychain API.
And to see for yourself, open the Keychain Access app on your Mac, and search for "Facebook", "TikTok" etc (that data is accessible by those apps on all your other Apple devices too)
> For shop owners buying ads, they'll still need to provide statistics of view, clicks and conversions and that needs tracking. So that's not different from google.
The difference is in how the data is handled. One is using it as an asset to update the FBI-like file they have on you. The other is treating it like a hot potato.
Nextcloud is an old product that inherit from Owncloud developed in php since 2010.
It has extensibility at its core through the thousands of extensions available.
I'm not saying that sourcehut is the same in any way, but I want the difference between GitHub and sourcehut to be the difference between NextCloud and alternative.
> Nextcloud is an old product that inherit from Owncloud developed in php since 2010.
Tough situation to be in, I don't envy it.
> It has extensibility at its core through the thousands of extensions available.
Sure, but I think for some limited use cases, something better could be imagined.
Nextcloud not perfect but it's still one of a major project that has not shifted to business oriented licence and where all components are available and not paywalled with enterprise edition.
So yes not perfect, bloated js but it works and is maintained.
So I'd rather thanks all developers involved in nextcloud than whine about bloated js.
I'm so shocked to read this "Each of these commissions reflects the many ways Apple creates value for developers’ apps, whether they use the App Store and/or Apple In-App Purchase." whereas it's app developpers that create value for Apple.
Without apps, Apple platform is dead.