Hardware revenue is 3x the services revenue, even with half the margins it still generates more profit than services. I get that Apple would like to increase service revenue but they are a hardware company at heart and their financial statements show it too
The battery life stinks, the build quality is subpar and the fan runs all the time. If you don't care about anything that makes the MacBook Pro a premium device, then sure you can be overpriced consumer-grade slop that has a slight edge in specs (except CPU). But it's a miserable trade-off.
The world would be a better place without AI, OpenAI, Anthropic and all others. It only immerses the world into chaos, dystopia and increased inequality. So far nothing for the public good has come out of it.
I agree here. Sure, certain tasks that would take weeks are just one prompt away now. But out of a group of 100 people, how many are able to come up with the correct prompt?
Good question indeed, I think quality matters less these days because it's trivial for an LLM to increase code quality.
Quality is usually observed from a human perspective. But in my experience, codebases that humans would judge as "low quality" are actually fine for LLMs. They don't have as much trouble as we do with spaghetti code. They don't have problems with readability or obscure syntax, it's all perfectly fine for them. They don't care about indentation either.
Also it's really easy to increase the quality of the code base. You can just prompt to add unit test coverage and it will. You can prompt the LLM to handle edge cases better and it will (you don't even have to specify which, it helps, but it's optional). If you want to have better separation of concerns, just ask the LLM to have more separation of concerns and you'll have it. Documentation lacking? Just one prompt away. More robust build pipeline? You get the idea.
1. Usually the commit message is often too short to capture the "why" adequately.
2. It is very beneficial to capture the why in one single source of truth, and that usually is not the Git commit message in a business context. Hate on Jira all you want, but if you capture the "why" there, you can add comments, view history, add rich context, link dependencies, add rich context, etc. Can't do that in a Git commit message.
Made me buy a MacBook Air instead. Waited for a long time because I was not a fan of macOS, but Apple is quite cheap in all segments nowadays. A well-specced MacBook Pro these days is cheaper than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The MacBook Air at ~$1000 price point with 16GB/512GB is also incredibly hard to beat in price, and even if you pay the premium for a Windows competitor (crazy sentence) you actually get a less than premium experience: worse build quality, worse display, worse battery life.
I don't think so. AI use is still very limited. For OpenAI and Anthropic and the AI boom to match their valuation, AI adoption needs to increase substantially. The current constraint is data centers. Pricing will be heavily influenced by market dynamics. Plenty of things that should be cheap aren't because of scarcity (simple example: RAM).
I doubt that. The developer community is what made the MacBook predominant in every tech organization. Before that Macs were mostly popular in the creative sector.
I was trying to come up with a response but you're right. It would be easy for Apple and Apple would get so much goodwill from the community in return.