I’m absolutely floored by some of what I am reading here. Six months before passkeys rolled out there were numerous succinct consumer-friendly write-ups. I sent at least one of these to several non-technical people I knew and they had no problem understanding the benefit and moving to using them where available once they started rolling out.
For just the two daily BART trips that I do within SF, it would be $1200+/mo for Waymo/Uber/Lyft. So from that perspective perhaps the extra $30/mo for the small convenience of getting priority and being able to cancel a few rides could be seen as “cheap” by comparison.
If I include the walks of 30+ minutes and bus rides, it’s probably pushing $2k/mo in rideshare costs.
Companies are hitting their budgeted limits for AI tokens less than half way through the year and reporting that they aren’t seeing enough benefit to substantially increase that budget, and so they are scaling back use and asking people to be prudent rather than token maxxing.
In the meantime subscriptions still exist in the form of chatbots and it’s easy to exceed the inference cost of the provider by simply using your daily, weekly, and monthly limits.
The reality is that we just don’t seem to be at a point now where people are willing to pay full price for the perceived value. Perhaps we’ll get there within another generation or two of hardware and software improvements.
And yet they are not profitable on an ongoing basis, and aren’t even claiming to be.
The supply is currently constrained because 50+% of data center plans were cancelled as a result of the impossibility of the buildouts happening in a timely fashion, and subscriptions are charging a small fraction of the actual cost of inference, leading them to all bleed money, hence the rush to IPO to get one last infusion, since many of the past investors have publicly stated they aren’t putting any more money in until they see an ROI.
As someone who has both TE and monome gear along with Elektron, Moog, and a decent variety of other gear, I still don’t understand the hate toward TE and it reminds me very much of the Apple haters who bash the company no matter what they ship claiming it’s all over-priced and that you can get better gear for less.
Back in the early 2000’s people made the same sort of comments about Apple laptops that I see applied to TE where they claimed
Apple made laptops for hipsters rather than serious machines.
I find monome a really curious example to use in particular because if anything norns is incredibly overpriced for what it does (something people call out regularly in forums).
TE makes a particular form factor that is small, light, easy to travel with, and easy to pull out and use with a small amount of space for a music setup. I pull out my TX-6 far more often than my Audiofuse Studio these days for that reason. Despite it being more expensive with fewer features the convenience for someone that doesn’t have a large dedicated space for music more than makes up for the price premium.
If you compare the trajectories, I think it’s safe to say software has been a dumpster fire under Craig compared to what’s been accomplished on the hardware side. The fact that Craig has been the face of WWDC for many years made many people see him as the face of the company but it’s been clear they have been elevating Ternus’s visibility in product announcements for a few years now.
Apple Silicon wasn’t under his purview, that would be Johny Srouji.
Not saying that Ternus wouldn’t have been involved in or part of the decision making process in moving the Mac to Apple-designed silicon, but I haven’t seen any indication he was any more involved than other execs at the company.
I wrote RPG II code in the 80s and helped the company I was working part-time for transition to another one of these S/36 emulation environments on the PC in the 90s. The software we used was made by the very generically named California Software Products.
It worked well enough and allowed the company to run until the founder retired and folded the business.