That's kind of a weird one because the PC market has notably regressed there over the past few years. Other than the Surface Pro 12 there've been no fanless PC laptops released since 2022-ish, when there used to be dozens.
On a technical basis, fanless PC laptops released now would be better than the ones in 2022 just on the basis of 2022 lineup having a moribund lineup of CPUs (Snapdragon SQ1, Amber Lake, etc.) You could release a lineup now that would be broadly competitive with the M1 at least, but it doesn't seem to be a market segment that PC OEMs are interested in.
Right, so, a K-12 education-oriented PC with an Intel N-series chip, about 1/3 as fast as what you get with an M4 (or worse).
When I asked my snarky question I'm really talking about "fanless laptops that someone would actually want to use and get some serious use out of."
The regression of the PC market is because the PC market didn't see the ARM train coming from a million miles away and just sat there and did nothing. They saw smartphones performing many times more efficiently than PCs and shrugged their arms at it.
Meanwhile, Apple's laptop marketshare has purportedly doubled from 10% to 20% or perhaps even higher since the M1 lineup was released.
I say this as someone who actually moved away from Apple systems to a Linux laptop. Don't get me wrong, modern Intel and AMD systems are actually impressively efficient and can offer somewhat competitive experiences, but the MacBook Air as an every-person's experience is really tough to beat (consider also, you could get a MacBook Air M2 for $650 during the most recent Black Friday sales, and you'd have a really damn hard time finding any sort of PC hardware that's anywhere near as nice, never mind match it on performance/battery life).
Yeah, like we're in agreement about the current state of the market, I just don't think it has to be that way. The Surface Pro 12 is fanless, so presumably anyone else could make a fanless Snapdragon laptop if they wanted to. (My daily driver work laptop is Windows-on-ARM, and most everything works pretty well on it.)
Battery isn't relevant to plugged-in devices, and in the end, electricity costs roughly the same to generate and deliver to a data center as to a home. The real cost advantage that cloud has is better amortization of hardware since you can run powerful hardware at 100% 24/7 spread across multiple people. I wouldn't bet on that continuing indefinitely, consumer hardware tends to catch up to HPC-exclusive workloads eventually.
You could have an AppleTV with 48 GB VRAM backing the local requests, but... the trend is "real computers" disappearing from homes, replaced by tablets and phones. The advantage the cloud has is Real Compute Power for the few seconds you need to process the interaction. That's not coming home any time soon.
Interestingly, some of Apple’s devices do already serve a special purpose like this in their ecosystem. The HomePod, HomePod Mini, and Apple TV act as Home Hubs for your network, which proxy WAN Apple Home requests to your IoT devices. No other Apple devices can do this.
They also already practice a concept of computational offloading with the Apple Watch and iPhone; more complicated fitness calculations, like VO2Max, rely on watch-collected data, but evidence suggests they’re calculated on the phone (new VO2Max algorithms are implemented when you update iOS, not watchOS)
So yeah; I can imagine a future where Apple devices could offload substantial AI requests to other devices on your Apple account, to optimize for both power consumption (plugged in versus battery) and speed (if you have a more powerful Mac versus your iPhone). There’s good precedent in the Apple ecosystem for this. Then, of course, the highest tier of requests are processed in their private cloud.
If the cloud AI is ad or VC-supported, sure, but that doesn't seem like a sustainable way to provide good user experience.
And don't worry, I'm sure some enterprising electricity company is working out how to give you free electricity in exchange for beaming more ads into your home.
I recently logged onto LinkedIn for the first time in a while, and found an old job posting from when I was hiring at a startup ~2 decades ago. It's amazing how much it sounds like LLM output—I would have absolutely flagged it as AI-generated if I saw it today.
Philips Hue also doesn't allow for an email change, and they've been around longer than OpenAI. And if you want to delete your Philips Hue account to create a new one with a new email there's considerable pain involved if you have a house with many Hue products.
You can use 3rd party apps/tools to get around this, FWIW.
I use OpenHue on Linux. On iOS I've not had much luck finding a quality app, however a long time ago I did find a good one for Android...(I just don't remember the name, sorry.)
The account login crap is ridiculous, considering you don't even need internet to use their stuff. The lack of needing a login was the whole reason I bought into the ecosystem to begin with.
> That requires extra hardware in your network though, right?
It requires a Hue bridge, but all the official Hue apps need that too (unless you're using the new Bluetooth support, which very few people are). You shouldn't need any other hardware though.
> The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.
Locally, it doesn't really matter, since everything just goes over the local network. You're definitely correct for remote access though, but I hardly ever need to control my lights remotely.
> Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive.
That's only if you're only looking at the top 10% or w/e of the market in the first place. New grad software engineer salaries at MS are higher than the median software engineer salary in the US.
> Name a major U.S. public company in recent years that has consistently prioritized improving its product over boosting short term stock price or extracting maximum profits.
Well in some perverse sense, I'd say Meta qualifies here. Zuck isn't beholden to other shareholders and is free to burn truckloads of money on worthless projects. The big asterisk is that for Meta, "improving its product" is effectively "creating the best digital cigarettes".
I guess it depends on what kind of investor you are.
If you're holding MS stock long-term, and you plan to gradually shift away from equities as you near retirement and then gradually liquidate your holdings to fund your retirement, juicing the stock in the short term does nothing for you.
If you're holding short-term, then you also need to sell the stock after it gets juiced, so that you can move your capital to not-yet-juiced stocks.
Missed a point above - that for said short-term investor... that strategy doesn't actually work, since a "sell high buy low" strategy on individual stocks is outperformed by just holding ETFs long-term.
So really, which investors does short-term stock juicing benefit? Insider traders, I guess.
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