No. I don’t want Apple to make LLM Siri. I do wish they would become the company unlocking creativity instead of shackling it. I will give you one specific example: iOS has extreme limitations on what it allows app developers to display on the Lock Screen. The area each app gets is limited. What gets displayed and how is very limited. How often the data gets displayed is limited.
This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.
It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?
The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.
Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.
iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!
I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.
Frankly I think it’s the opposite - Apple is one of the only BigCo without an advertising based biz model. Unlike say Meta, Apple didn’t profit directly from increased engagement with your iPhone (at least to a sizable extent), they profit when you purchase a new device. This alignment of incentives is what allows Apple to at least marginally prioritize user privacy in a way Meta/ Google just structurally cannot.
40% (and growing) of Apple’s profits are from services. Margins on services are 3x of hardware.
Apple doesn’t make money directly when you doom scroll but a lot of App Store revenue is a by product of people simply using their device in unlocked state.
Dumb question: why do news websites have such a hard time keeping users logged in? Like I can go an entire year without getting logged out of gmail. But can't go more than a few days before getting logged out of news websites.
I have subscribed to news sites and still use something like archive.is because it is faster than my paid experience.
I've been stunned by how many smart people talk so casually about LLMs becoming better at math. Do they just forget that a calculator that is wrong 1% of the time is a de facto calculator that doesn't work and should not be used?
Doing math is not the same as calculating. LLMs can be very useful in doing math; for calculating they are the wrong tool (and even there they can be very useful, but you ask them to use calculating tools, not to do the calculations themselves—both Claude and ChatGPT are set up to do this).
If you're curious, check out how mathematicians like Robert Ghrist or Terence Tao are using LLMs for math research, both have written about it online repeatedly (along with an increasing number of other researchers).
Apart from assisting with research, their ability on e.g. math olympiad problems is periodically measured and objectively rapidly improving, so this isn't just a matter of opinion.
You realize that when typing into a calculator, you probably hit a wrong key more than 1% of the time? Which is why you always type important calculations twice?
I've been stunned by how many smart people talk so casually about how because LLMs aren't perfect, they therefore have no value. Do they just forget that nothing in the world is perfect, and the values of things are measured in degrees?
There’s a big difference between mistyping 1% of the time yourself (human error) and a calculator failing 1% of the time (machine error) and I am willing to bet there isn’t a company out there (maybe a handful of less scrupulous ones) that has knowingly shipped a calculator that got it wrong 1% of the time. Especially in previous decades when countless people were using a dedicated calculator dozens of times a day. Hard to imagine a 1% margin of error was acceptable.
Not to mention now you have the compounded problem of your mistakes plus the calculator’s mistakes.
The computer on your desk has a number of errors just holding values in memory.
Yes, it's not 1%, but the argument is about them being imperfect devices. It's not a horrible thing to start with the presumption that calculators are not perfect.
Yes but I don’t depend on the output of my comp’s memory in such explicit terms and it doesn’t have lasting consequences. If my calculator literally gives me the wrong answer 1% of the time that’s a bigger problem.
There isn't a difference in the big picture. Error is error. Even when we have incredibly reliable things, there's error when they interface with humans. Humans have error interfacing with each other.
But you seem to have missed the main point I was making. See? Another error. They're everwhere! ;)
Good luck. I lost access to my Facebook account of 18 years a few years ago due to some 2fa bug (it tells me to enter a code from the fb app which doesn’t have that code.) Despite sending copies of my passport, license etc, the automated systems are of no help.
Downside is it doesn’t allow mp3s. I’ve been making my own meditation mp3s using AI tools and wish I could listen to them when I’m on my walk with mighty and no phone.
>I think the real question is if someone other than Steve Jobs was running Apple, would they have gone the same way the companies you listed go as well?
I think the true lesson to learn from the CEOs who weren’t Steve Jobs was that one of them had the foresight to get Steve Jobs back, after he had proven he was a keen leader with NeXt and especially with Pixar.
Clearly you're not as keen business-wise as noted terrible CEO Gil Amelio, who correctly saw that NeXt being in the dumpster was a good thing, since they needed its software, not its revenues.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, likely if NeXT had been doing better financially Apple couldn't have afforded it. You can check NeXT's aborted S-1 here.[1] They had an accumulated deficit of $273 million as of a few month's earlier, were almost out of cash, and were losing money.
Apple's purchase price of $400 million was not exactly a bonanza to their investors...
While I continue to dig in to the specifics of the billing and support issues described, I can confirm this bit from the blog post:
if you stored 2 million images and delivered 1 million images, your total cost for that month for the Images product should be ~$210, not $400+
I've reached out to the author to get some additional information which will help me investigate this further. Also happy to chat with anyone else with questions or issues (zaid at cloudflare)
It seems like the author already went above and beyond to try to get this resolved through the proper channels. Why did it take an HN front page post to get it actually looked into? It does not inspire confidence in your service.
The thing is that Cloudflare has no proper channels. Anyone that has tried Cloudfare's support (even as a paying customer) knows that it's almost impossible to get a sensible answer to anything.
That's the way tech companies work today. You need to have connections or spend social capital to reach people who can solve issues. Or you need to bang your head in support channels for weeks hoping that someone will escalate your issue.
Sometimes there's workaround, if you pay big bucks, you might get "personal" manager who can actually connect you with necessary people. But that service is not available for every company out there. And if you don't pay big bucks, you don't have a chance.
This scheme probably makes sense. At certain scale you just can't talk to everyone. When you have 20 developers and 20 million clients, one person can have only so much time. And most support issues are stupid anyway.
I recall several similar situations with Cloudflare: a user has billing/service problems and the only way to get some support is to end on HN frontpage or reddit ...
Skimming through the blog post, it sounds like in the end they were not overcharged, but the timing and calculation of prorated charges for upgrades, vs. the credits for what what already paid, was a little weird and not obvious.
What contact info did you use? My partner is the author of this blog post, and neither of us has been contacted by Cloudflare that we know of.
My original ticket number was 3029706 but it seems to have disappeared after the support platform migration.
