Pretty much, and yes, this is not a desirable path for progress.

But communists have an absurd love for bureaucracy, and their need to control is unlimited, so they'll argue to the death about stupid shit instead of, you know, actually competing.

You are being idiotic. One hour of running is almost half of my minimum energy expenditure. All the other movements in a typical day only account for about half that, unless I make sure to walk a lot more than most people would.

The brain does increase energy expenditure with activity, but as said in the article, it's quite minimal.

I have been tracking caloric input very precisely and energy expenditure with an Apple Watch (one of the most precise trackers) for a while, and I can guarantee you it all adds up.

In fact, once everything is calibrated, I could predict my weight loss/gain with a 5-10% margin of error at worst (mostly due to imprecision in food calorie accounting and inaccurate energy expenditure tracking).

Too many people try to mystify something that is extremely simple. There are some things to care about (like not going too low on the protein), but it really is all about getting the same amount of energy that you are spending, and that's pretty much all there is to it.

People just like to hate on Windows. The home version has some issues and limitations, but if you are willing to invest in the Pro version, it's mostly fine, really.

There are still many complaints to be had, but the fact is that Windows does what it needs to do on a wide range of hardware without much hassle if you know what you are doing.

Yep. Basically the iPhone was very good at the start because Jobs smelled the future with his legendary intuition, but it was still a flawed product. They won because it took competitors years to meaningfully catch up.

But now they are falling behind quite hard. In general, you just can't compete alone against a free market, and Apple gets a lot more profit compared to their volume, but they are unable to use it for meaningful improvement.

If nothing changes at Apple, I think they'll have a hard time in the next decade. Apple being forced to rely on a competitor for AI is just the sign of complacency that will get them in trouble.

That was basically the whole point of it.

Apple makes money selling hardware; they have a vested interest in making things slower/worse to incentivize people to buy newer hardware.

This is why you can never really trust Apple and also why no matter how bad Windows gets, it's still a better deal because at least you can count on the fact that PC businesses will compete on the hardware front to get your money.

Choosing Apple is a lot like being in an abusive relationship; you can't leave because the switching cost are quite high, so you tolerate a lot more abuse than you would be willing to otherwise.

And this is the reason people try to not rely on Apple software too much; if you do, they truly have you by the balls.

Finder has to be used with the Miller columns; otherwise, it doesn't make sense.

But since the switch to the new filesystem, it's kinda slow and annoying.

They have built some proprietary stuff around their filesystem to increase their walled garden height. Which is kind of stupid in the era of cloud computing, because you cannot use any of it if you share files/directories with other people who don't use Macs.

The whole window management system is an exercise in contrarianism. They basically chose to do things in the opposite manner of their competitor and mostly against what intuition would dictate for the sole reason of being different.

macOS is very frustrating to use without utility apps that provide the necessary improvements. But they are never as well integrated, cost money or are a hassle to set up.

Apple just wins because they make good-looking, well-built hardware, and sometimes they win on some performance metrics (in the Apple Silicon era, it's mostly about efficiency and single-core speed, which is not as useful as some like to believe).

Apple only "wins" by charging exorbitant prices that idiots are willing to pay to have a digital status symbol. What they have not "won" is market share. They have always been an "also-ran" in market share.

Android (70%) beats iOS (30%). Windows (68%) beats MacOS (13%).

Well, I agree with that if we are talking about the general population. But Apple does have some niches it serves very well that make the prices worth it for some. But of course, this is a very tiny minority of their customers.

For example, they always have been focusing on video editing since the PPC days, starting with the iMac DV. And nowadays, Macs are still quite good for video editing; even when you factor in the price, it's not that bad of a deal. Previously it was about DTP and desktop graphics generally.

But it's always the same playbook; they are first to offer the possibilities of a new usage, but that comes with their high price; over time they lose competitiveness, and they end up switching to something else.

The question is always if the asking price is going to be worth it for whatever you try to accomplish with a computer at the moment. If you are doing work that doesn't require being on the bleeding edge, the answer is probably no.

However, in general, people buy Apple stuff for the status, very often as an ego trip (to prove they are better) and not infrequently out of ignorance/incompetence (it's crazy how much stupid shit Apple fans believe).

That's just the typical Apple distortion field.

I have been using Apple devices and supporting many of their users for over 20 years, and they are all extremely invested in their choice of computing device. It's really a source of pride for many of them, weirdly. For this reason, anything Apple does is necessarily better than everything else on the market. It's a bit pointless to argue because they come from an emotional standpoint; if you point at the many things not working properly, they always have an excuse to handwave it away. It's really funny because I use Apple stuff, and I find many qualities in it, but I'm unwilling to be blind to the faults and weaknesses.

This sort of ego investment exists for other brands as well; I think it is a lack of emotional maturity and an inability to realize that a brand does not care if you do not fully "love" their products.

I agree completely. This sort of emotional immaturity was acceptable a decade ago. But today? They are behind everything. I have 3 Macs, 2 iPads and 1 iPhone and their software is sh*t. iPad pro is a joke. It should be illegal to use the label pro as it constitutes false marketing. It's such a dumb OS for the kind of hardware you get. What's the use if it has M3 Pro or whatever if the OS can't keep up. Half the time, it's filled with bugs. Same story for iOS. Mac OS is great..so far. But, their phones are garbage. I have to save my documents into Google drive just so they work fine. What a joke.

And yet 2.35 billion Apple devices are in use and growing. You may be the outlier.

I guess that if I ask you for a good burger, you will point me at a McDonald's. They have so many customers, truly a marker of quality.

Ok, which system has more viruses devoted to it?

Most definitely Windows, but that's basically a factor of their past hegemony.

Hilariously, you are going to argue that Apple is good because they sell a lot of stuff, but somehow Microsoft is bad because they sell a lot of stuff (a lot more, in fact).

Those Macs you are talking about are still very niche and mostly used by loyal customers that do basic/common things or very vocal fanboys who always find a way to shill for whatever Apple comes up with, no matter how flawed and lackluster the product is.

Even if you want to run local AI, Macs are not really a good deal when you account for the price of soldered RAM and the limitations of AI tools on macOS. But as always, the minority is very vocal, so it looks like it's all the rage but for the most part, people doing work are still using PCs and they don't have that much time to argue about it on the internet.

I think you’re underestimating or not understanding why Macs have taken off so much for AI. It has nothing to do with fanboys shilling for Apple. You can get a MBP today with 128GB of unified memory or a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. Then you get to run MacOS, which is vastly superior to Windows for AI productivity and far more accessible/convenient than Linux even today. There’s a reason so many AI apps are Mac native first (or exclusively). No other company offers so much memory and convenience in a consumer product for these purposes. These have become genuinely unique products with almost no competition, and by all accounts it seems Apple is just getting started in this direction.

Local AI is very limited and mostly a waste of time/capital compared to subscribing to access the good stuff provided by the key players.

But by all means, throw more money at Apple for a problem they can't even solve themselves.

If AI was that good on Apple hardware, they wouldn't need to buy access from their competitors to finally make Siri not completely useless.

Your statements are a couple months out of date. The space is evolving rapidly. It's definitely not a cost-efficient approach today, but models like Kimi K2.5 can be run on dual 512GB Mac Studios with performance rivaling (though still not fully matching) cloud frontier models. That's $20k of hardware, so it's certainly not going to be common today. My point is more about the trend: hardware to run serious models is starting to become more affordable, and open weight models are slowly but surely closing the gap with cloud models. Project this forward in time a couple years, and I think you'll be surprised how many folks will be interested in running AI locally outside of cloud environments. This trajectory will also intersect and interact with the trajectory of advertising and other monetization methods with cloud-based vendors necessarily becoming far more aggressive over time.

I'm not contesting that AI will become worthwhile on local hardware at some point. With software optimization and hardware costs falling over time, that's pretty much a given.

But I'm arguing that it's not going to be worthwhile doing on Apple hardware. GPU sharding is already a thing for PCs, and you don't need to stupidly buy multiple full computers for it to work.

Apple has put themselves into a corner with their Apple Silicon strategy. It's good for efficiency and thus quite nice for mobile usage, but it makes no sense for desktops that do not need to be power/space constrained.

Their GPUs are still weak, and their strategy of gluing 2 together gives poor results in general workloads. They are limited by the die size and the RAM bandwidth they can allocate to the whole thing because of physics.

If Apple manages to get good results by aggregating multiple computers, PCs will get even better results by using multiple GPUs in the same box, interconnected by the PCIe bus, which will always be faster than Thunderbolt no matter what, because of physics. In fact, they could even come up with a new interconnect if need be.

There is just no realistic way for Apple to become a dominant player in AI. They cannot compete properly on the hardware side because they won't get the cash flow/key players NVidia and AMD are getting, and they cannot compete properly on software because it will always be ports of stuff made to run on better/faster hardware. They'll lose AI basically for the same reason they have lost gaming: uncompetitive performance for the price. People who actually want to do stuff care less about how things look and a lot more about how good/fast they run.

And whenever datacenters start offloading older GPUs, their price will fall, making it the cheapest way to do local AI. Apple hardware keeps a stupidly high price even when it's completely obsolete because of the status it confers; it will never be cost competitive.

It's basically a replay of their PPC mistake, where they thought they could compete by going at it alone but in the end fell pretty hard because they couldn't compete against the volume PCs were getting.

Now Apple has money but cannot attract enough talent because they have no vision, and the management style is basically mean girls running the show.

You are arguing about purchasing a solution that would cover 8 years of top-tier AI subscription. Seriously, who in their right mind would do that? Apple hardware for AI makes no sense; either you have prosumer-level needs that are going to be served just fine with cheaper hardware (like, for example, Ryzen AI) or you have large needs, and investing in a real AI solution is going to be better because it's going to be much faster. Being able to fit large models is useless if they run too slow.

Well, those people are resistant to facts and logic.

But when you think about it, their survival depends on it, so it makes perfect sense. Most of those making those arguments have cushy bullshit jobs, completely dependent on stealing the work of others to live. Funnily enough, you would pay them to do nothing; it would be preferable for society because it would cost less money, and they wouldn't be able to create insane bureaucracy to satisfy their power trip.

But it doesn't matter; reality has a way to always catch up and expose the liars. The system is clearly unsustainable, and enemies have been probing for weakness for a while now. It's unclear how long we have left until a full-strength attack happens but it seems hard to avoid now.