I disagree strongly here. The chatbot is the furthest thing from sufficient for the average consumer. Take the newly announced feature that groups your compromised passwords together and offers to agentically change them all for you. Really cool! Could you do that via a chatbot interface? Sure. Would the average consumer? No.
first paragraph begins the article upon 2 very big and flawed statements:
> Apple fans would, for years and years, sneer at Microsoft’s penchant for talking about products that may or may not ship, deriding them as vaporware.
maybe some would, but as a whole I would say this is not a common thing
> After Apple’s bungled 2024 launch of Apple Intelligence and new Siri, however, vaporware is fair game
no it's not
I didn't know about Project Solara so learned a new thing from the article, but I got the impression that it's not as big as the author tried to make it seem, felt very distant and forced.
Certainly the copilot button in ms paint did nothing to attract the clawbot ecosystem to windows
OpenAI's ChatGPT is AI consumer software and is a hit, albeit mostly free tier users.
You might re-title the article instead, "The iPhone holds its ground", and it would be a more realistic title. But perhaps garnering less clicks.
I've always thought Ben Thompson is strong on enterprise and b2b topics but super weak on everything consumer related, he simply doesn't seem to understand consumer behavior (he has zero empathy or ability to project his mind into the average person's mind)
E.g. Ben was sure iPhone air would be a massive hit because he himself loved it. (It's struggled as people don't like the smaller battery life).
Ben was sure the Vision Pro would be a huge hit because he himself loved it. (It was a total failure as the average person doesnt want to pay huge amounts for a ridiculous looking dork helmet).
Ben raving about Meta's hand controller which he was sure was going to be the future of consumer electronics (The Neural Band). He was discussing how you could use it while your hand is in your jeans/pants pocket. Not quite thinking about how this would look while you're sat on the subway with someone sat opposite you.
Ben discussing how the future of watching sports is in VR. Not considering how weird it would be to go to a friends house to watch the game and everyone has their own VR headset. Also not considering the fun of watching sports is doing it with other people.
Basically, he has a huge issue with extracting his own liking of techy products to the average consumer who are basically nothing like Ben Thompson.
Just because you like something, doesn't mean it will succeed. These people will more likely using some sort of industry knowledge to form conclusion which conforms with their bias.
On the flip side, just because you hated something doesn't mean it will fail. There are plenty of Apple haters who will write things that seems to make sense but completely misses the mark every single time.
- iPhone Air to cram everything into a small space
- Vision pro - a new OS for looking at things and interacting
- Better Siri and AI that works with voice
- Smart local model / routing to big models in the cloud
- integration with wearables (air pods and watches)
you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of
devices, none of which stand alone, but are
more like portals to interact with your agents
And then a minute later I could ask it "Is copilot done yet?" and it replies "No, looks like it is still working on it". And then a minute later I ask again. It replies "Yes, it finished. It updated chart.py and styles.css.".
But it looks like none of the chat agents with voice interface have such a connector at the moment? An SSH connector would be the most useful. But a "GitHub Codespace connector" or something like that would also do.
I wonder if that will be a missing piece for long. If so, I would build an agent with voice mode and ssh connector myself. But I guess it should come out from the big guys any moment now?
Of all the things they could build, why must they pick this future...
wiseowise•1h ago
> The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive
Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services?
> consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.
What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?
> What they do want to do is watch short-form video
Yeah, it seems so.
cultofmetatron•1h ago
brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.
baal80spam•1h ago
wiseowise•48m ago
And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?
Forgeties79•23m ago
Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false.
Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.
technothrasher•10m ago
coldtea•45m ago
I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!
yladiz•33m ago
koolba•21m ago
If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them.
But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.
skywhopper•15m ago
Traubenfuchs•51m ago
Microsoft is still simply one of the very best at enterprise dealmaking.
imglorp•45m ago
engineer_22•25m ago
ceejayoz•22m ago
imglorp•15m ago
There was a meme going around last week where a child saw a phone calculator app and remarked "wow there's an AI just for math".
Generalizing, they're using chat for everything else, like search. Actually reading a source is not on their radar.
This is frightening. A whole generation that will not, and can not, think. At all. "Do it for me."