It is indeed a niche product. Its price reflects the sales expectations of Apple.
But its form factor has been validated for almost a decade now from other manufacturers. So iPhone Duo will do fine. It will not surpass a slab iPhone but fine.
Vision Pro was a completely new beast, the hardware was not there, the market was not there.
It's worth noting that "niche" in this case means ~10M in its first year, comparted to an estimated 250M Apple smartphone shipments in 2027. So far, Apple has sold ~600K Vision Pro in total.
Also, supporting Duo is not an enormous lift if you're already supporting resizable windows, as developers are required to do for OS 27.
Yeah the market had shown that anything bulkier/heavier than a pair of regular glasses is not acceptable. Not sure why apple released it unless it is a glorified dev kit that would allow devs imagine a use case for a product that is 10 years away.
> I know exactly one person who has a foldable phone and I live in sf.
If we're comparing anecdotes, when I lived in the states far from sf many tech people I knew had folding phones. They loved them and I was curious, but I like iOS.
My only concern is that they'll sell out so quickly for so long that I'll have to wait for the iPhone Duo Two-o because they won't be easy to get until like May 2027.
Well, you know what they say. The best time to blow tens of billions you might never get back on a risky memory fab in your home country is ten years ago. The second best time is today!
Some of their treasury (Non-Current Marketable Securities) could be bonds that are invested with targeted contracts for trade-secret benefits.
Say TSMC needs capital, and say Apple has spare capital: they are both likely to agree to an investment where Apple gets contractual benefits that other customers do not.
I would expect Apple to be very aggressively investing into suppliers to get results that strongly benefits Apple and perhaps that disadvantages competitors.
An advertising ban would solve 80% of the problem. This stuff has always been around for those who want it, and (arguably) in a free society should be. But shoving it down people's throats in every channel imaginable has to end.
It's still shocking to me that there are so many California Lottery advertisements (I'm sure other states have these too). They're spending taxpayer money to make poor people poorer...
Illinois has a bunch of these too. They would always sell expanding what gambling is allowed by saying that the proceeds were going to go to pay for public schools, but its hard to say if that is true or not. Even if the gambling money goes to schools seems like it just frees up other tax money for whatever else. Now here its like a town of 4000 will have over a dozen places offering electronic slot machines. It's like every gas station and bar has them now. And then you can also have stuff like draft kings and fan duel on your phone. It seems like it would be inescapable once you fell into the habit of gambling.
As a professional advertiser: yes. Gambling ads should be illegal. Big issue is supreme court said states cant ban gambling ads due to first amendment.
Funnily enough cigarette ads were banned in 1970 before the Supreme Court regime that says you can't ban ads for a given legal product. If someone were to take the case to the Supreme Court, they could probably get cigarette ads un-banned.
Watching some new shows on Amazon this past month, Kevin Hart can fuck right off with those draft kings commercials. I swear there are at least 10 gambling ads per 1 hour show. It's disgusting.
Adrenaline is the drug, ain't it ... And gambling is just one way to leverage it.
However once you realize that gambling is not the drug, and merely something that triggers your body to create a rush... Then can you really call it a drug? At least any more then any other of those activities?
Eg Skydiving and basically any other extreme sports.
And once you're there, you should really realize that it's not worth the sacrifice.
This is a societal issue and should not be addressed with legislation.
The only thing that can be safely regulated are things like disallowing marketing.
How do we determine at what point something is “too addictive” to be allowed?
There are many people who can gamble responsibly and enjoy it. I love playing poker, and play in a tournament every few years. Lots of people are compulsive gamblers, though, and lose it all.
Do I have to give up my hobby because some people can’t handle it?
What about drinking? I enjoy a happy hour once a month or so, and have a couple of drinks when I do. Others drink 10+ drinks a month. Do we ban it because of the people who can’t stop? (We know how well that works)
I am not saying we do nothing, but I don’t think it is as easy as “just pass legislation”
We know how full 100% alcohol prohibition in 1920's worked in the USA, but what's missing is that it doesn't have to be a full 100% for it to benefit society. Laws restricting sales, like no selling alcohol past a certain hour, or on Sundays, still exist on the books in many places, and while I can't speak to how well they actually work, given that we'd just stock up on Saturdays anyway, there's also no Al Capone levels of violence in places with those restrictions. So let's not say "we know how that goes" hinting at 1920's prohibition, which was over a century ago now, and just leave it at that.
For a counter example, I like driving fast. Really fast. Should I be banned from doing that because other people can't handle that responsibly? Society has looked at that and decided that, yes, no one should be allowed to do that on public streets. So I keep that behavior to the race track and sign an extra liability waiver in order to do so.
Why should gambling or alcohol be treated different from that?
> Society has looked at that and decided that, yes, no one should be allowed to do that on public streets. So I keep that behavior to the race track and sign an extra liability waiver in order to do so.
So can I still drink and gamble in private if I sign a waiver?
What would a gambling liability waiver cover? Your losses/damages are not in a confined circuit or ringfenced from your general finances. Are you just agreeing not to sue if you lose your house/wife/job?
Sorry, but alcohol prohibition did not work and was instrumental in fueling the rise of organized crime (does that ring any bells?).
I happen to believe the War on Drugs (prohibition v2) is an even bigger mistake than the first one, which also ignores why it came to be: v1 prohibition enforcers needed something to do and there was a growing problems with an "uppity" segment of society that needed to be put in its place. The history of it is horrifying; and the current implementation of it is horrifying as well.
So legalize it all. Regulate the advertisement/promotion/access/purity, etc. It's going to happen one way or another and pushing it into the shadows only makes it worse.
So let the gambling happen but keep it on a short leash.
If all you're saying is that it needs the right legislation/thoughtful legislation and not just a blanket ban, then I guess I agree. The base of this thread was someone saying that all gambling should be state owned, which seems like a reasonable thing to me.
I was playing fast and loose with the word, but you know what I meant.
I'm all for individuals to choose their own paths and mistakes and don't want a true nanny state, so I'd be ok with banning advertising of those services, as well as independent audits to ensure that they are not letting minors in.
There is a fentanyl vaccine approaching human trials, but I don't believe its mechanism works close enough to the reward center. Maybe gene therapy is a long term fix as it relates to the reward center dysfunction, to be determined.
Specifically the part where a variant of this protein seems directly implicated in the specific self upregulation that leads to changes in the brains reward pathways that seem to directly cause the sort of "Drug seeking" and other addiction seeking behaviors that are so harmful in addiction.
I especially love the part where we tried inhibiting this protein expression with simple chemicals administered orally in rats and it significantly improved their addictions, and we did that in 2015, and we have not touched it since
Gosh, wouldn't it just be the best if we had spent $4 trillion on bioscience instead of GPUs? I feel like we understand circuits pretty well by comparison.
That's crazy that the whole reward system might just come down to one protein and how long you crave another reward is literally just the time until that protein decays.
It should either be illegal or not. This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
If it is bad and yet the government is allowed to use it to make money then is the government evil? Why does the government get to do it if we can't? It just makes the whole thing seem ridiculous and makes underground betting seem like I guess it isn't really that bad since the government is allowed to do it. The operators are just people fighting for their freedom to operate the same business the government operates.
Because any addictive thing is on a spectrum and you don't want the people with incentives to go all the way up the spectrum to be the operator of the harmful thing, a là the dose makes the poison. (See alcohol, cigarettes, any class of drugs etc.)
Some things are just wholly harmful where no small amount provides any benefits, some are harmful in large doses, but not so harmful in small doses that they cannot provide other uses.
Governments (ideally) don't exist to maximize profit so they are (generally) not incentivized to increase the addictions of their populace.
Harm reduction. In the US, state lotteries have reduced illegal gambling. Illegal gambling would increase under a total ban.
Some markets fail. If the government can step in and provide a service that doesn't end in a failed market, that's not an imposition on anyone's freedom.
I think of it is the level of regulation I'd require / desire in an endeavour.
On one side there's things with very little regulation required, private companies go crazy (and they will!:).
On the other hand, there's things I want high regulation on - use of violence (army / pokice / security), medicine, key infra utilities, alcohol/drugs/gambling, etc.
We can discuss whether we agree those things need regulation, and if so, what form that regulation takes.
(To me, some things I want so highly regulated there's no benefit in private ownership, just risk of runaway loop exploitation)
> This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
It makes a lot of sense. Here in Idaho, hard alcohol can only be sold in state run liquor stores. The stores aren't advertised and the staff is all well trained. People that want booze can still get it, but at the same time it's not being ran like a business (It still turns a profit). That is to say, there's no advertising or marketing for it.
> If it is bad and yet the government is allowed to use it to make money then is the government evil?
People are going to gamble if they want to. Making it illegal just pushes them to underground gambling. Making it state ran allows the state to better control the gambling, including doing things like having the ability to provide recovery options and interventions.
> Why does the government get to do it if we can't?
The government isn't motivated by (just) money. They don't have to advertise for gambling and they don't have shareholders to make happy. They could even operate the gambling at a loss if they wanted to.
> It just makes the whole thing seem ridiculous and makes underground betting seem like I guess it isn't really that bad since the government is allowed to do it.
Completely the opposite. The government doing it happens to stop underground gambling from happening. You can sue the government and expect them to treat you fairly. Underground gambling, on the other hand, has no reason or motivation to treat it's participants fairly.
Some things are better left in control of the government _because_ they are dangerous. You either:
* Outlaw gambling, and gamblers will just go towards shadier options, putting their own lives in even more risk.
* Allow private operators whose goal is to extract as much money from possible from gamblers as possible and ensure that you will inevitably have people abusing the system up to the limits to which it can go and testing out if they can go further, over and over again
* Government ran gambling organisations that can ensure they also offer proper systems to wean yourself off, offer healthcare, and make use of the money "made" from operating it to improve your health care systems.
Only one of those options is sensible.
>The operators are just people fighting for their freedom to operate the same business the government operates.
HAHAHAHAHA. No. Absolutely not. Some people are truly as caricatural as movies and books make them appear, and casino owners truly live up to it. I worked for them, for "betting rooms", anything you want: they are thieves, mafias, manipulators and bring nothing but misery on the world. They're not "fighting for their freedom", they have found a legal way to abuse human misery and addictions.
> Government ran gambling organisations that can ensure they also offer proper systems to wean yourself off, offer healthcare, and make use of the money "made" from operating it to improve your health care systems.
Please list any state lotteries that offer any of these things. All I've seen is an 800 number to call, listed in the fine print at the bottom of the advertising. And they advertise everywhere, and though many were established with promises to "fund education" or something that sounds noble, money is fungible so it just gets sloshed around in the state budgets.
"My country that is hostile to public healthcare doesn't offer public healthcare" no shit sherlock, the US's healthcare system is a shitshow. Look at anywhere in Europe where those lotteries are publicly ran. The entire post is about changing the law, that doesn't include closing your eyes on how it's currently shit.
>It should either be illegal or not. This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
So no nation in history should have been allowed to have a military to defend its loot or to acquire more loot.
Or conversely, individuals should possess the right to form a militia or employ a private force to defend oneself and one's property from the encroachment of the state and other trespassers. They should be able to exercise this right for so long as each nation retains its respective armed forces.
I feel like there is an inside joke here, so I apologize if I am being a bit spectrum-y taking it at face value.
Every sovereign can print money and repay lenders, but doing so cause an inflationary cycle. When it looks like that is inevitable, borrowing rates start spiralling, so you have to print more money, and soon you are Zimbabwe.
Like the US is catastrophically indebted -- both parties have been negligent on this, though one party has been much, much worse than the other -- and right now there's a certain defeated malaise about 40T in debt. The last time bond rates were this high the country had only $6T in debt, and even that was considered a catastrophic level, and bond rate trends are...not looking good for those want government funds leftover after servicing the debt.
"Oh but we'll just grow the economy..."
The debt has grown by 6.5x, and the GDP has grown by 2.8x since 2002. The math just isn't mathing. And remember that bond prices were historically low, and if there was ever a time to pay down the debt....
Nope, $2T deficit, "hide in the ballroom bunker and hold the world hostage with the nuclear launch button" projects, and now a hilarious $1.3T bribe to voters. Utterly busted. It is astonishing that it took this long for the world's lenders to chuckle and say nah.
The math that isn't mathing is that GDP needs to stop being the number we look at. Goodhart's Law says that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." and GDP is no exception. If I pay a cleaner $200 to clean my home, that's $200 into the GDP. If I do it myself, that's not reflected in the GDP. If I buy a robot maid, pay for it once, and it cleans my apartment for me, thats an ongoing quality of life improvement that's not going to be reflected in the GDP. If that $50,000 robot maid frees up 10 hours/week for me to do other stuff, GDP might actually fall instead of rise.
Debt service costs as a percent of GDP are in fact lower than they were in the 1980's, when things came out fine. Is this the best way to run the budget? Likely no. Should we make policy changes? Certainly yes.
Is the best way to drive that policy argument flinging around adjectives like "catastrophically indebted". No. If you have a suggestion make a suggestion. Screaming about "The Problem" without discussing policy is echo chamber logic.
Buffett claimed you could solve the deficit problem instantly by firing congress when they run deficits. Obviously, untenable (they'll cheat, admin overhead, etc).
You could very easily force congress to balance the budget (both parties and the media have complained endlessly about this for exactly no good reason). You could also freeze spending at current levels and force congress to do it's job: allocate our limited resources most productively.
Hard to get re elected doing the right thing, but maybe we just need a throw away set of leaders to do the hard work?
There are really just two ways to avoid the inflationary spiral. You can either increase income (i.e. grow gdp) or you can decrease spending (i.e. cut entitlements).
This is as close as it can be to clearly explain. The problem is that most of our politicians are not explaining it and instead ignoring it. As an individual the only thing you can do is vote for candidates who are willing to have that hard conversation with the public. Unfortunately it looks like that would require voting for a third party candidate and a vanishingly small minority of the electorate is willing to do that. So given all of that context I'm not really sure that the term "Catastrophically indebted" is wrong.
> Debt service costs as a percent of GDP are in fact lower than they were in the 1980's
This is an amazing use of the "in fact" trope, in exactly the same misleading way[1]. I talked about debt, and you casually shifted to servicing costs which presumes that rates stay historically low...when they're actually rapidly rising. Comical.
In the 1980s, the debt to GDP ratio was less than half what it currently is. Rates were higher, making the debt a crisis level then, but maybe you haven't noticed...rates are going up. Indeed, right now the rates were historically low, and anyone with functioning grey matter saw what was coming.
The US has an absolutely solidified, structural deficit -- utterly zero chance of paying down the debt, and a desperate need to constantly be borrowing more -- and an enormous debt. The trajectory of rates say this is crisis levels.
It's actually kind of funny reading your ridiculous comment -- "screaming", "echo chamber", etc -- when you sound completely in denial.
Your argument is basically the guy that used the "0% interest for six months" checks he just got with his 28% credit card, telling everyone that it's free money, so there's no problem if he goes wild. ROFL.
Sounds like it's time for a $1.5T military budget and a $1.3T bribe! Free money!
Sidenote: When asked about the bond market, Trump seriously offered up the "military solution". Utter insanity.
[1] - It's also simply a lie, making this extra funny. The highest historic servicing cost was 3.2% of GDP. It is currently projected at 3.3%, and that presumes rates don't keep spiralling up. So your "in fact" was simple bullshit, even as you tried the narrative shift by changing from debt to servicing costs.
You're doubling down with more hyperbole. What's the policy suggestion? What do you propose to cut? Where do you propose to find new revenue? What compromises are you willing to make to other priorities and what stands are you taking on which you won't budge?
Shouting about deficits is, to be blunt, just crack for the incurious mind. It's a party you're throwing for people who agree with you. Refusing to treat with the very real (and despite your hyperbole, very soluble) problems is likewise a trick your brain is using to expand the guest list: you can get almost everyone to sit at a "Deficits Suck" table, it's much harder to populate a "Let's Talk About Entitlement Restructuring and a VAT" forum.
But it's the boring wonks at the forum (the one's you're shouting at!) who are ultimately on the hook for saving you.
> What do you propose to cut? Where do you propose to find new revenue?
I'm not American, and no one needs to "save me". The country is a fucking idiocracy, and you elected a fascist self-dealing conman pedophile rapist. I pointed out objective, indisputable reality and you responded with some farcical lies and pearl clutching nonsense.
But you know, when your country is bankrupt, increasing military spending $600B, paying for endless vanity projects for that disgusting bag of shit to emblazon his shameful name on your country for eternity, or even entertaining the disgusting "bribe the population" farce is just fantasy.
Endlessly giving tax cuts and breaks to your kleptocracy/plutocrat class...maybe an incredibly stupid thing to do, no?
Nah, something something 1980s nothing we can do hey let's build an arch to celebrate the most catastrophically destructive president in history!
That ends at the beginning of 2025, and already it was equalling the historic max (which was during a brutal recession, it should be noted). Since then the debt has added trillions more (about $4T), and the rate due on that debt has kept increasing. Oh, and the debt of the US is increasing quite a clip faster than the US economy is "growing", even with the fantasy numbers from the sharpie presidency.
Yeah, jabroni, my statement is 100% confirmed fact. Indeed, it's incredibly optimistic, really, because if rates follow current trends, things are going to get dramatically worse by year end.
Not sure it plays out that determistically. If the gov prints money to just payoff debt without increasing the government spending, there is no new money entering the market.
You just pay off old promises that were expected to be kept.
The real risk is that new lenders will not be willing to lend you, yes. But not outright inflation.
So you agree it's a problem, but still characterized the situation as "all is good" in your first comment. I would not call that good, and I would be have used different words to characterize/trivialize this situation.
Printing money causes inflation and inflation causes increasing interest rates. It is possible to enter a positive-feedback cycle, and has happened to countries before.
I'm not predicting that this will happen, but we do need to take the debt seriously and not assume we will be able to just print money to get rid of it.
not necessarily according to the courts. there are a number of cases where scale has been the line between permissible and not - e.g. it's fine to scrape ebay, it's not fine to build an ebay scraping business.
courts haven't always ruled that way but there's definitely precedent!
It is like watching on repeat the EU imploding from the debt crisis in 2009.
The only difference is that the US can inflate away their debts and the world will keep buying the usd.
The EU had to impose strict austerity, and essentially all the banks stopped providing any liquidity to businesses. Entrepreneurship and research just died overnight.
The EU didn't have to impose strict austerity. It was just the policy they went with and it ended up being worse than what the US did in the financial crisis.
Seems like we need one more decade of oled panel and gpu improvements before we can have good enough density with a reasonable size and power consumption.
counterpoint : animal rescues and shelters benefit greatly in getting adoptable animals before people scrolling, for super low cost to them, but of course because the scrolling people are seeing ads.
It is very, very hard to enforce behavior to an optimization system just with rewards / penalties and no explicit constraints. Which is why in manufacturing we use MPC, not RL (or use them within a system that can outright reject their recommendations if dangerous).
There will be always cases that sacrificing one direction (operating rules) can improve the other one (profit).
But its form factor has been validated for almost a decade now from other manufacturers. So iPhone Duo will do fine. It will not surpass a slab iPhone but fine.
Vision Pro was a completely new beast, the hardware was not there, the market was not there.
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