I think this really overstates how much they are fretting over things like these groups.

Sure they may like pandering to those groups as convenient, but it's obvious from a vague look around that corporate interests will shrug all that off without a thought if it can make a few more bucks.

About as much as we needed to cover the story of irrelevant companies migrating to cloud hosting?

I've dealt with sites managing tens of thousands of hosts. It's surprisingly not *that* difficult. It's a niche community but they have the tooling to do it.

It would be *excruciating* to wrangle that many laptops with laptop style usage, but not so much for servers. Besides improved manageability, there's also the reality that no one cares too much about arbitrary box X in a sea of boxes, so no one's particularly bothered if you batch up repair actions to do once every couple of weeks or maybe once a month, leaving specific boxes either completely down or somewhat degraded for weeks unnoticed by anyone who cares.

I mean, if those numbers are accurate, it seems like more than just "playing with their stats". $2.2 mil in CapEx in a year avoids $3 mil in OpEx? For this sort of stuff, you generally would expect such a capital expense to be about 3 times higher than the operational expense, with the benefit of getting more years out of it instead of incurring it every single year. If CapEx paid off within the same year, that's a really substantive benefit.

I also find it credible, as I've dealt with businesses so enamored of 'all OpEx' they said point blank they would pay more to rent the capacity for a year than it would take to buy the same capacity permanently because CapEx is just such a no-no in accounting world when it comes to IT equipment.

And people were all weirdly vocal about going to the cloud as well.

It's a big shift, between capex and opex. There are a class of investors that like capex, particularly for longer lived companies, and others that love opex, particularly if there's a large chance the company goes bust before it could get the benefit of big upfront capex.

The "everything should be opex" crowd has been absurdly the standard voice in the market, to the point where companies are encouraged to spend more opex in a year than it would cost in capex over 3 years for the same stuff.

Well that right there would suggest they have a problem. Someone with respect for their brand hasn't considered their products since last century...

I have a panasonic plasma I've thought pretty well of...

But broadly Panasonic seems to be undifferentiated products in a lot of segments, "good enough" but not doing anything that inspires significant brand loyalty.

It isn't exactly something you have to "train up" to do. You *might* get outmaneuvered in some specific ways if you neglect to bother to use it, but I don't see it as being an active employment discriminator any more than "can you let tab completion do it's work when it can save you time or do you just type everything out manually?"

Why anyone thought that was going to be a 'skill'.

The whole point of the prompt is that it's a low skill interface. If it did require skills, then it's missing the point.

The skills to audit and do the work the LLM fails to do are non trivial, the natural language prompt piece is trivial.

The issue with projection is that you don't have a lot of control in the wild for your projection surface. Projecting onto glasses on your face comes closest to the most control, but it's still pretty poor. Projection onto the retina or impossibly good camera pass through for a full VR setup maybe.

The thing about projected keyboards is that it is *super* hard to beat actual buttons. We take the compromise on phone keyboards out of necessity, but even then there's at least a touch of haptic feedback and gesture typing to offer a tradeoff for losing the buttons.

The point is that iPhone was still 'additive' to the iPod concept, it was not a 'risk killing the iPod market'. The timing for the iPhone vs. iPod touch had the touch *technically* coming later, but only about 3 months apart. They clearly had the iPod touch in mind, potentially delayed just to give their cellular partner at the time a window of exclusivity over "big touchscreen iPod".

If you have at most 3 friends and you propose that AI can meet the demand of "15 friends", well it turns out that 12 AI "friends" would be the most of your friends. This doesn't seem to be much of a stretch of a headline at all....

Yeah, it's like someone let him know that Biden imposed export controls that Trump would have likely imposed himself, but just because Biden did it, he has to reverse it.

But that's a weird take. The iPhone was basically an iPod with a cellular modem. That's not risking the golden goose, that's just feeding the goose more.

It's just some hollow word without a concept to back up what they imagine a fundamentally distinct product would be to suggest they are going to be there for whatever the tech has.

He's harping on AI, though no sign of AI changing the form factor (the pin even if it worked well was a plainly dumb concept, obviously if it does work well for now the handheld computer remains the most likely physical realization of the benefits.

They did give VR a... shot.. AR glasses would be the biggest candidate I could imagine for cracking the fundamental form factor debate. Apple managed to get a whole bunch of people to wear earbuds 24/7, so I wouldn't be *shocked* if they managed to pull that with AR glasses one day.

Agree, they only discontinued the iPod after it was *clearly* just an iPhone without a cellular modem, and as the iPhone and iPod touch prices came together, why bother with the lesser product?

iPod 'Classic' was highly compromised on screen real estate, the Nano's niche was pretty much filled by the Watch, the Shuffle never really made a whole lot of sense since it couldn't be differentiated from all sorts of other music playing devices..

I don't think anyone questions the desired endgame, nor do they doubt that 'good enough' will be used in a heartbeat to get there even if somewhat lacking. The questions just about the relative applicability to one job versus another, and just how good the technology really is or potential. I've been evaluating and while it's certainly likely to enable a whole lot of previously untouchable use cases, it doesn't quite live up to the hype, and everyone breathlessly talking about it taking over just so much of human work seems to coincidentally be in a position where they would be receiving a lot of money if they are perceived to be the great oracles of technology spend.

This isn't new either. A lot of jobs have been automated away over time. Question is do we reach a tipping point where we run out of ambition, and how awkward the situation will be if we have a labor surplus, but still need a lot of human labor.