Comment by threatofrain
4 days ago
Google, Apple, and Microsoft are each in a stronger position to win consumer AI because they're guardians over the foundations of the user's experience. Meta always has to wonder whether they're going to be edged out, like when Apple decided to limit permissions or set new rules on user data handling.
How has Meta responded? With a failed phone and speculative headset.
That's entirely why Zuck's been pushing VR and the metaverse for so long. they have no OS to control - Microsoft has desktop, Apple has their vertically integrated devices, Google has both Android and also Chrome.
Meta is at the whims of these other companies to play nice - and they already got hit hard once by apple when they decided to anonimize add profiles on the iphone and go privacy first.
Okay, so I've heard Apple "prioritized their own ads". If there's meat behind that - cool (and perhaps might not do anything about certain scummy listings on the app store)
But app stores and iOS ostensibly exist exactly so Zuckerberg can't do what he does, which is steal credentials. Facebook syncs everything, bought Whatsapp to do the same; of course he's pissed off his ill-gotten moat got attacked
iOS can stop applications from stealing credentials without relying on the App Store. macOS does it, Apple should be encouraged to secure the iOS runtime more than the iOS store.
Until Opus 5.5 I agreed with this. But since then... I'm now able to build just about anything I want, quickly. Including... all the reasons I'm on a mac (or presumably, one on windows) in the first place. IDK if I believe in my heart just yet, but as a long time mac user, if you gave me the choice between mac + commodity model or a near naked Linux laptop + Opus 5.5, I would easily choose Opus 5.5 and build what I want. If this is real, I think Google is still in a good spot, but are Apple and Microsoft? They have no models themselves. They do have hardware but the value of their OS (in Apples case) and software (in MS case) becomes extremely devalued, relatively speaking.
MacOS, even nowadays, has a level of polish and care put into it that nothing you do with opus is going to get close to.
> How has Meta responded? With a failed phone and speculative headset.
I guess their spin on Muse would be, by building the AI agent that Apple has shown it's nowhere near being able to build
Apple responds by waiting and partnering with companies like Google, and treating this as a layer that can be swapped out.
And their resulting product is just not good.
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Apple didn’t figure out yet that Google’s AI performance is nothing like Google search. Google’s AI is just junk, worse than open Chinese models. If someone (Facebook,OpenAI) gets a hold on the “killer” app, Apple won’t be able to do anything to truly compete. They will be late and end up with a social network like “find my friends” or whatever that useless thing was that nobody used.
Being one of if not the top advertisers in the world? I think Meta is doing just fine.
Sure but that doesn't mean they will become the front runner in AI.
>Google, Apple, and Microsoft are each in a stronger position to win consumer AI
Microsoft has completely lost the ability to make good software; see Microsoft Teams and what they've done to Windows 11. Apple don't have a foundation models team so they're limited to using other people's models, which handicaps them as they can't do vertical integration like with their other products. Google hasn't made a single competitive consumer product in the past decade, but has certainly killed a few.
> Microsoft has completely lost the ability to make good software
did they ever? maybe MS DOS, Win 3.1, and Win2000 were ok, although PC DOS and OS/2 were better; Sure what an unusable junk it's today is beyond any precedent in history, but why many companies use it today at all? why?
You are in a bubble/biased. I've switched to Linux on desktop half a year ago. For the average user, Linux has as many issues as Windows (or as few, more precisely).
In Windows, things mostly worked, with some minor annoyances. For example, night light stopped working at some point. Forced reboots for updates are another things I really don't like. SMB file sharing still does not work well out of the box, esp. w. Android phones.
In Linux, it is kinda the same, with the exception that I had a few really bad cases when GUI stopped working at all (terminal worked still, but barely).
My Lenovo laptop officially supports Linux. Still.
Things that I had lately (And I don't remember half of it) 1. BT headset disconnecting after a few seconds of connecting.
2. BT Game controller not detected by PC sometimes.
3. Application installs are weird and not that convenient. Sometimes you use package manager, sometimes AppImage, sometimes flatpak, sometimes brew, sometimes source code, sometimes zipped binary.
4. KDE vaults cannot be closed, because KDE indexing service locks dirs/files inside them.
5. KDE Indexing service indexes stuff that needs not to be indexed, hogging SSD resources and killing its lifespan.
6. KDE built-in screenshot app does not have good good annotation shortcuts, and annotation tools could be better.
7. Multi-monitor support have minor issues out of the box. Either display is garbled when laptop comes out of the sleep, or it does not support DisplayLink out of the box, or something else.
8. Graphics hardware acceleration in Firefox sometimes works, sometimes does not. Lately it does work, which is nice.
9. Game had a bug when it was choosing wrong GPU. No system configuration option was helping at all. Like literally nothing. Only disabling embedded GPU in Bios did.
10. Hibernation menu item exists, but does not work, coming out of hibernation is broken.
11. If you use hard links and directory bind mounts a lot, you will soon find that these are declared as working, but half of the software breaks when encountering them.
12. Laptop performance profiles selected from tray kinda work, but not reliably. I have to use laptop Fn button shortcut for them.
13. When I tried to change some stuff in keyboard layouts for non-english language, I encountered some weird behaviors/bugs. It took me a lot of time to properly configure CapsLock as a keyboard layout switch. On Windows, it is not possible as a built-in feature. With 3rd party - one tiny 20kb app.
14. While audio works mostly very well, sometimes, with a lot of audio devices, they glitch a little.
15. Bluetooth devices take a long time to display in connection list.
16. BT mouse takes 5 seconds to wake from sleep.
17. For me, fonts looks slightly worse then on Windows. I tried a lot of options, but I prefer Windows ClearType default look on my FullHD monitor.
18. Dolphin file manager has quite a lot weird/inconvenient behaviors. How it allows to work under root permissions (weirdly), how it handles absent network drives and some others.
"Microsoft has completely lost the ability to make good software; see Microsoft Teams and what they've done to Windows 11."
Uh, what is your positive comparison point?
I have been using MS apps since MS-DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1 (including doozies like Windows Millennium and Vista) and Teams and W11 are some of most stable, "it just works" pieces of software coming from them I can think of...
Apple should have morphed Siri into a Muse-like experience a year ago. But they didn't. Muse is great and millions of people are already getting used to having it be a part of their daily lives.
Muse, the pi/openclaw/AI assistant app is maybe not impressive to HN, because you can always just "get an FTP account", as it were, but if you're outside of the HN bubble and don't hate Facebook, Muse is an absolute winner. It's currently the top downloaded app on iOS, above ChatGPT, TikTok, and Claude. I think they've currently got the strongest consumer AI play but we'll have to wait and see how the situation evolves.
>It's currently the top downloaded app on iOS,
Yeah because its gone a bit viral. It'll settle down over time as people try it and dispose of it.
I think it was ousted by a fast food chicken app fwiw. Couldn’t tell you why.
Same as Threads
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>Google, Apple, and Microsoft are each in a stronger position to win consumer AI because they're guardians over the foundations of the user's experience.
From everything I've seen, they're all too large and dysfunctional to make a competent play in consumer AI. Anyone in there trying to work on it is too far removed from end product and is answering to too many masters.
That's definitely gemini
At least Gemini is an okay model independent of how Google is leveraging for consumer experiences.