I hope so. Competition would make Windows a better product. Most of innovation that Windows has had in the last 10 years it’s all about getting telemetry and adding ads.
It would be good if the change was towards Linux, but it seems more likely the transition will be towards an increasingly restrictive Android, reflecting how phones have become people's primary computing devices, so I'm not looking forward to it.
This story may be amusing, but it's actually a serious issue if Apple is doing this and people are not aware of it because cellphone imagery is used in things like court cases. Relative positions of people in a scene really fucking matter in those kinds of situations. Someone's photo of a crime could be dismissed or discredited using this exact news story as an example -- or worse, someone could be wrongly convicted because the composite produced a misleading representation of the scene.
Sure, but smartphones now automatically doctor every photo you take. Someone who took the photo could not even know it was doctored and think it represents truth.
Fair point, but I still think we’re exaggerating the amount of doctoring that’s being done by the phones. There’s always been some level of discrepancy between real life subjects and the images taken of them.
It’s just a tool creating media from sensor data. Those sensors aren’t the same as our eyes, and their processors don’t hold a candle to our own brains.
In the interest of not rambling, let’s look back at early black and white cameras. When people looked at those photos, did they assume the world was black and white? Or did they acknowledge this as a characteristic of the camera?
Film is also subject to manipulation in the development stage, even if you avoid compositing e.g. dodging and burning. Photographic honesty is an open and active philosophic debate that has been going on since its inception. It’s not like you can really draw a line in the sand and blanketly say admissible or not. Although I’m sure established guidelines would help. Ultimately, it’s an argument about the validity of evidence that needs to be made on a case by case basis. The manipulations involved need to be fully identified and accounted for in those discussions.
With all the image manipulation and generation tools available to even amateurs, I’m not sure how any photography is admissible as evidence these days.
At some point there’s going to have to be a whole bunch of digital signing (and timestamp signatures) going on inside the camera for things to be even considered.
I’m still waiting for the first time somebody uses it to zoom in on a car number plate and it helpfully fills it in with some AI bullshit with something else entirely.
We’ve already seen such a thing with image compression.
This was important in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. The zoom resolution was interpolated by software. It wasn’t AI per se, but the fact that a jury couldn’t be relied upon to understand a black box algorithm and its possible artifacts, the zoomed video was disallowed.
(this in no way implies that I agree with the court.)
The zoom resolution was interpolated by software. It wasn’t AI per se
Except it was. All the “AI” junk being hyped and peddled all over the place as a completely new and modern innovation is really just the same old interpolation by software, albeit software which is fueled by bigger databases and with more computing power thrown at it.
As far as I know, nothing about AI entered into arguments. No precedents regarding AI could have been set here. Therefore, this case wasn’t about AI per se.
I did bring it up as relevant because, as you say, AI is just an over-hyped black box. But that’s my opinion, with no case law to cite (ianal). So to say that a court would or should feel that AI and fancy photoediting is the same thing is misleading. I know that wasn’t your point, but it was part of mine.
I see your point, though I wouldn’t put it that far. It’s an edge case that has to happen in a very short duration.
Similar effects can be acheived with traditional cameras with rolling shutter.
If you’re only concerned of relative positions of different people during a time frame, I don’t think you need to be that worried. Being aware of it is enough.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think Apple is “filming” over the course of the seconds you have the camera open, and uses the press of the shutter button to select a specific shit from the hundreds of frames that have been taken as video. Then, some algorithm appears to be assembling different portions of those shots into one “best” shot.
I’m aware of the differences. I’m just pointing out that similar phenomenon and discussions have been made since rolling shutter artifacts have been a thing. It still only takes milliseconds for an iPhone to finish taking it’s plethora of photos to composite. For the majority of forensic use cases, it’s a non issue imo. People don’t move that quick to change relative positions substantially irl.
You don’t need a few whole seconds to put an arm down.
Edit: I should rephrase. I don’t think computational photography algorithms would risk compositing photos that are whole seconds apart. In well lit environments, one photo only needs 1/100 seconds or less to expose properly. Using photos that are temporally too far apart risk objects moving too much in the frame, and thus fail to composite.
It takes you several seconds to move your arm? I hope you don’t do manual work.
Also did you use the iOS camera app before? You can see how long it takes for the iPhone to take multiple shots for the always-on hdr feature, and it isn’t several seconds.
Those arm positions occur over the course of a fluid motion in a single second. How long does it take for you to drop your hands to your side or raise them to clasped from the side? It doesn’t take me more than about half a second as a deliberate movement.
I can also see the three arm positions being a single motion, just in three different time frames. If it really takes seconds to complete a composite, then it should also be very easy to reproduce, and not something so rare it makes it into the news. If I still can’t convince you, I guess we agree to disagree then.
Please, feel free to reproduce one yourself then. And no, using the panorama trick doesn’t count, which I think the “silly photos” in the article may be actually referencing instead of this.
And is it really “outrageous”? At most I think this is amusing. Nowhere in the article gave me the impression that this is something that people need to be extremely angry about, Mr. Just in case.
There’s three different arm positions in a single picture. That doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye.
It’s a lot faster than you might be expecting. I found it helps to visualize it in person. Go to a mirror and start with your hands together like in the right side mirror. Now let your arms down naturally, to the position in the left side mirror. If you don’t move your arms at the same exact time, one elbow will still be parallel to the floor while the other elbow has extended already, just like in the middle position.
Thus, we can tell that the camera compiled the image from right to left.
A “legitimate” google ad tricked my friend into installing a version of vlc with spyware packed with it. This was a few years ago. Are tech journos just figuring this out?
Here’s the thing, until they can put out a value better than a $400 PS5, I don’t feel like it matters what they do. They’re stuck in an extraordinarily thin price niche where on one end you’ve got lower-priced consoles that blow Macs out of the water in gaming, and on the other end you’ve got similarly-priced traditional gaming PCs and laptops which also blow Macs out of the water for gaming. The “not having games” problem is entirely secondary here, Macs aren’t competing as gaming machines. They’re doing all this work to make it easier for developers to put their games on the platform, but not a single thought has gone into attracting consumers. The magic mouse completely blows for gaming, that’s not even a question, so why does Apple still handicap the experience for people using third-party mice? Why hold something like smooth scrolling ransom if they want people to take the platform seriously? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say maybe they’re just wanting to focus on controller players, great, so then consider that a controller doesn’t come with a Mac and that the same DualSense controller that Apple sells comes stock with that PS5.
It’s like they’ve got a small group of software engineers that want gaming on Mac to be viable but everyone else at the company missed the memo.
Unless Apple drops the price of their devices by at least a third, it’s not really going to happen.
Another thing to consider is that Jamf will certainly not be dominating the Apple MDM management solution arena in a decade either.
Companies with a mostly win estate with win infra, aren’t happy with paying another $40 per user, per year for Jamf and Intune will be making up a lot of ground for a one shop solution, even if management is not as featured or complex as what Jamf offers.
The bigger problems Apple has are their enterprise device and user management, and the fact that many businesses are still reliant on Windows-only software.
Most companies I've worked for buy machines that usually aren't much cheaper than Apple equivalents, at least in terms of MSRP, despite the quality often being worse. My work-provided 2022 HP Z-Book 15 is more expensive as configured than my personal M2 14" MacBook Pro, and is still a shittier machine in just about every objective (and subjective) way I can think of. This is because enterprises typically buy business class laptops like Lattitudes and ThinkPads rather than lower cost (and less durable) consumer oriented machines. That said, it is not uncommon for IT departments at large enterprises to pay well under MSRP for these machines when buying in bulk.
This is my small company. We used to buy cheap computers (like even from Best Buy or Wal-Mart…the then CEO was super cheap), but then we (I) always had to deal with bloatware and just crappy computers that wouldn’t last a year before I started getting complaints that they were slow or just acting up all the time. When he left, I started buying business-line computers directly from the OEMs. They’re not necessarily cheap. The Dell and sometimes HP laptops we buy average about $1500. Even before the pandemic and inflation that was true.
On the other hand, I also support a handful of Apple users, mainly in the Marketing/Communications team, and all but one have M1 Macbook Airs. They cost like $800. And they’re amazing. I bought a Mac Studio for our web designer/video & graphics editor and it only cost like $2000, I think. It too is a beast.
When I worked at a small MSP, some of the C-suites and biz owners I supported wanted powerful Windows laptops. Rarely for any work-related reason; they just wanted something better than the “peons.” They sometimes paid around $2000 for them. And like you mentioned, they were often still shit.
Sticker price isn’t that big a factor in enterprise in my experience. For one thing, Dell, HP, and Lenovo’s enterprise PC lines are more expensive than their consumer lines, so the difference isn’t all that big. Also, there have been many studies showing that Macs offer a lower TCO than Windows PCs.
I can see this happening, though it will vary widely by industry for sure. I’ve been working in roughly 50/50 Mac/PC offices for over a decade now. Users like Macs, Apple has good enterprise management and security features, and Microsoft is kind of shitting the bed with their cloud migrations. Microsoft lives by inertia and backwards compatibility, and they’re throwing away that advantage by making these transitions difficult.
It’s got the same energy as the “year of the Linux desktop” meme. I think that the mobile space will be Apple-dominated first, then laptops will come later as the PC market naturally shrinks and starves off less-profitable players à la the current tablet market.
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This article is speculation on top of speculation on top of speculation.
It could make sense, and Rivian is certainly on a tipping point right now in terms of its future, but this article doesn’t do a great job convincing me that it’s true.
He also sold before the buyback which caused the stock to raise 7%~. If he was insider trading, it would have made sense to purchase before a buyback, then sell afterwards.
It was clear they had supply constraints a few years ago, and when those cleared up there was a huge bubble of sales. Expecting growth this year when so many regular customers just got a new phone would be silly.
And it’s also a distraction - the problems facing Apple are
How poorly the company is responding to antitrust complaints.
The Vision Pro doesn’t seem to be doing well, and their car project was so much worse they literally killed it.
Twelve years ago Apple was leading the industry on digital assistants… Siri was nowhere near good enough but nobody else had a “good enough” product either and Siri showed real promise. Now? WTF is taking so long? It’s pretty clear other companies are very close to achieving what Siri failed and there’s not much to indicate Apple can keep up.
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