As someone who has used Ashby pretty regularly over the last several years, I suspect I’m not alone in wishing they’d let the AI make the technical and product decisions.
It’s a product that feels like it’s designed and built by the C or D team. The slowness and bloat of Rippling with wild, fever dream interaction models and workflows that frustrate and confound.
(And enjoy fucking emailing them if you need anything at all: almost literally no self service paths exist in the app for account upgrades, adding on SAML etc. And I do mean that you have to email them—last I checked it’s a mailto: link, not even a form.)
Given the abundance of vaguely similar local-first AI memory layers, it might be a good idea to add a "Why Mnemo" section right at the top of README.md to explain why folks should consider using it.
> And then guess who bought Beats for their exquisite metal weight technology? That's right, it was Apple.
It's self-evidently extremely disingenuous to claim that Apple bought Beats for their "exquisite metal weight technology", so I thought I'd double check your claim that there are "metal weights" inside Beats headphones.
All of this appears to stem from two blog posts, written by the same VC.[^1] The first time they accidentally tore down counterfeit Beats, and when they managed to repeat the process, they "stuck by [their] claim" that:
> "…these metal parts are there to add a bit of weight and increase perceived quality with a nice look."
The BOM estimate they provide lists the following metal parts:
* Inner cast metal separator
* Springs
* Torx screw
* Self tapping screw
* Cast metal supports
* Stamped metal ear cup
None of these are extraneous weights not serving a purpose. The claim of the author might be better presented as:
"Beats headphones use heavier metal components instead of plastic ones, and I think it's because they add weight."
There are a lot of very good reasons to use materials that dampen unwanted interference like parasitic vibrations. Stiffer materials such as metal parts typically flex less, and have fewer (but usually more pronounced) resonances than plastic parts, which have intrinsic damping but might distort.
A good example of this is that the driver in your headphones is moving. Therefore the housing it is placed in must consider sprung/unsprung mass. Adding metal components increases the mechanical impedance.
So:
1. It is entirely possible that your claim about the weights is correct, and Beats chose to use metal components rather than plastic purely to add weight to the product.
2. There are a great many other possible explanations for using metal rather than plastic, and I don't think that you're likely to be party to them. For example: maybe they had the parts in-chain already and didn't want to have to tie up hardware engineering or supplier quality engineering for a new plastic part.
> 2) look at the single core performance, battery life, and screen quality of the original 13" M1 MacBook Air. Now find me a laptop with commensurate performance at the same price point from that time.
My point is not that there are NO faster or cheaper laptops than MacBook Air, but that at this price point, it's very difficult (impossible?) to find comparable processor performance, battery life, and screen quality.
You offered a laptop which doesn't seem to be commensurate on any of those aspects. I think it's possibly because you didn't read the full comment?
> Or ignore that and continue to insist faster and cheaper laptops don't exist.
Hopefully the above clears up what I'm driving at. Faster laptops definitely exist. Cheaper laptops definitely exist.
> It's a $400 laptop and your only critera was that it had to be faster and cheaper.
No, that is not what I said. I referred to the MacBook Air "test" twice:
> > 2) look at the single core performance, battery life, and screen quality of the original 13" M1 MacBook Air. Now find me a laptop with commensurate performance at the same price point from that time.
This might be unclear to you. I am saying: look at [processor performance, battery performance, screen performance] of the original 13" M1 MacBook Air. Now find me a laptop with commensurate performance [to those aspects][ at the same price point.
I went on to refer back to this later on:
> 4. Can you find me that mythical laptop computer to compete with MacBook Air?
I did not set the condition that it be cheaper. I did not constrain performance to JUST the processor speed.
> If you actually wanted to talk about displays then yes, your original comment was missing some key details.
Is there something beyond me specifically referring to the "screen quality" that would have been helpful to your understanding?
> I wouldn't be surprised if your next reach was to claim MacOS is an "infinite value add" and end our comparison on that basis alone.
You're engaging in a lot of quite pointed speculation about my integrity in this discussion. Did you read what I said to OP? If so, can you help everyone understand why you think I don't care about the list of parameters I enumerated and am somehow moving the goalposts by assessing your example by the criteria I feel like I originally expressed?
I'm happy to get into the subjective stuff you've outlined, although you're not OP, but before I do, can I just make sure you're clear on what I'm asking for on the laptop thing?
I said:
> look at the single core performance, battery life, and screen quality of the original 13" M1 MacBook Air. Now find me a laptop with commensurate performance at the same price point from that time.
1. Single core performance
It looks like the M1 which shipped in the 13" MacBook Air massively outperforms the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U[^1] on Geekbench 5 single core: 1710 vs. 707.
Am I missing something?
2. Battery life
Here's a comparison[^2] of the M1 MacBook Air with the laptop you referred to from the same publication. The M1 MacBook Air scored >29hrs on the battery rundown test: "It ran for 29 hours and 1 minute on our battery rundown test, producing one of the longest results we’ve ever recorded." The Ideapad was about 1/3rd of that at 8hrs: "Eight and a half hours away from a wall outlet isn't bad…"
Am I missing something?
3. Screen quality
The same reviews refer to the Ideapad having a "mediocre" screen. It's 1920x1080, but the resolution is only 142ppi. The M1 MacBook Air is higher resolution and higher PPI (227) and 13" not 15". The disparity in quality between them almost couldn't be starker.
Am I missing something?
Happy to talk to someone who can at least try to offer substantiation for their perspectives, but it feels like we're missing each other on this.
Isn't it funny that in your previous reply, you suggested that if you offered a rebuttal of my point around performance, I would try to move the goalposts:
> Let me pull up single and multithreaded bench marks. "Oh not that measure". "Well it was among, top 36.6 percentile".
And now you say:
> You share links to random websites that fit your narrative. Its dangerous to listen to your opinion,
If you can reject the mass of empirical data supporting the view that MacBook Air M1 offers unparalleled processor performance and battery life in its class and form factor, then I'm not really sure what to say. Good luck with the MBA which educated you sufficiently to suggest that Apple's marketing team might profile customers in retail stores based on age and gender.
> Your identity is wrapped up in Apple products, its scary what they can do to a human brain.
I'd say my identity is more wrapped up in helping the world to avoid making facile and conspiratorial statements about marketing strategies so hopelessly out of touch with reality that they can make someone apparently educated to a postgraduate level appear roughly as superficially informed as a high school student.
> It'll be by appointment so they can control the tap, say it is sold out, say there is a waiting list. Create a buzz.
For near enough the last decade, all iPhone launches have been appointment only in-store, and Apple Watch was appointment only in-store for the first 4 months of its life.
> Cynically, a case in point is the display: it is so new and advanced that they have problems ramping production!
Imagine that at the end of next year, Apple has sold 400,000 devices, and tells us that only supply constraints are preventing them from selling many more. Which is the more plausible explanation:
1. As with nearly all novel/complex technologies when manufactured at large scale, the combined costs of tooling, the complexity and uncertainty of new manufacturing techniques, and the low yields which inevitably follow, have created a supply constraint for Vision Pro.
2. In the face of weak demand for Vision Pro, Apple and its partners choose to collude in a lie to customers and shareholders alike, claiming that Vision Pro is supply constrained when really nobody wants to buy it, thus… achieving… erm… uh… something?
> When you say it generically like this, it has no meaning. Among? Top 50%
Here are two measures for you: 1) look at the last ten years of Consumer Reports smartphone rankings. How often is the latest iPhone ranked in the top 3? 2) look at the single core performance, battery life, and screen quality of the original 13" M1 MacBook Air. Now find me a laptop with commensurate performance at the same price point from that time.
> You could say this about any company. Its marketing jargon from the best in the world at marketing.
The urge to suggest that you seek a refund of the tuition fees for your marketing class is tempered only by a growing feeling that it might have been an elective at high school?
> This is no different than when they plaster 'Security' and 'Privacy' in their ads, yet have worse security than Android(if we use pegasus and zerodium for security)
Trusted Reviews:[^1] "iPhones are more secure by default. Disk encryption is enabled by default, apps from the App Store go through a stricter vetting process, and Apple doesn’t gather users’ personal details for advertising purposes"
Norton:[^2] "There’s no doubt Android is a bit more of a Wild West than iOS, but, with the right precautions, it can still be a safe platform."
InfoSecurityBuzz:[^3] "Android had 547 vulnerabilities in the year 2021, compared to 357 for iOS. While both Android and iOS have vulnerabilities […] Android has more overall vulnerabilities [and] a higher proportion of Android vulnerabilities are considered to have a low attack complexity, which means that they are easier to exploit."
The claim that Android is more secure than iOS seems like pure fantasy. Can you substantiate it?
> and have been known to hand over data(PRISM, data in Russian and chinese data centers).
Any foreign company operating a data center in China is required to contract with a domestic partner for legal ownership of the data within the facility and physical security of the location. In this regard, as with PRISM, Apple is no different to Amazon, Microsoft, et al.
The only data stored in Apple's Chinese data center is that of its Chinese customers, and I do not believe Apple markets its products as "privacy"-focused in China, where there is almost literally no concept of privacy.
Apple has in fact publicly resisted repeated attempts from state and federal authorities to have it insert backdoors into iOS, and launched an amicus legal claim with Meta against the NSO group.
But anyway, let's pretend for a second that I grant you all of these fantastical and unsubstantiated claims about iPhone privacy and security, I have some direct questions for you!
1. Can you explain to me why "the marketers" are adopting the same strategy for Vision Pro's launch as they have for every other flagship Apple launch in the last decade?
2. Can you explain why a company with an estimated NPS in range(+65,+80) even _needs_ the best marketers in the world?
3. Can you explain why you seem to believe that it is the job of Apple's marketing team to "normalise" something ex post facto? Isn't it a well understood axiom of Apple's philosophy that until the technology is mature (in this case: thin / light) enough to create a resonant user experience, they will not enter a market?
4. Can you find me that mythical laptop computer to compete with MacBook Air?
5. Can you see a trend looking back at the top 3 smartphones in Consumer Reports' surveys over the last decade?
> Not because the technology was bad, but because people just don't want it.
Have you ever used an AR/VR headset for something you generally enjoy (a game, a movie, Google Maps, whatever)?
I ask because my own experience (and the consensus of my network and the critics I read) is that devices like Oculus and the Vive Pro are extraordinarily compelling but overall held back by immature technology. Base stations. Wires. Visible pixels. Low quality video pass through. Stupid controllers you have to hold in your hands.
People see the potential and flashes of what might be, but it's impossible to get beyond the awful user experience.
> What Apple is missing here is that people wanted the iPhone (a phone with an iPod built in) for years before it was even officially announced as under development.
Two thoughts on this:
1) It seems to undermine your point that iPhone launched in 2007 and yet through 2011 failed to come close to outselling iPod in terms of units.
2) The device you are describing -- "a phone with an iPod built in", before the iPhone -- actually did exist. The Motorola ROKR E1, or the "iTunes Phone": it was unveiled in 2005 on stage by Steve Jobs. Motorola did the phone stuff, and Apple did the iPod bit.
It was a dismal failure and was discontinued after roughly a year on the market.
> It succeeded because the market invented it, not because Apple are geniuses who showed us we needed it.
What do you mean by "invented"? Because literally two years before the iPhone launched, the market "invented" a phone with a built-in iPod, manufactured by the leading cell phone manufacturer of the day, in collaboration with Apple, and it failed miserably. Did the market invent that phone?
It's fair to say that Apple is not the first entrant to most market it contributes to, and it's fair to say that they are rarely the progenitors of the technologies their devices rely upon.
What Apple is very good at is deeply understanding when new technologies can be combined or honed to bring them over a threshold of resonance with consumers which drives widespread adoption. It is not enough to simply say "ship a phone with a touch screen' --- folks were doing that for years before iPhone launched. Instead it's about understanding the interplay of latency, brightness, PPI, plural point awareness, manufacturing yields, component costs, and making tradeoffs which pursue a vision which people buy into.
That's why when you said "a phone with an iPod built in" you could have been referring to both iPhone _and_ the ROKR, but the two devices could not be more different: ROKR had a fiddly microSD card for storage. Crummy slow processor and user interface. Stupid tiny keyboard for typing on. WAP internet. Wired transfer speeds slower than high speed USB. Slow java apps. A low resolution TFT LCD display. Only 11 megabytes of onboard memory.
Supply chain scuttlebutt is that the display technology is so constrained[^1] that Apple expects to only _manufacture_ 400,000 headsets next year.
It's possible that this product will flop, but I can't see it being anything other than sold out everywhere for most of 2024. Heck, you can make a reasonable case for there only being 10k-30k SKUs in channel inventory at launch, and Apple has 275 retail locations which require multiple demo units in addition to launch stock.
> my marketing class taught us to look at everything Apple does under the view of the best marketers in the world.
I think there's a risk that your marketing class is being taught by folks who have a limited grasp of how trivial the discipline of marketing can be when a company's products -- in Apple's case: iPhone, MacBooks Pro & Air, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch -- rank among the leading products in their categories by nearly any measure, from consumer satisfaction to performance benchmarks.
> The marketers told them to go for the 'exclusive club' vibe by doing in-store appointments.
"The marketers" told them the same thing for the Apple Watch launch in 2015, and each iPhone launch since 2014 (?). The article suggests that the in-store requirement for Vision Pro stems from the need for multiple components of the device to be tailored to the purchaser's head/face/vision.
> Who knows maybe they will go full abercrombie and make sure people who are older than 40 get it slightly later than 20 year old females.
It's almost impossible for me to imagine that someone with sufficient interest in marketing to intentionally study it in a class could entertain this idea, even as a joke. It betrays a near total misconception of the discipline of marketing, and Apple's relationship to it.
Sorry for the slow reply. I don't seem to get email notifications any more when I receive replies on HN.
It seems like I might not have been very clear, so I'll summarise my points again briefly:
1. Apple products are in general only affordable to the middle and upper classes.
2. That does not mean that they are only attainable to the middle and upper classes: I specifically said affordable because a poor person owning an Apple device does not mean that it is "for" them in the same way as a middle class person owning a Ferrari does not mean that Ferraris are "for" the middle classes.
3. Your refutation of my point is that you know low income folks who have iPhone. But that isn't what makes something a luxury product or not, and if we draw the line in this way (Apple can't be luxury because poor people own it), then LV is not a luxury product because plenty of poor folks have LV goods too.
Hopefully that makes sense. From your most recent reply:
> a designer handbag is not a necessity
No doubt.
> A cell phone isn't a nice to have; it's pretty close to being a necessity
Agreed, but you're (presumably accidentally) creating a false equivalence by implicitly comparing the necessity of a designer handbag and any cell phone. The more illustrative comparisons would be any handbag to any cell phone, and an LV handbag specifically to an iPhone specifically. (I would expect you agree that "handbag adoption" amongst women is likely to be as high as cell phone adoption, right?)
The things which make a cell phone a necessity -- a fixed phone # to be contacted on, messaging, and web browsing -- are accessible at far lower price points than any iPhone, including the SE. You can get all of them in a $30 Alcatel handset. iPhone does the same stuff, but nicer (and more expensive).
Clearly wanting a slightly nicer thing than the very cheapest one available does not mean that you are buying a luxury good. The economic underpinning of a luxury good is that as income drops, propensity to spend on it reduces disproportionately (and the inverse is also true). The idea being that folks use their capital to take care of necessities, and increases in income yield the purchase of things which are not necessities. When times get tough, the first things which people stop buying -- and they stop buying them disproportionately to the drop in wealth -- are luxury items.
The iPhone SE is almost certainly the product of Apple's struggle with this very issue. iPhone ASP prior to the SE was c. $900, and I would bet good money that a lot of Apple's customers switch away from iPhone to cheaper handsets when they fall on tough times.
It's fairly uncharted territory, because for the first time the very best product in the market is one which is reasonably attainable, but that does not mean that Apple is a mass market brand. Andy Warhol wrote this about Coca-Cola, which I think helps to drive at the challenge in categorising Apple:
> You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
For two decades, this sort of calculus was not possible in the handset industry, but now there is nearly zero subjectivity. You don't need a $25,000 Vertu phone to know you have the best phone in the market, you can just go and buy a $1200 iPhone 11 Pro.
But the fact that cell phones are now a necessity shouldn't confuse us into thinking that Apple is not a luxury brand.
1. The ASP for iPhone is $900, and they report c. 70% of their mix being the Pro models.
2. ASPs for the remainder of the handset market are lower, and Apple is outsold about 4:1 globally by other manufacturers. They attract about 20% of buyers globally, and from the ASP we can be fairly sure that they are people spending the most money in the market.
3. From a utilitarian perspective we know that iPhone does not do anything which other handsets do not in the same way as a Ferrari does not do anything which a Prius does not. So if you are paying for iPhone you are paying a premium for "nice".
4. The people I am saying are excluded by Apple's strategy (lower income households) account for about 30% of the US. This is a really important point: your view of what is luxury can be distorted quite easily. (See also prevalence of LV bags in China.)
Lots of people who can't afford or can barely afford Louis Vuitton also have LV stuff. Low income families buying Apple products doesn't mean they're not luxury, it means they are aspirational.
A few years ago I read an upsetting news story about a girl who was sexually abused for three years by her stepfather, up until the age of eleven or so. She was so traumatised by it that a lasting symptom was a fearful, hysterical reaction to sausage.
It was an upsetting, almost cartoonish detail in the story, but it might be helpful to you here. On a rational level she should not be afraid of sausage. But years of abuse meant that she was. It's sad, but understandable. It's just how trauma and conditioning work.
One doesn't need to be a victim of racism to empathise with the fact that it has a profound and traumatising impact on people. Maybe you know something about OP that I don't, but if you are right, and there's no reason for them to be talking about race in this instance, it's unlikely you'll persuade them with incredulity that they hold the point of view they do.
> Pointing out that someone is white is about race, and I don't see why we should bring race into this.
OP didn't point out that anyone was white, they pointed out that although Apple included a variety of races in the video, they believe that this is a service which will appeal to upper and upper middle class Americans, which means predominantly white Americans.
They are talking about class, and noting as an aside that they believe this service caters to a predominantly white audience as a consequence of catering to the upper and middle classes.
The point is inane because ultimately Apple sells luxury consumer goods which are affordable only to the upper and middle classes, and as you point out Apple rightly has no interest in fighting for equality through its new fitness service.
I agree with your point, I'm just saying that OP's point, whilst unintentionally clumsy, did not bring race into it in a meaningful way.
It’s a product that feels like it’s designed and built by the C or D team. The slowness and bloat of Rippling with wild, fever dream interaction models and workflows that frustrate and confound.
(And enjoy fucking emailing them if you need anything at all: almost literally no self service paths exist in the app for account upgrades, adding on SAML etc. And I do mean that you have to email them—last I checked it’s a mailto: link, not even a form.)