AFAIK you can still install any random APK but the process will require enabling developer mode and one time 24 hour wait period. But the problem is many stupid Apps check that developer mode is on and refuse to work.
> What are your philosophical thoughts on paying a subscription to get your work done?
You are paying to get the work done much quicker. You are saving time, if you don't think your time has more value than the cost of AI agent then you should not pay for these tools.
> The new norm?
As long as companies are ok to pay for these tools and they believe that these do provide value, yes this is going to be the new norm.
> Lets see what local models can do?
My hope is that local models become as good as cloud models but the tricky part is all the AI companies would prefer to have big giant cloud models instead of innovating on optimization so that even small models can do good work.
It is unified in the sense that the OS can dynamically assign memory to CPU and GPU. Apple silicon is not a alien tech that other silicon vendors cannot implement.
LLMs (the current AI approach) are definitely useful tools BUT the cost of training and inference and creating bigger and bigger model to improve the "intelligence" is extremely high and the consequence of this high cost is having negative impact of average people whether it is in terms of job losses or rising cost of electricity and other stuff.
Unless the industry is able to reduce the cost drastically and soon, it will have negative impact on all of us.
To counter my own "against top panel" argument, one thing that the top panel does is that it enables you to auto hide the app panel/dock and yet have the ability to see things like date/time and other information on the top panel.
Many apps these days have tabs at top like chrome or firefox and having a top panel (with or without menu bar) means you loose the useful of the fitts law for accessing the tabs of such apps.
So this is essentially Android desktop mode with Android 17 Gemini integration.
Please get rid of that top panel. I just don't get why this and desktops like GNOME tries to copy macos top panel when clearly in macos it is menu bar that host app menus but that concept doesn't exists in these other desktops and yet they have a top panel. This is just bad UX.
This will follow same model as Chromebooks i.e different devices from different OEM partners and for x86 and arm. So soon someone will be able to create a generic ISO for this that you can boot on a standard x86 PC/laptop.
Samsung is also working on such devices but they will probably have Dex which is much better then the current Android desktop mode.
Windows hiding the file extension by default means all non-tech people who use Windows never learned about file extension and it also means they all can be easily social engineered into executing malicious code.
> They want the thing, they don't care if it works well. They don't care if it's efficient. They want it now.
That's because they don't know what to build that will be a successful product, so they essentially try to brute force this question of "what to build" by trying different ideas quickly and see which one will stick. And in this quick iteration loop people just throw bunch of stuff together to make something and once that something gains traction they will keep piling on top of that shaky foundation.
In same price range you can get a PC that not only has more ram but also has better multicore performance, better disk speed and better port selection. Yes neo wins on build quality, trackpad, speaker, display and battery life but the PC would also allow you to install any linux distro.