Apple didn’t want to, it was forced to.

From a design and manufacturing point of view you want everything to be identical. Differences are expensive.

From a profit maximization standpoint you want identical phones that can't easily be sold across market borders. Usually that's done in software (e.g. region locked video games), but that can usually be cracked, so a single design difference is the best solution. A great example is Nintendo's cartridge slot shapes that were different in each region despite the hardware being the same.

Apple had lightning everywhere; they were forced to change to USB-C. Therefore they changed to USB-C everywhere. The market protection design change remains the sim slot.

We see this more locally in the US as well. There's something called the California effect. California emission standards were more strict than the rest of the country, but it didn't make sense to make California only vehicles and then vehicles for the rest of the country. So automakers built to the California standards and residents in all of the other states got to benefit from cleaner air as a result.

> From a design and manufacturing point of view you want everything to be identical.

OK, so why not ship a SIM card slot in the US? eSIMs work perfectly well in Europe, the US and most of the rest of the world, "region locking" is clearly not the answer.

Apple did not have "lightning everywhere" either - Macs and iPads got it much earlier.

Imagine the shit show of trying to win support of third parties when you can't even standardize on one connector for the same device.

... and now the TV itself has ads!

as well as anti virus.

The way people talk about RSI reminds me of how people talk about the rapture.

... is what they believe.

They don't want FDA, they want FINRA. Basically an organization that can rubber stamp them and create regulatory headaches for others.

FDA is just way too much red tape.

> Inference is not being subsidized and in fact has pretty high margins.

1. Companies are trying to decrease costs, not increase it, and are looking at alternatives

2. Competitors are catching up, and even if the frontier labs are "better" at some things (like writing plans or complicated analysis), the competitors can take a lot of the inference on routine tasks like implementing a well-defined plan

3. The frontier labs don't just need to have high margins right now. They have to pay back their massive liabilities.

Astra does exactly the same sort of things that Sol or any of the previous agents do. They duplicate code, overengineer, miss the point, etc.

I was very optimistic about it when it was announced and saw all the demos, but a week later I find it only marginally better (and in some cases worse) than before.

So they really are like the Private Equity of the software world.

More like following the Computer Associates model, a tale as old as time. Find a mature platform with a captive user population with a fat, lazy management team, buy them out, slash headcount, and open the taps. Someone in the thread mentioned Atlassian, that is a perfect target for this kind of strategy.

Atlassian is too large. Also atlassian has been doing the same growing by acquisition for a long while themselves.

ca got out-ca'ed when broadcom (avago) bought them

Yes but focussing more on long-term ownership, as opposed to the usual turn-around and flip or asset stripping methodology.

Right now it’s only for the free tier, but given the recent trends I imagine it will make its way to paid tiers.

Just consider how even paid streaming services are bringing in ads, or how TVs were caught using ACR to spy on us.

Paid tier just means you're a more lucrative ad target.

Well they are being generous giving you extra 15 min video streaming which cost a lot to produce for free in a 45min show.

Soon, one need to be tipping advertising producing partners for their hard work.

> This drama is about AI achieving impressive outcomes with little to no human intervention

That's not at all what the drama is.

Of course, as any drama, it has been developing into a lot more but the main motivation for OpenAI has been about winning that battle.