If 90% of passengers were scamming the drivers or hijacking the car for some nefarious purpose that affects other cars, you definitely wouldn't find that silly.
I would think it is pretty silly if I needed some sort of verification to drive people I personally know around because other people were getting their car hijacked after choosing to pick up strangers they found on the highway.
1- that Jobs would somehow be the hero of a mythical arab/syrian culture and diversity politics who would
have behaved differently than Cook towards Trump.
If anything, Jobs cherished the white working suburban middle class of the west coast that has been destroyed in the last generations. He _never_ behaved as a white knight and nobody knows what he would have done (and nobody knows how hard Cook's political equation is)
2- that Apple is due for perfect, idealized products that fill 100% of people's void. This guy explains that iPhones make too many compromise and the OS is just "good enough".
Would be curious to hear of _one single_ previous or current OS platform or hardware at that scale that matches Apple's 2026 line up.
Jobs seemed mostly apolitical, but a joke could be that he would've bankrolled RFK Jr. to victory in 2024, while forcing him to stick to the moderate position where he was in 2008 when Obama considered making him head of the EPA.
That's one is first point: "don't buy anything Apple" based on the linked Anil Dash's post, itself based on Arab Steve Jobs fantasy and Cook's supposed betrayal.
You could swap "tech" for "big media" and just play the same blame game for Reagan's and Bush Jr's elections.
> the crown jewels of America’s last century
Including Nasa in this pure idealization of the past. Nasa had many flaws that enabled a catastrophic Shuttle program and then the slow loss of US go-to-LEO capability.
There's probably more to expect of US investment in space without incompetent or contradictory military and political oversight than the current nasa zombie programs.
And it's unclear that Nasa can ever be without that oversight.
Do you remember when a President of the United States was impeached for an affair with an adult intern?
Do you remember when a Republican presidential nominee defended his opponent from a racist question at a Republican Rally, calling him a "decent family man?"
--
Then, can you think of a time when a POTUS committed a pump a security he was selling, only to dump it immediately after his inauguration, and it it was barely talked about at at all?
I wasn't alive but I read about how people made fun of Carter for being a peanut farmer.
So much for Americans believing in hard work and salt of the earth! Now they have a NYC property developer.
To understand America do not listen to what they say but watch what they do...
You may not realize this because the vast majority of people don’t realize it, but there are far deeper things going on with both those situations, i.e., how Reagan became what he did and why Carter was so attacked and for so long. It takes immense understanding of history and geopolitical matters beyond what the system’s education system can impart, which makes it challenging to understand things properly.
Think of it like trying to understand the true origins and nature of the Soviet Union while being in the Soviet Union. Only a few people will even be able to achieve such an understanding and only under immense pressures and significant dangers even without speaking out, just alone for having sought out the truth. You cannot understand the Matrix while being plugged into it.
You can keep your abusive language to yourself. It does not work on me. Either you have intention behind your lies or you are simply naive. Either way you are projecting, you can move along. You are dismissed.
You know there are people on HN who come from or live outside the US, right? Instead of ruminating on how incredibly hard it is for mere mortals to understand the historical forces in play, you could just make your attempt at articulating what you think the key drivers were. Granted, a HN comment only allows for so much depth and references to books or academic papers involve work to generate and read, but as it is you've advanced no thesis whatsoever.
>> Do you remember when a President of the United States was impeached for an affair with an adult intern?
You know, you could at least try to get your facts straight. Clinton was not impeached for his consensual affair with Lewinsky. He was impeached for lying about it under oath.
edit: providing corrections now gets posts flagged huh?
Kind of funny that you specifically pointed out the "lying under oath" part. Becaause you know, the initial argument's current POTUS lied under oath, several times, about way more dangerous things.
And he fired the people that did their job at the FBI to investigate him. Out of pure retaliation.
The shuttle program wasnt what NASA wanted to do, it was the military that pushed for that.
It's ironic that you'd blame them for the thing they didnt want to do.
If theyd kept their budget and autonomy after the moon landing it looked like they wouldve been building reusable rockets like the ones elon is building now, except in like, 1980.
It's ironic that you didn't read a comment before answering.
> it's unclear that Nasa can ever be without that (military and political) oversight
By design, Nasa is probably doomed to get interference.
> If theyd kept their budget and autonomy after the moon landing it looked like they wouldve been building reusable rockets
Pure fantasy. Nasa's interest for reusable vehicles led them to the Shuttle. Even without all the design changes, it would have been a dud.
Due to its nature, Nasa can't freely explore and commit to a design like SpaceX does/did. It draws a concept and freezes it after contractor review, only to find after an already massive investment if it works. Then there's public accountability instead of executive risk taking.
I'd bet the proper way to have protected Nasa would have been to keep it focused on key scientific missions with limited financial exposure. Mars rovers are a perfect case, or most James Webb.
Using Nasa to go back to the Moon or reach Mars was doomed to fail (sort of like it failed post Apollo).
>Nasa's interest for reusable vehicles led them to the Shuttle
The shuttle was a result of budget cuts they had no control over, military pressure they had no control over AND an interest in reusable spacecraft. The latter wasnt the problem.
The way I see it you are either blaming the organization for something it had no control over or are making an incoherent point in order to disparage the organization. Perhaps you could illuminate a 3rd interpretation of your comment.
Feels more like Apple is sticking to its position that "all those LLMs are gimmicks and not actual AI". So they think they're not late because they see the primary tech behind oAI (etc) as a base for non-threatening features.
This stance will probably age very poorly but that's what it is.
They didn't do anything with "blockchain" either, and are no worse off for it. It's actually nice to see a company not just chasing whatever is hot and trendy each month.
I'd say they're correct from the consumer POV. In the context of a phone that's consumed mostly by non-technical people, AI in its current form is at best a better Google that occasionally fabricates the truth (or a silly image generator for creating memes).
Facebook had immense network effects working for it back then.
What network effect does OpenAI have? Far as I can tell, moving from OpenAI to Gemini or something else is easy. It’s not sticky at all. There’s no “my friends are primarily using OpenAI so I am too” or anything like that.
OpenAI (or, more specifically, Chat GPT) is CocaCola, not Facebook.
They have the brand recognition and consumer goodwill no other brand in AI has, incredibly so with school students, who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them.
I think better models are enough to dethrone OpenAI in API, B2C and internal enterprise use cases, but OpenAI has consumer mindshare, and they're going to be the king of chatbots forever. Unless somebody else figures out something which is better by orders of magnitude and that Open AI can't copy quickly, it's going to stay that way.
Apple had the opportunity to do something really great here. With Siri's deep device integration on one hand and Apple's willingness to force 3rd-party devs to do the right thing for users on the other, they could have had a compelling product that nobody else could copy, but it seems like they're not willing to go that route, mostly for privacy, antitrust and internal competency reasons, in that order. Google is on the right track and might get something similar (although not as polished as typical Apple) done, but Android's mindshare among tech-savvy consumers isn't great enough for it to get traction.
> Unless somebody else figures out something which is better by orders of magnitude and that Open AI can't copy quickly, it's going to stay that way.
This will happen, and it won't be another model which Open AI can't copy, it'll be products.
I don't doubt OpenA I can create the better models but they're no moat if they're not in better products. Right now the main product is chat, which is easy enough to build, but as integrations get deeper how can OpenAI actually ensure it keeps traffic?
Case in point, Siri. Apple allows you to use ChatGPT with Siri right now. If Apple chooses so, they could easily remove that setting. On most devices ChatGPT lives within the confines of an app or the browser. A phone with deep AI integration is arguably a fantastic product— much better than having to open an app and chat with a model. How quickly could Open AI build a phone that's as good as those of the big phone companies today?
To draw a parallel— Google Assistant has long been better than Siri, but to use Siri you don't have to install an app. I've used both Android and iOS, and every time I'm on iPhone I switch back to Siri because in spite of being a worse assistant, it's overall a better product. It integrates well with the rest of the phone, because Apple has chosen to not allow any other voice assistant integrate deeply with the rest of the phone.
Does Google not have brand recognition and Consumer good will? We might read all sorts of deep opinions of Google on HN, but I think Search and Chrome market share speak themselves. For the average consumer, I'm skeptical that OpenAI carries much weight.
> For the average consumer, I'm skeptical that OpenAI carries much weight.
My friend teaches at a Catholic girls’ high school and based on what he tells me, everyone knows about ChatGPT, both staff and students. He just had to fail an entire class on an assignment because they all used it to write a book summary (which many of them royally screwed up because there’s another book with a nearly identical title).
It’s all anecdotal and whatnot but I don’t think many of them even know about Claude or Gemini, while ChatGPT has broad adoption within education. (I’m far less clear on how much mindshare it has within the general population though)
> who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them.
...Until their employer forces them to use Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, or whatever, because that's what they pay for and what integrates into their enterprise stack. And the new employee shrugs and accepts it.
> Just like people are forced to use web Office and Microsoft Teams, and start prefering them over Google Docs and Slack? I don't think so
...yes. Office is the market leader. Slack has between a fifth and a fourth of the market. Coca-Cola's products have like 70% market share in the American carbonated soft-drink market [1].
Coca Cola does insane amounts of advertising to maintain their position in the mind of the consumer. I don't think it is as sticky as you say it is for OpenAi
Yep, I mostly interact with these AIs through Cursor. When I want to ask it a question, there's a little dropdown box and I can select openai/anthropic/deepseek whatever model. It's as easy as that to switch.
Yeah but I remember when search first started getting integrated with the browser and the "switch search engine" thing was significantly more prominent. Then Google became the default and nobody ever switched it and the rest is history.
So the interesting question is: How did that happen? Why wasn't Google search an easily swapped commodity? Or if it was, how did they win and defend their default status? Why didn't the existing juggernauts at the time (Microsoft) beat them at this game?
I have my own answers for these, and I'm sure all the smart people figuring out strategy at Open AI have thought about similar things.
It's not clear if Open AI will be able to overcome this commodification issue (personally, I think they won't), but I don't think it's impossible, and there is prior art for at least some of the pages in this playbook.
Yes, I think people severely underrate the data flywheel effects that distribution gives an ML-based product, which is what Google was and ChatGPT is. It is also an extremely capital-intensive industry to be in, so even if LLMs are commoditized, it will be to the benefit of a few players, and barring a sustained lead by any one company over the others, I suspect the first mover will be very difficult to unseat.
Google is doing well for the moment, but OpenAI just closed a $40 billion round. Neither will be able to rest for a while.
Yeah, a very interesting metric to know would be how many tokens of prompt data (that is allowed to be used for training) the different products are seeing per day.
> So the interesting question is: How did that happen? Why wasn't Google search an easily swapped commodity? Or if it was, how did they win and defend their default status? Why didn't the existing juggernauts at the time (Microsoft) beat them at this game?
Maybe the big amount of money they've given to Apple which is their direct competitor in the mobile space. Also good amount of money given to Firefox, which is their direct competitor in the browser space, alongside side Safari from Apple.
Most people don't care about the search engine. The default is what they will used unless said default is bad.
I don't think my comment implied that the answers to these questions aren't knowable! And indeed, I agree that the deals to pay for default status in different channels is a big part of that answer.
So then apply that to Open AI. What are the distribution channels? Should they be paying Cursor to make them the default model? Or who else? Would that work? If not, why not? What's different?
My intuition is that this wouldn't work for them. I think if this "pay to be default" strategy works for someone, it will be one of their deeper pocketed rivals.
But I also don't think this was the only reason Google won search. In my memory, those deals to pay to be the default came fairly long after they had successfully built the brand image as the best search engine. That's how they had the cash to afford to pay for this.
A couple years ago, I thought it seemed likely that Open AI would win the market in that way, by being known as the clear best model. But that seems pretty unclear now! There are a few different models that are pretty similarly capable at this point.
Essentially, I think the reason Google was able to win search whereas the prospects look less obvious for Open AI is that they just have stronger competition!
To me, it just highlights the extent to which the big players at the time of Google's rise - Microsoft, Yahoo, ... Oracle maybe? - really dropped the ball on putting up strong competition. (Or conversely, Google was just further ahead of its time.)
From talking to people, the average user relies on memories and chat history, which is not easy to migrate. I imagine that's the part of the strategy to keep people from hopping model providers.
No one has a deep emotional connection with OpenAI that would impede switching.
At best they have a bit of cheap tribalism that might prevent some incurious people who don't care much about using the best tools noticing that they aren't.
IMHO "ChatGPT the default chatbot" is a meaningful but unstable first-mover advantage. The way things are apparently headed, it seems less like Google+ chasing FB, more like Chrome eating IE + NN's lunch.
OpenAI is a relatively unknown company outside of the tech bubble. I told my own mom to install Gemini on her phone because she's heard of Google and is more likely going to trust Google with whatever info she dumps into a chat. I can’t think of a reason she would be compelled to use ChatGPT instead.
Consumer brand companies such as Coca Cola and Pepsi spend millions on brand awareness advertising just to be the “default” in everyone’s heads. When there’s not much consequence choosing one option over another, the one you’ve heard of is all that matters
I know a single person who uses ChatGPT daily, and only because their company has an enterprise subscription.
My impression is that Claude is a lot more popular – and it’s the one I use myself, though as someone else said the vast majority of people, even in software engineering, don’t use AI often at all.
> OpenAI has been on a winning streak that makes ChatGPT the default chatbot for most of the planet
OpenAI has like 10 to 20% market share [1][2]. They're also an American company whose CEO got on stage with an increasingly-hated world leader. There is no universe in which they keep equal access to the world's largest economies.
Not sure if Google+ is a good analogy, it reminds me more of the Netscape vs IE fight. Netscape sprinted like it was going to dominate the early internet era and it worked until Microsoft bundled IE with Windows for free.
LLMs themselves aren't the moat, product integration is. Google, Apple and Microsoft already have the huge user bases and platforms with a big surface area covering a good chunk of our daily life, that's why I think they're better positioned if models become a commodity. OpenAI has the lead now, but distribution is way more powerful in the long run.
That's not at all the same thing: social media has network effects that keep people locked in because their friends are there. Meanwhile, most of the people I know using LLMs cancel and resubscribe to Chat-GPT, Claude and Gemini constantly based on whatever has the most buzz that month. There's no lock-in whatsoever in this market, which means they compete on quality, and the general consensus is that Gemini 2.5 is currently winning that war. Of course that won't be true forever, but the point is that OpenAI isn't running away with it anymore.
And nobody's saying OpenAI will go bankrupt, they'll certainly continue to be a huge player in this space. But their astronomical valuation was based on the initial impression that they were the only game in town, and it will come down now that that's no longer true. Hence why Altman wants to cash out ASAP.
The comparison of Chrome and IE is much more apt, IMO, because the deciding factor as other mentioned for social media is network effects, or next-gen dopamine algorithms (TikTok). And that's unique to them.
For example, I'd never suggest that e.g. MS could take on TikTok, despite all the levers they can pull, and being worth magnitudes more. No chance.
Google+ absolutely would have won, and it was clear to me that somebody at Google decided they didn't want to be in the business of social networking. It was killed deliberately, it didn't just peter out.
Pretty sure this is not about revenue but profit margins, since the Services line was under heavy surveillance by markets back then.
Though that's the core issue, margins on services are just too addictive for big tech. Not sure Apple can keep its recipe for success with both services and hardware.
You could argue that macOS development is too slow, not too fast and in need of a maintenance year.
Basic OS features have fallen way behind in term of UX - and of vision. Managing files and searching for information have become a chore compared to most internet- or llm-based services. Even a bug-free Finder or faster Spotlight would not bridge that gap.
All apps listed in the article feel similarly lost behind - Mail, Messages, Photos. The only exception is System Settings that does definitely need a snow version.
This is obviously true for other platforms as well.
We are possibly lacking a leap forward. Not faster horses, electric cars.
An obvious root cause of this is the lack of newcomers to the OS again. It's an oligopole that has no interest making things much improved.
