A taxi with pre-calculated price, driver and vehicle rating, that actually arrives on time and the driver can't take you around the city with a boosted taxameter to overcharge you. Amazing indeed.
On time? Here in europe (Germany, Poland, CZ) you get ETA 7 minutes, but real time is 10-12 minutes every time. It's going down and only the cost agreement is now better than taxi. Money, as always, is the only matter working here.
Thanks for perfectly illustrating the impact of Uber - now you complain about few minutes!
I used a "real taxi" a lot in Germany, Poland and CZ before Uber. The best approximate they gave me was "in half an hour" and it usually was more like 45-60 minutes, if it arrived at all. The usual thing to do was to take one passing by, but that got you a terrible smelly car with a ganster driver that overcharged 2x-5x.
Since you mention CZ - the taxi mafia in Prague was especially legendary. Can't thank Uber enough for disrupting that.
I don't know anything about germany but here in the US except for a few select cities, taxi service was garbage and user hostile. Uber improved it in every way. Uber gives me confidence that almost everywhere in the US I can get a predictable ride.
You’re complaining about a five minute difference between estimated and actual time of arrival? U. S. taxis would have you standing in the rain for an hour past promised pickup, and maybe they just don’t show at all. There are good reasons that Uber, et al., were practically overnight successes.
I did business in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Estonia and Sweden. It was a total shitshow, and I moved it all to UK, which is much better (especially the gov.uk site is a godsend).
As everywhere else in EU (and unlike the UK), filling taxes and registering employees for all the necessary insurances and gov agencies becomes an extreme burden as soon as you go beyond just one person / the simplest business transactions. It's a fulltime job even if the company is still very small and just doesn't have the resources to hire a fulltime dedicated person.
Uhm... usually if you go beyond 1 person then you get someone to handle all the paperwork and this applies to almost all countries... In case of Poland it's not all that expensive either, especially if it takes off of you the burden...
No, not really. I can't make the money to hire the person to handle it without first having the employees. I handle it all myself, I am not VC-funded nor eligible for incentives.
This is very prevalent in the expat community where I have many friends. I hate it. At least the current AI developments made it possible for messenger apps to transcribe the messages to text (and back, though I haven't seen that feature yet) - we both get what's best for us.
And same with voice calls and voicemail - I mostly don't accept calls and let them all go to voicemail. iPhone transcribes what they're saying in real time and I can decide to pick up.
I'm really looking forward to an AI-first total overhaul of communication UX.
> iPhone transcribes what they're saying in real time and I can decide to pick up.
How does this work? Is it a carrier feature?
On my iPhone, if it goes to voicemail the call is done and the display goes to sleep. I have to go looking for the message in the voicemail to interact with it.
I’m in France and have never seen this on the two carriers I’ve used (Bouygues and Free).
It recently started to work on my Vodafone plan. Never even had a voicemail before that. Probably not a carrier-specific feature, at least not the transcription - though passing the voicemail audio data on probably requires some carrier-side support. I don't think it's some backhand deal though, I think it's using some unusual GSM/LTE/5G capability.
"In this excerpt from The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, 1999), Ray Kurzweil describes his work in speech recognition." - previous link
"The ‘80s saw speech recognition vocabulary go from a few hundred words to several thousand words. One of the breakthroughs came from a statistical method known as the “Hidden Markov Model (HMM)”. Instead of just using words and looking for sound patterns, the HMM estimated the probability of the unknown sounds actually being words." - https://sonix.ai/history-of-speech-recognition
"Voice Recognition", title of page 82, "Who's who in Artificial Intelligence: The AI Guide to People, Products, Companies, Resources, Schools and Jobs" - By Alan Kernoff, 1986
In my case, it always been garbage. Speech to text doesn't require AI when you do it like Microsoft did it in the aughts; ever since "new, better", cloud-side techniques came along, the technology got worse, and the only meaningful qualitative improvement I've seen in two decades is in the last two years, with new-generation models which may or may not be backed by LLMs now.
Over time its become worse, but all of Googles products have become worse. That doesn't mean it we couldnt do it, we just can't rely of Google to provide it.
The low end models are so cheap that Apple is definitely subsidizing them with revenue from the higher end models. If RAM upgrades were priced based on RAM stick costs, the base model would have to be much more expensive and less people would have access to it.
Professional workstations have always cost an arm and leg - both arms and both legs usually, for example a SGI workstation used to cost 50K dollars! I think it's great that Apple also produces a subsidized low cost model so more people can get access to it.
> The low end models are so cheap that Apple is definitely subsidizing
Depends what do you mean by "subsidizing".. Obviously their margins on entry level models are lower but I would still bet than they are much higher if not several times higher than the industry standard. They are certainly not selling them at or below cost, they can probably upgrade the base config to 16GB and still make more per unit sold than Dell/HP/etc.
Even MS get rid of 8GB with the new Surface: 13.8, Snapdragon, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD is $1000, the equivalent 13.6 M3 Air is $1,299 (8GB is $1100). So if Apple is subsidizing their lower-end Macs what on earth is MS doing? Surface is already a premium(ish) tier device and I'd assume their are paying more to Qualcomm than it costs Apple to make an M3 chip.
> the base model would have to be much more expensive
Why? I don't really get this logic. They are pricing their base models at what the market will bear, it wouldn't make sense to sell them at a discount just because they have more expensive models, they'd hike their prices even more if they could.
What they are making from memory/storage upgrades is basically free money on top of already presumably very reasonable margins (by industry standards).
> The low end models are so cheap that Apple is definitely subsidizing them
Source? I find that quite unlikely, considering their brand has strong recognition and demand, and design+manufacturing costs are probably not wildly different from other laptop makers.
They could be trying to get more people on board via lower prices, but the prices I've seen, although accessible to many people, seem similar to other brands, and seems quite compatible with making a profit.
They might be subsidising low-end models like that with the M-series, but as they were definitely overcharging for RAM way back when it was user-installable sticks… my gut feeling is RAM* is mostly a differential pricing strategy
* for laptops and desktops, storage pricing tiers also give me this feeling; however in the case of tablets and phones, the way they're used — for most people they are the primary computing device in their lives — less so.
Any (even the slimmest) evidence that this might be the case? Because it seems like an extremely far fetched claim... And year RAM/Storage upgrades seem like a clear example of market segmentation.
When I chose "might be" rather than "are indeed", that was to say it's not impossible rather than to outright agree. Other companies do have loss-leaders, I cannot rule out the possibility that Apple also does exactly what was asserted in the comment I was replying to.
I'm not sure even if that was the case it would fit the definition of a "loss-leader" unless we assume that Apple makes back the loss and more through the App Store and other services which seems extremely unlikely.
Otherwise who would selling laptops at a loss increase the sales of higher-end laptops, most people don't buy both.
> given they make more from services than from macs:
Almost all of that comes from iPhones/iPad/etc. services. Also IIRC 1/4 of their services revenue is just the $20 billion Google is paying them every year.
> but it would be mild surprise rather than shock.
Alright, you might be right. However, while I'm not shocked but still more than mildly surprised that there are people who think that this might be possible.
