> the current generation of hardware is sufficient that hardware refreshes will continue to decline
If anything, Apple is refreshing their hardware much faster now compared to the Intel days. There's literally a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air every year. And of course there are 3-4 new iPhones every year.
> It’s cheap enough it’s not enough to fund development of Final Cut but also not enough money to bother spending time on it. Find it odd personally, just offering them free to keep hardware makes more sense than trying to push a tiny subscription revenue number.
Apple doesn't work that way.
Unlike almost all other tech companies that are organized by divisions, Apple uses a functional organizational structure.
So all of the software teams are under one head of software; there's no senior vp of the Final Cut division, for example.
For accounting purposes, all software is lumped together.
Apple made $391 billion in revenue last fiscal year; when you're making that kind of money, you can afford to do things for reasons other than the amount of money you could make.
Whatever revenue Final Cut generates isn't required to fund the Final Cut team.
> you can afford to do things for reasons other than the amount of money you could make.
This is what I'm saying and why I don't see the point in charging at all for these apps. The existence of the subscription price tag on them is evidence against what you're claiming.
> The existence of the subscription price tag on them is evidence against what you're claiming.
I disagree. Apple doesn’t need the money, but they also know consumers don’t value free apps the same way they do for pay apps.
It also plays into people’s desire for something better than what everyone has. Everyone gets Numbers, Pages and Keynote for free, but if you subscribe, you get bonus content and features.
So while Apple doesn’t need this to be a blockbuster product, they’re not going to leave money on the table either.
> Of course, they'll eventually remove the option to buy the software by paying once, I think everyone can see the writing on the wall
There's no indication Apple is planning to end the option of paying once for these apps.
Apple introduced subscriptions for Final Cut and Logic nearly three years ago [1]; this isn't new by any means. Pages, Numbers and Keynote remain available at no cost.
Ok, you can "easily", but how quickly can you revert to a snapshot? I would guess creating a snapshot for each turn change with an LLM become too burdensome to allow you to iterate quickly.
Attempting to lazy load an LCP could delay the loading the image as much as 15% [1].
Lazy-loading is an effective technique we can use to delay non-critical resources at the beginning of the page load. However, a considerable problem occurs when we apply this technique to an LCP image. Lazy-loading prevents the browser from loading the image immediately because it takes time for it to realize that the image is in the viewport and needs to be loaded. According to some lab tests, this could cause a 15% regression in LCP performance. This might sound obvious for someone working on web performance, but the fact that nearly one in five web pages are doing it is a sign that it’s not very well understood by most other web developers.
The AI labs use each other's models constantly. It's also pragmatic: there are cases where one model can't do something but a different model can blow right through it.
There's an X thread where Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) shows his workflow of running 5 CC agents in the terminal using 5 tabs while running 10-15 instances of CC on the web [1] and how he moves projects from the terminal to the web and vice versa.
If anything, Apple is refreshing their hardware much faster now compared to the Intel days. There's literally a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air every year. And of course there are 3-4 new iPhones every year.
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