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The Less-About-You Edition Monday, March 24, 2025

To Truly Fix Siri, Apple May Have To Backtrack On One Key Thing—Privacy, by Andrew Williams, Wired

One confounding factor: Apple’s approach to this stuff is likely not close to the norm. You'll need to be comfortable handing over large amount of data to make Alexa work its best, while OpenAI’s Sam Altman seems happy to destroy entire categories of jobs at the altar of progress. But Tim Cook and Apple? A cleaner, more positive image has for decades been part of the company’s appeal, and that includes a very clear focus on privacy.

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A privacy focus was also perceived for years as a reason Siri never felt as good to use as, for example, Google Assistant. It seemed less intelligent, less naturalistic, because it literally knew less about you. And regardless of quite how true that was, it’s part of the root of the problem in this new Siri too.

The New Secret To Finding A Cheap Mac, by Jose Osborne, PC Magazine

These events have shaken up the mix of new-in-box Macs that you can buy for less than $1,000 from official sources. (The aftermarket of used, refurbished, and other resold under-$1,000 Macs is a whole other, woolier story.) But it also raises several questions. Why did this new pricing dynamic come to pass? Which cheap Macs are still available? Can you still buy an M2 or M3 MacBook Air? And what happens next?

Notes

Apple Announces $99 Million New Clean Energy Fund In China, by Jessie Pang and Beijing newsroom, Reuters

Apple Inc said on Monday it will set up a new clean energy fund in China worth 720 million yuan ($99.22 million), coinciding with a Beijing visit of its CEO Tim Cook.

Apple Increases Donations In China To 350m Yuan Since 2020, by Ma Si, China Daily

Apple Inc announced on Sunday a new donation to the China Development Research Foundation to expand training programs for rural teachers, bringing its total support for causes across China to 350 million yuan ($48.3 million) since 2020.

Bottom of the Page

Is the privacy problem with Apple Intelligence something that Apple can solve just by throwing money at it? I am thinking along the lines of Private Cloud Compute, but probably at a greater scale…

Or is it a problem of not getting the user data from all the different apps, just like Apple TV app knows nothing about what you watch on Netflix?

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Thanks for reading.