One is a piece of hardware akin to a Roku. The other is a streaming service akin to Netflix.
The Apple TV hardware and the Apple TV app on your iDevice can both be used without paying a subscription. The hardware has all other streaming apps a la Roku, and both it and the app on your iPhone can be used to purchase and watch TV shows and movies.
Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Buzz, Google Talk, GChat, Inbox, Messenger, Messages, Bard, Gemini, etc. Who else has a track record of chopping and changing like this?
To you. You are projecting.
Apple TV (app) gives access to Apple TV+ (streaming service)
- AppleTV - the all things tv stuff from Apple that I pay once for
- AppleTV+ - all things tv stuff from Apple that I have to pay every month for
I guess the + is like the + sign on a calculator ;)
It's an industry term now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%2B "Disney+ was launched on November 12, 2019"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud "In June 2021, Apple introduced iCloud+..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(Apple) "Apple Fitness+ is an ad-free video on demand guided workout streaming service announced during Apple's September 2020 Special Event"
I’ve always associated “plus” with Apple, not with Disney.
Google+ was too far ahead of its time!
a comment from another thread this morning- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300741
iPad 10 is still A14 Bionic, not Apple Silicon.
The iPad Mini has A15 Bionic.
Likewise for engineering, Google is organized into Product Areas (Geo, Search, Cloud, etc.), which also explains why one product would get some feature that would really make sense integrated into another... but it never happens.
Google is exceptionally good at making its products be near-perfectly reflective of its internal organization scheme. So reflective you can brush your teeth with it.
I'm often a broken record about this on HN - but IMO the PA organizational structure is a strong inhibitor to Google's success and ability to create coherent suites of products.
Amazon?
Meta for example ships extraordinarily quickly (see: Threads) but their products are considerably more tightly integrated and demonstrate an ability to leverage across the ecosystem (see: Instagram-Threads integration) that Google has trouble with.
More to the point (and extra points in favor of Meta for this): Google's apparent product velocity is a bit deceptive? The company ships a lot of ill-considered product. Is it superior product velocity if the product is consistently half-baked (and maybe more importantly: will die before it ever becomes fully baked)?
If you put those two factors together and consider product velocity as how quickly a company ships stuff that actually sticks (as opposed to a simple exercise in how quickly one can release code), Google's product velocity is IMO substantially inferior to all of FAANG. Meta, Apple, Amazon, and MSFT at this point are generating sticky product at a substantially greater pace.
What I’ve seen, is that when consensus can’t quickly be reached among different naming factions, someone will say “well our customers know and love Brand Word XYZ, let’s just bolt a qualifier on that and win for us!”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/15/23960517/microsoft-copil...
Then you have also under Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot (not to be confused with Copilot X).
After 14 years of using Siri, I can't imagine Apple developing any competent AI tools in the first place.
- Tap and hold an object in Photos and it will figure out how to separate it from the background for you
- AirPods noise cancelation
- iOS 17 autocorrect is based on a transformer model and works noticeably better
- Optimized Battery Charging, which learns your charging habits and tries to delay putting a full charge into your battery until just before you unplug, in order to avoid damaging the battery
- Detection Mode is an awesome accessibility feature where you point the camera at something and it will describe what it sees
Apple calls all of these things Machine Learning instead of AI and they are all optional features within an existing product. Seems like a very deliberate strategy. But they are utilizing the latest techniques. CoreML and the M series chips are also very competent at training and using AI models.
Maybe the reason Siri is stuck in the dark ages is because it would be entirely AI dependent. They could have a “no generative AI” mode but nobody would use it. I’m guessing Apple is looking for a breakthrough in how to prevent it from hallucinating / lying.
The iPhone is literally just iPhone <Number> with Pro for high end, or no modifier for low end. Add “max” for big screen. The only confusion maybe is “max” isn’t obviously referring to screen size.
iPhone 15, 15 Pro, 15 max, iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Macs are the same way. I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s confusing that “M3” processor has different specs than “M2” processor.
Beyond that, Mac laptops are Pro vs Air, defining how powerful vs portable they are with associated screen size variant 14, 16 and 13,15.
MagSafe means two different products.
The current MacBook Air is thicker than an older MacBook.
I’m not even sure what a “pro” phone is, but okay.
The iPad lineup has been a total mess for years.
I’m not saying these names are impossible to decipher, but they do require some research.
> The current MacBook Air is thicker than an older MacBook
I feel like you’re just looking for things to be mad about here; it’s thinner than _current_ MacBooks.
> I’m not even sure what a “pro” phone is, but okay
Okay this is just ridiculous. It seems you would be unhappy with any naming convention other than “iPhone Good”, “iPhone Better”, and “iPhone Best”.
I see your point, I do agree that the name of their processors were too marketing team driven.
> The current MacBook Air is thicker than an older MacBook.
The current air is plenty thin to be called “air”, and they haven’t made a “MacBook” since like 2016. It’s not confusing here IMO.
> I’m not even sure what a “pro” phone is, but okay.
It’s the line with overall better specs. The last 20 years of tech products have solidified this definition is. Not a new concept.
> The iPad lineup has been a total mess for years
Yes this is absolutely embarrassing for them. I presume they have some BS market segmentation reasoning. Looking at their website, I can probably explain the target market for each one, but it’s still a disaster. They should dramatically redo it, and designate the really cheap one as “iPad for education” to totally segment it out, so it can be “iPad small screen, medium screen, large screen, and iPad with Mac processor and pro tier features”
it's actually 15 Plus rather than 15 Max, which i'm sure you now see is a bit confusing
is one of the cultural difference between a computer-first logical mindset contrasted with the mathematics-first mindset
the mathematics first mentality does not properly recognize the importance and the difficulty of having good names for things, whereas the computological view recognizes both: the importance and the difficulty
so far it's a close race between philosophers and mathematicians. I'll take your comment as a vote in favor of mathematicians
so while written philosophy is verbose, philosophers talking can "transfer" a lot of "meaning" with short sentence
whereas mathematicians will likely need to talk for a very long time for what they can write down in a short terse equation
another cultural difference is the kind of homework they hand out; the difference boils down to whether you hand over a printed (or printable) proof checked by reading through it, or a runnable program or script checked by running it
Of tangential interest: I recently heard that Faraday, while discovering new electromagnetic phenomenon, then turned to either a linguist or classicist for help in assigning/inventing terms for them. (I cannot find a link for this just now, so consider this heresay.)
The only thing that was stupid with Microsoft's naming was this latest generation that they call it Series S and Series X, which is bad for 2 reasons:
- No one knows what to call them as a general term. You can say "this game is for PS5" but for them it's like "this game is for Xbox Series"? I guess they just want you to call it "Xbox" cause that's all it says at the top of the game cases now.
- They just came from selling the One S and One X, which was a mid-lifespan hardware update, the S being a smaller formfactor Xbox One and the X being a spec bump. Confusing that they continue to sell and S and an X but it's a whole new console.
They should have already learned from Nintendo who made this mistake several times with the 3DS (which many didn't realize was an entirely new but backwards compatible system from the DS), new 3DS (yes that was an actual system's name that had exclusive games that couldn't be played on the normal 3DS), and Wii U (which everyone thought was a tablet controller for the Wii)
Xbox -> Xbox 360 -> Xbox One -> Xbox Series (?). I still don't know whether S or X is the "good one". Compare it to Playstation: PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3 -> PS4 -> PS5. The upgraded line is "PS $number Pro".
Someone can tell me they have a PS5 Pro, and I know what they mean. They could tell me they want a PS6 and I know what they mean, even if the PS6 hasn't even been announced yet.
Someone tells me they have an Xbox One X and my eyes glaze over. Prior to now, that means nothing to me. I don't know when the Xbox One came out, I don't know if it's their newest line, I don't know if X is the Pro or if it's the budget. The S and X may not even indicate pro and budget, but I think they do.
At least Nintendo's names are kind of cute. It's still silly, but at least Wii or Switch is kind of endearing. Xbox Series X sounds like they let an edgy teenager name it; having X on both ends reminds me of the days of xX420ShadowRanger69Xx usernames. Also doesn't make a clean acronym; XSX is both hard to say and makes me think more of SXSW than Xbox.
The S naming has been consistent since the 360: it's the small one.
It's not a stretch of anyone's imagination that the other one is the bigger one (I mean that's t-shirt sizing), nor that it exists in the same generation as the S and therefore is not bigger just for the sake of taking more real estate under the TV.
The one they nailed though is Xbox One X, which is recursive.
Those were not the ones I called out as bad. Those are good because when they came out they were unique and memorable.
Let me list out the following consoles:
Nintendo DS
Nintendo DS lite
Nintendo DSi
Nintendo DSi XL
Nintendo 3DS
Nintendo 3DS XL
Nintendo 2DS
New Nintendo 3DS
New Nintendo 3DS XL
New Nintendo 2DS XL
There's technically only 2 generations of Nintendo consoles in there, but the DSi had some exclusive physical games that were sold in store, and couldn't be played on the DS. And the new 3DS had some games that couldn't be played on the original 3DS.
Some of them I don't mind too much. The XL and Lite SKUs make sense to me, presuming they mean what they appear to.
3DS makes intuitive sense to me, it's clever.
There's a separate conversation to be had about whether it's too many SKUs (probably) but name-wise I only really hate "New Nintendo" and DSi. DSi only because it's far less intuitive than the others.
Can you imagine Apple causing confusion like this? I know it’s not a like-for-like comparison, but everything Apple does it seems like they have a grand strategy that’s clear for everyone to see. Things build up in a modular way to fit a big puzzle.
Google, on the other hand, constantly makes up things on an ad hoc basis.