I think Apple is using the same method airlines use when selling seats, just in reverse. Airlines start selling seats cheaper at the beginning, and as there are fewer and fewer seats, the price increases. Apple, on the other hand, is selling at a premium price for a new product category, and I believe it is, so they can get away with it for some time, and they will lower the price as they sell more. This has nothing to do with economies of scale. They already own the premium portion of the mobile phone market.
Something less available is worth more. Those who own it now can enjoy people's attention and their curious inquiries, which are worth more than money can buy for some people.
Another analogy can be found in the current way that automobiles are sold. For new models that are considered desirable, they maximize their margins by putting expensive limited editions with desirable badging and options on sale first. It may take a full year or more before a mainstream mass-market edition with basic features is released at a lower price.
The iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pros were released this week. The "ordinary" iPhone 18 apparently won't ship until Spring of 2027. That's the same strategy!
I believe this is also known as a Dutch auction. They don't know the true value of their product, so they price it high and will slowly bring it down until they are satisfied with demand.
You don't need to generate fake videos for that example. State of Isreal have been killing Palestinians en masse for a long time and intensified the effort for the last 4 months. The death toll is 29,000+ and counting. Two thirds are children and women.
Isreal media machinery parading photographs of damaged houses that could only be done by heavy artillery or tank shells blaming on rebels carrying infantry rifles.
But I agree, as if the current tools were not enough to sway people they will have more means to sway public opinion.
Hamas has similarly been shooting rockets into Israel for a long time. Eventually people get tired and stop caring about long-lasting conflicts, just like we don't care about concentration camps in North Korea and China, or various deadly civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa, some of which have killed way more civilians than all wars in Palestinian history. One can already see support towards Ukraine fading as well, even though there Western countries would have a real geopolitical interest.
This is a similar problem manuscript duplicating workers in the Ottoman realm. The printing machines would take their job, but they resisted and lobbied against it in the courts of the sultan. They succeeded in delaying the adoption of printing for some time for the detriment of the people. Unfortunately, this has been the history of man and technology destroying something for the better or worse.
Some twisted the story as if the underlying issue was the religion but economic concerns were the real reason.
All companies strive/want/expect/hope/conspire for one thing for cost: When purchasing for the input it would like to operate with terms of a market economy but when selling their goods/services they would like to be monopolistic. It's very a fundamental and natural desire. Desire to kill competition is just a manifestation of this fundamental rule.
If a well position and well oiled company is in fear of losing business and firing people how come you expect to find jobs let alone stable jobs.
You give your 4-5 years to a company and the company dumps you at the first sight of hardship.
I think Stripe made a bad choice when firing people. They should have decreased salaries, percentage wise more at the management level and try to keep their workers. I wouldn't want to work such company ever.
> You give your 4-5 years to a company and the company dumps you at the first sight of hardship.
You got paid every month for those 4-5 years right? That's the settlement of what the company owes you for the time you gave them.
I've had this point of view for a long time. Every payday, you and your employer are even. If you feel that you are giving your employer more than they are giving you, you need to negotiate a raise, or start looking elsewhere for a better deal.
Does that mean you quit without notice and feel zero guilt about it, or are you a one-sided corporate simp?
To me the world is a better place when an employment relationship is not purely contractual, on both sides, and I'm glad I live in a country that supports that.
I think we should recognise that while these ways of acting (in both directions) are legal, they can still be antisocial and rude (which of course doesn't mean they're not occasionally warranted). While a company's only legal obligation may be to pay their employees, that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't socially call them out if they're too sharp-elbowed.
People tend to get emotionally attached to their workplaces and changing it is difficult sometimes. We know business is business. If companies act this way, they should also expect zero employee loyalty.
What you mean to say is "this is why there is zero employee loyalty". Employee loyalty is a concept from an era where it was commonplace, but it always had to be earned. So, here we are.
I won’t pretend I know what the ideal solution is, but lowering salaries across the board doesn’t seem like a great choice. If someone is a high performing employee and then sees a cut to their paycheck, that’s an incentive for them to leave, and that’s also extra bad for the company because of course better performing employees will be more capable of finding another job. With layoffs, companies remove their “worst” employees instead, which theoretically improves productivity, assuming of course the rest of the company doesn’t think they’ll get laid off too.
Reducing salaries opens a whole new can of worms with legal and immigration involved. Basically, if you hire someone on a visa, it is going to be a hassle to reduce their salaries - and the knock on effects could include restarting the immigration process. It might end up costing more than the dollars saved, and employees will likely leave anyway.
Hypothetically speaking, assume you are to be laid off. Would you rather be laid off now with pay until March, or laid off in March with no notice and no further pay? They're being pretty generous here, relatively speaking.
Stripe made a bad choice _hiring_ people, early this year. They were very explicit about this in the email. They overextended and didn't foresee the economy contracting the way it did - and now they have to correct.
Cutting salaries for everybody has a number of disadvantages, chief of which is that it will encourage the best of people to leave. Firing can be done strategically, targeting the most recent hires and the underperformers.
I do feel like I have to remind that the first duty of the management is to the company - not because the company is "Mother and Father", in an old communist wooden language, but because the company needs to survive in order to pay all salaries, and hopefully expand enough so it can hire again even more people (assumingly in a more sustainable way this time).
Speak volumes for the character of the people who are managing the company. Lay off people who helped you get where you are the moment you feel you won't need them in the future.
What avenues have they exhausted before laying off workers?
For example my company during COVID chose to make a temporary 3% reduction to salaries rather than laying off the people. That was that year's minimum salary increase. Basically they took what they gave that year.
Many companies are very disloyal to their workers, vice versa.
Speak volumes for the character of the people who are managing the company. Lay off people who helped you get where you are the moment you feel you won't need them in the future.
What avenues have they exhausted before laying off workers?
For example my company during COVID chose to make a temporary 3% reduction to salaries rather than laying off the people. That was that year's minimum salary increase. Basically they took what they gave that year.
Many companies are very disloyal to their workers, vice versa.
I wonder what would be your suggestion for someone who wants to build his own first ML machine (and actually first computer as well). I would like to start small and add (graphics) cards and then maybe upgrade them later one by one. Should I go with high-end cards? latest? Thanks for any good pointers as well.
GPU pricing is kind of all over the place at the moment, but, assuming you are on a budget, I would look for either a RTX 2070 (super if you can) or GTX 1080 Ti as great 'starter' cards for ML. Both should be available second hand for a fairly reasonable price. If you want a 'new' card, I would go for the 3070 or 3060. The 3060 is interesting since while it has few and slower cores than the 3070, it has more VRAM which is important for certain workload.
As for the rest of the components, don't sweat it too much. As to which is actually more important, it depends a lot on exactly what you are doing. 32 GB of RAM, basically any 'mid range' CPU from the past few years and an SSD an you're good to go.
One thing worth considering however is getting a latest gen CPU/motherboard so that you can upgrade the CPU in the future. For example, while you will probably find great deals on AMD AM4 CPUs and Motherboards today, you won't be able to upgrade to the latest AMD CPU in a couple of years since AM4 is end of life. Getting an AM5 CPU/motherboard will cost more up front but you will have the option to upgrade the CPU down the line.
Also as a final point, ask yourself do you really need an ML machine? If you're just 'playing around' consider sites like Colab and others that offer free or cheap GPUs for training ML models. I know lots of people who have done real ML research and publish actual ML papers using only the free tier Colab, so you can get quite far on it.
You have to pay more for the CPU, mobo and DDR5 ram, so it's quite a tax right now. It depends on your workload of course, but if it's mostly GPU-bound (ML, gaming) I think the AM4 5800X3D is a really good choice that is destroying benchmarks and should last 4-5 years.
For GPU it depends on your vram needs, the Stable Diffusion stuff seems fine with 8, but Textual Inversion (adding yourself to the Stable Diffusion model, etc.) and text/transformers work needs more. I wanted the latter so I bought a used 3090 which was relatively cheap (compared to before, anyway!)
True, I guess it really depends on your workload. If you're not CPU bound and don't really expect to be, then getting the best CPU/mobo combo you can afford today and not worrying about upgrading might be the best way to go.
With Intel's latest release, I'm not sure AM5 is worth investing in at this point. Raptor Lake seems to crush AM5 with support from existing sockets and DDR4 all while being cheaper. That massively cooled my desire to go all in on a big AM5 system.
Is there a reason you can't use Colab? That would be the first suggestion. A pro license costs about 600 a year.
Next question is what are you training?
The latest cards are almost certainly faster, but you're normally concerned by VRAM than absolute speed. The 3090 (or the older Titan series) is unique in consumer cards in that you get almost double the RAM of the next cards down. I've had no problem training models on an 1080ti 8GB card but I wouldn't want to go smaller than that. System RAM is cheap in comparison, you can easily spec a 128GB machine, M.2 SSDs are a must for fast data loading, etc. Most CPUs are quads now, but more cores and lots of RAM means you can run more parallel dataloaders.
Otherwise there are plenty of guides that do a cost analysis of which cards to buy. If money no object then the 3090/Titan series, but maybe you don't need that much RAM. I saw a sibling comment mentions issues with heat - the stock 3090 has terrible VRAM cooling. I water cooled mine and it works well, but it's not cheap at all.
Thanks for the reply. Also, I have the tendency to become very conscious when I use a paid service and kind of messes my mind. I think in the long run it will be cheaper to own a machine.
Actually I am more into RL than DL. But DRL use DL.
I don't need a machine at the moment, I am in the learning state at the moment. But eventually I will need something and passively want to learn on building my own machine. So trying to avoid costly mistakes.
It will be NVIDIA cards for sure. It does not have to be the latest, but I would like to be able to upgrade the cards without need to change the rest of the machine, at least not more than 10% of initial cost. I am very ignorant on this that's why asked how to build a machine starting with cheaper graphics cards but then be able to upgrade to latest and the best if I need to. I guess motherboard is the most important component but which one? Also, size of the box. Any article that discuss these in depth? Not videos, I prefer reading.
Money is not an issue unless I don't make the mistake of buying wrong components that does not fit both physically and compatibility.
I would like to build a compact machine yet able to upgrade, for example 2 graphics card eventually.
The biggest issue you're going to run into is available RAM. Card speed is less important, you can always train a bit slower, but you can't get around memory limits. A recent *80 series would be fine to start, e.g. the 2080/3080 have 10-11GB. You have to go to the higher end cards like the 3090 to get 24GB. Generally working on a single card is easier than distributed, so one 3090 is better than 2x3080 IMO. Fortunately the mining crash has made stock a bit more available and prices have stabilised a bit.
If you want room to upgrade to 3 GPUs then it's going to be a reasonably sized case. These are 2-slot cards at minimum and you're going to need to either buy a big PSU up front (1kW at least), or upgrade later. Any high end motherboard with enough PCIe slots should be OK though.
I don't have a particular guide in mind, at this point I would say just post on Reddit /r/buildapc or /r/machinelearning and say you want to build a 3-GPU machine, or see what others have built on there. You can use something like PC Part Picker https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ to filter by compatible components.
Excuse my ignorance but this is something I have been longing to ask for. Do these services compromise security? Wouldn't you put too much trust on these services, like 1Password. If that service is compromised in someway aren't you exposed? Is these a good article debate on this topic. Thanks.
I think Apple is using the same method airlines use when selling seats, just in reverse. Airlines start selling seats cheaper at the beginning, and as there are fewer and fewer seats, the price increases. Apple, on the other hand, is selling at a premium price for a new product category, and I believe it is, so they can get away with it for some time, and they will lower the price as they sell more. This has nothing to do with economies of scale. They already own the premium portion of the mobile phone market.
Something less available is worth more. Those who own it now can enjoy people's attention and their curious inquiries, which are worth more than money can buy for some people.
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