Linked List: October 31, 2024

Thursday, 31 October 2024

The Talk Show: ‘His Most Pro Shirt’ 

Dan Moren returns to the show to discuss this week’s introductions of the first M4 Macs: iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pros.

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Anthropic’s Claude AI Chatbot Now Has a Mac App, But It’s an Electron Turd 

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Claude, the AI chatbot made by Anthropic, now has a desktop app. You can download the Mac and Windows versions of the app from Anthropic’s website for free.

Sebastiaan de With, on X:

Big miss from Anthropic releasing a super clunky macOS electron app that feels like a bad wrapper of their website. Very weird non-standard UI all over, choppy and sloppy animations.

OpenAI is really leagues ahead in making good apps (+ has ChatGPT Search rolling out today).

There’s much talk that Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 has pulled ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o in terms of chatbot “intelligence”, but as an overall experience ChatGPT wins hands-down. For one thing ChatGPT has been able to search the web for answers for a while now, and it works great. For another, just today OpenAI launched ChatGPT’s dedicated “search” mode. Claude has nothing like it.

But even their respective Mac apps are a stark contrast. The Claude app is a lazy Electron port. Right off the bat, the email field on the login screen doesn’t support autofill. Once you’re logged in, you don’t get any standard MacOS features. And of course because it’s Electron it’s bloated architecturally and uses a lot of memory. If you really want to use Claude as an “app” on your Mac you’d be better off saving a web app with Safari (File → Add to Dock…) than using this.

ChatGPT’s native Mac app, on the other hand, is a truly native Mac app. It looks like a Mac app and feels like a Mac app because it really is a Mac app. I’ve liked it ever since it launched back in May, and it keeps getting better. And I keep using it more and more as my go-to resource for answering questions.

I asked Claude, “What is the best way to engineer a native Mac app? What frameworks and developer tools should one use if the goal is a great Mac experience?” Claude’s answer started by positing it as a decision between SwiftUI and AppKit. Perhaps Anthropic’s Mac engineers should have asked Claude this same question before they built this turd of an Electron app.

The Exception That Proves the Rule: the Walmart M1 MacBook Air Still Has Just 8 GB RAM 

While it’s true that after this week’s Mac announcements, every new Mac Apple sells now comes with at least 16 GB of RAM, Nick Heer reminds us that there remains a new Mac available with just 8 GB: the rather remarkable Walmart-exclusive $650 M1 MacBook Air.

Apple Q3 FY2024 Results 

Apple:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $94.9 billion, up 6 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $0.97. Diluted earnings per share was $1.64, up 12 percent year over year when excluding the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision.

Jason Snell (along with his usual assortment of excellent charts illustrating Apple’s results):

The one twist: Apple recognized a one-time charge of $14.8 billion related to Apple finally having lost a long-time tax case in the European Union. That’s a lot of cash — almost exactly half of the quarter’s total income, in fact.

All in all, Apple’s business was relatively flat. iPhone sales were up 6% but flat for the fiscal year; Mac sales were up 2%, which is about how they’ve been all year; Services continues to have reliable double-digit growth, but the rate of growth slowed to 12% year-over-year.

Every product/division did fine.

‘Dodgers Capture World Series by Storming Back in Game 5 to Upend Yankees’ 

Both teams had stretches of greatness on both sides of the game. Home runs. Clutch hitting in late innings. Freddie Fucking Freeman. Innings of unhittable pitching. There’s no question in my mind these are the two most talented teams in baseball. But one team made a bunch of glaring mistakes, throughout the series (and especially so tonight), and the other team made few mistakes at all.

As a lifelong Yankees fan who watched or listened to every inning of the many American League Championship Series and World Series they’ve played in since 1996, I have some experience with the various emotional results of a deep postseason baseball run. There is a new Netflix documentary devoted to one such series that did not end well for the Yankees. This year is not the worst feeling. It hurts. This sucks. But this is not the worst. These two teams were evenly matched talent-wise, but the Dodgers played much better baseball. Objectively they deserved to win. The years that really hurt are the ones when your side plays as well or even better than their opponent but loses the series anyway (usually in game 7) because there is a significant aspect of high-level baseball that comes down to chance. This was not one of those years for the Yankees.

This was a well-earned championship by the Dodgers.

(And at least they got to celebrate this at a nice ballpark.)