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S4, E10 Understand the "Why"

41m 47s

S4, E10 Understand the "Why"

Mae'r trafodaeth yn olrhain hanes 50 mlynedd o Apple, gan nodi ei llwyddiannau technolegol mwyaf dylanwadol. Dechreuodd gyda'r Macintosh yn 1984, a gyflwynodd y llygoden a'r rhyngwyneb defnyddiwr graffigol, gan newid cyfrifiaduron am byth. Yna, ar ôl cyfnod o anawsterau ariannol, daeth yr iMac yn 1998 gyda'i dyluniad lliwgar a'i gynllun 'all-in-one', gan ailgyflwyno'r cwmni i'r farchnad. Yn 2001, cyflwynwyd yr iPod, a ddaeth â chyfnewid digidol i'r diwydiant cerddoriaeth drwy iTunes. Llwyddiant arall oedd y iPhone yn 2007, sy'n parhau i fod yn cynnyrch mwyaf profitiol Apple, a'r MacBook Air yn 2008, a osododd y safon ar gyfer gliniaduron ysgafn. Ychwanegwyd at y rhestr gyda'r iPad, yr Apple Watch, a'r AirPods, pob un yn adeiladu ar ecosystem integredig y cwmni. Crybwyllir hefyd rai methiannau, fel yr Apple Newton a'r PIP, sy'n dangos anawsterau'r cwmni yn y gorffennol. Drwy gydol ei hanes, mae Apple wedi pwysleisio technoleg ddefnyddiol a dyluniad esthetig, gan sicrhau ei le fel arweinydd yn y diwydiant.

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Shachden. Pagranu'r yna eisiau gachdjordyn le'ch gael ty a'g ysgildu a'g ysgter yma'i lathu a'r eranolus. Syrin mae'r hampol i cantergol anthol i cantergau'r cushcostu, a ti'r y gallfog unu'r quikied mile y gyshech ied mile. Glwyn Majdut Argyllwn, hon i'n brwdd speciali'n ymysio gawag. A gydw'r ff'i misio i'r shtey yn sy'n rhaidwell. Shachden, ond endo a'r sgildeg. On the lace episode of Real Health me crowd Henry and a Lada to be joined by Orla Drumgoul, trying life lessons, her new cookbook and lots more. The end result is what I want, which is that people come together, and people eat together and people enjoy each other's company, and they taste nice food but it shouldn't be that you have sweated, bloodened tears over this and you're in the kitchen all day and you can't talk to anybody because you've just got that to do and that's your focus. That is a means to an end and the end is the part that is the most beautiful part. As ever it's available on all podcast platforms. This is an Irish independent podcast. You are listening to The Big Tech Show with Adrian Weckler sponsored by Deal. Deal lets you hire, manage, pay and equip anyone, anywhere. Visit del.com/bigtech Steve Jobs comes back in, has to get a $100 million loan from Microsoft because Apple is screwed financially and then he brings out the iMac. You're probably too young to remember the iMac, but this was an earthquake. These were candy colored, if you remember CRT, computer, but on all in one computer that you could lift from place to place, it had a handle on it. It was green, yellow, orange, purple, red and it was a massive, massive hit. And again redefined desktop computers, huge, huge hit, absolutely huge hit. And that kicked off Apple's renaissance. Hello and you're welcome to The Big Tech Show with me Adrian Weckler. Today we're going to talk about 50 years of Apple its biggest hits and its biggest flops. We're going to talk about artificial intelligence. In journalism should you ever use it, should you not ever use it. We've had our own issues in the snack of the woods with that. But another senior journalist has been caught using AI in recent days. And we're going to talk about the effect of the Iran War on electric car sales. Daron Olin is here with me today to talk about all this. We're going to start about talk about Apple and at 50. Let's talk about its hits and its misses. We're going to go back in time. First of all, just before we talk about the hits and misses, let's just take a moment to realize that in 2026, it's all of the AI goliaths. When we were all told that artificial intelligence and chips were the future, that Apple has now almost regained the number one spot in the world. So I checked earlier on and its current market cap is, I think it's standing now at about $3.7 trillion. It's a full trillion dollars more than Microsoft now. Microsoft, which had its exposure to open AI, which had sword past Apple has now tumbled, collapsed back. So just want to put that on the record. People have slagged off Apple for not being with the cool kids on AI. Turns out it was a smart strategy. It's hits. Number one, the Macintosh, the Mac 1984. We actually had a Macintosh in our family. I remember. I don't think I've ever even seen one. It was this little Bayji white box and it had a built-in screen and it had a little sort of disc for a 3.5 inch floppy disc. My mother got one. She was a journalist and she got one for work. It cost three and a half thousand pounds, but her the Sunday Tribune paid for it. And it arrived back and it was the first computer that could use a thing called a mouse that was wired into it and it had a thing called a cursor. And when you use the mouse, the cursor on the screen moved around the screen. So all these MS-DOS computer guys with these Honeywell bull and these Amstrad computers and these Commodore 64s, and they had these sort of black screens with these orange and these green letters. And none of them knew the joy that we had in RS. It was unbelievable. It was absolutely incredible. But that was a huge hit and arguably changed computers forever. Every computer you see today basically came from that. It's really interesting how, and I've found this looking through the history of a range of different Apple products and kind of starts with the Macintosh as one of its first big successes. In terms of what you've said there at the top about how Apple has maintained its success and is still this giant in the tech space in spite of everything's going on at the moment. And it's just a through line and all of that. And it's just understanding people want tech that looks nice and is easy to use. And that's kind of the be all an end all. We've seen that recently with how successful the MacBook Neo has been. And it says it goes to a lot of the continued success of the iPhone. Like we're constantly barrage with people who say, and look, I'm an Android user as well. But people are saying, you can get the same product for half the price and it's more powerful in terms of Android and you don't have to spend all this money on an iPhone. But there's a reason that people still buy iPhones and it's because they're nice and they're easy to use. And you see that throughout the entire history of Apple. I think that's the one thing that all of these things seem to have become. Yeah. Soon after that, Apple for some reason ditched Steve Jobs as CEO and they brought a guy in called John Scully who was the Pepsi CEO. And even though commercially did okay, he was in for about eight or nine years and from a product point of view, the company went through a very lean spell. Steve Jobs came back in in the late 90s and his first product was the iMac, 1998. Now, all of the computers before that had been kind of lukewarm. Apple still had its fans, but it was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. Steve Jobs comes back in, has to get a $100 million loan from Microsoft because Apple is screwed financially and then he brings out the iMac. These were candy colored, if you remember, CRT computer, but on all in one computer that you could lift from place to place, it had a handle on it. And again, redefined desktop computers, huge, huge hit, absolutely huge hit. And that kicked off Apple's renaissance until its first truly mega hit of the modern Apple era. And that was the iPod 2001. By then, I had my first job in journalism. And I remember getting the iPod to test and review 2001. And it was, I think it was a five gigabyte model. I think it was a five gigabyte model, a 10 gigabyte model. I think maybe a 20 gigabyte model to start with. And it was white, it was chunky, it felt like something like, you know, like, you know, a Saudi prince will get it with like heavy and metal, you know, and it had these click wheels and stuff. And the sound quality compared to what you were getting on, you know, a disk man or something like that was actually really good. And it just again, it completely redefined. It changed music forever. It also probably knocked out music piracy because now what you had was a legal mechanism, iTunes, to pay for music. And you didn't have to buy full album. You could buy a single song for 99 cents. Or 99 cents. I can still remember the first time I picked up an iPod and held it. And that's the one thing that I remember is the metal back. I remember the coldness of the metal back and the weight of it and just think this is, like to me, compared to the MP3 players and the walkmans that were knocking around our house, this was like a rocket ship. It was like, it was kind of like a window into the music you were listening to because of the screen and the wheel and everything about it. It felt like, even though it fundamentally, it did the same thing. It felt like something completely different. Of all the things Apple has ever made, I don't think the iPod is the most accessible. I think, I mean, the iPhone is the most successful. And maybe you would say the MacBook, maybe is the second most accessible. But the coolest for me is probably the iPod. It just in terms of what it was and it's the one thing you could say was a real gadget. And you know, music into your pocket, you bring it with you and it changed your experience, it changed your day. Apple likes to position itself as this, you know, creativity company that it affects your day in a creative way. And you know, to an effect, if you have a nice laptop or you have a nice phone, okay. You know, there is some qualitative difference to using a nicer laptop or a nicer phone. Definitely that is true. But having something, having, you know, a music device in your ear, unshuffle, with your own little music station for you to soundtrack to your life as you walk along the street. I mean, that's, that's, that's there for that changes your life in that day or in that moment. And that of course then set up that, you know, Apple's monster product. the biggest selling product in the world, the most profitable product in the world. The reason why Apple now makes $1 billion in profit every 50 hours, $1 billion in profit every 50 hours, and most of that comes from one product, and that is the iPhone. That was introduced in 2007. And I remember that, and if you look on YouTube, you'll still see Steve Jobs introducing it, and the famous video where he shows the MP3 player, he shows the phone, he shows the computer, and are you getting it? And then he shows the iPhone. Yeah, and it's something that I've watched a few times over kind of periodically. And there's so many different moments in it that now we look back and think people had no idea what was coming. And it's because so much of what came out of the first iPhone was actually foundational for all smartphones that we have today. The App Store sets up everything for how we access software on our phones, beat an iPhone or another phone. It's completely different. Another thing, in a way he's talking about, we're going to ship a stylus with the phone, and he's like, you've got 10 styluses. And everybody's just amazed, but it's so simple, and yet it's revolutionary. I know, I was really skeptical when it came out. I was actually genuinely skeptical. I remember a lot of skepticism around touch screen phones in general. It's talking people like this, isn't going to stick. Well, it wasn't the touch screen that I was skeptical about. It was the idea that so many people would use it one way. Where my blind spot was, even I'm usually into photography, what my blind spot was, how powerful the cameras could become. And once I saw the first inkling of that, then I realized, oh no, this is actually going to become a huge, huge thing. It followed up very quickly on up actually the next year with what became by far the biggest and most important laptop the world has ever seen. 2008, MacBook Air. I'm not sure if you've ever seen a video of this. It's where Steve Jobs comes on stage. And he's talking about 10 laptops. He's saying the problem is the engineering issue and if all got these drives and these spinning drives and you got to put DVDs in them. And then he's talking about the Mac, this new laptop they're working on. He called the MacBook Air and he walks over to the desk and he picks up this brown vanilla envelope and he takes it over and then he takes the MacBook Air. And everybody in the audience, you know, cheers and laughs. And then you could almost in your mind, so I imagine all these, you know, these HPs and Del's and Lenovo's all freaking out and seeing if their laptops fit into a man vanilla envelope. But that again set the stage. And what was really interesting about it was, you know, it hardly had, it didn't have HDMI ports. It didn't have, you know, half the ports that the other laptops had. It had a solid-state drive. It didn't have it a smaller battery and it didn't matter. The fact was this was a thin light laptop. It looked beautiful. It felt great and it then set the stage. And by the second or third iteration, it started to become the best selling laptop in the world. And like literally for the last 13, 14 years straight, it's been the best selling laptop in the world without any, without any pause. I was thinking about this on the way into work today. Just in terms of how often you see that Apple logo on the back of someone's laptop. Like it's fire in a way. Like it's so noticeable. And like I'm particularly thinking about when I was in college. And it's like for every one PC across all of these different brands, you would have like five, six, seven people walking around with a Mac. And it's just that's actually going to increase because of the MacBook Neo. I mean, obviously we did an episode on the MacBook Neo a couple of weeks ago, a dedicated review. If you're interested, you can go and have a listen to that or I'll watch that. But that is going to bring it on even more. If you didn't catch that, I will just repeat again because I have all three at the moment, the the Air, the Pro and the the Neo. I have the Pro here in front of me with the M5 Pro chip. And if I was buying a laptop tomorrow, I would buy the the Neo, the cheapest 699 euro Neo. There is nothing in my workflow. And that includes photo and video editing that it cannot do, you know, compared to the the the the Pro or the Air. I don't understand why anybody would buy a Pro or an Air. I just don't understand. But that's my view. I'm sure there are listeners with different workflows who might argue differently. We've not 2010 then. And depending on who you talked to, this is a very meaningful launch and still has had you know, has had a huge legacy. But people differ on its impacts. The iPad 2010. Yeah, I feel like tablets in general are in a little bit of a weird space. Personally, I use a tablet every day. No, I mostly use it to I'm also using it to stream and not a whole lot of else. But I feel like I don't know a lot of people who use one in in their daily lives anymore. I'm one of the few people I know who uses a tablet and iPad Pro as my main work device every day. So today is a rare day when I'm not using it because I'm using the M5 Pro 2026 MacBook Pro as my work to my daily driver the one because I'm testing it. But normally I will use a an iPad Pro for everything. And that includes everything. And that's because it's just a brilliant device. It's just excellent. It can handle everything and I like the way it works. But I'm quite rare. Most people don't do that. Most people have a view of tablets, of iPads as tablets as as 99 euro devices that you give to a kid in the back of a car and a long journey or something that you stick on the back of a register in a shop and a coffee shop and that you spin around to choose whether it's going to be 5% 10% 15% or 20% for the tip. My partner always calls me an iPad baby anytime I have the tablet out every single time without fail. Anyway, and see look I literally as we were talking there to move on I literally went to scroll with my finger on the iPad because it's a MacBook Pro. In 2015 Apple Tim Cook's first big product because of course 2010 was Steve Jobs's last product because he passed away in 2011 or 2012. 2015 Tim Cook's first big product the Apple Watch. And this is really interesting because most people don't think of the Apple Watch in the same tier as some of these other products. And yet the Apple Watch for the last seven years has been the best selling watch of any kind in the world every year. Like regardless of like not regardless of anything. So that sells more than you know swatches name any brand any type of watch and the Apple Watch sells more. To me it kind of seems like it should be put in a similar vein to how foundational the MacBook and the iPhone were for the rest of the tech that followed it. I'm sure there was a predecessor to the Apple Watch but to me it sets in motion all of the kind of hardware and software that we get from wearables in general after the fact. My feeling about why it did well was that there were quite a number of people who didn't wear watches. And for those people everyone then had a smartphone. And of the people who had smartphones about minimum of 30% then had iPhones. And in some countries it's as high as 50%. In Ireland it's about 45% have iPhones. And so that percentage that didn't have a watch but have an iPhone. Now you have a device that can you know counter steps that can monitor your sleep that can allow you to tap to pay in a shop without you know using your phone. If that's important to you a lot of a lot of the things you don't have to get a fit bit if you want to you know monitor your health. Lots of other things that you know are wearable might do and can also tell the time. And yeah so it has become an extraordinarily successful product. So a huge huge huge hit if it was spun off as a company in itself it will probably be one of the top five or six hundred companies in the world. 2017 this is really interesting. We don't even think about this as being like a category. 2017 AirPods. Kind of the first again the first one of itself that everybody to an extent does copy. Absolutely massive. Massive hit. I mean if you think about AirPods I mean again this is the kind of the magic of Apple's ecosystem commercially and what they have set up. We've talked about the Apple watch, the iPad, the the iPhone, the MacBook, now the AirPods all of this stuff works with each other. And you know you put your AirPods in, you open your MacBook it'll work with that. You close your MacBook it'll transfer over to your iPhone. you know, an alert comes on your iPad, it'll work with that. And then they launched the AirPods Pro. And they were the first earbuds for me that had adequate noise cancellation. The rest of them were kind of crappy before. And I would say even the first version of the AirPods Pro where the noise cancellation was borderline, I wouldn't have found it acceptable. AirPods Pro 2 then for me were acceptable. And AirPods Pro 3 have been excellent. - Such as the dominance I think of the AirPods that I know a lot of people who are not in the Apple ecosystem in any other way, even when it comes to getting wireless earbuds. - That's what they reach for. And it's, I think make sure just how prevalent they are as a brand to an extent, I think AirPods is almost a stand in for, like if you have any other earbuds. But as well, I think that's what people go for. They think wireless earbuds and they think AirPods. And there is a quality element to that as well. - Yeah, okay, let's talk about the flops briefly. This is something that probably neither of us have you. I saw one of these ones. I never actually really used one. Apple Newton in 1993. This was, you probably don't remember, there was a thing called a Pan Pilot. They had these thing called PDAs. The personal organizers that were supposed to be, they came with a little stylus. And they were supposed to be like your digital assistant that you could write on and your diary and your calendar. And they would synchronize with your email and things like that. But because it was sort of a pre-blue tooth world and there was no such thing as wireless internet or anything like that, they were very limited use and there were no decent games. And Apple decided it would try to get into this business. HP kind of ruled that world. They had a device called the IPAC at the time. I remember quite well. And then Apple decided they wanted to, to enter that world. This was under John Scully. This was after Steve Jobs had been ousted. And it was just an operation. And it had been discontinued. 1993, the Apple Newton, any of our older listeners might remember this. One that I don't remember at all, and yet it appears in all the lists was the PIP. And it was an internet connected games console. - I found out about this for the very first time today when I was taking a look back through. I was like, I had no idea that Apple tried to get into this space. - There are some devices that are launched and that never make it over here. That we'll talk about a very famous one that was only launched a couple of years ago in about in two minutes time. But anyway, the PIP and like that, that goes down as one of the most obscure flaps that Apple ever launched. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - I do remember the launch of the cube, the G4 cube, because this was something that when Steve Jobs came back, the iMac was a huge triumph. But Steve Jobs had, he was obsessed with aesthetics and he wanted beautiful computers. So we came out with this thing called the cube, which was this really cool, nice looking computer. But it was kind of a piece of crap. - I don't remember it, boss. I vividly remember the scene in the Michael Fastbender Steve Jobs film. - Yes. - And it's all about trying to make the physical hardware be a perfect cube, which kind of speaks to the madness of the world. - But at least it was hardware and you can kind of forgive somebody for making that. Another one a 10 years later was a really weird one by Apple. It was called iTunes, ping, and it was a sort of a half-assed attempt to create kind of a weird equivalent of almost like a social network from people's iTunes usage. And this was now a couple of years after Facebook had taken, we were well into the social media era at this point, like Facebook was five years, six years in. I think Instagram had just started. YouTube was a few years old. I mean, we're pretty tick-tock and everything. But an Apple was still uncomfortable with doing business with companies like Facebook, but it just felt it needed to be there. And it launched the thing called iTunes, ping, and people were like, you're not serious about this. And anyway, we don't feel that we want to interact with other people just based on their iTunes and that whole thing just didn't take off. - It's interesting to me because how music has a relationship with social media has become a thing over time. It's just not in a dedicated space. It's in different kind of little ways. - What's ironic about that is it did in the early years through my space. - Yeah, and people as well, I think. - Yeah. - So there was kind of a template there, but Apple was conflicted on that because on the one hand, it wanted to be the privacy company where only you control your own information. To be a social network, you almost have to be a bit reckless with people's privacy. You have to sort of encourage them to push everything out there and Apple were never in that mindset. So it didn't really have a chance. The same year that came out with the iPhone 4, which in one sense was, people still talk about the iPhone 4 as the best designed and engineered aesthetically from just a pure satisfying in your hand a phone that Apple ever made in terms of the lines. I mean, Apple actually went back to the basic iPhone 4 design from the iPhone 12 on with the straight flat sort of steel sides. The problem was with the iPhone 4 was it's antenna was not wonky, but it was weak and the phone would drop calls. And there was a kind of a lash back against it. And famously it led to Steve Jobs chiding people and just telling people just hold it a different way. - I can't remember this one, but I can remember the iPhone 6, a couple of models later. - Oh, a band case. - Band case, yeah. 'Cause the famous line that Apple came out with in response was that we've only had nine complaints about iPhone 6's bending. And then years later it came out after the fact that their own internal research had found that the phone was bendable. And there was way more than nine videos out there of people being like my iPhone 6, like people who carried their phone around and their back pockets would sit down and they'd get up after a couple of days of since having bought the phone. Their iPhone has been to like very noticeably bend as well. Yeah, what's funny about that as well is that they have a testing center down in Cork. I've been down to it a couple of times. And you'd wanna see the abuse they put their phones in. By the way, that testing center in Cork, they test devices there that are yet to be announced like maybe in two or three years time. Like they have stuff down there that is only rumored. By the way, I have no idea what it is, but that is plugged into their global, you know, to be announced stuff for, you know, 10 quarters from there. But I've seen some of the machinery that they used to test stuff including the phones and it's brutal. Like they really, like we'll never see an iPhone 6 Bend Gase scenario again. Even with the iPhone Air now it's so thin and yes, like people have been putting that thing through the edges. Oh, it's indestructible. Oh, absolutely. It's bulletproof. Now, I mentioned earlier on, a thing that was launched a couple of years ago, but hasn't even been launched in Ireland. And that is a sign that is struggling. Vision Pro. The big giant computer, you know, I call it a cranial strap on, like Robocop. Yeah, you know, they big sort of goggles thing with the weird sort of creepy eyeballs on the front. And basically it's a built-in computer, you know, in the goggles. And the experience the first few times you use it is kind of amazing. Most people are kind of blown away by it because you can pull up screens and you can play games and you can watch movies and things like that. And then for a lot of people, people I've spoken to anyway, they don't sell it in Ireland. A common experience is just to then you can't find a use case for it, so you leave it in the drawer. And so it feels harsh to call it a flop because Apple is still selling it and it may still have an application and it may be used as a prototype for stuff that Apple might sell in future. But like compared to some of the stuff we were talking about, this is not even in the foothills of, you know, things like iPhones. Now it's not fair to convert to iPhones, but let's say AirPods or Apple Watch. Like those are huge hits. Vision Pro, it's not just that I don't know anyone in Ireland because it's not in sale land. In the UK, you don't see people on public transport on planes. You don't see people in the UK where it is on sale, where in Vision Pro. I think it's the sector is kind of a flop onto itself almost. Like I think there are-- A metadata is OK. I think there are definitely use cases. And like for decades, the question has been like VR technology is coming. how it how is it going to be used and some people say, well, VOR isn't future, but AOR might be. And I think like there's definitely a place for us. Like I've done some of the VOR experiences that you can go to and those are very worthwhile, but I just don't know in terms of computing or gaming is a headset like that ever going to be something that you buy and own and have in your home. I don't know. I think Apple's idea was that this would become like your computer. So you'd set yourself up and you'd ask, if you work for the day and this would be your computer, like it wasn't going to be, you know, necessarily your leisure time. Although Apple did have promo videos showing that a while's your leisure time that you were watching TV this way as well. Which I think was the thing that turned people off. I think people could imagine you doing your workday this way, especially if you're working remotely. But then as you know, to your workday is over on your weekend sitting back on your sofa and then putting your, you know, strapping on your cranial goggles and then sitting there and just motionless. I think you're hitting on something there as well with particularly if you're working remotely. I think especially in an Irish office setting it was going to be like, it just feels a little dystopian. Yeah. Look, Apple is still selling it. So look, we can't completely write it off yet, but it feels a little bit like it's entering flop territory. Okay, look, we haven't left the time for the other topics, but let's try and see if we can tackle them. AI and journalism. So for anyone who's been under a rock for the last few weeks, we had our own issue with that here because our own former chief executive and publisher Peter van der Mirsch was suspended from media house after the work that he had done was found to have quotations that had been procured using AI and those quotations had never been altered by the people who Van der Mirsch's articles had said had ordered them. One of them was Emily Bell who was writing in the Columbia Journalism Review during the week. And she was commenting on this saying she was commenting very critically on this and commenting on the idea of AI in journalism and how it's a very, very dangerous thing. And then this was compounded by The New York Times a couple of days ago who have dropped a freelance journalist Alex Preston because he used AI to write a book review. Preston has said he made a serious mistake that their his words. The New York Times had flagged similarities between a January review that Preston had done of a book called Watching Over Her by John Baptiste and Dreyer. And that review was very, very similar to one that had been that had appeared in the Guardian by another journalist, Christopher Bell, Kent and Alex Preston admitted that he had used AI and AI had gone and taken bits from the Guardian review and essentially surfaced them and then Preston took what he saw in AI and used them in his review. And he has said that he is very sorry and he's embarrassed. And the question now is Dara, where do we go from here? Because I can't imagine this is the last time this is going to happen. There are different cases I should say because I haven't an invader me or she's case was that he was using AI. He was using perplexity, chat GPT and Google Notebook to research things. They were throwing up or surfacing quotes from noted journalists and academic journalists on topics. And these were bona fide authorities but the quotations they were throwing up were kind of things that they never said but things that sounded like stuff they might have said. And he was taking those quotes and using them in articles for his online blog. They never uttered those words but he relied on his chat GPT, let's say, quotations as their quotations. Obviously he should have checked. He should have just checked through. In Preston's case he seemed to do something different. He seemed according to both the Guardian and the New York Times and himself. It was something a little bit closer to copying. Yeah, no, it strikes me as really lazy too. I don't do reviews in my day-to-day work in my reporting but I used to, the last one I was part of a student publication, like when I'm doing a review, I don't even want to know what the people have said and I certainly don't want to know what an AI is said. A review is effectively your own opinion of something. So one would think that the solution to that is don't even go near anything else. Would it be an AI tool or something else? Otherwise you're going to fall fell of that. The question though here is how do we think about AI and journalism going forward? I've heard some pretty strong opinions about AI and journalism since the Vander Mirsch thing blew up. I've heard some extreme views saying that AI and journalism are mutually exclusive and I don't think that's completely true. Let me explain what I mean by that. In the sense that the way that I would, and others would use Google to try and surface information, I would do the same with AI. AI can go down and they can dig down and research 300 page PDFs and pull-up sections. Now when I say pull-up sections, it can point you to what it says are sections. It is entirely 100% on you then to go and check that there are sections there and that what it says are in the sections are in the sections. You don't ever rely on what Chatchy BT says are in the seconds. It's up to you. You're just using it as a signpost into the original report. But it's still useful as a signpost into the report. Absolutely. I think that's the crucial thing to say pushing back against people who say AI has no place in journalism because just as you said there, oftentimes still my first point of contact for a specific piece of information is a Google search, but there are certain types of information. If you're looking for something really specific that you often know this piece of information is out there somewhere, but I'm particularly with the way that Google has gone. It's not as powerful at all as it used to be. Being able to turn around to Chatchy BT and ask it like this is a specific piece of information that I'm looking for. Can you find it? It's like anything else. You check your source. You verify that what you're doing is accurate. That's the job of a journalist anyway. The information is arriving to you in a different way, but you still have the responsibility to check it. Ultimately that comes down to the really the core of the entire meaning of the word journalism and any trust that goes along with that. You have to be able to stand over your work. It's entirely on you and always on you that what you're writing or saying that you can back it up and you can verify it. The entire responsibility is on you. You can never say, "Well, I thought this much because this said this, that I could rely on that." That's kind of Andrew Meersh did that. He said that that's what he initially was seduced into relying on. He said admitted in his maya culpa that he shouldn't have done that, but he admitted that he was lulled for a while into relying on that. I think that's probably what disappointed a lot of people. Yeah, frustrating, but I think also hit on an interesting inflection point that I think the industry is asked. As we go forward, we know the way newsrooms are evolving, there are often certain workflows where fewer and fewer people are being given the responsibility for it'll kind of ever-growing larger amounts of work. Is net, no, again, not taking away the responsibility from anyone individual, but is I wonder, there a danger that in the future someone is going to rely on AI because of the level of pressure that they come under in a newsroom setting? I think there definitely is, but also I think if whoever that company is or that organization is, that puts those people under that pressure, they are going to have to take the responsibility and face the consequences and the reputational hit. of whatever comes their way for doing that. Because if they want the growth hacking of content and audience growth that comes from the quick acquisition of content through AI, then you're also going to have to take the downside from not being fully in control of the verification and the truth of that content. I mean, look, I could name you a half dozen online outlets shall we say. I won't say where they're from or anything about it, but I could name a half dozen, which I'm confident to do that already. And they do get some blowback about it, but it's not enough to hit the audience. They've clearly figured that it's worth it from a business model, point of view, Dara Nolan. Thank you very much for joining us for this podcast. Alan Kelly was on sound today and JJ Clark produced. I'm Adrian Weckler and you've been listening to or watching the big tech show. I'm going to talk to you soon. You've been listening to the big tech show with Adrian Weckler, sponsored by Deal. Deal's not just another payroll platform. It's one your team might actually enjoy. H-R-I-T and payroll together, finally. Visit d-e-l.com/bigtech. We want to earn your trust and our members of the Trust Project. See our ethics policies at independent.ie/ourjournalism.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Trafodir hanes Apple dros 50 mlynedd, gan ganolbwyntio ar ei llwyddiannau mawr fel y Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone, MacBook Air, iPad, Apple Watch ac AirPods.
  2. Pwysleisir strategaeth Apple o gynhyrchu technoleg hawdd ei defnyddio a pherfformio'n ddibynadwy, gan esbonio ei llwyddiant parhaol.
  3. Crybwyllir rhai methiannau, megis yr Apple Newton a'r PIP, sy'n dangos anawsterau'r cwmni yn ystod cyfnodau penodol.
  4. Mae'r sgwrs yn amlinellu dylanwad dyfeisiau Apple ar ddiwydiant technoleg a'u hymyrraeth ar fywydau defnyddwyr.

Summary:

Mae'r trafodaeth yn olrhain hanes 50 mlynedd o Apple, gan nodi ei llwyddiannau technolegol mwyaf dylanwadol. Dechreuodd gyda'r Macintosh yn 1984, a gyflwynodd y llygoden a'r rhyngwyneb defnyddiwr graffigol, gan newid cyfrifiaduron am byth. Yna, ar ôl cyfnod o anawsterau ariannol, daeth yr iMac yn 1998 gyda'i dyluniad lliwgar a'i gynllun 'all-in-one', gan ailgyflwyno'r cwmni i'r farchnad. Yn 2001, cyflwynwyd yr iPod, a ddaeth â chyfnewid digidol i'r diwydiant cerddoriaeth drwy iTunes.

Llwyddiant arall oedd y iPhone yn 2007, sy'n parhau i fod yn cynnyrch mwyaf profitiol Apple, a'r MacBook Air yn 2008, a osododd y safon ar gyfer gliniaduron ysgafn. Ychwanegwyd at y rhestr gyda'r iPad, yr Apple Watch, a'r AirPods, pob un yn adeiladu ar ecosystem integredig y cwmni. Crybwyllir hefyd rai methiannau, fel yr Apple Newton a'r PIP, sy'n dangos anawsterau'r cwmni yn y gorffennol. Drwy gydol ei hanes, mae Apple wedi pwysleisio technoleg ddefnyddiol a dyluniad esthetig, gan sicrhau ei le fel arweinydd yn y diwydiant.

FAQs

Macintosh 1984 oedd un o lwyddiannau mawr cyntaf Apple, gan arwain at gyfrifiadur gyda llygoden a chyfeiriwr, gan newid cyfrifiaduron am byth.

Ar ôl benthyciad gan Microsoft, lansiodd Steve Jobs yr iMac yn 1998. Roedd yn gyfrifiadur 'all-in-one' lliwgar gyda dolen, gan ailgyflwyno Apple i'r farchnad.

Lansiwyd yr iPod yn 2001, gan ailgyfrifiannu sut rydym yn gwrando ar gerddoriaeth. Roedd iTunes yn cynnig ffordd gyfreithlon o brynu caneuon unigol am 99 cents.

Yr iPhone, a lansiwyd yn 2007, yw'r cynnyrch mwyaf llwyddiannus. Mae'n cyfrif am y rhan fwyaf o elw biliwn ddoler Apple pob 50 awr.

Lansiwyd y MacBook Air yn 2008, yn denau ac ysgafn iawn. Mae wedi bod y cyfrifiadur gliniadur gwerthu gorau am dros ddeng mlynedd.

Mae ecosystem Apple yn golygu bod cynhyrchion fel iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Apple Watch ac AirPods yn cydweithio'n ddi-dor, gan newid yn rhwydd rhwng dyfeisiau.

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