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Smartphones and Computers Are Now Exempt From Trump’s Latest Tariffs

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Auzinea Bacon, CNN:

Electronics imported to the United States will be exempt from President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday. Smartphones, computer monitors and various electronic parts are among the exempted products. The exemption applies to products entering the United States or removed from warehouses as early as April 5, according to the notice.

The move comes after the Trump administration imposed a minimum tariff rate of 145% on Chinese goods imported to the United States. The tariffs would have a major impact on tech giants like Apple, which make iPhones and other products in China.

Roughly 90% of Apple’s iPhone production and assembly is based in China, according to Wedbush Securities’ estimates. Analysts at Wedbush on Saturday called the tariff exclusion, “the best news possible for tech investors.”

Here’s Commerce Secretary Emily Litella making the announcement on Weekend Update.

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samuel
11 days ago
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Everything is computer
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Sorry, iPhone Mini Fans: Apple Isn't Planning Another Small Phone

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Bloomberg's Mark Gurman today shared bad news for fans of the iPhone mini.


In a live-streamed Q&A session today, Gurman said that Apple currently has no plans to reintroduce a smaller iPhone model.

Apple discontinued the iPhone 13 mini in September 2023, and it has not offered a mini model since then. Apple is not expected to release an iPhone 17 mini this year, and Gurman's revelation likely rules out an iPhone 18 mini next year too, given Apple's multi-year planning and development cycle for future iPhone models.

Since it discontinued the third-generation iPhone SE last month, Apple no longer offers any new iPhone models with under a 6-inch screen size. All of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 models that Apple currently sells have between 6.1-inch and 6.9-inch displays, whereas the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 13 mini had 5.4-inch displays. The final iPhone SE had a 4.7-inch display, albeit with thicker bezels that increased the device's overall size.

While there is a vocal group of customers who wishes that Apple would bring back the iPhone mini, the smaller model simply never sold well enough for the company to continue offering it, according to market research firms. It is not much of a surprise that Apple is not currently reconsidering this decision, but it helps to set expectations for those who may still be holding out hope. Do not expect another iPhone mini any time soon.

The full Q&A audio stream can be replayed on Bloomberg's website.
This article, "Sorry, iPhone Mini Fans: Apple Isn't Planning Another Small Phone" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

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samuel
28 days ago
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Aaaarghghghgh
Cambridge, Massachusetts
skivvie
28 days ago
agreed. Guess i'll be keeping my 13 mini longer
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James Webb Space Telescope Spots Mysterious, Free-Floating Mass

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The strange body could be a rogue planet or a so-called 'failed star.'

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samuel
49 days ago
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I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that the vast majority of planets in the universe are rogue planets.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
fancycwabs
48 days ago
Huh. One of the reasons Pluto's not considered a planet anymore is that it doesn't "clear its orbit." Once something no longer has an orbit, is it still considered a planet? I guess I could ask my nephew the astrophysicist.
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iPhone 16e Versus iPhone SE 3. How Much Did Apple’s ‘Budget’ iPhone Really Change?

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The iPhone 16e seems sure to go down in tech history as a pocket-sized example of feature creep, in which a development team keeps adding more and more fancy tech to the point they undermine the product’s value.

It packs a better chip and better screen than we were expecting, but what’s the point? The iPhone SE 3, officially known as the iPhone SE (3rd Generation), came out on March 18, 2022 as a mid-priced phone that also served the Apple-faithful and Apple-curious who bemoaned that iPhone screens were growing too large to comfortably use.

Then we got our official glimpse of the newest iPhone when Apple announced it on Wednesday, February 19. The first major surprise was that the SE moniker was dead. Apple’s new tiny, budget iPhone would henceforth be known as the iPhone 16e, and it wasn’t very tiny at all. And come to think of it, it wasn’t very budget, either.

a lot more expensive

The iPhone SE 3’s retail price started at $430, and a major selling point of the iPhone SE was that you could have Apple’s it-just-works slickness and intuitive iOS ecosystem for… not cheap, but cheaper than the high price of entry that even base-level iPhones require.

I thought (what we now know is called) the iPhone 16e would target the $400-500 price bracket that all three previous generations of the iPhone SE occupied, and boy, was I wrong. The iPhone 16e jacks up the entry-level price to $599. It’s no longer a budget smartphone.

look at all that screen — credit: apple

It is a higher-spec phone than the mid-budget iPhone SE family ever was, but is it needed? An iPhone 16 is only $200 more. Once you’re that close in cost, you may as well spring for the iPhone 16.

For that extra $200, you gain dual camera lenses (it adds a 12 megapixel ultra-wide), macro photography, sweet Dynamic Island, faster MagSafe wireless charging, cinematic video mode, faster Wi-Fi 7 (versus the iPhone 16e’s Wi-Fi 6), and spatial photos.

so long, smaller-screen iphone

Aside from price, the iPhone SE’s other major calling card was its smaller screen size. As smartphones get bigger and bigger, people with hands on the small side are left behind juggling a handheld device that doesn’t quite fit in their hand, at least not comfortably or ergonomically.

The iPhone SE 3’s screen measures 4.7 inches, and the case’s overall dimensions measure 5.45 by 2.65 inches, with a thickness of 0.29 inch. Next to the iPhone 16e’s 5.78 by 2.82 inches, and a thickness of 0.31 inch, it’s functionally identical. Not only that, but the iPhone 16e packs a much larger screen, at 6.1 inches.

All good, right? More screen for roughly the same overall size. But it’s not only the overall size of the device that frustrates folks with smaller hands. It’s also the reach across the screen to type and swipe their way through apps, and so that far larger screen on the iPhone 16e presents the same, familiar size problem as the standard iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro do. Once again, there’s no iPhone option for people who value a smaller screen.

How do you like them Apples? Myself, I’m still trying to decide. The SE made a clear case for itself in the Apple lineup. It was quite different from the main lineup of iPhones and significantly cheaper. The iPhone 16e is neither.

It’s not budget enough to be a true successor to the SE, and it intrudes on the iPhone 16’s turf. The strongest case against the iPhone 16e is the iPhone 16 itself.

The post iPhone 16e Versus iPhone SE 3. How Much Did Apple’s ‘Budget’ iPhone Really Change? appeared first on VICE.

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samuel
56 days ago
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I don't know what I'm going to do with my iPhone SE 3 (my second SE, too, coming from the iPhone 7) but I'm going to avoid upgrading to a larger screen for as long as I can.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Three Observations - Sam Altman

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Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. 

Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to understand the moment we are in. AGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields.

People are tool-builders with an inherent drive to understand and create, which leads to the world getting better for all of us. Each new generation builds upon the discoveries of the generations before to create even more capable tools—electricity, the transistor, the computer, the internet, and soon AGI.

Over time, in fits and starts, the steady march of human innovation has brought previously unimaginable levels of prosperity and improvements to almost every aspect of people’s lives.

In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say “this time it’s different”; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential.

In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.

We continue to see rapid progress with AI development. Here are three observations about the economics of AI:

1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.

2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger. 

3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.

If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.

We are now starting to roll out AI agents, which will eventually feel like virtual co-workers.

Let’s imagine the case of a software engineering agent, which is an agent that we expect to be particularly important. Imagine that this agent will eventually be capable of doing most things a software engineer at a top company with a few years of experience could do, for tasks up to a couple of days long. It will not have the biggest new ideas, it will require lots of human supervision and direction, and it will be great at some things but surprisingly bad at others.

Still, imagine it as a real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworker. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them. Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work.

In some ways, AI may turn out to be like the transistor economically—a big scientific discovery that scales well and that seeps into almost every corner of the economy. We don’t think much about transistors, or transistor companies, and the gains are very widely distributed. But we do expect our computers, TVs, cars, toys, and more to perform miracles.

The world will not change all at once; it never does. Life will go on mostly the same in the short run, and people in 2025 will mostly spend their time in the same way they did in 2024. We will still fall in love, create families, get in fights online, hike in nature, etc.

But the future will be coming at us in a way that is impossible to ignore, and the long-term changes to our society and economy will be huge. We will find new things to do, new ways to be useful to each other, and new ways to compete, but they may not look very much like the jobs of today. 

Agency, willfulness, and determination will likely be extremely valuable. Correctly deciding what to do and figuring out how to navigate an ever-changing world will have huge value; resilience and adaptability will be helpful skills to cultivate. AGI will be the biggest lever ever on human willfulness, and enable individual people to have more impact than ever before, not less.

We expect the impact of AGI to be uneven. Although some industries will change very little, scientific progress will likely be much faster than it is today; this impact of AGI may surpass everything else.

The price of many goods will eventually fall dramatically (right now, the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy constrain a lot of things), and the price of luxury goods and a few inherently limited resources like land may rise even more dramatically.

Technically speaking, the road in front of us looks fairly clear. But public policy and collective opinion on how we should integrate AGI into society matter a lot; one of our reasons for launching products early and often is to give society and the technology time to co-evolve.

AI will seep into all areas of the economy and society; we will expect everything to be smart. Many of us expect to need to give people more control over the technology than we have historically, including open-sourcing more, and accept that there is a balance between safety and individual empowerment that will require trade-offs.

While we never want to be reckless and there will likely be some major decisions and limitations related to AGI safety that will be unpopular, directionally, as we get closer to achieving AGI, we believe that trending more towards individual empowerment is important; the other likely path we can see is AI being used by authoritarian governments to control their population through mass surveillance and loss of autonomy.

Ensuring that the benefits of AGI are broadly distributed is critical. The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most of the metrics we care about (health outcomes, economic prosperity, etc.) get better on average and over the long-term, but increasing equality does not seem technologically determined and getting this right may require new ideas.

In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some “compute budget” to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect.

Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshall the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025; everyone should have access to unlimited genius to direct however they can imagine. There is a great deal of talent right now without the resources to fully express itself, and if we change that, the resulting creative output of the world will lead to tremendous benefits for us all.


Thanks especially to Josh Achiam, Boaz Barak and Aleksander Madry for reviewing drafts of this.

*By using the term AGI here, we aim to communicate clearly, and we do not intend to alter or interpret the definitions and processes that define our relationship with Microsoft. We fully expect to be partnered with Microsoft for the long term. This footnote seems silly, but on the other hand we know some journalists will try to get clicks by writing something silly so here we are pre-empting the silliness…

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samuel
72 days ago
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Agency is what we need to be teaching kids
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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gedcarroll
71 days ago
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some interesting takes regardless of how you feel about the direction that Salm Altman is taking things
Hong Kong and London

AI-generated tools can make programming more fun

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I want to tell you about a neat experience I had with AI-assisted programming this week. What’s unusual here is: the AI didn’t write a single line of my code. Instead, I used AI to build a custom debugger UI… which made it more fun for me to do the coding myself.

* * *

I was hacking on a Prolog interpreter as a learning project. Prolog is a logic language where the user defines facts and rules, and then the system helps answer queries. A basic interpreter for this language turns out to be an elegant little program with surprising power—a perfect project for a fun learning experience.

The trouble is: it’s also a bit finicky to get the details right. I encountered some bugs in my implementation of a key step called unification—solving symbolic equations�—which was leading to weird behavior downstream. I tried logging some information at each step of execution, but I was still parsing through screens of text output looking for patterns.

I needed better visibility. So, I asked Claude Artifacts to whip up a custom UI for viewing one of my execution traces. After a few iterations, here’s where it ended up:

I could step through an execution and see a clear visualization of my interpreter’s stack: how it has broken down goals to solve; which rule it’s currently evaluating; variable assignments active in the current context; when it’s come across a solution. The timeline shows an overview of the execution, letting me manually jump to any point to inspect the state. I could even leave a note annotating that point of the trace.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget the most important feature: the retro design 😎.

Using this interactive debug UI gave me far clearer visibility than a terminal of print statements. I caught a couple bugs immediately just by being able to see variable assignments more clearly. A repeating pattern of solutions in the timeline view led me to discover an infinite loop bug.

And, above all: I started having more fun! When I got stuck on bugs, it felt like I was getting stuck in interesting, essential ways, not on dumb mistakes. I was able to get an intuitive grasp of my interpreter’s operation, and then hone in on problems. As a bonus, the visual aesthetic made debugging feel more like a puzzle game than a depressing slog.

* * *

Two things that stick out to me about this experience are 1) how fast it was to get started, and 2) how fast it was to iterate.

When I first had the idea, I just copy-pasted my interpreter code and a sample execution trace into Claude, and asked it to build a React web UI with the rough functionality I wanted. I also specified “a fun hacker vibe, like the matrix”, because why not? About a minute later (after a single iteration for a UI bug which Claude fixed on its own), I had a solid first version up and running:

My prompt to Claude

That fast turnaround is absolutely critical, because it meant I didn’t need to break focus from the main task at hand. I was trying to write a Prolog interpreter here, not build a debug UI. Without AI support, I would have just muddled through with my existing tools, lacking the time or focus to build a debug UI. Simon Willison says: “AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects”. In this case: AI-enhanced development made me more ambitious with my dev tools.

By the way: I was confident Claude 3.5-Sonnet would do well at this task, because it’s great at building straightforward web UIs. That’s all this debugger is, at the end of the day: a simple view of a JSON blob; an easy task for a competent web developer. In some sense, you can think of this workflow as a technique for turning that narrow, limited programming capability—rapidly and automatically building straightforward UIs—into an accelerant for more advanced kinds of programming.

Whether you’re an AI-programming skeptic or an enthusiast, the reality is that many programming tasks are beyond the reach of today’s models. But many decent dev tools are actually quite easy for AI to build, and can help the rest of the programming go smoother. In general, these days any time I’m spending more than a minute staring at a JSON blob, I consider whether it’s worth building a custom UI for it.

* * *

As I used the tool in my debugging, I would notice small things I wanted to visualize differently: improving the syntax display for the program, allocating screen real estate better, adding the timeline view to get a sense of the full history.

Each time, I would just switch windows, spend a few seconds asking Claude to make the change, and then switch back to my code editor and resume working. When I came back at my next breaking point, I’d have a new debugger waiting for me. Usually things would just work the first time. Sometimes a minor bug fix was necessary, but I let Claude handle it every time. I still haven’t looked at the UI code.

Eventually we landed on a fairly nice design, where each feature had been motivated by an immediate need that I had felt during use:

Claude wasn’t perfect—it did get stuck one time when I asked it to add a flamegraph view of the stack trace changing over time. Perhaps I could have prodded it into building this better, or even resorted to building it myself. But instead I just decided to abandon that idea and carry on. AI development works well when your requirements are flexible and you’re OK changing course to work within the current limits of the model.

Overall, it felt incredible that it only took seconds to go from noticing something I wanted in my debugger to having it there in the UI. The AI support let me stay in flow the whole time; I was free to think about interpreter code and not debug tool code. I had a yak-shaving intern at my disposal.

This is the dream of malleable software: editing software at the speed of thought. Starting with just the minimal thing we need for our particular use case, adding things immediately as we come across new requirements. Ending up with a tool that’s molded to our needs like a leather shoe, not some complicated generic thing designed for a million users.

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samuel
119 days ago
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I find myself doing this too. Building custom tools just for inspecting data for a one-off. Claude's UI is great, but Cursor is where I go for the actual implementation.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
sredfern
69 days ago
Have you tried roo-code as a vscode extension?
samuel
69 days ago
Just installed it in Cursor. I've been using Composer. Why use roo-code over composer?
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