There may well be tiers like on NFLX, where some are ad-sponsored and some are not. But seeing as how rapidly the free/open models catch up to prior-generation proprietary models, I doubt there will be much margin or room for ads on anything but the latest/greatest.
Presumably this wouldn't work in areas that flood, but Fresno isn't one of them. I also wondered about earthquakes, which are a risk in some parts of CA.
I agree that knowledge of local schools/teachers is helpful. But this misses the forest for the trees. My point (as another commenter who asked about parents as a market elsewhere) is that this could upend the entire education system. Who cares what my local school teaches for biology, if what I really need is for my kid to learn bio and get a good score on the AP test?
Furthermore, the fact that some people use in-person tutors doesn't mean that no one uses remote tutors. This absolutely happens. We live near Stanford, and there are tons of Stanford students who advertise their tutoring services on ND. These kids didn't go to local schools, and they don't know the local curriculum — they're from all over. But parents pay to have smart students tutor their kids.
I imagine that these parents would also pay to have an AI bot tutor their students if the results were good, the price were favorable, and the bot were (of course) available 24/7.
BTW, I'm curious where you live that "education technology" is called "edutech". You mention having been in the field a long time, but I've never heard it called this (always "edtech"). Where have I not been that it has this alternate moniker?
This claims multi-day battery life, since wrist detection can be turned off. I’m curious to know how much of a difference this one change makes. I haven’t bought an AW because the battery life isn’t good enough for a “watch” in my book, but if it can get multiple days of life, and it’s more like a phone replacement, then I’d be more likely to give it a try.
I have never understood why AWs consume so much battery at rest. I have a Garmin that lasts for several days, and I would be happy to have an AW what doesn't do all the stuff the AW does, but which is made by Apple. It could be a dumbed-down version that just vibrates and displays messages that I receive. I basically want a smartwatch so I can avoid phantom vibrations, and so I can quickly see what messages have come in so I don't have to get out my phone all the time.
Is this an issue with WatchOS, the chipset being used, or the size of battery they have chosen? I know a lot of people out there who do not consider an AW or any other smartwatch because they don't want to have yet another device to charge daily. There are other companies that have achieved very good battery life (Amazfit, Garmin, Pebble), so it is clearly possible to have weeks-long battery life with a feature set that is more than enough for people like me.
I feel like I'll never have an AW until they decide to make an AWU-sized device, but with more battery and fewer hardcore workout sensors. I don't need to dive with my watch, or have it utilize multiple satellites for GPS. What I do need for a watch is to have it last for more than a day or two, so I don't have to bring a charger whenever I go on a trip.
Is this an issue with WatchOS, the chipset being used, or the size of battery they have chosen?
It is the screen (and cell radio, as I’ll note below). Note that when Garmin started putting OLED screens in their watches, the battery life dropped dramatically compared to a watch with similar innards, but a MIP display.
However, Garmin will still beat an Apple Watch for battery life even with an OLED display, because as you point out, the AW is doing a lot more in the background. And firing up that cellular radio is not cheap on battery, either. I’ve got a Garmin 945LTE with an LTE radio, and let me tell you that when that thing can’t find a cell tower, it’ll crank that radio up and burn through a battery in no time. Not so much that I’ve run out, but enough that I definitely noticed a large difference. It makes me wonder if that isn’t the reason the 945 LTE has been neglected and no other adult watches have been made with cell radios.
But, yes, make a “not so much stuff in the background” mode. If I’m in the middle of a 50 mile race, I don’t need email. I don’t need a lot of background refreshing. The AW does have a mode like that, but without going into a long spiel, I think Apple could do better.
For Apple-blessed stuff only. They tightened third-party widget update budget so badly third-party widgets that should provide up-to-date information are essentially unusable. E.g. large Weathergraph widget still works because it shows a day-long forecast, so being an hour old is rarely noticeable, but Fantastical (can keep showing outdated event for a while and miss the actual schedule) or Battery Grapher (can be up to 30 percent points off from the actual battery status) are absolutely unusable.
Thanks - Weathergraph author here. The tightened update budgets are just a part of a puzzle, another bad parts are:
- no background updates (for non-Apple apps, of course) once the low power mode is enabled
- a buch of long unfixed bugs, like this one https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=5568946145067008 - a WidgetKit cache of rendered widgets gets randomly corrupted (race issue when rendering maybe? seems to happen more often with a complex widgets), and once it happens, the specific widget stops updating until device restart (and app has no way of finding out that this happens)
Off-topic: thank you for the app! It's (subjectively, of course) by far the best weather widget out there - and I've tried a number of them. Really appreciate your work.
If you know about the events in advance, you can hand them to watchOS and have it display them for you. So I'm surprised to see calendar apps struggling with this…
I've found the Ultra comfortably lasts for two days if I don't wear it overnight, but that might change if I used it more actively in this form factor.
This is great! I really wish Apple allowed your device to query a model you host instead of skipping to their cloud (or OpenAI). I'd love to have a Studio Pro running at home, and have my iPhone, iPad, Mac, and HomePod be able to access it instead of going to the cloud. That way I could have even more assured privacy, and I could choose what model I want to run.
Does this work with Siri? I'm not running the beta so am not familiar with the features and limitations, but I thought that it was either answering based on on-device inference (using a closed model) or Apple's cloud (using a model you can't choose). My understanding is that you can ask OpenAI via an integration they've built, and that in the future you may be able to reach out to other hosted models. But I didn't see anything about being able to seamlessly reach out to your own locally-hosted models, either for Siri backup or anything else. But like I said, I'm not running the beta!
> They are structural problems related to the three main types of buyers, which are: 1. Schools, (K-12, Univ), 2. Companies (employee training, compliance, etc), 3. Individuals (self-learners). There are other types of buyers but they don't represent nearly as much aggregated potential revenue as these three.
What about parents? That would seem like a natural market for a product that could replace expensive private school tuition (or paying high property taxes in order to be in a good public school district). I recently saw a literacy product aimed at parents, and which costs $50/month. They justify their pricing based on its substitutes being a tutor or private school tuition. While this is a bit of a stretch for a literacy tool, it would be a very fair comparison for a very good AI tutor that teaches the child and has a dashboard/summary for parents.
> What about parents? That would seem like a natural market for a product that could replace expensive private school tuition (or paying high property taxes in order to be in a good public school district)
Quality of education is one factor among many when making the choice to send your child to a private school or move to a prosperous community with well funded public schools.
Another major one is social clustering, premised on the expectations that children will pick up beneficial cultural traits from similarly higher privilege peers that will help them advance.
Edu software can't provide the social benefits of exclusive schools (whether they are private or public). Parents know that which is why if they can afford to, they avoid underperforming schools.
> or move to a prosperous community with well funded public schools
To be clear, in most highly advanced democracies, public schools are mostly nationally funded, not locally funded. The US is a rare outlier, where public schools are mostly locally funded. Most people from both sides are surprised to learn about the other: people from US to learn about "the majority" and non-US people to learn about US system. In most places that use national funding for public schools, if you wish to select a school system with better funding, you pay for private school.
> Edu software can't provide the social benefits of exclusive schools (whether they are private or public). Parents know that which is why if they can afford to, they avoid underperforming schools.
Well, the underperforming schools also have worse teachers, and can be dangerous. It's not like the reason people avoid bad schools is because of the software. A parent recently told me he's sending his son to a private middle school because he's worried about gangs and bullying at the public school. An AI chatbot wouldn't bring those risks (though it also wouldn't deliver benefits of social interaction with well-behaved, bright children, either).
>I recently saw a literacy product aimed at parents, and which costs $50/month. They justify their pricing based on its substitutes being a tutor or private school tuition.
There's a software startup aimed at teaching 3-5 year olds reading called Mentava that charges parents $500/month (not a typo). And there are plenty of online tutoring services for kids at the $200/month level.
I think educational software aimed at parents has traditionally priced themselves too low, hampering the development of what's possible.
Bingo. I expect that the "home schooling" market will balloon in coming decades, and that it will no longer be called "home schooling". It will be "independent schooling" or some such thing, and will be extremely popular. Combine this with remote work, and all of a sudden parents can live in all sorts of places that would have previously been impractical or impossible.
Kind of like mini-USB, which was briefly popular but quickly supplanted by micro-USB. I think my only surviving mini-USB device is a bike light battery.
My Happy Hacking Keyboard—which I bought comparatively recently, maybe 2017 or so—uses a mini-USB connector! Really solid piece of hardware, and I guess they just didn't see a need to update a design that worked.
Mini usb is actually more physically robust than the thinner microusb. I've never had a mini bend, but many micros. And it was much easier to get it right on first insert.
> Hockley Mint has also upgraded its windows so that blinds are now encased between panes of glass — their fabric panels were a magnet for precious metal dust — and it also has an on-site laundry to process workers’ clothes.
Hilarious — I guess big tech companies weren't the first to offer employees on-site laundry after all!
My guess is she'd actually like for him to stop collecting this stuff.