AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

Want an AI agent to run as much if your life as you are willing to give it? Apple's been working on it for years with Siri and its version of machine learning and then AI like ChatGPT came onto the scene. It was all large language models for a few years while Apple's effort being largely absent from the scene even as it marketed and misfired with Apple Intelligence. However, as an iPhone, iPad, and Mac user, we all know that there are elements of Apple Intelligence working in ways that are front and center like a chatbot. Now, we have OpenClaw. If you don't know act it is, I think it is what Apple has planned for Siri but has never found a way to make it work. OpenClaw is an AI agent that runs natively on your Mac or PC that capable of executing tasks on your behalf. The issue with OpenClaw is privacy as it requires access to user credentials to complete most of the tasks. And it was susceptible to prompt injections and lack protection against attacks. While this is a perfe...

I did a quick survey of people who uses AI consistently to see what they are using it for. A vast majority of people I know are using it instead of regular Google search. Judging by Google’s earnings, I do not think the company is too concerned by AI taking shares away from them just yet. Having said that, what is concerning is that a lot of the people who do use search via ChatGPT, Gemini, or another LLM take what they are presented as fact. I have a different view of search via AI: never trust and always verify.  For me, posing questions questions to the AI bots is a starting point that allows me to thinking deeper and eventually search the traditional way through DuckDuckGo (and then Google if I cannot find what I want right away). The people who uses AI as a search engine falls into two camps - those who just trust what the AI presents and those have a search flow similar to mine. A few months ago, I had an interesting use during a drive with ChatGPT’s voice function. We chatte...

I like to bring back posts about my recent AI uses. I am sure many other folks are using LLM more and more but I still say to myself why am I doing this task when the AI can do it while I move onto something else. First, let me start with my 80-year old uncle who is now using ChatGPT on a daily basis. He chats with it via the text prompt. And when he goes on his walks, he is chatting via the voice feature. Here are some things I found that what he has being using ChatGPT for. He is a meticulous writer. Prose and poetry. He writes them and post them to ChatGPT so it can provide critiques and suggestions on how he can improves his essays.  I recently told him that I was using AI to learn Japanese. He has since started doing that while he goes on his morning walks. He already knows some basic Japanese whereas I am starting from scratch. I think he'l make better and faster progress than I will.  He has posted results from his medical tests to ChatGPT. He would over his personal in...

The MacBook Neo is a laptop is hitting above its weight. From all indications, it can handle just about any daily computing tasks you throw at it and then some. Photo and video editing, even some light Blender work , gaming, and school/office work including coding. And it is doing all that for $600 or $500 for education. What's the response from outside of Apple's wall garden? So far, it's mostly muted and not the derision that we had come to expect from Microsoft executives. Nothing like when Steve Balmer , former CEO of Microsoft, said about the iPhone when Steve Jobs released it. So far, the most direct statement about the Neo came from Asus CFO Nick Wu who said the newest MacBook is "a shock to the entire market" ( Fortune ). And that's it! It has been relatively quiet from Michael Dell, Microsoft's current Surface's lead, or other PC makers on the Neo. Qualcomm who is making ARM chips for the laptops to complete against Apple and Intel.  While...

I write a lot so it's great that I have the option of doing it on my MacBook Air , iPad , and the iPhone . Well, what if you already have an iPad. Should you get the MacBook Neo ? The iPad is a vastly different tablet after the release of iPadOS 26 with more features like a window system and multitasking features that are traditionally available only on the MacBooks . This was only the reasons why I decided to get a new iPad Air last year. But suppose I do not have a MacBook. Should I get the Neo even though I already have an iPad?

You are thinking of learning anew language.  Start now with one of the chatbots. You can’t go wrong with this and if you’re not doing it, well, shame on you. With ChatGPT, I am learning French. With Gemini, I hope to be fluent enough so that when I visit Japan later this year, I am get away without using my translation app. And of course, when I get a chance to visit France (I’ve been told that the French look down on visitors who do not speak French. Especially Americans).

I think it is time for me to upgrade from my MacBook Air to the latest one. My sole reason is simple. I am all in on AI such as running local LLM , experimenting with 3D and focusing on AI generated contents . My current MacBook Air can do quite a bit but if I want to run bigger models and render faster, the MacBook Air with M5 with 32 GB would go a long way. However, should you even if you are still rocking the MacBook Air with the M1 ? It really comes down to what you are doing now with your MacBook. What has me thinking about it more this week is not because of the MacBook Neo and the new MacBook Pro that Apple released this week. Rather, it is all the new AI development in the last few weeks. 

Right now, the small Mac is the powerful Mac mini that a lot of people are buying to run OpenClaw. It’s small. We’ve all likely seen it in person. Well, what if there was a Mac even smaller. Say the size of a soda can or, smaller, the size of a Rubik’s cube. Well, given the success of the MacBook Neo, estimated to ship 4-5 million units this year, it makes sense for Apple to release a Mac desktop base on future iPhone chips that can run MacOS. Given the jump in computing power of each generation of Apple Silicon, these would be perfect computers would be great to as a home computer for the family, especially the kids, or used as local AI servers. Of course, Apple can simply call it the Mac nano but Apple is mostly about looking forwards and the era of iPods like the iPod nano is now history. So, I am sure Apple will stick with the Neo in the future. So, Mac Neo it is. Would you be interested in it? You bet you would! And so would I! Let’s look at the possible uses.

The release of the Macbook Neo could usher in a new era of computing (not just mobile computing and I'll get to that later) with daily routine computing tasks happen on the Apple silicon while heavier tasks like AI is passed through to Apple's servers. The Neo is not only about hitting a price point with a Macbook that is not garbage. I think current Mac users will be very interested in the Neo as well. It may well be the smartest network computer ever. In the 1990s, Larry Ellison of Oracle was pushing a computing device called the "network computer" as a way for computing in the future. He was right, you know. Valued at $500, it was a way to shift the enterprise culture away from Windows and Intel towards and deploy millions of cheaper NC that can network to a cluster of servers over LAN (local area network). Sound familiar?

I vibe coded a local LLM running on my M3 iPad Air using Apple's models and it works. Sort of. I had known that Apple has its own models that run  devices to power Apple Intelligence. How well does it work? Definitely. Am I replacing the app I created instead of ChatGPT or Gemini? No way. Not even close. Not because I created some great AI chat app. In fact, it is missing a few important features that users have come to expect from an AI app. I am still fine-tuning it and I do not know if I will be sharing it with the world because I do not know how Apple feels about building an app around their models for people to use. What I do want to discuss here that it is surprisingly useful.  Let me first say that the LLM is very limited. I do not know whether it is because of the guardrails that Apple put into place on the models or it has something to do with how the app is built. I am still working on that part. What I do know is that I can have a regular conversation with it and ge...

The Macbook Neo is a great laptop for a vast majority of users. Including myself. I spend nearly all of my time writing. I would say it is about 99% writing. However, I have been dabbling with AI, I think 10% of my time on my Macbook Air M2 are spend on experimenting with local LLM and vibe coding with Xcode and Python. Than running local LLM, My Air is not really doing any heavy lifting. If anything, its power and talents are wasted on me. So for emailing, browsing the web, writing, or watching videos, the Macbook Neo is great. But it is also a good alternative to the iPad as well. So, naturally, I am curious which Apple product the Neo will cannibalize and the more I think of it, I think the Neo is more likely to cannibalize the Air than the iPad. Let's look at this together.  

 I am spending a lot of time with AI these days. About 60 minutes with AI each day. That comes out to 12.5% of my work day assuming it is a 8-hr work week. It’s a lot for me but I would like to know what others think. However, I anticipate that the type of AI activities that I will spend my time on will change over time. I would like to go through my AI routine these past two weeks and I would appreciate some feedback.  I run a couple of reports. Those are quick. A couple of prompts , upload some files, press enter, and go make coffee or tea. That is probably a minute. I think out of the rest of the total hour in a day that I send with AI, I spend about 10 minutes just asking questions that come to mind, not necessarily work related. For example, I am so invested in Punch the monkey from Japan . Love the little guy and I request updates a couple of times every day. I send about 30-40 minutes working with AI on new report formats and, more importantly, I discuss with it my wor...