AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

I am going to upgrade to the new iPhone that Apple will release in less than an hour. I don't know which iPhone yet as the actual details (weight, battery life, what we can actually do with the new iPhone Duo/Ultra) will help me make that final determination. And I am still on the fence about what to do with my iPhone 13 mini. It has been my loyal mobile companion for nearly 4 years. That is the longest I have ever held onto a phone. It really says about about the device. So as you can see, giving it up is not that easy, least of all, it is still chugging along and should get a few more iOS updates from Apple. Sentiments aside, it is only a tool. Just like the AI induced social and industrial changes that are happen right now, the AI models are still just tools. We continuously get updated models because the ones that come after is always more capable and "smarter". For the mini, the fact that is still works and does a lot of what I need is the reason to keep it around. S...

I have been trying to test out agents on my MacBook Air. In just playing with it for a few days, without a lot of success yet. However, I realized that a lot of what I am was able to work with the app are things that Siri will eventually be able to once Apple has time to let the new Apple Intelligence mature. For Apple, I do not know if they will define AI agents the same way most other people do but I think for the vast majority of us, we will either find them very useful or not use them much at all. Even now, you can automate tasks with the need for an AI backend. Having said that, Siri-powered agents or tasks are coming. I am guessing here but I see two tracks happen on at the same time.  Siri ウwill gain more agentic features. Shortcuts are the way to go but automation is going to be a big deal if Siri becomes important as new generation of users want to farm daily and repetitive tasks to the computer to perform. Apple wants a lot of that to take place on-device. My understandin...

I was trying to get tickets for an event that was in high demand. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get it ourselves. While a friend was able to get it for us, it occurred to me that perhaps this is a situation where an AI agent might be able to do a better job than I could do myself - waiting in the digital line and maybe even get a better spot than I could have. To date, I have never been able to get a ticket where we have to wait in line. So, is this something an agent might be more suited for the job? Then it also occurred to me that perhaps this could be the start of an agentic arms race where agents are tasked to get tickets, reservations, or any other goods and services that highly demanded. I did not have anyone to ask so I asked a could of LLM if agents could be used in this way. The answer is technically yes but there coding and possible other issues that might mitigate any advantage an AI might have over regular old humans like me. Eventually, platforms will have to deal wit...

 Here is this week's update on replacing myself with an AI. It has not been seven and a half months into the experiment. The progress of this experiment really came in the last two months, a busy August could have became overwhelming if it was not for a lot of my workflow that was automated by the AI. For the first six months, work was pretty laidback when it came to AI use. In the fist few months, I did not really gain much tracking in terms of the time saved. It was not until I started focusing on specific tasks that I began to realized hours saved per day. But work became concerned about the whereabouts and security of the data that the AI had access to. Through irksome, I cannot blame them. Only a couple of weeks after they wanted to pull \ back, the hacks by Anthropic followed by OpenAI happened. Still, I did not want to give up on the progress. I resorted to having the AI create offline scripts for me to run. I continue to save time each day. Though I am not a computer or dat...

Depending on what plan on doing on a particular day, I switch between bring my iPad and MacBook. And for the vast majority of my tasks, the iPad (I happen to have an iPad Air) is hands down the mobile device that I grab on my out. And if The Apple gods permit it, it might be the only device I will ever buy, which means no more MacBooks for me. Email, paying bills, reading books/news, playing Clash of Clans (yup, I still clash), and watching videos, those are the things I do on the iPad. I also do a lot of work on it as well. I am shocked at just how powerful the iPad is now when it comes to office productivity.  On the days when take my MacBook Air to work is when I needed to do some work via AI-enhanced work locally or when I needed to vibe-code something. For a layman, these are things that I have not found a way to do on the iPad (I will be experimenting with some Python scripts to see if they work on the iPad this weekend). And these days, local AI is all the rage as my company...

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...

It is time for Apple to give us a much needed features that I think many users are not aware they need: for them to plug their iPhone into an monitor and instantly use it as a desktop computer. I feel this is a feature is that is long overdue and will greatly enhance user experience and provide iPhone users greater productivity and enables Apple to truly innovate beyond the segmented OS that they created for the different categories of products. This is a feature that already exists on Android for some time. While I do not know if Android users take advantage of the ability to use their phones as a computer when plugged into a monitor, I feel this is something iPhone users will greatly appreciate more given that Apple will implement it better given their experience with the MacOS and now iPadOS.  I will likely get a new HDTV in the next few months. The current one I have works well for Youtube videos and some movies but it's showing it age after 15 years. I put Youtube videos on my...

I’m on the prowl for a new pair of AirPods Pro and I figure AI might be able to help me find the best time to get one. As I dug deeper, I realized I should be asking AI when the best to is to buy anything at all: Best day of the week to get grocery? Wednesday. Apparently, that is when sales start. Also, that Tuesday evenings or Wednesday mornings is when they stock up and produce the most fresh. Also, that is also when there are markdowns on perishables. Brilliant! I did not know that. Both Gemini and Perplexity agree on this point. Perplexity went further and suggested the best time to go when it is not busy. Also, it suggests making a list to avoid impulse buying. My problem is that I do make a list and get what I need. Then I go beyond that but that’s something an AI can help me with. (PROMPT: Which day of the week is the best time to get grocery) Copilot suggested to me to wait a few more weeks and see if Apple’s retailers will discount the AirPods Pro 3 further. The best discount ...

I paid another pilgrimage to the Apple Stores this weekend - this time to the stores at the Americana and Glendale Galleria. I really only need to go to one but I just happened to pass by the second one and decided to make a short stop. And I’ve pretty much decided that I am going with the Pro. However, I get the obsession with the iPhone Air and I have high hopes that I think iPhone is in my future, perhaps in a year or two. And it might not be the one we think if the rumors are true. First, why the iPhone Air? It is a no brainer. It is so thin and light. I am not in the camp that the iPhone Air is having an iPhone X moment. It is inevitable that Apple and other phone makers to will make a stab at thinness as technology allows - speed, battery, and integrity of a thin smartphone. I will even wager that a small form factor iPhone will return in some form and based on some rumors, it is of sort (I’m looking at you, iPhone 13 mini, my current iPhone). When you hold the iPhone Air on your...