With my new job, I get to use a Windows 11 laptop. It’s not a powerhouse, but it is decent—except when it’s not plugged in. As a Mac user at home, I take for granted the speed and battery life that an Apple Silicon Mac offers. It’s night and day. I don’t notice any difference when using the Mac on battery; I never hear the fan because there isn’t one. It’s night and day. We should always remember that.

Something Is Wrong

We’re getting close to the end of August and moving into September, which means Apple’s usual rush of new product launches. We already know quite a bit about Apple’s upcoming iPhone. We also know that Apple’s unifying Liquid Glass is likely to cause major issues when it encounters hundreds of millions of devices. We can probably expect Apple to be in damage control again. And I’ll probably have to explain why Apple did this to my friends and colleagues.

Usually, around this time of year, I would have one or two articles ready to publish about all this. But not this year. I won’t upgrade to the iPhone 17 Pro Max, even though I normally would every two iPhone generations. I’m voting with my dollars by skipping this year, because I disagree with Tim Cook’s (and Apple’s) stance on the orange clown.

Something is wrong.

Do you remember the SETI program? I think this is what it was called. Anyway, it was about providing or contributing personal computing resources to help find extraterrestrial life from background noises or signals coming from space. You would install an app on your computer and when you weren’t using it, its processing power was diverted to the app for computing purposes. Now, fast forward to 2025: could something similar be done e for running LLMs on personal computers? This could then generate usage credits applicable to the AI provider.

I am curious to explore other providers of generative artificial intelligence services. I am a paying subscriber to ChatGPT, but I haven’t seriously explored other alternatives yet, though I plan to do so. I fear missing things out if I ever leave OpenAI behind. I tested Perplexity, but I don’t believe in their business model. I think Claude from Anthropic seems to be the most interesting candidate. They have an iPhone and iPad app, just like OpenAI. From now on, I will systematically query both ChatGPT and Claude for my research needs and compare their performance.