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The iPad Air is in such a weird spot.

Heavier than the Pro, 60Hz, but more Ram in the M4 Air than the M4 Pro? It makes no sense. Who is this for?


Ideally Apple would finally do their Surface/2-1 with iPads, but Apple being Apple, rather sell an overpowered tablet, and a Mac laptop to go alongside with it

Some places even do a bundle "discount".


I don't think even Apple knows what they want to do with the iPad.

I could buy the "companion device" niche for a while until iPad OS 26 came along, which took away most of the "touch first" multi tasking and replaced it with a model that heavily favors mouse and keyboard use. I actually use my iPad less now since the update, because I still primarily used it as a tablet, I don't even own the magic keyboard/trackpad for it.

Now it's essentially a gimped macbook, and it's not really clear on where it fits in their product lineup. Is it supposed to be a laptop replacement? A companion device? An art tool? An expensive e-reader? No one, not even Apple, knows.

So yeah, they either need to come up with a clear vision for what it's supposed to be, or finally just let it be a 2-in-1 macbook with apple pencil support.


> Google is an advertising company and while Android allows open software installation (today, at least), Google's conflicts of interest as an ad company are more concerning for the entire platform and larger ecosystem than Apple's conflicts of interest as an application gate keeper.

This, I suspect is a large part of it. At least for me, as a self described "tech nerd" who have been messing with computers since my childhood in the 90s.

The other aspect is that I don't do anything serious from my phone. I'm still "old school" I guess and prefer a keyboard + mouse. My laptop is my main computing device, not my phone. And for that, Apple currently offers the best of a bad situation. It's still advantageous to them from a marketing standpoint to offer privacy, and they aren't primarily an advertising company. They are the only one of the two that offer E2EE (Advanced Data Protection) for photos, all the processing for that is done on device, etc. When meta threw their huge fit over the app tracking transparency, but were silent on anything Google was doing with Android, that just sold Apple even more for me.

I'v made a choice to accept the tradeoff of them being an application gate keeper because for anything "serious" I'd just be using my computer anyway, which still allows me to install and run whatever I want, and do whatever I want with the hardware. I don't need that from a phone. Quite the opposite, I don't want that on a phone, I'm totally fine with the phone just being an appliance, and Apple offers the best appliance experience still.


That's where I'm at too.

For now, Apple is still the best in a bad situation, and at least for now they aren't primarily an ad company.

I am glad about the Graphene+Motorola partnership though, it always felt ironic to me to have to give Google money to completely escape Google.


> Lenovos recent big decision to sell Linux as the default on their new devices.

Where did you see this? I want to believe it, but I can't find any press release about this (other than it already being available as an option at checkout, but it's not default) outside of weird domains full of AI articles.


Right? It’s been kind of funny watching everyone “rediscover” the terminal and I’m over here feeling like a true graybeard “silly kids, I’ve been here the whole time.”

What’s old is new again is apparently just as true in tech as it is in fashion.


The terminal was _always awesome_, the bar to realized that was just a tad high for many people. Until now!

here-doc usage has probably 100x-ed in the last year

It's 1,000,000,000,000x easy. Have found enough annoying bugs in powershells implementation of it that I know nobody is using it.

How so?

It's because the web developers who destroyed the web are now taking their mess with them into more obscure places, such as terminals, hardware and AI.

That's probably why it is so hyped up as it is right now.


Why the hate against web developers?

Because of all the laggy javascript, wasting precious compute and gigawatts of power just to make buttons dance, track us and shove ads up ours?

Websites used to be below 100KiB - now they come with MEGABYTES of obfuscated JS.. wtf

Though obviously, it's not the individual developer to blame but the incentive system.


The HN zeitgeist has something of a love/hate relationship with the web, I've noticed. HN in general seems to skew a little older than a lot of online communities, so a lot of HN users were adults back in the early days of the web/Usenet/etc. There's a tendency to view those days with nostalgia, leading a lot of people to feel like the "good old days" of the web were "ruined" by the modern shift into more interactivity, fancier/prettier design, etc. And "web developers" are the ones proximately responsible for the shift, so they get the hate too.

I laugh every time I see someone on HN asserting that the web "shouldn't" be used for anything beyond "documents and lightly interactive content", which is not uncomment. There's some real old-man-yelling-at-clouds energy there.


Have you used the web recently? It’s a mess. Most sites don’t actually work well. Everything is slow and bloated and ad-filled, pulling hundreds of megs from hundreds of hosts to display a single page covered in popup alerts, subscription begs, cookie warnings, and paywalls.

Embrace, Embellish, Enshittify.

Anthropic isn’t the inventor here, they are a service provider. The government can easily go find a different service provider, or if none of them will allow their service to be used for war, then the government should develop their own tech.

Saying the government can just nationalize any company purely because they want to use the tech to kill people has pretty big implications and his historically against what this country stands for.


> Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.

TIL Fully automated killbots and mass domestic surveillance are American principles.

I mean, I should have known but there's no clearer sign saying "leave the country now if you don't agree with this admin" than now I guess.


Not entirely true.

The designation only applies to projects that touch the federal government, or software developed specifically for the federal government.

Contractors can still use Claude internally in their business, so long as it is not used in government work directly.

A complete ban would be adding Anthropic to the NDAA, which requires congress.

The DoD designation allows the DoD to make contractors certify that Anthropic is not used in the fulfillment of the government work.


The language in the tweet was

" Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."

Is that just his fantasy or?


Example: Perhaps "Amazon US Services LLC" or whichever subsidiary they have that deals with the government will be banned from using Claude, and all of it's other subsidiaries won't?

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872423...



Well, IANAL but tweets aren't legislation. What that tweet implies is something that would have to be amended into the NDAA, which requires congress. Hegseth can't just go on a drunk rant and have everything out of his mouth become law.

The supply chain risk directive would come from existing procurement law, which only allows the DoD to require contractors to certify that Anthropic is not used in the fulfillment of any government work.

Which is also separate from Trumps' EO, which being an EO only applies to the federal government directly.

So yeah, banning any contractor, supplier, or partner from any commercial activity with Anthropic is just fantasy without going through congress first.


You know, it's an interesting question what happens when the commander in chief makes a pronouncement like this. PROBABLY everyone will just ignore it and go with the actual technical definitions of these things, but...I mean it is an order.

Lawyer here - this is legally fantasy, but socially not?

Anybody with significant contracts with the DOD is not going to use anthropic because they want to keep getting contracts with the DOD.


Yes. It's fantasy. However tariffs are legally fantasy too. This administration is a machine turning Trump's legal fantasy to reality.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the administration. No one has to follow an illegal order.

Yet, look at how all of the media and how many people in this thread are saying Department of War instead of Department of Defense, even though legally it’s still the DoD as it cannot be renamed without congress. Just because “Trump said so” doesn’t mean something is legitimate.

Why is everyone voluntarily complying with a wannabe dictator? It’s the very people of this country that are turning his dictator fantasies into reality by not standing up to the bully.


> Contractors can still use Claude internally in their business, so long as it is not used in government work directly.

I work in the enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry. There is no way to guarantee that amongst any FedRAMP vendor (which is almost every cybersecurity and enterprise SaaS or on their roadmap).

Almost all FedRAMP products I've built, launched, sold, or funded were the same build as the commerical offering, but with siloed data and network access.

This means the entire security and enterprise SaaS industry will have to shift away from Anthropic unless the DPA is invoked and management is changed.

More likely, I think the DoD/DoW and their vendors will force Anthropic to retrain a sovereign model specifically for the US Gov.

Edit: Can't reply

> This is the core assertion that is not clear nor absolute.

If Walmart can forcibly add verbiage banning AWS from it's vendors and suppliers, the US government absolutely can. At least with Walmart they will accept a segmented environment using GCP+Azure+OCI. Retraining a foundational model to be Gov compliant is a project that would cost billions.

By declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk, it will now be contractually added by everyone becuase no GRC team will allow Anthropic anywhere in a company that even remotely touches FedRAMP and it will be forcibly added into contracts.

No one can guarantee that your codebase was not touched by Claude or a product using Claude in the background, so this will be added contractually.


> If Walmart can forcibly add verbiage banning AWS from it's vendors and suppliers, the US government absolutely can.

You can add new language to new contracts. That is not what this is.


FedRAMP contracts require all inputs being FedRAMP compliant and a vetted BOM. Anthropic is no longer FedRAMP high and because it is declared a supply chain risk now all our FedRAMP contracts are at risk and any company who has FedRAMP customers is at risk too.

Possibly Claude has already touched too much code, so this will be very interesting.

> This means the entire security and enterprise SaaS industry will have to shift away from Anthropic unless the DPA is invoked and management is changed.

This is the core assertion that is not clear nor absolute.


Basically, if you are a federal contractor, the designation means the DoD can force you to certify that Anthropic tech is not used in the fulfillment of your government work. Because it's just a DoD designation, and an executive order and not added to the NDAA, you can still use Claude for non-government (federal) touching work.

So using Claude Code to write software for the DoD is now a no go, you'd be in breach of procurement directives now.

If they go as far as to convince congress to add Anthropic to the NDAA, that would be a nationwide ban like Huawei making it illegal for any federal contractor to use the tech anywhere in their business.

But for now, even fed contractors can still use Claude in their business, just not directly for government work.


That doesn’t seem to match up with the original tweet though - it sounds a heck of a lot stronger:

> Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic

Emphasis mine.

And I’m looking at news organizations that presumably have staffs of legal analysts pouring over this stuff, and they also seem to be saying that it can’t be any commercial activity:

> The label means that no contractor or supplier that works with the military can do business with Anthropic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/us/politics/anthropic-mil...


Ok Looking at Anthropic’s response they agree with the parent response:

> Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement. Legally, a supply chain risk designation under 10 USC 3252 can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts—it cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-...

Looks like the NYT might have gotten it wrong…


Wait the liars who lie and don’t care about the law, lied and don’t care about the law?

> it cannot allow private companies to control the use of military equipment.

The big difference here is that Claude is not military equipment. It's a public, general purpose model. The terms of use/service were part of the contract with the DoD. The DoD is trying to forcibly alter the deal, and Anthropic is 100% in the clear to say "no, a contract is a contract, suck it up buttercup."

We aren't talking about Lockheed here making an F-35 and then telling the DoD "oh, but you can't use our very obvious weapon to kill people."

> Surely autonomous murderous robots is something U.S. government has interest in preventing

After this fiasco, obviously not. It's quite clear the DoD most definitely wants autonomous murder robots, and also wants mass domestic surveillance.


So what your saying is it should be removed from the military supply chain?

i dont think any of the big ai companies or any of the sota models should be in a kill chain

i as a foreign citizen get to have hard to detect influence over the model because it scraped tons and tons of my internet comments.

if youre going to have a supply chain, it needs to include where the trainjng data is sourced from and who can contribute to it


No, he's saying if this was such a big deal why did they sign up in the first place?

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