misa

80s_Apple_Guy said:

The problem is Apple almost never acknowledges a problem until sued in court and forced to.  Three 2011 MacBook pro is one example.  

That's not true. 

Most, if not all companies will not acknowledge a problem unless it's coming from multiple independent sources. Take the Tesla battery fires, and the earlier Sony Battery recall as examples where the product might work for a long period of time before a problem caused by how it's used creates the dangerous situation.

Compare that with Ford's Pinto gas tank, the car industry on the whole's airbag replacement (which spans more than 10 years worth of vehicles from nearly every manufacturer), the Whirlpool dishwasher fires, where the companies simply refused to acknowledge there was a problem and had to be sued. These were products known the be faulty, but continued to be sold.

You're unlikely to see the recalls for non-dangerous defects because the Apple iphone 6 touch disease and the 2011 Macbook GPU failures, the problems only start to show up at the mid-point of the product's expected life cycle of 3 years (for the phone) or (7 for the laptop.) Apple is not the only company that waits until there are repeated reports.

Various Chinese (Taiwan) brands like MSI have a really poor record of product reliability, and that is because reliability tends to scale inversely with popularity. Korean brands are no better. LG and Samsung have never recalled their flip phone products, despite nearly every single one of them failing to work on AT&T's original GSM rollout. Many US brands simply license white-label versions of the very same products and when that happens to be a popular brand, customers aren't aware that the same device is being sold under 30 some brands in the US.

Just imagine if toy and costume-jewelry companies recalled products every time they found lead or cadmium in their china-produced goods, they'd go out of business.

It's not defensible to just go "it's just business" and pay for any potential lawsuits, but to basically go "Apple is the only company..." is a fat out lie. You're not going to see a company recall an entire line of products if the defects aren't a safety issue, because sometimes those defects only affect products on X day of the week when Y had a shift, and Y sucked at doing their job.

It would be great if there was just a universal database that people could plug serial numbers into and find out of their product is still safe to use.

The Intuos tablets were always the premium (the Bamboo models are rebrands of the earlier Graphire series.) That said, the Cintiq is de-facto requirements for animation. Everyone else who has access to a tablet PC (or even a phone) can buy a pen and get about 50% of what they need (especially with the Apple Pencil for the iPad Pro) but it doesn't replace the software or necessary tilt/pressure requirements for professional use.

Ask anyone who works a comic/art/animation convention and they will tell you that the Surface Pro 2 was pretty much what they wanted (which had the Wacom tech,) then Microsoft botched it with replacing it with nTrig, and now nobody will recommend the Surface Pro 3 or later except to people who aren't sure if they want to use a tablet computer at all.

The primary issue with drawing, is that the software (eg Photoshop) is very CPU/GPU demanding in bursts, which tablet PC's are extremely bad at, so you can't spend 8 hours a day using the Surface Pro, because it will literately start melting by hour 2. This is the cost of "thinner lighter" and we need to walk this back before the computers become utterly not useful like the "netbook" generation.

So Intuos series are pretty much "just a graphics digitizer" and the biggest selling point was the tilt and pressure sensitivity levels (the graphire only had 9 bits of precision where as the Intuos has 11 bits) The nTrig tech never has more than 8 bits of pressure and has no tilt. It's not terribly meaningful for vector graphics, but is absolutely required to have the maximum precision for digital paint/photo restoration.

I think the W1 stuff will be a very short-lived product. People don't want, or even like wireless headphones/earbuds because of the short battery life, and Bluetooth is lossy and typically laggy. People who might be on the go (eg fitness) also don't want to lose them (I imagine lost earpods will be very common on public transit.)

I'll give Apple a little bit of credit however, while I think removing the 3.5mm headphone jack on devices is a completely incompetent solution, at least they didn't just remove it entirely and provide no alternative connection method. But there were several alternatives that were not completely stupid for waterproofing (eg optical connections held by magnets) or just straight up using USB-C. The fact that the iPhone 6S has a 3.5mm headphone jack and survives being immersed in water was proof enough that they didn't need to do this at all.

That said, I feel that people are going to be rightfully pissed off having to replace ear pods at $160 a pop.

jkichline said:

1983 said:

The S8 multi-core performance is actually very slightly better than the iPhone 7, even though the difference is tiny, so you could say they're on equal footing there. Its single core performance where the iPhone 7 is still the king by quite a considerable margin.

Not sure where you got your information, but it looks like last year's iPhone 7 trounces the recently released S8 - https://www.google.com/amp/bgr.com/2017/04/10/galaxy-s8-vs-iphone-7-plus-speed-test-youtube/amp/

Keep in mind that under synthetic benchmarks, the Samsung device will look better than it really is because a synthetic benchmark can be cheated, and Android devices are notorous for doing so.
https://www.xda-developers.com/benchmark-cheating-strikes-back-how-oneplus-and-others-got-caught-red-handed-and-what-theyve-done-about-it/

Even though they may claim not to be cheating now, you will never know unless the benchmark changes it's benching algorithm process with every version.

Which brings me to the other half of the performance claim. iOS software is 100% C/C++/OBJC/Swift. They are compiled to native code. Android devices are a mixture of Java and native code. Even if you could run Android on an iOS device, it would perform worse than iOS with the same software because there is this entire Java problem to deal with.

You can see this with games developed in Unity. The game on iOS, works like a charm, low loading time, etc. Same game on Android on equivalent hardware, long loading times, lots of render stutter, OS native UI stuff is slow and ugly, etc.

Like, there is no way in hell I would buy an Android device for that reason alone. You need 20% more "phone" just to make up for Android inefficiency, and that is reflected in synthetic benchmarks which perform non-UI computations. If you were to actually test the responsiveness of a phone on the same software, the iOS software actually is responsive, where as Android is sluggish. There is just no getting around this. I've never seen a game perform identically on an iOS phone and a Samsung phone. The Samsung phone is always kneecapped by Android.

Mike Wuerthele said:

Okay, look, here's the reality. The public perception is that Apple has somehow crippled the hardware with an OS update, forcing users to buy new phones.

Guess what. Newer software means heavier software demands. The phones are literally the same speed as the day they were bought and these metrics are the proof. The difference is the load placed on them by the software.

There is no plot or conspiracy. There is no shadowy cabal demanding that code get bloated to force users to buy a new phone. There is no Cook and Ive plot to turn down the processor and GPU speed. That's insane to even speculate, but yet, here we are. Planned obsolescence as a conspiracy to force hardware sales isn't a thing.

Do you want your phone to be the same as the day you took it out of the box? Never update your software. Problem solved.

Yet this is not true when you use Geekbench 3 or 4.

https://i.imgur.com/v5cWxQY.png
https://i.imgur.com/CZSSCsQ.png

The question is, why is the benchmark getting different numbers? My Retina iPad, which remains on iOS 9.3.5 has the same Geekbench score as it had on 9.2
But my iPhone 6S gets 1799/3083 on 11.0.2 but 2498/4374 on 9.0.2. One third of the CPU performance has vanished.

Geekbench 4 says it should be 2373/4046
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/38

But it ends up being 1796/3123 on 10.3.3 and 1161/2373 on 11.0.1 , GeekBench 4 is suggesting the phone is half the speed it should be. Yet if I run it right now on 11.0.2 it gets 2174/3813, still 10% below where the GeekBench website says it should be.

So the question winds up being, why? Did the power management change? Is more running in the background? Are Geekbench or Futuremark's benchmarks rigged in a way to give a certain score on a certain chip? Does the OS cheat one benchmark software and not another?

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Apple is doing anything that intentionally degrades the performance of the phone, but if the maximum performance of the phone can only be obtained under very specific circumstances, then what is the point of benchmarking the devices. It all feels familiar to the CPU cheats on old benchmarks and GPU cheats by GPU vendors later on desktops, everyone is out to get the best synthetic score possible, and no real world software actually benefits from this optimization. 

Like see https://www.xda-developers.com/benchmark-cheating-strikes-back-how-oneplus-and-others-got-caught-red-handed-and-what-theyve-done-about-it/

horvatic said:

Yea there's a lot of media who want to see Apple fail in so many ways. Here's more proof that cheap copies doesn't make a great deal and Apple will usually win out eventually. Poor build quality, lousy software and cheap components don't make it in the real world as an iPhone competitor.

I regularly read (or troll, depending on the context) some pro-open-source/pro-linux type of forums and the general tone, or tone-deafness tends to be that they are still holding their breath for the iPhone to fail.

The reality is that the iPhone has appeal to pretty much everyone except for the people who see it as a political anathema to promoting open source. Which is fine. Less nerds interested in the iphone, less jailbreaking and subsequent security issues will show up.

Really, the question is, why can't these other idiot smartphone makers actually appeal that nerd market? Because they're after Apple's market. That's the market they can't make any headway into because you can't use Apple's software on non-Apple phones, Android is a miserable experience, and the two other mobile phone OS's out there don't have any market share. Quite honestly I'm surprised the Chinese vendors didn't just make their own OS from scratch, but I guess that would require them to worth together on something that isn't rubbish. It just won't happen. It's bad enough that most Android phones appear to be designed without any UX designers.

There are two kinds of security risks:

a) I have no idea what I'm doing, I'm assuming the defaults are safe : This is basically what happens when Android users are forced to allow software to change permissions in order to even use the software. This is why say a VPN is running instead of just a whitelist/blacklist of domains. Ad blocking is moving from being just marginally stupid, to incredibly stupid.

b) I have an idea of what I'm doing, and I refuse to follow safety guidelines : This is when people install adblock on devices, use open WiFi access points, and then check their email/bank accounts. God damn people, turn off your browser extensions when you visit your banking sites, or don't be surprised when that free widget you installed passes your PayPal account to some eastern european hacker.

If you're smart, you would never turn on a VPN to anything but a machine you control. Those VPN's that these ad blockers, movie piracy, game hacks/bots, and so forth are popular with, is an great way to have your email, bank accounts, and game accounts compromised, if not outright stripped. All someone needs to do is create a MITM attack at the VPN point. This will be more successful with websites that allow downgrade attacks. 

People have a right to be paranoid, but in all seriousness, installing unverifiable, if not untrusted apps on a device that are capable of MITM'ing your data is a bad thing, and Apple rightfully should be blocking this. Android vendors, and even Microsoft Windows and OSX should be doing this, but unfortunately, the Windows platform and the OS X platform offer painfully inferior browsers as a result of too much integration into the OS that should never have happened in the first place. Hence, use Chrome and Firefox at your own risk.

brian green said:

emoeller said:

It's all about the processors.   The sooner Apple moves to its own chips the better....

We have their M chips for the iPhones, A chips for the mobile devices, S chips for the watches, and now the W chip for the wireless Air Pods.  We're seeing Apple design their own chips rather than taking things off the shelf more and more.  It would seem to me that creating an entirely new chip (non x386 architecture) would be something they are contemplating considering the slowdown with Kaby Lake, and all.  It's been a good long while since we've had a shakeup in the processor world, and x386 has been great for us all, but the time might be right for Apple to create their own chips and have Intel manufacture them.

It's not going to happen, People have been saying Apple will do this for several years (just like removing the headphone jack, switching to OLED's, adopting the "edge screen", bigger phablet screens, and so forth) there is no evidence that Apple is going to do this.

The A10 is not equal to any 2016-era CPU in performance. The A9 last year wasn't either. Apple can NOT pull a Microsoft here and create a parallel ARM laptop platform and then admit failure. Microsoft failed on this front because Windows is not designed to be used with a single input. 

Apple would rather improve the performance of the A-series chip until the iPad Pro beats whatever Intel puts out in the sub-15watt sub-stupidly-thin-laptop market, and then quietly discontinue all low-end Macbook Pro's. Because at that point the iPad Pro essentially is better than any possible laptop that is possible. Apple will still put out x86 laptops, but the best performance will be in the iPad Pro and whatever high-end laptop with a dedicated GPU that is still available. The iMac/MacMini and Mac Pro will always remain x86 because those devices are simply not used that way. You're not going to get someone to connect a cintiq to an iPad. You're not going to plug in your video editing equipment into an iPad. It's just not possible to do any "pro" stuff with an iPad that involves any other hardware.

As it is, for Apple to scale the A10 up to the performance of an i7-4790 it needs to become 55% faster without using any more power. Even Intel's highest-end Xeon's don't do this well, overclock a 3.6Ghz processor to 4.0Ghz and it goes from 150 watts to 280 watts and risks melting the socket. To scale the A10 up to the performance of a 22-core Xeon would require only a 20% increase in clock speed, but 22 cores, which means you'd have to imagine a PCB 11 times larger that what is in the iPhone. Currently that is not going to happen either.

People quickly forget the circumstances of why Apple switched from 68K to PPC and PPC to Intel in the first place. The 68K to PPC was fine because the PPC could run the 68K software, which included the OS 8.5 itself. NextStep/OSX was built to run on anything. So can Windows NT. However Microsoft's mistake in trying to get an ARM version of Windows was that NONE of the software works on ARM, as there has never been a requirement for "fat binaries", and Micrsoft's legacy software all requires two-button mouse input or meta-key keyboard shortcuts. Neither are available on a touch-screen, hence an entirely new UI is needed. For OS X however Apple has never required more than a 1-mouse button (this might actually be a long-con game with the eventual goal of touch-screens, who knows) and OS X has the Launchpad which functions identical to iOS's way of launching software. Yet it remains a full OS and doesn't try to shoe-horn you into something unfamiliar.

Apple could, but it won't. It leaves "Switching to it's own CPU's" as leverage over Intel. If Apple ever wanted to switch to it's own chips, it would still end up coming back to Intel for chip-fabrication, and likely wouldn't get the latest fabrication that Intel makes it's own chips on. This is always the risk for Apple, that it wants to use it's own chips but can't find enough capacity to produce enough of them. 

And that is why Apple will continue to use Intel's chips, they have no reason to switch unless the Intel-Apple relationship sours.That is why they switched away from IBM/Motorola in the first place. Apple will not be able to produce better chips for the laptops and desktops than Intel, and if the laptops run different chips than the desktops, then people simply won't buy the laptops at all.

So in short, we're not going to see it in a 7s, or an 8, but maybe something beyond 8. Or preferably an entirely different product.

A flexible screen makes a little more sense in a tablet, but the underlying battery, pcb, and chasis is not flexible, so a lot of "flexible screens" are meaningless. Flexible screens are meant for literal "flexible" computers, like watchbands, cuffs, and tube/sphere/cone shaped surfaces that aren't necessarily information devices but decorative props.

I don't use Siri.

I think we're being sold "star trek computer" but being given babbys-first-voice-recognition.

It may have uses for accessibility reasons , but the last thing you need is a TV program going "Siri, call 911" and having millions of 911 calls go out.

It's a blackhat's fever dream of being able to get millions of devices to do something malicious without confirmation.