melgross

GeorgeBMac said:

thedba said:

GeorgeBMac said:

For all those defending the "Everything Glued together & soldered together" assembly of the MacBooks by saying "Nobody ever upgraded a computer", Andrew just called bull!

His biggest (only?) complaint about his M1 MacBook Air is that it can't meet his needs because it is frozen in time with what it came with when he bought it -- versus his MacPro which grew and developed with enhancements as his needs, wants and requirements grew.

Likewise, my 9 year old i7 Thinkpad runs perfectly well and meets all of my needs -- because it's been upgraded to a 500Gb SSD, 16Gb Ram and an internal harddrive used for ongoing, real time backups.  Without those cheap and very simple to install (5 minutes or less) upgrades the machine would have been scrap

Statements such as this remind me of my now deceased father who used to long for the days of when he could service his car himself. 
I sometimes wonder what he would say seeing today's Teslas or Priuses. 

Either way, all technology will move towards this way of doing things with ARM architecture taking up more space. Apple is just ahead of the curve on this. 

I don't see the logic behind equating an inability to service or upgrade something as synonymous with better products.

For many products, a lack of upgradability means a smaller, sealed product which is more reliable and easier to carry around. In my own business, we generally had about 32 Macs. We would replace about a third every year, moving them down a tier in production until the forth year, when we either sold them or gave them away to employees. So we replaced all of our Macs over a three year period. Every other production house I knew did pretty much the same thing. My wife worked at Citicorp for 28 years, and she got a new computer every three years too, and most corporations are on a three year replacement schedule.

we found that it cost more, and was a loss in productivity, to upgrade machines. For a short while that was a popular thing, as you could get excellent CPU upgrades for the Mac, significantly enhancing performance, something that never worked well with Windows machines. What we found best was to just get machines equipped the way we needed them in the first place. If you’re making real money with your machine, either as an individual, or as a corporation, you get to deduct many expenses, such as cost of equipment in several ways for tax purposes, making your purchases less expensive over the life of the machine. Discuss it with your accountant.

increasing RAM can help, but not by nearly as much as you think. The reason why some claim this as a big thing is because they bought the lowest config in the beginning, which was below their needs. So yes, increasing it made a noticeable difference. But if you buy what you need in the beginning, adding more leads to a minor difference. Same thing with drives. Don’t skimp on a startup drive. Smaller drives and storage is always slower. That’s true for hard drives, SSD’s and internal NAND storage. There are real reasons for that. Figure out what you really need, and double it. Be realistic about both. Remember these days that 512 NAND will be almost twice as fast as 256, and that 1TB doesn’t add much speed above that. But I always get 1TB startup because you really shouldn’t keep NAND more than about 60% full for good NAND long term health.

there are a bunch of common sense rules to follow if you understand your needs and how to satisfy them. Upgrading in mid stream rarely gets you much unless you starved your machine in the beginning.

While I’d like to believe this is all true, I find some of it in error, or just a stretch.

tango was abandoned for several reasons. One was that the technology was complex. Another was that it was expensive. The last was that it was, technologically, too early.

a problem with Android is that the average selling price of the phones, worldwide, is about $230. That doesn’t allow much room for expensive technologies. Overall, while Apple has just a small share of the market, which has been shrinking, it has an outsized portion of the high end market. For example, while Apple will sell about 200 million high end phones in the next 12 months, Samsung will sell about 30 million. Huawei will sell less, and other manufacturers, even less. Google just sells about 3 million phones as a high estimate.

because of that, it’s difficult to develop a high end technology that will need to be applied to a large number of devices for third party developers to take part. Even Apple can’t force that. An example is 3D Touch, which Apple themselves never applied terribly strategically, and which third party developers for the most part, ignored.

so Google gave it up.

as far as Apple efforts in photography go, there are other cameras that outdo Apple’s work in individual areas, but not overall. Going to computer sites, or channels that are run by people who are not photographically savvy, note the few areas in which Google and even Samsung and Huawei outdo Apple in one area or another, but fail to note that overall, Apple’s cameras are better in reliability and consistently. But go to sites and channels run by professional photographers, and it’s rare to find one that uses something other than an iPhone, or who has anything good, overall, to say about them. Take a thousand pictures with phones, and iPhones will return a much higher percentage of good shots than any other.

and yes, I’m familiar with night modes. And yes, I know that Apple doesn’t have one yet. And while they excelled in getting a photo out of trash, they really aren’t good photos. Low resolution, and other problems abound. But getting the photo has excited those who use the feature, and so the other problems have been ignored. Is that why Apple hasn’t come out with a competitive mode yet? Very likely. Generally, Apple’s cameras have better normal low light quality, but that doesn’t compare to a low resolution comparison on the web. Maybe this year, we’ll finally get an improved version from Apple.

but, my concern is that we need substantially better sensors to begin with. It’s not impossible. But current sensors are already getting most photons to image, so conventional sensors can’t just leap to a much better level, particularly in the tiny sizes we already have.we. We need something new. There is the Foveon sensor, introduced shortly after Digital photography got going. I was given one of the early model cameras. Low resolution when compared to a beyer sensor, but sharper per pixel. I had high hopes for that, but it fizzled. Sigma, the lens maker, bought the technology some years ago, and has made advances in the resolution, and put them into some rather idiosyncratic cameras with some pretty awful software. They’ve gone nowhere. While the technology allows for high per pixel sharpness, color quality is compromised. So that’s not the answer. I have some ideas, but who knows what Apple, Canon and Sony are working on?

I’m just hoping that Apple isn’t going to come out with more of the same this year. The third camera is nice, but none I've seen so far have advanced the state if the art in any way.

TenApplesUpOnTop said:

Imagine that! Planning ahead gives you a competitive advantage. If only Apple planned ahead for depending too heavily on one communist country for the majority of their components....

Yeah. That country is the USA. According to Cook, Apple bought over $50 billion from USA suppliers in 2019. That consisted of parts and materials. In 2020, it rose to over $60 billion.

while Apple does buy from Chinese suppliers, it isn’t the majority of what goes into their products. And don’t confuse assembly of products to manufacture of products.

lkrupp said:

I hope they advertise this as “Assembled in the USA from imported parts” as opposed to “Made in the USA.” The latter would be misleading. 

Most of the parts Apple uses in its devices of all kinds are made right here, in the USA. There are also imported parts, because no one in the USA makes them. But Apple bought about $60 billion of materials, parts and sub assemblies from USA manufacturers in 2018. The year before, it was over $50 billion.

so to characterize what Apple does is just assembly here from imported parts, is completely wrong.

tht said:

Feels like they should have started 4 years ago, but good to hear they are committed. They could have switched Macs to Apple Silicon in 2018. And their own cellular modems could have been started in 2016 or 2017. They basically wasted billions and 4 years to groom Intel to be a secondary or primary modem provider, but Intel has poorly performed in virtually everything they have touched the past 3 to 4 years.

I don’t think it’s that simple. Apple knew that Intel was starting years behind in R&D and patents. I think that Intel did a pretty good job considering that starting position. In fact, if 5G had come in one year later, it’s possible that Intel would have made Apple’s 5G modem.

it’s only because Qualcomm now seems to have been forced to license its essential patents as FRAND, as they should have been made to do years before, that Apple can even do this.

netrox said:

elijahg said:

So Apple is finally friendly with Nvidia again?

What makes you think Apple wasn't friendly with Nvidia? 

Good one! Apple has had a feud with Nvidia for a long time. It started with CUDA. Apple came up with their own software for that which was better. ATI embraced it, but Nvidia didn’t allow it in their GPUs. That was the first problem. The second was as linked to above, when Nvidia changed their production to different solder balls. It didn’t tell the manufacturer of the sub boards the chips were then soldered to. When the incompatible solder connections began to fail for all manufacturers, and we had two iMacs that failed because of this, Nvidia refused to take responsibility. Eventually they had to put $500,000,000 into an escrow account for manufacturers to dip into, but it wasn’t adequate.

Apple hasn’t used Nvidia since. So this is interesting and somewhat surprising.

I’ve got a bunch of TB 3 and 4 cables gathered over the years. I’ve got three TB docks and what’s the point unless you can use them at full speed? But a regular cable likely costs Apple around $5-7, while a TB 4 cable might cost them around $15-20. That may not seem like much, but remember that a product sells for around 2.5 to 3.5 times the part cost. So that would be a big difference to the consumer who likely doesn’t need it and would throw it in their pile of other USB C cables and just pull a random cable out to use.

so, if we’ll need the speed, we’ll just buy it. I mean, if we’ve spent all that money for the higher end phone to do photos and video, another $50, or so, won’t be a bother.

designr said:

I recently read an article (that I cannot find) about how Apple spent a boatload of money on machines to be able to do the (extremely) precise (and unique) springs and locking system. The article made the case of how it ended up being worth it given the $$$ Apple made from the interchangeable bands. Perhaps there are reasons to move on. And we know that Apple loves magnets. And I can imagine Apple finding a way to make the band attachment system even more elegant. But, to me, all that adds up to a fair amount of skepticism about a change in this. Maybe.

I don’t like magnets because I have metal shops and do grinding. That metal powder gets everywhere. I always wear my Apple watch in the shop and no matter what, it’s been fine. But with a magnetic attachment, I shudder to think how much of that powder will get in there. I already have a problem with my iPad with the edges, in the case, getting full of metal powder. So much powder that you can see each magnet, and it won’t all come off, no matter how I clean it. It does come off the iPad, just not the case.

Well, as usual I spent a lot of money I didn’t have to. So I bought the whole thing, 13”, keyboard and Pencil and also the nano glass. I hope the glass isn’t too difficult to clean as my iPad screen gets dirtier than my Apple monitor screen.

i was surprised that the rumor about the M4 was true. I’m willing to bet that there are two reasons for it. Apple has two things to contend with right now. The push in AI is one and the new SoCs from Qualcomm are the other. Apple know about both some time ago. They knew about the SoCs a good two years ago and I wouldn’t be surprised if the push to get the M4 on this, right now, before any PCs with the Qualcomm chip come out is a big reason we’re seeing it. Qualcomm is marketing their chip as being as, or even a bit more powerful than Apple;s M3. Whether that’s true or not, Apple needed to get ahead it it and with the specs for this M4 I believe they have.

anyway, I’m pretty excited to see this new one. It should be here between the 16th and the 20th. My wife’s, which doesn’t have the nano screen and 512GB instead of 1TB, will be here the 15th.

bobolicious said:

"Users have ultimate control."

Do all roads still lead to iCloud and Apple servers ?

Will ChatGP ultimately end up being 'Sherlocked'...?

I hate that term, “sherlocked”. Apple comes out with software for System 9, then OS X can’t use it and Apple is taking time to get it working there. A third party developer comes out with an app called Watson, to mimic Apple’s old Sherlock. Apple finally comes out with a version that works on OS X and immediately some people yell that Apple “Sherlocked” him. I always thought that was nuts.