John Lockwood

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John Lockwood
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  • HomeKit will securely store videos in iCloud, explicit router support coming

    John LockwoodJohn Lockwood
    Apple have announced a new HomeKit feature which is to provide 'free' video recording to iCloud for compatible security cameras. This is great news on the surface. The recordings are stored for 10 days, encrypted so only you can access them and do not count towards your storage limit.

    There is however a massive catch. The above might lead you to believe you can simply link it to your existing (free) iCloud account. After all if it does not count towards your storage limit then the fact your free account only has a 5GB allowance is irrelevant.

    Unfortunately the 'small print' says that you need a paid for 200GB account to allow using a single camera and a 2TB account in order to support five cameras. In other words you do have to pay for this feature.

    Whats worse is that it is not clear what happens if you have more than five cameras. I have already five (presumably) compatible cameras in that they support HomeKit and I already have plans that would involve adding another four cameras. How much would this cost me? The biggest possible plan is the 2TB one which Apple says only supports five cameras. This alone is going to cost me £6.99 a month aka $9.99 a month at least. This is if anything more expensive than the plans for non-HomeKit cameras.

    As a comparison Amazon's Ring offers plans for £2.50 for a single camera or £8.00 for unlimited cameras both with 30 days of storage. (Three times as long as Apple's offering.)

    Clearly Apple's Secure Video feature is not free. Apple may have strayed sufficiently beyond an honest description here to be guilty of breaking the law in terms of false advertising, or bait and switch sales tactics.

    :(

    Apple's charging for iCloud has always been 'irrational' in that even if you have paid the Apple tax for multiple Apple devices you do not qualify for more storage which makes trying to backup multiple iPhones and iPads difficult unless you pay yet more.

    Now I am not saying Apple should simply make this feature completely and really free although that would obviously be welcome but I do feel they need to revise it to be a lot more honest. I would propose that they first stop trying to con people by saying it is free - clearly it is not and claiming it is free as mentioned could be breaking the law. Secondly they should revise the offerings, they should have say a basic level supporting one camera - presumably at the 50GB iCloud fee level, a middle level supporting between two and five cameras at the 200GB level, and an unlimited number of cameras at the 2TB level.

    This would then be fair, honest and competitive compared to other brands whilst still providing I believe a similar level of revenue to Apple.

    Note: Compatible cameras would not only include outdoor cameras but the new HomeKit compatible smart doorbells (with cameras) and of course indoor cameras. Hence it is much easier than Apple perhaps considered to exceed a total of five cameras.
    gatorguyAppleExposed

  • PSA: There are not (yet) any Retina-caliber external displays compatible with Apple's eGPU...

    John LockwoodJohn Lockwood
    One of the problems is that Displayport 1.4 is still not available on Macs. This would allow running 5K displays over a single cable. Intel was believed to be to blame for this delay. Once Displayport 1.4 is available then PCIe video cards could use it like they currently do Displayport 1.2a. The new Dell 8K display uses Displayport 1.4, like the Dell 5K display you need to use both ports on the 8K display to a single computer to support driving the massive 8K resolution.

    Due to the massive delay in shipping Displayport 1.4 chipsets from Intel Thunderbolt3 does not support Displayport 1.4 and hence even Thunderbolt3 cannot drive an 8K display.

    Since Displayport can run over Thunderbolt connections it has a cascading impact.

    Also contrary to what the article says, you can do 4K displays at 60fps over HDMI but you need HDMI 2.0 which can be done with some PCIe video cards and with Displayport to HDMI 2.0 adapters. HDMI 2.0 is however not able to do 5K displays, for that you will need HDMI 2.1 which it not yet available. Sadly it is still the case the Apple's support for PCIe video cards is appallingly bad, OS X apparently does not support HDMI 2.0 on the Nvidia GTX 980 card even though it does have a HDMI 2.0 port. It used to be that Apple could argue that a) the Mac Pro was discontinued and b) they never sold these cards themselves, however Apple have admitted they made a mistake with the Mac Pro 2013 and committed to a new 'modular' Mac Pro for 2018 onwards and this therefore is expected to use PCIe video cards. So Apple now have a need to properly support PCIe video cards again, although arguably their drivers have always been inferior even for cards they sold themselves.

    Note: Where the term Displayport is used this equally applies to Mini Displayport.
    nhughesksecxzupscooter63

  • Logitech sees growth opportunity, seeks to build more HomeKit, Google Now devices

    John LockwoodJohn Lockwood
    polymnia said:
    How long until stereo receivers & TVs boast HomeKit compatibility? Logitech would be the designer of the remote UI and hardware. Apple would provide the common interface protocol to A/V components.

    Is this the way (aside from high-end, professionally programmed systems) that we can FINALLY move to the promised land of direct query of device states and direct commands (and ability to confirm execution of said commands) via data connection.

    I cannot believe it is 2017 and I still have a little computer attached to an IR emitter that tries to remember if the TV is on and what input it is set to, instead of just QUERYING THE DAMN TV!
    You are so right, especially as these days the overwhelming majority of AV devices - especially TVs have network interfaces as standard.

    Sadly the impression is strongly given by all AV makers that they still live in the 70s - almost pre-Internet, their user interfaces suck, they generally are incapable of offering software upgrades of even the most basic level and their using the term smart TV is an oxymoron.
    StrangeDaysjoeljones

  • Meta seeking unfettered access to iPhone user data via EU DMA interoperability requests

    John LockwoodJohn Lockwood
    I think this is a case where Apple needs to use EU law to fight back against Meta and 'hoist them by their own petard'. This would be payback as Meta would be punished for trying to use EU laws to abuse EU laws.

    Apple could firstly try using GDPR against Meta. Secondly Apple could go to the European Court of Justice and accuse the EU of having insufficient measures to protect EU citizens data the basis by which the ECJ previously ruled that the 'Safe Harbour Agreement' between the US and EU was invalid as the US did not sufficiently ensure the data of EU citizens was protected.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Safe_Harbor_Privacy_Principles
    mattinozbaconstangwatto_cobra

  • Is Apple finally serious about gaming after its latest push?

    John LockwoodJohn Lockwood
    Apple and gaming…

    • Yes Apple Silicon means sealed non-upgradeable Macs can in terms of performance potentially match custom built PC gaming rigs (and despite the perception of an Apple hardware tax, might be price competitive as well)
    • Yes iOS has been (and is) extremely successful as a gaming platform
    • Yes Apple has been providing more recently some tools to help game developers e.g. Game Porting Toolkit
    • Yes the consistency of platform between iOS, iPad OS, TV OS, macOS helps - in theory, encourage developers to release macOS games

    Is the Mac therefore now considered a serious gaming platform - hell no

    Is Apple themselves serious about Mac gaming? We don't know. Evidence so far says the answer is still no. What is more important is that the overwhelming industry perception by developers etc. is also no and backed up by decades of experience of Apple. :cry: 

    This is an area that Apple are keeping any plans they might have very much hidden. My own perception is that they still are not treating gaming as a serious category and that this is a huge mistake.

    I have a number of ideas that could completely transform this and I feel ultimately add tens of billions of dollars of revenue. If Apple are interested they can contact me, :smile: 

    Sadly history indicates Apple is still not interested in gaming.

    Most of us will recall Steve Jobs was anti-gaming and this arguably still shapes Apple. The irony is that one of the first steps in Steve Jobs (and Steve Wozniak's) careers was working at Atari!

    https://blisscast.wordpress.com/2023/04/24/breakout-atari-apple-english/
    timpetuswatto_cobra

  • Intel app compatibility on Mac is holding you back and will never get better

    John LockwoodJohn Lockwood
    With regards to running Intel binaries on an Apple Silicon Mac in macOS 28 and onwards...

    • You could run macOS 27 in a VM via Parallels (or other) and macOS 27 will still provide Rosetta2.
    • You can also run older versions of macOS - that is Intel only versions of macOS e.g. macOS Catalina in UTM on an Apple Silicon Mac.

    "In addition, lower performance emulation is available to run x86/x64 on Apple Silicon as well as ARM64 on Intel."

    See 

    https://mac.getutm.app/

    The performance of running an Intel macOS and Intel apps via UTM on an Apple Silicon Mac will obviously be much slower, however as this article indicates, an Apple Silicon Mac especially an M4 or newer is so much faster than an Intel Mac that this might still be acceptable.

    Saying all this, I despise app developers who out of laziness chose not to update their apps to be Apple Silicon native, Apple made this as easy as possible using their developer tools. I encountered the same blinkered attitude way back when Apple moved from PowerPC to Intel. In more recent times I found many anti-virus product makers had not updates their products and relied on Rosetta2. Whilst they did work via Rosetta2 I regarded this as an unacceptable risk because of the small possibility Apple would make a change during a macOS update that would 'break' Rosetta2 so that Rosetta2 might need redownloading/installing after a macOS update resulting in the risk that the anti-virus tool would at least temporarily become disabled.

    (Ironically Microsoft Defender turned out to be the most compatible solution for Macs at that time and I therefore migrated the entire global organisation to Defender as a result.)
    watto_cobra