cgWerks

designr said:

It seems like regular testing is a good approach. It respects natural immunity which appears to be all but ignored now. It also respects individual's concerns about the current vaccines.

The thing is, very good rapid antigen testing has been available since very early on in the pandemic. It costs much less (~$5 per test) and takes minutes (instead of hours or days). Given all the issues with PCR, one very good questions is why it hasn't been widely used. (It's almost a rhetorical question at this point, IMO.)

But exactly, they could easily test in situations where it would be deemed necessary. That's always been an option, for everyone.

baconstang said:

"It respects natural immunity which appears to be all but ignored now."  
Oh, that's the kind of immunity that 90+% of hospitalized Covid patients have, correct?

No, those would be the claimed (w/o evidence, as far as I've been able to tell) people who are unvaxxed and haven't yet had Covid. While people who have had Covid already can contract it again, the vaxxed are *much* more likely to do so, and it seems are more likely to spread it than those who have had Covid already (or even those who haven't and are unvaxxed).

"SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021. The increased risk was significant (P0.001) for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold (95% CI, 4.85 to 7.33) increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold (95% CI, 5.51 to 9.21) increased risk for symptomatic disease. SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected."

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1.full.pdf


Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination | medRxiv

designr said:

That's the immunity that comes from having the antibodies as a result of having contracted the virus and recovered.

This is nothing new. You can read under "Active Immunity" here.

Actually, it's even better than that. It includes T-cells and a much broader ability to detect variants, instead of just last-year's virus.

The downside, is of course, that you'd have to get and recover from Covid. For most healthy, young people, that isn't *usually* that big of a deal. So, there is a risk-calculation here. The problem is that as more data keeps coming in, one side of that calculation is looking more and more scary.

We'll just all have to hope and pray this guy*** isn't right: https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post/the-last-post
Because if he is, Apple might have a bunch of job openings to fill over the next couple of years (as well as a lot of other companies).
(*** btw, you might want to have a peek at his bio before responding to this with the usual 'conspiracy theory' tripe.)

I’d really love a pair, but w/o audio in, it’s a no-go. And, I wonder if they solved the problem with a seemingly high percentage of the original ones breaking? They are way too expensive if they only last a couple of years (and Apple won’t stand behind them, just like they haven’t for my crackling AirPods Pro).

AppleInsider said:

When Apple announced iOS 13 earlier this year, they also opened up support for Sony's Dualshock 4 controllers and Microsoft's Wireless Xbox One controller. So if you already have these two controllers at home, you'll be able to connect these controllers to your Apple devices when Apple's new OS goes live in a couple of weeks.

I have to disagree some here, and advise to just buy a Sony DS4 or Xbox controller and wait a bit (unless you really, really just have to get playing now). While I do like my Nimbus, it isn't a DS4 (in feel, or possibly even quality). It's hard to describe, but it just isn't quite as responsive or ranges/engagement-zones aren't as well designed as the DS4.

So, instead of 'if you have already' I'd say you're more likely to just want to start there.

Why the heck are people still using these social login methods?
It wasn't a good idea back in like 2012 when it started to be pushed, and certainly shouldn't be a good idea these days when we know all the bad things that have resulted.

claire1 said:
"I do it every time I go for a longer-than-few-minute drive in the car."

My goodness that sounds tedious.
 
What I bolded in your comment is actually VERY very very common, which is why I always though "wireless" charging was dumb, especially when Sammy bragged about it. Which is also why I believe Apple will remove the lightning port but add a Watch-style clip-on charger that clips to the Apple logo or the whole back of their devices. OF course before they actually crack real wireless charging.

But handling 2 cords just to listen to music is ridiculous and never heard of anyone doing it until Apple removed the headphone jack and morons(not you specifically) suddenly parroted the meme against Apple.

"In terms of Apple-stupid, removing the 3.5mm jack ranks right up there near the top. "
Kinda how they were stupid for removing the floppy disk drive, the CD Rom drive, SCSI Drive, Mobile Keyboard etc. etc.

"No but this time's different!"
Heard it before too.

Much easier than spending $50k for a newer car, which probably wouldn't solve the problem anyway. I suppose I could use a BT adapter and only have 1 cable, but it's not much harder to plugin in 2 than 1, and I get better audio quality that way. And, if I didn't plug power in, then the phone goes to 'sleep' unless I go in and change settings (which is a bigger hassle). Also, if using navigation and playing podcasts, etc. it's nice to have it all charged up when I get to my destination.

So, I guess I have to ask... what's the alternative I'm missing?

re: wireless charging - Yeah, I suppose a 'mag-safe' like cord/disc could be a reasonable charging solution. But, there are many other uses for Lightning (or whatever DATA port is there). But, seeing Apple thinks a 3.5mm jack is 'legacy' maybe efficiently/reliably transferring data is too? I don't put about any level of silliness above Apple these days.  And, I hope they never crack 'real' wireless charging, as that just sounds scary.

re: 2 cords - Like I said, my wife and son do it all the time. It isn't just to listen to music either, but watching YouTube or playing a game, etc. My son especially does this, as we often don't want to hear all his gaming noise (so make him wear headphones), and the games suck the battery down. I guess I thought I was actually the unusual one, as I'm disciplined about charging every night and use low-power consumption apps and settings, turn my wifi/cell off when not needed, etc.

re: floppy vs 3.5mm jack - not even in the same ballpark. 3.5mm jacks are still widely in use, and I see no reason they won't be for a long time. They are also mechanically superior to Lightning, which is important on devices people tend to put into pockets (assuming you see the dongle as a solution to the lost compatibility).

9secondkox2 said:

This. Article could really do without that last line. 

It’s not like a hostile press didn’t earn it. 

No doubt, they've (press) been over-the-top daffy in response to Musk buying Twitter.

My concern is that this person's track record doesn't look good when it comes to free-speech concerns and trying to keep the politics from driving Twitter back into the hole.

9secondkox2 said:
Can’t wait to see it become “X.” Will dominate. 

I'm honestly concerned about that, too. I want Twitter to be Twitter. I'm not sure I want (or need) it to become the 'everything' app.

JP234 said:

"Elon has committed to being accessible to everyone for continual feedback," Yaccarino said near the end of the interview. "If freedom of speech, as he says, is the bedrock of this country, I'm not sure there's anyone in this room who could disagree with that."

Indeed. Who could disagree with that?

They might say that, but actions speak louder than words. Pre-Elon Twitter was about anything but free-speech. Everyone seems willing to say free-speech is a bedrock, but few seem to actually back that up.

anonymouse said:

... under his control Twitter will continue to devolve into the cesspool he is making it. 

I've been on Twitter for quite a long time, and it has never been better on almost any metric I can think of. What's the beef?

fastasleep said:
LOL you Musk sycophants are really something else. Nobody grounded in reality could look at Twitter right now and say this with a straight face. It's a five alarm dumpster fire sinking into a cesspool.

How so?

Stabitha_Christie said:
Above all else Twitter is an adverting platform. Having a successful adverting executive run an advertising company does make sense. 

I'd rather it be a service. Advertising ruins most things. But, maybe given the financial realities, that isn't possible at this point.

williamlondon said:
Doesn't matter if advertisers won't spend money with twitter because it's such a fucking RWNJ cesspit now (despite how wonderful she *might* be), especially now that they're looking at bringing the advertiser repeller (Fucker Carlson) to the platform.

The key here is how bad the other platforms are screwing up. Carlson has a massive audience. If Twitter becomes a successful platform for distribution of shows to compete with YouTube, etc. w/o the baloney, it could become quite successful.

That said, I think there are even better platforms, as even Twitter will unlikely be as hands-off as it could be, in terms of success for such shows.

mark fearing said:
What? It’s doing well? Half the audience or more left it. Advertisers left it. He bought it, overpaid because of ego, and they will write it off as it falls apart.

Sorry, that's total baloney. A few people left. Advertisers virtue-signaled and have been returning. He probably did vastly overpay, but he seems to have done that at least partly in principal (which, makes him a hero for that aspect, at least).

crofford said:
So - your point is Elon made a bad pick and then you used another Musk company example as how to do it right?

Probably not a bad point, as Tesla and SpaceX have been quite successful.

Stabitha_Christie said:

williamlondon said:
Doesn't matter if advertisers won't spend money with twitter because it's such a fucking RWNJ cesspit now (despite how wonderful she *might* be), especially now that they're looking at bringing the advertiser repeller (Fucker Carlson) to the platform.

As someone else pointed out, what a moron for paying $44B for a platform and turning it into something he could have bought (Parler) for ~$200. Musk thinks he's Midas, the results say the opposite.

You seem to be reading my comment as some sort of endorsement of Twitter or Musk. It isn't the guy is a complete nob and I'm fairly convinced that Twitter will implode or be sold off at an incredible loss. My point that if your business is adverting then having someone that has success at an executive level isn't a bad choice to run it. She is qualified for the job. Plenty of qualified and talented have not failed to save a floundering company. 

You're thinking clearly. It is these 'knee-jerk Elon haters' who aren't. Kind of like Apple, I've been extremely critical of Elon at points, while appreciating the good things he does. It's a sign of intellectual maturity, which I guess is rare these days.

It has to either be smart, or sound good.
And, if it is in that 'sound good' category (like discontinued HopePod) then it needs an audio input so it isn't a one-string-banjo.
I'm not sure why Apple is having such a hard time with this.

I’ll go on record admitting I consider Elon near hero-status for taking over Twitter and exposing the corruption.

That said, I don’t agree with several of his decisions regarding Twitter as a business. He didn’t buy it *just* to be altruistic, and fear for what it might become. What he/they did to Twitter 3rd party apps was really uncalled for. That’s the kind of thing you do with advanced notice.

I do support this character expansion limit, but primarily to make threads unnecessary. Sometimes you just want (or more, need to) post a few paragraphs or include some information, and having to break it up across a dozen tweets doesn’t benefit anyone, IMO.

What I don’t get (if I’m understanding correctly), is the showing the summary with ‘more’ button for non-Twitter-Blue, but for Blue, will it just display the whole thing? I think it would be better to have the more for everyone, as having some huge ‘tweets’ is going to make using Twitter harder, I’d think.

danox said:

Oh boy, a bigger Landfill doesn’t make for better garbage….

Garbage is everywhere. If you don’t know how to sift through it, you’re in trouble. But, sometimes more data is necessary, especially to make or rebut a point. It is a welcome addition, I’m just not sure of the implementation. Like it or not, Twitter is where it is at for a lot of information flow. I don’t think that is going to change.

rob53 said:
The M2 Ultra delivers 27.2 teraflops of graphics performance so one current Mac Studio/Pro is faster than the 2005 system. 

Just be sure to check what it actually does in your workflow. How many teraflops it can do is irrelevant if the viewport on your 3D app is too choppy to use.

Marvin said:
If Apple made a Mac Pro that supported quad Nvidia 4090 GPUs (or equivalent), 2TB RAM, quad M-series CPUs, they'd sell... maybe a few tens of thousands of units, just the same as if they don't offer that option. Likewise with a souped up M3 Extreme.

The fact they dropped MPX modules shows that for all the bloviating about how the 2019 model was the right design for pros, nobody bothered buying them. Meanwhile Apple mentioned they've sold millions of Mac Studios with the exact same design constraints as the 'trashcan'.

Yes, this is true as far as it goes. It depends on what markets they want to serve. I think it benefits them overall to support the range, but they'll always make more money down on the consumer end than high-end pros, for the most part.

But, I'm not sure I agree with that second statement. I think they moved to this new Mac Pro to fulfill their transition, and probably couldn't figure out a way to do the MPX thing on the new platform, or just don't plan to do it.

I think for all the bloviating about how the 2019 model was the right design for the pros, they just abandoned that all with their new platform direction. (Unless I'm missing something, they could implement AMD cards and eGPUs and such, they've just decided not to.)

charlesn said:
Another riff on a frequent theme in Apple commentary of late: this inane notion that Apple is pumping out "stopgap" products because this or that didn't quite work out so they had to rush "something" to market. Everything from the Apple Watch 7 (a last minute kludge because the constantly rumored flat-sided design failed in production) to the Mac Studio (a stopgap because the Mac Pro wasn't done in time) to the new Mac Pro itself. Anyone who knows anything about the time needed for R&D, production design and testing, supply chain procurement, etc to bring a tech product to market that meets Apple standards of near perfection knows that these "stopgap product" claims are ridiculous. 

The simple storyline usually goes like this: something is rumored (the M2 Exteme! the M3 Hyperdrive!). Said rumored thing doesn't appear in a product as rumored. Therefore, Apple couldn't get said rumored thing to work in time or work at all, so it banged out a stopgap or kludge product last minute. It's just stupid. 

Apple's high end computers now seem logically divided. If you need power but not expansion, the base Studio M2 Ultra is $4K. If you need power plus more ports and card expansion capability, the base Mac Pro is $7K. In terms of upspec'ing from the base model, the costs are the same for the Studio and Pro. Maxed out, your $12K investment in a Mac Pro now buys you a machine that will easily outperform what cost $54.000 previously... and people are disappointed with this. It just never ends. 

I disagree. The new Mac Pro only meets the needs of a fraction of the market the old Mac Pro did (which was already small). While rumors and wishes can get a bit wild, I think a basic presumption that the new Mac Pro would be somewhat competent compared to the previous model is warranted. The new one is faster on some metrics, but not even the the ballpark on others (like GPU performance).

My read, is they simply wanted to complete the transition, so they did. They've done this in past transitions. I'd be a bit concerned if I invested in an Intel Mac Pro, as I wonder how long they'll support it OS-wise.

No, a $12k Mac Pro won't even come close to outperforming a previous Mac Pro with a single higher end GPU option, let alone 4 of them. But, the reason for the complaining, is that for people in 3D who use AMD (or Nvidia) based systems, Apple has no competitive machine any longer. Even if you've got unlimited funds, Apple doesn't have the hardware. And, there is little in-between, either. You're better off buying a $1500 gaming PC, and a $600 mini, I guess.

dewme said:
The only real expectation that came directly from Apple was that they would move their whole Mac product line over to Apple Silicon. It finally happened with the release of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. is it a drop-in replacement for the Intel Mac Pro? Nope, just like the 24” iMac is not a drop-in replacement for the 27” iMac. Apple gets to decide where it wants to focus its investments and how it wants to structure its portfolio going forward. It is what it is and they seem to be content with what it is, at least at this point in time. 

My read on it, is that the plan seems to be they'll have something more workable when they hit the M3 or M4. If they make enough GPU advancement (and add RT, etc.), it might not match what is going on in the PC world with AMD/Nvidia, but it might be good enough. We'll see.

StrangeDays said:

darkvader said:

Less RAM, no real graphics card, and Apple making wild performance claims without any actual benchmarks.

I'm unconvinced.  I want to see real benchmarks vs current AMD and Intel processors, and current high end Nvidia and AMD graphics cards.  I want to see that because I strongly suspect Apple is just doing a bit of puffery.

I strongly suspect you’re not in the market for this machine and thus are just complaining yet again. If only we had a word for such a thing…

Same for me... true to some extent. I can't afford a Mac Pro. But, the Mac Pro is an indicator of where the platform is going in terms of potential, so I watch it closely.

I had been expecting I'd buy a Mac Studio once it was introduced. It seemed like the perfect machine I've always wanted. I still might buy one when the M3 version is released. The problem the new Mac Pro highlighted, though, is that I still don't see a clear plan for GPU power. I need GPU power. So, if the M3 doesn't cut it, I may be much better off minimizing my Mac cost (ex: fairly base mini), and then buying some real 3D power in a PC. I can just remote-control the PC for 3D apps and gaming, and the mini should be plenty fast enough for the rest of my Mac stuff.

nubus said:

The direction of Apple Silicon is clear. Pro = Studio in a PCIe 4 enclosure with no other modularity. The Pro crowd will have to make a decision.

I guess this is part of the debate. Is this representative of Apple's new direction? Or, is it simply a stop-gap? I'm really hoping it is the latter, because otherwise it is quite disappointing.

chasm said:
1. Let us know how many expansion cards you can shove inside that Mac Studio, will you?

2. How — exactly — can Apple “fail to deliver” something they never, ever promised, Mr. Entitled? Did you know that your theoretical fantasy chip involves exponentially more work to create than just hot-gluing two M2 Ultra’s together?

3. You may be right about the sales predictions, but my own theoretical fantasy regarding this machine is that now that its out, Apple might strike a deal with Nvidia — or heck, just make in-house — video cards that can with, rather than be a substitute for, the incredible on-board GPU. I think those PCI slots will eventually prove very useful in unexpected ways, though again you may be right that that’s a job for the M3 or later.

Ok, you get a 'like' for that 3rd point (and I so hope you're correct).
But, re: 1 - True, but what percent of the 2019 Mac Pro user base needed those card slots (besides GPU)?
re: 2 - Fair point... except, I think it is reasonable to make the assumption the new Mac Pro will be better than the old one. If you need GPU-power, the old Mac Pro will wipe the floor with the new one. Heck, my 2018 Mac mini will wipe the floor with the new one. (Apple has no mid-to-high-end anymore in this regard.)

chasm said:

In my view, this version of the Vision Pro is intended to sell to a) corporate developers and b) corporations, mostly. Some rich enthusiasts will also buy them for bragging rights, I’m sure — in endgame capitalism, some people have literally more money than they know what to do with.

The way this is built is very obviously designed for you to be plugged in to the mains most of the time, only using the battery when you need to go to another part of the office/warehouse/factory/complex/home, and Apple deliberately emphasized the desktop computing paradigm. You sit in a comfy sitting position with less need for a desk, you use the spatial computer for typical tasks, you can still interact with co-workers.

You take it home, and it replaces your personal computer, TV, and stereo system for social and entertainment purposes. Heh, I wonder how long before “VR face” (where you are noticeably more tan in the non-headset areas) becomes a thing?

Hey wait a minute — didn’t Pixar predict all this in Wall-E?

https://www.dotdash.ie/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/wall-e-humans.jpg

Yeah, most of the people buying this one will be developers and people with $ wanting to experiment. But, the price will come down in the future (or, inflation will bring everything else up?).

I had to laugh though, at the 'it replaces' marketing. Made me think of the kitchen-gadget infomercials... it slices,  it dices, if you had to replace all these functions...

My main issue with it as a product category, is that I'm not a big believer in spatial computing. There are vertical applications, but for the average person, I just can't see how it would be better than just watching at TV, using an iPad on the couch, or sitting at ones Mac on their desk. I suppose this partly depends on how comfortable it is, but is anyone going to want to wear one for many hours at a time? And, there's a reason I'm typing this into the forum, and not dictating it.

My summary so far: incredible technology, engineering, and industrial design. Very weak use-case.