swineone
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The bell is tolling for Intel Macs with the arrival of the first Apple Silicon specific fe...
Look, it’s nice and all that people are mentioning the neural engine. It’s quite likely it’s being used for some of these features.
However, assuming Apple has decent software engineers that actually follow best practices in the field (something you can no longer be sure of since they’re so worried about the newest “racist” hire or pressuring Apple into taking sides in middle eastern wars), they have a machine learning API that can and should have multiple computational backends. So the code is the same regardless of where it is executed. One of these backends, sure enough, is the neural engine. But GPUs were there long before there was a neural engine, and even CPUs can handle simpler workloads in real-time — assuming real-time is even a constraint, which it certainly isn’t in some of these scenarios.
So yeah, this reeks of a marketing strategy to get people to upgrade.
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Apple reportedly blocks pay equity Slack channel amid rising tensions with employees
Apple, the bastion of the left. Except when the leftist agenda starts interfering with those dirty, right-wing concepts such as profit.
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The bell is tolling for Intel Macs with the arrival of the first Apple Silicon specific fe...
many of the best new macOS Monterey features will only work on Apple Silicon. And so they should.Planned obsolescence much? Indeed that's the case as will be clear from the breakdown below.
You may or may not like blurred backgrounds in FaceTime calls, but if you do like the effect, you'd better buy an Apple Silicon Mac.Google Meet has done that for a while already. On a web application, no less.
M1 Macs will be able to use Live Text in macOS Monterey. With any image, whether it's on a website you're browsing or your own photos from five years ago, M1 Macs can read the text there.
That's intensive pattern recognition that's done on-device.Intensive but, from my understanding, not real time. Even an old PPC G4 could do it given enough time.Ooh, sounds like a super-complicated thing that would be impossible to do on-device in an Intel Mac. Wait, not really. Probably Intel hardware was what Apple used to transcribe conversations behind the scenes on their cloud servers.
For some reason the editor won't let me quote the next paragraph properly, so I'll just wrap it in double quotes.
"Doubtlessly, Intel Macs will be able to show you directions and the same level of detail we get now. But all of the tremendous extras like rendered elevations and city exploration we're getting with macOS Monterey won't be on Intel."
More of a GPU than CPU issue. Anyway, PCs can easily render ultra-high-resolution photorealistic games in real time, but hardware of similar caliber (with a less powerful, but still extremely powerful GPU) on an Intel Mac supposedly can't render some simple 2.5D scene with simple, almost schematic-level, assets? Give me a ******* break.You can currently dictate into Siri on a Mac for up to around one minute. From macOS Monterey onwards, there will be no time limit at all -- so long as you're on M1 or later.
That's partly because dictation will now be done on-device instead.
Conclusion: yeah, it's all marketing, and Apple pressuring us into an upgrade we don't really need. So much for being so "green", it's all about the greenbacks (as well it should be, but let's not pretend Apple is a saint).
Either way, I don't care, my hardware is still quite new (2018 MBP) and it'll have to last long to recoup my investment in it, even if Apple is forcing my hand on this by not allowing me to make a FaceTime call with a blurred background -- and, as mentioned, if I really need that feature, I'll just use Google Meet which miraculously is capable of doing that in my supposedly underperforming Intel Mac.
I'll probably stay out of the market for another 3 or 4 years, and in the meanwhile I'll be monitoring whether someone decides to tackle the Windows virtualization issue (hell, there was Virtual PC back in the PowerPC days, you're telling me Apple Silicon is so underpowered it can't emulate the supposedly low-performance Intel Macs?) If nobody does, this will probably be my last Mac.
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How to refurbish a fifth-generation Time Capsule
Congratulations to the author for such a detailed article.
However, I've lost trust on Time Machine the software and Time Capsule the hardware. For the former, in particular, I just grew tired of having to throw backups away every few weeks and restart from scratch after the dreaded error message I'm too lazy to Google for now -- and this is even if backing up to "new" hard drives that are very unlikely to be defective. I also had a huge scare after trying to restore from a Time Machine-backed up hard drive to a new M3 Max MacBook Pro and having many, many, many (dare I say the majority) of my files missing. I simply can't and won't ever trust Time Machine again after this episode.
Currently I'm using a mixture of Carbon Copy Cloner, a GUI interface to BorgBackup called Vorta, and Arq Backup. By the way, if you have "small" amounts of data, an external high-performance SSD is something I just cannot recommend enough. I'm using the Crucial X6 (which is not super-high-performance, as there are faster models at a small cost increase) and couldn't be happier with it. I believe the diversity between mechanical and solid-state drives also reduces the chance of losing all your backups.
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TikTok is still your one-stop shop for total nonsense about Apple
Until and unless Apple provides a blessed API call and approves an app that allows you full control over battery charging, then yes, planned obsolescence is a very real, concrete and provable thing. No, the non-working (and half-useless even if it worked) “Optimized Battery Charging” feature is not it. It is In fact the proof that Apple designs planned obsolescence into all of their hardware save Macs, since the technical capability for controlling charging exists but they won’t let the owner control it as they please.AppleInsider said:The concept of planned obsolescence is so broken it only takes a moment of actual, coherent, thought to understand why it isn't happening.
If users were given that capability and followed a few simple battery care steps (plug phone in whenever possible while limiting battery SoC, do not expose to high heat, do not fast charge) then a mobile phone battery would easily last as long as an EV battery, rather than forcing you to swap the battery after a couple of years — which, at this point, is only marginally cheaper than upgrading, and thus people make the rational choice of upgrading; ergo, planned obsolescence. -
iPhone 15 has new battery health controls to prevent charging past 80%
The problem is that you cannot look only at the science and engineering aspects, but also sales and marketing.dewme said:I just want to mention one thing regarding the “you cannot ignore the science” arguments.
I totally agree that you cannot ignore the science. But there is a difference between science and engineering. Engineered products are built with as much consideration for the human and societal element as they are for science. Engineers are responsible for designing products that manage the limitations imposed by the science so as not to expose users to unnecessary harm or inconvenience. This is part of what’s considered engineering margins or operational derating.
Engineering margin is used to increase the likelihood that a product is not designed with its normal operating or rated limits too close to its scientific and physical limits. For example, if an elevator is user rated for 1000 lbs maximum, the engineers who build it and specify its operational limits will include sufficient margin to allow the elevator to exceed its rated limits by some percentage to reduce the likelihood that an overloaded elevator will suffer total failure. Additionally, a well engineered elevator will include safety devices to ensure that users cannot overload the elevator to the point of failure.
If the batteries in these devices are in some way harmed or degraded when the user is utilizing the device within its normal, rated, and advertised limits there is an engineering design deficiency with the product. This is especially true if the user is expected to manually enforce limits/margins on their own that result in a loss in performance, capacity, or product lifetime over what the product builder sold to the customer.
If maintaining the battery charge between 20-80 percent is imperative to the health of the product then Apple should enforce these limits through derating the battery capacity and runtime that it advertises pre-sales and what it shows on the device. In this case, the percentage of battery charge remaining should reflect the amount of usable and battery-safe battery capacity available to the user based on the derated values and margins engineered into the product. This type of engineering driven product design is not beyond the capability of Apple’s product designers.
So this isn’t simply an argument about science or best practices. It’s an argument about engineered product design that considers the impact that battery rating and management has on the useful lifetime of the product. Some people may argue that enforcing engineering margins hides potential value because the batteries can actually be “pushed beyond their practical limits” when absolutely necessary, perhaps for emergency situations. I can see where an accommodation could be included to place the device into a temporary “Emergency Mode” with appropriate warnings.
In any case, I think that what Apple has done with providing the 20-80 limit is a crude admission that they didn’t do the engineering that they should have done to relieve their customers from having to worry about something they shouldn’t have to worry about. After all, not all users are scientists, they’re just ordinary folks using a product they expect to “just work.” It’s the engineers that are responsible for making that happen.
The fact is that mobile phone buyers want phones that are thin, lightweight, powerful, cheap and that hold a charge all day or even more (and when they do have to charge, they would like to fully charge it in a few minutes, not hours). And unfortunately the technology isn't there to meet all of these constraints simultaneously and comfortably. Battery technology even more so, which isn't exclusive to mobile phones or even portable electronic devices in general: just have a look at EVs.
Then there's the fact that battery runtime is a (strong) selling point, whereas very few people factor battery lifespan into the purchase. Combine this with the relationship between "overcharging" batteries and their reduced lifespan -- and really, there is no law of nature saying you have to stop charging at 4.2 V or 4.3 V or 4.35 V, all you have are different charge limit/lifespan tradeoffs. This translates into perverse incentives for device designers, who push batteries to the limit even if it means they will last a year or two (and some users don't even care since they upgrade their devices every year).
Oh, and with the drive to ever thinner devices, and users wanting waterproof phones (again a selling point), now you have to make batteries non-user-serviceable. Prior to this you would just buy a new battery for cheap and replace it. Or even keep a battery in a bag, and if you ran out of juice, you'd just replace it. Now this is impossible, and swapping batteries is much more expensive due to the labor required to take apart the phone and put it together again, much more so than the cost of batteries themselves.
So really, what was Apple supposed to do? Say they cap their batteries at the "ideal" 3.9 V (~60% of the capacity of a battery charged to 4.2 V), turning off the device once it reached the equivalent of ~30% state of charge, and remove any fast charging capabilities; this would lengthen battery lifespan considerably. But then their Chinese competitors would advertise phones with similar thickness and weight, which would last 3 times longer on a charge, and with fast-charging. Sure their batteries would last a year, two at most, but more power to them: the user would just buy a new one, providing extra revenue for the manufacturer. So Apple does what's reasonable, and just goes along with what everyone else does, which is what you would call bad design. Thankfully they've finally been waking up to this issue and adding features such as charge management, optimized battery charging and now this toggle. Of course none of this would have been an issue if they just let the owner of the phone use it as they see fit rather than according to the rules that Apple dictates; i.e. App Store rules won't let you have an app similar to Al Dente in the iPhone.
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Sideloading is a malware danger, Apple tells U.S. lawmakers
Company that profits hugely from a 30% cut from non-sideloaded apps claims that sideloading is dangerous. It certainly is — to their bottom line.The only thing I’m surprised by is that anyone would even bother reading what Apple writes on the subject, given their inherent conflict of interest.
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If US lawmakers are good at anything, it's failing at technology
Newsflash: politicians are incompetent!
You know what, if I knew someone was incompetent, I’d want to strip them off their ability to do harm through their incompetence, taking away their power and money.
Yet people call for ever and ever more government interference and playing Robin Hood. People here are quick to realize politicians have zero clue about technology (and really, if this was a site about X, they’d realize just as well they have zero clue about X), but do they really think they are any less clueless about economics, science, health, education or any other topic?
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Apple's A16 processor to be exclusive to iPhone 14 Pro, says Kuo
Great, Apple just saved me the temptation of upgrading from my current iPhone 13 (non-Pro).
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Apple employees ask for more flexible remote work options
foregoneconclusion said:
Neither would a software engineer. Same difference.swineone said: A CEO of a large company that spends all day in the bath wouldn’t last the first week, hell, perhaps not even the first day. Plus he wouldn’t ever get employed again in any high level position.You really have no idea what it is like to be a CEO, compared to what effectively is the IT equivalent of a construction worker. I guess I won’t waste any more words on this.
