Spencer314

lordjohnwhorfin said:

How does this compare to what’s available in the PC world, whether Intel/AMD or the more comparable ARM based Snapdragon?

The M4 Max score is quite a bit ahead of Intel CPUs on both single and multi-core performance on Geek Bench 6. 

https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

I'm sure NVIDIA GPUs are still faster, but it's a bit more difficult comparing them since they don't really run the same benchmarks. It's also pretty hard to compare AI engines for the same reason. 

hammeroftruth said:

Apple's refusal to unlock the phones from the San Bernardino attack in 2015 was the first high-profile case. The FBI paid a large sum to Cellbrite to bypass Apple's security, but it's unclear if they found anything useful. This incident sparked a debate about whether there should be a backdoor into Apple's security, especially in light of concerns about government surveillance.

They didn't find anything of value, which is basically what Apple had expected based on the iCloud data that they did have. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple–FBI_encryption_dispute

Also, the FBI screwed up the ability to get the phone to do a final iCloud backup, which would have resulted in the most recent content of the phone being available to law enforcement without cracking the phone. 

All this anti-stalking stuff makes the AirTag a lot less useful as an anti-theft device, unfortunately. If Apple keeps tightening the AirTag anti-stalking capabilities, what use cases will be left? Just finding stuff in your house? 

nubus said:

Will the lack of parts pairing cause more devices to be stolen? Apple should have the right to block parts from stolen devices to protect us.

I would have thought this would be one of the points, but the article didn't mention it. If you can't salvage one phone for valuable parts for another, then the third party repair industry won't end up as as a laundry service for stolen phones. Also, parts like fingerprint readers would be more difficult to replace with unsecure backdoors if their security chips have to be matched up. 

It does sometimes feel like a lot of the pushbacks on Apple are almost harkening back to an earlier era when our devices weren't the center of our financial lives and so weren't critical to our personal and financial security. 

Perhaps we will eventually at least be able to pay extra for locked-down phones that we can provide to relatives (who will then replace their login passcodes with "1111" thus undoing our of our efforts to keep them comparatively safe). 

Gawd I hope this isn't the direction Apple is going. I don't mind a 120mm lens, though I'm seriously not going to use it that often. But, killing off the 72mm lens to get that 120mm is insane. If the max simply had a better lens and camera for the 72mm, I might have bought the 15 Pro Max (the 15 Pro's 72mm camera quality is a bit underwhelming, particularly when compared with the excellent main camera even at a 50% crop), but there is no way that I would want to sacrifice having a 12MP camera nowhere between 48mm and 120mm. The 70mm to 90mm range is just way more useful. Heck, 120mm isn't even telephoto enough to be that interesting, as a telephoto, so it really is nothing more than bragging rights. I have talked a few people out of getting the 15 Pro Max for this very reason, and all have realized I was absolutely right. 

Honestly, given the history here, Apple deserves to lose this one. I did get myself an Ultra 2 prior to the ban, and quite like it. But seriously, from all the reports, Masimo initially negotiated with them in good faith for a potential deal, then Apple raided their employees and immediately filed patents covering technology that Masimo had in development or had already patented. Maybe Masimo's price for licensing was unreasonable and Apple didn't see another choice, but intellectual property law is what it is and Apple f'd over the wrong company. 

I wonder if Apple was just surprised at how little cooling their chips required, which could explain the overbuilt heat sink and cooling fans for the Mac Studio. It seems likely that the M3 Max will run just fine in a Mac mini form factor, and if so the Mac Studio hardware would be relevant only for the M3 Ultra. The M3 Ultra itself might just not have a large enough market to support two form factors, and if they are going to do a Mac Pro with a base price of $5000 and configurations going up to $20K, that might just make the most sense as the platform to keep, particularly if the M3 Ultra Mac Pro is a decent amount smaller than the current Mac Pro. 

But who knows, given that this is the post Steve Jobs Apple we are talking about, we can be assured that some of the decisions Apple will continue to make in support of their pro users really won't make much sense. 

At least one company has publicly pushed back. The fact that there isn't more of this is so ridiculously sad, and frightening. 

Also, DEI is an extremely broad concept. Being absolutely and utterly against it means ... what exactly? That it should be illegal to not use nepotism for hiring or to look outside of the group of people who look just like you? Does it mean that pay and promotions should be based purely on manager biases or who has the loudest testosterone driven demands for more money and a better job title? Does it literally mean being exclusionary? 

It would be one thing if people were complaining about aspects of DEI that companies get wrong, like if they really were genuinely shutting out stellarly capable white guys in favor of filling organizations with genuinely incompetent trans Inuit drag queens (presuming this ever happens), but if there is a coherent description of absolutist anti-DEI "thinking" that doesn't make clear that its most influential "thinkers" are just sexist racist nepotists, I have yet to see evidence of it. 

foregoneconclusion said:

bobolicious said:

I cannot ever remember a monitor needing firmware upgrades... ?

Do an internet search for "difficulty updating firmware dell monitor" and prepare to be amazed...

I have a Sony camera flash for which there is a firmware update. Updating the camera flash, the HVL-F45RM, requires connecting it to a camera that is compatible with the firmware update, and may require that the camera itself be updated to the right firmware level first. This is for a camera flash, something which mostly just puts out a bunch of light in a very short period of time. 
I have tried three different cameras, including updating one to the exact camera version specified, and I have tried this on a Mac, on a Windows virtual machine on my Mac, on a Windows Server virtual machine on my Mac, and I eventually tried this on a real machine running Windows that I borrowed from an in-law. 

Silly things have firmware upgrades these days. And it is clear that for many manufacturers, the firmware update processes themselves are an afterthought. In Sony's case it isn't clear that the word "thought" should come into play at all, "after" or otherwise. Perhaps Dell monitors are the same. That is certainly a lot of listed case numbers for monitor update problems. But hey, at least they document their bugs. That's so far beyond Sony that Sony can't even see it in the distance. 

This is as it should be. The Apple-to-Apple features are just going to continue being more advanced and predictable than Apple-to-RCS, and the color coding helps know what doesn't work. Better, though, might be a third color to represent RCS or end-to-end encryption (when that is supported with a new RCS standard), though perhaps that would be going too far.