Marvin

macgui said:

WTF.

Why after composing a post, do I get a Verify Your Human post that, when verifying, wipes out my post?

The site devs are aware of the issue, a CloudFlare plugin was added as bots were doing things on the site. CloudFlare controls when it triggers.

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/turnstile/

The redirect after verifying isn't working correctly as it should post the comment after successful verification. It would be good if it could be disabled entirely for logged in users but I don't know how much control there is over it.

It usually triggers on certain keywords and links. Save the contents of the post (easiest to copy the code using the HTML View </> so it can be pasted back in) in TextEdit before hitting submit. Preview can help track down what's triggering it. Try removing links and currency text. If preview works, it will post ok.

The feedback forum is where the site devs can be contacted about it:

https://forums.appleinsider.com/categories/feedback

jdw said:

As I've mentioned under other articles in the past, my experience with ChatGPT4o isn't that great.  I want like to use it to check multiple online sources quickly, in the hope it can Google faster than I can on my own.  And it is fast.  But the problem is, it lies a lot.  So I always ask it for sources.  Then it gives me stupid links that when clicked on, open nothing.  So I have to then as it for plain text URLs.  It complies, but none of them ever work.  EVER!  They lead to the expected domain, but they always result a 404 file not found.  ALWAYS!  I then complain to ChatGPT saying it needs to read the articles it links for me to ensure the article truly exists and exists at the plain text URL it will give to me.  It apologizes and seemingly complies, but it continues to give me more bogus URLs.  I have repeated that cycle multiple times in a row, until my free sessions with GPT4o expires.  It never learns from its mistakes.  It never gets it right.  I've been using it for months, and it hasn't improved at all in that regard.  So I mostly find it useless.  And this experience remains valid even if some GPT lover comes along a raves about how well it summarizes text.  Fine and well, but it still lies and gives bogus URLs to its source info.    

jonro said:

Why bother to review headphones without comparing the sound? Seriously, features comparisons mean little without discussing the sound quality, which is the core feature of headphones. It's like comparing cars without mentioning the engine or doing a test drive.

There are some sound sites that do in-depth and consistent sound quality tests:

https://www.soundguys.com/apple-airpods-max-review-44975/
https://www.soundguys.com/sony-wh-1000xm6-review-137397/

The XM6 like the XM5 has 30mm drivers, XM4 has 40mm and some reviews rank it higher for sound quality. Smaller drivers tend to produce weaker sound, especially weaker bass but some people prefer the sound clarity with weaker bass. Airpods Max has 40mm drivers like most premium over-ear headphones.

https://versus.com/en/headphone?filter%5B%5D=driver_unit=30,90

This is mentioned in this review:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/sony-wh-1000xm6-review-hail-to-the-new-noise-canceling-king/

"When Sony moved from the XM4 to the XM5, it went from using 40mm drivers to 30mm drivers, which changed the sound fairly dramatically, and not everyone liked the change. The XM4, which remains available, is a warmer headphone with bigger, more energetic bass, while the XM5 offers more detailed sound and tighter bass. 

multimedia said:

I think the mother should petition Tim Apple to gift her the money lost back from his personal account in the spirit of Christmas. He should empathize with her for this unfortunate technology related mistake which has really put her in dire straights.

The game developer (Sega) should return the money, they're the ones who got it, it's not a loss for them, they're just virtual coins that aren't worth anything. It's obscene that game devs are milking players like this, especially knowing they target children.

There are a number of reasons a parent wouldn't notice the bills. They might not check the email account tied to the Apple account, they may have setup an email for the kid. They saw the credit card bill earlier but didn't know where the charges came from.

While they should have been able to prevent it, Apple could easily implement a policy that requires the card holder to enter their card details for any cumulative purchases on an individual app over $200 and again above $1000. This kind of thing would never happen again. Charges like this should be explicitly opt-in for the card holder.

aderutter said:

Apple would be leaving money on the table if they don’t update the Studio & Mini 

Apple net income 2023 = $97b
Mac revenue 2023 = $29b
Mac desktop revenue = ~10% = ~$3b
Mac Studio & mini revenue = < 5% = < $1.5b
Mac Studio & mini net margin ~25% = $0.37b

That's how much would be left on the table, assuming nobody bought the older ones that are available now. How much potential revenue determines most companies' priorities.

It's not like the Studio and Pro are outdated, they were refreshed 12 months ago. The mini is 1.5 years out. They can throw an M4 in the mini whenever they want but it's not impacting Apple's income.

charlesn said:

The SE selling proposition was certainly a whole lot easier for customers to immediately grasp: a brand new iPhone for a dramatically lower price. Everybody gets that. An SE was 46% cheaper than the base iPhone 16. The 16e is only 25% cheaper--that's a huge difference and takes what was an easy decision for price-sensitive shoppers and makes it much more complicated. Do you want the full feature set of the 16 for $200 more? Or the full feature set of the 15 for $100 more? OR: maybe all the new iPhones are too expensive now and you'd rather shop refurbs. Or go to Android. The 16e certainly gives buyers a lot more to think about before making a purchase decision.

All we know for certain right now is that competing in the aggressively lower price point arena was not good business for Apple and so they have abandoned that effort completely. Sales of the SE never equaled those of any of Apple's more expensive iPhones, even the Plus, which is itself on the chopping block due to reported low sales. I'll be very curious to see how Apple markets the 16e and what they'll choose to emphasize about the phone. I think the greatest risk with this phone is the degree to which it might cannibalize sales of the regular iPhone 16. I could imagine that for many shoppers considering the 16, the "e" in the 16e might very well mean it's "enough." 

Apple has a comparison page with the iPhone 14:

https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16e,iphone-14,iphone-16

The 16e is effectively a replacement for the iPhone 14, which was also sold at $599.

Instead of an older model at a lower price, it's a cut down version of the main model at a lower price. The old SE had an IPS display, moving to OLED had to increase the cost.

There have been some marketshare reports showing the low-end and mini models don't make up much of the overall sales:



https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/iphone-15-sales-figures-show-the-pro-models-have-become-the-default

It's still a lot of people as the total is 250m units so 6% = 15m. Most of these people will eventually buy a larger model, very few would move to Android as they have large screens too.

A lot of people buy on contracts so the price difference is negligible:

https://www.att.com/brand/apple/iphone/

The 6.1" size is bulky but it's the most popular size. There was a poll done here that had 6.1" as the top choice:

https://www.gsmarena.com/weekly_poll_what_is_the_ideal_screen_size_for_a_smartphone-news-57173.php

After using larger displays for a while, the 5.4" mini display felt cramped, especially when typing in portrait but the 5.8" on the iPhone X felt like the largest usable single-handed size. Larger phones (above 2.8" wide) have to be shuffled around or held with one hand to type with the other because they are too wide and it's difficult to do gestures like swipe back on a browser.

If they make a mini model again, it would be good to see a 5.6-5.8" model that is thinner and lighter. It probably still wouldn't be lower than $599 due to the OLED display and higher spec components.

dominikhoffmann said:

I have had an issue for quite some time, possibly since Ventura, where the dialog asking me to allow the USB device to connect disappearing within a fraction of a second. I miss the dialog altogether. My workaround has been to unplug the device and plug it in again, repeatedly in necessary, until I can okay it. From then on I don’t have a problem with the device.

The confirm dialog disappearing so fast is really badly designed, I don't know how that got past testing. There's a preference in System Settings to avoid manual approval of new devices:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/allow-accessories-to-connect-mchlf779ae93/mac

Another fix that can sometimes work for drives not mounting is force quitting the diskarbitrationd process and plugging the drive in again.

jeffharris said:

What about old Mac games like titles from Ambrosia Software. Mars Rising, etc?
There was a developer that released a whole bunch of pinball games.
Or Hellcats. 

That would be great!

OS 9 can be run via UTM. Apple's change here may have been influenced by the alt store, which will be one of the first 3rd party app stores:

https://www.theverge.com/24100979/altstore-europe-app-marketplace-price-games
https://altstore.io/

The featured apps on that store are emulators like Delta, UTM, Dolphin:

https://getutm.app/

Here is UTM running OS 9:



Emulation speed on M-series chips is very good, some people think M-chips are overpowered for mobile devices but the benefit shows with CPU-intensive apps:



Nintendo recently sued an emulator developer:

https://www.polygon.com/24090351/nintendo-2-4-million-yuzu-switch-emulator-settlement-lawsuit

Some emulators can run current-gen games, which can result in the company losing money, e.g Nintendo Switch games like Mario Wonder and Zelda:





Nintendo could make a lot of money with an official emulator for mobile for the old systems, especially if they legally supply ROMs.

neoncat said:

foregoneconclusion said:

IMO, it looks like a portion of the blame can go to the developers themselves. The iPhone versions of many of these ports sound like they were fairly lazy with marginal frame rates and bare minimum approaches to graphic fidelity. 

Or maybe Apple overstated the performance of its products.

The iPhone runs close to expected, these AAA titles are next-gen games and really heavy for mobile. The iPhone 15 Pro is somewhere around 2TFLOPs, close to PS4 and an Nvidia 1050. These games are designed for 10TFLOPs+ (M1 Max) next-gen consoles.

This is how a 1050 runs, RE4 gets 30FPS 1080p low:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1050-Notebook.178614.0.html

There aren't many new games on that page in green but a few that performed well include Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Forza 5, Far Cry 6, Mass Effect, Doom Eternal, Jedi Fallen Order, Modern Warfare 2019 and there are quite a few further down the page. It's best suited for 2019 or older games.

iPhone gets 30FPS in RE4 too and it looks ok:



Apple also hasn't integrated frame-generation in MetalFX yet, which is in AMD FSR 3. This can boost framerate 1.5-2x.

These ports are well made with native Metal renderers and MetalFX support but there's only so much they can do with mobile computer power. The iPhone is only around 2-3x the Nintendo Switch. It's a good baseline performance to have though, every iPhone going forward will be capable of running titles like this and the userbase will exceed consoles in a year (not all gamers but it's a good sized audience).

The need for a controller also hinders sales of these kind of titles on mobile because there isn't a model that is well promoted, most people wouldn't know where to start. Consoles all ship with good controllers. I always felt Apple should ship a minimal controller that just has shoulder bumpers but uses the touch screen for movement and aim and they can help promote 3rd party controllers inside the game pages on the App Store.

brianus said:

tiredskills said:

Why on earth would I want to run an AI model?  Locally or otherwise?

I’m sure this was meant to be snarky, but for me it’s a genuine question: what are the envisioned real world use cases? What might a business (even a home one) use a local LLM for?

The article mentions a hospital in the context of patient privacy, but what would that model actually be *doing*?

In hospitals, AI models are reviewing patient scans to detect cancer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mur70YjInmI

This is image analysis rather than text but text models can be used for medicine. There's an online AI for free here:

https://duckduckgo.com/chat

It can be asked about medical issues like if there's a pain somewhere, what could it be and what treatments are available e.g 'What medicine is typically used to treat acid reflux?'.

In a clinical setting, a doctor would review the recommendations.

In business, they'd be better off using a custom AI model that is trained on high quality data. A legal company might train a model on past cases and they can quickly find similar cases to use as references.

Local models are usually more responsive (if the hardware is fast enough), don't get timeouts and you can save past prompts more easily. They would likely still be cloud-based so that all employees can access them from lightweight clients, just a company cloud server.

blastdoor said:

At about 5 minutes and 30 seconds he says that building this with consumer PC hardware would be "quite expensive." I was looking for a fair bit more precision than that. 

Specs are listed here:

https://geekbacon.com/2025/02/20/running-deepseek-r1-671b-locally-a-comprehensive-look/

It needs multiple 3090 or higher GPUs + 512GB RAM. There's a video here showing a $2000 setup but it only runs at 3 tokens/s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq_cmN4j2yY&t=2822s

Another uses an Nvidia 6000 that costs around $7k for the GPU:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-EG3B5Uj78&t=560s
https://www.newegg.com/pny-vcnrtx6000ada-pb/p/N82E16814133886

Performance is 4 tokens/s. The video in the article mentioned the M3 Ultra was around 17 tokens/s.

This is one area where Nvidia and AMD are worse value and they do it on purpose because they make a lot of their revenue from this where they lower the memory in the consumer GPUs and charge a lot for enterprise GPUs with more memory that is needed for AI.

This video tests Nvidia H100 GPUs x8 ($28k each - https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16888892002 ), which gets 25 tokens/s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOp9ggH4ztE&t=433s

If Nvidia sold a model of the H100 with 512GB of memory, it could probably compete with M3 Ultra but would cost more than $30k just for the GPU.

Applications that need lots of unified memory is where Apple's hardware design is very competitive and they knew this when designing it.