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.    

neoncat said:

No way, Apple. Fool me once, twice, too many times. I hope publishers listen and avoid the bait and switch yet again. 

All the problems in the past were for good reasons. The major ones were switching to OS X, switching to Intel x86, deprecating OpenGL for Metal, deprecating 32-bit support and switching to Apple Silicon ARM. These all caused breaking changes for software over the years.

Apple is now on its forever platform ARM64 across their whole hardware lineup. There is no reason for a breaking change after this, they control their own hardware, their own graphics API and there's no reason to go above 64-bit (16 Exabytes RAM limit).

Times are also different now. Most of these games are built on Unreal Engine, some on Unity so they are already taken care of. Apple has been helping build Metal renderers for the other engines. That alone shows a strong commitment to the industry as well as building a DirectX 12 emulator. People tried for years to build DX12 support and Apple released a near perfect implementation that supports hundreds of games, even really high-end ones:



iOS is Apple's big platform for gaming and now the hardware can run AAA titles.

AMD recently released a cross-platform open-source global illumination solution as part of FidelityFX, some of which MetalFX is using:

https://wccftech.com/amd-fidelityfx-brixelizer-gi-is-a-compute-based-dynamic-global-illumination-solution-available-now-in-sdk-1-1/
https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-brixelizer/

If Apple integrates frame-generation from FSR3 and a fast global illumination system, their mobile hardware will become competitive with the current highest consoles.

The hardest part left is the game price and convincing players to regularly buy at a high price on Apple platforms, especially older games. Having support for dozens of modern titles is a good start and being able to run on both iOS and Mac will be a huge plus for them.

One thing that would help is wrapping older individual games with the compatibility layers and selling them as separate units. That would support over 500 games overnight and would immediately give the developers revenue. 500 games x $20 x 500,000 Mac buyers = $5b. If they can run on iOS, the unit volume would be even higher.

It's justified being cautious given the history but I think this is the start of their real commitment to a stable gaming platform that they will be able to support long-term and it's nice to see them marketing it.

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.

daveinpublic said:

So if someone offers a game for free, and it gets 1,000,000 downloads, and it made the developer $200K in a year....

That developer went from only giving Unity $20K total, to now $200K per month. In one year it will cost them 120x more. It will bankrupt them.

That's the fastest change in price structure I've ever seen. Your game went from making you $180K in a year, to costing you $200K each month.

I think they've messed up on their pricing structure. If you were making money from the games, you'd likely have a Pro license, which is about $2k/year.

The Pro license gives you 1,000,000 free installs. If you get more downloads than this and make more than $1m, like say 100m downloads, the charge per download goes down to $0.02 for most of the other 99m downloads. That's still crazy though at ~$2m because it could be more than you make if it's a free-to-play game.

These changes happen when a company has been mismanaged and is struggling financially. Unity has only recently made a profit and has been losing money all the time until then and not a small amount - billions in losses.



Just like what happened with Reddit, they come up with a crazy plan on how to make money and are prepared to burn every bridge because they are in survival mode.

Reddit was in the position to do it and will be ok. Unity isn't in the position to do this. They aren't the leading game engine developer. It won't be easy for every developer to switch to another engine. Genshin Impact is built on Unity for example and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make but a lot of the cost is asset creation and code, which doesn't have to be remade from scratch.

Unity earnings are here:

https://investors.unity.com/financials/sec-filings/default.aspx
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U

The worst part isn't so much the pricing but that they can change the terms whenever they want, to arbitrarily harmful terms and game devs investing so much time and capital have to deal with it. Once that trust is broken, devs will abandon the platform. The question is to what? While Unreal is an obvious choice, it's a very heavy engine for Indie developers and is mainly designed for high-end AAA games with a steep learning curve.

Maybe this will be a wake up call for game studios that there needs to be an engine separate from an individual company's or even an individual company owner's (Sweeney) problems. A lot of companies already make their own engine, they could easily all share an engine and contribute to it. It would be best to be a minimal core engine that companies can build out with their own extras.

The core engine would mainly need to cover the renderer and the target platform deployment, which are the hardest parts. Once you can handle realistic lighting and shading and deploy to multiple devices, the rest can be handled by small 3rd party code libraries.

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.

chasm said:

mayfly said:

Is it just me, or are those before and after exactly the same?

Read the caption on the picture more carefully. In the first image on the left, you are seeing the entire image. As the caption says, the artist used the generative feature to add more landscape to the BOTTOM of the picture, which is evident in the image on the right.

I would certainly agree that a better example would have been converting a 4:3 photo into a 16:9 photo, but the example in the article does show what it is claiming to show.

It can do even better than that. Here's an example photo:

https://www.theaussieflashpacker.com/2015/10/top-10-most-beautiful-lakes-in-world.html

Uncrop image, select inside, invert, generative fill with no prompt:



It can still give some bad results for people, animals etc with things not drawn correctly like hands but it's getting very good and fast at doing some things. It will be a huge time saver when it comes to doing quick mockups or marketing images.