sevenfeet

Like the author of there article, I'm a recreational diver (25 years experience, advanced open water & nitrox certs).  Like the author, I wear a Zeagle BCD, specifically the same Ranger model I've used since 1998. Unlike the author, I have no problem wearing the Apple Watch Ultra as a primary dive computer since my current computer is, well, a little old.  22 years ago, Zeagle sold a dive computer (made by someone else) and I bought it. It's still my main computer after all this time and I've changed the battery twice since owning it and had the seals inspected a few times because of its age.  This Zeagle computer does have PC computer integration....if I could find the Windows 95/98 software it came with.

So something like the Apple Watch Ultra is a very attractive upgrade, especially since I was looking to invest in one anyway. But ever since the announcement, i've seen a lot of chatter on the inter webs about why you shouldn't buy this product.  They fall into the following categories:

1. "I won't risk my life on a 1.0 product". This is odd since all standard dive training centers around using dive tables to calculate your bottom time and deco limits, which was what we always had to do before dive computers. Dive computers are a nice to have, but not a requirement for rec diving.  Also, Apple spent millions crash testing this product, the iPhone 14 and Apple Watch 8 in case you were in a car accident.  Somehow I think that their R&D safety budget for this product was more some manufacturers sell in actual product for their dive computers all year.

2. No air integration.  Many dive computers, in fact probably most don't have this feature.  It's a "nice to have", in fact a "great to have".  But everyone dives with a tank pressure gage as standard dive equipment that came with your regulator.  Would it be nice to have this feature?  Sure! Why doesn't it?  Well it probably has to do with his radio frequencies travel through water. I don't know for sure, but I'd reckon that the frequencies used for AI are probably pretty low frequency.  Submarines communicate through low frequency radio transmission and I would imagine that higher frequency signals like what's used in cell towers, Wifi or Bluetooth probably wouldn't go far under water (and all that's needed for distance is about 5 feet), the distance between the sensor attached to the 1st stage regulator behind your head on the tank, and your wrist.  The radio chip set in the Apple Watch Ultra probably doesn't handle radio frequencies like this and they probably didn't want to make a custom design for it this cycle (and antennas might be an interesting challenge too).

3. I trust a company more that only makes dive computers, or the "jack of all trades, master of none" argument. Fair point, I guess but this goes back to the same logic in example 1.  And considering how often Apple is sued, I'm sure the legal team had to be comfortable with all kinds of issues with this product before coming to market with it.

4. Not big enough screen. Well if you want to buy a Shearwater, nobody is stopping you.  Heck my dive shop sells them and they are wonderful. But they are a dive only product whereas the Apple Watch Ultra can work as a dive watch and then wear it home. There are plenty of dive computers that also function as standard wrist watches, but few can auto populate your phone's electronic dive book to track what you did on your dive the moment you return to the boat. That is a killer feature in its own right that few discuss.

5. You can't service it like a typical dive computer.  A fair point but this isn't a product that you're going to use for more than five years anyway since Apple will obsolete the Watch OS software by then.  If you upgrade your dive computer every five years or so, then it's not a problem. As for people like me who still rock a 20 year old computer, a Watch Ultra can at least replace the Watch I have. The problem is that it's a pretty new Apple Watch 7 bought only a year ago.

6. Only 40m depth compatibility isn't enough!  It is for anyone doing normal rec diving since that's what you're certified to safely dive at.  Anyone doing tech diving or using tri-mix gas to go really deep (like 100m) can buy something else since that's not the majority of divers out there.

7. You need to charge this at least every other day. This is true, most dive computers go a lot longer on charges (my old one lasts years). And if you're on a dive boat for a week or longer, you'll have to figure out how you charge it.  Again, not a problem for most people. And solar powered chargers have been a thing for some time.

8. The Oceanic app is subscription only. So are a lot of apps these days. I heard the model has a daily rate and considering how often I dive every year (not often), that's enough for all the other features you get.

I had just begun my career out of college with Apple in 1988 but was working part time as an Apple student campus associate in 1987 when this video came out. This article strikes the video as "boring" but the context is what things were like in the 80s. This video is very much Alan Kay's vision, with him visualizing some of these concepts with his "Dynabook" paper all the way back in the late 1960s.

We showed this video to big customers and at our yearly internal meetings. I kept a copy on VHS tape for years after I left the company. And I remember our leadership at the time saying they were working on everything seen in the video "except for the folding screen. That's science fiction".  Turns out that wasn't science fiction after all.

The Knowledge Navigator shown is very much in the design aesthetic of the day if you look at upcoming Mac models like the SE, SE/30 and the Mac II.  LCD screens were on the horizon with the Apple Portable and color would come a few years later in 1992 with the Powerbook 180c. These days design is much thinner and elements like a front facing camera are huge versus modern ones. There might have been a decision to make it larger for the video just so everyone would know what people were looking at. And while video conferencing was being proposed and demoed by companies like AT&T since the 1960s, using it in a Zoom-like call alongside your computer GUI desktop was a new thing as opposed to using a standalone device.

The KN was a touch screen interface predating the iPad by 23 years (although unlike the iPad, it had a Mac interface). You have no idea how cool this was to see visualized back then. Star Trek: TNG would use something similar when that show premiered in the same timeframe.

Other technology elements were pretty out there but turned out to be spot on. Apple would introduce Wifi to the world built into a Mac in 1999 (iBook). There were rudimentary search tools like Gopher on the then-Arpanet (the true open Internet was not a thing in 1987) but true powerful search engines like Altavista and later Google would be years later. The ability to have multiple people work on a common document is pretty routine these days but back then, it was fantasy but Apple would introduce its first version of that idea as OpenDoc.

And now we come to the Chatbot agent itself, the guy with the bowtie. This seemed the most "sci-fi" of all back then but we were told at the time that scientists were working on it. But as we know with Apple, hard times would befall them in coming years and many of the long term research projects fell by the wayside as unaffordable luxuries. But we're pretty close to that personalized agent as part of our devices.  Context and intent are fast approaching what was shown in the video, along with knowing personal details like the professor's mother, his friends and colleagues, personal schedule, all his files, and even listening in and (hilariously) interjecting in a conversation.  All this time since the iPad was introduced and later Siri and its (better) chat agent cousins, I've wondered how long it would take us to get to Knowledge Navigator. It looks like we won't have to wait that much longer.

My thoughts...

Yes, this was the worst kept secret in the industry, just like the PowerPC -> Intel transition.  But there are some interesting long term ramifications.

First, the fact that more Intel Macs are coming is testament that Apple thinks they can transition the Mac to AppleSilicon and the vast number of users not even notice.  It's just a compile and some QA.  Apple usually supports macOS for at least 6 years for most hardware and the Mac Pros usually get 8.  So there will be Intel versions of macOS long after the last Intel Mac is sold new.

Pundits have talked about the fact that the current iPad processor is quite competitive with Intel hardware and that's the reference hardware developers will be working from.  Do you think that is going to be the speed/performance of the first shipping Macs?  I think not.  The first machines will have to a make a statement that Apple can do this better than the platform they are leaving behind.  If it's indeed a "Pro" machine, then that will be a really big deal.

Apple has already slain the power consumption dragon by a decade of iPhone chips.  What will be interesting is Mac chips.  On the slide they showed, they indicated there will be high performance AND high efficiency cores.  How many of each for a typical Mac is anyone's guess.  But I'd wager that they way Apple configures a chip might be different than anything currently available.

The presentation also put a stake in the heart of AMD in that Apple may not need them for advanced graphics either, but that remains to be seen.  We've already seen the Mac Pros accelerator card which is probably a bunch of custom design GPUs.  That kind of architecture is probably just the beginning.  Someone earlier questioned if Apple will have advanced ray-tracing like Nvidia and AMD are doing now.  Hard to say, but i wouldn't bet against Apple.

I/O will be interesting to see play out.  Any new AS Mac will need things like Thunderbolt, HDMI (Mac Mini), and USB.  All of that will be in the reference developer machine.  Will AS Macs debut with Thunderbolt 4 which will unify Thunderbolt + USB?  The timetable of both toward the end of this year will be interesting.  The slide during the presentation spoke of a common memory architecture, which i read as common from CPU and GPU.  This is standard practice in phones and tablets and we saw it in mainline computers when Intel gave us GPUs in Core i3/i5/i7 processors.  But Intel took awhile to get GPU performance up to snuff.  I don't see Apple making that mistake so the common memory will be a key performance variable.  But Pro GPUs use more exotic memory in order to keep pipelines stuffed.  How will Apple solve this?

Some of said that Mac Pro users will be pissed?  Why?  Those machines were built for a job....to make money.  Every one in production right now is chewing up watts earning their keep, and will for years.  The real test will be a "server" version of the A-series processors that a Mac Pro or iMac Pro can use that will kick the crap out of Xeon or Ryzen.  Back in 2006, we got the first Intel Mac Pro whose hardware was based on the previous G5 PowerMac. I think the hardware basics will remain the same, but the CPU guts will look very different.  And graphics?  Too soon to tell.

From a marketing standpoint, will the shipping Mac chips be A-series chips or will they have their own designation?  Maybe the T3?  The T2 is already a specialized ARM-based chip....why not expand it to do everything and eliminate a chip from the board?

I'm not sure why everybody complains about Mac RAM prices as if it's the first time they see that Apple RAM prices are high.  They've only been pricing RAM this way for 30 years.  At least they gave us an option this time of Bring-Your-Own-DRAM this time.  Try to feel fortunate for that.

Yes, it's not the $500 machine it used to be but neither is the perceived customer base.  Originally this was a machine for switchers who got to keep their monitor, keyboard and mouse.  This machine is for power users (including the SOHO and home theater crowd), creatives who need something other than a laptop, developers and server farm companies.  That's what Apple is marketing this machine to.  Apple is going to sell 20 times more MacBook Airs than this machine in the first three months.  A general purpose machine is not why it exists.

And yes, the easiest comparison is the Intel NUC machines which have grown popular among hobbyists and for specialized tasks. It's easy to find a stripper box for $300 that has a CPU, no RAM, storage and only a couple of USB 3 ports.  But if you want something similar, I found an Intel NUC with a quad core Core i7, 8 gigs of RAM, 256 GB of SSD and Thunderbolt 3.  All this for $850.  But the Intel chip is 6th gen, not 8th gen.  So you can't get a 6 core processor (at least not yet) and no 10GB ethernet yet.

Happy_Noodle_Boy said:

crowley said:

Is AOL even worth anything any more?  Does it still have presence in the US?

The brand name itself likely has value just by virtue of it being so recognizable but I have no clue what that price tag would be. They have a U.S. presence. They stopped being an ISP some time ago but were doing some media content creation and publishing. 

Fun fact. AOL was originally the product of a company called Quantum. Quantum released AOL as a rebranded product that was called AppleLink and was a joint venture with Apple to offer dial up BBS for customers. So at some point AOL started as an Apple product. 

This is partially correct. The original Applelink was an online service for Apple employees internal communications. It was the first of its kind with a UI to show off the features of the Mac back in the Mac Plus/Mac SE/Mac II days. I was at Apple at the time and used it every day. It used GE's online system as the back end.  GE also marketed a text based service with the same servers as GENie, which was a rival to CompuServe and Prodigy back in the 80s.

Applelink was also used by some partners and repair facilities, but there had been a push from those non-Apple employees that had seen it to make a version for the general public. But Apple didn't want it on the same system as the one for employees. Instead of going to GE to design something different, they partnered with Quantum, run by Steve Case in Virginia. Quantum had a growing network of text based online chat forums as a competitor to CompuServe and GENie and worked with Apple on a UI version of what Quantum had that was branded Applelink Personal Edition. Apple also took an equity stake in Quantum.

Sometime after the presentation (early 1990) we got internally on the rollout of Applelink Personal Edition, we began beta testing it as Apple employees who had access. But Apple leadership decided to change their mind on the whole thing and pulled out of the deal right before launch. Steve Case and Quantum literally had a finished product ready to go, so it was rebranded as America OnLine, and as they say, the rest is history.

One bit of epilogue....Apple watched the success of AOL in the 90s and realized they screwed up so a few years later, Apple came out with a competing service called eWorld (I still have the T-shirt). eWorld went no where and went off to the grave of so many 1990s Apple initiatives.  Apple did end up making money on AOL, selling off their stock in the intervening years for badly needed cash.

One of the nicer features of OS X Server back in the day was the UI for management of DNS. It wasn't for extremely complex situations but it was very handy for small to medium sized networks and it was a lot easier than hand editing text files.

This article completely misses the point of why Airports are going away.  The reason is pretty simple.  It has everything to do with the advent of ISP-supplied wifi routers built into existing cable modems, DSL modems and fiber modems.  When that began happening and more importantly, when these add-ons became good enough for the masses, there wasn't much of a need for the third party market.  Ask yourself, how many friends and family do you know that solely relies on the cable modem provided by Comcast, Verizon or Time Warner?  This crowd that visits this website is a different kind of user.  But for the vast majority of the users out there, the ISP provided solutions were just fine.  In fact, advancements in wifi speed and antenna technology made these kinds of wifi routers give very good performance in most home and apartments regardless of where they were placed.  Only those of us with larger homes, difficult obstacles or desiring the latest in wifi gaming speeds/latency really needed to continue getting wifi from the traditional ways.

Looking back over the advancements of personal computing technology over the last 4 decades, we usually look at the beginning in the 70s with the first personal computers, the invention of the IBM PC and Mac in the 80s, GUI interfaces in the Wintel world in the 90s, the advent of the web combined with the Google search engine in the 90s/2000s and then the iPhone/smartphone in the 2000s.  But we often miss one extremely important event...the epoch of wireless communication.  We got modern laptops in 1990 (thanks Apple!) but if you wanted to communicate for email, AOL or the early web, you still needed a cable, which was most likely a phone modem in those days.  Thanks to Lucent Technology who invented Wifi (whose name was also missing from article), Steve Jobs saw an opportunity to give the Mac another compelling reason for adoption (remember, Apple in those days in the late 90s had still just escaped from going out of business).  Fresh off of the initial success of the iMac, Apple needed a hook to get buyers to the new lower priced iBook and when Steve Jobs saw wifi in the labs, he knew he had his hook.

When the iBook was announced and then the "one more thing" was that you could actually use the thing wirelessly (again, email, AOL, web), it was a jaw dropping demo.  Even better, it was a reasonably priced option for it and the Airport base station.  And while Lucent announced you could get the Orinoco wifi card for PCs, only the iBook (and later the Powerbook (Firewire) had it baked in with no drivers to install and an easy setup application.  Remember in those days, most people got their internet through dialup so the early Airports base stations could do that too.  And Apple wisely came out with an Airport base station configuration tool for Windows since for quite a while, the Airport was the only base station on the market and many PC owners (and even many companies) who adopted early technology bought them.  It was an instantly profitable line of business during days where Apple desperately needed the cash.

But most importantly, it was a new era of wireless communication.  We take it for granted now with wifi hotspots literally everywhere and global cellular communications.  But in the summer of 1999, Steve Jobs not only introduced this major piece of tech but he made it sizzle.  He showed how it was going to change the world and brought it to Apple's new low priced laptop, not the Powerbook line first.  Now wifi is everywhere in everything (even home appliances!) and wifi base station technology is delivered straight from the ISP in most cases.  The need for most people to own an Airport no longer exists.  And yes, its a sad day.

Stabitha_Christie said:

entropys said:

I miss the days when people weren’t so tribal.  

Seriously. 

Indeed.  I know everyone likes their partisan camps these days and thinks anyone not in their camp isn't worth the time of day, but let's look back at 2003 when Al Gore joined Apple's board and what the company was like back then.

Gore was a few years out of the vice-presidency after the close loss of the 2000 presidential election. Previously he had been a two term senator from the state of Tennessee, a seat his father Al Gore Sr. had originally held.  Former presidents and vice presidents usually have a world of opportunity in front of them, being corporate boards, foundations or other pet projects close to them. And he took advantage of a few of them but one stuck out: Apple Computer.

In 2003, Apple had recently been on the brink of bankruptcy in 1997, having lost $1.05 billion and according to history reports, was about 90 days away from filing bankruptcy. During that time the board of directors literally put all their chips on the table and spent $400 million very precious remaining dollars to buy NeXTStep to finally get a modern OS in house and to maybe bring founder Steve Jobs back into the fold. That move (and an investment from Microsoft spearheaded by Jobs) energized long suffering Apple fans with 1998 having less revenue ($5.94B vs 7B) but turned a profit at $309M. By the time Gore joined them, the iMac would be introduced (1998), Mac OS X would debit (2001) and an odd little personal devices called the iPod would hit the market in time for Christmas 2001. And Apple had made a huge gamble by opening their own retail stores. So in 2003, Apple was doing a little better with $6.21B in sales with $69M in earnings, slightly up from the previous year.

Two decades of board decisions later, Apple reported at the end of Q4 2023.....checks notes, $89.5 billion in revenue JUST FOR THE QUARTER. Total revenue for the year was $383 billion with revenue of $97B. Shareholders received $25 billion of that in dividend payments.  Market cap is about $3 TRILLION. Easily the most stunning turnaround in the history of business. And Steve Jobs and Tim Cook get much of that credit.

But there are a number of people who contributed to the current state of Apple. And one of them is Al Gore and the Apple Board of Directors for the last 20+ years. Think of all of the board level decisions that had to be made on what major projects were going to be funded (iPod, iPhone, Macs, Watch, wearables and of course, Apple Silicon). But why else is Al Gore there? Former US and world leaders create instant gravitas in a room wherever they go and whomever they speak to. Gore knew the working of government and the law intimately and could help in any decision that involved not only the US government, but especially foreign powers since Apple had already made the decision to move production from Fremont, CA to China. Gore has been all over the world and every world leader knows him, even from his time as a Senator. Having a seasoned and respected political leader in the room can sometimes make the difference as to where you build a factory, open new markets, deal with antitrust issues and any number of decisions.

Regardless of whether your politics dictate if you would have ever voted for him, you have to tip your cap to the success of him being on this board for so long and through so many things, many we saw in the press and a lot more than weren't.

toddzrx said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

emoeller said:

That’s President Al Gore you’re speaking of and he deserved to be on the BoD.

Please enlighten us as to his contribution?

"An Inconvenient Truth" is considered a seminal work on climate change and bringing attention to it the general public.  Apple changed the industry to consider "performance/watt" instead of just raw performance.  Apple has been pushing green initiatives and recycling in a higher profile way than any other large tech company and probably any other corporation period.  It pervades their entire image.  

An Inconvenient Truth is a pile of pseudoscience. It was debunked the moment it was released.  Please, get your information from reliable sources. Al Gore isn’t one.

toddzrx said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

emoeller said:

That’s President Al Gore you’re speaking of and he deserved to be on the BoD.

Please enlighten us as to his contribution?

"An Inconvenient Truth" is considered a seminal work on climate change and bringing attention to it the general public.  Apple changed the industry to consider "performance/watt" instead of just raw performance.  Apple has been pushing green initiatives and recycling in a higher profile way than any other large tech company and probably any other corporation period.  It pervades their entire image.  

An Inconvenient Truth is a pile of pseudoscience. It was debunked the moment it was released.  Please, get your information from reliable sources. Al Gore isn’t one.

My wife has a PhD in what you call "pseudoscience". Thousands of researchers around the world who do this kind of work in the field, labs and classrooms would like a word with you. Science doesn't conform to politics....it just is. Ignore it at your...and all of our peril.

danox said:

DAalseth said:

If Rome had been built like modern computer systems, the first woodpecker would have destroyed western civilization.

As others have pointed there is a lot of blame to go around. I however agree with Delta’s CEO. Windows is way too fragile for us to be using it as a foundation for our whole economy and safety net. I finally got out of IT because I was fed up with replacing crappy broken Windows systems with crappy NEW windows systems. This was an accident. The next one may be as well. Down the road though it won’t be. Someone will deliberately target the house of cards that is Windows and we will discover that everything grinds to a halt, melts down, or bursts. Then rebooting to Safe Mode and deleting a file won’t fix it. 

Microsoft needs to fix their OS kernel, AI and the Surface need to take a back seat Nadella probably needs to get those third parties out kicking and screaming and that is going to be a massive undertaking?

Imagine if Microsoft had forked Windows and fixed the Kernel outside the EU and the EU was the only place where this fiasco happened? If the EU continues they will be left behind outside the EU it needs to be fixed.

Right now there a little shock in the system for American tech companies but soon they get over it and start to design around the EU.

As usual, this ends up being a pretty complicated situation that has predictably devolved into a lot of finger pointing. So here is my take, as someone who actually works in enterprise support for a well known international tech company.

1. Crowdstrike. Yes, they deserve the lion's share of the blame here. While I get the fact that there is often a race against the clock to get out new descriptions for Crowdstrike Falcon to protect clients and servers from active threats, they should understand that they can also bring computers completely down with bad software or description files. And not only does this get back to having a 24/7 testing regime to make sure that nothing hits the download servers until it has been vetted....period. Clearly that was not going on, and its very inexcusible.  Second, their software which has kernel access on Windows has lousy file validation to inspect description files before using them. Dave Plummer, former Microsoft Windows programmer all the way back in the Windows 3.1/NT days said on his Youtube channel that the lack of error correction in their product reeked of incompetence. I would agree. This is also not the first time this has happened to Crowdstrike. They had two other issues with Linux distros in recent years, but it didn't make the headlines since it wasn't something widely used in critical systems like RedHat.

2. Microsoft. They don't get off easy here. They let a 3rd party kernel driver into Windows that could update description files without going through all the possible scenarios of how a bad update could bork an entire machine (or in this case, 8.5 million of them). And Microsoft has to think about all the ways a bad actor or state sponsor could use the very same flaw to create all kinds of havok worldwide. Break into a Crowdstrike download server (not easy, but not impossible) and you could paralyze millions of machines intentionally. And yes, I know Apple figured this out years ago and ejected 3rd party kernel extensions from the OS, replacing it with a security framework that gives certain software lower level access to restricted APIs without running in kernel mode. Yes they ran afoul of the EU but they needed to make a better case on why this would be better for the world and still allow competition. Finally, this situation exposed a critical problem where this kind of scenario not only crashed millions of machines, but fixing them literally took IT professionals to put hands on the machine. For Delta, this took DAYS to recover from...no wonder their CEO is pissed. I don't agree on forking Windows to solve this.  Windows is complicated enough as it is.

3. The EU. Leave the security technology issues to the professionals. Sometimes they know better than you.