OutdoorAppDeveloper

I read this and wondered how large the exclusion zone is exactly? It's not AI's fault that they did not mention it. The story here is pretty much identical to one posted in many news sources today. Some digging turned up the answer: About one mile. The FAA is restricting 5G in places where it could affect aircraft within the last 20 seconds of flight in the USA (compared with the last 96 seconds in Europe). The US also broadcasts 5G at higher power than in Europe which is why the FAA is still concerned about how it could affect aircraft radio altimeters on precision approaches especially during low visibility conditions. To work out that the distance is about a mile, I looked at the approach speed of aircraft. That's 30% above their stall speed. Their stall speed is based on the weight of the aircraft. A 747 has an approach speed of 166-172 MPH. Divide 172 by 60 is 2.86 miles per minute. Divide that by 3 and you get 0.96 miles. So it's about a mile. Not sure if this is only over the flight paths but it's a likely guess. The exclusion zone is some kind of weird ameba shape around the airport and the approaches following a signal strength contour.

Tile's app uses the GPS location feature in the background while also scanning Bluetooth for nearby Tile products. It gets permission from the user to do this. Apple now demands repeated permissions from users for the Tile app to continue to run in the background. Apple claims it must do this because users don't realize apps that run in the background and use GPS are burning through their battery life. This is true but Apple has magically chosen to implement a solution that puts its own AirTags product in a clear advantage. Users will probably never even be asked if they want to scan for AirTags in the background just like they are never asked if they want to scan for Apple's products using WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS in the background currently (that's how Find My and WiFi location works). I see both companies as being in the wrong here. Tile should never have built their business model with such a huge dependency on Apple's SDK restrictions. Apple should never restrict what users can choose to do with their products. Users should always have a way to tell iOS that they want to enable full access to Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS in their apps. By all means make it easy and obvious which apps are using the most power and show users why when they tap on them and give them some options for limiting the power usage of those apps (like revoking GPS background permission). If Apple built its entire SDK strategy around giving information and power to their users, they would never get into situations like this one.

This is due to Apple's repair policies more than anything else. Apple tells customers that their iPhones must be replaced even if they could be repaired by a competent technician. This is why all of Apple's claims of being "green" are rubbish. Reuse is the best form of recycling. This recycling firm was actually doing its job. It just happened that the way they did it was not in Apple's best interest even if it was in the best interest of the planet.

This is a giant bribe to the corrupt Chinese government officials. Apple values human rights a lot less than virtue signaling about the environment and global warming. By paying off Xi and his crew, Apple thinks that it can guarantee that it will be left alone to manufacture and sell as many iPhones as it can in China without any more government or court interference. This was kept a secret for a reason. I don't think the Chinese people will be happy to learn that their leaders just pocketed over a quarter of a trillion dollars. Never forget: China is currently engaged in genocide.

If you watch the various computer hardware/PC builder channels on YouTube, you will see an entire industry in denial. They are trying to squeeze every last drop of precious performance out of their x86 CPUs by water cooling them, immersing them in liquid nitrogen or using fans usually reserved for Boeing 747s. Meanwhile, the M1 Mac Mini is quietly getting better single core performance than most of them. Whenever a Geekbench score is mentioned comparing the latest AMD to Intel, I have to ask "but what about the Apple M1?" I am ignored of course because that's not something they want to consider. In truth the entire PC industry is about to be turned upside down by the M1X, M2 and then, perhaps, the next generation of ARM processors in about two years when NVIDIA has had a chance to catch up with Apple. Microsoft appears to be well aware of this fact. They got that little memo from Apple saying that Windows ARM emulation speed is a Microsoft problem to solve. Recent build of Windows 11 for Arm are working quite well. Seeing GTA V playing at decent frame rates on the Mac Mini in Parallels is quite literally a game changer.

I have been testing Windows for ARM on the M1 Mac Mini using Parallels over the past year. It works surprisingly well. The most impressive thing I have seen it do is to run Grand Theft Auto V with good frame rates and only very minor graphics glitches. This is not something I recommend doing as a game console will run rings around it but the fact that it is possible to run an extremely resource demanding game on a completely different processor architecture than it was designed for is impressive. It means that both Windows 11 ARM and Parallels are well designed. Parallels does run Windows 11 x86 just fine on x86 Macs.

Here are some of the issues you will run into (not had a chance to test Parallels 11.1 yet):
While Direct X is well supported in Parallels, you won't be able to run software that uses Vulkan or OpenGL. OpenCL GPGPU compute is not available either.
Microsoft still won't be able to match the performance of Rosetta which takes advantages of additional instructions on Apple Silicon.
While I was able to upgrade one of my VMs from Windows 10 Pro to Windows 11 Pro and retain the license. I don't see a way to transfer this license to Windows 11 ARM.
In Parallels 11.0, it was very difficult to move a VM from one computer to another if the virtual TPM was used. This is something that Parallels could fix in a future release.

The main purpose of the app review process is to protect Apple's business from app developers and users of apps. Apple has automation that carefully checks that its API is being used correctly by an app developer and thereby greatly restricts what a user is allowed to do. The app review process as designed cannot determine if an app or a company is fake. If I made a new developer account and claimed to be Acme Hole Company, Apple would never contact the real Acme Hole Company to find out whether the app really belonged to them or not. Instead Apple waits for users to report apps as malicious and then takes action if there are enough complaints. Of course by then the fake app developer has already made their money and just sets up a new fake developer account and app. Always keep in mind that most of Apple's security is for Apple not for you.

Apple's problem is that since they curate apps, they have taken on the responsibility for the apps in the App Store. They would have been protected if they had allowed any app on the App Store since no user would trust them. Instead they have tried to build trust by saying that the App Store is safe because apps are reviewed. Users have no understanding that "safe" only applies to Apple's technology and not their own information.

If Apple wants to fix this problem it should do two things:
1. Identify its developers in some secure way that prevents developers from pretending to be someone they are not. Collect biometrics (voice, facial features, retina scans, etc.) of developers before allowing them to publish anything.
2. Trust developers who have a long track record of releasing safe apps and dealing with customers honestly. Use that trust to grant them additional API access to sensitive features (like being able to request access to a user's personal information).

I am running Windows ARM on an Apple Silicon Mac Mini. It's ... interesting. Even Microsoft's own software development tool Visual Studio says it is not compatible with Windows ARM. However the OS does run but is noticeably slow doing some fairly basic tasks. It is so early in development that when there is an update, a lot of the time you have to re-install the entire OS to get it to work otherwise you get a cryptic error code. A VM is the only way to use the OS currently as reinstalling it is fairly painless that way.

To be fair, this mess is not Parallels fault. They have done what they can. Now it is up to Microsoft to fully support ARM including the special instructions Apple built into Apple Silicon that speed performance of x86 emulation which are used in Rosetta. Microsoft is not moving fast enough to develop Windows ARM. There have been only a few updates in the past six months and none of them made any noticeable difference in the performance. Hopefully Microsoft wakes up soon and realizes that they will lose the game if they don't fully support ARM.

When I get excited about a new computer it is due to what can be done with it, not as much about how it looks. A new GPU architecture, AI features, a large number of CPU cores, built in cellular data, an edge to edge micro-led screen and so on. Sure it's great if the computer looks awesome, but design takes a back seat to functionality.

The M1 Pro and M1 Max are extremely impressive processors. Not only are the CPUs among the best in computer the market, the GPUs are the best in the laptop market for most tasks of professional users. A minor concern is that the Apple Silicon GPUs currently lack hardware ray tracing which is at least five times faster than software ray tracing on a GPU. Apple is likely working on hardware ray tracing as evidenced by the design of the SDK they released this year which closely matches that of NVIDIA's. Hopefully it will appear in the M2. The one area where the M1 Pro and Max are way ahead of anything else is in the fact that they are integrated GPUs with discrete GPU performance and also their power demand and heat generation are far lower. Not only does this mean that the best laptop you can buy today at any price is now a MacBook Pro it also means that there is considerable performance head room for the Mac Pro to use with a full powered M2 Pro Max GPU. That one could very well be the most disruptive processor to hit the market. It will be interesting to see how NVIDIA and AMD rise to the challenge.

Also note the 64 GB of vRam is unheard of in the GPU industry for pro consumer products. For some tasks, the new MacBook Pros will be the best graphics processor on the market. Better even than desktop computers.