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Editorial: Will Apple's 1990's "Golden Age" collapse repeat itself?
That's not a kernel problem. That's all the other things that are going on around the kernel. Linux runs on innumerable embedded devices, IoT devices, different architectures (big endian, little endian, ppc, ARM, MIPS, etc.) and even used to boot from floppies on 386 and 486 - it can certainly work in low resource settings. Linux, particularly the kernel, is very good at memory management. Android, and the userland that Google has put around the linux kernel, less so. Part of that comes from apps running in the Dalvik or ART (Android RunTime) virtual machines, and the other part comes from app developers who don't do a good job of managing the memory their applications claim or release. What you could say if you wanted to place blame is that Java and the ART VM that Android apps run within doesn't do a good job of pushing app developers to use good practices.DanielEran said:
Yes - and iOS employed not just NeXT/MacOS X's modern memory management but added new mobile-ready conservative memory use and liberal recycling of unused memory, something that Android is rather bad at, with a kernel coming from Linux PCs. So that's another example of Google facing an Old Apple problem. Users are left wondering how to diddle with utilities to kill apps in order to get things to run, and Android devices demand far more RAM to work well at all.firelock said:Great article. Having run an imaging and design studio for a major ad agency during the mid-90s, I’ll add that another factor in Apple’s near collapse was its inability to deliver on building a major update to its OS. The biggest issue with the legacy Mac operating system was its lack of dynamic memory management. Raise your hand if you remember having to get info on an app and manually adjust its memory allocation. As a pro it was certainly frustrating to have to be constantly adjusting memory allocation on Photoshop and Quark, and closing one app to free up enough memory to run another. Apps would just crash and sometimes corrupt files because they ran out of memory. But as pros, most (some?) of us at least understood the problem and how to deal with it, but consumers were completely at a loss. I don’t know how many friends and family I had phone calls with trying to explain to them how to manage the memory on their Macs. Worse yet they would run off and take their Mac to get “repaired” because their apps were constantly crashing. What they needed to do was increase the memory allocation for the apps, but the shops would instead sell them more RAM which not only cost them hundreds of dollars, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem was so bad that I stopped recommending Macs to non-professionals in my circle.
Apple had promised year after year to come out with a modern OS that could manage memory dynamically, but they failed to do so year after year and instead just kept issuing minor updates that made small improvements to the user interface (Mac OS 8 & 9). I was very close to switching my entire studio over to PCs over this one issue when the return of Jobs and the promise of OS X convinced me to stick it out. Obviously this paid off and I’m glad because OS X and now iOS are light years ahead of the competition.
Placing blame on the kernel is kind of silly, there's so much more going on. Mach and BSD kernels are microkernels, with everything outside of them. Linux is a macrokernel, but a lot of things are loaded as extensions (just like Mach) rather than being compiled in. It's possible to replace the kernel and you'd still have the same issues - not because of Linux, but because of what Android is doing with all the other parts that stack on top of the kernel. All this is to say, place blame where it's due.
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Apple's AirPort base stations are gone, and we wish they weren't
Incorrect, depending. If you are using Wi-Fi for the mesh network, then you want fewer obstructions between base stations. It will work through walls, but if you're already placing them in weak areas, as many people do, as opposed to at the edges of good coverage areas to spread to weaker areas, you're asking a lot of it. However, if you have wired backhaul between them, place them anywhere you please.rob53 said:WiFi routers are like PCs, they constantly change without any real reason. Those Velop mesh stations aren’t exactly inexpensive, something Apple haters complained about AirPort costs all the time. I read mesh stations need to have line of sight between stations, or at least minimum walls, to work properly. That’s difficult in many houses so I’m not that excited about moving to them. I had two AirPort Extremes connected via an Ethernet cable and they ran great. Easy to configure and they just worked.
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Apple's AirPort base stations are gone, and we wish they weren't
The original technology wasn't even Apple's. It was a reworked 802.11b Orinoco Gold PCMCIA card with the antenna protrusion lopped off, with a similar card in a carrier inside the AirPort Base Station
The original base stations were so unoriginal internally as to be a straight up implementation of the AMD reference design, using a 486 processor to run the show. Seriously.
What made them shine was that Apple showed the world you didn't have to go to Cisco school to learn how to set up Wi-Fi, which you pretty much had to do prior to Apple's Airport. Linksys didn't exist yet, and Linksys were pretty much the ones who showed the world how to do a web interface for configuring a router in a mostly-humane way.
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Hands-on: Ecobee4 Thermostat with Apple HomeKit & Amazon Alexa
You aren't alone.flydog said:The Ecobee thermostat itself is nice, but the app has never worked properly since I bought my Ecobee two years ago, and I've lost all hope that it will ever work properly. The HomeKit integration is useless, since it overrides the built-in Ecobee functionality.
I went through two Ecobee3, repeated support calls and emails, resetting the app, resetting the thermostat, resetting (erasing) my homekit home in iCloud (please, never make anyone do this. It's awful.) I couldn't get homekit to work on it half the time, and at the end, the Ecobee app wouldn't work, either. I had to control it via the web page.
Screw it. I installed Honeywell Lyric. The added extra room sensors are not the huge deal Ecobee thinks they are, when the basic functionality didn't work.
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Compared: 2018 iPad versus the Acer Chromebook 11 in the school
That position falls apart when your kid says, "my iPad isn't getting wifi and the chromebooks do, when I have to work on a google doc or slides project with other kids." It turns out the school in this example has Cisco Meraki access points, has them placed badly for coverage, doesn't want to hear about doing a site survey to re-place them for better dispersion, because his first battle is that he has 1gbit/s for the school, and has apportioned out 1mb/s for any student devices so that teachers can have the bulk of the bandwidth. Your kid is going to take the chromebook because it gets the signal.tht said:At a minimum, my children will be using personal iPads to take notes during class. Our school system isn’t 1-to-1, but if it were and they distributed Chromebooks, I would still have my children use their iPads to take notes with a Pencil or whatever cheaper stylus.
All this Education discussion about Chromebooks and needing a keyboard reminds me of corporate IT, where computer equipment are purchased based on the needs of the IT department, not based on the needs of people who actually use them. No thanks.
