misa

horvatic said:

Yea there's a lot of media who want to see Apple fail in so many ways. Here's more proof that cheap copies doesn't make a great deal and Apple will usually win out eventually. Poor build quality, lousy software and cheap components don't make it in the real world as an iPhone competitor.

I regularly read (or troll, depending on the context) some pro-open-source/pro-linux type of forums and the general tone, or tone-deafness tends to be that they are still holding their breath for the iPhone to fail.

The reality is that the iPhone has appeal to pretty much everyone except for the people who see it as a political anathema to promoting open source. Which is fine. Less nerds interested in the iphone, less jailbreaking and subsequent security issues will show up.

Really, the question is, why can't these other idiot smartphone makers actually appeal that nerd market? Because they're after Apple's market. That's the market they can't make any headway into because you can't use Apple's software on non-Apple phones, Android is a miserable experience, and the two other mobile phone OS's out there don't have any market share. Quite honestly I'm surprised the Chinese vendors didn't just make their own OS from scratch, but I guess that would require them to worth together on something that isn't rubbish. It just won't happen. It's bad enough that most Android phones appear to be designed without any UX designers.

lkrupp said:

MobiusHead said:

Apple execs like saying "it took courage" to do something. That's what they said when they removed the SD card slot from the Macbook Pro. I guess it took courage to ship a $3k under powered Macbook Pro that can't be upgraded... ever.

Yet Mac sales had their best quarter ever. Care to explain? Or are people who like Macs just stupid?

A little of the latter.

People complain about things, but often lack the context from which it's given. In the case of iMac, and MacBook/MacBook Pro/MacBook Air, these devices are severely underpowered devices that are considered a joke in gaming and film/video-journalism. Yet they are sufficient for activities that are not about gaming. Photography and Video work can be done on them, but no professional videographer would ever buy one. They're just too far on the rubbish end of the spectrum of computers that you would be wasting substantial amounts of time trying to push 4K video through one.

This is why we keep asking for a real Mac Pro. It's as if Apple has abandoned the entire market for which the Final Cut Pro X exists, ceding it to Avid. Hell, the requirements for most of these software packages Apple doesn't make a system for. 

However, nothing has fundamentally changed with photography and other desktop publishing which can actually be done on the iPad Pro now. This owes a lot to the GPU on the iPad Pro actually being less rubbish than Intel's iGPU designs in the notebooks, which the iGPU's in notebooks are primarily meant to watch video, not encode it.

Mike Wuerthele said:

Okay, look, here's the reality. The public perception is that Apple has somehow crippled the hardware with an OS update, forcing users to buy new phones.

Guess what. Newer software means heavier software demands. The phones are literally the same speed as the day they were bought and these metrics are the proof. The difference is the load placed on them by the software.

There is no plot or conspiracy. There is no shadowy cabal demanding that code get bloated to force users to buy a new phone. There is no Cook and Ive plot to turn down the processor and GPU speed. That's insane to even speculate, but yet, here we are. Planned obsolescence as a conspiracy to force hardware sales isn't a thing.

Do you want your phone to be the same as the day you took it out of the box? Never update your software. Problem solved.

Yet this is not true when you use Geekbench 3 or 4.

https://i.imgur.com/v5cWxQY.png
https://i.imgur.com/CZSSCsQ.png

The question is, why is the benchmark getting different numbers? My Retina iPad, which remains on iOS 9.3.5 has the same Geekbench score as it had on 9.2
But my iPhone 6S gets 1799/3083 on 11.0.2 but 2498/4374 on 9.0.2. One third of the CPU performance has vanished.

Geekbench 4 says it should be 2373/4046
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/38

But it ends up being 1796/3123 on 10.3.3 and 1161/2373 on 11.0.1 , GeekBench 4 is suggesting the phone is half the speed it should be. Yet if I run it right now on 11.0.2 it gets 2174/3813, still 10% below where the GeekBench website says it should be.

So the question winds up being, why? Did the power management change? Is more running in the background? Are Geekbench or Futuremark's benchmarks rigged in a way to give a certain score on a certain chip? Does the OS cheat one benchmark software and not another?

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Apple is doing anything that intentionally degrades the performance of the phone, but if the maximum performance of the phone can only be obtained under very specific circumstances, then what is the point of benchmarking the devices. It all feels familiar to the CPU cheats on old benchmarks and GPU cheats by GPU vendors later on desktops, everyone is out to get the best synthetic score possible, and no real world software actually benefits from this optimization. 

Like see https://www.xda-developers.com/benchmark-cheating-strikes-back-how-oneplus-and-others-got-caught-red-handed-and-what-theyve-done-about-it/

ronmg said:

robin huber said:

I guess Apple has made their decision on upgradable pro machines. Buy a maxed out machine and when it's cutting edge components get long in the tooth, buy a new one. One thing seems clear, no major redesign of the consumer iMac for a while. No way they'd give them an updated look in the fall while selling a pro machine that is shaped like the old consumer ones. Also, what about Mac Mini?

Nice thing about iMac is when it comes time to selling the one that is long in the tooth, they actually hold their value pretty well. Unlike Windows PCs...

Only desktops hold value, not all-in-ones.

And even then Apple all-in-ones hold value better than Windows all-in-ones. But this... this is still not a Mac Pro. It's certainly better than what they've been offering, but this still lacks upgradable parts, that's the deal killer. I don't care what Steve Jobs thought of Mac's being more like furniture or whatever and hated having them serviceable, but if your high end stuff is not servicable, then people are not going to be using them as their primary system.

Like, personally, I can not justify buying anything that I can not replace the video card after 24 months. That is the deal breaker for me, and everyone in the gaming, film and VFX industry. You need as close to new as possible, because time is money, and you could be making more money with twice as powerful hardware 24 months later, or you could try to squeeze out as much value out of the closed-systems.

Sure, yes, I can see this being about right for photography however.

I don't use Siri.

I think we're being sold "star trek computer" but being given babbys-first-voice-recognition.

It may have uses for accessibility reasons , but the last thing you need is a TV program going "Siri, call 911" and having millions of 911 calls go out.

It's a blackhat's fever dream of being able to get millions of devices to do something malicious without confirmation.