misa

ericthehalfbee said:

We knew Touch Bar was coming, but it's still cool to see.

This is Apples answer to those who think the actual screen should be a touchscreen (stupid idea, IMO - who wants to reach up to touch your screen and who wants fingerprints).

Now you have a smaller touchscreen in an area that's easy to access and fingerprints won't matter. Yet you still get all the contextual buttons/controls.

They could have just made the entire keyboard a e-ink touch screen. That solves many multi-lingual issues too. BUT...

No games.

The primary problem with removing mechanical keys is that you also remove the touch-typing and ability to play games that rely on WASD controls. The entire reason WASD controls exist is because the 101 key keyboard has the arrow keys on the wrong side of the keyboard. (Remember before WASD, it was typically the arrow keys and the ctrl/alt/shift key of the keyboard before FPS games pretty much made things stupidly complicated)

Of course the solution is to just use a gamepad, preferably a wireless one. However there's not a single MMORPG game that can be constrained to 12 keys, FFXIV just barely gets away with it by design, and they had to redesign the entire game once to get there.

Which comes back to the entire problem of using a Mac, let alone a laptop for gaming. If you are a "hardcore" gamer person, you don't use any of those wireless things because of the latency, and you don't use software-implemented things when there is hardware that does it (eg no wireless headsets, mice, keyboards, or joysticks/gamepads.) The trade off is that you typically have to spend "macbook pro" levels of money on a gaming laptop or desktop that isn't an Apple device.

But I do see what these MacBook Pro's are targeted at (eg Final Cut users) but this is still no replacement for a Mac Pro.

80s_Apple_Guy said:

The problem is Apple almost never acknowledges a problem until sued in court and forced to.  Three 2011 MacBook pro is one example.  

That's not true. 

Most, if not all companies will not acknowledge a problem unless it's coming from multiple independent sources. Take the Tesla battery fires, and the earlier Sony Battery recall as examples where the product might work for a long period of time before a problem caused by how it's used creates the dangerous situation.

Compare that with Ford's Pinto gas tank, the car industry on the whole's airbag replacement (which spans more than 10 years worth of vehicles from nearly every manufacturer), the Whirlpool dishwasher fires, where the companies simply refused to acknowledge there was a problem and had to be sued. These were products known the be faulty, but continued to be sold.

You're unlikely to see the recalls for non-dangerous defects because the Apple iphone 6 touch disease and the 2011 Macbook GPU failures, the problems only start to show up at the mid-point of the product's expected life cycle of 3 years (for the phone) or (7 for the laptop.) Apple is not the only company that waits until there are repeated reports.

Various Chinese (Taiwan) brands like MSI have a really poor record of product reliability, and that is because reliability tends to scale inversely with popularity. Korean brands are no better. LG and Samsung have never recalled their flip phone products, despite nearly every single one of them failing to work on AT&T's original GSM rollout. Many US brands simply license white-label versions of the very same products and when that happens to be a popular brand, customers aren't aware that the same device is being sold under 30 some brands in the US.

Just imagine if toy and costume-jewelry companies recalled products every time they found lead or cadmium in their china-produced goods, they'd go out of business.

It's not defensible to just go "it's just business" and pay for any potential lawsuits, but to basically go "Apple is the only company..." is a fat out lie. You're not going to see a company recall an entire line of products if the defects aren't a safety issue, because sometimes those defects only affect products on X day of the week when Y had a shift, and Y sucked at doing their job.

It would be great if there was just a universal database that people could plug serial numbers into and find out of their product is still safe to use.

AppleInsider said:

Facebook has unveiled the next steps in the Oculus virtual reality platform, including a sneak peek at a wireless version of the Oculus Rift, and an initiative to lower the hardware requirements needed to use the system to specs already exceeded by Apple's 4K and 5K Retina iMac lines.

...


"There's virtual reality and there's augmented reality -- both of these are incredibly interesting," Cook said to Roberts. "But my own view is that augmented reality is the larger of the two, probably by far."

Um no, what they did here was nerf the software so that it can run on much crappier hardware and not make people want to vomit in 30 seconds. That's not really any improvement. You still need the top-of-the-line, one-generation removed, hardware or better or you are just going to have a miserable time.

I've already seen these things being demo'd at the Microsoft store, and quite honestly the thing frightens me for the amount of money you have to drop in order not have a sickening experience (over $3000) I would not touch these things until "$99 GPU" 's are the same performance as current $600 GPU's like the 1070 and 1080. A 960 is "minimum" like "a 386 with 4MB of RAM" was a minimum to run Windows 95 when you really needed a Pentium 75 and 8MB of ram.

We didn't learn. "Minimum" requirements always mean "you will not like the experience, not one bit, but if you're desparate, you can play." Early MMORPG players learned this the hardware when they had Dial-up and people on the other side of the planet had better latency due to having cable.

ireland said:

mac-daddy said:

thewhitefalcon said:

If either of them purchases Twitter I will delete my Twitter account.

No you won't. 

You never know. When facebook acquired Instagram, I stopped using the service.

When Fox acquired Myspace, it was quickly abandoned.
When Facebook acquired instagram, everyone abandoned it. It was a fad product to begin with.
When Yahoo acquired Tumblr, I stopped using it... well mostly everyone reduced their usage knowing how god-awful Yahoo has been about product management.
When Google acquired Youtube, it was largely independent until they tried to force G+ on everyone and turned it into a huge pain in the ass, and that also did nothing to curb the trolling on it. Google is now trying to turn Youtube into a social media platform (wtf google, you failed) so it would make sense for Google to try and acquire Twitter, but I have a feeling that they will screw it up, much like every acquisition, and people who already hate G+ will abandon it. Youtube is something that I think Google regrets buying much in the same way eBay regrets buying Skype. Back in 2007 there was much talk inside eBay about how eBay, Paypal and Skype were meant for each other, and now look at it.
When Microsoft bought Skype, it shutdown it's own MSN messenger service, but people started abandoning Skype for other products, eventually Slack becoming the winner. This is again, because everyone who has handled Skype has ignored the core technology (a peer to peer messaging/VoIP product) and tried to take the P2P aspect out of it.
Verizon bought AOL and is buying Yahoo, largely to expand their advertising base. If they bought Twitter you'd see Twitter become 60 second ads between tweets. 

Of all the suitors, Salesforce is probably the worst one, they've acquired 40 companies and extinguished them in favor of their own brand. You'd see Twitter become "Salesforce social messenger" or some dorky name. When I think salesforce, I don't think of a successful cloud computing company, I think of the CRM software it started with.

So what is the lesson nobody seems to be learning here? You can't buy a good product and turn it into your vision. If you don't honor the original products vision, it decays rather quickly and is abandoned. "Your" (as in the acquiring company) vision for the product is stupid.




 

Here's the question I really want to ask.

Wouldn't this NAND mirroring attack work on most/all Android devices since they seem to prefer emulating the security (cloud storage of payment credentials for example) rather than actually having it?