semi_guy

Contactless payment methods like ApplePay would be great addition to contain COVID-19 transmission. Sad that many essential businesses like groceries, pharmacies, and hardware stores do not offer ApplePay or other contactless payments. In these days, we are choosing to buy from stores that have ApplePay vs those that force us to insert cards and touch their little card readers.

Disabling and limiting for price points is to save test time and improve yields. Not testing a part of the CPU can save precious test time which leads into a cheaper part. Also portions of the chip might not be as fast as the rest due to longer paths to memory, main busses, power rails, etc. Thus, it is faster to test and produce higher yields leading to savings in manufacturing costs. Moreover, a portion of the chip might add too much power consumption or noise to the system, so it is better to shut it off. There could be a bug with a portion of the chip where timing closure was tight and a subsequent version addresses this issue or reduces the power consumption. Given that Apple is the only customer for their own parts, disabling a portion is probably one of these concerns rather than pricing for additional features or speed.

razorpit said:

I don't understand why modern LED lights don't allow you to dim something to the point where they are almost off.

LEDs can have some, but very limited current control. Brightness is mostly determined by turning them ON and OFF at a fast rate. Turn them off for significant portions of time and the eye sees the lights flickering. So, another option is to double the LED count with some designed to operate at low current and low light output, and others at high current and hight light output, doubling all the electronics...

He doesn't know what he is talking about! He complains that MacBook Pro has a poor performing DAC that converts all those digital bits into an analog signal. No audio producer is going to directly plug in a recording system, mixing board, or mic input to the analog audio output of any computer. These under $2 DACs are 100-110 dB SNR. They are not bad, but they are not great, just good enough. First, computers have a lot of inherent noise with those chargers banging away, then processors running at hight speed with a lot of ground noise, added with LCD displays, etc. In summary, Laptops are inherently noisy. Second, an audio expert, would keep its music digital and connect to a pro-audio interface for final analog recording. But who converts their digital audio into an analog recording these days? This digital audio is transcoded into different sample rates and bit widths at the end product to maintain the most resolution of the audio signal. Third, at his age and exposure to loud noises from his many concerts, his hearing has the high probability of being damaged. Some people claim he wears a hearing aid. By the way, today's best hearing aids only operate for speech, (bandwidth of 4KHz), not the full audio spectrum. It is hard to amplify frequencies that are so damaged you can't hear them at any volume.

Nice to see people helping needy communities! School institutions funding has been greatly slashed across the country. It would be good that decent software and most importantly training is offered to teachers.