verne arase

beowulfschmidt said:

I know there's no way it would actually happen, but it would be nice if Apple and other tech companies would just close up shop in the U.K.  Fire everyone, and remove all their products from the stores.

Same with China.

Note that failure to do so is not entirely Apple's fault.  The laws for corporations in the U.S. can result in legal penalties for executives who piss off the shareholders.

Close Apple's British business presence and allow Brits to buy Apple products mail order drop shipped from China (or India).

If necessary, make 'em grey market purchases.

Regulators in the UK and EU think they're kings of the world - let 'em try to keep British purchasers from ordering internationally; the product nazis need to realize that their own citizens don't support their bullsh*t.

Looking forward to the lighter frame (titanium), a telephoto zoom camera, better modem (faster LTE), and Thunderbolt for (hopefully) faster Mac syncs. Going from 480 mb/sec to a nominal 40 gb/sec should make for much faster transfers - though changing out my alarm clock and cables will be a bit painful.

Unfortunately, wired docks may be a thing of the past due to USB-C's tighter tolerances eliminating blind docking solutions.

The A17 should be faster and more energy efficient and in conjunction with the bigger battery should solve some of the battery woes of the 14 Pro with its always on display.

Hopefully supply chain problems won't make this puppy too hard to get.

jdiamond said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

Apple is also part of the RISC V consortium. As soon as Apple announced Macs as having “Apple Silicon” and not “ARM-based CPUs” I knew it’d be a possibility that they’d always remain open to other ISAs.  If RISC V continues on its current trajectory— and continues to attract all the talent — it may happen by 2035–40. 

I completely agree.  Apple's not going to get caught again being tied to an ISA.  The agreement with ARM is likely just to guarantee terms on Apple using ARM for the next 20 years - Apple could drop at any time like they did with Imagine and GPUs.

Apple doesn't license processor IP from ARM - just the Instruction Set Architecture.

AFAIK, there is nothing in the ISA that limits Apple - in fact it's rumored that ARM designed ARMv8 at Apple's request so Apple could create Apple Silicon's deep pipeline out-of-order execution model (which ultimately resulted in the up to eight simultaneous execution unit of Apple's Firestorm processor).

There's nothing magical about an instruction set - provided it doesn't limit deep pipelining by doing old-gen stuff like ARMv7's inclusion of condition code execution in every other instruction.

The only advantage of something like RISC V is licensing - and Apple's already got all that covered.

I agree that USB-C with Thunderbolt would be good thing to have - but I don't agree with the EU on all issues.

Specifically, I think the EC is getting too big for its britches, and mandating things like replaceable batteries and message protocols waayyy oversteps the bounds of their authority - and threatening world-wide revenues is a Chinese Communist Party kind of tactic … they aren't the kings of the world, after all.

They also aren't engineers, and the ramifications of things like replaceable batteries can serious compromise battery life and features like inductive charging.

Once you mandate replaceable batteries, you create a situation where the replaceable battery needs to have sufficient stiffness so that carrying one in your pocket won't produce a fire hazard - and that means thickening the casing around the battery making the phone much thicker when the battery is inserted into the phone and the cover closed. It also endangers things like waterproofing of the device.

I think that Apple and other phone manufacturers may soon be forced to make a global phone and a regulator phone - one model optimized for performance and the other compromised so it can be sold in all markets. The regulator device can forego things like MagSafe, can be thicker and heavier, be released later, and maybe be more expensive. Things like a periscope camera may have to be scrapped to allow room for the internal battery compartment, and according to local laws may ship without iMessage (though it could be downloaded from the app store).

Amazing how the EC and others think they can regulate devices neither manufactured nor designed within the EU. It would be the greatest travesty to let them have the authority to dictate what devices sold outside of the EU need to be like.

Just remove the damned thing.

There's enough cruft in the OS as it is.