verne arase

I dumped Apple stock at the beginning of November, and repurchased recently.

I like Apple, but don't feel compelled to ride the stock down when the company suffers from their own stupidity (doggedly insisting on manufacturing in China) - increased my share count by about 17.45% as a consequence.

twolf2919 said:

Going forward, Apple may have some growth issues.  While iPhone sales might still increase a few percentage points and similarly now Apple Watch sales might still incremental sales increases, I think Mac sales will be flat or down in the near future.  Apple has benefited from its move away from Intel and the home-bound demand during covid, but those waves are gone.  Increasingly, folks won't move from PC to Mac simply because they can't or won't because some critical or favorite software isn't available on the new Mac.  One example I can think of is Turbotax for Business.  Intuit never made a macOS version - but with x86-based Macs you could at least run the software in Parallels Desktop's virtual machine offering or dual-boot your Mac.  Now that is gone.  I got a new Mx MBP, but I am keeping my old x86-basd MBP around - just for that reason.  Others simply won't/can't do that.

Actually, you can.

If you run ARM Windows 11 in a Parallels virtual machine, it has the ability to run x86-64 code in emulation similar to the way the Mac runs x86-64 Mac code in emulation in Rosetta.

DuhSesame said:

In Steam's own hardware survey, 92% of people are using CPUs with 8 or fewer cores, meaning most people are using Ryzen 7s. We can safely say that M2 Max will be more powerful than 92% of personal computers.

However, 8-core is only considered as mid-tiers.

Meanwhile, the best-selling chip from Intel is the Core i5, which is at least 10-core.

This is wrong on so many fronts it’s hard to quantify - unless you’re running a server with a transaction dispatched on each core, additional cores are simply a crutch for a CPU manufacturer who can’t or won’t put in the effort to design a faster CPU.

The real metric which should interest workstation level users is single core speed - single core speed has the greater influence on perceived speed than any other single factor.

x86/64 improves single core speed by bumping up clocks which increases heat generation exponentially which then must be cooled to keep the CPU from burning up - Apple Silicon does this by making the CPU wider which allows the CPU to peer deeply into the execution queue and parallelize instruction execution. Ever since the A14's Firestorm cores Apple Silicon has been able to peer 690 instructions forward in the execution queue, and with a massive reorder buffer and multiple redundant arithmetic units and has an out-of-order execution unit capable of running up to eight instructions simultaneously. Now multiply that by 6 or 8 high performance cores.

Oh, and the high efficiency cores have been sped up considerably too.

I believe that Apple has also increased the memory cache so Trans Lookaside Buffer stalls will no longer be an issue from too many developers simply porting graphic logic across from Wintel graphics workflows and not reengineering graphic workflows to properly use Tile Based Deferred Rendering keeping intermediate graphic results out in tile memory (using immediate mode in a step by step rote port).

Looking a byline date: Nope, not April …

rob53 said:

I dislike dealing with Epic health records systems but I've also seen more Macs and iOS devices being used in medical offices so Epic needs to accept the fact Apple is around and stop ignoring them, making only garbage Windows systems. Epic, and many other Windows-based health records systems, have gotten away with forcing health care providers to use their systems that are as open as Windows wants them to be. Windows is still the least secure and most heavily and easily attacked operating system in the world and they've probably bought off regulators and members of Congress to keep rules and regulations limited so they can't be held responsible for data loss. I wish this article would have included any data loss by Epic systems.

Actually, it's worse than that.

Most enterprises which run Epic have found it's so difficult to keep Windows up to a set maintenance level that they have to run the Epic client on a set of specially maintained virtual desktop servers, and use RDP Windows or thin linux-based clients on user desktops to peer into those virtual clients.