dewme

currentinterest said:

mayfly said:

Let me get this straight. Apple removes a proprietary connector and replaces it with a cheaper industry standard that's made on a scale thousands of times larger than Lightning, but charges their customers more…

From what earlier rumors suggest even though the port will be USB-C it will be governed by Apple electronics such that maximum charging and data exchange will only be possible with Apple or other MFi approved cables. So, in a sense it is still an Apple proprietary connector.

Once you get into the world of USB-C connectors you’ll discover that the mere presence of the connector does not convey everything you’ll need to know about the port’s functionality and compatibility with various cables. Many people have been disappointed when they purchase a “USB-C” cable only to find out that it does not support the very reason they bought the cable.

For example, some USB-C cables don’t support Thunderbolt 3, 4, USB4, or DisplayPort capability. You may buy a fancy new monitor with USB-C and the monitor may even come with a cable that works as intended but is too short for your installation. So you go out and lay down $30 USD for a long-enough cable only to find out it doesn’t work. The USB-C equipped cable you really need, the one with the correct specs, may cost you $100 USD. Ouch.

I’m totally cool with Apple placing restrictions on what capabilities are allowed to work with various cables as long as the basic functions needed to support the device, which in the case of a USB-C equipped iPhone would be battery charging and at least USB2 or USB3 data connections, still work with any USB-C cable. This is in no way a case of Apple making an open standard proprietary, it’s simply a way to remove some of the confusion around knowing which USB-C cables work with various functionality beyond the basic charging and basic data transfer. Third parties would still be able to build less expensive USB-C cables that meet Apple’s MFi requirements just like they’ve been doing with Lightning cables for over a decade.

Face it, standardizing on USB-C was kind of a stupid decision because it’s still in a state of flux and some of the proposed methods of disambiguating what a USB-C port can and cannot do are ridiculous. Asking anyone over 40 to read one-quarter point type label on the back of a device or discern a port’s capability based on pseudo standard colors (on USB-A ports and which Apple never adopted) is a mess. It’s one thing to standardize on a standard that’s well grounded, stable, baggage-free, and proven, but to standardize on a moving target … not such a good idea. At least they didn’t land on the horrific mini USB or micro USB connectors. /rant

For EU fans, Apple’s certified USB-C cables would still provide the required basic charging and data transfer functionality for any USB-C device, which was supposedly the reason behind forcing Apple to move to USB-C ports in the first place. Unfortunately, whatever Apple does, short of moving its entire business and all of its operations to France, will not be enough to keep the EU regulators from coming up with yet another reason to go after Apple.

sconosciuto said:

How long until shareholders sue him? Of all the letters... "X" on a black background??? It looks like a logo for a porn site with an exclusive, gentleman's club vibe. Of the 26 letters, he had to pick the one everyone automatically associates with porn and NSFW?

He's completely trashed the brand from start to finish. This move, it's like Coca-Cola changing the name of its namesake beverage to R. Why would I call it a Coke if it's not Coca-Cola any longer? Similarly, why would I call it a tweet if it's not Twitter? The name of the company became a verb, branding professionals make a career of an accomplishment like that. And this "genius" just threw it away because he's high AF again.

I dare you to find a single person in the marketing profession not on his payroll who thinks this is anything other than a colossally bad decision.

bsd228 said:

What's the point of a non exclusive license?   Asus didn't need permission to make small computers, just to use the NUC name, and if others can have it too, what's the value?

Intel is also giving away the "Intel's NUC systems product line designs, enabling it to manufacture and sell 10th to 13th Gen NUC systems products." This will give any manufacturer with experience in this product category a big jump start on getting identical and updates of existing products built and available for sale. Shorter time to market. There is still a healthy market for these small form factor computers regardless of whether the size of the market is sufficient to justify Intel's investment. Intel has limited time, limited resources, and frankly bigger fish to fry because they are playing catch-up with Apple, AMD, even Qualcomm, just to mention a few. They can't afford to dabble in expensive side hustles and niches, no matter how well executed, in a market that is price driven for high volume commodity products, including PCs. The ROI on their NUC sales may be great, which I doubt, but being great in a niche market isn't good enough for Intel.

As far as the "NUC" name is concerned, it's already been coopted as a generic term by non-Intel PCs that follow the same basic formula. It's brand value, like its product sizes, isn't very large.

Why would Intel give these designs away to anyone who wants them? The most obvious answer is that these ready-to-bake designs all employ Intel chips. The designs have been tested, proven, passed regulatory and certification requirement like UL, CE, FCC, etc. Of course the as-built designs from other manufacturers would probably have to be resubmitted and re-certified at least in-part, but the likelihood of discovering expensive and time consuming design-related or manufacturing-related issues should be minimal for anyone who takes Intel up on its offer. I don't know who's been manufacturing Intel's NUCs but maybe ASUS was already involved in some way.

As a fan of the Intel NUCs, I think moving the stewardship of the product line to ASUS is probably a better-case or maybe even a best-case outcome compared to letting the NUC dissolve into oblivion. The NUC has been a great platform for prototyping embedded PC-based computing platforms before committing to much more expensive hardened industrial hardware. They've also been great HTPC host platform and a convenient way to add a PC sidekick to an otherwise Mac based setup when you want to run your Windows or Linux based applications on real hardware without taking up too much desktop real estate. The PC-reliant scenarios that NUCs can serve have increased since Apple abandoned Boot Camp.

Anything that can be modulated to represent at least two distinct states and conveyed via a medium can theoretically be used for communication. Light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, as are radio frequencies, so using light for communication is simply an extension of existing electromagnetic communication theory, science, and engineering. Lidar follows the same fundamental electromagnetic science as does radar. In terms of using light for communication, naval and maritime signal lights have been used to communicate between ships and between ships and shore since the mid 1800s.

Other forms of communication exploit other mediums and science including magnetism with inductive couplers, pressure waves, i.e., sound, through solids, water, and gas, sonar used for Morse code, underwater telephone that modulates voice communication on a carrier frequency, voice tubes to communicate between the ships bridge and the engine room, sound powered telephones, smoke signals, semaphore flags, etc. There has even been studies done to examine the use of plumbing water pipes for communication. We're all familiar with power line modems that modulate signals on top of your home electric wiring to span communicate using modems between locations where running an ethernet cable is too difficult or costly to run. I'm assuming a similar modem based strategy could be used to turn your existing light fixtures into access points for LiFi.

Of course there are also communication techniques that take a hybrid or multi-media approach to span different communication mediums, for example, the use of laser to sense the physical (sound) vibrations imparted on the window glass of a supposedly secure room to remotely detect what those in the room are talking about. 

FileMakerFeller said:

More and more competition for password managers. Third parties are going to have an even harder time; it's hard to win against "comes with the platform" plus "no added cost."

Yes indeed. If this product category follows what we’ve seen with other product categories like office productivity apps, ebook readers, PDF viewers and annotation tools, etc., the best third party apps like 1Password will survive but fewer new startups will jump into the competitive fray for the product category that Apple decides to bundle into the OS. It’s unlikely an all-or-nothing outcome.

The other thing to think about is that, in the case of software, higher availability is usually aided by having diversity of implementation between redundant functionality. This is one reason why I always have more than one web browser installed on every internet connected device I own. The less commonality between the redundant implementations the better. On iOS and iPadOS it’s not (yet) as easy to achieve diversity because of the underlying browser engine commonality. But even in those cases the unique configuration of each browser powered by the same engine can differ quite significantly, e.g., built-in content blockers and filters, which very often allows one web browser to work for me while another one simply won’t.