dewme

Justice Department demands Google sell off Chrome in new filing

dewme

March 10

I disagree with the declaration that Google is a monopoly. Those who are making these assertions have very little understanding of the dynamics and nature of today’s technology driven products and how their growth and spread happens due to networking effects.

In my opinion, the only thing that has intrinsic value in the Chrome browser is the Chromium core. All the naughty stuff is really done in Google’s search and data hoovering. Killing the Chrome browser doesn’t prohibit Google continuing to operate with business as usual in anyone else’s browser, at least to the extent that the browser owners allow.

I’m a big fan of Vivaldi browser which is built on Chromium. It can run most if not all plugins from Chrome. I don’t care if Chrome is brought back behind the barn and shot in the head. It’s totally irrelevant. The fact that these lawyers, judges, and politicians are going after the Chrome browser illustrates just how clueless they truly are. It’s like they’re burning Google in effigy.

Apple teases revamped Apple Store for Westlake, Ohio

dewme

March 9

That store really needs a rethink. In addition to being too small, it is also way too hidden and inconspicuous. It feels like it's in a back alley and like it was wedged in as an afterthought. Crocker Park is fairly new and is built around a new theme of being a quaint village atmosphere with a mix of retail and residential, much like the Apple Store in the Easton Town Center in Columbus. With the not so slow extinction of the cavernous mega malls from the 60s through the 80s and the move to more quaint and outdoorsy and mixed-use malls, the Apple Stores in these new malls shouldn't feel like they would be equally at home in the old dinosaur malls. Apple of course sets its own theme, but they need to maintain their place of prominence while still fitting into the new mall aesthetic that has arrived in in the past couple of decades. The bottom line factor is that these new mall settings are where people want to shop and where they feel safe in comparison to some of the cavernous old style malls where half or more of the storefronts are blanked out and the cops are often being called to break up one thing or another.

Apple says not every Apple Silicon generation will get an Ultra

dewme

March 6

programmer said:

keithw said:

While it's nice that the M3 Ultra is now finally out, why did it take them over a year to release it? (The M3 line came out on October 30, 2023!) Why didn't they release the M4 Max Studio at the same time as the M4 Max MBP? If they had, I may have saved a few thousand $$$ since I got tired of waiting and bought the MBP. And is the single core performance of the M3 Ultra the same as the M4 Max? Enquiring minds want to know... But I guess with the 512MB memory capacity and the 80 graphics cores on top of the 32 CPU cores, the M3 Ultra should be killer LLM machine.

The thing people don’t seem to understand when whining about not getting this or that is that these products take a huge development effort to create. And then when they have been designed, there is a complicated balancing act about fab capacities and yields. This isn’t some blokes with a drill press pumping out aluminum parts from their garage. This is light years beyond that in terms of complexity. Apple (and the rest of the industry) are pulling off miracles, and forum trolls pour hate on them because doing that takes no brain cells and you don’t even have to get off the couch.

If I were to speculate wildly, I would suppose that the process node (N3B) used for the M3 series had some issues, and pretty much only Apple used it. So to address the issues, Apple moved faster on the M4 using the newer process (N3E), and eschewed the ultra connector to get that line out faster. This may have freed up M3-capable capacity, which they can now use for the M3 Ultra… and IIRC (and this is even more speculative) the first process did have some advantages over the later one (they removed features from N3E to make it work better), which may play better to what high end chips like the ultra need. So rather than spending the time to make the ultra connector work using N3E, they are probably focused on N3P, which is apparently what comes next.

Thank you x 10 for injecting some sanity into the conversation. First of all, none of the so-called Apple soothsayers who claim to know what Apple’s plans really are are privy to what Apple is actually planning that’s not been externally announced.

Second, even if they were somehow able to get a snapshot in time of a committed roadmap, anyone who’s worked in any development organization knows that plans change based on priorities, actual progress, current conditions, constraints, and often, funding. The only thing that is constant in business is that things will always change. If you can’t adapt to change you go extinct.

Third point, these chips are incredibly complex. I remember when the Intel 80386 came out and it was seen as a massive step up in the world of personal computing. It had slightly under one million transistors, which was astonishing at the time.

The M3 Ultra has more than 180 billion transistors.

Building these things is a lot harder than making a PB&J sandwich. When the 80386 arrived they needed a massive amount of computing resources simply to verify the design and test the fabrication while using the best fab and test machinery available. I can only imagine what it must take to verify the design and build and detect flaws in an M3 Ultra. All of the machinery need to fabricate the chips has to be built and verified as well.

The M3 Ultra is one of the most complex consumer SoCs ever developed. It’s a fantastic achievement regardless of what name is attached to it.

Apple's new iPad updates are not dramatic, but don't need to be

dewme

March 4

In my opinion the base iPad has always been an incredible bargain for what it delivers at its price point. The new model does not change my opinion at all. If Apple Intelligence was fully baked and transformational I would say its omission is a big deal. But in 2025, not really. If Apple really starts to deliver significant improvements with a clear purpose with Apple Intelligence, delivering things that no third party AI can deliver because they are too far from Apple’s core, next years base iPad lacking Apple Intelligence will be a serious oversight.

Apple's board gets the DEI and AI results it wanted at the annual shareholders meeting

dewme

February 25

It's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Equity and equality are significantly different.

If you were building a deck on the back of your house and the ground under the deck was not level:

- Equity means you have to cut some of the deck posts to different lengths to compensate for the unequal ground.
- Equality means you cut all of the deck posts to the same length, resulting in a deck that is not level.

It's sad that some of the arguments that are being used to rescind DEI initiatives are based on the assumption that equity and equality are interchangeable.