danvm

AppleZulu said:

danvm said:

AppleZulu said:

There will continue to be a limit on things like multitasking.  iPads are sealed devices with no means to cool the processor.  They can be powerful devices, but there are physical limitations that define their separation from Macs. MacBook Air has passive venting, and as you move up the Mac line you’ll find bigger and bigger fans for dissipation of heat. Apple designs the OS to serve the hardware, and so there will continue to be things that Macs do and iPads don’t do, and vice-versa.

The latest Surface Pro 12 is a sealed, fanless device. And based in the reviews, it has no issues at all with light tasks and multitasking.  I don't think the iPad / iPad Pro would have any issues at all.  

 … so we have this idea keep popping up. While a touchscreen on a notebook sounds fine and dandy (ignoring for a moment the clusterf*** of using touch to control a menu-driven OS), a touchscreen interface on a desktop Mac would be an ergonomic nightmare and orders of magnitude worse on a multi-screen Mac Pro workstation.  And before we start imagining a solution involving the bloatware of alternate user interfaces within the same operating system, let’s just remember that Windows does that for the Surface, and it’s well-proven to be nothing Apple should replicate.

So as you can see, while Apple leans into refinements that bridge the boundaries between product lines, there are actual reasons for the boundaries between product lines. Thus far, Apple has maintained the wisdom not to toss aside their core design principles in order to try to accommodate Apple fan fiction fantasies, and hopefully they will maintain that wisdom well into the future.

That "ergonomic nightmare" you describe is what we have with the iPad and the Magic Keyboard. You don't need to do everything with touch; it's just to complement the trackpad.  

When comparing the Surface and iPad, both have their pros and cons. As a tablet, the iPad is arguably the best on the market, but when it comes to using a device as a laptop or desktop replacement, the Surface stands out. It offers better multitasking, full-featured apps, and multi-monitor support. Plus, Microsoft provides the Surface Dock for a complete desktop experience. Ultimately, both are excellent devices, and the choice depends on how you plan to use them.

The iPad and keyboard are not analogous to the ergonomic noghtmare of a desktop computer with a touchscreen. 

I have a coworker with a Surface and dock. He sometimes asks for help to get it to do things. It’s an unintuitive mess as a far as I can tell. 

AppleZulu said:

There will continue to be a limit on things like multitasking.  iPads are sealed devices with no means to cool the processor.  They can be powerful devices, but there are physical limitations that define their separation from Macs. MacBook Air has passive venting, and as you move up the Mac line you’ll find bigger and bigger fans for dissipation of heat. Apple designs the OS to serve the hardware, and so there will continue to be things that Macs do and iPads don’t do, and vice-versa.

 … so we have this idea keep popping up. While a touchscreen on a notebook sounds fine and dandy (ignoring for a moment the clusterf*** of using touch to control a menu-driven OS), a touchscreen interface on a desktop Mac would be an ergonomic nightmare and orders of magnitude worse on a multi-screen Mac Pro workstation.  And before we start imagining a solution involving the bloatware of alternate user interfaces within the same operating system, let’s just remember that Windows does that for the Surface, and it’s well-proven to be nothing Apple should replicate.

So as you can see, while Apple leans into refinements that bridge the boundaries between product lines, there are actual reasons for the boundaries between product lines. Thus far, Apple has maintained the wisdom not to toss aside their core design principles in order to try to accommodate Apple fan fiction fantasies, and hopefully they will maintain that wisdom well into the future.

AppleZulu said:

In a nutshell, this explains why Apple is “behind” with AI, but actually isn’t. 

It’s remarkable the consistency with which this pattern repeats, yet even people who consider themselves Apple enthusiasts don’t see it. Tech competitors “race ahead” with an iteration of some technology, while Apple seemingly languishes. Apple is doomed. Then Apple comes out “late” with their version of it, and the initial peanut gallery reception pronounces it too little, too late.

Then within a couple of years, Apple’s version is the gold standard and the others -those cutting-edge innovators- race to catch up, because “first” is often also “half-baked.”

In the news this week, it was exposed that RFK Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” report was evidently an AI-produced document, replete with hallucinations, most notably in the bibliography, and of course it was. This is what happens when the current cohort of AI models are uncritically used to produce a desired result, without any understanding of how profoundly bad these AI models are. When I read about this in the news, I decided to experiment with it myself. Using MS Copilot -in commercial release as part of MS Word- I picked a subject and asked for a report taking a specific, dubious position on it, with citations and a bibliography. After it dutifully produced the report, I started checking the bibliography, and one after another, failed to find the research papers that Copilot used to back the position taken. I didn’t check all the references, so it’s possible some citations were real, but finding several that weren’t was sufficient to bin the whole thing. It’s bad enough when humans intentionally produce false and misleading information, but when a stock office product will do it for you with no disclaimers or warnings, should that product really be on the market? I also once asked ChatGPT to write a story about green eggs and ham, in the style of Dr. Seuss. It then plaigerized the actual Seuss story, almost verbatim, in a clear abuse of copyright law. This is the stuff that Apple is supposedly trailing behind.

So the report here that Apple is developing AI but, unlike their “cutting edge” competitors, not releasing something that produces unreliable garbage, suggests that no, they’re not behind. They’re just repeating the same pattern again of carefully producing something of high quality and reliability, and in a form that is intuitively useful, rather than a gimmicky demonstration that they can do a thing, whether it’s useful or not. Eventually they’ll release something that consistently produces reliable information, and likely does so while respecting copyright and other intellectual property rights. The test will be that not only will it be unlikely to hallucinate in ways that mislead or embarrass its honest users, it will actually disappoint those with more nefarious intent. When asked to produce a report with dubious or false conclusions, it won’t comply like a sociopathic sycophant. It will respond by telling the user that the reliable data not only doesn’t support the requested position, but actually refutes it. Hopefully this will be a feature that Apple uses to market their AI when it’s released.

P.S. As a corollary, the other thing that Apple is likely concerned with (perhaps uniquely so) is AI model collapse. This is the feedback loop where AI training data is scooped up from sources that include AI-produced hallucinations, not only increasing the likelihood that the bad data will be repeated, but reducing any ability for the AI model to discern good data from bad. Collapse occurs when the model is so poisoned with bad data that even superficial users find the model to be consistently wrong and useless. Effectively every query becomes an unamusing version of that game where you playfully ask for “wrong answers only.” Presumably the best way to combat that is to train the AI as you would a human student: start by giving it information sources known to be reliable, and eventually train it to discern those sources on its own. That takes more time. You can’t just dump the entire internet into it and tell it that the patterns repeated the most are most likely correct. 

P.P.S. I just repeated the above experiment in Pages, using Apple’s link to Chat GPT. It also produced hallucinated references. I just chased down the first citation in the bibliography it created. Searching for the cited article didn’t turn up anything. I did find the cited journal, went to it and searched for the cited title, got nothing. Searched for the authors, got nothing.  Finally, I browsed to find the issue supposedly containing the referenced article, and that article does not exist. So Apple gets demerits for subbing in ChatGPT in their uncharacteristic worry that they not be perceived as being “late.” This part does not fit their usual pattern, with the exception perhaps of their hastened switch to Apple Maps, based largely at first on third-party map data. In the long run, their divorce from Google maps was important, as location services was rapidly becoming a core OS function, not just a sat nav driving convenience that can adequately be left to third party apps. The race to use AI is perhaps analog, but the hopefully temporary inclusion of ChatGPT’s garbage should be as embarrassing as those early Apple Maps with bridges that went underwater, etc. 

mark fearing said:

When will the alternative X-Box store launch on the X-box?

danox said:

danvm said:

danox said:

danvm said:

programmer said:

danvm said:

And I have work with some of those workstations, and the performance is not as pathetic as you mention.  Some of them have advantages over Apple Silicon, specially when comparing the GPU. 

You say "workstations" whereas what you quoted said "laptops".  Big difference.  Apple Silicon's performance really shines in power-constrained situations.  If you can run plugged into the wall and with big heat sinks, then the Intel/AMD CPUs and the nVidia/AMD GPUs can burn copious power to deliver serious performance.  They're still inefficient in terms of compute per watt, but you don't notice as watts are cheap in such a situation.

It would be interesting to see a large scale data centre built from ARM-based machines and compared to ones build from Intel/AMD-based machines, and compare the operating costs.  Some of the big cloud vendors offer lower cost ARM-based hosts just for this reason -- they greatly reduce energy and cooling costs in the data centre.  Not Apple's focus though, so we aren't likely to see Apple Silicon based data centres (except perhaps for Apple's own, but they are typically very secretive about that).

There is a group of laptops that are considered workstations (Dell Precision, HP Z mobile workstation, Lenovo ThinkPad P-series). The quality of componentes, warranty / service and specs are different from a notebook that you buy in a consumer retailer.  Also, they are certified for ISV's like Autodesk, Bentley Software, Siemens and others. That's the reason I used the term workstation and not laptops. 

I also know the benefits of Apple Intelligence and ARM in general, especially with power efficiency.  But there are cases where some specialized applications use CUDA / Optix, and you are required to use Nvidia adapters.  In datacenters is very difference, and even more with AI.  There are even rumors of Apple dealing with Nvidia for their datacenters.

Unlikely report claims Apple is buying 250 Nvidia servers for AI

Large cloud providers also have their own AI processors (Amazon Trainium2, Azure Maia and Google Axion).  Maybe these processors have advantages over ARM and Apple Silicon for AI tasks.  My point is that ARM and Apple Silicon is not the magic CPU that will solve all problems.  It has many advantages over Intel and AMD in some tasks.  But Intel, AMD and Nvidia have some advantages over ARM / Apple too. 

At the end, It's good to have competition working for us.  

The competition from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia is commendable in theory, but Apple boasts several in-house operating systems (ecosystems) that make direct competition with them impractical. I don’t believe any of these companies will be working for Apple again. Two out of the three had their chance, and like Samsung’s (chip division), they only caused trouble for Apple.

Apple Silicon isn’t magical, but the absence of an in-house OS prevents these companies from optimizing their hardware to an operating system, putting them behind Apple. This is also why Microsoft is frantically flailing around with Qualcomm, attempting to revive its failing and unprofitable Surface computer line.

You have to consider that Apple ecosystem may have some benefits.  But at the same time, it doesn't means it's the best experience for every case.  For example, gaming is far better with Nvidia, AMD and Intel than with Apple, even with all the advantages their ecosystem have.  The same can be said in the enterprise, where Microsoft have a big advantage, a no other company comes close. 

And you when you talk about the Surface line, you have to think that Apple is not the only one competing with them.  HP, Dell and Lenovo outsell Microsoft (and even Apple) by a large margin. And these are the top three among many others. With Windows, customers have choices, not that much with Apple.  That's the reason I think you cannot make a 1:1 comparison of sales numbers between Apple vs Microsoft.  

BTW, from I have seen, the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite looks very competitive, even with Apple.  And there are rumors that Nvidia have something to announce soon.  

Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite isn’t competitive with anything Apple has done when it comes to Apple Silicon in fact, they can’t help cheating with their the benchmarks.

To make matters worse, the Snapdragon phone SOC’S are five-six years behind Apple they can barely achieve iPhone 11 Pro Speed notice the Snapdragon Samsung S24 uses an eight core SOC whereas all of the 11 Pro iPhones use only six cores, the Samsung using the Snapdragon at eight cores is barely ahead of a six year old iPhone. (Soon they will be seven generations back). Apples, only mistake was not including two more gigs of RAM in their iPhones, in short they optimize the little too much in that area.

https://browser.geekbench.com/mobile-benchmarks  Years ahead generationally.

Qualcomm has more problems than that and they don’t match Apple in anything when it comes to SOC’s. They do have better lawyers however defending their modem monopoly.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/arm-sues-qualcomm-over-its-1-4-billion-nuvia-acquisition/

Qualcomm is years off the pace that Apple sets. Snapdragon eight core vs Apple six core that’s running behind an iPhone 13 just ahead of a iPhone 12 Pro Max (a iPhone that was released five years ago by Apple). The only good news is that they are ahead of the Google Tensor which is even further behind.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M4-SoC-analysis-AMD-Intel-and-Qualcomm-currently-don-t-stand-a-chance.839332.0.html Not even in the ballpark….

Qualcomm bragged about the Snapdragon Elite and posted misleading benchmarks,.

https://www.gizmochina.com/2024/04/25/snapdragon-x-elite-misleading-benchmark/

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/qualcomm-faces-benchmark-cheating-allegations-snapdragon-x-eliteplus-benchmarks-claimed-to-be-fraudulent#xenforo-comments-3843099

https://itc.ua/en/news/not-a-competitor-to-apple-and-intel-qualcomm-is-cheating-with-snapdragon-x-chip-tests-insiders-say-manufacturers-didn-t-achieve-the-results/

Qualcomm tried to make themselves look better with a SOC that is many years behind Apple Silicon, I don’t think the new Apple C1 modem is that far back of Qualcomm current modem chips which probably means another trip to court for Apple because Qualcomm Is a bit of a cheat and a patent troll.

Not only is Apple designing first rate Apple Silicon SOC chips across the board, but the ability to have five (OS) ecosystems integrated/optimize with their Apple Silicon chips puts them far ahead of their competition only government interference in the USA, China, or the EU is where they’re going have their biggest problems going forward.

PS a hardware company (Dell, HP others) without an in-house OS isn’t competition not if you want to make the best, Qualcomm’s problem is not just Apple. It’s also Microsoft, who will never feel the sense of urgency very similar to Intel, IBM or Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois when Apple suggested, smaller faster, more energy efficient chips might be needed going into the future. Microsoft is too busy working on Recall or is it Cloudstrike?