anonconformist

randominternetperson said:

Honest question (not snark): what tasks require/make use of 256 gig of RAM?  Video editing I assume.  Anything else?  Massive ML projects?

Ray tracing (computer animation where it’s procedurally-driven) is an example where a beautiful 5k display, maximum RAM and CPU capability is never enough.

it’s a task that a single frame takes a huge amount of time to render, and you’ve got thousands of them, while also invariably seeing “oops, doesn’t look as good as hoped!” Pops up.  It parallelizes wonderfully if you’ve got the resources.

There are other things that can readily use such resources, such as doing MMO level video game design and testing/development for all the assets in a database that’s ideally kept in RAM because time is money, and huge displays make it easier to see all the editing controls along the edges while seeing what the game would look like in 4k, as an example.

Software development on such a system is nice, as I found with my 5k iMac I can look at about 750 lines of code at once (several columns) which can come in handy.  Most software development won’t be sped up by having that much RAM, though, as much as having an SSD and more CPU cores for builds, but using some debugging tools can result in huge amounts of captured telemetry to analyze.

saniat said:

When will AppleInsider deal with the safety issue of Face ID?  Does everyone really believe that constant facial scanning with a low power laser, over months and years, is perfectly safe for vision?   It's never been done before.  The eye's retina and other structures are very sensitive to light.  Damage to the eye is not "all or nothing".  Constant exposure to a low level laser may cause cumulative damage.  I've seen zero discusions about the safety of Face ID technology.  Is the safety issue of no interest to anyone?  Really?

I predict the answer is never, because there are no low-powered lasers in use, just projecting infrared.  That's not what lasers do, and that's not focused like a laser (look up what a laser actually is...) and infrared is... heat radiation.  It's like looking into a little bit of heat.

The eMMC models I would avoid outright: eMMC is slow.

64 GB isn’t optimal, but is workable, if you don’t have great storage needs for applications.  I’d still recommend getting more, and SSD, of course.

The RAM question isn’t as big of an issue as people think, as long as you’re not using the slower eMMC, because swap works well and fast on an SSD.

There’s always room to desire a faster CPU, but if you need a faster Windows machine, it’s cheaper to get a faster Windows laptop than to get a Windows tablet, because as a general rule, smaller things with the same speed/capacity cost more than the larger things.  For regular Office use, a faster CPU is wasted: MS Office is more than efficient enough that anyone that’d have a reason to go for a cheap tablet would ever care.

Where a small Windows tablet undeniably comes up short, however, is the relative dearth (at this time) of software properly designed to work on a small tablet, because most Windows software is designed with mouse usage in mind, and a majority of the software has come to expect a lot of screen real estate, so if you use traditional Windows desktop software on this (certainly possible with Windows 10 Pro, at least: I haven’t yet taken time to verify if any artificial restrictions for desktop software is involved with the non-pro Windows 10 SKU, and I’d still want to verify the Pro version isn’t stuck using Windows Store applications only).  Using Win32 software (not UWP applications from the store) that’s not explicitly designed for touch is an unpleasant thing in practice for usability.

I’d love to see this be very successful for a couple of reasons:

1. I’m an iOS developer outside of my regular day job, and I’d love to see Apple be forced to compete at maximum capacity towards the goal of a better iOS platform to develop for...
2. I work there!  In theory, the more profitable this is, the more secure is my employment and the better my overall income is.

ylon said:

From a technical side and OS design standpoint, this is not necessary. The real reason for this is to push their agenda towards the new hardware. They are flirting with producing a non-Intel platform and this is designed to help make this a cleaner transition. Overall it's very disappointing to see this kind of action from Apple without being both more forthright or offering more options for its users. They can continue to offer uncompromised support even more simply than they did with PowerPC support as they previously did for a longer period of time since it's actually part of the hardware, especially for the "legacy" (ha ha) systems that will be around for many, many years to come.

Let's not even address your tinfoil hat accusations that others have already addressed, and let's keep with the technical side and OS design standpoint.  I wade around in Windows OS code on a regular basis for my role where I work, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that dealing with both 32-bit and 64-bit applications in a mixed environment in the OS adds lots of complications to accomplish, and plenty of room for bugs to creep into the mix when thunking between 32 and 64 bits, as the kernel will be running in the opposite bitness for at least one of them, and things can literally get lost in the conversion.

It also has an absolute performance cost to run a combination of both 32 and 64-bit applications, in CPU cache, as well as RAM in general: supporting 32-bit at the same time requires a significant amount of code that's executed and thus also binary files that exacts a price.

Apple isn't an enterprise-focused company, but rather more of a consumer/home user-focused company, while Microsoft is the opposite.  They have their advantages and disadvantages, and Windows carries over all kinds of compatibility shims for the sake of backwards compatibility over a very long period of time, because that's what Enterprise demands, and that's the price of doing business.  It's a major cost to make sure that third-party applications that depend on past behavior (documented and not) don't break, leaving a lot of unhappy users.  This holds back the development of Windows, and keeps it from being as lean as it might otherwise be: there's a LOT of deprecated stuff in Windows that hasn't been removed, that really should be, because it has been replaced with something better, but Microsoft caters to the enterprise and that's where they make the bulk of their money, so... Windows has a huge amount of inertia to change.

GeorgeBMac said:

I'm glad to see the iPad go to Bluetooth connections for the external keyboard.   That smart connector was a throwback to the 90's -- I never understood why they didn't just make it a PS2 connection.

Go to it?

it’s not remotely new for the iPad to use Bluetooth keyboards. I didn’t try it with my first generation iPad, but my iPad Mini first gen and both my newer iPads have always worked fine with Bluetooth keyboards: at a minimum, the Bluetooth keyboard that came with my 2014 retina iMac (I had no need for a Bluetooth keyboard earlier, and frankly, it’s not worth the bother to have a wireless keyboard you need to worry about batteries in a desktop) works great and makes it easy to type as fast on even the first gen iPad Mini as the iMac.