zimmie

danvm said:

thadec said:

michelb76 said:

9secondkox2 said:

Gurman is wrong. 

Apple didn’t delay the Mac Pro two plus years in order to give us a Mac Studio with a different name. 

The new Mac Pro won’t arrive until apple is ready to blow the doors off everything else - even if that means waiting for M3 Extreme. 

The M2 just isn’t the destroyer hoped for. It’s great, but not something that will meet expectations of the delayed pro. 

M3 has been for a long time where the convergence of all the good things was headed. It may mean Apple breaks a promise, but it’s better than releasing something prematurely just because an ambitious project didn’t work out in time. 

The only way an M2 Ultra goes in a Mac Pro is if Apple developed an external-to-SOC traffic controller that mimics how their Fabric works - and then add multiple M2Ultra packages in a “modular” config. 

We don't know. It's very much possible that an 'M3 extreme' is also uneconomical.

It is not that it is "possible." It is that it is the entire case. Threadripper, Epyc, Xeon, even ARM servers benefit from a combination of economies of scale and data center customers willing (needing) to pay whatever they cost. So it makes sense for the chipmakers (chip designers?) to pay the foundries to stand up the manufacturing lines. But it doesn't make economic sense for Apple to do the same for "Extreme" SOCs to be used in Mac Pros and iMac Pros that are only going to move maybe 10,000 units a year and still need to have a starting price of around $5000. This problem didn't exist with the Mac Pro because it used Xeon CPUs that Intel sells to everybody else, allowing them to be made and sold to Apple relatively cheaply.

The original 2020 M1 merely required adding 2 cores to what was basically a pre-existing smartphone chip at a manufacturer that had already been making octacore ARM chips for Android devices for years. By contrast M2 Extreme would have required horizontal combining 4 M2 chips to make by far the largest PC chip (in surface area) in history. Please note that Intel and AMD have abandoned the horizontal thing with 3-D scaling (vertical and horizontal) AND are atomizing the CPU parts into components - AMD calls them chiplets, Intel calls them tiles - because it is less expensive to manufacture and package in a motherboard. But even there, it is only financially feasible because Intel and AMD are going to sell a lot more Xeon and Epyc CPUs than Apple will Extremes.

I still maintain that Apple should go into the ARM server market. It would require them to emulate what Microsoft did with Windows Server and come out with a bona fide server version of macOS. Not only would they make a lot of money directly, but the byproduct would mean making workstation CPUs that would otherwise need to be manufactured in very small numbers for a few niche customers financially viable. So Apple, go ahead and make a competitor to Nvidia Grace https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/08/29/details-emerge-on-nvidias-grace-arm-cpu/ except limit it to small and medium sized servers!

I'm not sure an Apple server would succeed.  They'll be competing with HP, Dell and other large server's OEM's that have been doing business with SMB and enterprises for years.  Most of those business have devices, services and applications from different vendors, and Apple is terrible integrating with other vendors.  Another thing Apple lacks is the ecosystem companies as Microsoft have.  They also would be competing with public cloud providers, considering a lot of business and enterprises are moving some or all workloads to AWS, Azure / MS 365 and GCP / Google Workspace.  

I don't think creating an additional niche product would work at all.  

AppleInsider said:

Note that Apple used aluminum key caps on the PowerBook G4, but those had regular key markings.

bloggerblog said:

It's also noteworthy to say that Apple had shone light through aluminum in past products by making the aluminum thin enough that light penetrated it. Or was it that the perforations were so small they were invisible to the naked eye?

genovelle said:

zimmie said:

bloggerblog said:

I haven't read the iMessage API documentation, but if it can be done 'legally' then Google would've jumped on that bandwagon ages ago. I'm skeptical

There is no iMessage API documentation, primarily because there is no iMessage API (at least not for writing iMessage clients). They probably reverse-engineered iMessage's traffic flow and found a way to write their own client. It wouldn't be hugely difficult. The techniques to do this (and to keep it legal) are very well understood. They're time-consuming, though, and the result could be fragile.

I doubt Apple could target this client and ban anybody using it. I also don't see them going out of their way to break it, but if a change eventually does break it, Apple definitely won't care.

Considering the keys to Apple’s iMessage encryption lives on the device in the Secure Enclave I’m curious how this would work. Unless it intercepts text messages that have too much data and makes them more accessible and iMessage like. 

InspiredCode said:

bloggerblog said:

I haven't read the iMessage API documentation, but if it can be done 'legally' then Google would've jumped on that bandwagon ages ago. I'm skeptical

There is no documentation or SDK for Apple Messages. It is probably not legal or it won't be in the future. All Apple needs to do is forbid it in their Apple ID user agreement. An open source non-commercial program could probably get away with it, but a commercial entity would probably need to get Apple's permission. 

There is only an SDK for iOS apps to embed inside of a messages chat through an extension API. That obviously wouldn't be supported by any third party chat system since it would require the full iOS operating system.

bloggerblog said:

zimmie said:

bloggerblog said:

I haven't read the iMessage API documentation, but if it can be done 'legally' then Google would've jumped on that bandwagon ages ago. I'm skeptical

There is no iMessage API documentation, primarily because there is no iMessage API (at least not for writing iMessage clients). They probably reverse-engineered iMessage's traffic flow and found a way to write their own client. It wouldn't be hugely difficult. The techniques to do this (and to keep it legal) are very well understood. They're time-consuming, though, and the result could be fragile.

I doubt Apple could target this client and ban anybody using it. I also don't see them going out of their way to break it, but if a change eventually does break it, Apple definitely won't care.

InspiredCode said:

bloggerblog said:

I haven't read the iMessage API documentation, but if it can be done 'legally' then Google would've jumped on that bandwagon ages ago. I'm skeptical

There is no documentation or SDK for Apple Messages. It is probably not legal or it won't be in the future. All Apple needs to do is forbid it in their Apple ID user agreement. An open source non-commercial program could probably get away with it, but a commercial entity would probably need to get Apple's permission. 

There is only an SDK for iOS apps to embed inside of a messages chat through an extension API. That obviously wouldn't be supported by any third party chat system since it would require the full iOS operating system.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/messages

bloggerblog said:

I haven't read the iMessage API documentation, but if it can be done 'legally' then Google would've jumped on that bandwagon ages ago. I'm skeptical

skippingrock said:

jayweiss said:

Expect a new subscription for Alexa services which don’t generate income. Things like turning lights on and off.

A prepaid paid per switch. 

“Sorry you don’t have enough funds on your account to turn off the switch.”