zimmie

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zimmie
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  • Tim Cook says AR & VR will be revolutionary, but the public will need education

    zimmiezimmie
    DAalseth said:
    I’ll agree with that. As of right now I have no use for VR, and having used a bit of AR, I don’t see why it would be essential in every day use, like the iPhone has become. Maybe there is a use case, maybe it will unfold like that, but I’m not seeing it yet. (Pun intended).
    Depends on what you mean by "AR". When interpreted more like "pervasive systems which improve your experience of reality" rather than as specifically visual overlays, there's a lot of use. The rhythmic thumping an Apple Watch does to indicate a left turn or right turn, for example. Adaptive transparency mode on noise-cancelling AirPods is technically mediated reality because it can subtract, but very few people use that term anymore.

    Visual AR is much less interesting to me than tactile and auditory AR.
    FileMakerFellerbloggerblogAndy.Hardwakewatto_cobra

  • Apple Watch Ultra is compatible with 45mm bands

    zimmiezimmie
    The bands are less interesting to me than something else in that photo which wasn't discussed in the presentation: there are four screws on the bottom. Past Apple Watches have been built with the sensor package on the bottom, then the SiP, then the Taptic Engine and battery, then the display on the top. With the antenna gaps around the screen, they may have moved the SiP in the Ultra to be up next to the screen. If the screws really do secure the sensor package to the watch body, that could allow for easy battery replacements.

    I look forward to seeing the teardown.
    watto_cobra

  • Xcode Cloud subscriptions now available for developers

    zimmiezimmie
    crowley said:
    The article didn't mention it, but the costs are:
    25 compute hours/month 
    Free (through December 2023, then US$14.99 per month if you choose to subscribe at that time.)

    100 compute hours/month
    US$49.99/month 

    250 compute hours/month
    US$99.99/month 

    1000 compute hours/month 
    US$399.99/month
    From: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

    I'm not sure why this is particularly useful unless it is substantially faster than on a local machine, and Apple don't seem to be making any claims about that.
    It's not so much that it's faster, though it is. It's more that it lets you run your tests somewhere else without tying up your local machine for 20+ minutes. It's faster because it can run many tests in parallel. An M1 MacBook Air, for example, doesn't really have the RAM to run tests in an iPhone simulator and iPad simulator and Watch simulator all at the same time, so you have to run them serially.
    blastdoor said:
    tht said:
    blastdoor said:
    How does the work completed in a “compute hour” compare to, say, an hour of M1?
    It would depend on the CPUs Xcode cloud is using, which could just be servers services from Amazon, Google or Microsoft. Could be Xeons, could racks of Mac mini's, could be Epyc. Maybe they are buying from MacStadium or set it up with their own hardware. Hopefully someone will spill the beans.

    25 hrs goes buy really really fast. It's basically a number to try out the service.
    Yup -- it could be almost anything, which is why I asked. 

    Sounds like nobody here knows, either. 
    Right now, Xcode Cloud VMs are amd64. The hardware identifier of the VMs is MacVM1,1. Each VM has four cores, 16 GB of RAM, and a framebuffer connected to a virtual 1080p display. It isn't yet known which specific processors are used, but it's likely to be Xeon Ws in rackmount Mac Pros.
    auxioblastdoordewmeFileMakerFellerthtwatto_cobra

  • Apple Watch ECG could be a good early heart attack detection system

    zimmiezimmie
    JP234 said:
    Apple tells you that the Apple Watch ECG cannot detect a heart attack right on the app.
    No, they tell you they can't diagnose a heart attack. You can detect most heart attacks with a single-lead ECG, but you can't tell what specifically is blocked, and other things can cause the same changes in lead I which a heart attack causes. It's enough to tell something is wrong, but not exactly what.

    Detect: Something is wrong.
    Diagnose: This is what is wrong.
    mikethemartian said:
    A heart attack or an arrhythmia? My understanding is that a heart attack specifically refers to a blockage and that an echocardiogram (not electrocardiogram) is specifically needed to diagnose that.
    An electrocardiogram can be used to diagnose most infarctions. Most walls of the heart are fed almost exclusively by one artery each, so when that artery is blocked, you get different results in V1 through V6 which show that wall not contracting properly. That's enough to diagnose a blockage in a particular cardiac artery. Cardiac echos are more often used to diagnose blood issues like physical flaws in the septa or valves, but they are sometimes used to confirm infarction.
    JP234watto_cobrabestkeptsecretviclauyycsireofsethjony0fastasleep

  • The cheesegrater Mac Pro could still be the best Mac ever made

    zimmiezimmie
    zimmie said:
    I have a macpro4,1 with updated firmware making it a 5,1. Two six-core Xeons, 96 GB of RAM, terabytes of SSD space. It's a beast of a machine, and I like it a lot. I wouldn't call it the best Mac Apple has ever made, though. The Mac Studio is better, hands-down.

    It's surprisingly hard to add Thunderbolt to a classic Mac Pro. It will work ... as long as you boot into Windows first, and don't hot-plug anything. Oh, and it doesn't do USB over the port, which is important for me. I use a 21.5" Ultrafine 4K which accepts DisplayPort over USB-C but needs the single USB 2 channel for brightness control, audio, and so on.

    The firmware doesn't support booting from an NVMe drive. Sure, you can boot from a thumb drive or a small SATA SSD then chainload to an NVMe drive, but something non-NVMe must be in the boot path.

    The power distribution is pretty weird. The power supply has plenty of headroom, but you only get two aux power connectors for GPUs, and they have a weird capacity (120W each, rather than the more common 75W or 150W each). Some GPUs (e.g, the Radeon RX Vega 64) draw exclusively from the aux power connectors, which can cause the system to brown out, even though it has plenty of power budget left (the 75W allocated to the slot isn't used). Wouldn't be safe to draw more over the two aux connectors, which is why there should have been more than two.

    It's also huge. If you haven't seen one in person, it's almost certainly bigger than you expect. And heavy. And the "handles" have fairly sharp edges, which make it unpleasant to move around on a regular basis.

    There are undeniably a lot of tradeoffs with the old Mac Pro. They're worth it for me, but they're not for everybody.
    Problem with the Studio Ultra is that it is limited to 128GB of RAM for anyone who needs memory intensive applications.
    The macpro4,1 and macpro5,1 are also officially limited to 64 GB of RAM.

    It was learned a few years ago that they can work with 16 GB DDR3 DIMMs and certain (but not all!) 32 GB DDR3 DIMMs. It's possible to get a dual-socket system to 256 GB if you're willing to try a few DIMM varieties and return ones which don't work. I would take the Mac Studio's vastly faster CPU, GPU, memory bus, and storage over the potential to get twice the RAM, though. Even swapping, it will be faster for any workload I've seen. And quieter, and it will draw vastly less power.

    The macpro7,1 (2019, with Xeon W and up to 1.5 TB of RAM) is a totally different beast. It's not the one this article is saying is the best Mac ever made.
    watto_cobraFileMakerFeller