zimmie

Also worth noting: Command-Shift-6 takes a screenshot of the Touch Bar.

Gaze tracking is critical for mass-market headset-based VR and AR. Our eyes only actually see roughly a circle ~2º across (called the fovea) with any precision. Everywhere else, we have the ability to see large patches of color, or movement, but no detail. Our brains fake all the detail we think we see outside of the fovea.

Even more interesting, when our eyes move, we go totally blind for a few milliseconds. This phenomenon is called saccadic masking. You can verify it experimentally in a mirror. No matter how hard you try, you will never be able to see your own eyes move, because they shut down while moving.

Taken together, these allow for something called foveated rendering, where the device tracks where the user's fovea is, and renders only that small patch with high detail. It then renders everything else much more coarsely. As long as the time to render a frame can be kept below the saccadic masking duration, rendering in this way is imperceptible to the user. This means it only needs to render around 3% of the screen, which would allow even a phone GPU to render VR/AR meeting today's standards for angular resolution.

This has even been done before in a series of experiments in the 70s. Subjects were presented with a block of text, which was blurred outside where their fovea was predicted to land. They had no idea this was happening.

jbdragon said:

Watch some of the other videos from Louis Rossmann, including one about Apple's T2 chip.

His video about the T2 in particular has a surprising amount of technical inaccuracy.

Among other things, he says the data is unrecoverable. The T2 is connected to one of the USB-C ports, and a data retrieval tool exists. It boots the T2 in DFU mode, formats an external drive, and copies all the data to that external drive. If the T2 itself isn't deeply faulty, the data can absolutely be recovered.

GeorgeBMac said:

zimmie said:

ravnorodom said:

Nice. Finally a MacBook that has cellular chip. I wonder why in the past years laptops in general don't have cellular built-in except mobile devices and tablets only. In today's age, we need it. I used to setup hotspot from my iPhone for my MacBook. But I couldn't now because I upgraded to unlimited cellular data and the hotspot feature is disabled from carrier. A G5 MacBook would fill that need.

Aside from those from Apple, every "business" laptop I've seen in a decade either includes a WWAN card or has a slot and antennas for one. Every single Thinkpad W, T, or X. Every Toughbook. Every Getac. It's a pretty common feature. Some even have combination WiFi/WiMAX cards, as an example.

The biggest pain of integrated WWAN, though, is the relatively short lifespan of cellular technologies compared to the lifespans of the devices carrying the cards. I have some Toughbooks from 2006 in my fleet. The firmware is locked so it will only boot with approved cards (or no card), and the only approved cards talk EvDO or 3G. I don't think anybody sells EvDO service anymore. 3G is still available in some places, but not all.

It seems that you might be able to upgrade the card in your Thinkpads.  In my experience they are not soldered in.

The cards aren't soldered, but like I said, the firmware is locked to only accept certain cards (based on the PCI ID). I have literally never seen that list of cards updated for a given computer.

The WiFi cards are the same, otherwise I would update some of the older machines to 802.11ac or ax. The machine has a card for the WiFi radio, it's replaceable, but it can only be replaced with a card the manufacturer has approved for that specific model of machine. If you put any other card in the slot, the system will refuse to boot.

There are ways to patch out that check in the firmware, but it's a huge pain, especially with Secure Boot.

ravnorodom said:

Nice. Finally a MacBook that has cellular chip. I wonder why in the past years laptops in general don't have cellular built-in except mobile devices and tablets only. In today's age, we need it. I used to setup hotspot from my iPhone for my MacBook. But I couldn't now because I upgraded to unlimited cellular data and the hotspot feature is disabled from carrier. A G5 MacBook would fill that need.

Aside from those from Apple, every "business" laptop I've seen in a decade either includes a WWAN card or has a slot and antennas for one. Every single Thinkpad W, T, or X. Every Toughbook. Every Getac. It's a pretty common feature. Some even have combination WiFi/WiMAX cards, as an example.

The biggest pain of integrated WWAN, though, is the relatively short lifespan of cellular technologies compared to the lifespans of the devices carrying the cards. I have some Toughbooks from 2006 in my fleet. The firmware is locked so it will only boot with approved cards (or no card), and the only approved cards talk EvDO or 3G. I don't think anybody sells EvDO service anymore. 3G is still available in some places, but not all.