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DAalseth said:

22july2013 said:

DAalseth said:

22july2013 said:

InspiredCode said:

Apple takes privacy seriously, so hopefully they fix this. App review should also be looking for data leaks from VPN apps if it really offers the consumer protections Apple says it does.

What kind of leaks are you talking about here? VPNs have many vulnerabilities, not just apps which leak data. Do you really trust a single third party to handle all your private data? Do you even know which national governments have the right to issue warrants to get data from the VPN company's software to provide information from their users? I don't trust VPNs very much which is why I prefer using Apple's Private Relay, which addresses some of those vulnerabilities.

So if you don’t trust VPNs that’s fine. Personally I’ll take a VPN with a good reputation, over a service from Apple. Eggs in one basket issue you know. Besides from what I’ve read Apple’s service is a bit limited.

You are misusing the "eggs in one basket" metaphor. By using a VPN you are putting all your trust in a single company, the VPN company, which can see all your traffic. but if you use Apple Private Relay, no single company, not even Apple, gets to see all your traffic.

So indeed any VPN user is "putting all their eggs in one basket", while any user of Apple Private Relay is making sure that no single company can read all your data.

Also, you called it "a service from Apple." I think you don't understand how Apple Private Relay works. There's a different company involved which Apple does not control, and that company may be different depending on where you live. It's a service provided by two separate companies.

Nowhere could I find a reference to it being a separate company from Apple. Got a citation?
It only works with Safari. I like to use DuckDuckGo’s browser. APR does nothing to protect that data.
It does not let you select a country to route through. Subverting geofencing aside, I prefer to not go through FiveEyes countries. That isn’t possible with APR.
It is built into iCloud, which is fine, but that gets back to the eggs in one basket thing. It’s an Apple service, running on Apple iCloud, on an Apple device, that only works with Apple’s browser. 
I might enable APR for general use. But I’m going to keep my VPN around as well. One based outside the US.

EDIT: I just looked and on my iPad which just got the latest iPadOS update today it is STILL listed as BETA software. I’m not going to trust it with anything until it’s out of BETA.

The document explaining iCloud Private Relay is only 11 pages, most of which are under half text.
 
Private Relay has two layers. The first is run by Apple everywhere. It handles making sure the user is authorized, but has no way to see where the user is going. The second layer is run by several "third-party partners" in each facility. It can see where the traffic is going, but it has no ability to see the user's Apple ID, source IP, or other identifying information. The phone does client-anonymous QUIC to the second layer, then sends that inside client-authenticated QUIC to the Apple layer.

It covers all DNS requests made through the system DNS resolver, as well as all HTTP traffic made through system APIs. All browsers on iOS are Safari skins, so all HTTP traffic from any browser on iOS can be covered by Private Relay. It doesn't do anything with HTTPS traffic currently.

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.

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.

fastasleep said:

NotoriousDEV said:

Beat me to it. The Legend lives. Relative to electronics, car assembly is orders of magnitude more complex. I just don’t see Apple getting in on their own. Much more likely to partner with legacy car makers, licensing Apple-developed systems. 

"We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."

There are meaningful differences between the industries. Most importantly, a phone, tablet, or desktop computer generally doesn't pose a risk to life when something goes wrong. The assembly methods and techniques also don't pose nearly as much of a risk to the workers. It's extremely easy to get grievously injured on a car production line.

The problems are not insurmountable, but building a safety culture is a lot harder than designing their own processors. It takes time and a lot of blood to get right.

blastdoor said:

Perhaps this already exists and I'm just not aware of it (please enlighten me, somebody!), but I'd love to see more discussion, documentation, tools, APIs, etc focused on making the purported advantages of the CPU and GPU sharing the same memory space as broadly and easily accessible as possible. 

They have had a few sessions on optimizing computations with Metal and unified memory. The one I specifically remember was Create image processing apps powered by Apple Silicon.

They could do more, sure, but a lot of the advantages are only relevant to certain types of program. Even then, only a small subset of the programmers who write what users perceive as that type of program need to care. For example, the people writing the Unity 3D engine would need to care about unified memory, but people writing games using Unity mostly would not.