michelb76

dmitrek said:

There are no tradeoffs except for total computing speed — whole transition to Apple silicon started from Apple Dev Kit (or Dev Transition kit) where A12 Bionic was put into Mac Mini enclosure, and it was already faster than Intel macs back then.

michelb76 said:
Curious what tradeoffs will be made. Most of the 'cost' is in the profit on the base and upgrades like RAM. Does this need to compete with Chromebooks?

Well then how will they make it cheaper? The CPU will be binned as it doesn't make sense to scale this out. They can already offer the M2 Air for much less if they let go of the 30-35% margin, but why would they? So it's going to need cheaper parts, reduced ports, functionalities or else this will cannibalise the lowest offer. 8GB RAM is not going to be enough next year, so there's an expense already. the M2 is at a theoretical $999, a $799 model does not make sense. Competition(whatever that will be) is at $400-$600. I can't see Apple go below $600 and higher than $600 does not make much sense. And if they CAN make a cheaper model without too many compromises, the Air is too expensive.

Marvin said:

AppleInsider said:

The company credited strong Redmi Band 5 sales and deeper integration through HyperOS, its custom operating system. 

The fitness bands are popular as they cover most of the basics at a lower price. Apple Watch SE at $249 is a reasonable starting price but some of the fitness bands are under $100:

https://www.amazon.com/Xiaomi-Version-Display-Battery-Resistant/dp/B0D8WQ94W5 ($58)


One thing that would set Apple apart is the style options. Usually the fitness bands have basic styles like on the left below. If they had styles like on the right to make the bands look more like jewellery, more people would be inclined to go for them.

Another thing that sets Apple apart is accuracy. The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 is not accurate at all, making it a worthless trinket for fitness/health.

What's interesting is that even though I have it disabled, it still sometimes pops up in mail when I try to send an email.

I had high expectations, but my god this runs bad. 23fps on an M4 MacBook air at the low preset to 500p render target. Barely hitting 40fps on the medium preset on my M3 Max, with a lot of low fps moments. Crazy.

applesauce007 said:

Great news for the Swift community.
Apple says that open-sourcing Swift Build will encourage participation from the corporate sector, academia, and other open-source projects.
Swift's popularity should take off like a rocket for the awesome programming language that it is.

That depends on how Apple will stewart it. Many of the previous contributions and suggestions by the community have been shot down because Apple doesn't need it. It's gone from a simple, elegant language to a monstrosity since Lattner left. Some critiques: https://blog.jacobstechtavern.com/p/apple-is-killing-swift

Swift would be perfect if it wasn't dying a death by 1000 cuts thanks to the inherent conflict in its governance.

Swift is caught between two clans: the Swift Working Group™ open-source community, and the Apple corporate entity who pays most of their salaries. Both have their own incentives and their own imperfections, but you guess who has the majority influence.

Ridiculous, permanent, tech debt such as hardcoded compiler exceptions are permanently living in the compiler codebase. Even worse, half-baked concepts such as result builders are pushed through without any real discussion because Apple wants the SwiftUI syntax to look pretty.

It's an amazing language still, but I can't see it surviving as nicely in the next 10 years if Apple doesn't learn to let go.