JustSomeGuy1
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Review: Promise Pegasus R4i and J2i add massive storage to the new Mac Pro
To follow up to @billalexander 's question on my wall (WTF, who knew AI even had such a thing?), the "other articles" I mentioned are other articles posted on AI, and more specifically comments made both by me and others in response. This is the OWC card: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2And here is another 4xSSD card: https://amfeltec.com/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-m-2-ssd/This claims not to require bifurcation so will almost certainly work.At $57 this is much cheaper than the OWC and probably the Amfeltec. It requires bifurcation support, and I don't know if the nnMP supports that.
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Study upends theory that 'night mode' UIs are good for sleep patterns
Sorry, AI, but this is really a terrible article.You conflate Night Shift with Dark Mode. They're completely separate things. And even assuming this new research is correct, Dark Mode does exactly what they say you want for better sleep: Lower the total brightness of the screen.Edit: Not that I'm advocating for Dark Mode - I don't use it, and "Godofbiscuits" above provided an extremely good link (https://tidbits.com/2019/05/31/the-dark-side-of-dark-mode/) which has a lot of good data on why it's usually a bad idea. But *if* this research is correct, it in fact says that Dark Mode will be good for your sleep, directly contradicting the first sentence in this article.
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Apple's $5,999 modular Mac Pro now available to order
The pricing is very interesting, and much cheaper than I'd expected, when you look close.First of all, CPU pricing is *surprising* - the cost of the chip upgrade from 8 to 28 cores is only about $300 higher than the difference in Intel's list prices. Obviously Apple is paying less than that, but still, this is a remarkably low mark-up! Put another way, Apple's margin on the nnMP configured with 28 cores is much lower than their margin on the 8-core unit. And I don't expect many purchasers to go with the 8-core unit. So, if they're Ok with that lower margin, why price the base at $6k? It's a bit of a mystery.Secondly, SSD prices are reasonable, assuming you're willing to say that the Apple SSD performs on a par with top-grade SSDs like the Samsung 970 Pro. Those list at $300/TB, the same per-TB cost as upgrading from 2 to 4TB. Of course you can get quite good performers- maybe marginally better than Apple's but without the T2- for $150-$200/TB. Nothing stops you from buying one (or four) of those, though, sticking them on a $100 PCIe card, and dropping them into your nnMP, if you want to. All in all, Apple SSDs aren't cheap, but the added expense is way more reasonable than it was on, say, the last 15" MBP.Memory is ridiculous. But that's easy to do yourself. I would expect that many users will order memory separately - even large corporate users. Those that don't are going to get reamed, but (surprise!) by a bit less than they would be if they were buying from Dell or HP.The video cards are a big question mark. We won't know what they're worth until we start seeing a bunch of benchmarks. Apple's valuing the 580 at $400 which is high but in line with other name-brand vendors. Of course the interesting cards are all much pricier.In short, if you're willing to buy your own memory, you can get a seriously roomy nnMP for $19k: 28 cores, 4TB SSD, one dual-GPU "Pro Vega II Duo", and the default 32GB RAM. Add $900 for 6x32 (192GB). Dump the 4x8GB, or buy another two for $100 and use all six for an extra 48GB. Now you're at $20k, and your Mac has 240GB RAM. Double your GPU for another $5k, if you like.Overall this seems more than reasonable for users who actually need this power. If we lived in an Intel-only world, it'd be a smash hit at an excellent price.The one problem is AMD. They're just starting to make inroads now but in six months they'll be everywhere. And I expect Dell and HP will be selling them in their workstation product line (whereas now Dell seems to be selling them only as "servers" and I can't find them at HP at all). The 64-core EPYC 7702 crushes the Intel 28-core chip, often by a factor of 2, while costing half as much. And you can get dual-chip systems if you really want a *lot* of cores.This isn't going to make the nnMP obsolete right away - after all, Intel will still be inside a large majority of all systems, and in that class, the nnMP is a winner. But as a halo product, it won't be "the most powerful" anything. It'll be "half as powerful" or "a quarter as powerful" as top AMD single- and dual-chip workstations. That's not so great.What Apple does next will really be more interesting than this nnMP. Will they build a 2020 model? Whether AMD or Intel, will they offer something better? Or do they let this thing sit there and shrivel in the harsh light of rapid tech advances, as they did with the nMP? If the former, I think they've got a great future on the high end. And if the latter, then they're done in that market, for at least the next 10 years, and probably a lot longer. Nobody will ever trust them again.Time will tell.
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How Steve Jobs saved Apple with the online Apple Store
I have criticized your writing before and remain unhappy with it but credit where credit's due: that was a good one!AppleInsider said:Back in the 1990s, there were no bricks-and-mortar Apple Stores. You had to buyMacs through specialist dealers or through big chain stores. The chains famously employed whatever the opposite of Geniuses is, and they all pushed whichever box they got the most commission on.AppleInsider said:The new online Apple Store brought in $12 million of revenue in its first 30 days, for an average of $730,000 per day. That's three-quarters of where Dell's daily revenue had reached after its first six months.
As I've told my son: If you show your work, you might at least get partial credit.$12,000,000/30 = $400,000, not $730,000. (Online stores do not have "business" and "weekend/vacation" days, not that that calculation would have explained this error.)
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Editorial: Samsung's new Exynos 990 isn't fast enough to maintain its custom M core
auxio said:
My guess is that it's due to a couple of factors:Rayz2016 said:The next article will take a closer look at how Apple was able to sneak past larger more entrenched silicon experts at Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung while the media doubted its progress and bet that rivals would easily catch up.
Yup, I'm a lot more interested in how Apple did it, rather than how Samsung couldn't. But I guess it's a question of context.- The market for mobile devices is far larger than PCs (Intel's core market), which gave Apple a lot more money to work with. Apple bet big on mobile and it paid off
- They didn't have to compete with Intel head-on like they did in the PowerPC days. Mobile devices weren't expected to do everything PCs do. So they could start from scratch and scale up the performance over time. Unlike Intel who were still entrenched in PC CPU design (and trying to make PC CPUs more power efficient for mobile)
- They control the whole stack: from CPU to OS to app APIs. Even if Intel came up with a great new mobile CPU design, they still have to work with mobile OS creators to ensure they're making use of the new features. Same with Qualcomm. Samsung was the only one who could compete here, but they still have to work with Google to have Android take advantage of their CPU features
The first couple of factors are clearly a big part of this. Your third, however, is off-base. It's correct, and important in other contexts, but not really very relevant here. It's not like Apple's huge lead in core performance is due to their ability to win big on specialized applications that depend on holistic product design. They kick everyone's ass on basic benchmarks (SPEC2006, for example) that measure very fundamental aspects of a CPU's performance. APIs aren't relevant, and even the OS takes a back seat (or should).At the level of those benchmarks, the OS shouldn't really be a factor, having a real impact only if there's a big screwup. For example, last year's (or was it two years ago's?) Galaxy with Exynos was severely throttled by bad DVFS, in a way that the QC variant wasn't. This had a significant impact on some benchmarks. But other than that, the OS shouldn't have much impact on low-level performance measurements.Every time someone trots out the "whole stack" argument, they're missing a key point: Apple's silicon is just *that much better*. At this point, the only performance competition Apple's got are the high-end i7 and i9s from Intel, and the Zen2 Ryzen 3xxxs from AMD (I'm ignoring small-market CPU's like POWER). Neither of those, of course, comes even close in power efficiency.
