JustSomeGuy1
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Editorial: After taking the premium tier, HomePod will expand in markets Amazon and Google...
As someone who has owned dozens of Apple products since his first Apple II (the one with the crappy gold power supply, even, and that needed the shift-key mod), and expects to buy many more, I still have to say: The HomePod, for me, is a piece of $hit. It adds so much negative value to my life that mine is unplugged and back in its box.As a speaker, it's quite good. But I have a good stereo already and I didn't want or need to replace it. The HomePod went into my office to be a speaker for my Mac, for music, etc. And there, it's an incredible fiasco.The worst part of it is that Siri is incredible: She hears everything and does nothing. For example, if I say "Siri, call my brother", my phone hears it... and then passes it to the damn HomePod, which tells me it can't make the call. That's just the worst stupidity ever. Someone actually decided to break things on purpose, to make that happen. Now originally, making calls was a "coming soon" feature. I didn't even want it, I was happy with my iPhone. But no, they screwed it all up. And then... they implemented the feature, but it's so buggy it can't figure out that my phone is on the same AppleID, and it *still* doesn't work... but it still steals the request from the iPhone.And then, as I'm going out I like to say "hey siri, show me the weather". That language should make it obvious I want it on the screen, but no, the HomePod insists on fielding that one too. Again, exactly what I *don't* want. And of course if I add "on my phone" siri parses that... but ignores it (same for calls). Worst of all, if I do this in the living room, so far from my office I can't even hear the HomePod... sometimes it'll *still* take the request.The Siri implementation, particularly its interaction with other Siris, is a massive failure. If I ran that project I'd fire the engineers responsible for that aspect of the product. And it completely overshadows all the good aspects of the product.I'm sure that there are many people out there happy with their HomePod. Either because some bugs aren't affecting them, or their use cases are different enough from mine that they have a different experience. That's fine, and I'm glad they're happy. But the HomePod is very far from being another iPhone (or even another Apple Watch). It's massively flawed, and so far there's no indication that Apple even understands this.
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Apple's iOS Contacts app claimed to be vulnerable to SQLite hack
9secondkox2 said:So... iOS is not vulnerable to this at all.
Someone needs to have access to the device and the ability to install unapproved software - in other words, jailbroken.That may be true. But also it may not. I would hope that AppleInsider would have specifically mentioned the requirement for a jailbreak, if it existed, rather than just the requirement that the device be unlocked.My guess is that you do NOT need to jailbreak, because they specifically talk about how Apps need to be signed, but the stuff that they're messing with does not.But that's just a guess. We just don't have enough info about this issue yet. And again, this doesn't help the Mac at all.
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Editorial: Apple's move to ARM is possible because most users want power more than compati...
melgross said:It’s a nice, fairly long article. It be]rings up a number of things that are correct. But, I still believe moving to Apple’s ARM chips is more difficult that some people think.
firstly, no, the ‘a serir]es still has a long way to go before it can compete with AND and Intel at the higher levels, with no guarantee that it ever will. That’s all speculation. Are we going to see a 6 core chip? An 8 core chip? These will be needed to compete on the higher laptop level. 16GB RAM? 64GB RAM? Same thing.
convincing developers, particularly those with very large, high performance software to go native ARM? And, yes, that will be needed.
if Apple does begin this process, it will be a very difficult one.Not because of hardware performance. You're quite mistaken about this. The A series *already* competes quite well with AMD's and Intel's mid/upper-range chips.The current iPad Pro already has an 8-core chip, and every current iPhone has a 6-core chip. The fact that four of the cores in each case is a lower-power core is irrelevant - regardless of power, a core still requires the same services from the bus (or mesh, or whatever) servicing it. Also, supporting large amounts of RAM is trivial, not a challenge at all.I suggest you re-read (I'm sure you've seen it already) this coverage of the A12 chip: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4And here's a bit more on the A12X: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13661/the-2018-apple-ipad-pro-11-inch-review/4Those two are the best articles I've seen covering the A12 generation. Here's a quote from the last paragraph of the second:"What is quite astonishing, is just how close Apple’s A11 and A12 are to current desktop CPUs. [...] we see that the A12 outperforms a moderately-clocked Skylake CPU in single-threaded performance. [...] we’re now talking about very small margins until Apple’s mobile SoCs outperform the fastest desktop CPUs in terms of ST performance."
Moving to ARM isn't trivial. But raw performance isn't going to be a significant issue, unless you're actually trying to run Intel code in emulation. And not even then, unless it's really CPU-intensive.
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Editorial: Apple's move to ARM is possible because most users want power more than compati...
seanismorris said:[...]
I’m also looking forward to a ARM based MacBook, but performance might be a bigger headache than straight speed tests suggest. Qualcomm and Microsoft have put considerable effort into their ARM offering, but performance has been terrible. Apple has done a lot of tinkering to optimize ARM and iOS and performance is impressive, but it also isn’t designed to multitask (they do have clever workarounds). A ARM processor in a MacBook is going need to excel at multitasking. This might be a much bigger problem/challenge than Apple fans are thinking, it might be a fundamental limitation of ARM that throwing additional cores/memory at the problem doesn’t fix. We’ll see...Your claim is fantastical nonsense. "Not designed to multitask"? IOS runs dozens of simultaneous tasks all the time. The kernel is designed from the ground up for multitasking. Qualcomm's problem was that they were more than two years behind Apple in terms of hardware performance, until the 855 generation, which has "leapfrogged" to only ~1.5 years behind Apple (and is not, AFAIK, in any windows-running devices).There is no multitasking issue in ARM's fundamental design. The notion is just silly. There are challenges in a transition to ARM (which Apple is clearly taking steps to mitigate, right now). Your concern, however, is not one of them.
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Apple is using a custom connector for the SSD in the new Mac Pro
This was touched on in their "platform" keynote (the session after the big one). It's confirmed. But I don't have details. It's exciting though, and long overdue in principle, though they haven't had the technology (APFS with flexible volume sizing) to manage it until now. If they're not using snapshots, they should, and probably will soon enough.elijahg said:
That's interesting, I wonder if they're doing that so they can use APFS snapshots to revert the OS if there's a problem. Is this documented online or did you discover it through the developer beta?rezwits said:The way Catalina installs with the OS on one Drive and the User + Apps on a different "Drive", I think 256GB should be enough, although people are going to HAVE to setup external storage (or the internal carriage), with whatever drives they want/can... but I am looking for the command line / tools that help with this... LOL
