JustSomeGuy1

I'm not a fan of the new KB but I'm not here to talk about that. I'm curious about the post I quoted.

This guy is a liar, obviously. The 2015 keyboard wasn't a butterfly. If he really owned those machines he'd be able to tell the difference. Also, he has a post count of 1. So, my conclusion is that he's a troll, either paid or not.

What I'm curious about is: If he's paid, then who's paying him, and what benefit do they think they get? And if he's not, what could possibly prompt him to show up and waste his time?

A few points people (and AI) have missed:

1) Intel isn't the only foundry that's supply-constrained. TSMC has issues too, though not as bad as Intel's at the moment. Of course, 7mn uptake is growing, and possibly faster than TSMC can improve yield and otherwise add capacity, so thy may get more constrained as 2019 goes by. Long-term, Apple may have to pay for its own plant (even if it's owned/operated by TSMC). And TSMC will likely have the whip hand on any such negotiations. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

2) Apple's ARM design is *already* able to compete with Intel's best consumer chip (the 8-core i9-9900k - I'm not talking about the ridiculous X-series Xeons-in-disguise). I wrote about this once before, but in short, the iPad Pro shows that Apple's uncore and interconnect capabilities are superior to Intel's, at least for up to 8 cores. So they could easily put eight of their high-performance cores into an "A12XX" and have something competitive with the i9. This wouldn't even be a major job. Now, there are still questions to be asked: How much headroom do they have for clocks at higher power? Pipeline length may be too short to enable 4GHz, or even 3.5, and there are other less obvious issues as well. Can the memory interface and caches grow organically without a major redesign? Could they scale to even more cores (probably not)? Etc. So, we don't know if Apple can beat the current i9 with their existing design, but we do know it's in the right ballpark.

3) For the guy worried about driver support - a good emulator will make that irrelevant. There are virtually no devices out there for which emulation overhead is a problem. I can imagine a latency issue for sound devices but it's highly unlikely. Of course time will tell. Note that Apple did this successfully twice already.

4) I used to think the notion of ARM replacing Intel in Macs was ridiculous. But Apple's execution over the last few years - and especially the ridiculous multicore performance and efficiency they pulled off in the A12X - has shown that that's inevitable. As long as their team keeps executing, that'll be a good thing.

There's actually an interesting historical parallel here. In the old days, "server" CPUs (actually mini/mainframe, servers were just big PCs and not relevant) defined the state of the art and provided the most performance (all the once-great RISC families: Sparc, MIPS, Alpha, etc., and various mainframe/supercomputers). But as volume in the PC business grew, Intel kept pushing its CPUs forward, and then applying those lessons learned to its server chips. Even though server ship development lagged consumer processors by 1-2 years, those advances eventually pulled Intel Xeons ahead of all the other architectures (excepting POWER, because IBM is stubborn and has lots of talent).

And now, we're seeing the same thing: Mobile chip development has the advantage in volume, and so the lessons being learned there will have repercussions on the desktop processor market. Only now the volume winner (at least in high-performance mobile) is Apple (and to some extent TSMC), and the loser is likely to be Intel.

The big question is, will Apple's designs ever migrate up to the server level? I don't see a natural path for that right now, but they may be leaving a LOT of money on the table. Well, a lot for any company that's not Apple. For Apple, it may be more distraction than money. But it's at least plausible that at some point, if their big-core designs continue to dominate the field (and they *really* dominate right now), some server-play ARM vendor (like Cavium/Marvell, Ampere, etc.) might license the core design (if nothing else) to build 64+ core chips.

In the oldish days of my PowerBook G4 (not the old days of my WallStreet G3, or *really* old days of my PB170), heat was a real problem. I found a fairly light (1-2 lbs?) metal board in my kitchen, ostensibly to be used to defrost meat faster than just leaving it in the sink. It worked great as a heat sink and heat spreader, with the PB sitting right on top of it. Made it OK to use in my lap (it could really be uncomfortable directly against skin or light clothes). If I didn't want to deal with a loud fan, and I knew I was going to be doing something heavy-duty, I could freeze it first. It would help keep the Mac cool for an hour or two. Something like that might work today too.

BTW, I have complained a couple of times about badly-written or underinformative articles here, so it's only fair to compliment this one as it is quite the opposite.

"That is roughly a 25-percent single-core gain and almost 50-percent multi-core."

I hate to say it, but the HomePod is *shit*. A truly embarrassingly bad product. And that is despite great sound quality. It may work well for some, and good for them, but due to fundamental design failures, it adds negative value to my experience of the Apple ecosystem.

I can no longer use Siri with my phone at home. And that is appalling. It would be trivially easy to fix this - and they've already done most of the hard work! The phone and the HomePod talk to each other, to make sure only one answers me. But it's always the homepod, despite it being obviously not the right choice. For example, if I say "Hey Siri, show me the weather", that obviously refers to the device with the damn screen! Or I say "Call xxx on my phone", it recognizes the words... and then calls on the homepod. (And then fails, but that's another story of error and shame.) When I'm two rooms away from the damn homepod, it intercepts my commands. Seriously? Trivially comparing the volume between the two devices would produce an obvious winner, but no...

Great hardware, but the software is so full of fail it feels like a MicroSoft product from the 1990s or 2000s. Broken by design, over and over again. And that's before we talk about all the stuff it should have but doesn't (which I won't, because others have said it already, many times over).