Spencer314

MisterKit said:

So could a developer have a free app-store app gutted of any real useful features, direct the user to a developer's site to basically sell them what makes the app become the app, and sidestep any fees from Apple, all the while using Apple's platform to distribute their app?

It certainly looks like it. And apparently Apple can't even demand that the developer make clear that Apple isn't doing the payment clearing to ensure there is no cheating. If this is the case, as it appears to be, the previous rulings in Apple's favor are essentially meaningless, and Apple's application services revenue model has been essentially blown to smithereens and then had the blown up bits run through an atomizer, and the resulting atoms then dumped into a black hole. They were certainly overcharging, as Apple does with most things, but the protected Apple App ecosystem is (was?) itself a good thing for the most part, even if Apple had taken it to an extreme. 

Where exactly do things go from here? 

So, only pay the M3 Ultra if you need a lot of GPU performance, or a lot more RAM than you can attach to an M4 Max (or for some reason need double the displays). The Ultra does so far seem to be most underwhelming part of the Apple Silicon family. 

At least one company has publicly pushed back. The fact that there isn't more of this is so ridiculously sad, and frightening. 

Also, DEI is an extremely broad concept. Being absolutely and utterly against it means ... what exactly? That it should be illegal to not use nepotism for hiring or to look outside of the group of people who look just like you? Does it mean that pay and promotions should be based purely on manager biases or who has the loudest testosterone driven demands for more money and a better job title? Does it literally mean being exclusionary? 

It would be one thing if people were complaining about aspects of DEI that companies get wrong, like if they really were genuinely shutting out stellarly capable white guys in favor of filling organizations with genuinely incompetent trans Inuit drag queens (presuming this ever happens), but if there is a coherent description of absolutist anti-DEI "thinking" that doesn't make clear that its most influential "thinkers" are just sexist racist nepotists, I have yet to see evidence of it. 

The fact that Google hasn't fixed these kinds of things is a serious issue. It also doesn't seem to care much about misrepresentation more broadly. When searching for "Covered California" (the California ACA exchange health plans) the first three that pop up are third party brokers who present themselves as if they are actually covered california, and who often do a poor job of correctly leading people through getting a Covered California health plan or sometimes sign them up for mediocre or even bogus plans, whereas the actual Covered California is pretty straightforward and does not misrepresent health plans or eligibility. 

I guess this could be fixed by the state of California itself better regulating what Google presents, but it's still sad that the profit motive so drives Google to allow or even encourage these misrepresentations. 

According to this page:

https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores

the M2 Ultra still beats the M4 Max in Cinebench in multicore performance, though it isn't exactly clear where that result came from, and the M2 Ultra wasn't ahead by that much. 

The M2 Ultra does have quite a bit more total memory bandwidth, but half of that memory has to shuttle between the two halves of the Ultra, so it might end up being worse if memory vs cores for the running threads isn't carefully managed. Maybe Cinebench is better tuned for non-uniform memory access than Geekbench? Or maybe the submitted benchmark numbers are bogus (though the M4 Max benchmarks also don't come from a verified source).