Marvin

SennaSempre said:

Upon closer inspection I see that one of these PCB's has a darker discoloration on some of the metal mounting points on the PCB. I took side-by-side pics of them here.

So I'm guessing that one of these boards had the water affect it more than the other and maybe has shorted out causing this darker burn-looking discoloration, I don't know, just speculating.

But since this is RAID 0 then I would have to replace this 1 board and reinstall it back into the original chassis and hope it starts up because I won't be able to get the to spin individually because of the RAID 0 configuration.

But I may need to replace the BIOS chip if the firmware is different. I don't know if it is just a clamp or if that chip is soldered because then I would have to bring the old and new PCB to a shop just to do that. Am I correct in any of this perhaps?

Check if the platters spin freely too, there's a video below where they recover a drive by swapping the platters using tape to maintain the alignment and they show the bearings are seized up in the broken drive (16:00). There would be no point replacing the board or heads if it's seized up:



Every part of the repair is delicate and a number of things can be wrong with the drive. At least the storage is cheap enough to buy equivalent models:

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Green-Desktop/dp/B004RORMF6/

In theory you could buy the equivalent drives and replace the parts or swap the platters over as long as the repair is done very carefully.

tht said:

I haven’t seen it demonstrated, I think. Can 2D display views overlap?

The panels can overlap, it's shown in the following video (7:40, 4:20):

moiety said:

Or you can download UTM for free:

https://mac.getutm.app/

And make your own Windows 11 ISO for free:

https://osdump.com/

It's also possible to install the Windows ISO that Parallels downloads in UTM and the free VMWare Fusion Player, it's in ~/Library/Parallels/Downloads.

https://customerconnect.vmware.com/en/evalcenter?p=fusion-player-personal-13

UTM and VMWare allow full use of the CPU cores, while entry-level Parallels is limited to 4-cores.

However, the GPU drivers in VMWare and UTM are really bad compared to Parallels. UTM is practically unusable for 3D, VMWare is usable but less than half the performance of Parallels.

https://youtu.be/Mqn1yoV_OW4?t=678 (VMWare)

22july2013 said:

I've always been worried that Microsoft will terminate sales of World of Warcraft for MacOS. But this would be a reasonable way to keep it running on Macs. I see that WoW has been available for years already on Windows for ARM. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EY3mTD-VuU which has only 551 views after 1 year.) Could someone please test the frame rate of WoW running on Windows 11 for ARM on an M3 iMac using Parallels at full screen resolution?

Native M1 performance is ~40FPS for 1080p Ultra:

https://www.macgamerhq.com/apple-m1/world-of-warcraft-m1-mac/

5K is 7x the pixels of 1080p.

M1 Max, which is 3x M3 can manage 4K Ultra at 60-70FPS. 5K is ~80% more than 4K. M3 iMac should only run 5K Ultra ~20FPS natively. M1 iMac shown in the video below. At 18:20, it says native 5K is ~20FPS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhcJzKCcpMQ

In Parallels, that can drop to 10-15FPS. If it was M1 Max, it might be ok as it's 3x faster.

I doubt Microsoft will drop native support. In general, buy Pro M-series or higher for decent gaming performance.

harrykatsaros said:

How does Sweeney keep his job at this point? The losses as a result of removing Fortnite from iOS have got to be in the billions of dollars by now, in addition to the millions in legal fees; and it was all for nought. Surely his one man crusade will not be looked upon kindly by his board and investors. 

Sweeney owns the controlling shares and the other big investor in Epic is Tencent, which owns 40%. Tencent wants this as much as Sweeney.

China blocks the Google store and services and Asian app stores take over. Tencent is 4 on the following page:

https://appinchina.co/blog/the-top-15-app-stores-in-china/

Tencent doesn't like revenue sharing, they'd rather be the official iOS app store in Asia and take all the revenue:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencent-games-removed-huawei-app-store-over-revenue-dispute-source-2021-01-01/

They make some of the highest grossing games on iOS and currently have to share revenue with Apple:

https://gurugamer.com/mobile-games/tencent-games-list-16486

China is a big market for apps, iOS alone is probably worth $10b+.

macxpress said:

Now if Apple can expand this type of thing to the Mac with AAA games that would be great. It now has a great silicon platform to do great things with games regardless of what Apple device you have. It's gonna be difficult but with a lot of work it's doable. 

This just needs money to start out. Microsoft has their XBox Game Pass, which they spend $1b/year on:

https://www.purexbox.com/news/2023/12/microsoft-spends-over-a-billion-dollars-a-year-bringing-content-to-xbox-game-pass

They make around $3b/year from the subscriptions (30 million subs @ $10/month - this is across console too).

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/xbox-game-pass-console-revenue-revealed-in-microsoft-activision-blizzard-legal-documents/1100-6508137/

There are a few big Mac games:

https://store.steampowered.com/macos

Baldur's Gate 3, Dota 2, Cities Skylines, Stardew Valley, Tomb Raider x 3, Arkham City, Bioshock, Broken Sword, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Hitman, Layers of Fear, Mafia 3, Metro Exodus, Syberia, Splinter Cell Conviction, Witcher 1&2, Resident Evil Village & 4, Death Stranding, No Man's Sky.

^ roughly 30 individual games + iOS games that can run on Mac.

The most expensive PC Game Pass library has 450+ games ($17/month), the lowest ($10/month) has 38 games.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/games#pcgames

Apple likely wouldn't get 30 million subs for Mac but 5-10 million is doable. Say 5m x $7/month = $420m revenue. They'd probably have to make a loss initially if they wanted to get a decent library.

$420m / 30 games = $14m per game. Baldur's Gate 3 reportedly sold over 10m copies ($600m) so for Mac, they'd probably only allow it on a Mac subscription service for $50-100m but they could perhaps negotiate multi-year terms e.g 3 years x $30m per year.

That would get the ball rolling, then devs would start talking about how much they made on Apple Arcade and more ports would be made. If they are open to ports using the porting toolkit at runtime, that would get things moving faster.

If they commit just under $1b/year to it, they can scale it to a decent enough scale like 100-200 games and it will reach 10m Mac subs. It won't be hugely profitable but it adds value to the $30b Mac platform. If it boosts Mac sales a couple of million units at $1300 x 30% margin then it pays for itself, especially when devs start doing more AAA ports to iOS.