elijahg

The lack of transparency around some of Apple's recent issues has been the reason they've blown up into something bigger than they should - the battery throttling being one that could have been nothing if they'd explained the reasoning, and the 2016 MBP keyboard. And this is another they should have been transparent about. When there are issues Apple seems to think if they shut their eyes the issue will disappear, but the media loves to see Apple make a mistake and as such it's better to explain what they're doing to fix it rather than letting the media have a field-day. Also having a proper error message helps, because then people know what's going on. A message saying an error has occurred is barely more useful than no message at all.

The systems status page is useless, as it claimed issues were fixed but 6 hours later the updates were still failing. As the article alludes to, it's pretty stupid that Apple's minimalism even bleeds over to error messages, the lack of information on Apple's status page is a detriment to all, for example "Some users couldn't access mail" should have more detail: "Some users were getting authentication failed errors when using Mail.app" would be better, so people know if their own issue is related and don't keep trying to diagnose something that might be an Apple issue. Similarly the obscurity around what updates actually do, they often don’t list fixes, only the usual “bug fixes and performance enhancements” - which everyone expects anyway. 

Oh dear. Syncdefaultsd is broken too, uploaded 600mb then launchd killed it. Seems a full wipe and reinstall is required...

I have found a fix for Python though for anyone who finds it broken - the error is something along the lines of "ValueError: dlsym(RTLD_DEFAULT, kIOMasterPortDefault): symbol not found", because Apple has removed system libraries from the filesystem and programs are expected to use the dynamic linker instead.

You first need to work around another bug and delete the old CommandLineTools in /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools, because without this the new Command Line Tools will refuse to update, despite being out of date. I also reinstalled Xcode to be safe. In the terminal do sudo xcode-select --install to install the new version, and afterward sudo xcodebuild -license to accept the new license.

Then if you don't have it, get Homebrew (at http://brew.sh/), and do

brew install --build-from-source python 

This should then install a non-broken Python, and you'll probably have to add /usr/local/bin/python3 to your $PATH to use it. Hope that helps someone.

22july2013 said:

mdriftmeyer said:

22july2013 said:

David H Dennis said:

I will admit to not knowing too much about this, but my impression was that eGPUs were connected to Intel’s PCI standard, and therefore would only function with Intel chipsets.  So of course Apple Silicon would not support EGPUs.

If I understood the keynote correctly, it seemed like the Apple CPUs and graphics chips were designed to work directly together, cutting the overhead of external chipsets and therefore much faster and more efficient.  This means you are counting on Apple’s graphics engineers as your sole source for graphics developments.  

I was expecting to see a 16” MacBook Pro after the 13” MacBook Pro.  So I was disappointed that didn’t happen. But the logical conclusion is that the larger MacBook Pro systems are going to be considerably faster than the lesser models and therefore very much worth looking at.  I think we should pass judgement on Apple’s solutions here when the larger machine is introduced and benchmarked.

However, I’m tempted to buy a 13” MacBook Pro just so I can say I have it and am on the cutting edge ... just the typical programmer’s ego I’m afraid.

I concur with most of your post, although using the logic in your first paragraph we should not have been expecting Thunderbolt support, since Thunderbolt up until now "would only function with Intel chipsets." Somehow Apple managed to make Thunderbolt (v3) work, and (perhaps) they could have managed the same with PCI. Especially since the PCI standard is no longer managed by Intel but by PCI-SIG which has 800 members, but the primary members seem to be: Agilent, AMD, Dell, HP, Intel, Synopsys, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. I don't see Apple in there.

Every computer vendor in the world supports PCI. the M1 for sure has PCI or it would be Dead on Arrival. PCIe is the defacto standard that DDR memory runs over. The ignorance of some who called this Intel's PCI standard is sad in the year 2020.

But the new Apple Silicon Macs use PoP memory, not DDR memory, right? Are you saying these new Macs support PCI? We're talking about the new Macs. I'm confused.

PoP and DDR aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. It's probably DDR and PoP. @mdriftmeyer is wrong in that DDR runs over PCIe though, it does not. And as I mentioned previously, PoP is probably why the RAM is limited to 16GB. More than 16GB would require too much physical space atop the CPU, or extra pins on the bottom of the CPU and thus a new CPU package. This is why is also why I think the M1 is little more than a slightly beefed up iPhone/iPad CPU. If it was actually designed from the ground up for Mac, there's little reason to use the expensive PoP method, which is mainly to save space. But anyway, some form of PCIe is supported to a certain extent by the M1 (and Ax CPUs), because the NVME interface for the SSDs uses PCIe. It's probably just a single PCIe lane.

liney said:

I'm dumbstruck that ALL of the M1 Macs have a maximum of 16 Gb of RAM - even the MacBook Pro! It appears that it is all in the Unified Memory of the M1 chip. How is this a good idea?

This is another thing that makes me think this is essentially a rehashed iPhone 12 CPU. iPhones use PoP (package on package) for the RAM, and more than 16GB physically won't fit. Therefore the CPU package would have to change to add extra pins for things like external memory and actual PCIe (not Thunderbolt), and that might have been too much work to get done for this event. 

mdriftmeyer said:

mazda 3s said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

curtis hannah said:

22july2013 said:

Maybe it was just an embarrassment to Apple to support external GPUs that had slower speeds than their internal one.

Well one of the main concerns was for most MacBooks, anything close to high end AMD GPUs wasn’t an option, we’ll just have to see how these perform to see if an eGPU option is really necessary (again, most pro users would save the eGPUs for the MacBook Pro or iMac or something that’s not today’s introduced Macs, so it’s a low bar).

Given the (limited) data that we have now for performance, the integrated GPU in Apple Silicon with eight GPU cores is about the same as a RX 590.

Huh? Apple said the onboard GPU in M1 is good for 2.3 TFLOPs. Intel Iris Xe in Tiger Lake is 2.1 TFLOPs. Radeon RX 590 is 7.1 TFLOPs

Most people are ignorant of how powerful GPUs are.

The new Radeon RX 6800 for instance:

Apple keeps comparing the GPUs in their chips with the integrated Intel ones, which are well known to be crap. There has been no mention of GPUs external to the CPU yet. I don't think the CPU package has enough pins to support PCIe, in the same way it probably doesn't have enough to support external RAM. Metal scores on an A12X are around 10000, the same as the Intel Iris Plus, but my iMac with a now reasonably old Vega 48 GPU gets 50000.