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When to expect every Mac to get the AI-based M4 processor
VictorMortimer said:jagrahax said:Half a terabyte is a lot of unified memory. It might be worth checking this report against memory roadmaps from SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron.Not compared to the memory you can connect to an Intel or AMD chip, it isn't. You already knew that, of course, because the REAL Mac Pro could use 1.5TB RAM, plus whatever video RAM was on your GPU boards."Unified" memory just means it's sharing RAM between the CPU and GPU. You know, the thing that used to be called "integrated graphics" that we used to acknowledge wasn't as good as a real GPU with its own RAM, but now that Apple does it, we pretend to fool ourselves?On-chip GPUs of the past partitioned off a section of system memory to serve as memory for the GPU. If a system has 8 GB of RAM, the on-chip GPU would partition off, say 1 GB, to serve as GPU memory, resulting in a decrease of system memory. To transfer GPU assets, programs would have to copy from system memory to the GPU memory partition. Some on-chip GPUs may have been limited on muchWith Apple’s unified memory, there isn’t a partition and therefore there isn’t a transfer of assets to do. The GPU just accesses system memory wherever it needs to. Any processing unit in the SoC has uniform memory access to system memory.Modern x86 SoCs may have addressed this and is using unified memory architectures, I think? I don’t really know and need to go find out.For discrete GPUs on a PCIe card, where transfers have to be made, there is limitation of how many MB could be transferred per copy/transfer command and introduces inefficiencies. Various companies are trying to institute protocols where a dGPU can access system memory directly and remove transfer size limits, like resizable bars or system addressable memory protocols, which enable a dGPU to address system right across the PCIe bus.Regarding 192 GB to a possible 512 GB memory on an Apple SoC, the GPU will be able to access something like 80% of it. So an Apple GPU could have 150 to 400 GB of memory it can directly address.
Most consumer dGPUs will be limited to something up to 32 GB. So it’s a natural advantage for certain workflows. Server GPUs have low hundreds of GB of memory, but not many people will have that on their desks. -
Apple wants to make grooved keys to stop nasty finger oil transfer to MacBook Pro screens
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iPhone 16 dummy units show off Capture button, new camera bump
lordjohnwhorfin said:How about no camera bump so the phone doesn’t look stupid and wobbly like a table with one short leg when you put it down on its back, and use the extra space for a biiiiig battery so I can go several days without charging? After all if you’re going to sell the satellite SOS feature, might as well make something useful for serious hikers.
The thicker phone with more battery life has been tried in the market. The Moto "Maxx" series of phones is probably the highest profile one in the USA. Since they didn't catch on, it implies runtimes greater than 20 hrs in a ~11 mm thick form factor wasn't more valuable to customers than a ~7 mm thick phone with 12 hrs runtime and a camera bump.
For people that want 20 hr runtimes, battery cases and MagSafe batteries basically gave that niche what they "wanted" without sacrificing the larger niche that wants a thinner phone. -
Spatial Personas adds 3D calling to FaceTime on Apple Vision Pro
Yup. This was inevitable. You could tell from the WWDC videos on visionOS common environments.Wonder if the Television app is using this?
I don’t think it is that valuable for meetings. You share content, not faces, in our countless streaming meetings, but if it is good enough, perhaps for more personal and private meetings?
Face-to-face meetings enforce attention. That’s probably the big thing. Will displaying your persona hide your inattention? Force you to pay attention and not play on your phone? Hmm… -
The next Apple CEO: Who could succeed Tim Cook?
nubus said:9secondkox2 said:Forstall would not have made a great ceo. He was great at attaching himself to people in power and playing the game. He gets a lot of miles out of being the team lead over the iOS fork that was built on Mac OS. But that’s his claim to fame. After that, crickets. Before that, crickets. Oh and that initial maps hiccup that took forever to be forgotten. And since then? What? Broadway? Nah. Not missing much. Even as a presenter, he was super awkward.Joz is brilliant guy and it seems he’s been groomed for the ceo role for a while. He knows enough of the business complexities, is careful with media, and cares about what made apple what it is. He’s the number one pick I’m sure.
So, he was really good at making these platforms, revising them, making the developer community came along. This all plays out in hardware and products. Swift and SwiftUI is basically Apple's next gen platform, and is essentially the official end of NeXT technologies at Apple. It's pretty slow going on the Swift front, and, its benefits don't seem that great. I wonder what a 3rd revision of an Obj-C platform would mean for all of Apple's hardware and user interfaces. You have to wonder what Apple's products would be like if Jony Ive wasn't in charge of UI and UE.
He wasn't fired because Apple Maps. He was fired because he didn't "get along" with Jony Ive, Phil Schiller, et al. On the one hand, the C-suite needs to work together. On the other hand, the C-suite can't become compliant to one dominant person either. They shouldn't be susceptible to group think. Someone needed to say no to some products or some actions. Apple Maps was initially a fiasco, but it was also a 1.0. With time and data, it became competitive, and it would have happened with Forstall remaining in charge of it. I didn't think anyone needed to publicly "apologize" for it.
I do think Apple is quite stuck in its own triangulation of what features its products should have. Apple puts limitations on their platforms that don't need to be there. iPads are hyper triangulated. They don't seem to want to have new product just cannibalize an old product. They don't want to take any chances at an odd or unusual product. (AVP is a breath of fresh air here). We've all lived through 2012 to 2018 or so. There were a lot of strange mistakes during this time. There needs to be a book written about how those mistakes were made and why it took so long to fix of change. Eg, 3 iterations of butterfly keyboards that didn't work. iPadOS multitasking is limited on purpose, with UI that don't get fixed or fixed fast.