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Greenpeace needs to slam India and China for their milquetoast carbon-free energy plans. There are a lot of 2050 carbon neutral promises between the two, but it needs to be 15 to 20 years earlier. It is shameful, basically killing their own descendants type of action, for them to build new coal plants. That's absolutely disastrous.

That whole area from India to China and to Indonesia contains something like 4 billion people, with the majority of them dependent on Himalayan snow and glacier melt to feed rivers to power, feed their peoples and global warming is going increase the altitude of the snow line, exponentially decreasing how much steady flow of water is going to go down those rivers. In some cases, water won't even flow to the ocean. It'll be a trickle like the Colorado and Rio Grande 

If they need a thermal plant, go nuclear. Solar+batteries is the way to go though. It only gets cheaper the more they build out. China, India, and southeast Asia going nuclear and renewables will go a very long way in making multiple market economies go carbon neutral.

aderutter said:

The term Application has always been used on Macs when (IBM)PCs always called them Programs.

Even the Application Menu” (called this in the Mac documentation) existed in System 4.2 in 1987 and Applications have been called Applications in all Macs inside the OS GUI itself.

Even the BBC Micro and the Unix/Sco-Unix systems I used (Windows 3.1 era) all called them Programs in my experience. Even the Sinclair, Commodore & Amiga systems of the 80s called them Programs.

There may be some systems that called Applications that before Macs, but I never came across any.

The use of the term "applications" to denote code running on a computer probably goes back to the earliest days in the 40s, 50s, 60s, but it was not some sort of unique codified language. It was just a word. People likely used programs, applications, executables, functions, etc, interchangeably. Apple is an old company, and they were using the term "application" in the Apple II human interface guidelines in 1978, and probably prior as the fundamental language of computers as personal electronics were all being invented at the time. I bet a lot that both Woz and Jobs were using the term "application" in the early 1970s, among other terms.

The first instance I know of for the .app extension is in NeXTSTEP. The ".app" extension was used for NeXTSTEP application bundles in the late 80s. This is the primary reason why macOS, iOS, etc, applications are called "app" today, imo.

Operating systems prior to this were command line style operating systems that used extensions, and ".exe" was the dominant extension, if not the only extension, used for programs. Obviously true for M/S DOS, and also true of Atari and Amiga. Apple's DOS did not use extensions as I recall.

Mac OS X is NeXTSTEP 5, and you can call all OS X derivatives (iOS, visionOS) successors to NeXTSTEP. Basically anything using XNU (Mach+BSD) and Objective-C frameworks. Once Swift becomes the dominant language for Apple's operating systems, I think you can probably say the era of NeXTSTEP is over, and while what replaces it still uses Mach+BSD, the change to Swift represents a rather large change. You can still run original NeXTSTEP applications on macOS or iOS with little effort. Once Obj-C is deprecated, it will be the end.

libertyandfree said:

 Whatever happened to the OLED killer, micro-LED that Apple and Samsung were supposedly working on?   I recall being told that OLED was a stopgap technology and micro-LED is the future and not far away.  

MicroLED displays are supposedly coming to Apple Watches in a couple of years. 

I'm guessing Apple is waiting on the GlobalStar constellation replenishment of old satellites and expansion with new satellites before announcing two-way text services. They need a way to subsidize the cost of emergency services. So paid tiers for two-way text messaging, rich messaging, and voice is surely coming. 

discountopinion said:

32 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores and a blazing fast neural engine. If i had the money i would buy it. A computer like this makes me loose all rational thinking, ability to use consonants in speech, mutter 1.21 gigawatts and pine for the fjords.

My workload use cases do not demand as much horsepower, but i can imagine that it must be an amazing time to work with heavy lifting workloads. Apple Studio with M?Ultra is very reasonably priced, seems cheap to me actually. I remember back in the day when people used to pony up a small fortune to get a Sparc station 5 on their desk.

Life as a computer enthusiast has never been this good and Apple leads the way. 

Does anyone feel there is any merit to the rumours of a further interconnect between 2 M?Ultras into something even more extreme? 
 
Would there even be an idea to package up many M3 Ultras into compute nodes like Nvidia is doing with their chips? The power draw from the M3 Ultra is nothing compared to their chips. Maybe this is something for Apple’s iCloud.

The last rumor on this was they pushed it out to 2027, 2028 type timeframe. The multi-core scaling is already poor going from Max to Ultra configs. It'll be even worse for an Extreme version. They have a lot of work to do to get it those GPU cores to scale.

Doubtful that Apple enters any server hardware market. They basically stick to products and service for consumers. They barely even try to serve the education market as at it. Network servers? Requires even more commitment than the gaming market.