tht

Totally disagree with the takes in this article.

I hear people saying the lack of Ethernet is bad on the $130 Apple TV. When I hear that, I immediately think those people are crazy. Crazy for not understanding what the mass market is, crazy for not being introspective of their desires versus the mass market. The mass market does not have Ethernet. They aren't going to wire their house with it. If their house or home has it, they won't use it. It's WiFi all the time. This Apple TV is a Christmas gift fare for the mass market. Perhaps Apple needs to cut it to $100, but at $130, it's a great price for what you get relative to other TV dongles.

If you are buyer that wants Ethernet, you can get an Apple TV with it for $150. This used to be the price of the lower end Apple TV 4K. The new one is basically 50% to 100% more in everything: CPU, GPU, RAM and storage. And it is fanless to boot. That's a pretty good deal.

I would recommend the $450 iPad 10th gen over the $330 iPad 9th gen. There is 1 GB more RAM, a 10% larger display, faster CPU, GPU, and RAM. It's simply a better machine, and it's worth $120 more. There is perhaps 2 reasons for getting the 9th gen model: a buyer doesn't want to spend $450 and buyer wants the home button. The former will be solved with time, the latter is one of those things that can't be solved and people will have to live with it.

If people want better iPads, they spend more. Same as it always is. That ~11" iPad form factor now scales from $450 to $2100. The more the buyer is willing to pay, the more and better they get. From 10th gen to Air to Pro, the quality improves. The case gets thinner. The displays get better, the performance gets better, the stylus performance gets better. If you are just a news browser, iPad 10th gen is the way to go. You like to play games, step up to the Air. If the iPad is the primary computing device you plan on using for years, get the Pro or perhaps the 12.9".

I can believe the total BOM cost of about $500. Maybe. It's your basic MSRP divided by 2 to 3, depending on how much you believe the soft costs are.

The headliner of an A16 SoC costing $110? I call BS on it. Nobody knows. Heck, I bet TSMC and Apple don't even really "know". It's a rather circular contracting arrangement of pre-paying, fixed-priced unit costs, technology funding, so on and so forth. How they determine $/SoC is going to vary with accounting assumptions. At $110, the SoC is 25% of the cost of an iPPM. Sounds crazy. If it was $80, easier to believe.

mpantone said:

tht said:

It's amazing how keyboards can have so many keys, yet have these weird imperfections. There isn't one perfect keyboard, or mouse for that matter.

Some of the keys on the Mx Mechanical mini for Mac keyboard don't look to be standard width and are less wide. If it is for Mac, why are the functions in the function key row different from a Mac laptop keyboard? There's always something.

This is a 65% keyboard. The normal keys are all regular sized keycaps. The lens on the camera might be making things look different but all the central keys are the same dimension.

The other keys (tab, caps lock, shift, control, command, option) have to be adjusted for the constraints of the 65% layout which is one key wider than the main layout.

It's a standard 75% keyboard layout. It's probably an optical illusion that the right side cmd, fn and opt keys, the esc and tilde keys appear less wide than they should be. Then, Logitech did not put the sound volume controls in F10-F12. What the F1-F3 keys are, I don't know. They all have the same icon.

It's a mechanical keyboard with replaceable keycaps. So, if the keys don't look the right size, they did something wrong as buyers typical want the option to have replaceable key caps on this sort of keyboard. But it looks like an optical illusion, so that's good that it really is "standard".

Here are a couple if other low-profile 75% keyboards that are "made for Mac":



Basically the same layout, with different treatments for the top row of keys.

Experienced PC builders will be familiar with the benefits of water cooling, including the potential to offer better thermal conditions than air-based methods, the possibility of improved chip performance, and a reduction in noise.

Reminder that the "water cooling" here is basically like how "wireless charging" is used to describe induction charging. Using the words "water cooling" is conveying more than what it is actually doing. Ultimately, these cooler designs are transferring heat from the chip to the ambient atmosphere. Virtually all them do it by blowing air across radiator fins (heat sink in my parlance). This is an "air-based" method.

Basically every single "water cooler" is a closed loop that pumps water from the chip block to a radiator and a fan is used to blow air across it to transfer heat to the ambient air. So if there is a Venn diagram, PC water coolers would be a circle inside an "air-based" cooler.

Moreover, all of the high performance "air-based" coolers, as you are thinking of them, like what is inside the Mac Studio or the MacBook Pro or Mac Pro, are "liquid coolers". They employ a heat pipe which employs a fluid medium that transfers heat from the chip block to the radiator fins. They might employ a 2 phase loop, or just be single phase, but it's a pipe with a fluid inside. The fluid transfers heat from the chip block to the radiator fins, just like what a water cooler does.

The one big advantage a water cooler has is that it uses flexible hosing. Note that I didn't say heat transfer performance. Flexible hosing enables a PC builder to do neat stuff in their case in an affordable way. The heat pipes in "air-based" coolers are basically inflexible and are custom designed for the application. You get what you get from the vendor. "Heat pipes" are as efficient if not more efficient in transferring heat than pumped water, I think. So the heat transfer properties of pumped water is not a heat transfer advantage. Flexible hosing is nice though, as PC cases have a lot of variation. PCs often have limited volume or not-optimal volumes for heatsinks or radiators. The flexible hosing enables the radiator to be 6", 12", 18" long with more advantageous fan setups and radiator locations. This is good for the PC market where there is a lot of case and motherboard variation.

If you start from a blank page, you can do everything with what you think of as air-based coolers. Just look at the Mac Pro.

22july2013 said:

The article says "The satellite connection feature can also be used to send the user's location to friends or family members." This suggests that the user's location is not necessarily sent to the satellite. And if it is not sent to the satellite, then how would the satellite know the location of the phone? And if it doesn't know the location of the phone, how does it prevent callers from, say, Mexico or Cuba, (which are near the US) from using this feature? I haven't seen anyone asking if iOS uses geo-fencing to restrict users to certain countries.

The phone has GPS. It will work anywhere around the Earth as long as the GPS antenna can get a lock on 3 or 4 GPS satellites. So, GPS coordinates of an iPhone are transmitted to a GlobalStar satellite, it transmits them to GlobalStar relay stations, the relay station than routes it to cellular network and or to emergency services of the supported country.

GlobalStar satellites won't know where the phones are. It only knows that it has established a connection to a device, the device has sent it the destination of where it wants the message to go. It may not even know that. It might only be the relay station that is capable of figuring where a message needs to go or where a call needs to go. The content of the message? It's going to be encrypted if it isn't already.

A user can connect to a GlobalStar satellite anywhere on the planet with line of sight to the satellite. It will work in China, in Cuba, in the middle of ocean. However, would a relay station be able to route an SOS to a country's emergency services? Or a client device within a certain country? Well, it depends on whether the country will allow the relay station to connect to its telecomm services in the country. Hence, Apple has to coordinate that. GPS coordinates routed to Find My? Yes, that should be supported anywhere on the planet with GlobalStar satellites in line of sight.