rcfa

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  • Apple may have a solution for fraying Lightning cables

    rcfarcfa
    Sorry, this is nonsense.

    The issue with these cables is, that Apple in its drive to be environmentally sound uses a plastic insulation that’s not resistant to sweat/oils from the fingers.

    Where you touch the cable, is first discolors, and then the insulation gets soft, gooey, and crumbles. 
    Where you don’t touch the cable, it remains perfectly intact.

    I treat all my gear very carefully. And I have all sorts of cables, incl. varying quality third party USB and lightening cables, and the problem is unique to Apple, because they are trying to use environmentally friendly plastic, which of course backfires, because if you stick to Apple’s cables, you’ll have to buy several over a product’s life span, rather than one.

    Still got perfectly fine “hockey puck” power supplies and cables, old Apple USB cables, etc.; they’re all fine because they’re made from PVC or something similar, while the new *-free cables just crumble over the course of some months on their own after being touched by bare fingers with sweat and finger grease on them.

    You can tell the process is starting when parts of the insulation gets sticky and you could carve it with a finger nail, while elsewhere on the cable, where there’s no regular skin contact, the insulation is neither sticky, nor does it give in to a finger nail.

    By classifying these cases as wear and tear and not replacing them under warranty, Apple has in essence prevented that their materials engineers got the proper feedback on one of the main the causes of these issues: It’s chemistry, not physics!
    JapheyelijahgFrancescoBDogpersonwow321olswatto_cobradysamoria

  • How Linux was ported to the Apple Silicon M1 Mac mini

    rcfarcfa
    I assume this leaves the neural processors completely unused? What about the GPU? Are graphics done just with the CPU thanks to the shared memory architecture? Or is there sufficient documentation/reverse engineering around, to allow for using that?

    Apple should just document their hardware properly, after all, they sell hardware, not software. If people want to run Linux or some other OS on their hardware shouldn’t bother them, it’s not like documenting some instruction sets and boot sequence details allows anyone to clone their chip designs or something like that; and security should never rely on obscurity, but on well documented processes.
    beeble42elijahgtechconccaladanian

  • Apple Watch may be able to detect coronavirus infection days before tests can

    rcfarcfa
    There’s usually a long stretch of time between initial study results, verification of these results, creating a product, and getting FDA approval.

    Also, if these are indicators for inflammation, disambiguation is going to be a big thing.

    It’s one thing to look at COVID-19 patients and going back in time looking for indicators; it’s a different thing concluding based on indicators that someone’s got COVID and not some other infections, allergies, etc. that result in an inflammatory response.

    Best one could do relatively quickly is warn people that they have indicators typical for inflammation and tell them it might be worth reducing contacts until they can get tested; but likely even that would require disclaimers the size of a small phone book...
    bageljoeylongpath

  • Kuo: Redesigned MacBook Pro models with MagSafe, no Touch Bar, more ports coming in Q3

    rcfarcfa
    I love the Touch Bar, especially the version with a discrete esc key.

    The only issue with it: it doesn’t default to function keys during boot, but is blacked out. This makes dealing with booting a boot-camp partition in Windows recovery mode problematic without external USB keyboard.
    And that’s a problem the ARM based Macs won’t have to worry about until M$ officially releases Win10-ARM.
    So, yeah, I’d miss the Touch Bar! 

    Also: who needs a stupid proprietary MagSafe power cable, when there are plenty aftermarket USB-C MagSafe-like cables?
    9secondkox2williamlondondewmefirelockjibwatto_cobra

  • Intel 'Alder Lake' chips take same approach as Apple's ARM designs

    rcfarcfa
    Intel’a and TSMC’s nm don’t exactly compare, because they use different processes.
    If I remember what seems to be one generation apart, is actually comparable.

    So intel’s 10nm is like TSMC’s 7nm

    Of course TSMC/Apple already being at 5nm, intel is still one generation behind, they should be at 7nm using their processes, rather than at 10nm

    IIRC intel stacks things higher, so they can get similar density with a seemingly one-generation behind process, but they also need comparatively wider traces due to the kind of 3D structure, or something like that. There was an in-depth article on that somewhere, of which I only remember fragments. Point being, intel is behind, but not as much as it seems, but they are being held back by a legacy chip architecture.

    Eventually they may just have to do a new RISC architecture, but one designed to run a Rosetta-like software layer for x86 emulation particularly efficiently, i.e. quasi exposing microcode as RISC instruction set...
    elijahgviclauyycwatto_cobra