arthurba

Here in Oz I've had two friends (one female, one male, one a professional 50yo one a retired 70yo) go into different 'shops' (in different suburbs) to ask about getting a new iPhone as an upgrade to an ageing iPhone. In both cases they were told that it'll cost them over AUD$1,000. In both cases they qualify for a 'free' iPhone SE if they sign a two year contract - but the sales assistant didn't mention this. Of course that was my advice when they contacted me later. It seems to me that the Android vendors must be offering some nice sales commissions... There's a lot of phoney (pun intended) advice going around about price...

BTMM used wide area Bonjour and the DNS update protocol and DNS Service Discovery protocol:
https://help.dyn.com/bonjour-and-dns-discovery/
  
My company also wrote some software that uses wide area Bonjour.  It's awesome.  We still have plans to use the DNS update protocol too.  

But this tech really didn't catch on like centralised 'cloud' solutions.  

Why?

Well two reasons I think:

1. it was so simple people couldn't get their heads around it - particularly IT types who wanted to open firewall ports and configure routers and set up DynamicDNS - none of which was needed and most of which would get in the way.  IT people make their money by ensuring that things are as complex as possible, they don't advertise solutions that don't require their extensive involvement and specialist knowledge.

2. There was nothing to sell (monentize), so nobody bothered explaining the feature.  Centralised cloud solutions are easy to monentize.  With iCloud disk space you need to pay $$$ per month - but with BTMM you already owned the disk space and you had to pay nothing.  Something to 'sell' means lots of people will tell you that you should be buying it, how to buy it and who to buy it from.

For a limited part of the market - wide area Bonjour and DNS update protocol enables people to easily access services on your own servers - like VNC or a web server or an SMB/CIFS/AFS server, or a printer server or an SSH server.  That is not your average consumer.  Apple are having a lot of success with consumer devices and services and this is 'refocusing' on that market.

No SLA. Why would you store your data on a service with no SLA?  Ok - yes they have an SLA -but only for service uptime.  All data storage can fail (even redundant storage) - and they are making NO PROMISES that your data will ever be available to restore, no SLA. If their SLA said 90 days or 30 days then would you be ok with that (ie: what you stored 30 days ago will be restored in the event of catastrophic data failure)?  Well BackBlaze promise less - they promise nothing.  This is no unrealistic- Amazon recently lost several customers S3 data going back weeks - and their SLA is relatively good. But the customers only had a single region so when several rows in the data centre went up in smoke so did their data.  Cloud storage/backup has its place - but if it’s reliable (with a decent SLA) its incredibly expensive and if it’s not reliable then it’s only useful as a 3rd or 4th rung backup. 
https://www.backblaze.com/company/sla.html

macxpress said:

wozwoz said:

macxpress said:

I was hoping the next 12" MacBook refresh/update would have an Apple CPU/GPU inside of it. 

lol rofl aha aha. A ridiculous concept - a) to lose Intel compatibility, b) for all the heartache,  c) makes no sense: if it is faster, then it not suited to the bottom end;  and if it is slower, who wants it anyway. 

You can laugh all you want and I'll laugh right back at you all day long when it happens. You can see the writing on the wall...apparently you don't. 

I think macxpress makes a good argument, but I agree that the writing is on the wall, and it will happen.  

The point is that it won’t happen yet, and probably not for some time.  I remember when Apple ditched PowerPC for Intel - the new hardware was:
a) not cheaper
b) a huge leap forward in power
c) appealing to more people (those who needed a part-time windows pc/full time Mac who couldn’t work out how to use Connectix VPC)

I predict the same for the ARM switch - it will be:
a) not cheaper
b) a huge leap forward in both power and life (like a week long battery life like a kindle)
c) appealing to more people (eg: an iOS / laptop crossover)

That Zollotech video nails it. 

The obsession with ‘thin’ is great - but not when it impacts performance. The design is probably fine for the ‘stock’ processors - it’s just the i9 isn’t really suited. 

The era where we could have performance and portability seems over. 

I’m personally waiting for the Mac Pro.  The iMac Pro  and MacBook Pro all have thermal issues.  I’ve got the luxury of not strictly needing the performance when I’m on the road.  It’s a “nice to have”. But for many ‘flexible workers’ using shares spaces and for creatives who need the PC ‘on site’ it’s not an option. A real shame.

There is a chance of course that Apple will fix this in 2019 when LPDDR4 is available. They’ve really crammed a lot into that old chassis for the 2018 15”...