bsimpsen
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Apple acknowledges iPhone 15 charging problem with BMWs, Toyota Supras
My iPhone never moves once placed on the charging mat and placement isn't critical. CarPlay uses Bluetooth only to achieve pairing. After that, everything is transferred via wi-fi.Rogue01 said:The Toyota Supra is actually a re-branded BMW Z4. The engine and all electronics are made by BMW.
Wireless charging is kind of ridiculous in a car. Go over a bump and the phone moves slightly and no more wireless charging. It is not that hard to plug it in, and the audio quality on a wired connection is far better than Bluetooth.
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Hands on with HomePod & HomePod mini's new features in software update 17
Siri-HomeKit has been a dumpster fire for our family since inception. Since iOS 17, our Siri capable devices are erroneously waking more often than ever before, even though we've not removed the requirement for "Hey". I can issue a command in the kitchen, and hear the response in the garage, 50 feet away on the other side of a closed door. I can ask Siri what time it is and get "Sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the Internet". Two seconds later, I can ask for tomorrow's weather, and get it.
I understand that distributed databases are difficult to manage, but Apple should have understood that too and implemented a layer of checks to prevent Siri from looking like an idiot.
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Apple will use 3D printing to make Apple Watch Ultra mechanical parts
Don't be so quick to judge. People thought that machining unibody chassis was a bogus idea when everybody else was stamping parts out of sheet metal, but that's precisely what Apple does. Selective laser sintering can be faster than CNC machining if the parts are small and multiple lasers are employed over the powder bed.eriamjh said:There is no 3D printing process that can handle the volume for the production of Apple Watch.
This article is bogus. 3D printing is only used for prototypes.
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Apple is letting Tesla skip millions of dollars in App Store fees
I don't see how Apple's 30% would apply to Tesla's $10/mo. Tesla charges that fee through their own payment system, for a service that runs independently of Apple. That's entirely as it should be. Amazon doesn't give Apple a slice of Prime membership fees, even though my phone's Amazon app accesses Prime services.
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Why Apple uses integrated memory in Apple Silicon -- and why it's both good and bad
The trace lengths and widths of PCB memory busses and socket connections are substantially greater than those inside the chip carrier. That adds significant capacitance that must be driven by both the SOC on one end and the memory modules on the other. This takes considerable power. As trace lengths increase, timing skew increases. With clock frequencies approaching 6GHz, a "bit" is approaching one inch in length (PCB signal propagation speed is about C/2). Matching trace lengths is much harder to do as trace length increases. Keeping signals on the PCB also becomes harder as trace lengths approach 1/4 wavelength, turning traces into antennae. There are very good reasons for Apple to take the path they're on. Phones, tablets and laptops are the bulk of the Apple's business and those products don't want server farm memory architectures.mfryd said:
Actually, moving the memory further away from the CPU does add latency. Every foot of wire adds about a nanosecond of delay.melgross said:Ok, so the writer gets it wrong, as so many others have when it comes to the M series RAM packaging. One would think that’s this simple thing would be well understood by now. So let me make it very clear - the RAM is NOT on the chip. It is NOT “in the CPU itself”. As we should all know by now, it’s in two packages soldered to the substrate, which is the small board the the SoC is itself soldered to. The lines from Apple’s fabric, which everything on the chip is connected with, extend to that substrate, to the RAM chips. Therefore, the RAM chips are separate from the SoC, and certainly not in the CPU itself. As we also know, Apple offers several different levels of RAM for each M series they sell. That means that there is no limit to their ability to decide how much RAM they can offer, up to the number of memory lines that can be brought out. This is no different from any traditional computer. Every CPU and memory controller has a limit as to how much RAM can be used. So, it seems to me that Apple could, if it wanted to, have sockets for those RAM packages, which add no latency, and would allow exchangeable RAM packages. Apple would just have to extend the maximum number of memory lines out to the socket. How many would get used would depend on the amount of RAM in the package. That’s nothing new. That’s how it’s done. Yes, under that scheme you would have to remove a smaller RAM package when getting a larger one, but that's also normal. The iMac had limited RAM slots and we used to do that all the time. Apple could also add an extra two sockets, in addition to the RAM that comes with the machine. So possibly there would be two packages soldered to the substrate, and two more sockets for RAM expansion. Remember that Apple sometimes does something a specific way, not because that’s the way it has to be done, but because they decided that this was the way they were going to do it. We don’t know where Apple is going with this in the future. It’s possible that the M2, which is really just a bump from the M1, is something to fill in the time while we’re waiting for the M3, which with the 3nm process it’s being built on, is expected to be more than just another bump in performance. Perhaps an extended RAM capability is part of that.Then there is the issue of how many wires you run. When the memory is physically close to the CPU you can run more wires from the memory to the CPU, this allows you to get data to/from the CPU faster. It's not practical to run a large number of wires to a socket that might be a foot or more of cable run away. That means you transfer less data in each clock cycle.
Generally socketed memory is on an external bus. This lets various peripherals directly access memory. The bus arbitration also adds overhead.
Traditional CPUs try to overcome these memory bottlenecks by using multiple levels of cache. This can provide a memory bandwidth performance boost for chunks of recently accessed memory. However, tasks that use more memory than will fit in the cache, may not benefit from these techniques.
Apples "System on a Chip" design really does allow much higher memory bandwidth. Socketing the memory really would reduce performance.
