tzeshan

StrangeDays said:

sidrictheviking said:

Love Pages and Keynote. They’re both so intuitive and versatile — I use them mostly on iPad, hardly ever on iPhone or Mac. Never use Numbers, other than for opening Excel documents from time to time. 

I use both Numbers and Excel. Work uses Excel, but I use Numbers personally. To me the multiple tables-based layout in Numbers is vastly superior to the single-table sheet in Excel. I can crest so much nicer worksheets when they aren’t all tied to the layout of a single table. 

tmay said:

tzeshan said:

tmay said:

GeorgeBMac said:

tmay said:

GeorgeBMac said:

hexclock said:

tzeshan said:

yojimbo007 said:

tedz98 said:

What’s amazing is the decline of chip fab capabilities in the United States. IBM used to be a big player running their own foundries. They’ve basically exited that business. Intel is falling behind and can’t compete with TSMC. AMD has lost ground. US auto manufacturers have had to slow production lines due to chip availability issues. The US really needs to find ways to improve its abilities to create wafers and chips. Chip manufacturing capabilities are no where on the Biden agenda. That has to change.

Biden has  got to go .. that will solve much bigger problems..

Biden inherited the problems created by Trump. Biden is in office only two months. 

US chipmaking has been on the decline for decades. US companies have been outsourcing labor for years, so you really can't blame Trump for that, fashionable as it is.

You can blame Trump for shutting down the Chinese chip factories that we rely on.   The shortages are mostly in the types of chips that they made.   But, we shut down the factories and then whine that we can't buy what they want to sell.  

Bullshit, you can't blame Trump, and for once, get you head out of your ass, and do some online research, and you'll see that you are absolutely wrong.

The shortage had nothing to do with any entity or individual "shutting down the Chinese chip factories", simply because those were never shut down.

It has everything to do with the Pandemic, that slowed the auto manufacturing industry to a crawl, forcing these companies to give up their places in line at the component manufacturers.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/13/business/global-chip-shortages-carmakers/index.html

"A chip shortage

The supply chain bottleneck could end up hurting business. A much stronger than expected recovery in sales and production volumes has contributed to the crunch, but carmakers risk missing out on the demand uplift if assembly lines slow. When the pandemic forced automakers to temporarily shutter factories last year, leading semiconductor manufacturers reassigned production capacity to companies making smartphones, laptops and gaming devices.

"With lead times of six to nine months, the semiconductor industry has not been able to scale up fast enough to meet this unexpected growth in automotive demand," parts supplier Continental (CTTAF) said in a statement sent to CNN Business on Tuesday. The bottlenecks are expected to continue "well into 2021, causing major disruptions in Continental's production." The company said that an internal task force supervised by senior management is managing the "critical situation."

Automakers account for only about 12% of all semiconductor demand globally, putting them in relatively weak purchasing position, said Arndt Ellinghorst, a senior analyst at Bernstein.

Bullshit, you can blame Trump for shutting down Chinese chip factories, get you head out of your ass, and do some online research, and you'll see that you are absolutely wrong.

There you go again;

What Trump enacted is restrictions of IP necessary for Fabs 10nm and better. That has nothing to do with current, operating fabs.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/trump-cuts-off-chinas-top-chipmaker/2020/12/

"In the final throes of its presidency, the Trump Administration isn’t backing down on its tech war with China. The Wall Street Journal reported today that the U.S. Commerce Department banned the export of U.S. intellectual property related to semiconductor manufacturing over Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp’s (SMIC) alleged ties to the Chinese military.

“Entity List restrictions are a necessary measure to ensure that China, through its national champion SMIC, is not able to leverage U.S. technologies to enable indigenous advanced technology levels to support its destabilizing military activities,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told The Wall Street Journal in a statement.

The outright ban comes months after the Commerce Department announced it would require all non-U.S. chipmakers using American equipment, intellectual property, or design software to apply for a license to sell chips to Chinese chipmakers like Huawei and SMIC.

According to The Wall Street Journal report, SMIC along with more than 60 other Chinese companies will be added to the entity list. The list — effectively a black mark — restricts companies from exporting U.S. technologies to listed organizations without a license. However, where SMIC is concerned the Commerce Department has taken the extra step of adding a provision effectively baring the company from acquiring the technology required to produce 10-nanometer and smaller chips."

You seem to be conflating two different issues; the shortage on components from existing fabs, and the restrictions on advanced fab tech.

So some fucking research.

Let me explain if you can understand. Trump and Republicans try to stop China's economic growth. But China was already the largest consumer of semiconductors. Many chip companies lowered their long time capital expenditures. But the high tech growth did not stop. 5G, AI, and auto industry keep increasing their demand for chips. Now Biden is in office, the pandemic is nearing an end, the world economy is recovering, as a result the chip industry could not satisfy the demand. 

Again, the current shortages have nothing to do with Trump restricting technology transfer to China. That's all about future 10 nm and under foundries, but I do agree that the restrictions will have an impact on access to sub 10nm components by Chinese companies.

Still, and I have to keep pointing this out, if the U.S. and its allies see a threat from Xi Jinping and authoritarian China, why would they allow technology transfer that would absolutely be militarized?

yojimbo007 said:

tedz98 said:

What’s amazing is the decline of chip fab capabilities in the United States. IBM used to be a big player running their own foundries. They’ve basically exited that business. Intel is falling behind and can’t compete with TSMC. AMD has lost ground. US auto manufacturers have had to slow production lines due to chip availability issues. The US really needs to find ways to improve its abilities to create wafers and chips. Chip manufacturing capabilities are no where on the Biden agenda. That has to change.

Biden has  got to go .. that will solve much bigger problems..

cndgoose said:

Just had a thought ... could apple offer an M1 iMac/iPad hybrid with detachable iPad screen?

cloudguy said:

tzeshan said:

Apple Silicon should be booted the same as iPhone and iPad. Any people successfully ported Unix to iPhone? 

While you are not wrong from the perspective of Apple, you are ignoring that a lot of users in the tech arena have been using macOS, Windows and *nux almost interchangeably for 15 years. While before this would have been impossible, the combination of common hardware platforms and multiplatform applications based on open standards made it (almost) easy. Back in the day ... not so much. PC was once exclusively used to refer to "IBM machine that isn't a mainframe, server or minicomputer." Even after the "PC clones" made it a more generic term, until 2005 Apple and Wintel/WinAMD were so divergent that you couldn't use the same peripherals: the ports were different. 

Open standards (like USB for ports!), Java and other multiplatform tools, the web, cloud, SaaS etc. created a situation where "everything is a PC" whether it was running Windows, macOS or even Linux. (ChromeOS is the only outlier.) The current generation of tech workers expects to be able to use pretty much any hardware they buy basically the same way. If you are someone who actually "uses a Mac like a Mac" - meaning that you rely primarily on software written for macOS - then you won't understand how big a chance this is for these people. Some people "get it" ... I saw the first raft of articles stating that Macs should no longer be considered PCs last year. But if you are someone that has made building applications, networks and infrastructure based on open multiplatform standards with hardware as interchangeable parts the basis of your entire career - and if you are under 40 you have done exactly that - then this is a major change.

Enough to take your rack-mounted Mac Minis and your Xeon Mac Pros out of your infrastructure? Well if you were responsible for 500 devices, would you still use 75 of them if they didn't boot the same way? Or would you go for uniformity? Exactly. It wasn't a problem for iPhones and iPads because no one deploys the Apache applications on iPhones and iPads that are used to encrypt outbound web traffic. Instead, they deployed it on rack-mounted Mac Minis running Linux that were used to encrypt web traffic that originated on the iPhones and iPads. These folks would prefer to continue to use the Mac Minis for this because they perform well, are extremely reliable and have small footprints. But if problems like this can't be solved, they won't be able to. They will likely switch to Intel Nucs or small form factor Dells instead, even if a single M1 Mac is capable of handling the load of 2 Dells.