The latest Mac Pro really didn't make much use of its size, as there were too few useful things to put into. Especially as the GPU is now part of the package anyway. Also, the Mac Studio is the perfect workstation for the desk.
Still, there are a few things which could be improved relative to the current Studio. First, the ability to easily clean the internals from dust. You should be able to just lift the lid and clean the computer. Also, it would be great to have one Mac which you could just plug in a bunch of NVMe disks.
On the other side, they might replace the Mac Pro with a rack mountable machine as the demand for ARM servers in the cloud raises.
Yes, they should all have taken actions. But also, it is much more difficult to fix something broken once the damage has settled in. I guess none of them was willing to risk the disruption a fix would have caused. And the system seemed to have held up for quite a while. Weren't there some mass firings of ATC personal at the beginning of the Trump presidency?
The bottom line is: don't break things that are difficult or impossible to fix.
Absolutely. But for many things, denial is easier than fixing. See climate change. We knew about the problem for a long time. At latest after the oil crisis in the early 70ies, it would have been the perfect moment to reduce fossil fuel usage. Of course we know, how this has not happened and so we just entered the next oil crisis last week. And everyone is to blame for that.
The problem is, many "nerds" have little other options in hardware. Which ARM laptop would be the alternative? Even if you allow x86, which ones are as nice as the Macbooks? Then, there is the problem, that not everyone wants to be Linux-only in their setup. I definitely prefer macOS to W11.
You don't need an arm processor, many modern x86 chips match or outcompete m series on power efficiency and performance. Mainly lunar lake gen 1 and the new gen 3 (arrow lake not really).
The efficiency of arm chips was never arm, really, it was the manufacturing node and SOC design. Well, Intel and AMD can make SOCs, and they do.
There are reasons beyond pure power efficiency to use ARM processors. It is a nice architecture to work with, especially if you plan to write low-level code. Also, you might want to deploy on ARM servers.
Also, there is the question who in general makes Laptops as nice as a MB Air? Who makes a fan less laptop of roughly comparable power?
If you're writing true low-level code then you're most likely doing it for performance reasons, like ffmpeg. But ARM doesn't have the instruction set to make the best use of that, x86 does with its extensions. Otherwise, the compiler handles translation, so there's just no reason for you to care about the assembly unless you're writing assembly.
As for nice laptops, I think Asus and Lenovo makes some nice ones. I don't believe any are fanless, but most are quiet - Lunar Lake gen 3 is an SOC with a base TDP of 25 watts, and it can even go down to 15 watts. These CPUs are slightly faster in multi-core performance than M4, and they use similar wattage. I believe the Asus zenbook duo gets better battery life by a wide margin because of the 99 watt-hour battery. They still fall a little short of M5 in performance, but it's very close.
As for servers, it's a good point. But I think currently most servers are still using x86 CPUs, so it might not be relevant for a while.
ARM servers definitely seem to get more popular. Seems that for a lot of tasks they are the more economic option. Consequently, you want more and more development for ARM. That would be one reason. The other is, that developing for ARM is more fun, whenever you touch parts which are architecture-dependent.
For the computer: the Air is a great laptop. I am very happy it doesn't have a fan, so it can never get a clogged fan and it works great. Currently, I am running Linux on it via VMWare, so I get the best of two worlds. And Linux really flies on it. Once it is no longer supported by macOS, I am certainly going to go native Linux. As it is an M2, that probably would work already today.
If you want an ARM CPU, there are now a few single-board computers with a quadruple Cortex-A78 CPU in the "Qualcomm Dragonwing QCM6490" SoC (similar to a Snapdragon from the flagships of 2021), which run circles around Raspberry Pi and the like.
There are also older NVIDIA Orin SBCs with Cortex-A78, but those are severely overpriced, so they are not worthwhile, unless you really want to use them in an automotive project.
For software development, the Arm-designed cores have the advantage of excellent documentation, unlike the proprietary cores designed by Apple and Qualcomm, which are almost undocumented. Good documentation simplifies software debugging and tuning.
Unfortunately there are no cheap solutions for developing on the latest ARM ISA variants (except for a Chinese Armv9.2-A CPU, which has some quirks and is available in mini-ITX and smaller formats). For the latest ISA, you should develop software on a smartphone, e.g. on one of the Motorola smartphones that have DisplayPort for connecting an external monitor and a desktop mode for Android.
The Qualcomm laptops have various problems with Linux that have not been solved yet.
You have much better Linux support for an older Snapdragon from 2021 (with quadruple Cortex-A78 cores) which has been rebranded as "Dragonwing QCM6490" and which is sold by Qualcomm for use in embedded computers. Thus Qualcomm promises at least 10 years of support for it.
There are a few cheap single-board computers with it, e.g. Particle Tachyon 5G and Radxa Dragon Q6A.
Unfortunately, "cheap" means something very different today than last summer, due to the huge increase in the price of DRAM. Nevertheless, the SBCs with soldered LPDDR memory have been affected less by the price increase than the computers for which you have to buy SODIMM or DIMM memory modules, which may cost now more than a mini-PC in which you would want to install them.
Nothing seems to be close to the MB Air. I would definitely be interested in buying a comparable hardware, if Linux is better supported than on the Air.
I think a company which runs a printing business would have some obligations to make sure they are not fulfilling print orders for guns. Another interesting example are printers and copiers, which do refuse to copy cash. Which is partly facilitated with the EURion constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation) and other means.
As far as I understand, those Robotaxis are only available within Austin so far. That is slow city traffic, the number of miles per ride is very small. However the number for human drivers seem to take all kind of roads into respect. Of course, highways are the roads where you drive most of the distance at the least risk for an accident. Has this been taken into account for the evaluation?
It would be ironic that people are claiming the Tesla numbers for Autopilot are to optimistic, as it is used on highways only and at the same time don't notice that city-only numbers for the FSD would be pessimistic statistics-wise.
It does look extremely pessimistic. Like one of the 'incident' is that they hit a curb at a parking lot at 6 MPH.
No human driver would report this kind of incident. A human driver would probably forget it after the next traffic light.
While it's clearly Tesla's fault (if you hit any static object it's your fault), when you take this kind of 'incident' into account of course it'd look worse than humans.
The human data estimate they compare to to get the 3x number also includes this type of incident - even if of course no one reports it, you can get some idea of the number of such incidents based on service and paint shop data.
More importantly: it seems like Austin is mostly a typical US city grid of wide streets. Nothing comparable with an average old inner city, or narrow countryside roads with a ditch or cliff or quay on one or both sides. Probably not many pedestrians & cyclists roaming the streets either?
IIRC, this indicates that it's linked to someone else's account, and has not been shared with you. The "beep when moved" feature is to alert people they're being tracked.
For example, I let my mother in law use luggage of mine with an airtag still in it and every time she moved it after the first day or so, it would play a noise.
I had the thought too, but there is no way anyone else could have gotten physical control over this and shouldn't I see that AirTag when I scan for things in my surrounding as an anti-tracking protection?
i’ve had this happen due to going from beta builds to stable builds or vice versa. not super clear exactly which of those triggered it, or whether it was just a beta build bug, but the 5x reboot always fixes it
Tried with a cleaned new battery. It beeps when I put the battery in, that is it. When I scan for unknown objects, I get shown an air tag, but it doesn't tell me anything about it. So probably I should just remove the battery - I must have gone through a heap of them debugging this - and just smash it.
Oh yeah totally, that “feature” of a Duracell cr2032 battery screwed me over in that exact case. They just don’t work at all with an AirTag (battery bought from afaik reputable supplier, Home Depot).
Switched to Energizer cr2032 and it’s been great.
I once bought 4 air tags, never got to work them in any useful sense. I keep getting warnings about leaving my keys behind, which are in my pocket. I don't recall any time being warned about leaving things behind when I did. Can't really locate things a few meters away.
That’s so odd! They’ve worked exactly as promised for me. I never, ever get warnings about my own tags, or my wife’s tags that she’s shared with me. Not even once. And yesterday I used them to find my keys that the cats had relocated to across the house.
I don’t have any explanation for how our experiences could be so different, but they are. Mine even did the cool thing where you can watch your luggage move through an airport until you join up with it.
It seems like Apple should notify users that their AirTag disappeared and ask them if they would like instructions on replacing the battery or to remove it from their account.
The world is full of "head scratchers". But that makes it more important not just to yell "aliens!", but to exercise scientific curiosity. This is what makes me most angry about his works, he discourages people from trying to work out solutions for mysterious phenomena.
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