Posts by Lord Elpuss

Re: Traditional Apple.

"We all know that the whole "It has a whole extra GPU core!" on the pro vs air thing is complete bullshit,"

I'm with you on the ports, that's a deliberate drive to push people to more expensive machines. The 'extra GPU core' thing isn't though; it's supply chain optimisation. For any given silicon manufacturing process, there will always be a degree of waste; silicon wafers with defects, chips that don't work 100%. These used to be thrown away.

What Apple and other manufacturers are now doing is looking at the TYPE of defect, and working out whether what remains of the chip can still be put to good use. In this case, the 7/8 core devices are almost certainly 8/8 core chips that were manufacturers with one defective core; because of the way they're designed it doesn't matter WHICH of the 8 is defective, the remaining 7 will work just fine. So they're being sold as 'entry-level' devices.

Re: Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

@Andy 103:

The Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport adapter costs £59, and gives you HDMI, USB-A and USB-C passthrough; so you can charge and link to an HDMI monitor through one Thunderbolt port. You can plug your keyboard dongle into the USB-A port as well.

Then you have everything through a single connection, freeing up your other Thunderbolt port for anything else you might need.

Re: Seriously?

Downvoted by the fish microwaving maniac again - sigh...

"You're one of those people who like constantly rearranging windows are you?"

Most (if not all) Ultrawide monitors have multi-monitor mode built in. They can function as 2 separate monitors on one physical panel.

Re: Seriously?

"No-one should have to tote around a hub for basic tasks, and I'll submit that charging while connected to a monitor and simultaneously charging my phone, or connecting to a LAN, is a basic task. "

You don't need a hub for any of these things; assuming you've got a reasonably decent monitor, one Thunderbolt port does it all.

Loving the downvote - obviously caught a closet fish-microwaver ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: A Mixed Bag for me

If you're a developer with your specific use case, stay away from this beast.

FTFY.

Re: I'm going to go out on a limb...

I'm not UK based so no IR35, but we do have mutuality of obligation built into the contract. Reason being that I'm currently performing a critical function and am in theory not easily replaced (although I suspect I'm easier to replace than they think, they're just lazy), so they wanted a 3 month notice period.

Also no timesheets. It's a fixed-term employment contract with a defined end date. I'm not going to get into details as it could make me identifiable, but where I currently live the law allows for up to 3 fixed-term employment contracts before the company either has to offer you fulltime employment or not employ you for a calendar year.

The concept of risking being told 'we have no work for you' and shown the door is alien to me. I'm sure it happens, but it's not a contractual basis I or my employer would be happy with. I presume it works both ways, in that you can also walk away with same-day notice?

Re: I'm going to go out on a limb...

My contract doesn't allow a zero notice period except in disciplinary situations. If yours does without a very good reason, you might want to have somebody to look at it. I've certainly never had a situation where I've been asked to leave *immediately*, at least not without pay; I think my shortest ever notice period was 30 days, and now it's three months.

Re not being paid for four months; when I was a permie one of my team was sent on assignment from his extremely-low-cost home country to a country with one of the highest costs of living in the world. His assignment wasn't set up correctly (thanks HR) so he ended up not being paid his assignment salary uplift for 2 salary cycles, and had to cover several thousand pounds of living costs for that time. He could claim back of course, but expenses were paid back with salary cycles and so it still (temporarily) destroyed his savings, current account and credit card just to stay afloat.

My point is: sh*t happens to permies too.

Re: I'm going to go out on a limb...

” It's quite telling that even contractors inside ir35 who ARE paying the same tax rates as a permie still get this mild abuse because they STILL take more home than the permies they work with.”

I can only speak for myself, but I have no problem with a anything up to 30% uplift for contractors doing the same job, to cover the relative difference in T&Cs. No abuse from me there. But as soon as we start talking about integer multiples of salary, they lose my sympathy.

Bear in mind also that ‘what they owe’ has been determined by the judge here to be significantly more than ‘what they’ve paid’ - so here at least, it’s mot just an emotional argument.

Re: I'm going to go out on a limb...

@ratcatcher67 not sure what you’re calling junk, nobody’s arguing you do get job security as a permie. In fact the posts above state the opposite.

He wasn't asked the question; he offered the statement. Out of the entire phrase "forced to concede", the only accurate word is 'to'.

Re: no point

"As soon as they linked the store profits to developing new hardware like the M1 chip then statements like the one you make above loses credibility"

How so? Is Apple not allowed to use profits from one division to fund another? Crikey. Must inform every single Fortune500 company out there that they're ONLY allowed to have divisions run as individual profit-and-loss silos and there must be NO cross-funding between them. Dear oh dear.

Definition '...too much' means there's no business justification for an excessive profit margin. Companies owning divisions where sales of one product funds the development of another are NOT 'too much' - in any way shape or form. Half the companies on the planet would be out of business if that were the case.

You may well be right, but that's not the article quoted or linked in the Register article.

That said, your link does talk about malware on MacOS, and it's fair to say he acknowledged a malware problem in the article you provided.

Looks like Reg linked the wrong article to support the premise.

Re: no point

"Just greed. 30% is to much"

How do you know? It's a lot, certainly, but do you have insight into Apple's costs of maintaining the ecosystem, plus the costs of achieving the same marketing reach through other means?

Most products out there are priced way beyond the wholesale commodity cost of the product itself, and you're paying for a 'value layer' around the product because most of us don't have the skill or can't be bothered to put all the various bits together for a complete solution.

Apple offers that complete solution, and until you've analysed the economics it's not accurate to say 30% is 'too much'.

Re: "Apple’s ironclad control of the iOS platform"

"I think that that is way too much for a platform that is done and dusted and resells the same bytes over and over again 24/7."

It depends on the costs incurred, and also on the relative market costs to achieve the same publishing reach by other means. That 30% also gets your product marketed to hundreds of millions of potential punters; if you're Epic you might have a similar kind of reach, but for the vast majority of app publishers 30% is a steal compared to what you'd have to pay to reach the same client base through other means.

Re: "Apple is, after all, the professional’s platform"

"Yeah, but Mac lusers are most likely to sue"

I've never met a Mac luser. Worked in a company with 430,000 Mac users though.

Re: Its a problem of volume

It's not me voting you down - I can see where you're coming from. Might be a factor of the fact that at any given time 17% of the world's population is buying a new smartphone, but of course that's not cumulative and will be strongly centred around first-world economies. Maybe 15% is first-world, and 2% the rest. Something like that.

Re: Its a problem of volume

It's closer to 1.3bn in 2020, but the number is more or less correct.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share/

Re: But what about Apple?

"Apple's recycling scheme is actually quite decent..... Last autumn, I got £560 towards my new iPhone for the previous year's iPhone 11 pro. I got £250 for my two year old Apple watch"

I love Apple, as regular commentards know, but their recycling scheme is a pile of crud. You would have been WAY better off selling your <1yr old iPhone 11 Pro on the second hand market; you would have got far more money for it, and it would have gone to somebody else who could continue to use it; which is the ultimate form of recycling.

Re: "You buy a phone. Two years later, you buy another"

Downvoted for being smug. And irrelevant.

Re: Nothing there....

Differentiating here of course from the principle that Black lives do matter (the origins are genuine, honorable and founded on absolute necessity), the fact remains that the BLM movement itself is a con. A politically motivated, corrupt monstrosity just like Extinction Rebellion.