Posts by Dave 126 10664 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
I mean seriously, Adobe can't be lacking in resources given their subscription model. What are they doing with it all? Is there something I'm missing, such as the Photoshop code base being peculiarly Byzantine? Have they just been too complacent for too long, or is that oversimplifing things? Anyone seen any articles featuring interviews with ex Adobe employees?
> The price-point. The laptops are probably about right. MacMini slightly over-egged.
Yeah, that was my initial thought when I saw the Mac Mini price - if Apple sold it cheaper they could shift loads, and after all, there's not much to it beyond the M1, no screen or keyboard. But then I remembered that TSMC's production capacity for 5nm chips isn't unlimited.
> Whether the ARM scales to higher performance levels is another matter.
Shouldn't be a problem. Single core performance beats almost everything. Machines built for better thermal performance should allow more cores to run fast, though Anandtech note that a single core can saturate the memory so using more than one core can actually degrade performance.
The GPU question is interesting because the M1's GPU beats all integrated graphics and many lower end discrete graphics at far lower power consumption. Apple's roadmap doesn't show any AMD GPU's on ARM Macs. This suggests that Apple are confident of building a discrete GPU of their own.
What, why? Because they're fitted with better than average microphones? Because they don't crash every half hour like my Windows 98 PC did?
My sharp paring knife has the potential to do amazing things in the area of causing blood to come out of my fingers. But that's irrelevant because it's very good at slicing tomatoes.
Adobe has released a feature-complete Photoshop ARM beta for macOS, whilst stating that they don't officially support Rosetta 2 (although it seems to work). Across various Mac forums this has only reawakened user criticism of Adobe, for their slowness in adapting, their licensing terms and longstanding UI niggles, with much discussion of viable alternatives such as Affinity.
It's not as if Adobe haven't been slowly porting / rewriting Photoshop to ARM (iPad) for a few years now, or that Apple won't let them have development kits, or that they don't have the resources.
I'm a Windows user, and as such it reminds me of how slow first Microsoft was to support high resolution monitors properly, and then after they fixed it, how slow (years!) Adobe were to have Photoshop work at high resolutions without the tool palettes being unusably tiny. Grrr.
Okay, maybe I'm anti Adobe today because for the love of dog I don't understand why in Illustrator it's impossible to have the scroll wheel tied to zoom in / out as it is in Photoshop and in every CAD package from the last two decades.
Private citizens have been taking delivery of M1 Macs for nearly two days now - not just websites who may or may not have received review units. They're in agreement.
You're inferring that Anandtech are merely shills. There's nothing to stop you reviewing their methodology and reading up on their history before posting here.
I agree scepticism is generally good thing, but it doesn't stop one from looking at further evidence. That's the definition of cynicism.
There's a lot of distrust of Geekbench, as you note. That's why Andrei over at Anandtech appears to have been throwing everything he can think of at it since taking delivery of an M1 Mac Mini. There should be enough there to give people an idea of how well it will perform for their real life work loads.
Quite a few typos in his report suggest that he's either not slept yet or has just wanted to post the report ASAP:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/2
> Power usage in the Mac mini is interesting, 4.2w idle, ~30w peak.
Just to be clear, as Anandtech tested it, that's the power consumption of the entire Mac Mini (including its internal power transformer) since they weren't allowed to take the unit apart. They estimated that the peak of the M1 CPU GPU SoC is under 25W, after the power supply losses are taken into account.b
Applications running under Rosetta 2 run faster than they do natively on the Macs these new M1 models replace. That likely isn't a coincidence, but the result of a deliberate decision at Apple to only release the M1 Macs at this time. It makes their communication, their marketing if you will, that bit easier for them. Competency.
Hats off to whoever planned that, as well as hats off to the silicon design teams (who apparently worked closely with the Rosetta 2 team to make this possible.)
> also assume a mini sub would probably wipe out the $35million
A rebreather scuba setup doesn't release bubbles, and whilst more expensive (and requiring greater maintenance) than an air tank and regulator, it doesn't cost millions.
Of course, that's only a part of the getaway plan... you need advance warning to defrost the decoy dummy corpse and dress it in your clothes, then make your way to the underwater entrance of your pre-built hideout.
He was referring to the brother of a famous Columbian cocaine dealer who is selling a self-branded, gold plated Chinese folding phone for about half what the manufacturer sells it for... one theory a Reg reader put forward was that it was money laundering.
The marketing video featured more women in bikinis than a Samsung washing machine press event from 2010.
People have different use-cases to me, I know, and I attempt to keep that in mind.
However, when I think of 'out of the house tablets', the first use-case that comes to mind is keeping commuters entertained, but they mostly already carry a bag for other items - so can easily accommodate a conventional 9" 3:2 ish tablet (iPad Mini or equivalent).
Another use case is when you're running around a wild west theme park and the UI you need to quickly diagnose a killer robot requires more screen than a phone can give you.
Maybe folding screens will find their place in making a laptop fit into a small handbag instead of a satchel or rucksack? That's the sort of thing Weird Sony have done, back when they still made VAIOs (they made a folding dual screened Android tablet, they made a Windows net book with the screen no taller than the keyboard, heck they even made a Windows XP tablet with the keyboard spilt either side of the screen.)
> Now your aesthetic sensibilities may be offended but don't forget the GUI is a tool, nothing more.
The divide between appearence and function isn't as clear cut as you make out. Especially for less experienced users. The visual environment has a bearing on people's ability to learn. We're wired to spot differences, so if a visual environment is full of variations that are arbitrary then it obscures the variation that is meaningful.
As you say, the UI is a tool, but don't forget that since it is an *interface* with a *user* then issues with our human brains need to be accommodated.
It's the old convenience Vs security trade off. If you were using an Android phone, it might have been worth looking at 'Unlock phone with NFC tag' - and then securing an NFC tag to your glove. It can be set up to work with Bluetooth devices too. Obviously it opens an additional attack vector, bit that would have been for you to mull over.
> I'm just as confused why people use cases.
Strangely, people live and work in environments different to your own. Clearly a phone that used on a building site or farm yard is at greater risk of being dropped on something hard or sharp than a phone that is largely used in a carpeted office. The people who out cases on their phone may well be the people who supply you with food and shelter.
People in their dexterity and grip too, with some dubbed 'butter fingers'.
Neither ABS or polycarbonate are as stiff as glass, so would need to be make thicker than a functionally equivalent glass part, resulting in either a thicker phone or a smaller battery. If you say that you'd be fine with a slightly thicker phone, then you're in luck: you can put it in a case. So how exactly are you negatively impacted by the choice of glass?
Carbon fibre reinforced plastic isn't as easy to recycle as glass. Also, if it is chipped by dropping it on something, it can give nasty splinters.
> I've had an iPhone for years now and i like them, but I cannot fathom why Apple makes the damned things out of glass! I mean - why?
What material would you spec in its place? Bear in mind that metals will interfere with the radios and wireless charging, and polymers aren't as stiff as glass.
> This pandemic is no joke, it is super deadly. I mean they fact checked the death rate
OP uses the term 'they' without stating who 'they' refers to. There is strong correlation with this usage and the person using it being a crackpot.
OP asserts 'death rate' without stating whether that's per head of population or per case of population.
> Video is part of the interaction, we don't talk to each other with our eyes closed why when we are virtual would we do the same
The article author mentions 'broken social cues' in videoconferencing. He feels that no Visual cues ate better than false visual cues. Visual cues are important in face to face meeting (as indeed, is touch in many cultures) but video conferencing breaks these cues in at least two ways:
-eye contact doesn't work, because the camera and the screen are not in the same place.* Even if they were, your pupils would appear to the other person to be looking at a point in space roughly halfway between them and you.
-delays and lag can cause a distracting disconnect between people.
* The documentary film maker Errol Morris uses a half mirrored system, so that the person being interviewed appears to the viewer to be looking directly into the camera, but allowing the interviewee and interviewer to maintain eye contact during their conversation. He calls it the Interrotron.
The Reg could solicit its readers for stories for a new section:
"Impromptu tours of interesting facilities given to them as children because they just turned up" - especially tours in paces that these days wouldn't be allowed because of health and safety or data protection guidelines - or just because the foreman isnt given that sort of discretion.
My uncle and and his father once just turned up at a Cornish tin mine in the sixties, and were treated to a tour down the pit. My uncle afterwards used his pocket money to buy shares in it, which showed a good return during the rise in commodity prices a few years back.
>GPS is (or should be) completely reception based, doesn't need to send.
Phones tend to use aGPS (Assisted GPS) to get a faster fix on the satellites. AGPS uses multiple cell mast signals (if available) to quickly but roughly determine a phone's location, and thus have a head start in acquiring an accurate GPS fix.
> For reasons easy to guess, newer Android phones have now moved the "Mobile Data On/Off" button to "Settings -> Connections -> Mobile Networks -> Mobile Data.
The quick setting available by dragging down are customisable - not only which setting appear, but the number of them that are shown at once and the order in which they are presented. That's how they are on Samsung's OneUI on Android 9, but it isn't really any different to how my Nexus 5 (pure Google Android, a few versions ago) behaved).
Typical behaviour is to swipe down to display 5 settings in a row, plus notifications below. Swipe down again to display a grid of 15 settings. Then swipe right to show an additional page of settings.
Any deviation from this is more likely to do with your phone vendor's skinning of Android than it is to do with the version number of Android.
It's amazing how quickly things can become confusing when trying to spread an OS and software across different CPU architectures.
Let's see how new Mac users get on in next few weeks and if Apple's relatively clear message of "this stuff will work, this other stuff will work very fast" holds true.
Some knock Apple for 'merely' being good at marketing, but at times like this I see their competency at communicating as a virtue.
> I dunno, when you take that approach you always have the distinct possibility of getting people with egos trying to take a project in their direction
That is a danger, yes, but there are ways of mitigating it at the hiring stage and through management. There's a long parole period for new employees. One tool Apple management has is a clear vision of where the company is going and what they want the team to achieve. Prospective employees also have a good idea of what Apple is about before they apply. Management and team members are aided by employing very good analysts and supplying them with with expensive data to turn into good intelligence.
An egotistical team member is less likely to go his own way if he sees his manager rationally explain - with high quality data - why things should be done, and know that he himself is listened to. If that doesn't work, Apple has skunk teams exploring niche areas, perhaps Mr Maverick would be happier there.
As it is now, I'd imagine the teams responsible for the A series and M1 SoCs are giving themselves a deserved pat on the back - that's got to be good for team cohesion.
>Do we need to start caring about what the underlying hardware is again?
Probably not in the same way. In the nineties, a PC wouldn't even read a Mac floppy disk without faffing. Documents weren't as portable between operating systems. You were more tied to the operating system you are using. Okay, that's OS stuff, not cpu architecture per se.
Today, a lot of useful work can be done in a web browser - emailing, word processing, printing, etc, and most of us switch between OSs (Android, Windows, iOS, MacOS, Linux) many times a day. We expect to edit (or at least view) documents between them.
In addition, we're already all using computers with CPUs, GPUs, DSPs - different architectures for different jobs - inside them.
I heard it said that the Motorola CPUs (Atari, Mac) were better suited to music production in the '90s. And it was music and DTP that allowed Apple to survive that decade (Windows didn't have any means for system wide document colour management). Again, not an architecture thing. The inclusion of FireWire as standard (originally for high Res scanners) in Macs helped them in the early 2000s get the audio and video editing market.
> Shirley Intel, IBM and AMD also have the best people and a ton of cash??
I think @ecarlseen's point is that Intel, IBM, and AMD (and Qualcomm, Nvidia with ARM server CPUs, Samsung have wound up their Exynos designs) aren't in the same position as Apple, since they aren't designing CPUs / SoCs to run a single operating system family that they control. It's not just that Apple have a shit ton of cash, but that they are better placed to reap a return on their investment in this area. We've seen hints of it though - Google have an in-house silicon design team (for accellerators in their Pixel range), Microsoft worked with Qualcomm for an ARM chip for their Surface range
It's interesting to note that Apple were stung by the Trash Can Mac Pro a few years back. It's whole design was based on using two graphics cards, as was the industry norm at the time. What Apple didn't expect was for AMD (and Nvidia) to shift to developing single very powerful GPU cards instead - and the Trash Can's thermal design couldn't cope with that. The Trash Can wasn't seriously updated, and Apple reputation was bruised - for reasons that they couldn't have predicted unless they knew as much about GPU design as AMD did.
Similarly, MacBook Pro buyers complained for several years that new models didn't bring any great speed gains - because Intel weren't focusing on that at the time.
And people knocked Apple a few years back for releasing a MacBook Pro range that only supported 16GB RAM - because the Intel CPUs didn't support a certain type of power efficient RAM above that. Six months later, Apple listened and gave the option for more RAM, but it came at the cost of disproportionate RAM power consumption - because Intel didn't make the chip they wanted.
> I'm curious to know if there's any multi CPU support in these?
And others will want to know the GPU roadmap. Okay, right now Apple making a Mac Mini and MacBooks Pro and Air with the same chip is smart. The MacBook Pro sends the message that Apple Silicon can handle 'pro' tasks, the lower end machines mean that more developers can afford one.
Now, Apple *could* have announced an ARM chip with more PCIe lanes, Thunderbolt, and RAM - but why would they? The market for these pricier mission-critical machines is more cautious and wouldn't buy on day one anyway, since it'll take a bit of time for those M1 MacBooks to demonstrate their prowess, assuage compatability fears and attract developers. In the meantime, Apple can spend the next year continuing to develop the M2, M2X Super Turbo etc, plus their own discrete GPU.
Yep, a GPU. It's not been mentioned much, but their roadmap slides at WWDC showed no AMD GPUs alongside Apple CPUs.
The hardware (scroll wheel) was an integral part of the iPod UI. I had otherwise similar MP3 players, and the lack of a scroll wheel made navigating huge lists of albums less joyful than it could have been. Abba taptap tap tap tap tap..... Taptap tap Zappa!
(I'd previously had a Sharp 722 Minidisk player with a scroll wheel, but it was used for entering text, rather than for navigating tracks since albums typically didn't exceed twenty tracks. )
Noboy is disagreeing with you Mage when you say Apple are very good at marketing, or that their pricing structures and practises can be frustrating or even nasty.
However, the way to express that isn't to keep stating that they they don't innovate or that everything of note they've ever done is just brought-in or stolen. When you take this line of argument it *appears* that you only value innovation of individual components, as opposed to the refinement of an integrated end product. It's as if you don't see the work of people in form engineering, ergonomics, human behaviour, testing, etc as being of any worth. You come across as valuing a product's history over its function.
I'm not saying that's what you actually think, I don't want to make you a straw man. But that's just how your posts can read from time to time.
The chips are designed by individuals employed by Apple, based on an architecture developed by ARM, which itself was financially supported by Apple back in the Newton days. It suggests that someone at Apple bet heavily that spending huge amounts of cash on SoC development (rather than buying Qualcomm chips) would reap big returns.
Nobody here is too fussed about who invented or borrowed what first. It's often largely the integration of things that make an end product better fit for purpose.
The bottom line is, Apple have invested heavily in designing an ARM chip that is quite unlike any other (see Anandtech - the A series SoCs aren't mere enhancements of ARM's designs) to run software made by Apple to facilitate workflows it believes its customers want. If Apple believe that their customers want a laptop that do Zoom calls for nearly twenty hours on a single charge, so be it. If it believes that their chips can rush through AV work whilst sipping power, so be it. They can then select, fine tune and integrate the hardware and software required.
Depends upon the project and how many people are concurrently working on it. For sure, having engineers only access data on site, and that data held on the premises, is the most secure. So in this context, just replace 'cloud' with mainframe or server, and the upshot remains the same: computer on desk just needs to drive monitors. Changes an engineer commits to a model are immediately available to colleagues.
I didn't mean to suggest that the server / mainframe model is the definitively best way to use CAD in all situations, only that it does offer some plus points. The hybrid approach is popular - modelling done on local workstation, simulation / rendering done on local GPU farm or rented cloud resources.
newspupoy is counting how many architectures Macs have used. Fair enough. But there's a case for counting how many architectures OSX / NeXtStep has been on - it was designed to be as architecture agnostic as possible, and ran on a few things before Jobs rejoined Apple.
When contemplating putting OSX on Intel, an Apple engineer was sent out to buy a high end Sony VAIO laptop, and they got OSX running smoothly on it within two days.
> Until Spectre/Meltdown type flaws are found in the M1. Developing your own chips and doing security is *hard*
Indeed, but Apple aren't starting from scratch. They've had billions of chips from this family out in the wild for several years, at the mercy of motivated bug bounty hunters and security agencies.
Well, making a machine that competes with your rivals' machines on performance but costs you less money to make is going to be profitable. The trick is working out how to save costs. If it were easy, your competitors would already be doing it.
One would normally point out that the R and D cost of the silicon needs to included, but of course a huge chunk of that was paid for by iPhones. Again, sharing the R and D costs across phones, tablets and laptops is a smart move. A smart move that isn't easy for rivals to follow, since they don't control all the hardware and software.
A lot of the discussion here is how these ARM Macs compare to Intel. However, down the line it might be worth looking at other ARM machines running other OSs - flavours if Unix, Windows and whatever the hell Google is playing around with this month (ChromeOS, Fuschia etc). Could Qualcomm design laptop-grade ARM SoCs to compete with Apple's? Heck, even Google has played in the smartphone chip design space as they wanted ML stuff for their Pixel phones that Qualcomm wasn't doing.
I found this from a month ago from the Autodesk forums:
"Fusion 360 will not be a native ARM application out of the gate; testing with Rosetta 2 has been positive so far, with my personal experience being that performance is largely unimpacted. No doubt a few tweaks and optimizations will be necessary over time, but if you were to install the x86-64 version of Fusion 360 on Apple Silicone today, the difference is practically imperceptible."
- Lance Carocci, Fusion 360 QA for UI Framework/Cloud Workflows
If Fusion 360 is happy running through Rosetta 2, I can't see a simple STL to G-code 'slicer' application being upset.
If the workload benefits from several monitors, for sure... though perhaps the folk who run four monitors aren't always the types to be overly concerned about the size of their PC! The extruded aluminium cases that many fanless industrial PCs are built into would fit the bill.
If no extra monitors are required, and the workload is modest, a small ARM box is attractively cheap and quiet.
nVidia has been forgotten in the last few days
... Not so much in the GPU space, but in the ARM CPU space where they're doing good things for severs, so I'm told. Apple's new Macs are likely to be good for bringing even more developers to all ARM platforms. Since nVidia own ARM, that kind of makes them allies of Apple for the time being.
I dunno, maybe lasers of a safe class being used with permission during a nearby surveying job. Perhaps lasers used for illumination during a trade event below the flight path. I don't know the laws are written, but sensible surveyors or event organisers would talk with the air authorities in advance, or at least check the regulations / best practice.
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