291–300 of 467 posts
At what point does this become a monopoly issue? Sure others could have outbid hypothetically so it is on paper fair but Apple has a lot of cash.
2 issues in fact, one is TSMC being the only one capable of making these amazing chips and the second is Apple buying their entire supply. Now if any of that counts as a monopoly I don't think so
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I have a 65" 4k TV and sit across the room from it. The difference from 1080p to 4k is definitely noticeable. It's not miles apart but the details are absolutely crisper and nicer. I imagine the benefits of 8k only really start showing on 80"+ screens.
That's fair. I've seen a number of resolution charts like the one here[1]. But I suppose I forgot how different peoples' setups can be. Sometimes across the room is 6', sometimes it's 15'. And for sure, screen size and eyesight can make a big difference. --- 1. https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-r...
>Apple’s iPod, by comparison, was made far more pocketable thanks to the inclusion of a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive. The story behind how Apple came to acquire these hard drives for the original iPod is interesting. >Jobs had expressed interest in building a portable music player in late 2000 and had tasked Jon Rubinstein with making it happen. The problem, however, was that Jobs wanted a player that was small and sl…
Interesting article, thanks for that. One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen, paired with material and interface design that companies hadn't considered a priority.
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4nm is a 5nm derivative node
What's the evidence this is both true and matters to the original claim? In some sense all nodes will be derivative of the previous one, as they never reinvent the wheel completely.
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2 issues in fact, one is TSMC being the only one capable of making these amazing chips and the second is Apple buying their entire supply. Now if any of that counts as a monopoly I don't think so
Why aren't there other companies outbidding Apple?
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For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"
The rust community seem to be leading the fightback on this but I think it'll be about 5 years before there's a big switch over. If I owned a popular electron app, I would definitely be thinking about starting to write a Rust version or migrating to Tauri because if you're not then somebody will be. Once that Rust version hits feature parity with your core functionality people will end up jumping ship for the faster,…
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Allright, then an optimistic estimate of 3 times to "wrap up" the transistor skrinking with current tech. Then some dies (or chiplet) will probably grow and consume more electricity: I am thinking GPUs... if they can be fed enough data fast enough though. Look at apple Mx dies. That said, I have still no idea of the geometry of a transistor on a die to get an idea of how far we are (and I am not even talking about io…
As for true geometry, current 5nm at TSMC is actually a gate pitch (spacing between the gates) of 51nm and interconnect (smallest possible distance between the centers of adjacent wires on interconnect metal layers) of 28nm. Intel 4 is 50nm gate pitch and 30nm interconnect. So, they're between 1nm of each other. As an example, IBM did create 5nm transistors on silicon nanosheets with GAAFETs in 2017. The spacing betw…
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The M-series is way faster than previous generations even in single treaded general purpose code. “Computers don’t get faster anymore” was Intel’s inability to innovate for many years, not an inevitability of physics. We will reach the end of Moore's law someday, but it’s not there yet.
Computers get faster in benchmarks . If anything, regular computer tasks like checking your email or editing a file has more latency than 5 years ago. Software bloats to fill whatever container you put it in.
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> by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one. Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies c…
It honestly wasn't during this period. in 2001, computers did not last as long as they do today, with performance doubling often every year to 18 months. Ask anyone who lived this period - by 2001, virtually everything had CD-ROM. If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97. For what its worth, Microsoft Office…
> If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97.
While yes, this is true, most people didn't buy most software. I think you may have lived in a bit of a tech bubble. At the time, "retail-boxed PC software" was a thing only PC enthusiasts bought!
In that era, outside of a few coastal US cities with great Internet connectivity, most home PCs were used permanently disconnected from the Internet, with only the software that came loaded by the OEM (which is why, to this day, OEMs still feel an obligation to do that.) This is also why
> Microsoft Office 97 was last version to come with floppy disk release alongside the CD-ROM (46 floppies too...)
...because, if you look at PCs after 1996, they all had enough hard-drive space to ship with OEM-preinstalled copies of Microsoft Office. And they almost always did.
But most people of that era weren't buying new PCs. Most people of that era still only had the same PC they bought possibly nearly-a-decade prior, to be the fancy electric typewriter for their kids' book reports. Because nothing was demanding quite yet for them to upgrade. Because they weren't keeping up with new software. It was a "cycle of stagnation", per se.
It was only once Internet connectivity started improving in rural areas, and the web started developing multimedia killer apps with resource requirements that made old PCs feel slow, that the rest of the world started catching up, looking around, and wondering whether they indeed needed a new PC. (And even then, there was a lot of pushback, from a crowd who had up until that point got by with for years with the same first PC they ever bought; who was entirely unused to technology that changes out from under them. Especially when it was a teenager who wanted access to these killer apps — their parents often didn't get it. "Why do we need a new PC? The old one still works! This is like replacing a refrigerator that's still refrigerating!")
In short, this is why everything other than the iPod, in this era, was still using parallel. Consumer electronics people knew that for every one Silicon Valley technophile who has home broadband, there were 100 teen girls in Kansas with no Internet running Windows 98SE, who might nevertheless be swayed to buy an MP3 player — perhaps to then load it with music ripped from tapes using the PC's line-in jack with a program (distributed on an accompanying floppy!) that does some awful kind of low-bitrate but low-CPU-usage streaming compression.
It wasn't just that it took until 2003 for Apple to secure the IP rights necessary to launch the iTunes Music Store. It really just wouldn't have made sense in 2001. Too few people online to buy music to make sense of the licensing fees. But the adoption curve was clear (and clearly exponential); so Apple started work early, and got the deals done by 2003, when it would start being a profitable venture. Other companies, meanwhile — ones with large IP-rights-holders as partners — had tried the same thing years earlier! But those companies couldn't turn a profit. (At least outside of the few very special "even grandmas here are ahead of the rest of the world" markets of the time, like Japan.)
> Ask anyone who lived this period
To be clear, I'm probably older than you. I'm describing what I saw around me, at my house and my friends' houses and my school and my parents' offices and so forth, as someone who lived in a somewhat-rural area [town of ~50k people] from ~1995 until ~2007.
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iTunes was amazing. It’s UI was so successful it guided most of the Mac’s for next decade: Coverflow and Spotlight are direct descendants. Every major OS has Spotlight-like UI these days. You can thank iTunes for the search-as-filter paradigm. It also did everything you’d need regarding MP3s. You could rip CDs, organize and burn them, have the lyrics and album artwork show neatly while displaying a cool set of animat…
> Every major OS has Spotlight-like UI these days. You can thank iTunes for the search-as-filter paradigm. I think your Apple bias is clouding your memory. Apple certainly didn't invent the Spotlight UI. Quicksilver did it before on OS X, and my memory is hazy, but it also might've been inspired by another app. iTunes also didn't invent the search-as-filter paradigm. I remember using something similar on foobar2000 i…
I’m not claiming iTunes invented it, but it was the most influential implementation.