Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple's Blue Ocean

hypercritical.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 262 posts

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#221

Post by whywhywhywhy »

bilalq wrote: post #151
ttfkam wrote: post #77

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor. • Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail.…

The lack of MST support caught me by surprise. Six years ago, I intentionally bought an expensive monitor with USB-C and daisy-chaining support as the second screen so that the monitor itself would be able to function as my dock. Lo and behold, it worked fine on Windows but not on MacOS. Had to buy a dock separately and now have one more thing cluttering my desk. I spent so long troubleshooting and trying to figure o…

It’s so surprising that it doesn’t I too only found out when I bought the monitors plugged them in and it did nothing.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#222

Post by KETHERCORTEX »

Dig1t wrote: post #220
ttfkam wrote: post #77

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor. • Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail.…

>Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail. SSDs only have so many write cycles. One thing to note is the quality of Apple’s storage is above and beyond anything else you can buy. They have teams at every level of the storage stack and have an amazing focus on quality. From individual chips all the way up to the filesystem, all of the software is customized to extend the lifespan o…

> One thing to note is the quality of Apple’s storage is above and beyond anything else you can buy.

Average good experience of other users doesn't make a guy having a failing SSD feel any better. The absence of easy repair/replacement just adds an insult to injury.

> They do wear-leveling so the larger the drive you buy with your device the longer the device will last

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like a description of an average modern SSD. Heck, I was reading similar things about wear leveling regarding USB drives, like, a decade and a half ago.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#223

Post by ChuckMcM »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #148
ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is challenging because you probably don't want a phone that is hot all the time. There is however a very interesting technology which uses beta radiation and what are essentially "solar cells" to generate electricity directly[1]. Basically you could paint some Cesium 137 on to a solar cell and it would generate power 24x7! [1] Beta Voltaics a new kind of nuclear battery -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavolta…

Currently single digit efficiency so it's still going to be unacceptably hot.

I think you meant "big" rather than "hot"? It's decay rate is low enough that it doesn't even melt itself when not cooled (and it melts at room temperature). Adding precision here, a 'thin layer' would not melt itself, you could probably keep a 10+kg chunk liquid. But the low efficiency means you need a lot of surface area between the Cs137 and the silicon lattice, so it one could calculate the number of sq meters of "battery" surface you would need to power a device and then see if you could topologically fold that into a relatively small area. Cs137 also can produce a small amount of gamma radiation which you'd want to shield against so the whole thing might end up in a lead box. (not great for making it light :-))

It would be a fun engineering challenge and a good use of nuclear waste but difficult to sell politically because the association with "nuclear." And yes, it isn't actually practical at this level. Looking at where folks are looking at this seriously it seems to be more of a spacecraft thing (long duration probes far from the Sun kind of thing)

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#224

Post by foobiekr »

csomar wrote: post #141
foobiekr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Felt, GE, Philips. I have ~20 bulbs, including several on dimmers, in the house and have never had to replace a failed LED bulb in ten years. Are you sure your power isn't bad in some way?

I am guessing you are about to find out once you replace these old light bulbs?

Not having replaced a bulb due to failure for ten years (and to be clear not having replaced an LED bulb ever) is not the same as not having bulbs that are under 10 years old. We have a variety of LED bulbs from 2013 and then others I’ve incrementally replaced either as they annoyed me (heat, in almost all cases) or because I just got around to it (our external security bulbs most recently).

If LED bulbs are inherently prone to failure I’m not seeing it.

I do agree they’re more expensive, even if you adjust for inflation, but as far as I can tell they last forever.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#225

Post by barkerja »

1letterunixname wrote: post #110
ttfkam wrote: post #77

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor. • Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail.…

Apple devices aren't engineered to last; they're engineered to be manufactured, sell new, and sometimes sell expensive repairs by them. Also, NVIDIA cards in eGPUs and Thunderbolt (arm64) aren't supported. The best solution is either don't use Apple, or have a machine under warranty and very good backups. Complaints aside, the Anker 777 dock does 5K-8K DP over USB-C, 1 GbE, 100w charging, 4 USB-A and more and works w…

> Apple devices aren't engineered to last

This is just patently false.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#226

Post by fckgw »

jldugger wrote: post #162
todd3834 wrote: post #27

I really enjoyed the first half talking about how Apple and Nintendo followed a blue ocean strategy. Then the second half ranting about removable batteries felt totally out of place. I’m not sure I buy the blue ocean strategy of that, although well written.

> I really enjoyed the first half talking about how Apple and Nintendo followed a blue ocean strategy. Let me fix that for you. Blue ocean is roughly the idea of inventing new markets. While it might apply to Nintendo, that's really a stretch and I view it as product differentiation in a highly entrenched market where Sony and Microsoft are clear sharks in the water. If you look at Apple's product and marketing histo…

This is very reductive of the impact the iPod and iPhone had on the market. Every product has little bits and pieces of other products in it's DNA but to say the something like the iPhone didn't create the Smartphone market just because the Blackberry or the Sidekick existed is a little silly.

Even the iPad, which has clear lineage decades back to the horrible Windows XP tablets, create a whole new market category out of thin air.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#227

Post by ksoped »

>Second, people still crave the advantages of removable batteries that were left behind: increasing battery life by swapping batteries instead of using a cumbersome external battery pack, inexpensively and conveniently extending the life of a product by replacing a worn-out battery with a new one—without paying for someone else to perform delicate surgery on the device.

This whole paragraph is delusional. Apple users carrying and swapping out batteries? Apple supporting and allowing people to simply swap out a battery instead of going to the apple store for a certified repair? Apple??

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#228

Post by Dylan16807 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #223
Dylan16807 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently single digit efficiency so it's still going to be unacceptably hot.

I think you meant "big" rather than "hot"? It's decay rate is low enough that it doesn't even melt itself when not cooled (and it melts at room temperature). Adding precision here, a 'thin layer' would not melt itself, you could probably keep a 10+kg chunk liquid. But the low efficiency means you need a lot of surface area between the Cs137 and the silicon lattice, so it one could calculate the number of sq meters of…

Being big is also a problem, but I did in fact mean heat.

"Not melting itself" is not the threshold we need to meet for a phone. We should probably consider 5 thermal watts the limit. If we have a 30% efficient betavoltaic panel, then we can produce 1.5-2 watts of device power within that limit. If we have a 5% efficient panel, then we're only getting a quarter of a watt. A quarter of a watt can stop an idle phone from draining, but you'd only recover about 1% of a normal phone battery per hour.

By the time we're considering external devices, I think "battery bank with a solar panel" beats betavoltaic on the technical merits even when we're ignoring difficulty and radiation. Even a tiny panel built into the back of a phone generally wins.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#229

Post by highwaylights »

warrenm wrote: post #216
highwaylights wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the apps you're using substantially better than they were 4 years ago? Are they doing substantially more for you that you wanted from them? If the hardware is failing then I guess fair enough (it shouldn't be, that's a design defect), but inflated hardware demands to compensate for increasingly sloppy code isn't a reasonable justification to demand dropping another $500+ on a device that works fine. I recently gi…

>(As it is, the device still receives security updates, which I can't really grump at Apple for after almost six years - but only because they're better than the rest of the industry. It's still a poor situation). I am continually astonished at folks who expect OS and/or security updates past a few years (this is not a slight against you, just an observation on my part) A lot of folk like to gripe about "planned obso…

I guess my view on it is that there's really no reason for the obsolescence.

iOS 17 may not be technically able to run on the A11 chip in the iPhone X, but only on the basis that it's been designed not to do so. Any features that genuinely needed extra neural cores (or whatever limitation there might be) were clearly designed that way with the intention of forcing a new purchase - the software could have in all likelihood run just fine on the A11 if they wanted it to. OCLP kind of proves this on macOS, which should (in theory) be even harder to maintain support for than iOS, as there are many more binary driver blobs that Apple doesn't control the source code for and therefore can't stand over/patch if the original vendor has stopped doing so.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#230

Post by kergonath »

graphe wrote: post #152
ironick09 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my apple devices have lasted multiple (4+) years. The only time an apple device hasn’t is because I broke it.

Some of us remember our 2008 MacBook pros GPUs dying and apple refusing to fix it. Their electronics have, however never let me down.

Didn’t they end up recalling those and changing the main boards for free (of course, those replacements were also having the same issues as the original boards). AFAICT they still refuse to touch a nVidia GPU over this. It is not a common occurrence.
Post reply on HN