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Apple's Blue Ocean

hypercritical.co

241–250 of 262 posts

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#241
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have had many Apple devices since the 2nd gen iPod, and they have all lasted a very long time compared to my other devices. All my laptops back to my 15” PowerBook is still working. They have fixed a faulty GPU on a 4 year old laptop for free, even though I had opened the laptop and changed thermal paste. (Known manufacturing issue with that GPU, but still impressive) They have made mistakes. Like the battery in my…

> They have fixed a faulty GPU on a 4 year old laptop for free

I have to laugh at this.

Apple had a well known strategy of denying that obvious problems with their devices were not actually problems with their devices until 5-10 years later when no one would be using those devices anymore, at which point they would announce a recall, which involved a tedious process of proving it's the right device, and shipping it to Apple for days or taking it to an Apple Store for repairs.

In the meanwhile they would deny that it was ever a problem. The good thing was that a lot of Apple Geniuses were absolutely decent people and would probably give you a repair for free although they were supposed to try to get you to pay for the repairs.

I mean, just consider how long Apple denied the following, highly public recall worthy issues (and then extrapolate that to how they would behave with something that was less publicized and had a failure rate of about 10% as opposed to the much higher failure rates exhibited in these situations):

1. You're holding it wrong, iPhone 4. 2. No, your battery is not degraded...you're just imagining that your battery life is low 3. We fixed the degraded battery....no your phone hasn't slowed down...you're just imagining it. 4. Butterfly keyboards.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#242
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 de…

Where is the evidence of failing Mac SSDs?

I think you're being overly creative in your interpretation of average, like you're imagining a bunch of people people that have it fail after a year of regular use and then others that have it fail after 30 to 'average it out' and mask a bad experience for many people.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#243
post #238
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Watch the video I linked. Modern Macs are a single capacitor failure away from shorting 13v straight to those "amazing focus on quality" SSD chips. Either one of the two chips dies, you have a brick. No booting from external drive. Nothing. A brick. All because one capacitor fails. If it were just a matter of replacing a capacitor, I'd agree with you. But the wiring decisions from their "amazing focus" defaults to a…

You guys who are rossmann-pilled should put that as a disclaimer in your comments.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had any of the recent MBPs, but my 2020 HP EliteBook's main body looks similar to my 2013 retina mbp, which already had the "unibody" construction. If also feels quite solid when I hold it by one corner while open. The lid does feel somewhat flimsier, though, especially the hinge.

I have a Dell that looks the part when it’s sitting on a desk, but is actually quite flimsy (the underside is actually plastic, and the hinge does not look strong at all, the screen shifts colour when a slight pressure is applied on the lid). And it is a middle of the road Latitude, not a €1000 MacBook Air.

This particular HP is full metal. I was able to confirm it when using a random belkin charger with no ground: I got the familiar "vibrating" feeling in my fingers when moving them along the case.

This specific model is a 840/845 G8 (I have both, they're the same, one Intel and the other AMD). I haven't seen the current G10, but I've seen the supposedly higher-end 1040 G10 and, like the Dell, it looks the part, but it's clearly all plastic. Complete with creaking noises if you look at it wrong. And the one I'm talking about was brand new, maybe 5 hours old.

> the screen shifts colour when a slight pressure is applied on the lid

Heh. Must be nice to have a screen whose color is consistent if you leave it alone. My HP changes colors if I shift my head. No, these are not cheap 2003 models. Yes, they cost as much as a similar MBP.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lithium ion batteries that can handle a thousand to several thousand charge cycles and only see 80% reduction in capacity have been available for ten years. My 2013 Macbook Pro has just such a battery, rated for 80% capacity after 1000 cycles, and it lasted over 6 years before the battery's internal resistance rose enough that heavy load would cause a brownout and the machine to force sleep. Yet they are not in wides…

Its a bit of a myth for ever lasting bulbs, its more complicated than that. The life time was a trade off of colour and brightness. If you made them very red shifted and quite dim then there are bulbs that are very old still around, but they don't produce much light and never did. The harder you drive the filament the better the light properties but the quicker it died. The industry choose a point for trade offs as a…

> It is possible nowadays to make an LED that wont fail anytime soon

That was possible back in 2002. LEDs weren't yet "super bright" and an LED from back then had a lifespan measured in, well, human lifespans.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jumping in to recommend Cree if they're still around. Used to be able to get them at Home Depot here in the US. I started going Cree when I was renting 10 years ago, I've yet to have a single failure of the bulbs that I've drug with me to the place I live now. Have at least 25 bulbs currently in the house that are Cree LEDs. Their reliability actually has me frustrated at the current trend of lighting fixtures with i…

I’m replacing all the ecosmart bulbs with crees. The normal 60w/100w equivalents have been fine so far, but I have some 7500 lumen Cree ED37s that are trash, replaced 3 already out of ~7. Not sure what the deal is. Maybe my power at my house is bad or something. We blow through LEDs like crazy. They just start flickering.

At that point it is the wiring in your house. LEDs are super sensitive to crappy wiring. I have a couple receptacles in my house that just chew up LEDs, one a year, while the LEDs next to them have lasted for 5+.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

Higher levels of waste heat could be sold as a benefit, especially in cold climates. Nice little personal heating device to keep you warm on cold nights?

Optional accessories could harvest the heat to heat water, make coffee, cook food, etc?

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

Higher levels of waste heat could be sold as a benefit, especially in cold climates. Nice little personal heating device to keep you warm on cold nights? Optional accessories could harvest the heat to heat water, make coffee, cook food, etc?

Those people typically want to use their phone indoors too. There's really no good way to spin an uncomfortably hot phone.

If it's separate from the phone then you don't have to worry about that, but again if it's separate from the phone the entire scenario that made you want this kind of device starts to collapse because the requirements are so different.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#249
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; they're engineered to be manufactured, sell new, and sometimes sell expensive repairs by them.

I have a 2007 iPod nano that I still use pretty regularly. It still works, and I can load new music to it from my Mac.

I would say it was engineered to last.

If you're an Apple engineer then thanks for your forward thinking. Please keep it up, people do appreciate it, even if you don't hear it that often.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#250

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 am continually astonished at folks who expect OS and/or security updates past a few years

How many is “a few” to you?

Many people finance their phones through carrier deals that last three years. It should at least be supported that long.

And why not expect longer? To an outsider looking in, the software isn’t changing that much. I still have a messaging app, a browser, a camera app - that all basically haven’t changed their core functionality in the time I’ve had my device.

Just like computers, I think there is a correlation between price and expected support. If I’m paying $1,500 for an iPhone 15 Pro, I am doing so with the expectation that in 5 years it will be supported. If I am paying $100 for a cheap Android, my expectations are lower.

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