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The one thing I will say is even though Apple's software quality lately has taken a hit. Their commitment to security has only gotten stronger. The secure enclave, hardware level security, all of the things that came up with the FBI request have become a self serving prophecy for them. I applaud them for this and it looks like the MacBook Pro is going to be one of the most secure laptops around. Nothing is perfect of…
You mean the headphone jack that is still there?
Wired has an interesting and in-depth article on this. Also, the camera seems to have more security than earlier. > In the MacBook, the Secure Enclave is part of Apple’s new T1 processor, meaning it’s tied explicitly to the touch bar and Touch ID. It’s also, though, in charge of your webcam, a small but important difference. > “In previous generations of Macbook the webcam light was software controlled—which meant th…
Or, you know, spare one of the trillion transistors to switch power to 1) camera and 2) LED. There, solved. No full-powered ARM needed to control an indicator light.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is still software controlled; by software on a separate processor, and which is far harder to access than before. I'm not sure if that's a good thing.
Why not?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, you know, spare one of the trillion transistors to switch power to 1) camera and 2) LED. There, solved. No full-powered ARM needed to control an indicator light.
Why not just have a hard switch to cut the power to the camera. It is pretty low tech. Would be hard to hack without flipping the switch. No way camera could operate without power.
Who cares, now the LED is connected to the "secure enclave" ARM, previously it was connected to the SMC ARM. The point is: no frikken ARM should control the LED.
Earlier, it was software controlled. Now, it is not. Isn't that a good thing?
Though transmission of data is handled by the main processor, Apple Pay dialogs on screen are completely rendered by the T1 to take advantage of the Secure Enclave, a portion of the chip set aside for personal information just as it is in iPhones and Apple Watch devices. That sounds similar in concept to Intel ME, another "secure" coprocessor that can do a lot of other things that the more paranoid are freaking out o…
They almost certainly do. Intel won't sell you a CPU without Intel ME.
No touchscreen, no serious advances; only designer-first churn and imposing clunky acce$$orie$. Apple, in the computer industry, is chopped, unless radical, turnaround action is taken immediately. Sales of iPhone are also down because of lackluster improvements and declining value-for-dollar. Three straight quarters of revenue decline, the worst since Sculley.
Not really that surprising. Your average laptop nowadays probably has more ARM cores than x86 cores. They're in all kinds of peripherials like wifi controllers, power supplies, harddisk controllers, GPU job control, heck even AMD's recent APUs come with an integrated Cortex-A5.[1] ARM cores are everywhere, people just don't know about it. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6007/amd-2013-apus-to-include-...
AMD does the same thing with an ARM core.
Practically all peripherals contain at least one programmable processor.
Remote management / IPMI also usually works with an entirely separate ARM computer that's integrated with the main computers graphics unit -- basically a shared framebuffer, just in hardware.
Wired has an interesting and in-depth article on this. Also, the camera seems to have more security than earlier. > In the MacBook, the Secure Enclave is part of Apple’s new T1 processor, meaning it’s tied explicitly to the touch bar and Touch ID. It’s also, though, in charge of your webcam, a small but important difference. > “In previous generations of Macbook the webcam light was software controlled—which meant th…
Or, you know, spare one of the trillion transistors to switch power to 1) camera and 2) LED. There, solved. No full-powered ARM needed to control an indicator light.
https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/wiki/Specification---Fea...
^^ did everyone already miss that the webcam was an entire SoC and not just a sensor hooked up to UVC?