Apple Confirms Their Future Desktops + Laptops Will Use In-House CPUs

[scottishduck]

This type of person is called the useful idiot. Apple is the most malicious company out there. Software support is irrelevant as they offer zero support for the hardware itself. Got a cracked screen? Might pretty much just buy a whole new phone. Battery's dead? Get a new phone.

Apple offers free battery replacement for in-warranty phones and about $50 charge for out-of-warranty. They offer screen replacement for $25 in-warranty and have a sliding scale of prices depending on model for out-of-warranty.

[pal666]

That is not true at the moment. Supercomputer Fugaku the one that just took number 1 TOP100 has not had it GPUs plugged in yet.

it has 16-wide simd blocks doing all job, which is basically same thing. as was chinese computer which was at the top few years ago. rest are using traditional videocards

[Michael_S]

I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 that still kind of works; the battery is quite flat and the power button became defective but it's flawless otherwise.
I also own a Samsung Galaxy S6 which has problems with it's sensor buttons but it's flawless otherwise.
So I can kind of agree phones tend to break on some place or another.

The lesson I learned?

a) Buy a phone I can repair myself
b) Buy a phone that has some kind of longtime support
c) Buy a phone from a company that does not churn out phones like crazy because they quickly become abandonware and also fail quickly - by design

So I came to the conclusion a Fairphone 3 (link) is the right phone for me and, boy, how I love this thing!
Rugged, minimalistic, easily repairable (link to iFixit), Dual-SIM, MicroSD, removable battery... there is nothing I miss and it has everything I could hope for.

I live in the US, so getting a Fairphone would be difficult. I agree it's a great choice.

In the reviews I've been reading, even the Samsung flagship repairability is being reduced, generally, with each new generation.

[sheldonl]

I had been trying to get by with mid range Android phones and the best case options available for them for my family. LGs, Motorolas, Xioamis, OnePlus (back when OnePlus was cheaper), ZTE. We've gone through 10 phones in 4 years. That's how bad the quality is. Many of those 10 were replaced under warranty, and then failed again soon after the warranty expired.

Is all that better than Apple? Really?

I've given up, now my kids all have lightly used Samsung Galaxy S-somethings and my wife and I have Google Pixel phones - not because I want to spoil my kids or even myself, but because I'm desperately hoping these top end devices won't break if you look at them funny.

Meanwhile, my friends and coworkers with iPhones usually - not always, but usually - have a good reliability experience. There are luxury buyers that get something new every year or two, but most people in my social circle upgrade every four or five years. I've never had that option before now, my Android device was inevitably dead long before that.

The only android phone I would ever consider buying is a Pixel. Otherwise, I'd stick with an iPhone. So much less hassle, good long term support, better quality apps (overall IMO.) When I had an android device I had some iphone users tell me the same thing. I didn't believe them until I got one. They were right. You get what you pay for.

I find it hilarious some of the discussion going on in this thread about apple users do this or only do that, or mobile users don't care about this or that. That may be their experience, but nothing that I'm reading about this broad generalizations even remotely comes close to the reality that I experience so it's all subjective and YMMV. I actually have an iphone, ipad, macbook pro (2 actually) and an older desktop that still performs extremely well with KDE Neon. Many of the people I know use apple devices, so I don't know if these folks that are (mis)characterizing apple users are just trolling or really don't have broad experience with apple and being around a shit ton of people who use apple.

[sheldonl]

Apple offers free battery replacement for in-warranty phones and about $50 charge for out-of-warranty. They offer screen replacement for $25 in-warranty and have a sliding scale of prices depending on model for out-of-warranty.

I agree, Apple support is fairly good. Particularly if you have applecare. The batteries on my MBP went after 3 years, b/c it was an issue that other people had already experienced, even though I was out of warranty and apple care had expired, and I was the second owner of the device, they replaced the batteries free of charge. My only issue with Apple support is, if you go to the apple store to get support, you wait a long time.

[Michael_S]

You get what you pay for.

So, the thing I hate about that is that it translates to "be a member of the wealthy class or else go screw yourself".

I hate Microsoft and Microsoft Windows, but one of the key things that happened over the past twenty-five years is that an acceptable home user desktop computing experience went from a $2500 entry cost to a $400 entry cost - and even less, if you're educated enough to know what to buy when shopping. Apple has made fine computers for the past twenty years, but the entry level is still $1000 or so. And without Windows as competition, I would bet today's bottom end Macbook Air and iMac would be $2000 or higher. Apple's answer to the bottom 50% of earners in the US population is "go away".

My hope was that Android would do the same thing for mobile computing that Microsoft Windows did for desktop computing, only better because it was built on a Linux kernel. Apple would sell $600 smart phones and Android phones that were just as good would be $600, then $500, then $350, then $100 and open for all kinds of user customizations. Instead, Android has gone wrong in three ways. The Android flagships are now driving prices up as much as Apple. The open source aspects of Android are under active attack by Google, Google is systematically replacing everything with proprietary components and doing everything it can to tie Android apps to its proprietary services. And the $200 and $100 phones are not only behind in performance, they are flimsy and of poor construction. So someone like me ends up replacing so many $200 Android phones that it would have been no more expensive to just buy a single top tier phone.

Separately - as of the Samsung Galaxy S9, I think you can disable and delete most of Samsung's bloatware to get down to a nearly stock Android experience. Don't quote me on that, do your own research. But it's a much better user experience than the older Samsung Galaxy phones that crippled performance by bundling junk.

[sheldonl]

So, the thing I hate about that is that it translates to "be a member of the wealthy class or else go screw yourself".

I disagree, I'm not wealthy. It's fundamentally a value proposition mapped over time. Spend X now or spend less now, but ultimately more later b/c you bought stuff that appeared to be inexpensive but really ended up just being cheap stuff that ends up costing you more, over the long term, with more frustration. What I do is research out what I want, what will last the longest, what is the best value over time (you need to determine what your timeframe is) and then save some amount of money each month until I can get it. For example, it took me 3 years to buy my current 65" 4K HDR TV, because I researched out what I wanted, the tech that was coming down the pipe and then I saved a little every month until I had enough, and then I waited until Black Friday sales, when the TV was later in its sales cycle. It requires you to be patient and disciplined, not be able to go out and just drop a shit ton of money on a whim.

I think the rest of your comment misunderstands economics and what drives company product development.

[MadeUpName]

They don't care that they aren't going to win benchmarks in CFD simulations vs AVX-512 processors because that's not their market.

They do care that they get to lock you into their ecosystem with all the control they get over the iPhone users brought to notebooks and desktops.

About that.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/24/justice-department-anti-trust-apple-337120

[vladpetric]

First, you need to learn to express your ideas better (write better). I'm fine debating technical issues, but I need to actually understand the claims you're making. You're really all over the place (when communicating in writing with other people, stream of consciousness is really not the best idea). One thing you can do for instance is highlight your main ideas (e.g., use bullet points, highlight critical points, use punctuation properly, etc).

The CCN is, as far as I can tell from their documentation, a cluster-to-cluster communication system. So you have multiple clusters, then you use something like the CCN to provide coherent memory semantics.

My claim (clarified): you have a single cluster of cores (such as, on the rpi4), the coherence happens mostly internally, through the shared l2 cache. You don't end up with traffic to memory when passing cache lines from core to core, within a cluster. RPI4 is a single cluster after all.

My point is not that you don't need an AMBA bus for a processor at all (which seems to provide memory coherency as well) - of course you need a bus for IO ... . My point is that its maximum bandwidth (not talking about latency here) doesn't matter that much because of the caching system. That goes against your original claim.

Except that is not the problem AMD Zen cores are the same problem. AMD its the infinity fabric this on a Cortex A72 is the AMBA 5 CHI or AMBA 4 ACE with multi clusters but when you only have 1 cluster the AMBA is still there and is not in fact removable the reason why will come clear latter.

[Michael_S]

I disagree, I'm not wealthy. It's fundamentally a value proposition mapped over time. Spend X now or spend less now, but ultimately more later b/c you bought stuff that appeared to be inexpensive but really ended up just being cheap stuff that ends up costing you more, over the long term, with more frustration. What I do is research out what I want, what will last the longest, what is the best value over time (you need to determine what your timeframe is) and then save some amount of money each month until I can get it. For example, it took me 3 years to buy my current 65" 4K HDR TV, because I researched out what I wanted, the tech that was coming down the pipe and then I saved a little every month until I had enough, and then I waited until Black Friday sales, when the TV was later in its sales cycle. It requires you to be patient and disciplined, not be able to go out and just drop a shit ton of money on a whim.

I think the rest of your comment misunderstands economics and what drives company product development.

I would say the way a market works when it functions normally and functions in a way friendly to people with average incomes is that "you get what you pay for up to a point, and everything past that is a luxury". That holds true for a lot of things, but not smart phones.

Consider desktop PCs, laptops, and just to broaden the category I will add lawn mowers. You can spend $1200 on a Macbook and $800 on a lawn mower but you can get the same number of years of good usage out of a $500 Windows laptop (especially if you put Linux on it) or a $300 lawn mower. But a $250 laptop or a $150 lawn mower will be awkward to use and fail quickly.

Now consider smart phones. I said $100 and $200 devices in my previous post, but I have had terrible longevity problems with smart phones from $100 to $500 across five brands (LG, Motorola, OnePlus, Xiaomi, ZTE). So in this market, it seems like the only reliable options are the luxury options. The fact the smart phone market works that way is not a credit to Apple, just a damning condemnation of everyone else.

I work in tech, I can "drop a shit ton of money on a whim". But I generally don't - I don't own a tablet, my PCs are $800 or less, and my television is more modest than yours.

I'm not thinking of myself when I complain about smart phones and Apple, I'm thinking of people like my brother - in his 30s, making less than $15 an hour. He has no television, no gaming console, no tablet, a laptop that was a gift, a used car that was a gift, a $200 smart phone, and TracFone (an American pay-as-you-go option) for phone service. Unless his career has some kind of wildly unexpected twist or someone else decides to pay his rent, he will never budget Apple products. That's how a hundred million Americans live, and Apple ignores them - except for the ones it can sucker into going into debt (or further into debt) to obtain their products.