Curious Pineapple

I do enjoy living in this "nanny state" country as it is often called.

14 days statutory right to return a product for any reason and the retailer can't refuse (with a few exceptions that are not relevant here). As long as it's undamaged and in original packaging.

I could even buy a car and return it after a week because I've changed my mind.

I've been having issues with it too, couldn't join a party but could start one just fine.

Nothing too modern, a pair of X5670's for my Z800 workstation to replace the pair of X5570's. No real need for them but gaming with 13% CPU usage is nice. Sits at around 1% usage just browing

What's the ambient temperature like?

8 hours ago, Jarsky said:

 

I'm not talking about that, there are most certainly loopholes to doing this, and in some countries like Canada you dont need to specify a reason

My comment was in regards to this comment below. It costs Apple far more than $10-20 because doing the below is illegal in many countries to sell it as new. It would be sold refurbished which would be at a significant discount to be able to move it. 

 

 

They make a few grand on these machines, knocking off a few hundred is no biggie for them. Could always use it as a display model, then sell as ex-display later on.

I've got a few Xeon machines I was thinking of using for this very purpose. Not exactly the fastest available but a damn sight quicker than a laptop or lower end desktop machine.

3 hours ago, Yogi_DaBear221 said:

 He is entirely fair to Apple in this video, praises them for making the changes that they did, so that would invalidate his "hate" for Apple. Plus I mean he's got some pretty legitimate reasons for the things he doesn't like about Apple. You know like the whole iMac Pro incident. Which I'm sure has left a pretty bad taste in his mouth.

If I crashed a brand new car into my wall, I'd expect to be greeted by a very happy service head at the dealer when I turn up with the thing and a blank cheque and say fix it.

7 minutes ago, mr moose said:

snip

I did point out that the T2 has been the cause of USB 2 audio hardware dropping out and causing audio glitches, which is fact. What this pleb can't understand is why I mentioned repair of automotive electronics and programming flash memory being timing critical.

I have a Dell workstation with a few security settings in the BIOS that are off by default, but once enabled they are perminant. That's how it should be, off by default but if you need them, then they should be perminantly enabled.

The PS4 has a similar setup to the T2, the Southbridge is actually an ARM microprocessor which prevents PCI devices from accessing system memory through DMA and keeps the hardware in check (put simply). The PS4 can now install linux onto a flash drive through it's web browser, that's how secure locking down the PCI express bus was.

On 12/21/2019 at 8:31 PM, amdorintel said:

iphone 4 has lasted all these yrs

same with iphone 5

probably even iphone 3's are working just fine now a days too.

My 3g works fine, after I rolled back the OS. Got the week of battery life back too

5 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

What would happen is one CPU renders it in 5 secs, and one in 4.8. But it gets harder to measure precisely and you lose resolution.

Then you know that for every minute of render time for one CPU, the other saves a second, which is a minute every hour. Over thousands of hours, that adds up to a massive time saving. Testing without optimizations only gives a comparison if you will also render without optimizations. You could buy an i9 over a TR because it performed better, but find out that the TR is 2% faster when optimized. Kind of like the FX scenario, it performed fantastic with optimized software, but dog slow with generic or intel compiler options.

2 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Doesn't that just justify Apple's behavior?

Not really, if you buy a 20 grand machine, you're probably not one to be buying too good to be true bargain components from China.

4 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Well you did mention it, and now I am curious. First time I've heard of the T2 making audio devices unreliable. Is it this you're referring to?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/do-you-have-any-issues-with-audio-on-the-mac-mini.2153841/

Seems like a bug rather than an intentional function of the T2. We should be mad that the issue hasn't been fixed, but we should not ask for the T2 to be removed. Again, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

If you start running busses through another component it can introduce latency and timing issues, like it has with the USB audio devices. Not an issue for bulk transfer but where timing is critical, like audio or programming/flashing microcontrollers or flash chips, you can get corruption. For a microcontroller that just means a bad checksum and you try again, if you're repairing automotive control units for example, it may restart on upload and cause a failure.

6 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Well the need to buy a whole new machine is not really related to the T2, is it? That's a design choice from Apple. Almost everything is soldered on so you can barely upgrade anything. The chassis are glued together, etc etc.

Apple has been making it near impossible to upgrade Macs just fine without resorting to using the T2 to lock things down, right?

Except it is possible to reflash GPU's with Apple's firmware. It is possible to replace BGA components, you can do it with reletively inexpensive equipment.

The concern is not what happens now, but how long is it before even removable parts are tied to the machine? Microsoft did it with the Xbox 360, the optical drives were tied to the board to prevent swapping out and playing copies of games. Not really an issue in a games console and a repair service was offered rather than just selling the customer a new machine.

4 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

To them, a file rendering in 1 minute is better than a file rendering in 5 seconds, because it gives more granularity when comparing.

1:01 vs 0:58 is easier to compare and gives better results than 3 seconds vs 5 seconds.

I'd say the other way round is better. CPU X may render in 3 seconds, and CPU Y in 5, but CPU X has done it in 60% of the time.

It'd be like a bus and a car competing to see who can get the most people from one place to another in an hour. If you stuff 10 people into the car, and 10 people into the bus, the only differences will be the acceleration (assuming keeping to speed limit). That could possibly compare to better handling of an instruction that the application uses.

If you then load the bus up and allow the car to travel at it's top speed, you have a more accurate comparison. That would be more like comparing a TR 3970x to an i9-10900x. The TR may have slightly weaker per core performance, but if you can optimize the task for 64 threads, you'll steam ahead.

The car may do double the speed of the bus, but the bus can carry 10 times the passengers.

12 minutes ago, dizmo said:

You sure didn't look hard then... 

I fear for my millennial run future. 

The daft ones will run back to their safe spaces when big decisions need to be made.

16 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

1) Why would they do that anyway? There are counterfeit iPhone screens on the market, but nobody is making counterfeit Intel CPUs, or AMD graphics cards.

Yes they are, Wish and ALiExpress are full of fake parts. Reflashed GPU's, re-lidded CPU's, totally fake CPU's, graphics cards that fry mainboards. There are countless fake SSD's and flash memory products out there. If there's money to be made, people will do it.

Enlighten me, why does my G5 Power Mac require a custom flashed graphics card? Does it give some magical performance over the reference software? Does it sprout unicorns? Does it use voodoo to double the AGP bandwidth? Or is it to sell an off the shelf card with a heavy markup and leave consumers no choice but to go back to Apple for a replacement or upgrade? Of course, when Apple deemed that machine EOL, they won't bother releasing any newer GPU's for the system even if your usage is GPU bound and the rest of the system is perfectly capable of coping. You need to buy a new machine as you've already invested into the Apple ecosystem. That's what pisses people off, not increased security or whole drive encryption. Let's not mention that the T2 is responsible for audio devices becoming unreliable

50 minutes ago, Yeroh said:

There are some pretty sweet sports cars that don't necessarily have any practical advantage over normal family vans you could get for the same price, yet I'd still have a sports car any day of the week. Considering that a waste of money is pretty subjective, but regardless - the price is the same, so I think it's not an unreasonable point to make.

But you can only drive the sports car on approved roads and the wheel bearings are half the cost of the car for a set, which are only available from the manufacturer who won't sell them to anyone else.

22 minutes ago, hishnash said:

But they can put those restrictions in place without the T2, as I explained you don't need to T2 chip to put those restrictions in place, if they are just interested in money they would do it in the kernel much cheaper to do it there than in the T2.

 

Combine the 2 and you can't change the OS on the machine, nor can you run the OS on anything else.

I've been having a power off then back on issue for a while. At first I had to disable hyperthreading, then after a while it started resetting again. Disabled 2 cores and enabled HT, worked fine for a while, then had to disable HT and drop down to 1 core per CPU. It wouldn't get through POSTing without a power cycle. New PSU in and all works fine. That PSU is now on an almost identical machine just with slightly slower CPU's and it POST's just fine with 4 cores and HT enabled on dual CPU.

46 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Are you sure?,Try replacing the SSD with the new T2 security chip,the mac will stop working.

Won't be long before you need to swear allegance to the mighty glowing Apple once a day otherwise the machine will just self terminate.

Facebook could easily develop an open source OS that has built in spyware, they're not going to give away the source for their platform applications are they?

It's all well and good offering the source code, but most people (those that don't really give a shit what they share online) won't care they that can compile code themselves after inspecting it line by line. They'll just click the download installer button. Doesn't take a lot to offer the source code, and a compiled version which contains their own applications and drivers which could be doing anything.

20 hours ago, Twilight said:

please stop being a hypocrite and treat apple computers just like any other computer you cover, thank you. 

When Apple treats customers properly, offers repairs and spare parts, stops locking down hardware and software and gives up on the making key parts such as storage irreplacible, then they will deserve the same treatment as other manufacturers. I have no problem getting parts for my older Dell and HP machines, but I just paid way too much for a graphics card that's 14 years old just to test a Power Mac. It's not special, it's not magical, it's just an old piece of shit with custom firmware.

Even making the RAM a custom removable module would be a step up from soldering it down to the board. They're as bad as software locks in products like oscilloscopes. The same hardware sold for a few hundred, or a few thousand, the only difference is the software.

It's fine for gaming too at 1080p.

Just now, ryao said:

You did not buy that from Amp/Tyco. You got it through BMW.

 

If BMW refused to sell it like Apple did, you likely could not go to Amp/Tyco to get the same part that they sell to BMW. As you said, it is a custom part. If you wanted something compatible, you would likely need to do a bulk order of a custom compatible part that might not be exactly the same.

And you proved my point, if BMW refused to supply parts like Apple does, then people would be scrapping cars due to a single connector, or hacking something else into a wiring harness and potentially causing a serious risk. Refusal to supply or in some cases even repair will lead to a demand for stolen, fake, faulty and potentially dangerous parts.

2 hours ago, ryao said:

There is likely some of that, but the overall picture is not quite so simple. Apple has increasingly taken over the R&D work for much of the iPhone’s components, with their SoCs being a prime example. With such parts, Apple entirely owns the IP and even much of / all of the process used to fabricate it. This makes the factory making them nothing more than a contractor providing labor. Thus Apple is not prohibiting them from selling things so much as they never had the rights to sell them in the first place.

 

You can buy parts that are entirely owned by third parties such as Corning’s gorilla glass from the manufacturer directly. Increasingly less of the iPhone is like that. Off the top of my head, the glass, some of the logic board components, the camera sensor and the NAND flash can be purchased independently. The screen and battery might be possible to buy independently as part of a bulk order, but they were likely custom orders so you would need to know the exact specifications to be able to order them, as I doubt the supplier would breach confidentiality to tell you what you need to tell them. Not many companies allow their suppliers to do such things, so Apple is not being particularly different here. They are only different in that they do not sell such parts independently of finished products.

 

In the case of cars, things are more like with Corning where the supplier entirely develops the part and gets the auto manufacturer to adopt it or some version of it (usually a more cheaply made version). Thus, they are free to sell their own stuff to whoever they want.

BMW order enough connectors from Amp/Tyco to have tooling tweaked, meaning that they're effectively a custom part. The difference between this and Apple is that I can walk into a BMW dealer, ask for an injector harness and be sold one. BMW won't refuse and instead offer me a new car, or a "refurbished" one. Of course,  2 days earlier the "refurb" was another customers car that couldn't be fixed either.

1 minute ago, ryao said:

This kind of black market only seems to exist for the iPhone. The most that I have heard happen in terms of Xeons being counterfeit are engineering samples being sold and machines being factory overclocked to allow lesser grade parts to be sold as if they were higher grade ones. In some cases, the binning results in those processors malfunctioning from the overclocking.

I meant due to age, I have 10 year old workstations and a 10 year old Laptop, nothing wrong with any of them and if anything fails, I can just replace it.

Just now, ryao said:

In the case of the scam that was reported, people are counterfeiting entire phones with defective parts that were meant to be destroyed. The equivalent would be someone making an entire car out of knock off parts.

 

That being said, just changing some parts generally does not cause a car to explode, although changing the battery with a questionable one will cause a phone to explode. Apple claims that it is ensuring that batteries are genuine in the interest of customer safety and there is evidence to support that. If Samsung could not ensure its genuine batteries in the Galaxy Note 7 are safe, a third party that got replacement batteries from wherever probably won’t be in much position to do better. Note that only a small number of Galaxy Note 7 phones actually exploded, so achieving the same safety that Samsung had with its Galaxy Note 7 would likely to be considered to many to be safe, despite not being as safe as the original.

 

Furthermore, I think plenty of us would be unhappy to receive defective equipment unless told in advance what the defects are. While I like right to repair, I can sympathize with Apple on how it is impossible to ensure quality with third party parts. The sources are untraceable as things can change many hands on the way to a repair shop and it only takes one guy to accept something shady to ruin things. Furthermore, stolen phones could have been disassembled for parts, so there is also the ethical issue of the market unwittingly supporting phone thefts.

If Apple didn't prevent 3rd party manufacturers from supplying quality parts there would be no issue. If BMW prevented Bosch from supplying custom air flow sensors to the public, then the only options would be unreliable knock-offs. If they coded batteries to the car and replacement was a dealer only job, then people will spring up offering to clone or even open up the battery and jamming the control board in something else.