hishnash

IPhones are stolen by street theives and organized crime, and then "refurbished" and sold to people who don't know the origin. All the stuff that is locked and doesn't allow activation, gets chopped up and sold as parts on eBay that amazingly some sellers have hundreds of.
 
You may not want to believe it, but this is pretty much what the majority of the used electronics on eBay and other market places. "Sold As-IS" = Stolen, "No Warranty", Broken "parts only", are all stolen devices if they are still under the manufacturer's warranty date. We know this is true because of the kinds of disputes raised at Paypal.
 
A three year old device, nobody is going to question if it's stolen or not. But a seemingly "new" device being sold for parts is.
 

One in ten smartphone owners in the US has had a smartphone stolen. If Activation Lock is as common as we think it is, thieves can't resell them as working - what else do you think they're doing with those devices? It's a common practice with other valuable things like cars to strip them for parts and sell the parts - why do you think that wouldn't apply to phones?

pfft. no.
 
It's always about preventing blackmarket chop-shops from proliferating.
The only reason it was possible to do this, was because some of the parts were "Chopped" must have been from stolen devices. Not just broken ones. If they were all broken devices, then he would have been unable to obtain the main SoC PCB, because they would have been "locked" from the previous user of the device, as they would have serial numbers that are tied to someone's iCloud account. Seriously if you think about it for 10 seconds, every part you find online on eBay that isn't a battery is from a stolen or broken device, but in order for someone to have hundreds of parts from a current model device, they have to be stolen. Nobody is buying the eWaste from bestbuy just to pick out the 5 year old iphones and send the rest to a shredder.
 
That's why companies should be required to buy back their old devices if they want to keep chop shops from operating. The company buys back the devices and then sends them to companies who remove the usable parts and are authorized to sell the parts, and the company will mark those devices in their inventory as "not stolen"
 
 

Summary
Apple are going to be making changes the the parts calibration servers so that if you swap parts between apple devices they can still fetch their respective calibration profiles from apples servers so long as the past is not coming from a stolen device. 
 
My thoughts
This seems like a readable tradeoff to ensure the value of stealing a phone is not increased. But still letting people with legitimate parts use these to repair other phones. 
 
Sources
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/04/apple-to-expand-repair-options-with-support-for-used-genuine-parts/

Summary
Apple are going to be making changes the the parts calibration servers so that if you swap parts between apple devices they can still fetch their respective calibration profiles from apples servers so long as the past is not coming from a stolen device. 
 
My thoughts
This seems like a readable tradeoff to ensure the value of stealing a phone is not increased. But still letting people with legitimate parts use these to repair other phones. 
 
Sources
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/04/apple-to-expand-repair-options-with-support-for-used-genuine-parts/

Summary
Apple are going to be making changes the the parts calibration servers so that if you swap parts between apple devices they can still fetch their respective calibration profiles from apples servers so long as the past is not coming from a stolen device. 
 
My thoughts
This seems like a readable tradeoff to ensure the value of stealing a phone is not increased. But still letting people with legitimate parts use these to repair other phones. 
 
Sources
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/04/apple-to-expand-repair-options-with-support-for-used-genuine-parts/

If you call your company `DarwinAI` then you clearly have your targets set on being purchased by apple.    

If you call your company `DarwinAI` then you clearly have your targets set on being purchased by apple.    

In the end Siri like workloads are best done on device given your want low latency and you have so many possible devices that could be making requests that doing this server side would just cost a small fortune.   Just piping Siri to a cloud based LLM would have so many downsides from a load perspective since the Siri load is likly has lots of spikes throughout the day, and you cant pipe requests half way round the world to have a single server handle that load due to massive added latency so you would end up with a lot of compute spread out around the world with much of it only be used at peak times for that timezone. 

Being able to do as much as possible locally on the device, even possibly letting that on device model figure out how to query remove data sources (even remote LLMs) would filter out most of this load... it would be a huge wast of $ to have an huge cloud based LLM handle people adding groceries to thier shopping list, or tuning on and off lights in the house (this sort of things makes up most of the Siri requests)... people are not asking Siri to write them a 100 page essay. 

In the end Siri like workloads are best done on device given your want low latency and you have so many possible devices that could be making requests that doing this server side would just cost a small fortune.   Just piping Siri to a cloud based LLM would have so many downsides from a load perspective since the Siri load is likly has lots of spikes throughout the day, and you cant pipe requests half way round the world to have a single server handle that load due to massive added latency so you would end up with a lot of compute spread out around the world with much of it only be used at peak times for that timezone. 

Being able to do as much as possible locally on the device, even possibly letting that on device model figure out how to query remove data sources (even remote LLMs) would filter out most of this load... it would be a huge wast of $ to have an huge cloud based LLM handle people adding groceries to thier shopping list, or tuning on and off lights in the house (this sort of things makes up most of the Siri requests)... people are not asking Siri to write them a 100 page essay. 

"Hey Siri, turn off the lights"
 
*phone catches fire*

In the end Siri like workloads are best done on device given your want low latency and you have so many possible devices that could be making requests that doing this server side would just cost a small fortune.   Just piping Siri to a cloud based LLM would have so many downsides from a load perspective since the Siri load is likly has lots of spikes throughout the day, and you cant pipe requests half way round the world to have a single server handle that load due to massive added latency so you would end up with a lot of compute spread out around the world with much of it only be used at peak times for that timezone. 

Being able to do as much as possible locally on the device, even possibly letting that on device model figure out how to query remove data sources (even remote LLMs) would filter out most of this load... it would be a huge wast of $ to have an huge cloud based LLM handle people adding groceries to thier shopping list, or tuning on and off lights in the house (this sort of things makes up most of the Siri requests)... people are not asking Siri to write them a 100 page essay. 

Listening to WAN right now, I have a few questions:
 
1) if I wanted to buy 10 million screwdrivers from Linus, would I be able to bargain for a quantity discount from him just like Netflix haggled for a quantity discount with Apple? Are quantity discounts illegal? And how can he compare actively breaking compatibility via a RFID chip to passively not putting in the extra work (and continued support, forever and ever) to add Android support to Apple accesories? Should the government force companies to "put in the extra work and continued support till the end of times" for something that doesn't make business sense to them? 
 
2) close your eyes and think about how many accessories, peripherals, SSDs, gamepads, etc. you've come across in your tech life that could only be firmware updated on Windows (or via their gaming console for gamepads) and not on Linux/macOS. Just like the Airpods firmware can only be updated on the OS that is used by the vast majority of their users. (iPhone users worldwide are 1.2B, Airpods users worldwide are in the ballpark of 250M, a subset of the iPhone population, I have a feeling the overlap may be pretty high, maybe even in the 90%...whereas Beats sales may tell another story, but those can be updated on Android)
 
3) should the government force Floatplane to put in the extra work to support macOS natively (not via iPadOS app compatibility) or release a visionOS app? Should the government force Meta to finally release a native iPadOS app for Whatsapp? 
 
4) I'm gonna go full whataboutism: what about all the proprietary accessories ever that would only work with their respective same-brand products? Is the Sonos ecosystem completely illegal? Could the Wii U gamepad/tablet be connected to a PS3? What about some cameras and their proprietary accessories? What about some car accessories, can I install them on cars from other brands? Can I connect a Sony PSVR2 headset to macOS? (well actually that may happen, but only because they're having weak sales, not because the government is forcing them). So why can't the Apple Watch exist as an iPhone-only accessory? 
 
What I'm trying to say is that it's not that these business practices are unheard of or egregiously bad (Linus getting all triggered about them notwithstanding, "this is sPiTeFuL") per se, for the most part.
 
The framing should be more: Apple is TOO BIG to do this kind of stuff. A "gatekeeper", as the EU calls these kind of companies.
 
But Apple wasn't "TOO BIG" when all of this started.
So, of course they will keep doing what they used to do until someone forces them not to, they will defend their case, they will comply kicking and screaming all the way. Anybody here happily pays more taxes than they're supposed to? 

Yes apple will keep the Mac Pro.

But your not going to see AMD or NV Gpu support of the simple reason that apple does not want feature divergence in the Metal api space as that leads devs to developer for the lowest common denominator of features.  NV and AMD gpus both come from a very differnt pathway than apples (that are based on PowerVR IP) as such there are a LOAD of important GPU features that will never be supported on AMDs or NV gpus so adding these back to the Mac would in effect mean all pro applications would never do any work to support those features (that are very important for good perf on Apples other, high volume, product lines). 

But I would not be surprised if apple end up shipping some Metal compute cards (let's not call them gpus as I do not expect them to support display outputs).   I think apple might well just create these from M* Ultra chips that have to many defective cpu cores to be of use for the SOC but fully functional GPUs.  These would be monsters for ML work due to the massive addressable VRAM but of no interest for Gaming due to the massive addressable VRAM (and thus the $$$ cost). 
 
yer it seems non of the YT reviews know about Macs at all, also you can use the profiler that ships with Xcode (even from the command line) to log frame times (and much much more) so that they can create graphs.  Using Tomb raider that is x86 (and thus also has a very poor gpu optimisation) is not at all a good GPU test for someone doing professional work.

 

What they are saying is that apps that used the embedded system browser were build (and tested) against that browser engine, they do not expect the embedded browser to change on them at runtime on the users device and if it did (regardless of what browser it would swap to) it would break basicly every single app. Since they way you talk to embedded chromium is very different to webkit and even more different to embedded Firefox.    Expecting all apps (including apps written 10 years ago) that use these apis to continue to work while the underlying browser engine is swapped on them is just absurd. 

Using the OS provided embedded browser is much much much better than embedded your own since your never going to bother shipping an update to your app every week as the browsers has its weekly security patches rolling out so if you embed a browser within your app your just creating sec nightmare for your users. Using the system browser provides a consistent (ish) ABI that you can target and means you do not need to become versed in browser security and the extra complexity that has. 

More like "can't"
 
If you allow the system webview to be replaced then any application that uses the webview is impacted.
 
Honestly, does anyone seriously believe we're not reliving the MSIE 4.0 bundling nightmare that resulted in MSIE 4-8 required being installed because business vendors only build their activex crap to run on it? I'm sure companies like AT&T and Siebel were crapping their pants when Microsoft switched to Edge since all their stuff was proprietary "requires MSIE" hell. Hell there are still banks using Java. (not Javascript, Java, the plugin)
 
Everything is fine when everyone builds to a standard, and unfortunately Google swooped in and decided they wanted to set the standard by poaching Webkit from Apple, and then whines when Apple doesn't implement "their" stuff.
 
I just want a situation where I can rely on the OS to work as intended, and unfortunately this runs head first into political factors like consumer choice that says that the OS must treat all applications as equal, thus free avenues to developing on the OS (eg html 5+javascript) have to go away because the OS can't prefer it's own secured webview, and can't allow the OS webview to be overridden for OS components. Like imagine if you could replace the Edge webview on Windows 10/11 right now with Firefox? Every damn responsive web widget would end up broken. 
 
If anyone is at fault for this, it's Google. We shamed Microsoft for not updating MSIE to standards, until it fell so far behind that it gave up and borrowed Google's product. Yet Google is the one that keeps pushing pre-alpha quality features into the web browser and then changes and depreciates things for no apparent reason. Now imagine if that cruft was in the OS. 
 
I'm not saying Safari is great, but it's a known quantity that isn't beholden to Google's crappy behavior.

Cell wasn't for GPU rendering though, it wasn't even used for that on the PS3. Some researchers did a technical demo using it as a GPU and it did remarkably well but it was never going to be fully GPU pipeline complete, something would have ran like crap on it in that use case.
 
The actual PS3 GPU was an Nvidia RSX aka custom GeForce 7800 produced on 65nm rather than 90nm. If the PS3 were to use a 8800 based GPU the PS3 would have released 6-12 months later.
 
Also CUDA on a 8800 wasn't a replacement for something like Cell, back then CUDA and GPGPU was in it's infancy and "garbage". Making a 8800 do the job of high throughput CPU like Cell at the time would have the same end result as trying to make Cell be a GPU, neither would be actually good. Critical note here was this was the era of Double Precision HPC compute, something the Cell was specifically designed to do, which GPUs of today cannot do other than Nvidia x100 die based GPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs. 10 years later a GTX 1060 can't even do as good a job for FP DP as a Cell/8i.

Yeah that isn't a sound counter argument. It would be dumb to assume that Apple or any company would need to advertise practices just because some people don't like them. Also you are ascribing intent of them locking down their OS to purposefully trying to be anticompetitive and leverage their market position. The glaring issue with that assertion is that Apple has had a design philosophy of having a uniform locked down experience for various reason even before they had a significant market share to even leverage. They have also stated the reasons for that design philosophy and some people like that philosophy and buy Apple products because of it. Also asking for 30% cut is pretty typical in the industry so I would hardly say that is extortion and it is disingenuous to say they are making use of their position to overcharge when using that industry standard rate. If Apple was asking for 40% or more then I could understand people complaining that Apple is using their control of their os to extort app developers. 

The DMA is very clear that the only reason a gatekeeper can use this power (yes the DMA permits it) is to block known malicious applications.  

Be that when apple scan the app and sign it before you distribute or later if an app that has a novel malicious signature that is not detected on first scan but then I later detected apple can go and remotely revoke the certificate making it impossible to install (or even run) the app.   

The end result is what was agreed on in parliament, the people pushing for it of cource wanted much more but that doe snot mean the rest of the MEPs did, you can project the wishes of a small collection who wrote the first drafts onto the entier parliament. And even more complicating that is many of the seats within the parliament will be up for election this year. 

 
 
I don't think the presence of macOS has that much of an impact on the courts or law makers.  The law is knot expliclty targeting apple it is targeting anyone with a large enough market impact. I have seen a lot of takes down the line "well apple should have reduced the cut a few years ago and then the EU would not have written this law" these people completely miss that fact that every single part of the law would still apply regardless of the cut apple took (even if it were 0% and apple made a loss paying card fees out of pocket).  And the EU would have still passed the law as the law does not just target apple, its just that apple makes for good headlines so most of the media reporting around the law as been with respect to them. 

Anyone not expecting malicious compliance from the get go, needs to wake up.
 
This was not like the USB-C kerfuffle, where Apple had nothing to gain by sticking to lightning. It was just an albatross around the iPhone experience's neck.
 
However the "Walled garden" on Apple devices was a net benefit to the customer, MOST customers. The people who whine-bitch-moan about it, are mostly people who don't use Apple devices, or have something to gain from sideloading.
 
Epic Games want's this, because they want to keep 100% of the revenue. So do companies like Netflix and Spotify. That's why they make you signup and pay with your card on their website and not let you do it on the app.
 
None of this benefits YOU.
 

Most EU laws only apply to new products, not existing products that have already been created/imported.  See USB-C on phones. Even after this comes into effect phones that were released before the start date with non USB-C will still be able to be sold.  Just new products coming to market will need to comply with the rules. 

I'm pretty sure Microsoft could get something like this going using the Hyper-V core and Hyper-V Container technology. All the hardware emulation technology is already there in Windows, some specific additions would need to be made for DOS and Win95/98 probably, like virtual CPU frequency for things tied to CPU frequency like DOSBox does.
 
I just don't think Microsoft has any desire to do it and nobody else can without their blessing sadly.

Offering employees more money to move to your company isn't stealing, it's merely outbidding.

So what you are saying is 30 Masimo employees left the company and went to Apple because Apple was offering a better deal? How is that Apple's problem? Employees are allowed to leave their jobs for any reason. Employers are not loyal to their employees. Why should employees be loyal to their employer? Apple offered a better deal and 30 people took them up on that offer.