Apple is big enough they could definitely do a $300 box if they wanted to

They wouldn’t get their usual margin perhaps, but remember the neo macbooks are primarily a way of them using up a large number of processors that otherwise don’t have a product to go in, created as a side effect of their main product line.

Mac desktop users (and frankly, many average consumers) don’t seem to care about flexibility, because they already have the fairly successful mini and studio desktop lines which have very little flexibility out of the factory compared to a regular desktop.

I can definitely see schools and offices wanting to take them up on a cheap desktop, so it’s not like the volume of sales isn’t there. I think the main thing stopping it, based on some of the reports following the MacBook neo launch, is they might not have enough of the dud iPhone chips to meet demand. Of course, spinning up a whole manufacturing run to make chips for Neo machines defeats the entire purpose of them existing in the first place, so maybe they wouldn’t want to stretch the resource by asking more SKUs that use it.

UK/EU has had contactless payments via our bank cards for about 2 decades now. America caught up eventually some years later

When phones got the ability to act as our bank cards, it made sense for them to use something compatible with the same technology that was already deployed

Funnily enough, America (and I guess also Korea, given the companies) dragging their heels on standard contactless is one of the main reasons why Samsung/LG briefly put out a couple of generations of phones that had a magnetic stripe mimicking payment feature in addition to standard NFC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_secure_transmission)

Probably as a learning exercise so they know what developing and shipping for that platform is like.

Given they’re currently building a similar product, makes sense to see what the competition is up to

No idea on the loss side of things tbh, though given it’s AI based, I’m assuming it can’t be truly lossless

to use a toy example […] for simple maths

I know, I just picked easy numbers for the sake of discussion. The actual data rate is not important to this particular discussion.

You’ve gotta look at the magnitude of difference here, to use a toy example:

Let’s use a memory data rate of 1GB/s for simple maths

8GB of uncompressed textures getting moved would take us about 8 seconds

The compressed stuff at <1GB is going to be done in less than 1 second.

As long as the decompression process doesn’t take another 7 seconds to complete it’s going to be more performant

Edit: typo

Most people seem to go for either codeberg or gitlab as alternatives

That makes much more sense haha, I was sure I must have been reading that wrong

Wait 1/3 of the raster performance seems like a massive downgrade, right? Or am I reading that wrong

see people […] spent $25…$45…$30 on gas

I spend $7 ~ $13 […] three times a month

3 x 13 = $39

it’s not nearly as close as what I’ve seen other people spend.

?

Don’t people have to actually buy their consumer CPUs for this to actually mean anything?

Samples have to be cleared by the original author to be legally used in a new track

jump on in, the water’s… primordial

I think that’s the point though, they’re catering to the kinds of producer/professional that you list AND people who might want to do something that might need all that memory (there are plenty of scientific and AI workloads could easily chew through that)

Apple is also in the situation where as a business they will want to gain OS market share, but without the advantage of the PC platform that anyone can build a PC to meet their exact needs. If they’re hypothetically incredibly successful at their goal but with just consumer targeting hardware available, they’re leaving market share on the table by not providing hardware to fill the more niche use cases.

Now they could have done the provide loads of options thing, but it’s Apple, so they do their normal thing and have basically this one configurable model to serve all the possible non-average-consumers who want a workstation out there

I was originally gonna say Sigur Ros but that’s already been covered

My shout out goes to Niteworks then, who sadly did their farewell tour last year. One of my favourites:

https://youtu.be/GY7q1DjmsiE

The hell are you on about?

Someone who basically just uses their screen to pull up a recipe to make dinner with is not going to have any problems. Similarly for someone who uses it to keep in contact with friends (directly, not via a social network).

Someone who only spends a half hour a day using their phone, but that usage is scrolling on twitter or some bullshit like that? They’re absolutely going to have problems. It only takes a few seconds to read a post and then a shitty idea might lodge itself in their head.

Focusing on just screen time rather than the content on it is expressly not focusing on the root cause, and we’re not going to fix anything if we focus on just the symptoms. It’s like trying to ban hammers because someone is smashing your windows with one. The hammer isn’t really the cause of the problem, and the person doing the smashing will continue a different way if they aren’t stopped.

Why do people focus on the screens and not what’s on the screens? That’s what needs to be regulated

There is no time limit that will render propaganda ineffective

The screen isn’t the problem, it’s the antagonists on the other side

FT going for UBI a decade after we were calling for it to alleviate this

Lol. Lmao even.

Only socialism is really gonna cut it now, ship has sailed with the asset inflation crisis we’re about to hit

Goddamn it, when will people learn to stop using OGC as an acronym

Huh, typically you’d set an instance to scale out, not in when CPU usage spikes