Stories like this is all my family members get iPhones. If Google wants to move to a walled garden too it should at least deliver on the walled garden benefits. No point otherwise.
MCPRUE sells shameless ripoffs of the Mac Pro case, but with support for standard motherboard sizing, if you really want your PC to double as a cheese grater: https://www.mcprue.com/case
I own one and there's nothing shameful about it. It's basically CNCed to Apple's standards, just without the logo. The cool thing is since Studio Displays work on Windows too, with Thunderbolt motherboards you can have a setup that's visually the same as a Mac but is actually a PC.
P.S. Does anyone know how well Studio Displays now work on Linux? The best I could get it to work was on Ubuntu, where it basically worked out of the fresh install. X11 KDE on Fedora was a close second. Couldn't get it working on Wayland whatsoever.
A Ryzen 9800X3D is about 40% faster in single-core tests and the same speed to slightly faster at multi-core tasks, as compared to the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro. In addition, the Ryzen computer would presumably be modular and allow for the user to choose their preferred configuration of memory, storage, GPU, etc, with options far exceeding those offered by Apple in its limited and non-user-upgradable machine. In addition, configuring the Ryzen machine with comparable specs to the base model Mac Pro (64GB of ram, 1TB of storage, and a low-end to midrange discrete GPU) would put you at a total system cost of something like 20-25% of the $6999 that the Mac Pro cost, even with today's inflated memory prices.
I'm not sure if this is what the parent meant by "a real modern PC," but it would certainly be 1) faster and 2) vastly cheaper than the Mac. So at minimum, your assertion that it'd be slower is wrong.
Depending on your configuration, you could likely also match the overall power consumption of the Mac as well, though yes, it is easily possible to exceed it. But the most likely way you'd exceed it is with a high-end GPU, which would vastly outperform the (fixed, non-upgradeable) GPU in the Mac.
And a 9800X3D is not even the fastest CPU out there, nor even the fastest CPU you could use with your specific motherboard. A 9950X3D is essentially two of the 9800X3Ds combined, and would be a drop-in replacement.
Wrong. See benchmarks. Many games and single-threaded workloads run faster on 9800X3D.
There are various reasons for this, major one being that the 9800X3D has more L3 cache per thread than the 9950X3D.
And also wrong that a 9950X3D is 2x 9800X3D combined. A quick glance would tell you that, since 9950X3D has 128MB of L3 cache shared between more threads while 9800X3D has 96mb for half the threads, so more L3 per thread.
And most of the times, even when a 9800X3D loses to 9950X3D in games, it's usually within 1-4% margin for most games.
It's a monster for games and some workloads.
It's funny that people who blindly buy 9950X3D for gaming+office workloads without checking benchmarks often end up with similar or slower performance.
Much smarter to use the price difference on other hardware to speedup other things such as faster NVMEs, efficient silent cooling, faster GPUs, etc.
Those are all for Intel Macs, and not even the recent Intel Macs. You can't use a passive adapter to put a NVMe SSD into a current Mac like you could a decade ago, because back then the only thing non-standard about the SSD was the connector. Now most of the SSD controller itself has moved to the SoC and trying to put an off the shelf SSD into the current slot makes no more sense than trying to put an SSD into a DIMM slot.
Honestly I don't care, but Apples SSDs don't have a storage controller on them, and those adapters are designed to "bypass" the controller on m.2 drives.
You can argue that it's different for the sake of being different, but
A) I personally don't always hold that monopoly is a good thing, even if we agree m.2 is fairly decent it doesn't make it universally the best.
B) I'd make the argument that Apple is competing very well with performance and reliability..
C) IIRC there are some hardware guarantees that the new filesystem needs to be aware of (for wear levelling and error-correction) and those would be obfuscated by a controller that thinks its smarter than the CPU and OS.
if we're talking about Intel era Macs then that proprietary connector predates M.2 entirely and is actually even thinner and smaller (which is pretty important when the primary use-cases is thin-and-lights); though I suppose that the adapter fits is a sign that it would have been possible to use a larger connector...
That is an absolutely awful argument against what I just said. I can tell that you don't care.
Tens of thousands of mini PC and laptop boards ship with multiple M.2 slots. Apple can use both connectors, with the exact same caveats that normal M.2 SSDs have on ordinary filesystems. Apple does not have to enable swap, zram, or other high-wear settings on macOS if they are uncomfortable with the inconsistency of M.2 drives. Now, I'd make the argument that people don't complain about APFS wear on external SSDs, but maybe I'm wrong and macOS does have some fancy bypass saving thousands of TBW/year.
Whatever the case is, "the annoying thing is competitive" was not a justification for the Lightning cable when it reached the gallows. It did not compete, it specifically protected Apple from the competitive pressure of higher-capacity connectors. The same is true of Apple's SSD racket and the decade-old meme of $400 1tb NVMe drives.
I don't buy that argument, "a PC by any other name" is what made intel mac's somewhat uncompetitive when compared to the M-series laptops: which are currently dominating with total vertical integration of the OS and hardware.
Also: All things being equal, the lightening connector was technically superior to USB-C and arrived much earlier.. so it's somewhat on the same path.
USB-C succeeded due to a confluence of;
A) Being a standard people can get behind. (lightning was, of course, much more awkwardly licensed)
B) Lightning never got a sufficient uplift from USB-2.0 performance.
C) The EU eventually killed lightening through regulation.
It was, however, smaller, more durable and (as mentioned) earlier.
I'm totally not against our new USB-C everywhere situation w.r.t. phones, but if anything it reinforces the point: The technically superior thing being too proprietary caused its death (despite being early).
You remember the funny turn of phrase instead of how bad the reception was in your iPhone 4, and how it ruined the experience of owning it. Because it wasn't that big of a deal in the end.
People had the same reaction to iOS 7. They cleaned up some of the excesses over the next few years, and now the same basic concept is what people want Apple to RETURN to. They'll be fine.
I’d still want Apple to return to an iOS 6-like design. Not the super-skeuomorphic stuff, but the regular UI with discernible controls clearly separated from content.
Why on earth is the parent comment downvoted?
the title of the TFA asks a question. This statement directly answers that question. Seems very on-topic.
WebUSB is incredibly useful to flash firmware and update configuration on random devices.
The alternative is to install random software on your computer for every device (or, if you're a Linux user, you'll likely simply be excluded and whine about it).
Making device companion utilities WebUSB means that when the hardware maker goes belly-up and their site goes down, or just decides to stop supporting a device, it's now a brick. When they are native software programs, someone can preserve them.
Just look at all the old hardware like CNC machines still running just fine on old computers, and imagine if they were connected via WebUSB instead.
WebUSB is just a terrible idea if you're not an ad company.
Not if it's an Open Source project made by a bunch of people for the love of the game. Install a PWA and you have it even when the site is down, if not code available on GH. It's possible to do on a computer (write code and distribute an app not via an app store)...but not in the magical protected-profits land of mobile devices.
Your way of thinking is the reason why we now have a half dozen trillion dollar companies controlling the world.
I’m not sure why web-midi can’t be available behind a permission to control finger printing.
I can think of several light weight patch editors I’d like be able to use. There’s probably not enough demand for someone to make a stand alone app for them.
I can’t see any reason why this needs to be controlled by apple’s app store.
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