xyzzy01

Apple isn't shunning Intel chips in a shameless ploy to push its chips

Actually, in most of these cases they clearly are. As an owner of a top of the range 2020 Intel iMac, I'm annoyed. It's far more powerful than the M1 based computers that gets these features, and they still sell it.

1. Facetime calls - blurring the background. This feature is available on older, low end machines on other software like Teams, Zoom, etc. Claiming that only their Apple Silicon chips are able to do this is clearly untrue. If anything, this feature should have been released a long time ago on all machines. That said, while it is annoying and clearly an example of Apple being bad, I don't really care that much: While I do plenty of Teams calls every day - mostly from that iMac - and a couple of Zoom calls a week, I can't remember the last time I used Facetime video.

2. Globe and improved maps. This was available more than a decade ago, on Google Earth. It's not taxing, and it's not special. Granted, the globe feature is just useless and the maps are only for a very, very limited areas (so a non-feature in Norway). And who uses Apple Maps on a computer anyway, rather than on a mobile device? Still, this is also just Apple being mean towards some of their best customers - iMacs, Mac Pros etc.

3. on-device dictation. This could maybe be legitimate. Still, the latest Intel machines have significant ML capabilities - especially those with discrete GPUs - so it sounds kind of fishy that none of them can do it.

4. text-to-speech support for additional languages -- Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish. There's no way that the other languages can be done without Apple Silicon, and these need it. Again, just Apple being petty with their current customers.

5. Apple baked all of the T2 security and performance features directly into the processor and then some. This is what enabled Apple Silicon machines to work with Apple's wireless Magic Keyboard with Touch ID. This is different, in that it requires special hardware. Could Apple have supported this on Intel machines prior to Apple Silicon? Absolutely. They supported TouchID on Intel laptops, and could have added wireless protocols to the T2 and keyboards if they wanted to. Not adding it to iMac / Mac Pro for so many years was probably more caused by neglect of these product lines than wanting to push Apple Silicon, though.

So to sum it up: Apple is clearly holding back features that would work just as well on Intel computers.

dolfke said:

So many companies have shameless copied the iPhone, now Apple is accused to setup a system for only themselves ???

Irony, they name is Governments.

When it comes to abuse of a dominant market position, using said market position to get leverage in new markets is a big no-no.

I hope Apple loses this one, so other payment providers also can use the NFC capability. I really don't like Apple getting  the ability to keep a cut on everything we spend

I've got 170 GB free on my 256 GB phone (minimum capacity).

There's far less issues with 128 GB storage on iPhones than shipping Macs with 8 GB of RAM.

StrangeDays said:

thedba said:

If the only upgrade awaiting the Airpods max is USBC and additional colors, then muted isn’t the adjective I’d use.

Grossly underwhelming would be more like it.

What do you want them to do for you, besides play audio? Should they have a new shape too? Maybe triangles? Triangles are new. Should we do triangles?

Improve noise cancellation, as the competition does. Support lossless audio. Replace the bra with better protection. Better Find My-support - match thew newest tech there, from the new Apple Watch/ iPhone. All this in addition to the obvious change to USB C

I'd also love an on/off button, the current automatic setup just doesn't work well enough. The headphones often get confused on whether they're on the had or not,

stuke said:

No one forced you to buy an iPhone nor iPad since 2007. No one also forced you to purchase any smartphone application on the App Store if you did buy an iPhone or iPad.  Get off your high horse and innovate something out of the EU that the rest of the world finds useful, helpful, and or impactful, and is willing with their one free will to pay for that value. 

@Apple, quit selling in the EU Block. It will last for 3-6 months before the findings are negated. . 

Typically, if Apple has stopped distributing the product for more than five years, it's considered vintage

They sold the original Homepod until March 2021, so that's just over three years - not even close to "more than five years". And speakers like this should have a much longer lifespan than phones... Sonos even supports gear that's almost twenty years old, on an older, less-but-still-maintained version of their OS (S1).

This is weird. Beeper is not a competitor to iMessage. Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Signal, etc are competitors -Beeper is just a security issue attacking one of the messaging apps.

Looks nice, the only disappointment is no Wifi 7.

My current computer is Mac Studio M1 max. On the CPU side, going to a M4 pro looks better - more cores, faster cores. On the GPU side, it would be down from 32 cores to 20 cores - even if the new ones are faster, that might be slower. Will be interesting to see benchmarks.

9secondkox2 said:

avon b7 said:

Did the EU make Microsoft do this worldwide?

The problem last week had nothing to do with the EU. It was sloppy coding, sloppy testing and with little to no resilience built into the whole process. 

If the EU didn’t FORCE Microsoft to give sloppy third parties like CloudStrike the same security and update status it gives its internal OS teams, then the “sloppy developers” would not even be able to foist this crap on the world. 

It’s absolutely the fault of the brain-dead EU policies. Today it’s cloud strike. Tomorrow it will be anyone else. 

And now the EU is hoping to turn Apple into the same kind of disaster by removing the guardrails Apple has invested so heavily into. 

The EU puts Joe developer over the big companies that are responsible for ensuring critical system stay working properly and disaster ensues. It’s the exact scenario we’ve been talking about since this crap started. 

The entire set of policies from the EU relating to American tech companies needs to be reset and left alone. The new commission candidates would be wise to trash that nonsense on the first day in office. 

Otherwise, it will be more of this snd in faster succession. 

EU forced MS to provide a level playing field - in other words, MS can't sell their security solutions with "only our solution has the permissions to make your computers safe. We don't give the competition that access".

What they obviously could do is to provide APIs rather than direct kernel access. Like Apple does. It's not like MS hasn't had a decade and a half to fix that.