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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

> But, sadly, Apple is letting their desire to get vengeance outweigh the interests of their users

Of course they are, that's Apple's standard business relationship practice. See also why Mac's still don't have an Nvidia GPU option, because Apple & Nvidia got in some spat a decade ago and Apple has been holding a grudge ever since.

The more Apple brings stuff in-house the less this matters to the bottom line, but it shouldn't be surprising. Unless not having Fortnite begins to seriously impact iPhone & iPad sales, Apple isn't going to care regardless of whether or not it's hurting their customers.

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s/got in a spat/had years of repeated customer issues because of GPUs shitting the bed/

I think it was a system design issue because of lack of proper cooling from the integrator (Apple). Maybe someone can look it up, I'm going off of memory here..

Yeah, inadequate cooling caused the BGA to pop free, with the recall "fix" being to just add some rubber to smash it down. iirc Apple tried to blame Nvidia for it and Nvidia didn't take it, blaming instead Apple's design.

Since then Apple has repeatedly had inadequate cooling and power delivery issues, just typically resulting in throttling instead of recalls. Sooo Nvidia was probably accurate and it was Apple's fault. But regardless of whose fault it was, the end result is consumers were stuck with some truly second-tier GPUs for many years

... what are you talking about? The fix was to replace the mainboard. I know this, because I had it done several times.

Apple has a long history of inadequate cooling, ostensibly because Steve Jobs hated fans. The apple II overheated, the apple III famously overheated (causing the motherboard to warp and chips to pop out), the original macintosh had no fan either. For decades there was a suite of aftermarket fans for Apple computers, although that's less practical with a laptop.

> apple III famously overheated

it was so reliable it failed 100% times :)

Apple's slavish obsession with passive cooling, indeed. It doesn't matter how many times it has been proven to be a bad idea, they're still going to use it.

I'm not sure it's such a bad idea. You can take it too far of course.

I for one love passive cooling. I select my (no Apple hardware in my house) hardware for silent operation where possible. Started with selecting the right fans and sound proofing my desktop PCs back when and now I'm only buying laptops that do well with the cooling noise. Meaning, if all I do is browsing HN, you better not turn on any fans on me. And when a fan is turned on, it has to be silent and have the right "sound profile". There's just some noise that's very very irritating and the decibels are just one aspect of it.

So if someone does everything they can to do without active cooling, I support that. Now if they can't, put the right kind of fan in there, sure. E.g. on a GPU I'm fine with some cooling noise, but it better only happen when I'm likely not to notice because I'm loudly slaying aliens or something like that.

What are you talking about passive cooling? The machines in question were noisy as fuck when they got hot, due to fan noise.

The M1 Air seems to be a well liked machine.

It's taken them 20 years since the G4 Cube and several other no-fan, overheat-plagued models to figure it out.

Sad for all the customers along the way that suffered through all the failed attempts.

Well liked yes, but it throttles due to overheating, though it will only typically be noticeable on long running tasks. Adding a simple thermal pad so it makes contact with bottom case cover makes a big improvement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EY7KW-PVy8

This is also the case with the M1 iMac, the lower model only has a single fan and throttles on long running tasks as well.

Apple is constantly having bad designs and failing to take care of customers until they are forced to via lawsuits.

I saw a Linus tech tips video where they made that mod, and they found that it heated the chassis well beyond the regulation limits, while Apple’s original design falls just within it.

No multiple laptop manufacturers had this same issue. Toshiba and Sony were two of them. Heat was the cause but it was operating within the specs of the GPU manuafacturer. The issue that soured NVidia with these manufacturer was when it came to fixing the issues they told them to go suck it. Example when Seagate had an entire batch of 2.5 drives dying within a year of manufacturing, they worked with Apple and HP to get them replaced and the cost was shared by both.

Also NVidia has issues with their driver development and refuse to let Apple have a say in it.

>The issue that soured NVidia with these manufacturer was when it came to fixing the issues they told them to go suck it.

Hmm, I don't think this is accurate. As per their filing with the SEC, NVIDIA pledged $150 million to cover damages.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000119312508...

No, this was 100% Nvidia material engineering fail and affected whole industry. Dell, HP, all heavyweights had huge costly recalls. Apple cooling strategy of having internals as close to 100C "to keep the fan noise down" might of contributed to earlier failures, but pretty much _every single_ Nvidia G84/G86 series GPU died in same way.

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2010/10/nvidia-settle...

Apple had more failures than just that series, such as the GT 650M's in the 2012 models: https://www.anandtech.com/show/8994/apple-initiates-video-re...

In no way thanks to Apple's insistence on using weak solder and forcing the device to be as thin as possible. I've heard people argue this up and down the street, but I have a hard time believing it when most Windows/Linux devices have no problem managing their thermals in a way that doesn't destroy their hardware.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/07/nvidia-denies-rumors...

It affected a bunch of manufacturers.

How did Apple "weak solder" affect HP laptops? https://techcrunch.com/2008/07/10/nvidia-tries-to-cover-up-d...

NVIDIA is well hated by the industry. They tend to screw their partners. They're also very aggressive with litigation.

I am not surprised Apple hates their guts, too.

Yes, but we are talking about the interests of users here. The idea that apple would prevent Nvidia GPUs from being used with their machines is further to the point of Apple putting its grudges ahead of the interests of their customers.

I honestly don't see how using NVIDIA would be in the interest of users.

e.g. AMD's GPUs have full documentation, and high quality open source drivers. Same deal with Intel.

NVIDIA, you have to deal with their blob, and tough luck if it doesn't work, especially if NVIDIA has decided not to support your hardware anymore. They do that fairly quickly. In that sense, their GPUs are comparable with PowerVR, and your average shitty android SoC.

Did the Arm sale go thru yet? Makes you wonder if Apple made a bid or otherwise tried to discourage it.

Apple's large enough to have other options.

They've been hiring risc-v specialists recently. I wonder why.

The main reason flash was killed by Apple was also spite toward Adobe, they made valid excuses sure, but spite was the driving force

Flash was absolutely NOT killed by Apple. Adobe killed Flash, and it was unrelated to Steve Job's letter.

Source: me. Was working at Adobe at the time, probably at the thing that actually led to the demise of Flash (not that it was my intention in any way to contribute to the death of Flash, the decision to kill it was a surprise to me as much as it was to anybody else).

(⊙_⊙) ... please elaborate!

I didn't leave _that_ long ago, and don't want to look up my contract/NDA to see when it expires, so I don't want to go into too much detail.

Flash cost Adobe a lot to develop (it was a big team). At some point, I speculate[+] that Adobe simply decided they no longer need the runtime, since the browsers have/will soon have all the capabilities that they need, natively. So why waste the money?

[+] I don't know for sure (e.g. I didn't participate directly in the decision); but still, I believe my speculation is much more informed that the typical net user who just noticed the coincidence and wanted to believe the narrative.

"Adobe simply decided they no longer need the runtime, since the browsers have/will soon have all the capabilities that they need, natively."

I think that ignores a very very significant reason for the browsers getting to that point of being able to supplant Flash being that is was terrible and security nightmare and Apple had shifted mindshare against it and shown it wasn't needed in a mainstream platform. It wasn't just Adobe graciously terminating a successful platform that gave them a lot of influence.

Never claimed that it was without problems. But look at the timeline: Steve Jobs letter was April 29, 2010. About a year later Adobe stopped development of Flash on mobile (that's when they really killed it, the next 10 years were necessary to implement the decision basically). You really think that letter shifted mindshare in 1 year? Trust me, the opposite was true, there were some really big players that wanted to announce flash support on mobile and were caught completely off guard.

Using flash cc several years before EOL, it just wasn't a particularly consistent environment to develop in regardless of target device, and if you wanted to make ipad apps you ran into lots of limitations on what you could actually do with a release build, not sure if flash ever got the opportunity to use runtime interpreted actionscript 3 on release builds for iOS... that would have been nice to have.

> The main reason flash was killed by Apple was also spite toward Adobe

Prior to and subsequent to Flash (a Macromedia product, fwiw) Apple & Adobe have had extensive relationships and interaction that are in no way indicative of spite.

The main reason Flash died is because performance & power consumption on mobile never got past garbage, despite the platform wars going borderline nuclear on the topic.

> they made valid excuses sure,

Perhaps it's my becoming an ol' fogey, but it's crazy to see the Apple haters of yesteryear also move toward historical revisionism.

While the best approach is to just ignore such FUD like "valid excuses, sure", it's also important the record not be owned by zealots and those who preach spite.

Please let’s not forget what a morass Flash was in terms of security. Holy crap.

Jobs was mad at them for not coming in with more support when he went back to apple. also this.

https://bgr.com/tech/steve-jobs-iphone-adobe-flash-testing/

yes adobe and apple have histories tied together, but it wasn't always a rosie partnership.

Apple wouldn't have gpu options regardless. It's not how they market products.

IMO also Apple really doesn't like CUDA and Nvidia doesn't like Metal.

I mean, for a company eagerly (and correctly) removing the headphone jack for phones, it's the least surprising thing to remove GPU options. All that's left is RAM and HDD.

They're also removing it from iPads, which is a nightmare for anyone with small children.

This is definitely inferior to a headphone jack but it works: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35...

I briefly tried to use that. The Lightning port is centered in the case, so it's impossible to use the device in landscape without your hand knocking the connector loose. No, it doesn't work.

Ahh nice, a planned obsolescence piece of junk that prohibits any other connection to the device while using it.

The question is: can your four year old use it, not lose it, and not break it every other minute. Because they break _headphones_ fairly often.

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