GeekyBear

Parents already have the ability to control what their children can do on their personal devices.

It would be better to use public resources to educate parents on how to use those existing controls, if that is something those parents choose to do with their own children.

> It was originally more of a historical artifact of all of the tooling being deeply steeped in Apple's own tech stack.

I would say that it is tied to an institutional memory of what can go wrong when your platform depends on third party development tools.

Back in the classic Mac OS days, most developers used a compiler toolchain (Codewarrior) and application framework (PowerPlant) from a company called Metroworks.

They were bought by Motorola and those products were discontinued leaving developers in a bind.

After that, Apple decided that they needed to offer their own first party development tools.

> I guarantee you somewhere in their backlog is an item that says "require app store for app installations on macOS"

Apple isn't the company that has already attempted to lock their PC operating system to only accept apps from an app store.

That's Microsoft with both WindowsRT and Windows S.

Just because the first attempt failed in the marketplace and Microsoft backed down on the second doesn't mean they haven't already tried to lock Windows to only run app store apps multiple times.

He was my favorite author at Byte.

They have finally prioritized buying leading edge Fab technology over stock buybacks, so their design team finally has a chance.

Until Intel is capable of making a fanless laptop chip that also has industry leading single core performance, they aren't in the same ballpark.

Efficiency is one thing.

Efficiency and performance is another.

We've long known that pushing clock speeds results in diminishing efficiency, so it's about time we see Intel stop pushing the clocks (and power) so hard that the chip melts down and the battery drains quickly.

> This backdoor only appears on decades-old VIA C3 embedded x86 processors

Modern Intel and AMD chips also have separate CPU cores that neither the user nor the installed OS control.

Intel Management Engine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

AMD Platform Security Processor:

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Process...

Intel added them in 2008. AMD followed suit about five years later.

Intel chips also have a hardware backdoor in the form of a separate core that the neither the user nor the installed operating system control.

Intel Management Engine:

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

As do AMD chips:

AMD Platform Security Processor:

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Process...

Fixed, thanks.

As mentioned in the blog post's footnote, the bottleneck may just be on the NAS side:

> this real-world speed limitation could also be related to my use of my lower-power Arm NAS (running on Ampere Altra, with 32 fairly-slow CPU cores). I was testing writing to an array of fast enterprise NVMe SSDs, so they shouldn't be the bottleneck here.

He was only getting 1 Gigabyte of throughput out of the built in 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection and moving to the 25 Gigabit connection only made a marginal impact on throughput, after all.

Rye bread, cheddar, and a 50/50 mix of butter and bacon grease in the pan.

WindowsRT and Windows S were already attempts to lock down Windows to only allow apps from an app store.

Secure Boot initially didn't allow the install of operating systems other than Windows.

Microsoft is the company continually attempting to lock down their general purpose computers, not Apple.

...and no. Microsoft backing down aftet consumers revolt doesn't mean their attempts don't count.

"You can delay this update for a little while" simply isn't the same thing as "you still have full control over updates".

It's right up there with Microsoft's "you are not allowed to turn telemetry all the way off", or all the efforts to require the use of an online Microsoft account to access your own computer.

The base level M5 doesn't just have more memory than the base level M2.

The memory bandwidth is bumped up by 50%, and the size of the on-die system level cache is bumped up by 50% as well.

The M5 SSD's performance uplift was fairly substantial, even when compared to the prior generation.

> In the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, the SSD in the M5 MacBook Pro achieved read speeds of up to 6,323 MB/s, compared to just 2,031 MB/s on the M4 MacBook Pro. It's not like the M4 is "slow" in a vacuum, but the M5 SSD is over three times faster, which is a great generation uplift.

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...

It doesn't work with Windows anymore, since Microsoft no longer allows the user to control their own computer.

However, Software Update on Apple devices still allows you to turn off automatic update installation the way Windows used to.

As we used to say in the Windows world, wait for service pack 3.

The most consequential public health failure during COVID was the denial that COVID was airborne, based on no scientific evidence.

The infection spread based on being in the same enclosed space as an infected person, and was not based on being only a few feet apart.

What a great resource!

Thanks

Since the loss of Anandtech, have any of the other tech websites started publishing SPEC results for systems they test?

Thanks for finding that.

> The Clang workload uses the Clang compiler to compile the Lua interpreter, a popular open-source language interpreter.

People really shouldn't call Geekbench a synthetic benchmark anymore, since it has been using real world workloads for years now.

In the past, they have provided information on which workloads they use.

For instance, the file compression workload on version 6:

This workload compresses and decompresses the Ruby 3.1.2 source archive (a 75 MB archive with 9,841 files) using different compression codecs (such as LZ4 and ZSTD). It also verifies the files using the SHA1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) function.

https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-cpu-workloads.pdf

They do mention that the change is meant to reflect how real world programs handle various types of workloads.

> In Geekbench 7, a workload only runs in multi-threaded mode if the task it models actually runs multi-threaded in real applications. For example, the HTML5 Browser test isn’t included in the multi-threaded suite because web browsers are single-threaded (or lightly threaded).

You do know that we are discussing something that Apple talked about doing, but never did vs. something that Google has been doing for years?

And no, this particular article about Google attempting to have innocent parents arrested was published before Apple even discussed scanning images users manually uploaded to their publicly accessible web album on iCloud.

Informed consent would require Google to inform you that their AI server will scan every photo you take with your device and report you to the police if it should detect (or hallucinate) something it doesn't like.

Did he set up his device to upload his private data to Google, or did Google create an OS that automatically sent everyone's private data to their AI server for scanning without explicit consent?

This is an image that he did not send off of his device to anyone except his doctor's office, yet Google reached into his private data and scanned it anyway.

Google reported him to the police based on a single false positive.

To add insult to injury, even after the police contacted Google to tell them that they had cleared him of wrongdoing, Google refused to restore access to his account.

> I feel that Apple open pandora's box with the client-side scanning.

That box has been open for years now.

Big brother is already watching what you do on your Android device.

> A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

They do mention that the 8 Gig version of the laptop is stuttering while just working on Google Docs in a way that the 16 Gig version does not.

> The Surface Laptop would hang for a few seconds like this several times a day, even when I thought I wasn’t pushing it too hard. I’ve had these temporary freezes while just working in some Google Docs — no Teams call running or anything streaming in the background.

The issue seems to be that there isn't enough RAM for light multitasking or heavier applications without hitting the swap file hard enough that the system stutters.