How about the idea that, as an employer, I might have some insight that you, an employee, do not. I have to put my company's name on your work and you get to hide your fuckups behind that name; I'm going to do what I can to protect my name before I let you work under it.
The above is not hypothetical, by the way. I'm not simply guessing what an employer might say, I run a business, I have employees, and I am speaking from the perspective I represent above.
You can go ahead and start your own company and run it however you see fit. Let me know when you do so I can send you any candidates who fail the drug screen. Mind you, you probably won't see many from me, as none who have passed the interview rounds and received a job offer have failed the drug screen yet.
Yes, all of those things are possible, but very few of them are violations of federal law, or represent poor decision making on your part. Illicit drug use ticks both boxes and is much easier to check and control for. If alcoholism were as easy to screen for, you can guarantee that would be screened for as well; it certainly causes more workplace problems than drugs.
No, I got your point; did you miss the part where you, yourself, implied that no manufacturer would have touched it had they locked it down from day one? We seem to agree on that point, which would have made Android a non-starter. In short, there's nothing Google could have done to prevent this situation from day one and see any sort of market success with Android. That was my point and it was very strongly implied in yours.
you do realize the NVMe drives are "standard", they're just soldered in, IIRC
I've had my rMBP open, the m.2 drive is replaceable, actually, held in with a single screw. The soldered RAM is really annoying, though; my PC with RAM sockets is thinner than my rMBP and "thinness" is the excuse I always hear, so there's really no excuse for it.
Moving on, yes, they totally screwed up both the mac pro and mac mini in 2013. They've finally admitted it in 2016, at least on the mac pro. I'm hopeful they'll also correct their mac mini mistake this year. Coming out with a nice tower and a mini block that can be put into a grid was where I thought they should have gone in 2013. Instead we got design over technology. It's a computer, make it do neat computer things. Imagine if I could automagically hook up a MBP to a network with a couple of pros/minis on it, and when I want to edit/render video, it automatically allowed me to utilize the other machines on the network, provided I had access to them, of course. That 2 hour rendering job on a single machine could be cut down to tens of minutes, at least in my house.
I almost didn't quote this because I really have nothing more to say other than: agreed.
I'm guessing you accounted for the up to 4 or so GB caching utilized within a machine? It's pretty impressive what goes on within the OS.
If they've come up with a way to fill that cache with data from disk before it's been read, I'm sure there's an award somewhere they should be receiving. We're talking about read speeds, here; disk caches are only useful for caching writes and reading recent writes that haven't yet been flushed, they're not really helpful for large sequential reads of files not already present in (or exceeding the size of) the cache. I'm fairly certain Samsung's benchmark utility takes that into consideration; if it does not, nine 32GB passes with CrystalDiskMark surely didn't fit into the portion of my workstation's 64GB of RAM dedicated to disk cache. Considering that 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes total up to 3940MB/s, topping 4GB/sec wouldn't require much compression at all, mind you, and I ran these benchmarks without any sort of OS-level filesystem compression (it's an option with NTFS, but not enabled on the drive in question), so it has to be being done at the driver or chipset level. I will say I wasn't seeing much over 3GB/sec before applying the most recent firmware update and the performance I noted after the update far exceeds what Samsung specifies for the drive in question.
On the Mac, BlackMagic Disk Speed Test is more or less the standard test and it agrees with the benchmarks listed here for the SM0512F (utilizing Samsung flash) found in my rMBP. Apparently in 2014 they were running 2x PCIe 2.0 lanes; it wasn't until 2015 that Apple started using 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes for storage in the MacBook lineup. At least, that's what I just read. Even so, with 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes totaling up to 3940MB/s, that's as fast as you're gonna see without compression, so we're already at the point where a run-of-the-mill consumer part available at Fry's is as performant as the underlying technology allows; Apple can't do better than that.
I'd guess the data on disk is compressed, which would explain the much slower write speeds.
It is the place of the company to ensure they're hiring someone who will come to work every day ready and able to do the job. In that regard, it is prudent for a company to ensure they won't spend weeks or months training you, just for you to come in high and unable to work one day, or not come in at all because you overdosed and ended up in the hospital or morgue. Pot on the weekends? Sure. Harder stuff? Pass.
I still have the Lapdock from my Atrix. I use it with a Pi Zero. I don't have a real use case for it, to be quite honest, but I had the hardware laying around and decided to see if I could get it working and, well, I could. No real point to this comment, figured someone might find it interesting.
The 2013 IIRC didn't use NVMe drives. My 2014 is twice as fast as the old 2013 I had.
It's funny this came up today, actually. Having bought it in January 2014, I assumed it was a mid-2013 model, but "About This Mac" lists it as a mid-2014. I just happened to need to look that up to drop the info at the bottom of this post just a few minutes ago. F me for never having actually looked at that dialog in the over 3 years I've owned this laptop;)
NVMe will inherently be faster than SATA m.2 based systems because 1 layer of protocols has been removed. But you're talking 1 or 2%
You're going from 6gbps (768MB/s) to 985MB/s per lane. That's a bit more than 1-2%, my friend. SATA can't reach 1GB/sec, while m.2 PCIe can just about hit 4GB/sec. In fact, if the drive supports protocol compression, as the 960 PRO appears to with the latest firmware, you can break 4GB/sec in data throughput; the 960 PRO in my Ryzen build peaks over 4GB/sec on sequential reads, which surprised the hell out of me because I didn't know that was possible until I saw it with my own eyes, which teared over with joy at that moment. In all honestly, I'm only assuming compression is a factor in that; but, somehow, my 960 PRO managed a sustained transfer rate (during a benchmark) in excess of the bandwidth available in 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes.
I'd love an AMD based Mac Pro. Preferably with options for up to 8+ CPUs...
Are you hitting on me? Because now I'm blushing.
The reason this may be appealing from Apple's viewpoint is that AMD's ThreadRipper architecture actually ties into their GCD architecture better than Intel's Core architecture, and AMD's technology for multi-CPU support works better than Intel's approach
Sadly, Apple has hitched its wagon to Thunderbolt at this point. I wish it wasn't so, but I just don't see Cook changing course. We can hope and dream, though. This is one instance where I'd certainly love to be proven wrong.
As for Thunderbolt, it's a great tech still looking for a real use case.
There are a handful of use cases, but almost none of them apply to the lay consumer. You can shave a handful of milliseconds off latency off an ASIO audio interface by going Thunderbolt vs USB, which is great if you use a laptop in the studio; a workstation would be better served with a PCIe card and breakout box, which has been the preferred solution for recording studio workstation audio for some time now. Then, there are PCIe m.2 disks, which can saturate 4 PCIe lanes, which just so happens to be what TB3 provides; those operate at 1/4 throughput over USB 3.1 under ideal conditions, less in the real world. Again, great if you're stuck on a laptop but pointless if you've got a proper workstation.
Which brings me to the one use case the lay consumer might be interested in: docking stations. A 2-cable solution (1 if your laptop requires less than 100 watts to charge) is great for your average on-the-go consumer.
But we've had universal docking stations providing a 2 cable solution since USB 2.0 came out so, yeah, I agree that it's really a solution in search of a problem. Anybody doing real heavy lifting that would require that level of performance should be doing that work on a proper workstation and, if mobility is desired, using a laptop as more of a remote terminal. That sort of setup allows me to do the same work from an Android convertible that I can do from my desktop, except in rare cases where the dual 4k display are an absolute necessity.
If Thunderbolt disappeared tomorrow, I doubt many would miss it, honestly. A few DJs might suffer a couple extra milliseconds of delay during their performances, but the real-world impact would be minimal and the hope for an Epyc Mac Pro would increase by several orders of magnitude. It
Hmm, very interesting. I might have to try that this weekend. It might be a bit much to ask (and feel free to tell me to screw off) but might you have links to reliable sources for how to get this going? If not, I'm sure Google won't let me down, but I'd certainly appreciate you pending a few seconds to save me a few minutes if you have the resources already bookmarked.
When I looked into it when Sierra was first released, there was no AMD compatible kernel for that version of the OS. But, then, Sierra had only been out for a few hours at that point. I'll admit I haven't kept up with it since then -- already having a working Mac, the VM would be more of a nice-to-have than anything else.
So ultimately, no they couldn't have done anything
That was kind of my point.
the customer doesn't matter (at least to anyone but Apple)
I find it amusing that you think the consumer matters to Apple. That remark makes me question how serious you were actually trying to be, but if Apple cared about the consumer we wouldn't have nonstandard drive interfaces and soldered-in RAM in Macs, the Mac Mini wouldn't have taken a massive step toward the garbage heap in 2013, and the Mac Pro would still be a proper tower.
Sorry if that isn't the answer you wanted to hear.
~ Sent from my MacBookPro11,3 running OS X Yosemite
With a network adapter falling back to a lower speed is not always desirable. Sure, a 10Gbps Ethernet falling back to 5Gbps might not be a deal killer. If you are investing in a 40Gbps network adapter then having it not fallback to 10 or 5 Gbps USB speeds isn't going to be deal killer. Such people might even prefer it to not work since it exposes a very real connection problem rather than hide it with a fallback.
Link speed gets reported, it's not really hidden. That said, you'd also likely expect someone buying and installing that equipment to know what they're doing and not encounter the issue to begin with. Fallback is useful, though, in cases where you might be presenting a high-performance network interface for temporary use; not everyone is going to have Thunderbolt, even if they have USB-C, and not everyone is going to have USB-C but you can provide a USB-A to USB-C adapter and know that they'll likely still be able to connect. Admittedly a very corner case, but plausible nonetheless.
Audio devices, printers, and many other devices are such low bandwidth that there is no need to supporting Thunderbolt, USB 3 or even USB 2 speeds is enough.
Latency, actually. There are a number of Thunderbolt audio interfaces intended for professional use, where being able to shave even 1ms of latency is a huge deal, especially in a live setting. The same applies to network interfaces, actually; even at the sub-10gbps level, you can shave a few ms off your latency by going Thunderbolt.
I'm not so sure. I can understand why someone selling a Thunderbolt device might say to use the cable that came with it. This is not much different than someone selling a USB 3 device and saying to use the cable that came with it.
When we're talking about 18 inch or shorter cables, as long as all the pins are connected it shouldn't matter, the cable should pass both Thunderbolt and USB; but the moment your cable exceeds that length, you lose half your Thunderbolt throughput. And for USB devices, if you happen to plug in a Thunderbolt cable that doesn't pass USB (e.g. most of the vastly more expensive -- thus better in the eyes of the lay consumer -- active cables), you get nothing. Not even an indication that a device was even connected, which looks to the user like a broken device.
Where I'm frustrated is seeing cables that will support Thunderbolt 3 but not support USB 3 at it's full 10Gbps, or even 5Gbps. I've read that Thunderbolt 3 is a superset of USB 3, says so on Intel's Thunderbolt FAQ.
Indeed, it is, and those cables should support USB 3.1 at both ends. However, the spec also includes active optical cables, which will not support USB at all; it seems many manufacturers have taken this to mean they can leave USB out of their active copper cables, and I've seen "certified" cables that do this, so Intel must be okay with it. Your next paragraph is very much spot-on and much of the USB-C confusion is due to Intel's use of the port for Thunderbolt 3 without enforcing compatibility at the cable level in the standard; at the very least, had they done that, they could sue companies out of existence for using the Thunderbolt logo on cables that lack USB support. Aside from active optical cables, of course, as the spec lists them as not having to support USB at all, and those are easy enough to spot by eye so no guess-and-check should be necessary for those.
I suspect this was more of an imposition on Intel from the USB group to prevent Thunderbolt from replacing them completely than any intent to play nice or create a port of greater utility.
Hmm, interesting thought. I wonder, if that requirement didn't exist, would Intel license Thunderbolt to AMD? If not, USB isn't going anywhere. Sure would be nice, though.
Your ideas on color codes conflicts with existing color coding.
I'm quite aware of the issue. The first time it died in the middle of a work day, I deemed it not worth fixing and went out and bought a new machine within the hour so I could continue my work day rather than giving my machine to Apple for 2 weeks and being without a computer for that duration. Of course, I have a number of systems from which I can work today, but I didn't the day that GPU died.
It's been happily running Ubuntu since the day after the GPU crapped out.
By the way, the crap performance you mention seems to imply that you also hid or disabled the drivers for the Intel GPU, as Intel-only MBPs of that era don't have the flickering issue you mention. You could probably get acceptable desktop performance out of it (certainly not usable for gaming) if you managed to disable only the nVidia driver.
And let's be 100% fair, the NVMe drives Apple uses are top notch, likely faster than the multiple m.2 systems (maximum dual in every case I've seen although I'm sure you'll pull something with more out of your hat;)
The reason you're not seeing any dual m.2 system faster than Apple's single m.2 systems is that Intel isn't providing enough PCIe lanes until you start looking at Xeon. Well, technically they provide more than plenty, but motherboard manufacturers are assigning them to PCIe slots, rather than m.2 slots; an Intel motherboard with dual m.2 slots is most likely to be configured to share 4 lanes across both slots, allowing a single drive to use all 4, but assigning each drive a pair of lanes in a 2 drive configuration. If you're looking at a gaming board with a pair of 16x slots, you'll be lucky to have more than 2 lanes on the m.2 slot. A Ryzen-based system will have plenty of lanes to run a pair of m.2 drives on 4 lanes each, but I'm betting you haven't benchmarked one of those in that configuration yet.
Try to keep in mind that Apple has to buy their m.2 drives from somewhere, typically Samsung, and that Samsung does sell those parts to consumers as well. The 960 PRO is on par with what Apple is putting in their systems; at 985MB/s per lane, you're not going to get over 3940MB/s and my single 960 benchmarks so close to that that the difference can be accounted for by control codes which, of course, must be sent alongside the data. I somehow doubt Apple is using faster m.2 drives since the slot only has enough pins to provide 4 lanes and that's as fast as 4 lanes can go.
You're almost right, though; a non-Xeon Intel system is unlikely to perform any better with two m.2 drives. In fact, it will likely perform worse as it now has two streams of control commands to send alongside the same data, thereby reducing throughput over the same 4 lanes (or 2 in the case of a lot of gaming-oriented boards) shared by the 2 drives. You might find a non-Xeon board with a pair of m.2 slots and without a 16x slot that assigns 4 lanes to each m.2, and I'd be truly interested to see one; I'm sure such a beast exists (perhaps with more than 4 of more m.2 slots even) for Xeon, but it's a friggin' unicorn for Core-i CPUs.
Also worth noting, the 960 PRO benchmarks nearly 4x as fast as the SM0512F in my 2013 rMBP. Yes, faster drives than this were available in 2013 and yes, the PC laptop I bought shortly after the rMBP for roughly $700 less (with a manufacture date within a month of the rMBP) includes a pair of them and benchmarks more than twice as fast. It's hard to say that Apple uses the fastest drives after seeing that, though it may be true today when m.2 drives have reached their theoretical maximum performance and those drives have come down considerably in price.
But the reality is that I'm more ripping on Intel with this rant than Apple. AMD came out with a consumer CPU architecture with 4 more usable PCIe lanes than Kaby Lake which, for some workloads, makes them the better choice right now. Of course, Intel's new chips have more PCIe lanes available, but it's doubtful they would without Ryzen having been released. Threadripper has 64 lanes available and Epyc has 128, while Xeon is still sitting at 48 per CPU, so Intel has some catching up to do.
This makes me hopeful for an AMD-based Mac Pro; Epyc would be nice with, say, 4 16x slots, 4 4x slots, and the remaining 48 lanes split across 12 m.2 slots. It would be a hell of a large board to support all of that, but damn it would be top-notch and worth the premium in both space and price. I have my doubts as I don't think Apple would be willing to give up Thunderbolt, despite the fact that it's markedly less useful in a desktop/workstation scenario than it is in a portable or all-in-one. If an AMD-based Mac happens, I'll finally be able to run a macOS VM with an unmodified kernel on my Ryzen workstation, which will be nice; my wife has had her eye on this rMBP for some time and I could finally pass it on to her if that happened.
Sorry for the long post. I had a lot to say on this.
No need to apologize, it's a very in-depth topic with a ton of nuance and a mind-boggling list of use cases. Any proper discussion of the subject is bound to be wordy and I'm more than happy to explore just how many words we can write on the subject without becoming repetitive. You'll note a similar-length (if not longer) reply from me;)
When it comes to devices falling back to USB 3 if the cable or host system don't support the Thunderbolt protocol does not make much sense to me. What devices would you want/need such fallback? A hard drive might make sense I guess.
Hard drives, network adapters, audio interfaces, printers (do Thunderbolt printers exist?? I bet one does somewhere), scanners, there are a number of cases where it makes sense and those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head. The rest of that paragraph is more or less spot-on, and that's where the confusion comes in for the lay person. It plugs in, you have the drivers, yet it might still not work, very much unlike what people have become accustomed to with USB-A/B, and it's all because the port is pulling double-duty on some systems, but not on others. I know my Dell convertible with an Intel CPU has two USB-C ports that support the full gamut of connectivity the port is capable of, and I know that my AMD-based workstation has two USB-C ports that only support USB protocols; they're physically identical and have the same labeling, you can bet your sweet ass that a lay consumer would have no clue why a 5k display would work with the Intel system and not the AMD system.
By the way, in case you're not aware, it comes down to licensing; Intel will not license Thunderbolt for use in anything X86-based that does not have an Intel CPU. ARM devices get a pass because they're not X86, peripheral devices get a pass because they're not X86. AMD and VIA CPUs? No dice.
I have seen hard drives that support USB 3 and Thunderbolt on a single USB-C port before but I cannot find them now.
I've seen them as well; the ones I saw included a 3 foot USB-C cable, which may or may not have worked for Thunderbolt. My understanding was that the included cable was USB only and you had to buy a better cable for Thunderbolt since the same cable would not pass both. Looking back it appears that the passive cables do, indeed, pass both but only achieve 20gbps for Thunderbolt at lengths in excess of 0.5 meters. For similar reasons, you'll likely never see a Thunderbolt drive with USB fallback with an permanently attached cable; relying on fallback with a single cable simply isn't reliable enough to consider it practically possible, even if it works on paper and is specified in the spec. If my nemesis (not you) in this conversation really wanted to stick it to me, he could find one of those drives listed somewhere and provide a link to it; however, I suspect there is a reason neither of us can find them anymore -- they simply didn't work as intended.
I'll see drives with Thunderbolt 2 (mini-DisplayPort style) and USB 3 ports (wide micro-B style) and include USB-C cables for one or both.
I've got one of those, it's actually a pretty slick way for manufacturers to get rid of old drive stock. The physical disk was already the bottleneck with USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2, so they can sell the same disk in the same enclosure and just include a different cable and BAM it's a USB-C compatible drive.
I've even seen drives with three USB-C ports, one for Thunderbolt 3, one for Thunderbolt 3 pass through, and a completely separate USB-C port for USB 3.
Huh... Seems someone missed an opportunity there. They could have implemented fallback at the port level for the "to-computer" port; it still may (or may not) have required different cabling depending on what you were plugging it in to, but... It seems
Aside from house multiple m.2 and SATA SSDs and a handful of spinning disks (with hardware RAID) in a single enclosure with a single high-efficiency (93% under typical loads) power supply, nothing. I just like my work to get done faster than anything Apple sells will get it done, without a mess of cables connecting permanent external storage. The iMac Pro doesn't meet those requirements so, no, I'm not considering one.
This is what Mac zealots don't understand. Developers have to target the primary market for their software first, which often means the Mac comes last. No developer is going to spend more on a part-time use machine that's less capable than their workstation than they spent on their more capable workstation. Their employer might, but even that seems to be restricted to Silicon Valley.
Indeed. The YogaBook gets around that (and provides a good drawing surface as well) by placing a thin and flexible acrylic surface atop a springy/rubbery/i'm-not-sure-what-because-i-haven't-disassembled-it surface to give some bounce. It's not ideal and a physical keyboard is still preferable, but it's not horrible, either.
Would I type on it all day? Hell no, I have a Model M clone for that. Is it acceptable for convertible/tablet use on the go when I don't want to carry a Bluetooth keyboard? Surprisingly so, to the point that I no longer bother carrying the keyboard most of the time.
Of course, Apple would put it behind the hardest mineral glass they can find and it would suck. Which is sad, because if anyone has the resources to do it "right", it's Apple.
What Google and Bing are selling is aggregate data. You can actually buy it and find out for yourself; you don't even have to be a corporation to do so, but you can get better pricing if you're at least an LLC.
Look at the data you can buy from them, then come talk to me. I'd share, but I'd be in violation of the agreement I signed when I paid for access.
If you wanted a truly terrifying example, you should have used Facebook; but, then, they don't have anything on me that I didn't explicitly give them. Again, perhaps you and the AC I replied to should be more careful?
Good info, glad to see that things have gotten more stable in the 6 years since I played with it.
Please let me know when stock Apple install images work on the current best-of-breed systems, which happen to run AMD. As it is now, I can't even run a Hackintosh VM on such a system without a modified kernel because the stock kernel shits itself on AMD.
I ask that you correct me, which is subtly different from simply pointing out that I'm wrong. Until you prove it by showing me what is right, why the fuck should I take your word for it? It used to be that you'd tell me I was wrong, I'd research more and not find anything supporting your position, ask you to provide supporting details, which you'd fail to do, then conclude that you're just a dipshit. Now I just skip most of the middle stuff when I see one of your posts; sometimes I'll ask you to back up your position, in the hope that I might still be able to learn something from you, but you always fail to do so.
I would have to be a complete dumbass to take you at your word that I'm wrong about anything given your lengthy history of being unable to ever back it up with anything substantial.
So in summary, every time I point out you're wrong, you... refuse to admit it under any circumstance.
At this point? Yes, because all you do is point and yell. I edited out the bit about the tantrum, as you're typically the one throwing them. See the conversation linked in the above post for an example.
Some do not. For example, Lenovo. And while some laptops use round connectors, the OD/ID can vary.
And those barrel connectors still are not proprietary. Yes, there do exist proprietary power connectors *cough*Apple*cough* but they are the exception, not the rule.
Congrats for you. For those who don't own a Macbook Pro, a universal dock means they can do this in the future. And they can change laptops without requiring a new dock. In the past, it wasn't guaranteed that different models from the same manufacturer could use the same dock.
I use the same dock for my Dell convertible, though I do need a TB3 to TB2 adapter for it. That machine even charged from the dock, so it's a true 1 cable solution. We've had universal docks since USB 2.0, they became more capable with Thunderbolt, then USB 3.0, then Thunderbolt 2. Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 have made them even more useful, but they're by no means something new, nor have the ever been a Mac-only tool (that would make them... uh... not universal).
The dock I linked to has been on Amazon since at least 2010 (oldest review I could find) but has been on the marked since at least 2009 when support for it was added to the Linux kernel. It's not the first universal USB 2.0 dock to hit the market, either; they've existed practically as long as computers with USB 2.0 ports.
I may not have said the exact words "I'm wrong" but it sure looks like I'm acknowledging it. Your problem, friend, is that your sources quite often do not agree with you. You never go so far as to actually correct my understanding, as blindseer has done here, which is why I never thank you for your efforts. You see, I've done here exactly what I told you I do when someone actually correct my understanding on a subject. I'll save you the trouble of clicking (I provided the link so you don't call me a liar and claim the quote below was never actually said, or that it's being used out of context):
I learn and grow here all the time; if I didn't, I wouldn't bother returning to this site on a daily basis. When I'm wrong, when someone shows me that I've been wrong, I learn from that, grow from it, admit it, and - perhaps most importantly - thank whoever showed me that I was wrong for correcting my understanding.
And, you see, blindseer actually showed me that I was wrong. They didn't simply claim it, they showed it by correcting my understanding, not just by telling me it was wrong. Why does that matter? Because it would be irresponsible and idiotic of me to take someone on their word telling me that I'm wrong, especially someone who goes by the moniker "UnknowingFool", without being shown hard evidence of what is actually correct and seeing that reality differs from my understanding. That's the part you always miss, which blindseer managed to do quite effectively here, for which I thanked them.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that it would be a good move. On the contrary, I was suggesting it might not be as bad as people think. I've only been a Mac user since about 2010 or so and I view 2011 as the peak of the Mac's user-centric life; it's been all downhill form there IMO. My wife's been a hardcore Mac fan since the Bondi Blue iMac and she's only come to see Apple's decline with the 2016 MBP models. She's still strongly in the "just give me a Mac" camp, but their grip on her is weakening with every update.
I don't even try to get her to switch to PC anymore; she already gave up her MacBook Pro in favor of a PC laptop for casual gaming, and I keep hearing how much better Windows is getting with each update (I disagree, but I let her hold that opinion since it serves her well) and how much of a headache that 2016 27" 5k iMac with all the bells and whistles that she just had to have is becoming every time she uses it.
I think we'll have one less Mac user in a few years when the iMac finally breaks down.
Or someone at Apple will pull their head out of their ass and design a high-end Mac that's actually hign-end again. It's not too late, they could still pull it off. Maybe my next workstation will be a Mac Pro and my wife's next design system will be an iMac; I have sincere doubts of that, though. They will be considered. They always are.
They could, of course, remove future versions from those licenses and do whatever they wish
Which is precisely what I was implying.
but everyone could just continue to use the old versions or their forks.
With no updates from Google. Old versions with no security patches (okay, the community might handle that -- maybe it's even likely) and no feature updates, might be fine on old hardware, but isn't that the situation we're all complaining about right now? That's hardly an improvement, then, you see?
Forks might add new features, but they won't be the same features Google adds to new versions, so we'll end up with fragmentation. Isn't that also what we're all complaining about right now?
So yeah, people could keep using the old version, which is what many people are complaining about being forced to do already, and people could develop multiple forked versions, which is the other thing many people are complaining about already. Or, everyone could just use Google's version and actually see the problems they're complaining about solved.
So yes, what you propose could happen. Hell, it's probably the most likely outcome, but it would leave us with the very same issues we have today. And Google could still license future versions under more restrictive terms, knowing full well that our alternative to adopting those more restrictive terms is the status quo.
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Or, maybe they're a form of confirmation that the rest of my pre-hire screening process is working as intended and nothing was missed.
Your entire argument amounts to "you can't protect against everything, so why bother protecting against anything at all?" and that's just moronic.
How about the idea that, as an employer, I might have some insight that you, an employee, do not. I have to put my company's name on your work and you get to hide your fuckups behind that name; I'm going to do what I can to protect my name before I let you work under it.
The above is not hypothetical, by the way. I'm not simply guessing what an employer might say, I run a business, I have employees, and I am speaking from the perspective I represent above.
You can go ahead and start your own company and run it however you see fit. Let me know when you do so I can send you any candidates who fail the drug screen. Mind you, you probably won't see many from me, as none who have passed the interview rounds and received a job offer have failed the drug screen yet.
Yes, all of those things are possible, but very few of them are violations of federal law, or represent poor decision making on your part. Illicit drug use ticks both boxes and is much easier to check and control for. If alcoholism were as easy to screen for, you can guarantee that would be screened for as well; it certainly causes more workplace problems than drugs.
No, I got your point; did you miss the part where you, yourself, implied that no manufacturer would have touched it had they locked it down from day one? We seem to agree on that point, which would have made Android a non-starter. In short, there's nothing Google could have done to prevent this situation from day one and see any sort of market success with Android. That was my point and it was very strongly implied in yours.
you do realize the NVMe drives are "standard", they're just soldered in, IIRC
I've had my rMBP open, the m.2 drive is replaceable, actually, held in with a single screw. The soldered RAM is really annoying, though; my PC with RAM sockets is thinner than my rMBP and "thinness" is the excuse I always hear, so there's really no excuse for it.
Moving on, yes, they totally screwed up both the mac pro and mac mini in 2013. They've finally admitted it in 2016, at least on the mac pro. I'm hopeful they'll also correct their mac mini mistake this year. Coming out with a nice tower and a mini block that can be put into a grid was where I thought they should have gone in 2013. Instead we got design over technology. It's a computer, make it do neat computer things. Imagine if I could automagically hook up a MBP to a network with a couple of pros/minis on it, and when I want to edit/render video, it automatically allowed me to utilize the other machines on the network, provided I had access to them, of course. That 2 hour rendering job on a single machine could be cut down to tens of minutes, at least in my house.
I almost didn't quote this because I really have nothing more to say other than: agreed.
I'm guessing you accounted for the up to 4 or so GB caching utilized within a machine? It's pretty impressive what goes on within the OS.
If they've come up with a way to fill that cache with data from disk before it's been read, I'm sure there's an award somewhere they should be receiving. We're talking about read speeds, here; disk caches are only useful for caching writes and reading recent writes that haven't yet been flushed, they're not really helpful for large sequential reads of files not already present in (or exceeding the size of) the cache. I'm fairly certain Samsung's benchmark utility takes that into consideration; if it does not, nine 32GB passes with CrystalDiskMark surely didn't fit into the portion of my workstation's 64GB of RAM dedicated to disk cache. Considering that 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes total up to 3940MB/s, topping 4GB/sec wouldn't require much compression at all, mind you, and I ran these benchmarks without any sort of OS-level filesystem compression (it's an option with NTFS, but not enabled on the drive in question), so it has to be being done at the driver or chipset level. I will say I wasn't seeing much over 3GB/sec before applying the most recent firmware update and the performance I noted after the update far exceeds what Samsung specifies for the drive in question.
On the Mac, BlackMagic Disk Speed Test is more or less the standard test and it agrees with the benchmarks listed here for the SM0512F (utilizing Samsung flash) found in my rMBP. Apparently in 2014 they were running 2x PCIe 2.0 lanes; it wasn't until 2015 that Apple started using 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes for storage in the MacBook lineup. At least, that's what I just read. Even so, with 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes totaling up to 3940MB/s, that's as fast as you're gonna see without compression, so we're already at the point where a run-of-the-mill consumer part available at Fry's is as performant as the underlying technology allows; Apple can't do better than that.
I'd guess the data on disk is compressed, which would explain the much slower write speeds.
Who said anything about much slower write speeds? I'm seeing sequential writes in excess of 3GB/s, which also exceeds the performance level specified by Samsung for the drive in question.
Just color me skeptical
I would be, too, had I not seen it with my own eyes, then re-run the benchmarks in disbelief.
I'm not sure about that, with them going all full USB-C or USB-C only on the latest laptops.
It is the place of the company to ensure they're hiring someone who will come to work every day ready and able to do the job. In that regard, it is prudent for a company to ensure they won't spend weeks or months training you, just for you to come in high and unable to work one day, or not come in at all because you overdosed and ended up in the hospital or morgue. Pot on the weekends? Sure. Harder stuff? Pass.
I still have the Lapdock from my Atrix. I use it with a Pi Zero. I don't have a real use case for it, to be quite honest, but I had the hardware laying around and decided to see if I could get it working and, well, I could. No real point to this comment, figured someone might find it interesting.
The 2013 IIRC didn't use NVMe drives. My 2014 is twice as fast as the old 2013 I had.
It's funny this came up today, actually. Having bought it in January 2014, I assumed it was a mid-2013 model, but "About This Mac" lists it as a mid-2014. I just happened to need to look that up to drop the info at the bottom of this post just a few minutes ago. F me for never having actually looked at that dialog in the over 3 years I've owned this laptop ;)
NVMe will inherently be faster than SATA m.2 based systems because 1 layer of protocols has been removed. But you're talking 1 or 2%
You're going from 6gbps (768MB/s) to 985MB/s per lane. That's a bit more than 1-2%, my friend. SATA can't reach 1GB/sec, while m.2 PCIe can just about hit 4GB/sec. In fact, if the drive supports protocol compression, as the 960 PRO appears to with the latest firmware, you can break 4GB/sec in data throughput; the 960 PRO in my Ryzen build peaks over 4GB/sec on sequential reads, which surprised the hell out of me because I didn't know that was possible until I saw it with my own eyes, which teared over with joy at that moment. In all honestly, I'm only assuming compression is a factor in that; but, somehow, my 960 PRO managed a sustained transfer rate (during a benchmark) in excess of the bandwidth available in 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes.
I'd love an AMD based Mac Pro. Preferably with options for up to 8+ CPUs...
Are you hitting on me? Because now I'm blushing.
The reason this may be appealing from Apple's viewpoint is that AMD's ThreadRipper architecture actually ties into their GCD architecture better than Intel's Core architecture, and AMD's technology for multi-CPU support works better than Intel's approach
Sadly, Apple has hitched its wagon to Thunderbolt at this point. I wish it wasn't so, but I just don't see Cook changing course. We can hope and dream, though. This is one instance where I'd certainly love to be proven wrong.
As for Thunderbolt, it's a great tech still looking for a real use case.
There are a handful of use cases, but almost none of them apply to the lay consumer. You can shave a handful of milliseconds off latency off an ASIO audio interface by going Thunderbolt vs USB, which is great if you use a laptop in the studio; a workstation would be better served with a PCIe card and breakout box, which has been the preferred solution for recording studio workstation audio for some time now. Then, there are PCIe m.2 disks, which can saturate 4 PCIe lanes, which just so happens to be what TB3 provides; those operate at 1/4 throughput over USB 3.1 under ideal conditions, less in the real world. Again, great if you're stuck on a laptop but pointless if you've got a proper workstation.
Which brings me to the one use case the lay consumer might be interested in: docking stations. A 2-cable solution (1 if your laptop requires less than 100 watts to charge) is great for your average on-the-go consumer.
But we've had universal docking stations providing a 2 cable solution since USB 2.0 came out so, yeah, I agree that it's really a solution in search of a problem. Anybody doing real heavy lifting that would require that level of performance should be doing that work on a proper workstation and, if mobility is desired, using a laptop as more of a remote terminal. That sort of setup allows me to do the same work from an Android convertible that I can do from my desktop, except in rare cases where the dual 4k display are an absolute necessity.
If Thunderbolt disappeared tomorrow, I doubt many would miss it, honestly. A few DJs might suffer a couple extra milliseconds of delay during their performances, but the real-world impact would be minimal and the hope for an Epyc Mac Pro would increase by several orders of magnitude. It
Hmm, very interesting. I might have to try that this weekend. It might be a bit much to ask (and feel free to tell me to screw off) but might you have links to reliable sources for how to get this going? If not, I'm sure Google won't let me down, but I'd certainly appreciate you pending a few seconds to save me a few minutes if you have the resources already bookmarked.
When I looked into it when Sierra was first released, there was no AMD compatible kernel for that version of the OS. But, then, Sierra had only been out for a few hours at that point. I'll admit I haven't kept up with it since then -- already having a working Mac, the VM would be more of a nice-to-have than anything else.
So ultimately, no they couldn't have done anything
That was kind of my point.
the customer doesn't matter (at least to anyone but Apple)
I find it amusing that you think the consumer matters to Apple. That remark makes me question how serious you were actually trying to be, but if Apple cared about the consumer we wouldn't have nonstandard drive interfaces and soldered-in RAM in Macs, the Mac Mini wouldn't have taken a massive step toward the garbage heap in 2013, and the Mac Pro would still be a proper tower.
Sorry if that isn't the answer you wanted to hear.
~ Sent from my MacBookPro11,3 running OS X Yosemite
With a network adapter falling back to a lower speed is not always desirable. Sure, a 10Gbps Ethernet falling back to 5Gbps might not be a deal killer. If you are investing in a 40Gbps network adapter then having it not fallback to 10 or 5 Gbps USB speeds isn't going to be deal killer. Such people might even prefer it to not work since it exposes a very real connection problem rather than hide it with a fallback.
Link speed gets reported, it's not really hidden. That said, you'd also likely expect someone buying and installing that equipment to know what they're doing and not encounter the issue to begin with. Fallback is useful, though, in cases where you might be presenting a high-performance network interface for temporary use; not everyone is going to have Thunderbolt, even if they have USB-C, and not everyone is going to have USB-C but you can provide a USB-A to USB-C adapter and know that they'll likely still be able to connect. Admittedly a very corner case, but plausible nonetheless.
Audio devices, printers, and many other devices are such low bandwidth that there is no need to supporting Thunderbolt, USB 3 or even USB 2 speeds is enough.
Latency, actually. There are a number of Thunderbolt audio interfaces intended for professional use, where being able to shave even 1ms of latency is a huge deal, especially in a live setting. The same applies to network interfaces, actually; even at the sub-10gbps level, you can shave a few ms off your latency by going Thunderbolt.
I'm not so sure. I can understand why someone selling a Thunderbolt device might say to use the cable that came with it. This is not much different than someone selling a USB 3 device and saying to use the cable that came with it.
When we're talking about 18 inch or shorter cables, as long as all the pins are connected it shouldn't matter, the cable should pass both Thunderbolt and USB; but the moment your cable exceeds that length, you lose half your Thunderbolt throughput. And for USB devices, if you happen to plug in a Thunderbolt cable that doesn't pass USB (e.g. most of the vastly more expensive -- thus better in the eyes of the lay consumer -- active cables), you get nothing. Not even an indication that a device was even connected, which looks to the user like a broken device.
Where I'm frustrated is seeing cables that will support Thunderbolt 3 but not support USB 3 at it's full 10Gbps, or even 5Gbps. I've read that Thunderbolt 3 is a superset of USB 3, says so on Intel's Thunderbolt FAQ.
Indeed, it is, and those cables should support USB 3.1 at both ends. However, the spec also includes active optical cables, which will not support USB at all; it seems many manufacturers have taken this to mean they can leave USB out of their active copper cables, and I've seen "certified" cables that do this, so Intel must be okay with it. Your next paragraph is very much spot-on and much of the USB-C confusion is due to Intel's use of the port for Thunderbolt 3 without enforcing compatibility at the cable level in the standard; at the very least, had they done that, they could sue companies out of existence for using the Thunderbolt logo on cables that lack USB support. Aside from active optical cables, of course, as the spec lists them as not having to support USB at all, and those are easy enough to spot by eye so no guess-and-check should be necessary for those.
I suspect this was more of an imposition on Intel from the USB group to prevent Thunderbolt from replacing them completely than any intent to play nice or create a port of greater utility.
Hmm, interesting thought. I wonder, if that requirement didn't exist, would Intel license Thunderbolt to AMD? If not, USB isn't going anywhere. Sure would be nice, though.
Your ideas on color codes conflicts with existing color coding.
For USB-A, yes, even according to
I'm quite aware of the issue. The first time it died in the middle of a work day, I deemed it not worth fixing and went out and bought a new machine within the hour so I could continue my work day rather than giving my machine to Apple for 2 weeks and being without a computer for that duration. Of course, I have a number of systems from which I can work today, but I didn't the day that GPU died.
It's been happily running Ubuntu since the day after the GPU crapped out.
By the way, the crap performance you mention seems to imply that you also hid or disabled the drivers for the Intel GPU, as Intel-only MBPs of that era don't have the flickering issue you mention. You could probably get acceptable desktop performance out of it (certainly not usable for gaming) if you managed to disable only the nVidia driver.
And let's be 100% fair, the NVMe drives Apple uses are top notch, likely faster than the multiple m.2 systems (maximum dual in every case I've seen although I'm sure you'll pull something with more out of your hat;)
The reason you're not seeing any dual m.2 system faster than Apple's single m.2 systems is that Intel isn't providing enough PCIe lanes until you start looking at Xeon. Well, technically they provide more than plenty, but motherboard manufacturers are assigning them to PCIe slots, rather than m.2 slots; an Intel motherboard with dual m.2 slots is most likely to be configured to share 4 lanes across both slots, allowing a single drive to use all 4, but assigning each drive a pair of lanes in a 2 drive configuration. If you're looking at a gaming board with a pair of 16x slots, you'll be lucky to have more than 2 lanes on the m.2 slot. A Ryzen-based system will have plenty of lanes to run a pair of m.2 drives on 4 lanes each, but I'm betting you haven't benchmarked one of those in that configuration yet.
Try to keep in mind that Apple has to buy their m.2 drives from somewhere, typically Samsung, and that Samsung does sell those parts to consumers as well. The 960 PRO is on par with what Apple is putting in their systems; at 985MB/s per lane, you're not going to get over 3940MB/s and my single 960 benchmarks so close to that that the difference can be accounted for by control codes which, of course, must be sent alongside the data. I somehow doubt Apple is using faster m.2 drives since the slot only has enough pins to provide 4 lanes and that's as fast as 4 lanes can go.
You're almost right, though; a non-Xeon Intel system is unlikely to perform any better with two m.2 drives. In fact, it will likely perform worse as it now has two streams of control commands to send alongside the same data, thereby reducing throughput over the same 4 lanes (or 2 in the case of a lot of gaming-oriented boards) shared by the 2 drives. You might find a non-Xeon board with a pair of m.2 slots and without a 16x slot that assigns 4 lanes to each m.2, and I'd be truly interested to see one; I'm sure such a beast exists (perhaps with more than 4 of more m.2 slots even) for Xeon, but it's a friggin' unicorn for Core-i CPUs.
Also worth noting, the 960 PRO benchmarks nearly 4x as fast as the SM0512F in my 2013 rMBP. Yes, faster drives than this were available in 2013 and yes, the PC laptop I bought shortly after the rMBP for roughly $700 less (with a manufacture date within a month of the rMBP) includes a pair of them and benchmarks more than twice as fast. It's hard to say that Apple uses the fastest drives after seeing that, though it may be true today when m.2 drives have reached their theoretical maximum performance and those drives have come down considerably in price.
But the reality is that I'm more ripping on Intel with this rant than Apple. AMD came out with a consumer CPU architecture with 4 more usable PCIe lanes than Kaby Lake which, for some workloads, makes them the better choice right now. Of course, Intel's new chips have more PCIe lanes available, but it's doubtful they would without Ryzen having been released. Threadripper has 64 lanes available and Epyc has 128, while Xeon is still sitting at 48 per CPU, so Intel has some catching up to do.
This makes me hopeful for an AMD-based Mac Pro; Epyc would be nice with, say, 4 16x slots, 4 4x slots, and the remaining 48 lanes split across 12 m.2 slots. It would be a hell of a large board to support all of that, but damn it would be top-notch and worth the premium in both space and price. I have my doubts as I don't think Apple would be willing to give up Thunderbolt, despite the fact that it's markedly less useful in a desktop/workstation scenario than it is in a portable or all-in-one. If an AMD-based Mac happens, I'll finally be able to run a macOS VM with an unmodified kernel on my Ryzen workstation, which will be nice; my wife has had her eye on this rMBP for some time and I could finally pass it on to her if that happened.
Sorry for the long post. I had a lot to say on this.
No need to apologize, it's a very in-depth topic with a ton of nuance and a mind-boggling list of use cases. Any proper discussion of the subject is bound to be wordy and I'm more than happy to explore just how many words we can write on the subject without becoming repetitive. You'll note a similar-length (if not longer) reply from me ;)
When it comes to devices falling back to USB 3 if the cable or host system don't support the Thunderbolt protocol does not make much sense to me. What devices would you want/need such fallback? A hard drive might make sense I guess.
Hard drives, network adapters, audio interfaces, printers (do Thunderbolt printers exist?? I bet one does somewhere), scanners, there are a number of cases where it makes sense and those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head. The rest of that paragraph is more or less spot-on, and that's where the confusion comes in for the lay person. It plugs in, you have the drivers, yet it might still not work, very much unlike what people have become accustomed to with USB-A/B, and it's all because the port is pulling double-duty on some systems, but not on others. I know my Dell convertible with an Intel CPU has two USB-C ports that support the full gamut of connectivity the port is capable of, and I know that my AMD-based workstation has two USB-C ports that only support USB protocols; they're physically identical and have the same labeling, you can bet your sweet ass that a lay consumer would have no clue why a 5k display would work with the Intel system and not the AMD system.
By the way, in case you're not aware, it comes down to licensing; Intel will not license Thunderbolt for use in anything X86-based that does not have an Intel CPU. ARM devices get a pass because they're not X86, peripheral devices get a pass because they're not X86. AMD and VIA CPUs? No dice.
I have seen hard drives that support USB 3 and Thunderbolt on a single USB-C port before but I cannot find them now.
I've seen them as well; the ones I saw included a 3 foot USB-C cable, which may or may not have worked for Thunderbolt. My understanding was that the included cable was USB only and you had to buy a better cable for Thunderbolt since the same cable would not pass both. Looking back it appears that the passive cables do, indeed, pass both but only achieve 20gbps for Thunderbolt at lengths in excess of 0.5 meters. For similar reasons, you'll likely never see a Thunderbolt drive with USB fallback with an permanently attached cable; relying on fallback with a single cable simply isn't reliable enough to consider it practically possible, even if it works on paper and is specified in the spec. If my nemesis (not you) in this conversation really wanted to stick it to me, he could find one of those drives listed somewhere and provide a link to it; however, I suspect there is a reason neither of us can find them anymore -- they simply didn't work as intended.
I'll see drives with Thunderbolt 2 (mini-DisplayPort style) and USB 3 ports (wide micro-B style) and include USB-C cables for one or both.
I've got one of those, it's actually a pretty slick way for manufacturers to get rid of old drive stock. The physical disk was already the bottleneck with USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2, so they can sell the same disk in the same enclosure and just include a different cable and BAM it's a USB-C compatible drive.
I've even seen drives with three USB-C ports, one for Thunderbolt 3, one for Thunderbolt 3 pass through, and a completely separate USB-C port for USB 3.
Huh... Seems someone missed an opportunity there. They could have implemented fallback at the port level for the "to-computer" port; it still may (or may not) have required different cabling depending on what you were plugging it in to, but... It seems
Aside from house multiple m.2 and SATA SSDs and a handful of spinning disks (with hardware RAID) in a single enclosure with a single high-efficiency (93% under typical loads) power supply, nothing. I just like my work to get done faster than anything Apple sells will get it done, without a mess of cables connecting permanent external storage. The iMac Pro doesn't meet those requirements so, no, I'm not considering one.
This is what Mac zealots don't understand. Developers have to target the primary market for their software first, which often means the Mac comes last. No developer is going to spend more on a part-time use machine that's less capable than their workstation than they spent on their more capable workstation. Their employer might, but even that seems to be restricted to Silicon Valley.
Indeed. The YogaBook gets around that (and provides a good drawing surface as well) by placing a thin and flexible acrylic surface atop a springy/rubbery/i'm-not-sure-what-because-i-haven't-disassembled-it surface to give some bounce. It's not ideal and a physical keyboard is still preferable, but it's not horrible, either.
Would I type on it all day? Hell no, I have a Model M clone for that. Is it acceptable for convertible/tablet use on the go when I don't want to carry a Bluetooth keyboard? Surprisingly so, to the point that I no longer bother carrying the keyboard most of the time.
Of course, Apple would put it behind the hardest mineral glass they can find and it would suck. Which is sad, because if anyone has the resources to do it "right", it's Apple.
Even if you buy it?
Seriously.
What Google and Bing are selling is aggregate data. You can actually buy it and find out for yourself; you don't even have to be a corporation to do so, but you can get better pricing if you're at least an LLC.
Look at the data you can buy from them, then come talk to me. I'd share, but I'd be in violation of the agreement I signed when I paid for access.
If you wanted a truly terrifying example, you should have used Facebook; but, then, they don't have anything on me that I didn't explicitly give them. Again, perhaps you and the AC I replied to should be more careful?
Good info, glad to see that things have gotten more stable in the 6 years since I played with it.
Please let me know when stock Apple install images work on the current best-of-breed systems, which happen to run AMD. As it is now, I can't even run a Hackintosh VM on such a system without a modified kernel because the stock kernel shits itself on AMD.
I would have to be a complete dumbass to take you at your word that I'm wrong about anything given your lengthy history of being unable to ever back it up with anything substantial.
So in summary, every time I point out you're wrong, you ... refuse to admit it under any circumstance.
At this point? Yes, because all you do is point and yell. I edited out the bit about the tantrum, as you're typically the one throwing them. See the conversation linked in the above post for an example.
So you're not considering a dock or a monitor which attaches to a computer as a peripheral.
I am, the ones you provided just don't meet the requirements I asked for.
You asked for USB over Thunderbolt.
No, I didn't. I asked for a device that does what SuperKendall suggests. For reference, his suggestion was:
The same way USB 3 external storage devices do, graceful degradation to other less performant standards.
and my reply to him (which you quoted) was:
Wake me up when that happens.
That's where the goal posts have been since before you entered this conversation, my friend. So, no, your monitor and dock do not fit the bill.
Some do not. For example, Lenovo. And while some laptops use round connectors, the OD/ID can vary.
And those barrel connectors still are not proprietary. Yes, there do exist proprietary power connectors *cough*Apple*cough* but they are the exception, not the rule.
Congrats for you. For those who don't own a Macbook Pro, a universal dock means they can do this in the future. And they can change laptops without requiring a new dock. In the past, it wasn't guaranteed that different models from the same manufacturer could use the same dock.
I use the same dock for my Dell convertible, though I do need a TB3 to TB2 adapter for it. That machine even charged from the dock, so it's a true 1 cable solution. We've had universal docks since USB 2.0, they became more capable with Thunderbolt, then USB 3.0, then Thunderbolt 2. Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 have made them even more useful, but they're by no means something new, nor have the ever been a Mac-only tool (that would make them... uh... not universal).
The dock I linked to has been on Amazon since at least 2010 (oldest review I could find) but has been on the marked since at least 2009 when support for it was added to the Linux kernel. It's not the first universal USB 2.0 dock to hit the market, either; they've existed practically as long as computers with USB 2.0 ports.
I learn and grow here all the time; if I didn't, I wouldn't bother returning to this site on a daily basis. When I'm wrong, when someone shows me that I've been wrong, I learn from that, grow from it, admit it, and - perhaps most importantly - thank whoever showed me that I was wrong for correcting my understanding.
And, you see, blindseer actually showed me that I was wrong. They didn't simply claim it, they showed it by correcting my understanding, not just by telling me it was wrong. Why does that matter? Because it would be irresponsible and idiotic of me to take someone on their word telling me that I'm wrong, especially someone who goes by the moniker "UnknowingFool", without being shown hard evidence of what is actually correct and seeing that reality differs from my understanding. That's the part you always miss, which blindseer managed to do quite effectively here, for which I thanked them.
When you get all childish and start sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming about me being a liar (with no proof of that, of course), well, I'm sure you'll forgive me if I feel like you're attacking me personally rather than trying to have an adult conversation. Then, when I suggest that, perhaps, you should lay out the truth so that my supposed "lies" don't do any more damage, well, what do you do? You stick your fingers farther into your ears and scream louder about how I'm just a liar and everything I say is a lie, but never once attempt to disseminate correct information. Perhaps because there were no corrections to be made?
That's why I called you out like I did.
And you responded.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that it would be a good move. On the contrary, I was suggesting it might not be as bad as people think. I've only been a Mac user since about 2010 or so and I view 2011 as the peak of the Mac's user-centric life; it's been all downhill form there IMO. My wife's been a hardcore Mac fan since the Bondi Blue iMac and she's only come to see Apple's decline with the 2016 MBP models. She's still strongly in the "just give me a Mac" camp, but their grip on her is weakening with every update.
I don't even try to get her to switch to PC anymore; she already gave up her MacBook Pro in favor of a PC laptop for casual gaming, and I keep hearing how much better Windows is getting with each update (I disagree, but I let her hold that opinion since it serves her well) and how much of a headache that 2016 27" 5k iMac with all the bells and whistles that she just had to have is becoming every time she uses it.
I think we'll have one less Mac user in a few years when the iMac finally breaks down.
Or someone at Apple will pull their head out of their ass and design a high-end Mac that's actually hign-end again. It's not too late, they could still pull it off. Maybe my next workstation will be a Mac Pro and my wife's next design system will be an iMac; I have sincere doubts of that, though. They will be considered. They always are.
They could, of course, remove future versions from those licenses and do whatever they wish
Which is precisely what I was implying.
but everyone could just continue to use the old versions or their forks.
With no updates from Google. Old versions with no security patches (okay, the community might handle that -- maybe it's even likely) and no feature updates, might be fine on old hardware, but isn't that the situation we're all complaining about right now? That's hardly an improvement, then, you see?
Forks might add new features, but they won't be the same features Google adds to new versions, so we'll end up with fragmentation. Isn't that also what we're all complaining about right now?
So yeah, people could keep using the old version, which is what many people are complaining about being forced to do already, and people could develop multiple forked versions, which is the other thing many people are complaining about already. Or, everyone could just use Google's version and actually see the problems they're complaining about solved.
So yes, what you propose could happen. Hell, it's probably the most likely outcome, but it would leave us with the very same issues we have today. And Google could still license future versions under more restrictive terms, knowing full well that our alternative to adopting those more restrictive terms is the status quo.