So, this is a fancy RFID tag then? Basically, you wave your radio-barcode through the induction field and the payment terminal then goes online using the ring's serial number instead of your credit card number?
Ooh, future.
Precisely. Just a (admittedly clever) repackaging of the same ol' SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) technology that has been around since the late 1970s.
Also means that Visa gets to be in the middle of all those transactions...
You're stuck in 1990. Remember this thing called Bluetooth? It is very popular for Apple keyboards and mice.
You pull the iMac out of the box, plug in power cable, and if you have home WiFi (which a LOT of people do) and a wireless printer/all-in-one (which most modern printers support), you're DONE.
ONE cable, PERIOD.
Boot it up, and in a couple of minutes you're off to the races...
Not at ALL the same experience as with a "traditional" desktop computer.
No doubt someone is up for execution for this embarrassing string of events. Problem is, the engineer(s) on the butcher block was/were probably their best. Un will wind up whittling down his rocket scientists to nothing.
Apple IIGS and Super Nintendo Entertainment System are probably the best-known consumer products with a 65816. The IIGS has a standalone '816; the Super NES has a Ricoh 5A22, which puts a licensed '816 core on the same die as a custom memory controller for the DMA functionality that kept pace with Sega's "Blast Processing".
Oh yeah. I forgot about the Super NES having an '816, and I didn't know that Ricoh had done a CSIC with the '816 core. Fascinating!
So, you take your pick - the Apple way or Standards, so, nothing really changing, they are just moving monitors inside the walled 'garden'.
Actually, that is a longstanding, but mostly inaccurate, perception of Apple.
By and large, Apple does a pretty good job of either using existing standards, or, when creating a new protocol, releasing it to the world.
Long-gone are the bad-old-days of Apple's proprietary ADC monitor connectors and ADB mouse/keyboard connectors. Or else, products like the Mac mini wouldn't be practical, now, would it?
But some 6502 assemblers had a BGE macro, IIRC. It translates to BCS (Branch on Carry Set).
Furthermore, the datasheet for the WDC 65816 encouraged assemblers to include this macro.
Interesting.
I actually put the 8-bit-bus version of the WDC 65816 (can't remember the exact p/n (65802?)) in my Apple ][+, and, IIRC, defined macros in the Orca/M assembler (which I really didn't like) for it.
I also have an AppleIIgs that I bought off eBay for some paltry sum. Don't those have '816s in them, too?
Asus and others actually sell motherboards that are Thunderbolt capable - you just need the add-in card that gives you the ports for $20.
It's becoming far more common now that Apple's exclusivity agreement expired. Why? Because it's good technology with advantages over USB.
I believe that Intel's exclusivity agreement with Apple was only for 1 year, anyway. I just wish that the peripheral manufacturers wouldn't use TB compatibility as an excuse to rape the customer. But that will change as market-pressure (read: Cheap Chinese knockoff crap) drives the price of TB-compatible peripherals down.
...except that this is really only a PCI-e cable. That means DRIVERS.
Although any wired bus standard has this problem. Slapping a thunderbolt interface on an phone won't be that simple. Beyond the fact that a TB port is no trivial thing, you will still need drivers for the phone.
A high performance GPU is not something that's a vendor is going to want to handle with the equivalent of a standard USB driver.
As I said; this then turns into a SOFTWARE problem (drivers), rather than a "pixel-pushing" problem.
And since I am told that there are already USB 3.0 displays in the world, it is not a question of "is it possible/practical?" anymore. Just whether Apple will do this in an elegant, non-proprietary, way. And overall, they have a much better than average record, at least in the past several years, of either using an existing standard, or when creating a new standard, releasing it to the world.
How would it be cheaper? Except for modularity, it would be a worse product. The video card would need to sit on a riser (or be perpendicular to the display). It would be bulkier, physically less robust, harder to cool, harder to manage compatibility, and probably more expensive due to the extra components and cooling.
There is probably a market for a 5K monitor with user-replaceable video card, but I think a fixed GPU makes more sense for almost all of Apple's target market.
I disagree with most of that.
Other than the greater expense (duh!), I would bet that almost ALL monitors still have a major component in common: Dead space inside the enclosure. There is absolutely NO reason to think that the connector for the graphics-card in the monitor would have to be perpendicular to the display. Whatever gave you THAT idea?
And as far as "compatibility", well, that entirely depends on how Apple manages this, combined with third-party "adoption". If done right (and Apple has a damn good track record of that, IMHO), they will either use an existing standard, or release whatever standard to the industry in general.
There are many more potential "upsides" to this. Stop being so negative, and start thinking of how this could actually change a lot of things about "displays" that have been more-or-less stagnant for quite some time, and the band-aids (such as dual-link displays) are beginning to show more and more.
Not professionals. If this is in any way aimed at the professional market (regular people will just buy an iMac) then this is yet another bad move by Apple.
In what possible world is it a "bad move" for Apple to "release control" over the GPU hardware? After all, that is the single-most complained-about issue from the gamer-crowd regarding Macs.
Of course, "most" ordinary people don't buy desktop PCs, they buy laptops. They rely on "geeks like us" to set up desktops, and they don't want to do that.
Which is why the iMac is more popular than the Mac mini, even though the 'mini is much lower-priced. Because the iMac offers the power, separate keyboard & mouse and display-size of most mid-range desktop systems (IOW, more than enough for most users), but with nearly the same ease of setup (i.e. "none") of a Laptop.
But the problem with docking stations are that cannot be used with different laptop models from the same company sometimes much less different companies. A cable is more universal.
Yeah, but these days, "Docking Station" actually means "Port Replicator/Replacer" HUB, and is an entirely separate box connected with a single Thunderbolt/USB-C cable. Thanks to LVDS links like Thunderbolt, we no longer have to have "Docking Stations" that actually DOCK with a laptop, making them very proprietary. Instead, you can go to B&H Photo, Amazon, etc, and get a "Docking Station" that will not only work with pretty much anything that supports the "data link" cable, but even "Desktop" systems that need an extra port or three.
I would really, really like a 17" MBP. Not AC, not alone. I do real work, I need pixels.
My hunch is that getting "retina" pixels in a 17" form factor is probably expensive/difficult. I'd be happy with their best effort.
That's what I thought, too. The yields for 17" Retina panels probably sucked (I'm SURE they had some made some to try in their R&D dept.), and the prices quoted by the glass mfg. was likely astronomical.
But now that they have a 5k riMac, perhaps they could revisit the 17" rMBP thought.
I've hoped Apple would take this design route for years; their other existing product lines benefit from having a superior display provide independent capabilities. Think of the future where a more universal video connector allows everything from iPhones to MacAir, etc. to connect and display video on it seamlessly. That is the crucial issue with modern multi-device households - no single visual interface, even when all the devices are in the same room. That will change now.
Exactly. This could be a REAL game-changer, akin to the switch from Serial over DB-25s and DE-9s to USB.
It could be made modular(though Apple probably wouldn't be the vendor to do it); but I suspect that it would be in serious danger of falling into the same sort of niche that 'MXM' GPU modules for laptops have. Those are theoretically standardized and swappable; but relatively rare and often thermally or mechanically limited such that only a few specific upgrades can be made.
I am on the fence as to whether Apple will at least offer BTO GPU options for these displays, and I agree that, if this catches-on, other mfgs. could come out with aftermarket GPU-card upgrades.
Second, I think this is a different situation than with the MXM modules, simply because of Form-Factor. Laptops live-and-die by crunching-out millimeters and tenths-of-millimeters, but in a monitor/TV, there is automatically a TON of space to allow for cards with heatsinks, fans, etc., so there is LOT more design-freedom for the GPU-card mfgs. to play with.
This isn't the sort of thing likely to bother Apple; but the major downside will be that the monitor will be stuck with whatever GPU was integrated for its entire life; and odds are that a nice 5k panel will be good enough for the job longer than the GPU that would fit within a suitably slim power budget.
OTOH, there is a possibility that GPUs can be in a dedicated, but standardized, card-slot in the display, allowing the display OEMs the ability to easily offer a range of performance/cost options without having to spin-off an entirely new model of the entire display. Also the possibility of user Upgrades to the GPU card could create aftermarket and OEM add-on sales. br.
Done right, this is a very interesting development.
A minor point to make: Intel didn't just accept Thunderbolt, they invented it. Apple just happens to be the only mainstream adopter that I can think of, and if something like this was in their long term plans it makes sense why they started including it years ago in the MBP line.
Not exactly true.
While Apple is far-and-away the leading evangelist and adopter of Thunderbolt (afterall, they co-developed the copper-wire version in partnership with Intel), there are Wintel PCs from major OEMs with it (sorry I couldn't find a more recent article), and their number is increasing.
I would bet that this idea of Apple's is a game changer, though. The time for attempting to pour raw pixels to the monitor is past. "Display-List-Transfer" is FAR more efficient, even at the expense (no pun) of making monitors significantly jump in price.
This isn't some kind of crappy USB3 here, Thunderbolt is set up to be basically a PCI-e x2 or x4 port. The question is, what's it's future? Apple has had some pretty cool technologies that died when the rest of the world finally caught up with a different technology, in particular Firewire. Intel has accepted it, I don't see any other technology leap-frogging it yet, and it is possible that Thunderbolt over USB-C could actually catch on. (which could make the mini-DisplayPort version fall to the curse, ha ha)
The coolest thing here is that it doesn't require any hardware changes to the computer-side of things, so long as the computer supports Thunderbolt or USB-C. Heck, with a Display-List-Transfer protocol like this, even plain-old USB 3.0 would have enough bandwidth by far.
Now, who says Apple just repackages other people's ideas?
Slashdot Mirror
So, this is a fancy RFID tag then? Basically, you wave your radio-barcode through the induction field and the payment terminal then goes online using the ring's serial number instead of your credit card number?
Ooh, future.
Precisely. Just a (admittedly clever) repackaging of the same ol' SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) technology that has been around since the late 1970s.
Also means that Visa gets to be in the middle of all those transactions...
Where exactly would Olympic swimmers be going to buy things between races? Also what would they be buying?
Steroids, of course!
The iMac is one less cable, that's all.
You're stuck in 1990. Remember this thing called Bluetooth? It is very popular for Apple keyboards and mice.
You pull the iMac out of the box, plug in power cable, and if you have home WiFi (which a LOT of people do) and a wireless printer/all-in-one (which most modern printers support), you're DONE.
ONE cable, PERIOD.
Boot it up, and in a couple of minutes you're off to the races...
Not at ALL the same experience as with a "traditional" desktop computer.
The government has simply invested too much into them to kill them.
You're assuming that Dear Leader is a rational Despot.
Absolutely NOTHING in his past or present behavior would support such a conclusion.
No doubt someone is up for execution for this embarrassing string of events. Problem is, the engineer(s) on the butcher block was/were probably their best. Un will wind up whittling down his rocket scientists to nothing.
Cool!
considering how North Korea lises to kill people as punishment, I wouldn't be surprised if they have managed to run out of top rocket scientists.
I was thinking the same thing.
In atmosphere the effective range of laser weapons is short. 20 km is a generally safe upper estimate on range.
Yeah, but it sure can pop popcorn!
That way, he can have a front-row seat to witness the Glorious Achievements of their Most Exalted Dear Leader.
Apple IIGS and Super Nintendo Entertainment System are probably the best-known consumer products with a 65816. The IIGS has a standalone '816; the Super NES has a Ricoh 5A22, which puts a licensed '816 core on the same die as a custom memory controller for the DMA functionality that kept pace with Sega's "Blast Processing".
Oh yeah. I forgot about the Super NES having an '816, and I didn't know that Ricoh had done a CSIC with the '816 core. Fascinating!
So, you take your pick - the Apple way or Standards, so, nothing really changing, they are just moving monitors inside the walled 'garden'.
Actually, that is a longstanding, but mostly inaccurate, perception of Apple.
By and large, Apple does a pretty good job of either using existing standards, or, when creating a new protocol, releasing it to the world.
Long-gone are the bad-old-days of Apple's proprietary ADC monitor connectors and ADB mouse/keyboard connectors. Or else, products like the Mac mini wouldn't be practical, now, would it?
But some 6502 assemblers had a BGE macro, IIRC. It translates to BCS (Branch on Carry Set).
Furthermore, the datasheet for the WDC 65816 encouraged assemblers to include this macro.
Interesting.
I actually put the 8-bit-bus version of the WDC 65816 (can't remember the exact p/n (65802?)) in my Apple ][+, and, IIRC, defined macros in the Orca/M assembler (which I really didn't like) for it.
I also have an AppleIIgs that I bought off eBay for some paltry sum. Don't those have '816s in them, too?
Asus and others actually sell motherboards that are Thunderbolt capable - you just need the add-in card that gives you the ports for $20.
It's becoming far more common now that Apple's exclusivity agreement expired. Why? Because it's good technology with advantages over USB.
I believe that Intel's exclusivity agreement with Apple was only for 1 year, anyway. I just wish that the peripheral manufacturers wouldn't use TB compatibility as an excuse to rape the customer. But that will change as market-pressure (read: Cheap Chinese knockoff crap) drives the price of TB-compatible peripherals down.
...except that this is really only a PCI-e cable. That means DRIVERS.
Although any wired bus standard has this problem. Slapping a thunderbolt interface on an phone won't be that simple. Beyond the fact that a TB port is no trivial thing, you will still need drivers for the phone.
A high performance GPU is not something that's a vendor is going to want to handle with the equivalent of a standard USB driver.
As I said; this then turns into a SOFTWARE problem (drivers), rather than a "pixel-pushing" problem.
And since I am told that there are already USB 3.0 displays in the world, it is not a question of "is it possible/practical?" anymore. Just whether Apple will do this in an elegant, non-proprietary, way. And overall, they have a much better than average record, at least in the past several years, of either using an existing standard, or when creating a new standard, releasing it to the world.
Let him live his miserable existence in the Ubuntu and Windows world. You can lead them to water.
Meanwhile us Mac users snicker every time a thread like this pops up.
Yep. I've been snickering since 1984 (and 1983, if you count my time with the Lisa)...
How would it be cheaper? Except for modularity, it would be a worse product. The video card would need to sit on a riser (or be perpendicular to the display). It would be bulkier, physically less robust, harder to cool, harder to manage compatibility, and probably more expensive due to the extra components and cooling.
There is probably a market for a 5K monitor with user-replaceable video card, but I think a fixed GPU makes more sense for almost all of Apple's target market.
I disagree with most of that.
Other than the greater expense (duh!), I would bet that almost ALL monitors still have a major component in common: Dead space inside the enclosure. There is absolutely NO reason to think that the connector for the graphics-card in the monitor would have to be perpendicular to the display. Whatever gave you THAT idea?
And as far as "compatibility", well, that entirely depends on how Apple manages this, combined with third-party "adoption". If done right (and Apple has a damn good track record of that, IMHO), they will either use an existing standard, or release whatever standard to the industry in general.
There are many more potential "upsides" to this. Stop being so negative, and start thinking of how this could actually change a lot of things about "displays" that have been more-or-less stagnant for quite some time, and the band-aids (such as dual-link displays) are beginning to show more and more.
Not professionals. If this is in any way aimed at the professional market (regular people will just buy an iMac) then this is yet another bad move by Apple.
In what possible world is it a "bad move" for Apple to "release control" over the GPU hardware? After all, that is the single-most complained-about issue from the gamer-crowd regarding Macs.
Of course, "most" ordinary people don't buy desktop PCs, they buy laptops. They rely on "geeks like us" to set up desktops, and they don't want to do that.
Which is why the iMac is more popular than the Mac mini, even though the 'mini is much lower-priced. Because the iMac offers the power, separate keyboard & mouse and display-size of most mid-range desktop systems (IOW, more than enough for most users), but with nearly the same ease of setup (i.e. "none") of a Laptop.
But the problem with docking stations are that cannot be used with different laptop models from the same company sometimes much less different companies. A cable is more universal.
Yeah, but these days, "Docking Station" actually means "Port Replicator/Replacer" HUB, and is an entirely separate box connected with a single Thunderbolt/USB-C cable. Thanks to LVDS links like Thunderbolt, we no longer have to have "Docking Stations" that actually DOCK with a laptop, making them very proprietary. Instead, you can go to B&H Photo, Amazon, etc, and get a "Docking Station" that will not only work with pretty much anything that supports the "data link" cable, but even "Desktop" systems that need an extra port or three.
I would really, really like a 17" MBP. Not AC, not alone. I do real work, I need pixels.
My hunch is that getting "retina" pixels in a 17" form factor is probably expensive/difficult. I'd be happy with their best effort.
That's what I thought, too. The yields for 17" Retina panels probably sucked (I'm SURE they had some made some to try in their R&D dept.), and the prices quoted by the glass mfg. was likely astronomical.
But now that they have a 5k riMac, perhaps they could revisit the 17" rMBP thought.
I've hoped Apple would take this design route for years; their other existing product lines benefit from having a superior display provide independent capabilities. Think of the future where a more universal video connector allows everything from iPhones to MacAir, etc. to connect and display video on it seamlessly. That is the crucial issue with modern multi-device households - no single visual interface, even when all the devices are in the same room. That will change now.
Exactly. This could be a REAL game-changer, akin to the switch from Serial over DB-25s and DE-9s to USB.
It could be made modular(though Apple probably wouldn't be the vendor to do it); but I suspect that it would be in serious danger of falling into the same sort of niche that 'MXM' GPU modules for laptops have. Those are theoretically standardized and swappable; but relatively rare and often thermally or mechanically limited such that only a few specific upgrades can be made.
I am on the fence as to whether Apple will at least offer BTO GPU options for these displays, and I agree that, if this catches-on, other mfgs. could come out with aftermarket GPU-card upgrades.
Second, I think this is a different situation than with the MXM modules, simply because of Form-Factor. Laptops live-and-die by crunching-out millimeters and tenths-of-millimeters, but in a monitor/TV, there is automatically a TON of space to allow for cards with heatsinks, fans, etc., so there is LOT more design-freedom for the GPU-card mfgs. to play with.
This isn't the sort of thing likely to bother Apple; but the major downside will be that the monitor will be stuck with whatever GPU was integrated for its entire life; and odds are that a nice 5k panel will be good enough for the job longer than the GPU that would fit within a suitably slim power budget.
OTOH, there is a possibility that GPUs can be in a dedicated, but standardized, card-slot in the display, allowing the display OEMs the ability to easily offer a range of performance/cost options without having to spin-off an entirely new model of the entire display. Also the possibility of user Upgrades to the GPU card could create aftermarket and OEM add-on sales.
br. Done right, this is a very interesting development.
A minor point to make: Intel didn't just accept Thunderbolt, they invented it. Apple just happens to be the only mainstream adopter that I can think of, and if something like this was in their long term plans it makes sense why they started including it years ago in the MBP line.
Not exactly true.
While Apple is far-and-away the leading evangelist and adopter of Thunderbolt (afterall, they co-developed the copper-wire version in partnership with Intel), there are Wintel PCs from major OEMs with it (sorry I couldn't find a more recent article), and their number is increasing.
I would bet that this idea of Apple's is a game changer, though. The time for attempting to pour raw pixels to the monitor is past. "Display-List-Transfer" is FAR more efficient, even at the expense (no pun) of making monitors significantly jump in price.
Think of it as "Distributed Processing".
This isn't some kind of crappy USB3 here, Thunderbolt is set up to be basically a PCI-e x2 or x4 port. The question is, what's it's future? Apple has had some pretty cool technologies that died when the rest of the world finally caught up with a different technology, in particular Firewire. Intel has accepted it, I don't see any other technology leap-frogging it yet, and it is possible that Thunderbolt over USB-C could actually catch on. (which could make the mini-DisplayPort version fall to the curse, ha ha)
The coolest thing here is that it doesn't require any hardware changes to the computer-side of things, so long as the computer supports Thunderbolt or USB-C. Heck, with a Display-List-Transfer protocol like this, even plain-old USB 3.0 would have enough bandwidth by far.
Now, who says Apple just repackages other people's ideas?
So I could spend $1000 as a test? You're a loon.
I see. Well, I can see the only figure you'd really accept is ZERO; so nevermind. I obviously mistook you for an adult.