LOL. Oh really? Just like Java isn't controlled by Oracle, right? You would have to be an idiot to use one of these languages that a corporation will close down as soon as they get bored of it and come up with the next shiny language. Remeber ObjectiveC? Yeah right. Hope you didn't bother learning that.
You are a true idiot, you know that. Oh, wait, of course you don't.
You're so stupid that you have completely ignored the fact that Apple Open Sourced the entire Swift Toolchain under the Apache 2.0 License. How in the FUCK does Apple then control ANYTHING once Swift is forked?
Oh, about Objective-C? Not only does it REMAIN the main language for OS X and iOS development; and not only did Apple NOT create it, but it has been Ported to MANY other Platforms. So, it, too isn't exactly controlled by Apple, either, although admittedly, they drive most of its continued improvement. Here, read it and choke on Your own ignorance, Hater.
I woulda PMed ya but, ya know... Slashdot doesn't have that feature.;-) That's why I pointed to my email address a while back. You don't have an email address publicly associated with your account either.
Oh, I figured you still had my gmail addr since we conversed over that a few weeks ago. I will try to dig up one of those threads and email you.
Well they're using copyright notifications from Apple and it looks pretty official; if it's a scam it was pretty well executed and it's been going on for quite a long time relatively speaking.
I may have been wrong. You're right, it does look pretty official. I was just surprised to see Apple register through GoDaddy.
But that's like saying you really only have one choice: Both smallwall and pfsense are simply Derivatives of the now-abandoned (like so many other F/OSS Projects), M0n0wall.
And since smallwall's main focus is "Small and Lean", rather than "Robust and Complete", I would think that using it wouldn't be a step "up" in the world of firewall-dom.
As far as pfsense goes, I can't figure out where it lives, since it is considered a Derivative of m0n0wall, but yet it lists pf as a dependancy. So???
Heck, even iOS runs pf (which I actually found amazing). What is OpenWRT's problem?
Speaking of which, it may not seem like it but summer break is fast approaching and that's the refresh time or, in this case, probably an "addition to." I'm thinking I can probably get them the 2015 13" MBP for a steal if I time it right and do so just prior to or right after the 2016 release.
Well, Apple just upgraded the MacBook Pros a few weeks ago; so I would think that any "clear out the old stuff" discounts would have already happened.
If you want, PM me, and I will try to help you with what you are looking for. For example, do you really need MacBook PROs for kids? Would the plain "non-pro" MacBooks or MacBook Airs make more sense? The only thing that would bother me about the new (non-pro) MacBooks would be that damnable USB-C connector. I DO think that kids would REALLY like to be able to plug a USB Stick into their laptop, and that gets a little stupid with just a USB-C connector (yes there are adaptors; but that's a really bad idea for kids)...
More later. As I said, PM me, rather than us cluttering up/. with this stuff.
2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.
That number does not mean what you think it means. You can look up the precise term, but here's a quicker explanation:
If 5 million of these devices (2.5/(1/2 chance of failure) are made and powered up, 1 will fail every hour.
It does NOT mean that they'll all last 2.5M hours and then go poof.
No shit.
That's why it's a MEAN (one type of averaging) time between Failures (or MEAN Time To Failure MTTF, since, as someone pointed out, hard drives are rarely "serviced").
But it does mean that in your home computer (with one or two drives) or a consumer-grade NAS (with a typical 4 drive setup), it does mean that there is a fairly good (but not exactly zero) chance that you will replace (or decommission) the drive because of an upgrade before it actually fails. But if you're a Datacenter with 10,000 of them...
I know its uncool to RTFA here but I think this was notable.
"The benefit of using helium is that it’s less dense than air, putting less strain on the motor. End result is a five or six platter drive that can spin up to 7200 RPM on less power, while improving reliability of the drive (2.5 million hours MTFB)"
So im guessing if the helium did leak out you would probably just see a somewhat lower drive life.
2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.
Or so you would like to think. Ever look at Little Snitch logs? Unless you spend a lot of time turning things off, OS X sure sends a lot of info back home to the Mothership.
I think I said that you had to turn off some stuff that was on by default. And if you consider 10 minutes or so "a lot of time", I think you are exaggerating about the time it takes to turn off that data collection in OS X.
But at least Apple makes it easy to do that, and, unlike certain other OSes, doesn't hide the fact that they collect certain info, what is collected, whether it is anonymized, how long it is kept, what it is used for, who they share it with, what they do when the Gummint comes knocking, and how to turn it off.
Sadly, no, the guys I know are working on iOS and iTunes. I'd definitely be interested to hear from one of the chip devs, as well, though I'm sure there's nothing they can legally tell us that we don't already know (or can't find through Google). NDAs tend to suck like that.
True. But I thought I'd ask...
All of that said, I actually haven't been watching the phone market, for the first time since the iPhone came out, since I got my Nexus 6. Plain and simple, this is the first time I've ever been satisfied with a phone I've owned. I'm sure the iPhone 6 Plus would have scratched that same itch for me if I were in the iPhone camp; it's certainly doing the trick for my wife, she didn't even watch the keynote where the 6s models were announced because she simply doesn't need any more than she's got now... for the first time in as long as I've known her.
I must admit that I, also owning a 6 Plus, didn't watch that part of the Keynote too closely; simply because I, too, am very satisfied with my current iPhone. Having said that, the 6s does have some really significant hardware advances, and I am happy that whenever I get a new iPhone, it will incorporate those advances, and more.
Being firmly entrenched in the iPad camp, though, I do still think Apple screwed the pooch when they broke compatibility with all of the active styluses (e.g. pressure sensitive) in the iPad Air 2. Anything to make the iPad Pro look more attractive, I guess. My Air is working fine for me still and there are now active styluses on the market that work for the Air 2, so it would seem they didn't get the iPad Pro out fast enough if that's what they were going for. And I'm not sure what else they possibly could have been going for, there is no benefit to the developer, nor to the end user, in the changes they made to the touch screen on the Air 2. But, I digress, that's an old argument; it still hurts me, though, because the end result was that I bought a $700 product that ended up being useless to me for the purpose for which I bought it until a year after it was purchased, by which point I had moved on already.
You REALLY have to stop beating that drum, LOL! So, why aren't you interested in an iPad Pro? That neatly addresses your need for a Stylus (er, Pencil); and has more screen resolution and real-estate to boot...
Honestly, though, I've kind of bittered on the whole Apple experience. My Windows testing machine died a month ago and needed to be replaced. I've used my MacBook Pro 3 times since the replacement arrived; Apple simply doesn't make a laptop that performs the way this new one does. I say that as an owner of the fastest laptop they currently produce (which strangely remains the fastest laptop they sell since I bought it in January). I'm definitely not the typical laptop user, though; for most, anything in any manufacturer's mid-range is more machine than they'll need in their lifetime. For me? I need something that doesn't choke on my daily workload, and the MacBook Pro was doing just that.
Well, since you didn't favor us with what Windows laptop you're talking about, and what it's specs are, it's hardly a "fair fight", right?
Plus, didn't the MacBook Pros just go through a design refresh? So, like my 2013 MacBook Pro (non-Retina), the MacBook Pro you bought last January is no longer the New Hotness; so I don't doubt that there might be some differences in performance when compared to the newest model.
But even more important, there might be serious differences in the Applications you're using, as far as their performance on similar hardware in Windows versus OS X. I say this because, when it comes to Benchmarks, similarly-spec'ed machines from different manufacturers seem to perform within spitting distance of each other, regardless of platform.
To each their own. I certainly do miss the native Unix environment at times, but Cygwin does wel
What differentiates them is the number of instructions per cycle each core can execute, which is informed by the amount of on-die cache (L1, L2, and in the higher-end chips, L3) available. The cores are the same, the glue logic is effectively the same, with changes being necessary for the larger or smaller caches, but the caches are larger and that allows more instructions to be queued for execution...
First, I will freely admit that I couldn't design a modern CPU with a gun pressed to my head. BUT
I'm not sure that the design of the "Core" series has much to do with ARM design. Yes, I get what you are saying about larger caches being generally faster/better; but the length of the execution pipeline makes even a bigger difference, as do niceties like lookahead, out-of-order execution, etc. And I seem to remember an Intel document where they SHORTENED the instruction pipeline, because the "cost" of refilling a long pipeline based on a bad-predictive branch decision was higher than refilling a shorter pipe. So sometimes, more isn't always better in CPU design.
It wasn't until the A7, which is a 64-bit chip, that Apple's CPUs became competitive with the high end of the Android market; and at that point they were completely destroying anything in the Android world. That is owed in large part to the larger 64-bit instruction set;
Ok, I'll give you that; especially with ARM, where Opcode and Operand are often combined in the same instruction. (Extrapolating from my experience writing 32 bit ARM assembly language).
A dual core chip can only work on two different things at once and, as a result, will switch execution context twice as often as a quad core chip when more than two processes are simultaneously demanding CPU time. Context switching is expensive, and that's why benchmarks that don't account for it don't matter in the real world.
You are right that context-switching is VERY important. And I seem to remember a recent article that complained the Android handled multiple threads much worse than iOS (which I found amazing, actually, because all the Linux people whine about OS X's context-switch overhead). And since Benchmarks actually test SYSTEMS not CPUs, it kinda all gets lost in the sauce.
Bottom line: I would really like to know what someone on the A[x] Chip Development Team has to say about all this. Do you have any of those friends in your back pocket?
Yes, they do design the CPUs...and I never said they didn't... from ARM block designs. They arrange the blocks, they design the connecting lattice between the blocks, and yes, they've designed a few non ARM-core blocks to reside on the same die for specific functions; those blocks are not ARM, though. They're application-specific processors like audio and video hardware CODECs and such; living on the same die as the ARM CPU makes them ARM blocks in the same way that living on the same die as the x86 CPU makes an Intel GPU and x86 block: it doesn't.
I believe that it goes deeper than that. What you are describing is what most everyone else does with ARM designs. I'm pretty sure that Apple does more tweaking inside the CPU "block" itself. How else would you explain the difference in performance between A-Series ARMs and everyone else's? Seriously, they are getting more performance out of their dual-core designs that competitors are out of their quad (and more) core "equivalents".
All of that can't be attributed to differences in glue-logic and memory controllers.
The terms Stupid or gimmicky has never been applied to the Apple ][ series.
That's why I qualified the statement with "other than that". With the "that" being the Apple 2 and original iPhone.
No, you placed "year" restrictions around the Apple ][ that were wholly incorrect.
I'm not sure what metrics you use to determine "Stupidity" or "Gimmicky-ness"
Cost more, did less, tried to justify it with shineyness.
Most Apple 2 owners upgraded them for 286's when they came out and never looked back. There is a reason Apple almost went bankrupt in the 90's.
And that wasn't it. It was the fact that Apple tried to go in too many directions at once, and buried themselves in SKUs. And the final blow was Apple Licensing MacOS. THAT almost did them in. But it was never about "cost more, did less", unless the "Less" was Windows-Specific software.
But now all that has changed...
Fast-forward to the present: Apple makes the best laptops
Only since the Macbook became a shinier Wintel box. Not really thinking different now is it?
Just because Apple changed to Intel CPUs (the smartest move they ever made!), does NOT mean they became a "Wintel box". Far from it.
Nope, built in volume (100K/yr) in a factory in Zhuhai. Using a TI amplifier ($1.20/100K pieces), AKM DAC ($1.00 for a good quality unit, 100K pricing). Regulators ($0.70 - need 3.3V and 1.8V, LDOs are cheap but not that cheap), passives (another $0.40, driven mainly by caps), connectors, mechanicals (squirt a part, shoot a little paint, you're at $0.50 in 250K pricing). It's not cheap - which is why there is a STRONG market for counterfeit IAP2 chips, and many who don't pay the appropriate licensing fees, and many who use raw plastic finish (screw flow and knit lines), improper connectors (fake Lightning connectors with questionable tolerancing), etc.
This isn't just "an adapter" - it also would need to have a full DAC and amplifier inside, as well as a power supply. So it's more than the simple connector/wiring adapters you're thinking of.
Your quantities are low by AT LEAST an order of magnitude. Plus, at those quantities, and with a company like Apple, price-points for components are nothing like what you can find on a distributor's (or manufacturer's) website.
If Apple really were to do this, it would be purchasing at the "million" pricing level (think about the number of iPhones/iPod Touches/iPads that would be affected), not the piddly 100k level, and would be negotiating special pricing on pretty much every component. So, shave at least another 25-30 percent off the cost, especially since Apple doesn't have to pay as much for the IAP2 chip, and no licensing either. Plus, they would likely simply integrate the controller and DAC on the same die, and maybe even the amp. The quantities are such that it would make sense for Apple to spin-up custom silicon for this.
And if you look at my post, I wasn't contemplating a passive adapter, either.
As devices get thinner, batteries get smaller, and battery life shrinks. Batteries aren't subject to "Moore's law". They do not gain power as they shrink in size.
Yes, but because of a corollary to Moore's Law, the devices powered by those batteries get more efficient; thus "effectively" increasing the battery-size.
Unfortunately this has come out a while back. Shortly after Apple bought Beats. It does appear Apple is moving away from the standard jack because it limits potential for a thinner design. Apple seems obsessed with thin and the only other thing holding Apple back on thin is bendgate. Apple will either have to find a more rigid material in a thin state, or have materials that withstand bending. So get ready to buy a ugly dongle if you want to use a standard headphone with iPhone's in the future. Or buy a wireless one.
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LOL. Oh really? Just like Java isn't controlled by Oracle, right? You would have to be an idiot to use one of these languages that a corporation will close down as soon as they get bored of it and come up with the next shiny language. Remeber ObjectiveC? Yeah right. Hope you didn't bother learning that.
You are a true idiot, you know that. Oh, wait, of course you don't.
You're so stupid that you have completely ignored the fact that Apple Open Sourced the entire Swift Toolchain under the Apache 2.0 License. How in the FUCK does Apple then control ANYTHING once Swift is forked?
Oh, about Objective-C? Not only does it REMAIN the main language for OS X and iOS development; and not only did Apple NOT create it, but it has been Ported to MANY other Platforms. So, it, too isn't exactly controlled by Apple, either, although admittedly, they drive most of its continued improvement. Here, read it and choke on Your own ignorance, Hater.
I woulda PMed ya but, ya know... Slashdot doesn't have that feature. ;-) That's why I pointed to my email address a while back. You don't have an email address publicly associated with your account either.
Oh, I figured you still had my gmail addr since we conversed over that a few weeks ago. I will try to dig up one of those threads and email you.
Well they're using copyright notifications from Apple and it looks pretty official; if it's a scam it was pretty well executed and it's been going on for quite a long time relatively speaking.
I may have been wrong. You're right, it does look pretty official. I was just surprised to see Apple register through GoDaddy.
Should I learn Swift, or should I learn C#?
Depends if all you want to do is write .NET for Microsoft-stuff, or learn a new Open Source language with general-purpose application.
This is less relevant than C#. We don't want corporate controlled languages.
I think you will find, Hater, that as of now, Swift is anything-BUT "Corporate-Controlled".
Want some cheese with that whine?
swift.org web page appears to be unresponsive. Too bad their fastest growing programming language web server can't handle that load.
swift.org is a domain registered by GoDaddy. It is unlikely that Apple would do that. I don't think it's related.
But the page on GitHub seems to list a pretty damned complete package of Swift-stuff.
So the Router firmware that everyone here coos about actually uses a sucky firewall? Netfilter != pf. Typical F/OSS Fail.
So pick another one like http://www.smallwall.org/ or http://www.pfsense.org/ or whatever. The nice thing about FOSS is choice.
But that's like saying you really only have one choice: Both smallwall and pfsense are simply Derivatives of the now-abandoned (like so many other F/OSS Projects), M0n0wall.
And since smallwall's main focus is "Small and Lean", rather than "Robust and Complete", I would think that using it wouldn't be a step "up" in the world of firewall-dom.
As far as pfsense goes, I can't figure out where it lives, since it is considered a Derivative of m0n0wall, but yet it lists pf as a dependancy. So??? Heck, even iOS runs pf (which I actually found amazing). What is OpenWRT's problem?
Speaking of which, it may not seem like it but summer break is fast approaching and that's the refresh time or, in this case, probably an "addition to." I'm thinking I can probably get them the 2015 13" MBP for a steal if I time it right and do so just prior to or right after the 2016 release.
Well, Apple just upgraded the MacBook Pros a few weeks ago; so I would think that any "clear out the old stuff" discounts would have already happened.
/. with this stuff.
If you want, PM me, and I will try to help you with what you are looking for. For example, do you really need MacBook PROs for kids? Would the plain "non-pro" MacBooks or MacBook Airs make more sense? The only thing that would bother me about the new (non-pro) MacBooks would be that damnable USB-C connector. I DO think that kids would REALLY like to be able to plug a USB Stick into their laptop, and that gets a little stupid with just a USB-C connector (yes there are adaptors; but that's a really bad idea for kids)...
More later. As I said, PM me, rather than us cluttering up
2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.
That number does not mean what you think it means. You can look up the precise term, but here's a quicker explanation: If 5 million of these devices (2.5/(1/2 chance of failure) are made and powered up, 1 will fail every hour.
It does NOT mean that they'll all last 2.5M hours and then go poof.
No shit.
That's why it's a MEAN (one type of averaging) time between Failures (or MEAN Time To Failure MTTF, since, as someone pointed out, hard drives are rarely "serviced").
But it does mean that in your home computer (with one or two drives) or a consumer-grade NAS (with a typical 4 drive setup), it does mean that there is a fairly good (but not exactly zero) chance that you will replace (or decommission) the drive because of an upgrade before it actually fails. But if you're a Datacenter with 10,000 of them...
Openwrt uses netfilter instead of pf.
That's a show stopper.
So the Router firmware that everyone here coos about actually uses a sucky firewall?
Netfilter != pf.
Typical F/OSS Fail.
Thex Ultrastar drives have 5 year warranty
Hmmm. I thought I saw three the other day on Amazon.
Even better!
I know its uncool to RTFA here but I think this was notable.
"The benefit of using helium is that it’s less dense than air, putting less strain on the motor. End result is a five or six platter drive that can spin up to 7200 RPM on less power, while improving reliability of the drive (2.5 million hours MTFB)"
So im guessing if the helium did leak out you would probably just see a somewhat lower drive life.
2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.
I think that will work.
They will just shorten the warranty again, no problems.
HGST drives have a 3 year warranty. That's fairly reasonable for a consumer-level drive.
Or so you would like to think. Ever look at Little Snitch logs? Unless you spend a lot of time turning things off, OS X sure sends a lot of info back home to the Mothership.
I think I said that you had to turn off some stuff that was on by default. And if you consider 10 minutes or so "a lot of time", I think you are exaggerating about the time it takes to turn off that data collection in OS X.
But at least Apple makes it easy to do that, and, unlike certain other OSes, doesn't hide the fact that they collect certain info, what is collected, whether it is anonymized, how long it is kept, what it is used for, who they share it with, what they do when the Gummint comes knocking, and how to turn it off.
Microsoft and Apple also track and data mine their users
Microsoft, yes. Apple, not so much. And in OS X, what "data mining" is on by default is easily turned off.
I want you to try the ABLOY PL362 with a $20 bolt cutter. Make a YouTube video and post the result.
I don't think you can seriously compare a $10 Master Lock with a $250 Abloy. The Abloy BETTER had be better.
Sadly, no, the guys I know are working on iOS and iTunes. I'd definitely be interested to hear from one of the chip devs, as well, though I'm sure there's nothing they can legally tell us that we don't already know (or can't find through Google). NDAs tend to suck like that.
True. But I thought I'd ask...
All of that said, I actually haven't been watching the phone market, for the first time since the iPhone came out, since I got my Nexus 6. Plain and simple, this is the first time I've ever been satisfied with a phone I've owned. I'm sure the iPhone 6 Plus would have scratched that same itch for me if I were in the iPhone camp; it's certainly doing the trick for my wife, she didn't even watch the keynote where the 6s models were announced because she simply doesn't need any more than she's got now... for the first time in as long as I've known her.
I must admit that I, also owning a 6 Plus, didn't watch that part of the Keynote too closely; simply because I, too, am very satisfied with my current iPhone. Having said that, the 6s does have some really significant hardware advances, and I am happy that whenever I get a new iPhone, it will incorporate those advances, and more.
Being firmly entrenched in the iPad camp, though, I do still think Apple screwed the pooch when they broke compatibility with all of the active styluses (e.g. pressure sensitive) in the iPad Air 2. Anything to make the iPad Pro look more attractive, I guess. My Air is working fine for me still and there are now active styluses on the market that work for the Air 2, so it would seem they didn't get the iPad Pro out fast enough if that's what they were going for. And I'm not sure what else they possibly could have been going for, there is no benefit to the developer, nor to the end user, in the changes they made to the touch screen on the Air 2. But, I digress, that's an old argument; it still hurts me, though, because the end result was that I bought a $700 product that ended up being useless to me for the purpose for which I bought it until a year after it was purchased, by which point I had moved on already.
You REALLY have to stop beating that drum, LOL! So, why aren't you interested in an iPad Pro? That neatly addresses your need for a Stylus (er, Pencil); and has more screen resolution and real-estate to boot...
Honestly, though, I've kind of bittered on the whole Apple experience. My Windows testing machine died a month ago and needed to be replaced. I've used my MacBook Pro 3 times since the replacement arrived; Apple simply doesn't make a laptop that performs the way this new one does. I say that as an owner of the fastest laptop they currently produce (which strangely remains the fastest laptop they sell since I bought it in January). I'm definitely not the typical laptop user, though; for most, anything in any manufacturer's mid-range is more machine than they'll need in their lifetime. For me? I need something that doesn't choke on my daily workload, and the MacBook Pro was doing just that.
Well, since you didn't favor us with what Windows laptop you're talking about, and what it's specs are, it's hardly a "fair fight", right?
Plus, didn't the MacBook Pros just go through a design refresh? So, like my 2013 MacBook Pro (non-Retina), the MacBook Pro you bought last January is no longer the New Hotness; so I don't doubt that there might be some differences in performance when compared to the newest model.
But even more important, there might be serious differences in the Applications you're using, as far as their performance on similar hardware in Windows versus OS X. I say this because, when it comes to Benchmarks, similarly-spec'ed machines from different manufacturers seem to perform within spitting distance of each other, regardless of platform.
To each their own. I certainly do miss the native Unix environment at times, but Cygwin does wel
What differentiates them is the number of instructions per cycle each core can execute, which is informed by the amount of on-die cache (L1, L2, and in the higher-end chips, L3) available. The cores are the same, the glue logic is effectively the same, with changes being necessary for the larger or smaller caches, but the caches are larger and that allows more instructions to be queued for execution...
First, I will freely admit that I couldn't design a modern CPU with a gun pressed to my head. BUT I'm not sure that the design of the "Core" series has much to do with ARM design. Yes, I get what you are saying about larger caches being generally faster/better; but the length of the execution pipeline makes even a bigger difference, as do niceties like lookahead, out-of-order execution, etc. And I seem to remember an Intel document where they SHORTENED the instruction pipeline, because the "cost" of refilling a long pipeline based on a bad-predictive branch decision was higher than refilling a shorter pipe. So sometimes, more isn't always better in CPU design.
It wasn't until the A7, which is a 64-bit chip, that Apple's CPUs became competitive with the high end of the Android market; and at that point they were completely destroying anything in the Android world. That is owed in large part to the larger 64-bit instruction set;
Ok, I'll give you that; especially with ARM, where Opcode and Operand are often combined in the same instruction. (Extrapolating from my experience writing 32 bit ARM assembly language).
A dual core chip can only work on two different things at once and, as a result, will switch execution context twice as often as a quad core chip when more than two processes are simultaneously demanding CPU time. Context switching is expensive, and that's why benchmarks that don't account for it don't matter in the real world.
You are right that context-switching is VERY important. And I seem to remember a recent article that complained the Android handled multiple threads much worse than iOS (which I found amazing, actually, because all the Linux people whine about OS X's context-switch overhead). And since Benchmarks actually test SYSTEMS not CPUs, it kinda all gets lost in the sauce.
Bottom line: I would really like to know what someone on the A[x] Chip Development Team has to say about all this. Do you have any of those friends in your back pocket?
You mean the one that's already there, in the phone, to make it work?
I think we knew that. With wireless, you need ANOTHER ONE in the headset.
Who was talking about Wireless?
Yes, they do design the CPUs ...and I never said they didn't... from ARM block designs. They arrange the blocks, they design the connecting lattice between the blocks, and yes, they've designed a few non ARM-core blocks to reside on the same die for specific functions; those blocks are not ARM, though. They're application-specific processors like audio and video hardware CODECs and such; living on the same die as the ARM CPU makes them ARM blocks in the same way that living on the same die as the x86 CPU makes an Intel GPU and x86 block: it doesn't.
I believe that it goes deeper than that. What you are describing is what most everyone else does with ARM designs. I'm pretty sure that Apple does more tweaking inside the CPU "block" itself. How else would you explain the difference in performance between A-Series ARMs and everyone else's? Seriously, they are getting more performance out of their dual-core designs that competitors are out of their quad (and more) core "equivalents".
All of that can't be attributed to differences in glue-logic and memory controllers.
The terms Stupid or gimmicky has never been applied to the Apple ][ series.
That's why I qualified the statement with "other than that". With the "that" being the Apple 2 and original iPhone.
No, you placed "year" restrictions around the Apple ][ that were wholly incorrect.
I'm not sure what metrics you use to determine "Stupidity" or "Gimmicky-ness"
Cost more, did less, tried to justify it with shineyness. Most Apple 2 owners upgraded them for 286's when they came out and never looked back. There is a reason Apple almost went bankrupt in the 90's.
And that wasn't it. It was the fact that Apple tried to go in too many directions at once, and buried themselves in SKUs. And the final blow was Apple Licensing MacOS. THAT almost did them in. But it was never about "cost more, did less", unless the "Less" was Windows-Specific software.
But now all that has changed...
Fast-forward to the present: Apple makes the best laptops
Only since the Macbook became a shinier Wintel box. Not really thinking different now is it?
Just because Apple changed to Intel CPUs (the smartest move they ever made!), does NOT mean they became a "Wintel box". Far from it.
Nope, built in volume (100K/yr) in a factory in Zhuhai. Using a TI amplifier ($1.20/100K pieces), AKM DAC ($1.00 for a good quality unit, 100K pricing). Regulators ($0.70 - need 3.3V and 1.8V, LDOs are cheap but not that cheap), passives (another $0.40, driven mainly by caps), connectors, mechanicals (squirt a part, shoot a little paint, you're at $0.50 in 250K pricing). It's not cheap - which is why there is a STRONG market for counterfeit IAP2 chips, and many who don't pay the appropriate licensing fees, and many who use raw plastic finish (screw flow and knit lines), improper connectors (fake Lightning connectors with questionable tolerancing), etc.
This isn't just "an adapter" - it also would need to have a full DAC and amplifier inside, as well as a power supply. So it's more than the simple connector/wiring adapters you're thinking of.
Your quantities are low by AT LEAST an order of magnitude. Plus, at those quantities, and with a company like Apple, price-points for components are nothing like what you can find on a distributor's (or manufacturer's) website.
If Apple really were to do this, it would be purchasing at the "million" pricing level (think about the number of iPhones/iPod Touches/iPads that would be affected), not the piddly 100k level, and would be negotiating special pricing on pretty much every component. So, shave at least another 25-30 percent off the cost, especially since Apple doesn't have to pay as much for the IAP2 chip, and no licensing either. Plus, they would likely simply integrate the controller and DAC on the same die, and maybe even the amp. The quantities are such that it would make sense for Apple to spin-up custom silicon for this.
And if you look at my post, I wasn't contemplating a passive adapter, either.
As devices get thinner, batteries get smaller, and battery life shrinks. Batteries aren't subject to "Moore's law". They do not gain power as they shrink in size.
Yes, but because of a corollary to Moore's Law, the devices powered by those batteries get more efficient; thus "effectively" increasing the battery-size.
Unfortunately this has come out a while back. Shortly after Apple bought Beats. It does appear Apple is moving away from the standard jack because it limits potential for a thinner design. Apple seems obsessed with thin and the only other thing holding Apple back on thin is bendgate. Apple will either have to find a more rigid material in a thin state, or have materials that withstand bending. So get ready to buy a ugly dongle if you want to use a standard headphone with iPhone's in the future. Or buy a wireless one.
They already developed that improved alloy.
Don't forget the battery.
They still have to have that for the built-in speaker output.