Ye Macce Threade

[dsavitsk]

Yet Another iPhone, Dear God: What do you mean, you don’t need four studio-quality microphones?

“What a remarkable day of announcements,” CEO Tim Cook said in conclusion, but I struggle to believe that he meant it. This was, let us be honest, merely a day of announcements.

[HiWire]

An eminently skippable series of product updates.

[morphsci]

18 minutes ago, HiWire said:

An eminently skippable series of product updates.

AGREED! I will stick with my iPhone 14. Yo Apple! You are becoming Microsoft.

[HiWire]

They needed to save $13 billion to pay Ireland's back taxes. ☘️

Google is also on the hook for $8.25 billion in EU antitrust fines.

Edited September 10 by HiWire

[Dusty Chalk]

What happened to the M2 iPad?  I thought I read where they were going to give the iPad Mundane (easier to say than 'non-Pro, non-Mini, non-Air') the M2 chip.  Or is that going to be one of those "silent" releases?

[Grahame]

1 minute ago, Dusty Chalk said:

What happened to the M2 iPad?  I thought I read where they were going to give the iPad Mundane (easier to say than 'non-Pro, non-Mini, non-Air') the M2 chip.

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/06/new-ipad-mini-rumored-for-october/

[Dusty Chalk]

2 minutes ago, Grahame said:

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/06/new-ipad-mini-rumored-for-october/

Quote

Gurman said "new iPads" plural would be unveiled at the October event, so the entry-level iPad may be updated then too.

Ah, thankewe.

[luvdunhill]

4 hours ago, HiWire said:

An eminently skippable series of product updates.

I didn’t even watch it. Did the iPhone get wifi7 yet?

[HiWire]

Yes.

There's nothing wrong with the new products, they're simply incremental updates to established phones, watches, and AirPods.

[luvdunhill]

Just now, HiWire said:

Yes.

There's nothing wrong with the new products, they're simply incremental updates to established phones, watches, and AirPods.

Cool, glad to see the time to go from WiFi 6e to 7 is faster than some of their other adoption of standards… 

[HiWire]

Bluetooth 6 was just announced.

I checked the list of new features and most of them aren't particularly exciting for consumers, except the one where it is centimeter-accurate for distance estimation (useful for some gadgets).

[Knuckledragger]

Everyone's favorite hyperactive, high-pitched Canadian tech-dropper seems to like it. 

[HiWire]

I was going through the macOS 15 Sequoia (and iOS 18) reviews today.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/macos-15-sequoia-the-ars-technica-review/

Not a lot of interesting features, in my opinion. They seem to be catchup updates, enhancing usability, security, and fixing bugs. The promised AI features are late and they will be added to macOS later.

OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) updated to 2.0.1 recently. They've detected problems running the new macOS with 2018 MacBook Air and 2008 Mac Pro/Xserve, but otherwise things look fine. People have been running macOS 15 betas on OCLP for a few months so far.

https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/releases

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-15-sequoia-on-unsupported-macs-thread.2428654/

I'd recommend anyone with older Macs (pre-2018, generally) to hold off on upgrading to Sequoia for a few months at least, whether officially supported or not. People seem to say macOS 14 Sonoma works quite well on unsupported Macs with OCLP. Your mileage may vary.

macOS 14 Sonoma and 13 Ventura (and iOS 17) also got some security updates today.

Edited September 17 by HiWire

[Grahame]

Is Apple trolling us with the size of their AI Update? 

 

[HiWire]

Maybe.

They just announced new M4 iMacs, too.

Nothing much to report other than the elimination of USB-A ports and the possibility of a 32GB RAM upgrade and 2TB SSD.

The M4 has up to 10 CPU cores (4 performance, 6 efficiency), 16 Neural Engine cores, and 10 GPU cores, 120GB/s memory bandwidth.

 

 

Edited October 30 by HiWire

[TMoney]

This is a very cool feature. I can’t wait to have my parents take the test.

[HiWire]

Apple just announced the updated Mac Mini.

This is the first M4 Pro - up to 14 CPU cores (10 performance, 4 efficiency), 16 neural cores, and 20 GPU cores, 273GB/s memory bandwidth.

It almost looks like a credible, tiny Mac Studio replacement - the new M4 Pro Mini can be equipped with up to 64GB of RAM and an 8TB SSD. In terms of I/O, the M4 Pro has Thunderbolt 5 ports as well as optional 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

The only thing missing is Wi-Fi 7... for some reason, the Mini still has Wi-Fi 6E. I suspect native AV1 video encode is coming in a future Apple Silicon processor, but decode is sufficient for now, as the codec is not even mainstream yet.

The base Mac Mini is a good value. I'm not sure why the M4 iMac is so limited. Perhaps they intend to sell a more powerful iMac with a larger display later.
 

 

Edited October 30 by HiWire

[Grahame]

Indeed.

"When" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for Apple Intelligence, as in "When X becomes available, you will be able to  ..."

"Small, but fierce"

[Grahame]

But the power button placement!

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/10/29/apple-stuck-the-mac-mini-power-button-on-the-bottom

[HiWire]

MacBook Pro (the final announcement for the week)

The M4 Max has up to 16 CPU cores (12 performance, 4 efficiency), 16 Neural Engine cores, and 40 GPU cores, 546GB/s memory bandwidth.

Up to 128GB of unified memory and 8TB of storage.

I guess the MacBook Air will be updated later... they are doubling the base M3 MacBook Air RAM to 16GB at the same price.

The usual Apple hyperbole of insane performance and long battery life, at extreme prices. Your mileage may vary.

 

 

Edited October 30 by HiWire

[Knuckledragger]

New Mac Mini Has Modular Storage, 256GB Model Will Have Faster SSD.

Quote

Apple has returned to using two 128GB storage chips in the new Mac mini with 256GB of storage, according to a partial teardown video shared on social media today. This means the base-model Mac mini with the M4 chip will not have significantly slower SSD speeds compared to higher-end configurations of the computer with 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB of storage, as multiple NAND chips allows for faster SSD read and write speeds.

The teardown video also reveals that storage is modular in the new Mac mini, meaning that it can be easily removed since it is not soldered down. As we saw with the Mac Studio, however, replacing the modular storage is complicated.

The previous-generation Mac mini base model with the M2 chip has a single 256GB storage chip, resulting in 30% to 50% slower SSD read and write speeds compared to higher-capacity models. The slower speeds led to criticism from some customers.

 

I do not know what to make of this information.  256GB is entirely too little space.  I can make do with 512GB because I use so much outboard storage.  256GB won't even hold slsk, my torrent client and download folders.

[Knuckledragger]

"Working as intended."  (I'm running the newest MacOS and iOS.)

[Grahame]

 

 

[Knuckledragger]

Base model Mac Mini for $499 (click the coupon box) and possibly another 5% off with an AMZN Visa: https://amzn.to/3V6uZNd

I just bought one, in spite of my objections to a 256GB system drive.