Apple-Orange @esusatyo - Tumblr Blog

Posts

All the day’s developments as Osborne proposes corporation tax cut and a legal challenge is mounted to block article 50 without act of parliament

The captain is abandoning the ship.

#brexit

“@chockenberry @davedelong You're welcome. 10.11 supports Mouse Reporting, which is even better (e.g., in Emacs, Vim, Nano). #ElCapTerminal”

Less known feature in OS X El Cap: The terminal now accepts mouse scroll input. It works on Vim and Emacs too.

Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, has passed away. The company said in an official document that his death came about due to a bile duct growth, which he had been previously treated for. Here’s a look at the notice in full: Satoru Iwata started his gaming career when he joined HAL Laboratory following his graduation …

Nintendo Everything:

Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, has passed away. The company said in an official document that his death came about due to a bile duct growth, which he had been previously treated for.

Sad news. Rest in peace. You were so young. You meant so much to me, and to the world.

#top

John Siracusa:

Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote my first review of Mac OS X for a nascent “PC enthusiast’s" website called Ars Technica. Nearly 15 years later, I wrote my last. Though Apple will presumably announce the next major version of OS X at WWDC this coming June, I won’t be reviewing it for Ars Technica or any other publication, including the website you’re reading now.

End of an era.

You will be missed greatly. Thank you very much.

John Gruber was wrong on Kevin Lynch. Great story by Wired.

MacBook Range Anxiety

I really like the trend of increased notebook battery life that has been going on for the past few years.

My MacBook Air can seriously sustain up to 12 hours of battery in a single charge. However, whenever I fire up Xcode, iOS Simulator, and other CPU-heavy apps, the battery usually lasts closer to 5 or 6 hours. It can even sometimes be less than that if I’m truly pushing it (e.g. playing games).

One of the reasons why the battery life can vary by up to half the advertised battery life is because the Haswell chip that ships with most MacBook Airs are the ULT (Ultra Low TDP) variant, which can consume up to 15 watts of power. The more powerful variant in the MacBook Pros can consume up to 28 watts. This means that the batteries in the notebooks will not last as advertised when we push the limits. When Apple advertised “12 hour battery life”, they don’t mean that it will last 12 hours when you use the CPU at 100%, but most people who just browse the web and check email would not even use 5% of the CPU consistently.

The fanless new Macbook that Apple just announced last week are using the new Intel Broadwell Core M CPU, which consumes only less than 5 watts of power. Here’s Ryan Smith, writing for AnandTech explaining Broadwell Core M:

When it comes to building and configuring Core M, Intel likes to refer to their efforts as the “Fanless Challenge,” reflecting the fact that their biggest goal with Core M is to comfortably get the processor in to 10” tablets under 10mm in thickness that are passively cooled. A big part of getting into such a device is meeting the heat dissipation limitations of the form factor – a 10” tablet under 10mm would require a sub-5W SoC – which is where a lot of Intel’s engineering efforts have gone. Broadwell’s performance optimizations, the GPU optimizations, GPU duty cycling, and the 14nm process all contribute to getting a Core CPU’s power consumption down to that level.

This means that even when pushing the CPU to its limit, it will not use more than 5 watts by design.

This means that there is no way you can drain the battery in the new MacBook that fast, no matter how hard you push the CPU. The MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros may only be getting 25% to 50% of the advertised battery life when you push it, but the new MacBook will have much closer to the advertised battery life.

When the new MacBook ships, we’ll see how correct or wrong I am about this theory. But if I’m right, then I’d very happy with a stable 9 hour battery life. The bad news is, I think Intel are still quite far away from making the Pro chips fanless.

Update: A few people told me that Intel Core M can consume more than 5W when doing Turbo Boost. While this is true, I presume that Intel Core M it will still yield more performance per watt compared to Haswell.

#macbook #apple

> By January 2009, Jobs was in desperate need of a liver transplant, and found one in the man who would eventually succeed him. Fascinating. Tim Cook is a really nice guy.

Matthew Panzarino: > There is a set of vibrating motors underneath that provides ‘force feedback’, also known as haptics in some applications. This feedback fools your finger into believing that you’ve pressed down on a hinged button, the way your current trackpad works. This feedback relies on phenomenon called lateral force fields (LFFs), which can cause humans to experience vibrations as haptic ‘textures’. This can give you the feel of a ‘clickable’ surface or even depth. The Force Touch feature of the new trackpad allows you to press ‘deeper’, giving you additional levels of tapping feedback. The effect is done so well that you actually feel like you’re pressing down deeper into a trackpad that still isn’t moving at all. It’s so good it’s eerie. Very interesting. I can't wait to try it.

Moving Against the Crowd

A few days ago, Pebble announced Pebble Time on Kickstarter, and as of right now it has raised more almost 12 million dollars. It would almost definitely be the most funded Kickstarter project by the end of the campaign (current record is a 13.3 million dollar cooler box project).

I think Pebble is in a very interesting position right now, and they are very clever by not following the crowd. While other companies are trying so hard to follow Apple, they just stick to their guns and keep making what they make best. Instead of adding a touch screen and a nice watch band, they just stick to their e-ink display, 7 day battery life, and sporty watch bands.

There is no way that in the near future we would be seeing Apple Watch or Android Wear watches to reach anywhere close to 7 day battery life. Some people say that charging daily is better than charging weekly because it would build a habit, but I strongly believe that there's a market of people who'd rather be charging their watches weekly instead of daily.

It's weird that in the smartphone industry there's no one like Pebble, who just move against the crowd. I'm sure there are people who'd buy smartphones with 3 day battery life, or smartphone that has a 3.5" screen, or a smartphone that can withstand 10 metre drops. But nope, they just keep making the devices thinner, with bigger screen, better camera, and faster chip. Exactly what Apple and others has been doing in the past 5 years.

Brian Cardarella: > This year saw significant improvements in mobile web. We are so close. You are so close to native apps on mobile in 2008. I strongly believe that native apps will always be ahead of web development. There's an inherent layer that separates web apps from real hardware.

Tim Cook: > When I arrive in my office each morning, I’m greeted by framed photos of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy. I don’t pretend that writing this puts me in their league. All it does is allow me to look at those pictures and know that I’m doing my part, however small, to help others. We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.

Matthew Humphries: > Well it turns out the Kindle, or any e-reader for that matter, does in fact get heavier the more you fill up its memory with e-books. That may sound surprising until you hear just how much heavier it becomes. > > I was under the impression that data doesn’t weigh anything beyond the device weight it is stored on, but University of California, Berkeley professor of computer science John D. Kubiatowicz cares to differ. He decided to answer the question of whether an e-reader gets heavier with thousands of e-books loaded on to it for The New York Times. > >The additional weight is actually unmeasurable, but there is an additional weight on the order of 10-18 grams. This is because the transistors in the flash memory the Kindle uses distinguishes between a 1 and a 0 by trapping electrons. More data means more trapped electrons, which means ever so slightly more weight. Today I learned.

T-Mobile CEO, John Legere: > Let me help you about bendgate or whatever it was. It’s not slowing down demand. The demand for these devices in the last few weeks is unbelievable. Great interview. He's so honest about T-Mobile's relationship with Apple.

ZDNet: > Samsung is expected to start producing application processors (APs) for clients such as Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD, using its 14-nanometre process around the end of the year. Getting [worried](http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/30/5953603/samsung-sales-and-profits-down-q2-2014), Samsung? In the grand scheme of things, Samsung's not an important player in this game. Google is, Amazon is, but not Samsung. Soon people will forget them, just like how most people don't remember the brand of their fridge and washing machine.

David Golman: > Apple's new iPhone 6 charges from 0% to 100% in 1 hour and 48 minutes, which is about 10.5 watt-hours of energy. Multiply that by 365 days in a year, and you get 3.83 kilowatt-hours. Multiply that by the average U.S. residential electricity price (12.29 cents per kWh), and you get 47 cents per year. Super efficient.

Spoiler: It's not a new thing.

Kim Yoo-chul of Korea Times: > Top management at Samsung Electronics is unhappy to see what's happening with the sale of Apple's two new iPhones ― the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus ― as consumer reaction has been tremendous. So, they decided to release Galaxy Note 4 ahead of schedule: > "The positive reaction from consumers to those two Apple devices prompted us to launch the Note 4 earlier than previously scheduled. Samsung will be aggressive in promoting the Note 4 as it's true that we are being challenged and pressured amid a difficult situation," said an official at the company's marketing unit. Compare this to Apple who works patiently on Apple Watch before they release it.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Apple-Orange