(sorry these are late I will get them posted in a timely manner eventually)
Apple’s in House Silicon.
What a crazy news to finally hear. Apple is officially creating in house processors in their new
MacBooks and iMacs. After a ton of talk about moving to arm based they have finally made
an official statement about it at WWDC 2020(world wide developer conference 2020) This is
easily will increase the performance of the new coming MacBooks as apple has done a
inadequate job, to say the least, at cooling their current Intel based CPU’s leading to issues
like thermal throttling tanking the performance of these already super expensive MacBooks.
Moving to a new ARM based CPU would allow apple to better unify their iPhones, iPads,
MacBooks, and all other apple products. Apple being a predominantly software based
company this is an important move for them having a unified processor means that they can
now optimize their software even better and preform tasks snappier while still staying
extremely under powered and with lower specs. This will rise some issues for developers
though as it will continue to increase the difficulty of creating apps for apples new devices but
apple promises to make a smooth transition over the next 2 years. If you had asked me a few
years back if I had thought apple could pull this off in a 2 year period while still being smooth I
would’ve laughed but modern day apple is starting to listen to their customers more and
implementing features that more people want to see and with that I personally do believe
apple can make this transition seamless. Apple has promised a comparability layer for none
ARM apps to be installed before non ARM apps are downloaded allowing for apps to run
much smoother for everyone and creating so that all apple based platforms have access to
the same apps and you don’t have to download the “iphone version” and the “ipad version” as
two different programs. I’m excited to see where this leads often times companies will attempt
to add a feature and apple will take a different approach and then other companies will attempt
to follow them so this could mark a new trend of ARM based everything in a not so far away
future. For the time being though ill stick to my AMD processors as I much prefer the x86
architecture.
Western Digital Law suit.
Few people follow hard drives news in 2020 as most consumers have moved over to SSD’s
at this point and there very little that can interest a person with a hard-drive but as some of you may have heard Western Digital is being finned for selling SMR, or shingled magnetic
recording drives, as PMR, or perpendicular magnetic recording, so whats the difference? Well in nutshell PMR stores data side by side so each bit of data is followed by another with only on the x and y axis having data and not the z axis, on SMR data is stored on top of other data which allows for more data to be stored in a smaller space, which is good right? So why are they being sued? For a normal consumer it would make no difference but for their NAS or Network Attached Server based drives it can cause many issues. One of the biggest issues
is if you want to change data from a point that is under another point you have to first remove all the data above it then edit the data then recreate all the missing data. Think of it like those circle stacking toys for kids if you want them to go from biggest to smallest and you forget to put the biggest on bottom you have to undo the whole thing put the biggest on bottom then redo the entire thing again. The disks work in much the same way. So back to why this is important. In order to keep up with their faster SSD counterparts data is normally started in a high speed cache and considered “moved” once all the data is in the cache but not written to the much slower hard drive locations which for most consumers is no problem to wait an extra 30 min or so for it to in the background copy data over properly in exchange for more storage for less. This type of slow data storage on a NAS though could cause a world of issues including data recover via RAID taking significantly longer the time it takes to store data properly takes a lot longer making your “backed up data” still be potentially an issue. Another issue is that most NAS solutions use freenas which uses a ZFS file system which does not like to work with SMR drives as it was not designed for usage with SMR but rather PMR drives. The biggest problem here is not that they are SMR drives but rather that they where never labeled as such and being called a “NAS” drive normally means that they are PMR by not explicitly stating that Western Digital is selling a drive that for most people is NOT what they are looking for but labeled as a drive that they would want.
TikTok steals from iOS clipboard.
Social media giant TikTok is under fire for hiding the fact that they are continuing to take data from the clipboard on iOS based devices. This issue started about a year ago TikTok got in trouble for taking the data stored in iOS clipboard, for my iOS readers who may not be familiar with the clipboard its stored data that you have copied it generally stores the last few things that you have copied for easy access to them. TikTok had stated earlier this year that they would in fact stop doing this giving them some more privacy credibility but they havent confirmed an exact date and with the recent launch of iOS14 beta iOS alerted users that TikTok for apple (not for android) takes the data from your clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes which is believed to be used to help the algorithm find content for you. If you ever feel like your TikTok content is becoming super targeted to you its likely because it is. TikTok has been on blare for several other privacy issues so make sure you keep your data safe and stick to trusted applications only. That's not to say stay off of TikTok, my advice is just proceed with caution and leaving messaging to more secure applications.
For Noobs
Apple’s in House Silicon.
If you haven’t read my last article “for noobs” is designed to assist those people who want to
learn about technology and keep up with the ever growing world of it but who are very new to it and wish to learn. In my last article I talk about CPUs and how they work. Take a read of
that before reading this for best understanding. So First of all before we can get into whats
new we need to talk about whats currently going on. So on current MacBooks apple uses Intel based processors and one of the many design issues of a MacBook is the cooling for this CPU, a CPU runs best at cooler temperature the hotter it gets the worse it runs so its
important that you try and keep it as cool as you possibly can. MacBooks focus so much on
being thin and so little on the performance because of this the cooling solution is, less than
ideal. So the CPU “thermal throttles” what this means is that the CPU gets so hot that its not
stable and can not keep preforming with out damaging the CPU due to heat or decreasing the life span of computer so as a safety feature it shuts down the power draw and limits it so the CPU can not get to hot again making it so that the computer can prolong the life as best as possible. Apple is focused on making the MacBook as small as possible though. So why
doesn’t Intel just make the CPU smaller? The problem is the x86 architecture that AMD and
Intel CPUs and most standard processors follow in modern day require a set of instructions
which require a physical build to match it and it can only get so small with modern day
technology. On the flip side though there is another standard of processors designed for
phones called ARM processors. These are much smaller use much less power and use an
instruction set called “ARM”. So what apple is doing is they are putting these “ARM”
processors that they have been making for their phones for forever into MacBooks and iMacs. This means that there is now a standard of coding for every single apple device rather then x86 compatible for Macs and ARM for iphones. This will create a more tight knit ecosystem for apple users allowing say iPhone apps to work on iPad with out an “Ipad version’. These ARM chips will likely offer significant performance boosts as well as apple optimizes their software to the much slower and under whelming hardware they select to use, and being smaller and using a simpler instruction set ARM produces a lot less heat meaning that the, less then satisfactory heating solutions currently offered by apple are a thing of the past as they will much better fit ARM chips.