But Apple haven't actually stated they are cancelling it, they have just stopped talking about it. There is a MASSIVE difference.

Either: 1) they are cancelling it and haven't said so yet; 2) they are holding while trying to find another way to spin this; or 3) they are rolling this out in secret anyway (this last option will be the worst PR for Apple if it comes to light).

Apple don't exactly have a good track record for transparency. With the recent exposure of their secret $275Billion deal with the Chinese government, I would not be surprised if this had already been rolled out in secret (at least for Chinese iPhone users).

Apple's Market Capitilization is approaching $3 Trillion, but that only represents what investors are willing to pay for Apple shares. It is just what the market *thinks* Apple is worth. Does this meain that Apple have $3 Trillion in the bank? No, not at all. To see the book value of the company you need to look at Total Equity (which is the Assets minus Liabilities). As of last quarter, Apple's total equity is $63.09 Billion.... That is a far cry from even $1 Trillion.

By comparision, Alphabet's Total Equity was $244.6 Billion while their Market Cap was $1,941.5 Billion, and Microsoft's Total Equity was $151.98 Billion while their Market Cap is $2548.2 Billion.

IMO, the huge disparity between Apple's Market Cap and Total Equity, especially when compared with other similarly placed companies, means Apple's stock is overvalued.

^This

I get that Apple have done some amazing things with thier processor technologies, but I can't walk out and buy a M1Max and build a machine around it: I have to buy a complete system from Apple and wed myself to their ecosysem.

Can I install Windows on it natively? No

Can I install Linux on it natively? No. While Asahi Linux have been able to get Linux to run, there is no installer and many things are still unusable (eg. GPU).

Being confined to one set of hardware, on one OS, does not make this comparable to CPUs from other manufacturers in my opinion.

Are the specs impressive? Yes, but Apple have literally thrown billions of dollars at the problem (likely more than all the other chip manufacturers R&D combined), and can afford to drop legacy hardware support with no care, and are perfectly willing to ignore open standards in favour of proprietary tech.

When Apple starts selling CPUs to the general public, then AMD and Intel can worry.

It is not about the direct patent licensing for the ARM architecture, but all of the other patents around ARM.

Companies like Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom, and Nvidia are all actively developing around the ARM platform, and that means a rise in patents related to that architecture that are not part of the ARM licensing deal that Apple had. Apple have shown that their designs are years ahead of their competitors in *some* areas, but hey still have to rely on patent encumbered technology for others areas. Apple are very protective of thier own intellecttual property, and they have repeatedly shown that they don't like paying others for their IP (see Apple vs Qualcomm). If they can't own the IP, then they will try to work around it, even if it costs them tens or hundreds of millions. Would it make sense, with their size and cash holdings, to invest in an entirely new architecture where they can own all the IP for anything that was not free?

With the M1, Apple have signalled they have gone all-in on the ARM architechture. This process would have begun long before the Nvidia/Softbank deal. Softbank did approach Apple to offer them ARM, but Apple would have rightly concluded that they would never have gotten that deal past the FTC or EU (they already have issues being seen as anti-competitive). Is it possible Apple could see the relationship with Nvidia-ARM as being a rocky one? Could they be quietly hedging their bet long term (ie. 10-15 years away)?

The RISC-V ISA is free and open. Unlike many free software licenses, the permissive license for RISC-V does not require manufacturers to disclose chip designs. With RISC-V Apple could have a completely proprietary chip and, as long as it maintains a base compliance with the ISA, it can still be a legal RISC-V implementation. Changes in chip architecture are nothing new for Apple and, while it is still in progress, the shift to ARM on their Mac lines seems to be going well. We now know Apple had macOS running on ARM long before the switch from Intel. We know they had OS X running on Intel long before the switch from PowerPC. We know they had Mac OS runnign on PowerPC long before the switch from Motorola 68k. Why should it be different now?

Or... we are reading a lot into a single hiring, and this could be for something completely different.

So blaming the company is like criticising a car manufacturer when a drunk driver crashes?

Maybe so, but then reguiar car manufacturers don't build their vehicles to Mil Spec for the specific purpose of causing repeated crashes with guaranteed occupancy survivability, build in target acquisition and swerve-to-hit software, and then market it specifically to alcoholics.

Why does the poster talk about the Apple Watch and completely ignore the Galaxy Watch that is the subject of the linked article? It seems Samsung (in conjunction with MIT) are the innovators here, if one reads the linked article. Is the original poster trying to spin this as an Apple innovation?

I do have a hard time believing this is an actual blood glucose meter and not and interstitial glucose meter. Continuous glucose meters are interstitial glucose meters. They read glucose in the in the fluid that surrounds the cells of your tissue below your skin. Usually glucose moves from your blood vessels and capillaries first and then into your interstitial fluid. In this way, interstitial glucose readings aren't as immediate as the blood glucose reading, but can give you a better reading of longer term trends (as fingerstick blood glucose readings are only ever a snapshot). I have a hard time believing that a watch sensor can ignore interstitial glucose and only focus on glucose in blood vessels. Instead, I'm more likely to believe that this is an interstitial glucose meter. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that diabetics will still need to rely on a fingerstick blood glucose test for insulin (or other medication) dosing.

ARM cores are not new, and multicore ARM CPUs are not new. What is new is the unified memory archictecture, and moving that RAM from the motherboard into the CPU package.

In package memory may not be new (system-in-package chips are often used in low-cost, low power applications like MP3 players and cheap phones), but doing this for a large RAM sizes (8-16GB) on a high performance CPU is new. On of the most common system performance bottlenecks is memory performance. Making sure your machine has plenty of fast memory is often cheap way of improving system performance. Apple have effectively removed this bottleneck by moving the RAM in package. Apple have been doing package-on-package for several years, but moving the RAM is the next evolution. In a traditional motherboard, traces to RAM slots/chips may be tens of millimeters long (or longer). In the M1, it is tens of microns. This short distance allows the RAM to run much faster: 4.266GHz in the M1, as well as run at a much lower voltage.

Of course the downside is that the CPU is stuck with only 8GB or 16GB or RAM and you can never upgrade. That may not be a problem in the MacBook Air and Mac Book Pro, as those have not had upgradeable RAM in a long time, but Mac Mini users will be out of luck if 16GB isn't enough for their needs.

I do wonder what the next generation of CPUs will bring for the iMacPro and MacPro.... I cannot see them offering 32GB or more of in package RAM. Will they instead use the in-package RAM as a cache instead and have another memory controller for external RAM?

1) Cowboy Bebop

2) Ghost in the Shell

3) Erased

A couple of years ago work sent me to Beijing on a project. I have travelled a lot, but never to mainland China. I had heard about WeChat Pay (and Alipay), and was told it would be best to set that up. I looked into setting up myself with an account.

Getting a WeChat account was easy, but setting it up for WeChat Pay was not. Unless I had a Chinese National ID or a Chinese Bank account (or knew someone with those), setting up WeChat Pay as a foreigner was next to impossible (I understand it may be somewhat easier now). I made the mistake in thinking cash and credit cards would be acceptable.

Practically noone accepted credit cards, not even Western branded places like McDonalds. About the only places they did work was my hotel (pre-paid though work, but credit card for expenses) and airport duty-free. I did expect that to a degree.

What I did not expect is widespread reluctance to deal with cash. People seemed genuinely displeased when I pulled out physical RMB to pay for things. I had been warned in advance about counterfeit cash being a common problem. What I did not expect is that counterfeiting to be so widespread that noone trusted physical cash anymore, and as a result people who wielded cash were met with a similar level of distrust. The only thing that worked in my favour was the fact that I was clearly a foreigner. I expect someone who appears to be native Chinese would have a harder time.

One of the other guys on the project had set up WeChat Pay, and people seemed much nicer to him when he used that.

If I were to head back to China (not likley given I work for another company now), I would absoluetly jump through the hoops of setting up WeChat Pay before going.

In the days of PPC Macs one of the things I hated about my choice to go with Apple was the lack of gaming. The few game releases that did get ported to PPC/macOS/OSX were months or years old and the performance was less than stellar. I had my reasons for going with Apple, namely design and video work, and after scraping together what I could to afford a Mac I couldn't afford another PC to game on. Consoles are fine, but it is just not the same.

Intel Macs (and Boot Camp) solved that problem but now that Apple plan to transition from Intel to ARM I see problems ahead for macOS gaming. Unless Apple manage to get game engine developers (like Unity and Epic Games) onside with porting their engines to ARM macOS then gaming on Macs is just going to devolve into the same sorry state as the PPC days.

Apple threatening to cut off the Epic Games developer accounts is just a Big Stick being used to try and bring Epic Games into line, but Apple actually need Epic Games to help with a successful transition to ARM based Macs.

For me, I moved on from Apple years ago. I had one too many issues with hardware faults and with warranty support, and I worked out for the money I was spending I could move to PC and get more bang for my buck.

Emulating x86 was always going to have a performance hit, but these benchmarks show that performance hit is not as tiny as Apple make out. It is clear why Apple didn't want any developers to be running benchmarks.

In native ARM64, the A12Z scores around 1119 for single core and around 4699 for multicore (source)

Using the figures from the OP (811 single core, 2871 multicore), that is a 27.5% hit on single core performance and a massive 38.9% performance hit for multicore. Considering the ARM64 Geekbench score is from an iPad Pro with only 6GB RAM and optimised for low power vs performance and the Rosetta 2 Geekbench score was on a development box with 16GB RAM and minimal themal or power constraints, it is entirely possible the Rosetta 2 performance hit could be a lot larger than shown here.

The OP seems to think that the story is that the Rosetta 2 performance of the A12Z outperforms the native performance for a non-Apple ARM chip. I find it unsurprising that a development machine with twice the RAM and no thermal or power constraints outperforms a machine optimised for low power always-on capability. That it only outperforms it in single core, but not multicore means that it is not quite the destruction that the OP made out. The real story, however, is the performance hit of Rosetta 2.

...and the process shouldn't.

Contrary to the views put forward by the MPAA, RIAA, et. al. the vast majority of Copyright Infingement is not a criminal matter, it is a civil matter. This means that it is the responsibilty of the Media Corporations (Movie Studios, Music Companies, etc) to enforce their Copyrights, not some enforcement agency at taxpayer expense. When you produce intellectual property, it is your responsibility to defend that intellectual property. It is the cost of doing business.

Year after year, Media Corporations cry to Congress about how much they are losing because of Copyright infringement, yet year after year these same Media Corporations post record profits. These profits are almost always funneled through offshore shell companies to avoid paying as much Corporate Tax as possible. These same Corporations also spend tens of millions of dollars per year on Lobbyists to influence politicians and reports such as this.

The bottom line is that the Media Corporations aren't interested in the rights of consumers: they are interested in the government protecting their outdated business model so they can maximize profits.

There is no reason that Media Corporations should expect governments to proactively protect their Copyrights.

"I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?" - Tom Smykowski, formerly Initech

Seriously, it seems this is exactly the role of the 'Business Translator'. Taking the specifications from the customers and giving them to the engineers. Well, not physically: the secretaries do that.

;)

There are some really cool projects out there recreating the history of the Apollo missions.

Apollo 13 in Real Time is probably the most extensive, with live playbacks of actual mission control audio channels, as well as video and stills.

On Twitter, @apollo_50th is tweeting the mission as it happened 50 years ago.