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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • If it starts at $499 or less and the specs are somewhere in the ballpark of what the rumors say then the iPhone 16 has very little reason to exist: same A18 SoC and 8 GB RAM, storage probably starts at the same 128 GB, OLED, same main camera, Face ID. So $300 more gets you an ultra-wide lens and a different display cutout (if even that)? Am I missing something?

    Also, the upsell to the 16 Pro is suddenly quite steep.

    This would/could be the best value iPhone since the original SE (2016).


  • Apparently, the inner screen will come in at 12 inches, suggesting it’s going to be larger than previously expected.

    Okay but then the device would need to be at least iPad mini sized (depending on aspect ratio)? Unless it triple or quadruple folds. Probably a straight up wrong rumor.

    I’m actually interested in a folding smartphone, ideally sized somewhere between a 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max, unfolding to something comparable to an iPad mini in screen real estate (aspect ratio would be hard to match though).

    Main pain points with existing devices are durability, crease in the middle of the screen and weight, although we’re inching closer and closer to a more ideal device. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is something I’d almost want.





  • Makes me wonder if it’s faster than the USB 1.1 ports on the PS2. I used to load PS2 games from a USB drive but 1.1 speeds meant that some games had stuttering FMVs and some with texture/geometry streaming were more susceptible to pop-in.

    I can’t imagine it’d be much better via memory card though, considering it was only ever intended for small savegames and for loading firmware updates (which is also what this memory card or rather FreeMcBoot exploits).



  • Speculative execution seems to be the source of a lot of security flaws in many different CPUs. CPU manufacturers seem to be so focused on winning the performance race that security aware architecture design takes the backseat.

    Also, it’s more and more clear that it’s a bad idea that websites can just execute arbitrary code. The JS APIs are way too powerful and complex nowadays. Maybe websites and apps should’ve stayed separate concepts instead of merging into “web apps”.

    I also wonder if it’d be possible to design a CPU so vulnerabilities like these are fixable instead of just “mitigable”. Similar to how you can reprogram an FPGA. I have no clue how chip design works though, but please feel free to reply if you know more about this.




  • GPU that’s roughly on par with the Steam Deck.

    …when comparing TFLOPs, and that’s not comparable across architectures (by different companies as well!).

    If we take similar-performing (in rasterization) Ampere and RDNA 2 cards (say a 3080 and 6800 XT), we can see the 3080 has 29.77 TFLOPs and the 6800 XT has 20.74 TFLOPs, an RDNA 2 FLOP is worth about 1.4x as much as an Ampere FLOP.

    So extrapolating the 1.6 “RDNA 2 TFLOPs” of the Deck we get 2.24 “Ampere TFLOPs” and that’d make the Deck quite a bit faster than the Switch 2 in portable mode, but slower than the Switch 2 in docked mode.

    This is obviously all just wild and silly speculation, but I doubt the Switch 2 will match the Deck in portable mode. Samsung 8nm would just eat too much power for this to realistically happen in a handheld form factor.






  • This feature makes use of homomorphic encryption, so apparently the photo itself can’t be “seen” by Apple’s servers.

    It’s still very confusing wording as in the Settings app it states “Allow this device to privately match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple”, which to me implies that the device either downloads the whole index and then looks up places on-device or at least queries it online without sending any photo data, but it seems to send some encrypted and/or hashed variant of the photo(s) instead.

    It seems to be done in a privacy-respecting manner, but being on by default and primarily the poor wording in the Settings app is not good.

    I do think the article is a bit over-dramatic though when the author starts mentioning “that Apple computers are constantly full of privacy and security vulnerabilities”, which - while not entirely wrong - is true for basically every (complex) system.

    ~EDIT: fix two typos~




  • I’d actually be surprised if Apple pays anything to OpenAI at the moment. Obviously running some Siri requests through ChatGPT (after the user confirms that’s what they want to do) is quite expensive for OpenAI, but Apple Intelligence doesn’t touch OpenAI servers at all (just Siri has ChatGPT integration).

    Even then, there’ll obviously still be a lot of requests, but the problem OpenAI has is that they aren’t really in a negotiating position. Google owns Android and so most phones default to Gemini, instantly giving them a huge advantage in marketshare. OpenAI doesn’t have its own platform, so Apple having the second largest install base of all smartphone operating systems is OpenAI’s best chance.

    Apple might benefit from OpenAI but OpenAI needs Apple way more than the other way around. Apple Intelligence runs perfectly fine (I mean, as “perfectly fine” as it currently does) without OpenAI, the only functionality users would lose is the option to redirect “complex” Siri requests to ChatGPT.

    In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI actually pays Apple for the integration, just like Google pays Apple a hefty sum to be the default search engine for Safari.


  • Apple Intelligence isn’t “powered by OpenAI” at all. It’s not even based on it.

    The only time OpenAI servers are contacted is when you ask Siri something it can’t compute with Apple Intelligence, but even then it clearly asks the user first if they want to send the request to ChatGPT.

    Everything else regarding Apple Intelligence runs either on-device or on their “Private Cloud Compute” infrastructure, which apparently uses M2 Ultra chips. You then have to trust Apple that their claims regarding privacy are true, but you kind of do that when choosing an iPhone in the first place. There’s some pretty interesting tech behind this actually.