Apple, are we on CPU architecture 3 now ?
4
Macs started out on Motorola 68k processors, then made the switch to PowerPC, then to x86, and now ARM.
To be fair to Apple those changes were done pretty cleanly and for good reason.
68k was cheap and plentiful. It had lots of competitors using it. They could learn from each others successes and failures too.
PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term. But then it wasn’t built for the mobile era. Apple tried to reel it in but the other titans behind POWER overruled them so Apple had to migrate away.
By this point, x86 had caught up with many of the advantages power had and had a better path for the mobile market ahead of it so Apple went that route.
Finally, intel’s x86 was just not going to keep up with the efficiency demands of mobile. It consumed too much power. It was expensive. It ran hot. Intel was not delivering on their promises. And Apple could see what was coming for Intel years before others admitted it.
Meanwhile they already had incredible ARM chips in their phones. The PAsemi boys they bought up were put to the task of making a more general purpose ARM chip and they pulled it off.
So now Apple is on ARM and it’s serving them very well.
Apple isn’t playing planned obsolescence here. They are evil in plenty of other ways but in terms of planned obsolescence Apple is one of the more reasonable companies. These migrations solved a problem for Apple each time. They are very expensive. They are incredibly risky. Honestly it was miraculous they pulled off the jump to ARM successfully.
PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term.
There were also volume production issues and architecture advancement issues.
Essentially, they couldn’t get volume guarantees and they were at the mercy of a much slower improvement cycle than they would have liked.
PowerPC was absolutely an excellent top-tier processor, and the current Power11 line absolutely smokes anything else out there from either Intel or AMD, at the cost of being 100-200× more expensive. Like, think $30,000 USD for a single entry-level workstation, or $70,000 USD for the high-end one.
Exactly. There’s a reason power isn’t going away.
Sonos
They used to not be that way. I have 5 devices (couple connects, amps and plays) that I’ve kept on S1. Haven’t gotten any new features, but never lost any in their whole S2 debacle. Going 10+ years strong.
Washing machines. In the stores, you see a shiny stainless steel drum, but holding up the drum is a raw aluminum spindle. Those spindles corrode with typically caustic laundry detergents to last about 6 years. Replacement was possible, with a day of work. Now, manufacturers seal the drum unit with welded plastic so replacement is impossible.
Windows 11’s TPM requirements.
I recently built a brand new computer for my uncle. He was running a 3rd gen Core i7 machine running Windows 7. I get a call that it won’t boot. I do manage to get it booted, the SMART data shows the hard drive is on its last eyebrows, and anyway he’s running an OS that’s three generations out of date.
I’m a big Linux user, I’ve got my aunt running Linux Mint. My uncle is such a dunce at computers I don’t think I can do that, because he lacks the vocabulary to tell me what he wants his computer to do. “I might use it for business.” In his line of work that could mean anything from going to quickbooks.com to needing some piece of Windows-only shitware. So “Get a .exe from somewhere” had to remain intact.
For everything he actually does with that computer, that old 3rd gen i7 was fine. Replace the hard disk with a SATA SSD, maybe replace the weird 2-4-2-4 some but not all of it is dual channel 12GB of RAM with two 8 GB sticks of DDR3 and let it roll…except no currently supported version of WIndows runs on this computer.
For a large number of people, computers became objectively fast enough in 2015. That’s about when SSDs became standard equipment, fixing any hardware reason for “damn this thing is slow” even out of midrange consumer hardware. Gamers, home labbers and AI startups need more power, the rest of the world doesn’t. And that was a problem for Microsoft.
AI startups need more power
The only point I disagree with. Apart from a few special usecases, the AI BS can go to hell.
I actually see the TPM requirement as a good thing bc it will help kill Windows as a gaming platform. Once the AI Bubble bursts, gaming will be cheaper again and with a destroyed economy, many kids will start gaming as it‘s a relatively cheap hobby and their family might nit afford expensive holidays anymore. Mobile PCs like the SteamDeck need to become mainstream as sitting for long periods is extremely unhealthy, especially for children.
I’m hoping the steam frame gets more people into vr. Just standing up to play video games is so much better for you.
VR is even better, didn’t think of that. It is honestly quite annoying having to sit in a dark room at a desk to game. I‘m definitely getting a Steam Frame just so I can play normal games from my bean bag or the living room.
I hope it’s not too heavy or at least well balanced. I can only last an hour or two with the meta quest 2 and 3 until it starts giving me a headache. But I’m solidly middle aged pretty much any repetitive action is painful
And Gaben is taking more gamers to Linux each year 🥳
Smartwatches. Seriously, they are all working perfect one day, and next day they die. Wanna change the battery? Good luck keeping them out of the water, if you happen to find and replace the battery at all, which isn’t cheap anyway.
I’m perfectly happy with my Amazing Bip watch. It keeps track of my steps and sleep, and links to my phone so that it will buzz if I get a call or text.
It’s about 7 years old now, and still gets almost a month of regular use on a single charge.
I did own an Amazfit model, the battery was dead suddenly after less than two years. A full charge wouldn’t last a week.
I think that the Bip was the battery life champion. I checked sometime in the past year, and I think Amazfit watches typically lasted between 1 and 2 weeks.
Pebble seems to be headed in a good direction ever since it got bought back by the original founder.
I wish. It’s the only smartwatch I’d buy after some awful experiences. Well, the Pebble and little better version is the PineTime.
I’ve had a good experience with my Apple Watch. It’s the first model that ever came out and it’s almost a decade old. The battery lasts only 75% of a day now but I think ten years is a good life for it.
Probably doesn’t count as I didn’t buy it, so I’m technically not dealing with it. But let’s talk about electric riding lawnmowers. Last year I was looking to replace my 20+ year old riding lawnmower with an electric one. Could not find a single manufacturer who would also provide the parts lists. Digging deeper, seems like they simply do not sell parts, like at all. The mowers just aren’t repairable - straight up, if it breaks, buy a new one. That’s irresponsible when talking about an electric drill, but a full riding mower? WTF?
To be fair, this might be a chicken & egg problem. Low adoption rates means there’s a very small market for parts, so there’s no aftermarket support. And that aftermarket is where I get parts for my current mower. So maybe it’s not fair to blame the manufacturer? But I think that’s a stretch. From where I’m standing, it sure looks like intentional planned obsolescence.
eh, they are already making the parts anyway. just make them available on order or something, not ideal but acceptable. beats forcing consumers to take a leap of faith for a product that looks pretty clearly to be disposable.
John Deere ztracks have replacement part lists I managed to find on a retailer website. Most of the parts for mowers are off the shelf anyway, I would imagine the power supply stuff is off the shelf too.
Win11… The amount of perfectly good hardware that became ewaste in October is insane to me
Samsung Galaxy S8 Pro. It’s one of these curved phones with glass on the back.
The front glass is hardened Gorilla Glass. The back glass breaks when you’re looking at it wrong. Because of the curved soapbar style, the phone easily slips out of your hand, shattering the back glass.
I am very delicate with my phones and never broke one in all of my life. The S8 was the final boss for me, though. I had to have the back glass repaired two times, one time it just fell off of my bed which is only 15cm above the floor. Fuck you, Samsung.
Having to replace perfectly functional Pixel phones because GOS stopped making updates for them. I don’t blame GOS as they’re a FOSS project and their end of support coincides with Google’s end of support, but it still feels bad replacing perfectly functional hardware. Wish release cycles were much slower so support for existing devices could be focused on, instead of having to spend time porting to every new phone dropped like every year or whatever.
I put crDroid on my pixel 5 and I’m never looking back at graphene again.
But I would have replaced it even if it was still supported. Too apple " we know what’s good for you and you don’t " for me.
Windows 11 refusing to install on hardware it can absolutely run on.
IP rating on smartphones so there’s seals and glue everywhere and opening them up is a fucking nightmare.
the worst part is that there are plenty of examples of older phones that achieved high IP ratings while also being more repairable. they just gaslight us into accepting it.
(also obligatory 🐧)
U can still force an install on older hardware, I did it on my old Lenovo laptop and have t had an issue! Just takes a command to make it install despite “not officially being supported”
I know, but many people barely know what “supported hardware even mean”, they will see the message " this computer won’t receive any more updates" and simply buy a new one.
An unfortunate product of our consumer society :/ nobody knows shit about the crap they use every day any more! I remember when owning a car meant learning to do spark plugs and oil changes, now most people couldn’t hang their spare on the side of the road if their life depended on it nevermind be bothered to figure out what hardware is in their porn browsing device.
@innermachine @bobo1900 As of recently, you can officially install Win11 on unsupported hardware, you just have to click a prompt acknowledging that you’re on your own when you do it.
However, there’s nothing saying MS won’t rugpull that and start blocking Win11 on unsupported hardware again.
My desktop won’t run Windows 11 according to Windows 11. But if I make a VM with fake TPM on it, it will run perfectly well inside a VM on a machine that won’t run it lol
It wouldn’t install on an all-in-one PC I was selling, until I clicked the bypass options (RAM, TPM, etc) in Rufus
Windows 11 refusing to install on hardware it can absolutely run on.
RUFUS is not only a great tool with which to build your USB installer (it has an option to download the correct and latest ISO directly from Microsoft), but in the subsequent steps it also asks if you want to modify the installer in some pretty useful ways. Such as bypassing a Microsoft account in favour of a local account, and neutering some of the more recent requirements. IIRC the TPM 2.0 requirement can still be nerfed.
Dumbest thing about those IP ratings is that they don‘t even provide any warranty rights for water damage.
“IP rating only describes the sealing properties at the time of assembly and may deteriorate with time.” my ass!
Dacor Stove
In 2006 my wife and I moved into a new house and bought a Dacor RSD30S stove.
Dacor made parts for the thing for TWO YEARS and that’s it. I owned it for 12 years and it went through three igniters and the door handle broke. The first igniter broke within 18 months and I was able to replace it with a new one. The second one went out at around 5 years and the part was already discontinued. Fortunately, the parts guy I was ordering from was very familiar with Dacor and said that the igniter from the new model would work, the bracket would just need to be drilled to mount it. It took me all of 5 minutes. The third one went out and I was screwed. So I spent about 2 years manually igniting my “modern” duel fuel range. Even when it did work, Dacor used one igniter coil for all four igniters. If they were not all perfectly clean the current would only go to one with the least impedance and the rest wouldn’t work.
I was never able to fix the broken handle.
Dacor… Never again.
Contrast that with the stove I replaced the Dacor with, a Wolf DF304. Granted, we’re talking about a very high end range vs a middle of the road POS. However, Wolf has not changed the design of the DF304 in 25 years. I actually bought my Wolf 2nd hand, hence why I could afford it. It was 8 years old when I bought it. Wolf not only still has all the parts for it in stock, the stove is still in production. It currently is 14 years old and works like new, compared to the Dacor being 12 years old and completely clapped out. Also Wolf uses independent coils for each igniter, so the current doesn’t flow to the igniter with the least impedance like the Dacor.
I know this sounds like a case of “you get what you paid for”, but that Dacor new was $2500, so not exactly cheap.
And don’t even get me started on General Electric appliances…
Sealed in batteries on smartphones and Surface tablets.
The device will eventually reach a point where it won’t even boot when plugged in because the charger connection isn’t actually wired to power the main board without going through the battery first (most smartphones) or the device consumes more power than the port is designed to deliver (Surface).
Dealing with this right now. Battery is 4 years old and going weak, decided to no longer recognize any charger below a certain battery percentage (like 72%) unless it’s wireless. Thought it bricked itself when it first happened until seeing it’s an issue with the batteries used for this model just straight up rejecting to charge for many heavy users. Getting a new phone soon since its so inconvenient while working outside.
I had an LG phone for a few years until one night it literally just died on me. I was messing around on it one night, just scrolling randomly, then I set it down for a few minutes to play a game. When I went to check my phone again, it wouldn’t turn on or anything.
I’ve been successful in replacing built-in batteries in 2 different phones. Granted my families phones are all > 4 years old so maybe it’s gotten much harder lately.
Got to be Apple slowing down older iPhones to mask battery degradation, and hoping no one would notice.
I love to shit on companies for doing evil shit (like Apple removing Targeted Display Mode from their iMacs), but Apple did the right thing here, but communicated it in the worst way possible.
I had an old iPhone that would randomly shut down when it drew too much power for the old battery to provide. If they hadn’t done the fix, I would have had to get a new phone; it just wasn’t reliable anymore. With the fix, things were slow, but they worked. Honestly, this is the opposite of planned obsolescence.
I’m going to respectfully disagree; had the phone kept shutting down you would have gone to Apple or a 3rd party repairer and got a new battery for 30-80£€$.
By masking the real issue and just giving you a poor experience, you wonder if it was always like that, or if there is something wrong at all, maybe you compare it with a snappy new phone and decide to upgrade for 1000£€$
$30 to $80 is half the price of a new (used) phone.
Half the price isn’t bad to get more longevity out of a phone. And a different used phone will probably have to have its battery replaced fairly soon enough, too
At that point my phone is usually cracked and worth upgrading, but with each phone I go through I try to take better care of it. But so far I’ve never liked a phone so much that it was worth replacing the battery. But I have bought the exact same model of phone 2-3 times as replacements (esp when I broke one by dropping it)
This may be the difference here, I have never broken a phone, my iPhone 6 became my dads and is still going, and my current phone is the iPX I bought over 8 years ago.
You probably need to take better care of your stuff. 😀
Story of my life lol. I have butterfingers, and am distractable in ways that end up with not taking good care of things :(
Where are you getting an iPhone for less than $160 that still gets security updates??
I can replace my iPX for about $200 for a refurbished one, but not get an 11 which will only have 9 more months of updates. I can probably get a used 11 with an already trashed (<70%) battery for $160.
I don’t know. I usually buy used pixel devices, but that’s a good point. If you are trying to plan the replacement costs for an iPhone and you can repair the battery for $30-80, that’s a steal.
Not only that, but also silently removing contacts when you didn’t update and connected it up to iTunes. That same day I bought my first android.
Not come across that one, maybe it didn’t affect iOS 16, so us iPhone X users are safe?
It is funny that all the responses so far have been about phones.
This was around ios 6 or 7. The Iphone 4 was my last iPhone.
It’s funny, because if they just made this a “battery preserve” option, it would probably be hailed as genius and put in every single phone on the planet by now.
It is an option though.
I’ve refused to buy another Apple product after the slow down basically disabled my iPhone 4. I was even looking at a new iPhone, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth I’ve been android ever since.
This is one of the worst companies. They are about saving the planet with recycling their products. They don’t. Its all ends in landfills. Its all a grift.
Apple pisses me off. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro that could have continued to be supported, Apple just decided it wasn’t in their best interest to continue supporting it and if I want to continue I’ll just have to buy a new one!
My MacBook is on MacOS 13 thanks to open core legacy.
Mine is on Debian 13; I love my little 13" 2012 MBP!
My 15” 2012 is on Debian 13 also.
Linux learning experience of a lifetime trying to fully get the graphics working properly, but got there in the end!
Android does this by just bloating the software out and reinstalling games I uninstalled. It’s gotten to the point that I’m not sure if its actually dialing out or not.
The first Unifi Video NVR. It was a device with an Atom D525, running Debian 6, when Debian 6 was about to EOL. It went on the market for 6 months and then was pulled.
Windows and ios
School just got 30 new laptops because of the tpm requirement on windows 11 just like Microsoft planned.
I would not mind helping them with Linux of any distro even after Im done learning there because it’s so much better
