Even some of Intel’s Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake chips are being fabbed at TSMC.

Yeah, I think for most of what OP is describing, an earlier generation Pro with RAM and storage upgrade is a better bargain than spending the same amount of money on the newest processor. Not sure if OP can access the refurbished Apple store, but that’s where I’d be looking.

For stationary workstations limited to only driving two displays, permanently committing to one built in display hurts flexibility. A MacBook air can’t have a dual monitor setup where both monitors are the same size.

The mini form factor cools better, and can do more sustained work with the same hardware.

More ports means more straightforward connection to things like hardwired Ethernet, external storage, etc., good for certain stationary uses.

A couple hundred dollars is like double the price. The MacBook Air starts at $1099 for the current generation, almost twice as much as the $599 Mac Mini. For now, the Mac Mini is also ahead by a generation in the M-series chip and base storage/memory, too, so it literally is more than twice the cost for a similarly specced MacBook Air over a Mac Mini. Presumably the next generation Air will also have some improvements to the base model, but I expect it to be the same price.

I personally use my M1 Mac Mini as a pretty good home server. That might not be a super common use case, but I’d think it would make a way better desktop than a MacBook Air.

A camera that authenticates the timestamp and contents of an image is great. But it’s still limited. If I take that camera, mount it on a tripod, and take a perfect photograph of a poster of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the resulting image will be yet another one of millions of similar copies, only with a digital signature proving that it was a newly created image today, in 2024.

Authenticating what the camera sensor sees is only part of the problem, when the camera can be shown fake stuff, too. Special effects have been around for decades, and practical effects are even older.

I actually have fairly high hopes for Intel’s 18A and the upcoming technology changes presenting competition for TSMC (including others like Samsung and the Japanese startup Rapidus). And even if it turns into a 3-way race among Asian companies, the three nations are different enough that there’s at least some strength in diversity.

TSMC’s dominance in the last decade I think can be traced to their clear advantage in producing finFETs at scale better than anyone else. As we move on from the finFET paradigm and move towards GAA and backside power delivery, there are a few opportunities to leapfrog TSMC. And in fact, TSMC is making such good money on their 3nm and 4nm processes that their roadmap to GAAFETs and backside power is slower than Intel’s and Samsung’s, seemingly to squeeze the very last bit out of finFETs before moving on.

If there’s meaningful competition in the space, we might see lower prices, which could lead to greater innovation from their customers.

Do I think it will happen? I’m not sure. But I’m hopeful, and wouldn’t be surprised if the next few process nodes show big shakeups in the race.

Intel canceled their 20A after bad results, and shifted focus to 18A.

It’s even to the point that their own Arrow Lake chips are going to be fabbed by TSMC.

Because we’re going to stop supporting Windows 98!

At least there was a technical reason there, that Microsoft was merging the two separate codebases for consumer Windows and enterprise Windows, and building on the better NT codebase than the 95->98->ME codebase.

And XP was actually way better for the main thing that we were going to be using computers for going forward: networked with the actual internet.

Windows 11? Can’t see any paradigm shift in how the operating system itself is supposed to work, at least not on anything that actually makes a difference in a favorable way.

Did Intel ever get its foundry business off the ground? I remember some announcements in the last year or two, and then some rumors of yields not being good enough for the customers to move forward, and now some rumors of Intel thinking of spinning off the business. This partnership might be a watered down version of those plans.

Userland

Yeah, looks like a series of voluntary tags in the metadata. Which is important, and probably necessary, but won’t actually do much to stop deceptive generation. Just helps highlight and index the use of some of these AI tools for people who don’t particularly want or need to hide that fact.

Opposite from the enemy’s gate.

stop looking at those as “features of the keyboard and mouse that I purchased”

Seriously.

Maybe I’m an old timer but my idea of extra features on a mouse or keyboard are simply more inputs: more mouse buttons or wheels, more keys on a keyboard (like media keys). At most that just requires additional hardware, but nothing my OS can’t handle on its own.

That article has basically been validated over time. At the time it was written, the argument was that monopoly is bad for consumers even if it makes prices cheaper, and that consolidation of producer market power needs to be understood as consumer harm in itself, even if prices or services paradoxically become better for consumers.

It’s no longer a paradox today, though. Amazon has raised prices and reduced the quality of service by a considerable margin, and uses its market power to prevent the competition from undercutting them, rather than competing fairly on the merits.

I’m firmly in the “building new nuclear doesn’t make financial sense” camp, but I do think that extending the life of any existing nuclear plant does. Restarting a previously operational nuclear plant lies somewhere in between.

I wonder if someone could set up some form of tunneling through much more mundane traffic, perhaps even entirely over a legitimate encrypted service through a regular browser interface (like the browser interface for services like Discord or slack or MS Teams or FB Messenger or Zoom or Google Chat/Meet) where you can just literally chat with a bot you’ve set up, and instruct the bot to do things on its end, and then forward the results through file sending in that service. From the outside it should look like encrypted chat with a popular service over that https connection.

The browser is your thin client.

Mine’s getting pretty thicc

Once TSMC Arizona is up and running (probably 2027 or so), that’s going to be a supply chain that goes through entirely friendly countries, not at significant geopolitical risk.

There’s some history here:

SMS was ubiquitous in the United States long before smartphones. We didn’t have country codes to worry about, so anyone else in the United States was reachable in near real time over text, using an asynchronous, open, inter-carrier method of communication. If I had your phone number I could text you for free. Layered onto that was various automated systems over text (alerts, etc.). Later on, the carriers rolled out MMS for basic pictures being sent, group texts, etc.

So when iPhones became popular here, the default method of communication was SMS/MMS. The iPhone user knew that it would work with dumb phones, Android phones, Windows phones, whatever. And those habits and those chat threads predated the rise of WhatsApp, FB Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, etc., and a lot of those apps simply didn’t work with old dumb phones. Why give up an existing group chat thread just because one of those friends didn’t have a smartphone yet?

Then, whenever every member of a chat had an iPhone, the system automatically defaulted to the upgraded iMessage experience: high quality media sharing, typing/delivery/read notifications, reactions, etc. It was a slow transition, and didn’t start to show clear advantage over the open SMS/MMS standard until smartphones were ubiquitous, and where most people had iPhones.

And so once everyone had a “it just works” app, they didn’t want to switch to an app that required everyone to get a separate account and download a separate app. Especially because the iPhone hit something like 80% market share among certain demographics (the young, the non-technical rich, etc.).

From my frame of reference they designed the phones to be backwards compatible with preexisting accessories.

Apple does two things that are very expensive:

1. They use a huge physical area of silicon for their high performance chips. The “Pro” line of M chips have a die size of around 280 square mm, the “Max” line is about 500 square mm, and the “Ultra” line is possibly more than 1000 square mm. This is incredibly expensive to manufacture and package.
2. They pay top dollar to get the exclusive rights to TSMC’s new nodes. They lock up the first year or so of TSMC’s manufacturing capacity at any given node, at which point there is enough capacity to accommodate other designs from other TSMC clients (AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, etc.). That means you can just go out and buy an Apple device made from TSMC’s latest node before AMD or Qualcomm have even announced the lines that will be using those nodes.

Those are business decisions that others simply can’t afford to follow.