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> Maybe they build them for themselves. For what upside?

They do build it for themselves. From their security blog:

"The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot. We paired this hardware with a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. This allows us to take advantage of iOS security technologies such as Code Signing and sandboxing."

<https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/>


This is such a narrow narrow tiny corner of computing needs. That has such serious need for ownership, no matter the cost. And has extremely fantastically chill as shit overall computing needs, is un-perfomamce-sensitive as it gets.

I could not be less convinced by this information that this is a useful indicator for the other 99.999999999% of computing needs.


Good, because you can’t have one.

If that were true, the US wouldn't be able to extradite anyone to Mexico, where they do not use jury trials.

Constitutional restrictions on prosecution in the United States do not apply to foreign criminal justice systems.


That might carry more weight if Russia hadn't started an expansionist war to reclaim former imperial territory.

> For example, did you know that "Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy"?

Yes, because I read Inherit the Wind in middle school.


Inherit the Wind uses the historical case of the Scopes Monkey Trial to discuss the contemporary McCarthyism, neither of which is particularly closely tied to white supremacy?

Pretty sure "scientific racism" owes more to pop versions of evolutionary theory than it does to a near-Eastern religion that endows all people with immortal souls, spreads the faith in all languages following Pentacost, tells parables about Samaritans, and makes a point of adding Galatians to its sacred book.

Ugh. I'm sorry, but could you please explain yourself? I also read Inherit the Wind in middle school, and my understanding is that it fictionalized the (true) story of the "Scopes/Monkey Trial", which was an ideological conflict between science and religion. It's been over 50 years, and maybe I'm so pure that I disregarded any racial context, but I don't remember any.

How does "White Supremacy" come into the story, or the denial of evolution as a whole?


As a whole?

White supremacists hate the idea that they could have had non-white ancestors. Belief in a white Adam & Eve is much more in line with their world view. Non-whites were created by "the Curse of Ham". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham


As usual, when a "Christian" wants to be un-Christian, they do it by mining the Old Testament.

Surely you understand the difference between "Some X believe Y" and "Y is a form of X". Examples of the former pattern do not prove the latter.

Even if we correct the logic here, and change the conclusion to something like "All people who dismiss evolution are white supremacists", that would still be disproven by counterexamples, like the many non-white people who don't believe in evolution.

"Acceptance of evolution was lower [than in the US] in ... Singapore (59%), India (56%), Brazil (54%), and Malaysia (43%)"

https://ncse.ngo/acceptance-evolution-twenty-countries


I just gave a connection white supremacy and evolution denial, not trying to prove any absolutes. Everything you are saying seemed kinda obvious and thus I didn't mention it.

I apologize if I misunderstood. I thought your comment was related to the statement being discussed in this chain. ("Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy")

Biological evolution was butting heads with the dying concept of social evolution at the time, and that conflict provides illuminating subtext to the trial and book.

Which is another interesting aspect of the political use of science: that people will cherry-pick and bend all they can in ways that support their policies.

Thank you for some historical context.

I really enjoyed this author's "Complex Text Handling in WebKit" series from a few years back. They're spread over several months on the blog, so here are the direct links to each part, if anyone is interested:

Part 1: Encoding Systems, Code Points, and Code Units <https://litherum.blogspot.com/2013/11/complex-text-handling-...>

Part 2: Fonts <https://litherum.blogspot.com/2013/11/complex-text-handling-...>

Part 3: Codepoint to Glyph Mapping <https://litherum.blogspot.com/2014/02/complex-text-handling-...>

Part 4: Line Breaking <https://litherum.blogspot.com/2014/04/complex-text-handling-...>

Part 5: Bidirectional Processing <https://litherum.blogspot.com/2014/11/complex-text-handling-...>

Part 6: Run Layout <https://litherum.blogspot.com/2014/11/complex-text-handling-...>

Part 7: Width Calculations <https://litherum.blogspot.com/2014/11/complex-text-handling-...>


They're quite different product lines, serving different markets. The heatsink you'd need to cool something like the 9800X3D would be the size of the Mac mini itself. The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K costs roughly the same as the entire M4 mini, has twice as many cores (4x as many threads), and its advertised base power is twice the M4's maximum.

There's nothing wrong with comparing them, but they don't seem to be in the same market.


What's the market for Mac minis if not desktop nor laptop?

Desktop spans a wide range. Mac minis should be compared against NUCs or cheap PCs, not high-end PCs.

M4 is Apple's top-of-the-line CPU design atm and this very same CPU is used across all their products and not only Mac Mini's. It's used in MacBook Pro.

Is M4 TDP different in MacBook Pro than what it is in Mac Mini?


M4 is Apple's weakest CPU.

It is not. It is more powerful than M1 and M2 and somewhat at the margin with the M3.

> M4 delivers up to 1.5x faster CPU performance over the powerful M2

This is from Apple's first public announcement of M4.


Was there a single laptop chip included in the benchmark?

They are comparing a 5w CPU with 80-200w ones.. which is entirely pointless.


I don't think it is entirely pointless but what I think it is pointless is to presumably leave so much performance on the table for a device that does not even run on a battery.

There were no laptops being compared...

Performance per watt is a thing that matters for systems where you don't have a lot of watts. Desktops are not that.


Cost matters. Let's not forget about electricity/cooling cost as well.

That said, I wonder what would desktop cost that is better or equal in https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.0 on m4 mini. Does it even exist?


The new Scouts are being developed in cooperation with Rivian, using Rivian technology.

The storage is not soldered to the M4 mini SOC.

No, it is soldered to the storage module. You have to desolder the flash chips from that module and replace them. You can't just order a bigger storage module from Apple (or anyone else) and plug it in.

I don’t think anything is stopping you buying a second hand / 3rd party module online. It just needs to be physically compatible with your particular generation of hardware.

I don't think this is true. If you watch the videos, dosdude1 specifically says he had to order blank NANDs for this process. Then you DFU restore the system from another mac. I have no proof, but I assume part of this DFU restore process is the new NAND chips being hardware paired in some way.

Again I have no proof, but there must be reasons he claims they have to be blank NANDs


> there must be reasons he claims they have to be blank NANDs

If you are building new SSDs, it makes sense to be certain that used NAND chips aren't slipping into your supply chain.

They do have a limited number of write cycles that they are good for, after all.


Watch the video again. He emphatically says they have to be blank or it won't work

Well, someone has to build the 3rd party module

M4 Macs only accept SSDs of the exact same make and model as the one installed at the factory.

So to expand storage in an M4 Mac, you indeed need to desolder the flash chips and solder in new ones.


The video at the base of this thread has iFixIt take the 500GB SSD from one Mac Mini and swap it with the 250GB SSD from another, and both recognized and worked with the replacement.

It is a swappable part. Which means much more attainable servicing for flash failure or exhaustion, and possibly even upgrading storage in the future.


What stops someone from selling replacement cards?

not wanting extensive interactions with Apple's legal team. Charging $400 for $10 of storage means they have a lot of money to harass you with very well payed lawyers even if you are in the right.

There have been companies selling hardware upgrades for Macs that weren't designed to be upgraded for many decades now.

They've publicly disclosed that they built custom Apple Silicon servers to power Private Cloud Compute.

"The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot."

<https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/>


I'm about 75% through the audiobook, and it's absolutely fantastic.

The most surprising thing so far is how advanced the hardware was. I wasn't expecting to hear about pipelining, branch prediction, SIMD, microcode, instruction and data caches, etc. in the context of an early-80s minicomputer.


Yes, though that stuff cost bug bucks back then. PCs were a big step backward for a long time.

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