Announcements during Apple October 30 Event

[Dylrob]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Learnings about USB-C audio. In short, it is kind of a mess:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3284...esnt-work.html

If Apple adopts a digital only approach, I expect that those analog headsets will be dead in a couple years.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by OtinG

Yes, but is it soldered in?
......

Multiple reports that it is user-upgradable, like the earliest Mac mini’s. Here is one:

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/qui...pgradable-ram/

Storage is not replaceable. I’m still trying to understand relative performance of on board storage vs Thunderbolt 3 connected storage. For some reason I cannot seem to find this. If difference is negligible, then one could get less SSD onboard and just add it later as needed via Thunderbolt. I think the bottleneck is not transfer speed of TB3 (which is fast enough to replace and augment computing power via eGPU) but the speed of the storage itself, but would like to confirm it. If SSD gets faster in future, then maybe you even boot from external storage.

This would not be a corner to cut with a laptop but since mini is presumably sitting in a fixed location it seems one way to defer spending money.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Multiple reports that it is user-upgradable, like the earliest Mac mini’s. Here is one:

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/qui...pgradable-ram/

Storage is not replaceable. I’m still trying to understand relative performance of on board storage vs Thunderbolt 3 connected storage. For some reason I cannot seem to find this. If difference is negligible, then one could get less SSD onboard and just add it later as needed via Thunderbolt. I think the bottleneck is not transfer speed of TB3 (which is fast enough to replace and augment computing power via eGPU) but the speed of the storage itself, but would like to confirm it. If SSD gets faster in future, then maybe you even boot from external storage.

This would not be a corner to cut with a laptop but since mini is presumably sitting in a fixed location it seems one way to defer spending money.

People already boot from external storage.

I use an external raid drive (drobo) on my iMac for most of my media (iTunes and Calbre) and never have noticed any real delay. You just need to make sure you use a different drive for your backups since time machine can drag disk performance down quite a bit while it's backing up. I use two raid drives, which is a bit expensive, but is much better from a reliability and speed point of view.

If I were to use a mac-mini as a primary desktop, I would likely max out the RAM, get the base SSD hard drive and get a nice raid external hard drive.

I would use a different strategy for a laptop.

[Dylrob]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

People already boot from external storage.

I use an external raid drive (drobo) on my iMac for most of my media (iTunes and Calbre) and never have noticed any real delay. You just need to make sure you use a different drive for your backups since time machine can drag disk performance down quite a bit while it's backing up. I use two raid drives, which is a bit expensive, but is much better from a reliability and speed point of view.

If I were to use a mac-mini as a primary desktop, I would likely max out the RAM, get the base SSD hard drive and get a nice raid external hard drive.

I would use a different strategy for a laptop.

Heh, yeah... I actually boot my windows partition from an external SSD on my MacBook Air just cause I don't have enough internal space for it. Works alright, except for the fact that my battery drains like crazy with this setup!

[rem736]

i love apple devices. but claims of the ipad being a replacement for laptops is still way off. i work with A LOT of excel files, and these excel files are sometimes in the range of 50K lines of data. even with the ipad pro, making a simple formula change or a value that affects the calculation of these 50K lines of data takes minutes to run and even crashes the excel app.

if you are using it only for personal business, then yes, i would agree that an ipad can indeed replace a computer. but in the business world where someone has to deal with a lot of data, the ipad pro is no where close to replacing a laptop or desktop computer.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by rem736

i love apple devices. but claims of the ipad being a replacement for laptops is still way off. i work with A LOT of excel files, and these excel files are sometimes in the range of 50K lines of data. even with the ipad pro, making a simple formula change or a value that affects the calculation of these 50K lines of data takes minutes to run and even crashes the excel app.

if you are using it only for personal business, then yes, i would agree that an ipad can indeed replace a computer. but in the business world where someone has to deal with a lot of data, the ipad pro is no where close to replacing a laptop or desktop computer.

Did you try this with the newest iPad Pro? No claims were made for the original ones.

Dale

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Did you try this with the newest iPad Pro? No claims were made for the original ones.

Problem there is it's likely a memory issue. New models still have 4GB RAM unless one gets the 1TB configuration which starts at $1549 for 11" and $1749 for 12.9".

[Dylrob]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Problem there is it's likely a memory issue. New models still have 4GB RAM unless one gets the 1TB configuration which starts at $1549 for 11" and $1749 for 12.9".

That wouldn't be an issue on a desktop, as the operating system would simple offload to virtual memory. iOS seems to have pretty poor virtual memory management.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Multiple reports that it is user-upgradable, like the earliest Mac mini’s. Here is one:

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/qui...pgradable-ram/

Storage is not replaceable. I’m still trying to understand relative performance of on board storage vs Thunderbolt 3 connected storage. For some reason I cannot seem to find this. If difference is negligible, then one could get less SSD onboard and just add it later as needed via Thunderbolt. I think the bottleneck is not transfer speed of TB3 (which is fast enough to replace and augment computing power via eGPU) but the speed of the storage itself, but would like to confirm it. If SSD gets faster in future, then maybe you even boot from external storage.

This would not be a corner to cut with a laptop but since mini is presumably sitting in a fixed location it seems one way to defer spending money.

I believe they are talking about RAM, not storage. There are two RAM slots with plugin memory cards shown that you can add or replace. Extra RAM allows faster processing and dealing with larger files.

Dale

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by Dylrob

That wouldn't be an issue on a desktop, as the operating system would simple offload to virtual memory. iOS seems to have pretty poor virtual memory management.

Last I checked, iOS's virtual memory isn't backed by storage.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Last I checked, iOS's virtual memory isn't backed by storage.

That’s what virtual memory is: stuff that has to be paged in and out of RAM to disk. Disk in this context is flash memory, the volume where apps and their data is stored.

https://developer.apple.com/library/...outMemory.html

@Dylrob was claiming that the 1TB model has more RAM, which is reported here:

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/10/30...b-has-6gb-ram/

But I would wait until folks have hardware in hand before concluding that is true.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by tomsem

That’s what virtual memory is: stuff that has to be paged in and out of RAM to disk. Disk in this context is flash memory, the volume where apps and their data is stored.

https://developer.apple.com/library/...outMemory.html

Take note of this:

To give processes access to their entire 4 gigabyte or 18 exabyte address space, OS X uses the hard disk to hold data that is not currently in use. As memory gets full, sections of memory that are not being used are written to disk to make room for data that is needed now. The portion of the disk that stores the unused data is known as the backing store because it provides the backup storage for main memory.

Although OS X supports a backing store, iOS does not. In iPhone applications, read-only data that is already on the disk (such as code pages) is simply removed from memory and reloaded from disk as needed. Writable data is never removed from memory by the operating system. Instead, if the amount of free memory drops below a certain threshold, the system asks the running applications to free up memory voluntarily to make room for new data. Applications that fail to free up enough memory are terminated.

As for 1TB getting 6GB RAM instead of 4GB for 64-512GB, I think that's likely true. We already saw some Geekbench 4 results for iPad Pro models showing 4GB and 6GB RAM. Thus far, the ones that have JnnnAP motherboard have only 4GB and the ones with JnnnxAP have 6GB.

https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Models#iPad

[tomsem]

As the Answer states up front, ‘tl;dr’:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...memory-for-ios

[rem736]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Did you try this with the newest iPad Pro? No claims were made for the original ones.

Dale

i'm afraid that i cannot afford the newest ipad pro. my assessment was made from using my 2017 ipad pro 10.5". the new ipad pro sports the A12X Bionic chip vs the older A10X Fusion chip. the claim is 35% faster performance for single core processes and up to 90% faster for multi-core processes. though it's an improvement, i don't think that it will be comparable to a computer. my work desktop is on a 5-year old core i-5 and it still handles my excel files MUCH better than my ipad pro. add to that the iOS version of excel cannot handle macros and also iOS limitations and it makes it that much worse. i think that if i didn't need the better screen and graphics, that the regular ipad would've suited fine for personal use.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by tomsem

As the Answer states up front, ‘tl;dr’:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...memory-for-ios

That's pretty much the same thing I quoted above. iOS does not have a nonvolatile backing store (e.g. swap or page file on NAND flash) so apps just force quit when it runs out of available RAM.

From the stackoverflow link:

If this was the only way your process is allocating memory, then for most modern operating systems your process would be limited by the amount of unallocated physical memory, plus the amount of free space available in the machine's page file, swap partition, or some other nonvolatile backing store. However, iOS has no backing store and it enforces fairly strict constraints on the maximum resident set size of a process, so generally your app's resident set size will be limited by the lesser of the available physical memory and the per process resident set limit.