MacBook Pro, FreezerGate and a Tempest in a Teapot
Touch Bar MacBook Pro gets 32 GB RAM upgrade, more
MacBook Pro and FreezerGate
I’m calling it FreezerGate. You hadn’t heard? It all started here:
[Core i9 MacBook Pro Thermal Issues Throttle Performance ]
The next phase became an opportunity, for those sites that wished to, take shots at Apple by suggesting one has to put this MacBook Pro in a freezer to extract maximim performance. They’re not worth linking to.
The current phase is to settle down and look at the science. This is embodied in the sane and sensible analysis by Jonny Evans at ComputerWorld. It’s the Particle Debris article of the week.
Software — even test software — that is poorly optimized for the hardware or the hardware operating system will impose its own performance tax, which seems to be the root of the Premiere problem.
That’s not something you’ll fix by putting your Mac in the freezer.
Why would anyone do that, unless they wanted the clicks?
Author Evans, as he always does, looks at this tempest in a teapot with a sober, balanced, well-informed viewpoint. He raises a multitude issues that others, who would rather fly off the handle, want to ignore. Evans actually spoke with users.
There’s More
There are many, many nuances related to this kind of testing. And Evans doen’t even get to all of them. Primate Labs weighs in as well. “MacBook Pro (Mid 2018) Throttling.” To wit:
Why does this test not replicate the throttling seen in other tests? Part of the issue is the test themselves. Premiere uses both the CPU and the GPU, while Geekbench only uses the CPU. If the GPU contributes significant heat, then that will cause the CPU to throttle more aggressively.
AppleInsider looked at many issues, in depth. While they confirmed the problem with the one problem app, Adobe Premiere, they also pointed to many other facets of benchmarking the i9 MacBook Pro.
So, Apple can also change the fan speed thresholds to accommodate a CPU load better, by setting them to kick in sooner, and faster than it does at present. This probably won’t completely eliminate the thermal situation, but it will lengthen the time it will take to get there at the cost of a louder device when under heavy load.
The botom line is that Apple engineers test their products before shipping. They know the limits of an Mac they ship, and they know how customers use these machines. While some tweaks may be in order, it’s not in Apple’s nature to ship an outright flawed Mac that’s going to become a disreputable market failure. As some, it seems, hope for.
More research, more technical understanding and more patience is called for, even if those seems to be in short supply right now.
Next Page: The News Debris for the week of July 16th. Web spying for profit.
Page 2 – News Debris For The Week of July 16th
Web Spying for Profit
The World Wide Web is a complicated market place. Everything you do there is scrutinized for posible financial gain, and it’s done in secret under the guise of innocent, boldly advertized services offered. This week, we learned how far it’s going in a story that got national news attention.
From the article:
With little public scrutiny, the health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans, including, odds are, many readers of this story. The companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online. Then they feed this information into complicated computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost them.
This is why it’s even more important to identify a favored ecosystem, like Apple’s, that actively tries to protect your privacy. And then layer that with good privacy practices such as VPNs, minimizing your services footprint, and so on.
And to top it all off, those databases on hundredes of millions of Americans then become targets for malicious hackers. And so it goes.
More Debris
Related
• Who owns machine learning models? The developer, of course. What if the model is stolen and used for financial gain? IBM has cleverly developed a technique to prove ownership. “IBM’s AI watermarking method protects models from theft and sabotage.” While this seems like a customary thing to do, it also give me hope for AI’s future that the right motivations and values can be inculcated into our advanced AI systems. That is, if developers chose to do so.
• In a 1711 poem, Alexander Pope wrote: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” So it also seems with Samsung. See: “If this is Samsung’s $1,500 foldable phone, no one’s going to buy it.” Of course, the TV SciFi series, Earth: Final Conflict and its very cool folding display communicator set the bar no one has yet achieved.
Yep. It folded into the handle. But in a cool way.
• However, one thing that one might surmise is that, like iPhone displays, Apple Watch displays will get bigger. The issues are as you’d suspect: cost, display technology on a, perhaps, curved display, and scratch resistance. He’s a tantalizing preview and a discussion at AnandTech of next generation Gorilla Glass.
• These stories just won’t go away. This time, it’s a Chinese smart home manufacturer Diqee that builds a Roomba knockoff. “A vacuum vulnerability could mean your Roomba knockoff is hoovering up surveillance.” I’m beginning to suspect the design is mandated for the Chinese market.
• Finally, I’ll finish with a bit of interesting, good news. “Research team finds physics treasure hidden in a wallpaper pattern.” I found this quote enticing.
Some scientists have theorized that topological insulators, which insulate on their interior but conduct electricity on their surface, could serve as a foundation for super-fast quantum computing.
As with the IBM article above, when technology development inherits a proper purposefulness, wonderful things can be achieved.
Particle Debris is a generally a mix of John Martellaro’s observations and opinions about a standout event or article of the week (preamble on page one) followed on page two by a discussion of articles that didn’t make the TMO headlines, the technical news debris. The column is published most every Friday except for holiday weeks.
0 Response to "MacBook Pro, FreezerGate and a Tempest in a Teapot"
Post a Comment