Woke up this morning and had a quick read up on the Apple event that occurred – as expected there were incremental change with the big focus not necessarily on performance improvements when compared to the previous but rather pointing out that it is faster than the competition then quickly focusing on the battery life, new features etc. We’re pretty much getting to the point of diminishing returns where the additional performance is having less of an impact for the average user with the focus I see being in the future around battery life and what the device can do. Call me an old grouch but I refuse to see the phone as a replacement for a computer – it is a great device when you need to quickly get something done when you’re on the go (like back in the days of the PDA) but for serious work a computer is the best choice (tablets being good ‘computer replacements’ for people who want an appliance rather than a traditional computer with it all the power, flexibility but complexity that comes as part of the package).
I was having a brief look at the benchmarks for the Mac mini and I was shocked about the fact that my iMac (slightly under 4 year old) is being beaten. This has made me wonder whether, when I do upgrade my iMac and MacBook Pro, whether I should use go and get a Mac mini, Apple keyboard and mouse then buy a nice 4K 32inch monitor from Dell. The big factor for me going with the iMac over the Mac mini was because of the discrete graphics but if Apple is going to go with their own GPU for their Macs, from top to bottom, then I might as well look at look what alternatives to the iMac. Maybe the much rumoured maxed out Mac mini or even the Mac Pro mini, both rumours having been making the rounds for quite some time, would be an option. At this stage my only criteria is that it has to be ARMv9 compatible. As for what I’ll do with my old computers – I am tempted to donate them to mum or a family member unless I can get a decent deal which avoids me having go through he rigmarole of couriering my iMac – the iMac will either have to be a local sale or I’ll give it to my sister so they can use it.
I’m going to have a kebab tonight along with a mixed grill – salad, salad and more salad! I need to start eating my greens. It is interesting the number of new restaurants that are making an appearance on Delivery Easy but I wonder whether certain dishes won’t be available since they aren’t exactly the sort of dishes that keep well when it comes to a delivery service.
I’ve move back to Safari and I don’t know what Apple did but their latest update did something because now Safari is buttery smooth again. Although I threw a bit of a temper tantrum about the changes coming in Safari 15, it is highly likely that when I do eventually upgrade to macOS 12 (probably being released in around a months time or so) I’m sure I’ll be less pessimistic (the only exposure to Safari 15 has been through the Technology Preview releases from the Webkit project website). The Technology Preview builds are going to be buggy by their nature but the Safari 15 will be a lot more mature, less on the bleeding edge with the net result being probably a better overall experience.
It’ll be interesting to see what new features Apple will add to their SoC such as support for VP8, VP9 and AV1 which will hopefully mean a lot smoother experience when it come to video playback – I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually start finding that as time goes on that new features are either ARM only or if they are available on both Intel and ARM that the experience on ARM will be far superior to the Intel experience. It’ll also be interesting to see the work that Apple has done with LLVM (and all the associated projects) in terms of optimisations for their ARM based family of SoCs especially when one considers that eventually Apple will launch a range ARMv9 based SoCs which will include SVE2.
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