What an absurd take. If we use FLOPS as a crude measure, the Air would be comparable to the leading supercomputers of ~1999/2000. There's many reasons why that's a very poor comparison but ignoring the absolute insanity of the raw compute available in a pocketable, thin, battery-powered handheld that you can buy literally this week, is ridiculous. Modern smartphones are nothing short of sci-fi when compared to even recent living memory. We're simply used to them due to their sheer ubiquity.
The A19 GPU doesn't even have hardware support for FP64, which is the precision used for TOP500. No, it is not comparable to leading supercomputers of 1999/2000.
Air, as a product line, quite famously started with Jobs emphasising the thinness of the MacBook Air by pulling it from a paper folder. Taking what are ultimately marketing terms as literal face-value descriptors isn't particularly useful.
If you take Apple's presentation at face value, most of the iPhone Air hardware is within the plateau, with the rest of the body being almost entirely battery. So it's not immediately obvious that even if they did do away with the bump, that there'd be a useable phone left over once considering the necessary reduction in battery size.
Huh? GeForce NOW is a resounding success by many metrics. Anecdotally, I use it weekly to play multiplayer games and it’s an excellent experience. Google giving up on Stadia as a product says almost nothing about cloud gaming’s viability.
That seems incredibly prescient for accounts created before even GPT-1. Obviously broad data scraping existed before then, but even amongst this crowd I find it hard to believe that’s the real motivator.
Queensland, Australia introduced state-wide $0.50 public transit fares a year ago, and it’s been a raging success. Conveniently, this also eliminates the entire problem class of needing to calculate fares. Mind you, for those unfamiliar, QLD is a state 2.5x larger than Texas, 5x larger than all of Japan, 7x larger than Great Britain, and is bigger than all but 16 countries.
I guess size is a factor but also population density, does QLD have way less people per sq.m and does that make it easier to implement stuff like this?
QLD population density is something like 2000x lower than that of Tokyo…
Our public transport systems are so bad.
The Brisbane airport rail connection runs about half as many train services as the Perth airport, which seems about half the amount of travellers each year as Brisbane airport. It’s crazy, double the fare burden, half the patronage, and stuck in a monopoly contract until 2036.
Don’t even get me started on the stupid busways, gimped light rails, the new “metro” and the endless amount poured into the motorways that they have been widening one lane at a time for 3 decades…
Really? It’s always felt to me like it was app availability — for all the efforts, the app marketplace was a fraction of a fraction of the competitions’, and much like the network effects in social media, if you can’t catch up quickly, it can be almost impossible to ever do so. Haemorrhaging billions per quarter takes a strong stomach and a long vision, one that’s likely to put any executive’s tenure at risk. Nevertheless, it interesting to think what things might’ve looked like had Microsoft persisted another decade.
