Linked List: January 6, 2022

Thursday, 6 January 2022

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

Intel today unveiled new 12th-generation Core processors suitable for laptops, and as part of the announcement, it claimed that the new Core i9 is not only faster than Apple’s M1 Max chip in the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but is the fastest mobile processor ever.

The new Core i9 features a 14-core CPU with six performance cores and eight efficiency cores, while the 10-core M1 Max chip has eight performance cores and two efficiency cores. The high-end Intel chip has a max Turbo Boost frequency of 5.0GHz, but power draw can reach up to 115 watts, which is significantly more power than the M1 Max chip ever uses and not ideal for the thermal envelope of devices like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.

Intel shared a very basic performance vs. power chart as part of its marketing, with fine print indicating that performance was measured based on compiling binaries with the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suite.

If you look at the chart, the Core i9 may well be faster, but it uses way more power than the M1 Max. You could never fit that chip in a design like the new MacBook Pros. This is a chip for big heavy laptops with big loud fans. I’m sure some people like that tradeoff, but folks at Apple will look at these chips and think “Yeah, this is exactly why we divorced Intel.”

Lenovo’s Upcoming ThinkBook Plus Gen 3: A Large Laptop With an Integrated Tablet ★

Shipping in May, starting at $1,400, the ThinkBook Plus Gen has a 17-inch display with a widescreen 21:10 aspect ratio, and an iPad Mini-sized color touchscreen to the right of the keyboard (which keyboard is thus way off-center). Kinda wild, definitely original.

Dell’s Upcoming XPS 13 Plus ★

Monica Chin, writing for The Verge:

First, Dell got rid of the function row. It’s been replaced with what the company is calling a “capacitive touch function row,” which refers to little LED buttons on a flat bar that you can tap to fiddle with things like brightness and volume. Dell insists that this is not a touch bar (but it is, I mean, a bar that you touch to toggle things, so anyone else whose brain immediately jumped to that comparison, you are valid, and I see you), and to that point, they have a fixed set of functions like real function keys. The touch keys were responsive in my brief testing time, and I was never worried about accidentally bumping them like I always am with the Touch Bar on older MacBook Pros.

They’re capacitive, like the Touch Bar, but the buttons are set in hardware.

Another thing you’ll probably notice: there’s no delineated trackpad beneath the keyboard. Dell has outfitted the XPS 13 with what it calls a “haptic ForcePad.” As is the case with MacBook touchpads, this one doesn’t physically depress when you click; it just reproduces the sensation of depressing. I imagine there might be some learning curve to figuring out where you can and can’t click, though Dell thinks muscle memory will make that a non-issue.

This non-delineated trackpad makes for a very clean look, but I feel like I want to know where the edges of the trackpad are. The edge-to-edge keyboard looks cool, too, and brings to (my) mind the 12-inch PowerBook G4 from 2004 — one of the best-looking laptops ever. (The speakers on the Dell XPS 13 Plus are under the keyboard.)

Notably missing? A headphone jack.

The ‘Sindogs’ Excel Bug ★

Steven Sinofsky, in a fascinating post on software reliability on his Hardcore Software blog/newsletter:

I created many bugs on my own before Microsoft and learned how to find bugs planted in Microsoft code during my training in Apps Development College (ADC), but I learned about my first commercial bug during my first summer at Microsoft. DanN my lead in ADC shared (JonDe refreshed my memory of the specifics) the story of the infamous “Sindogs” bug in Excel 2.0, which was the first Windows version that shipped with Windows 2.0 about 18 months before I arrived. The bug manifested itself when an important part of Windows, a plain text file with all the system settings, was corrupted — in the file where it was supposed to say “[Windows]” it somehow was changed to “[Sindogs].” Neither the word Sindogs appeared in any code nor did any code write that string, so its appearance was rather mysterious. The bug took days to materialize and was only discovered after Excel testers ran an automated test to create and print charts over and over, for many hours. Eventually, through a significant amount of sleuthing, the team narrowed it down to a bug in drawing code in Windows, which was called when adding arrows to charts then printing them on old-school dot-matrix printers. There was a memory corruption, which changed the contents of the settings file that was in memory before it was saved to the disk. Stories were told about it for years. The Excel team even renamed their file server after the bug, and through Office 97 we connected to the server “\\SINDOGS\REL” (REL was short for release) for release builds of Excel.

Imagine tracking down a crazy bug after the product was in market and trying to figure out what caused it, then multiplying that by all the possible printers, video cards, and programs involved. Looking back, it was an engineering marvel that anything worked at all. In moments of frustration, or desperation, that is what we told ourselves.