Linked List: October 30, 2024

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

Apple Unveils New M4 MacBook Pro Lineup, Including, Hallelujah, a Nano-Texture Display Option ★

Apple Newsroom:

Now available in space black and silver finishes, the 14-inch MacBook Pro includes the blazing-fast performance of M4 and three Thunderbolt 4 ports, starting with 16GB of memory, all at just $1,599. The 14- and 16-inch models with M4 Pro and M4 Max offer Thunderbolt 5 for faster transfer speeds and advanced connectivity. All models include a Liquid Retina XDR display that gets even better with an all-new nano-texture display option and up to 1000 nits of brightness for SDR content, an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, along with up to 24 hours of battery life, the longest ever in a Mac.

The base model, with the regular M4 chip, is less of a not-so-pro forgotten stepchild now. It gets a third Thunderbolt port, and is available in the same space black as the M4 Pro and Max models — last year the dark version of the plain M3 MacBook Pro was boring space gray.

After the M4 iMacs were announced Monday, my fingers were crossed for a nano-texture MacBook Pro display, and I was rewarded. The option costs just $150 on both the 14- and 16-inch models. Can’t wait to see it in person. Can we get a nano-texture display option for iPhones next year too? Matte’s where it’s at, baby.

See Also: Apple’s 15-minute mini-keynote, with a 2-minute gag at the end.

Russian Court Hits Google With a Fine Larger Than the World’s GDP ★

Joshua Nelken-Zitser, Business Insider:

A legal dispute between Google and Russia over suspended YouTube accounts has led to a fine so large that it exceeds all the money on Earth. Ivan Morozov, a Moscow-based lawyer, told the state-run TASS newswire that a Russian court ordered the tech giant to restore Russian media accounts on YouTube, a Google-owned company.

He said that Google’s failure to do so has resulted in a fine that had been regularly doubling for years. There is no cap on the total, the lawyer said. Morozov, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, said that the cumulative amount has now reached 2 undecillion rubles — an almost unfathomable figure.

At the current exchange rate, the fine is equivalent to about $20.6 decillion. A decillion is a figure followed by 33 zeros — which, in this case, puts the fine at $20,604,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

This certainly makes the EU’s fines based on a percentage of companies’ global revenue seem fair and reasonable.

Sidenote of the Week: All MacBook Air Models Now Start With 16 GB RAM ★

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple today in its new MacBook Pro press release announced that the MacBook Air lineup now starts with 16GB of RAM, up from 8GB previously. This change applies to the 13-inch model with the M2 chip, the 13-inch model with the M3 chip, and the 15-inch model with the M3 chip. In the U.S., the MacBook Air lineup continues to start at $999, so there is no price increase associated with the boost in RAM.

We all know Apple Intelligence has steep memory requirements, which is one factor why it’s only available on iOS devices with 8 GB or more of RAM. But 8 GB of RAM on a Mac is, practically speaking, less than 8 GB of RAM on an iPhone or iPad, because of the profound differences in how memory is managed and application life cycles work on MacOS. On MacOS, every app that looks like it’s running is actually running. And there’s no hard limit on how many apps you can run. Even if your Mac runs out of actual memory, MacOS will use swap files to handle the overflow. iOS doesn’t work that way. iOS freezes apps in the background, freeing up memory — and while M-series-based iPads do support a limited form of virtual memory swap, A-series-based iOS devices (including all iPhones) do not.

Even taking Apple Intelligence out of the equation, Apple’s MacBook lineup was years overdue for a bump in base RAM. A few months ago David Schaub created a graph showing the base RAM of Apple laptops on a logarithmic scale since 1999. Today marks only the second time in the Tim Cook era that base Mac RAM went up. (Schaub made another graph for Mac desktops that goes all the way back to 1984, and the change in slope during the Cook era is even more striking on that chart.) Base RAM on Macs has been stuck at 8 GB since 2017. Even if you count the architecture transition from Intel x86 to Apple Silicon as a de facto bump in base memory — which is arguably fair, given the performance characteristics of an 8 GB Apple Silicon Mac compared to an 8 GB Intel Mac — Macs were still grossly overdue for a bump in base memory.

So I’m not surprised that Apple took this opportunity to double base RAM in the M3 MacBook Air models. I am quite surprised, though, that they went as far as to double the base RAM even in the entry-level $999 M2 MacBook Air. Finally.

Update, 31 October: There’s always an exception to prove a rule.