I'm also trying to understand what OASIS was really supposed to do that was going to.... uh... matter? It's a video chat app where you can be someone else in the video. Ok, that's cool but I'm failing to see how this is groundbreaking.
> Her: "Wait, haven't we banned you from the App Store? Why haven't we killed your company already?"
> Me: "We... haven't exactly told anyone at Apple about this."
> Her: "You're a mosquito. Apple will just stomp on you and you will not exist."
Told Apple what? That they have a bug? Why would they ban you from the app store? Why would someone say "You're a mosquito. Apple will just stomp on you and you will not exist.", it makes zero sense to me given the context laid out here.
Lastly, did Apple fix the problem? They made changes but we won't know anything for sure until next Friday at the very earliest.
Seems like a lot of name dropping (why should I care about a big name that didn't invest in you?) and big numbers ($10B, never explained) for a failed startup.
> You can be right about the future and still fail in the present.
Not clear at all what OASIS was "right" about really.
> Apple's A19 Pro isn't just a chip announcement. It's a confession. An admission. A vindication.
Ok, sure. If you say so.
Lastly, what were you "right" about? That iPhones can get hot?
Just none of this makes any sense or seems very interesting IMHO.
Apple adopted a new cooling technique on their highest end device to differentiate and give spec sheet chasers something to be hyped about. It should help reduce throttling for the very odd event where someone is running a mobile device at 100% continuously (which is actually super rare in normal usage). It's already in the Pixel 9 Pro, for instance, and is a new "must have". It has nothing to do with whatever app these guys were building.
The rest of the nonsense is just silly. If you are building an app for a mobile device and it pegs the CPU and GPU, you're going to have a bad time. That's the moment you realize it's time to go back to the drawing board.
We were just calling the iPhone's built-in face tracking system via the Vision Framework to animate the avatars. That's the thing that was running on GPU.
I'm telling you what I was told. It's a true story. I was there. It happened to me.
Why would I make up a detail like that?
It strikes me as troublesome that a company that found a bug could be banned from the App Store and the rep talks about it as killing the company.
Yes, all of that would be troublesome... if it were true. Given the rest of the post's content I'm leaning pretty heavily towards "made up". This whole thing reads like "Am I the Asshole" or similar subreddits which are 99% outlets for fiction writers.
It's really just a heat pipe - vapour trapped inside copper, not circulating liquid to a radiator.
“at 60fps in HD resolution. In real-time. On iPhone. In 2021.”
“5ms latency”
“512 x 512 pixel resolution per video”
I don’t mean to be rude but I’m having trouble convincing myself this is a real story.
It also seems like one of those self-aggrandizing things that tries to spin everything as a reaction to themselves, instead of just technology progressing. No, vapour chamber cooling isn't some grand admission, it's something that a variety of makers have been adopting to reduce throttling as a spec-sheet item of their top end devices. It isn't all about you.
And given that the base 17 doesn't have VCC, I guess Apple isn't "admitting" it at all, no?
And the CoreML v MLX nonsense at the end is entirely nonsensical and technically ignorant. Like, wow.
No one should learn anything from this piece. The author might know what they're talking about (though I am doubtful), but this pieces was "how to make an Apple event about ourselves" and it's pretty ridiculous.
It will be fun to see how hot the iPhone Air gets since it has the same chip as the 17 Pro (w/ one fewer GPU core), but a less thermally conductive metal and no vapor chamber.
In the real world I doubt anyone will ever notice the difference, VCC or not. VCC only will materially affect usage when someone is doing an activity that will hit throttling, which is actually extraordinarily rare in normal use, and usually only comes into play in benchmarking. The overwhelming majority of time we peg those cores for a tiny amount of time and get a quick Animoji or text-extraction from an image, and so on. Even the "AI" usage on a mobile device is extremely peaky.
The whole thing is written in a bombastic storytelling style that is typical of LinkedIn threads. If this is entertaining to you, this is the link for you since it has actual image examples of their model output varying between platforms.
E.g. maybe they actually said some variation of "your app is bricking iPhones? how did you get through app store review..." and the author interpreted it as "squashing his company like a bug".
"Off-the-books" meetings are just friend-based connections. I got a bug in the Linux nvidia driver fixed that was affecting me by just hitting up an old friend. I could write that story as him saying "Keep this top-secret" if I wanted because that's just fun storywriting.
Unlike Apple's formal "developer evangelist" and several others I contacted, the guy actually took the time to talk to us, and I was/am grateful for that. He's a cog in a very large corporate machine. Apple is Apple. He's not the CEO. He was doing his job and did me a favor. I am grateful to him.
But he was pretty professional in the way he went about it, “no names, no company”. And “You found a security bug! Show me. But you won’t get credit”
