nier

This is not an emulation but a recreation, mostly from screenshots. You can see as soon as it’s entering true interactive territory that the UI is off, like in the calculator. Actually, it hits you right when you open it, because iPhone OS never had a percentage display when booting up.

From the article:

«According to a lawsuit filed Friday, Liu departed with three things: a company-issued MacBook he never returned, a close relationship with an Apple employee who continued sharing internal information, and, most significantly, knowledge of a software bug that gave him ongoing access to internal file servers.

“LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny,” Liu wrote to his former Apple colleague, Alyssa Peng. He then, Apple alleges, used that access to download presentations, hardware designs, manufacturing details and testing procedures — all while already working at OpenAI.»

You can really get into this article and enjoy it. The text includes lots of interesting source mentions without resorting to footnotes. The red flags I see are a nod to a little-known German chip design startup at the very end, and the fact that this is the author’s very first blog post. Coincidentally, the owner of the website is also from Germany, and their university is just about an hour’s drive from the startup’s headquarters.

Excerpt:

«Which, to me, is the actual answer to this post’s title question. The M1 did not feel huge because of any single trick. It felt huge because Apple moved every lever at once: the widest core in the industry, on the best process node in the industry, with memory in the package, efficiency cores doing the housekeeping, an OS scheduler that knows about all of it, and a translation layer with dedicated silicon support so that nobody had to wait for the ecosystem to catch up. Any single one of these would have made a nice bullet point in a keynote. Together, and only together, they made a laptop that felt like a different kind of machine. That is what ten years of building phone chips on a merciless power budget teaches you.»

Coherence, balance, taste.

Every time we tested any of the child protection features as adults the software failed basic tests. It did so ages ago with Mac OS X when we only had nieces to worry about, and more recently on macOS and iOS when we wanted to setup something for our own kids.

In a way, I’m glad that I’m being forced to sit down with my kids, set a timer, and be present and watchful. But as they grow up this model will no longer be feasible and I dread the day when after reevaluating Apple’s progress in this area, there’s still going to be unacceptable bugs.