/Apple

The Apple GPU And The Impossible Bug

- Alyssa Rosenzweig tl;dr: Alyssa dives into the rabbit hole uncovered by reverse-engineering AGX to build open source graphics drivers. "The driver fails to render large amounts of geometry. Spinning a cube is fine, low polygon geometry is okay, but detailed models won’t render. Instead, the GPU renders only part of the model and then faults."

featured in #317


Always-on Processor Magic: How Find My works While iPhone Is Powered Off

tl;dr: A look into Apple's Always-on Processor (AOP). "The AOP has a special role. It connects to almost every other chip in the iPhone. For some chips, it only does basic tasks like power management, and for other chips, it acts as a transparent proxy that wakes up iOS when needed."

featured in #261


Mental Health Impacts Of A Big Tech Job

- Jake Preston tl;dr: "I got to a point where I needed to leave and focus on myself." Jacob talks about the toxic work culture during his time at Apple and recounts a story where work was valued over employee's mental health. Much of this was exacerbated due to the fact that he could never switch off from work while at home.

featured in #254


An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

tl;dr: "While child exploitation is a serious problem, and while efforts to combat it are almost unquestionably well-intentioned, Apple's proposal introduces a backdoor that threatens to undermine fundamental privacy protections for all users of Apple products."

featured in #244


Dissecting The Apple M1 GPU, Part I

- Alyssa Rosenzweig tl;dr: "A few weeks ago, I purchased a Mac Mini with an M1 GPU as a development target to study the instruction set and command stream, to understand the GPU’s architecture at a level not previously publicly understood."

featured in #221


The End Of OS X

- Ben Thompson tl;dr: The next version of macOS is 11.0, which "feels more like a son of iOS" than a sibling to it's predecessor. Ben hypes that this could be a shift to leverage iPhone customers to the Mac Apple store.

featured in #188


Building The NPR MacOS App, Part 1

- Connor Montgomery tl;dr: 2-part series where Connor guides us on how to build a menubar macOS app that streams NPR stations.

featured in #187