Dan Seifert

Former Verge reporter Sam Byford has a lengthy rebuttal in his Multicore newsletter to the criticisms of Leica partnering with Xiaomi that popped up recently.

Sam has actually tested and used many of the Xiaomi phones (along with countless other devices from Chinese OEMs that never come to the states) and can state unequivocally that they are good products with excellent cameras. Beyond that, he notes that it makes sense for Leica, which has never been shy with licensing its brand all over the place, to want its brand in front of millions of aspirational customers.

Sam goes deeper into the history of why Chinese smartphone software looks and works the way it does, too. It’s a good read and smart perspective that we don’t always see in Western coverage.

I’ve been critical of Apple’s new base-model 14-inch MacBook Pro, which comes with just 8GB of RAM for a starting price of $1,599. Despite Apple Silicon’s excellent performance and the fact that Apple’s unified memory is faster than traditional RAM, working memory is still working memory and more is better, especially if you use a lot of apps or browser tabs.

Jason Koebler at 404 Media agrees and points out that relying on swap, which shifts data to the SSD when RAM is full, also shortens the life span of your computer, making it an environmental issue on top of a bad user experience. We should expect more from our expensive laptops.

If you’ve been speccing out a new MacBook Pro this week and have poked around Apple’s configuration tool, you might have noticed that the options for the M3 Pro and M3 Max chips are... kinda weird. Memory is limited to certain configs, you can’t get the best CPU without also springing for the best GPU, and so on.

Quinn Nelson at Snazzy Labs has a compelling theory why: it’s due to the process node Apple is required to use for the 3nm chips TSMC is building and the necessary binning that results. It’s a good watch.

Dan Seifert runs down the news from Monday night’s Scary Fast primetime product event, covering what’s new about these updates to the MacBook Pro and iMac lineup and who should be the most interested in an upgrade. (Anyone who needs that Space Black exterior or someone who is replacing an Apple machine with an Intel processor or the first-gen M1 chip.)

Apple’s pre-event music can often be described as Banana Republic-core, but tonight’s event has a slightly different mood. There was some monk-like chanting going on when I started the stream, and now it’s a song called “Dark,” by Goldie, James Davidson, and Subjective.

There’s a Dunkin’ themed gaming PC out there. It better run on Dunkin’.

Never change, DragonForce.

(And despite numerous different lineups, I’m glad to see they haven’t!)

Thanks, Jony.