I believe the author in the article just enjoys pain:
"Some of the happiest moments I remember are from walking home after a new 20-rep squat record way back in the days. Walking up stairs was like being repeatedly stabbed with a blunt and rusty butterknife. But it was still pure bliss."
Also, he seems to lack the usual mentality:
"I hate to bust your bubble lil’ buddy, but women don’t give a shit beyond a guy looking reasonably fit. Lower than 10-12% body fat won’t make an ounce of a difference. If women is your main motivation for dieting, don’t bother getting shredded."
My guess would be that this guy always wanted to be a cinema-style military drill instructor. And now he's doing just that as a freelance fitness coach: "I work as a nutritional consultant [..] and personal trainer."
People on the outside generally think that the main motivation for lifting is about women but from inside the community it's an often joked about fact of life that guys are much more likely to appreciate your physique than girls.
Many years ago, the National Lampoon guys brought out some magazine parodies. I think that it was the Newsweek take off that recast the Soloflex ad as Cruciflex, with the motto: No pain, no gain. But then you discovered it was the pain you really wanted.
I wonder if it's possible for app devs to use Exclaves. The thing that irks me about Apple is that they invent this new amazing internal stuff but then completely wall it off from devs, leaving everyone else (banking apps, wallets, secure messaging, etc.) to continue running in unsecured user space.
They don't do that. Apple userspace has continually got more secure too.
One simple example: recent versions of macOS run all apps inside a sandbox, even those that don't opt in. One thing the sandbox blocks is apps modifying each others files, which up until then had been a major weakness of the security system (signatures of a bundle were checked at first-run, but not on every execution).
My understanding is no with the current design - exclaves are built into the overall OS and started as part of the boot process, so they are relatively static. I suspect these components have static relationships for security reasons.
They are also kernel-to-kernel currently, so third party support would likely be limited to implementing things like secure device drivers. However, Apple has been trying to push third party drivers to user space, not to the hypervisor. Based on that migration happening in parallel with this development, I do not suspect they plan to pivot and have third party driver developers use exclaves.
It is pretty common for Apple to do significantly more stabilization of kernel-imposed platform features like this internally before exposing to third parties (see also pointer authentication a la arm64e).
Just to clarify. There is an important difference between unified memory, meaning accessible by both CPU and GPU, and regular RAM that is only accessible by CPU.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, unified memory has existed long before Apple released the M1 CPU, and in fact many Intel processors that Apple used before supported it (though the Mac pros that supported 1.5TB of RAM did not, as they did not have integrated graphics).
The presence of unified memory does not necessarily make a system better. It’s a trade off: the M-series systems have high memory bandwidth thanks to the large number of memory channels, and the integrated GPUs are faster than most others. But you can’t swap in a faster GPU, and when using large LLMs even a Mac Studio is quite slow compared to using discrete GPUs.
Western companies operating outside China are often forced to agree with China's censorship requirements too. Look up the "great cannon" on wikipedia. Many such examples.
To show them that their battery life could go from 2.5 hours to 8 or more, perhaps. That was the Mac experience that customers weren't asking for yet "wowed" them when it came.
they definitely were asking for longer battery life and cooling systems less noisy than a fighter jet, but the supply side of the market was a desert filled with minefields and duds until the M1.
