Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

The M1 whacked a big old reset button on those restrictions, putting portable back into the power computing lexicon. And with M2, Millet says, Apple did not want to milk a few percentage points of gains out of each generation in perpetuity.

“The M2 family was really now about maintaining that leadership position by pushing, again, to the limits of technology. We don’t leave things on the table,” says Millet. “We don’t take a 20% bump and figure out how to spread it over three years…figure out how to eke out incremental gains. We take it all in one year; we just hit it really hard. That’s not what happens in the rest of the industry or historically.”

The conversation turns to gaming:

Millet also is unconvinced that the game dev universe has adapted to the unique architecture of the M-series chips quite yet, especially the unified memory pool.

“Game developers have never seen 96 gigabytes of graphics memory available to them now, on the M2 Max. I think they’re trying to get their heads around it, because the possibilities are unusual. They’re used to working in much smaller footprints of video memory. So I think that’s another place where we’re going to have an interesting opportunity to inspire developers to go beyond what they’ve been able to do before.”

So in a fit of crazy, I sidegraded to from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 this morning. Fundamentally the new OS makes my shit itch, but the changes to make it not suck too badly are undifficult.

First, buy a copy of Start is Back. It’s the best three bucks you’ll spend today. I hear that the guy who wrote this had it easy in Win8 (Microsoft only disabled the code for the start menu, and all he had to do was re-enable it), but for Win 8.1 the Redmond Hive Mind actually removed the code, and the SiB author had to write his own version. He did a great job and deserves to get paid for it (while certain PMs and product design folks at Microsoft . . . don’t). It’s a shame you have to spend money to unbreak something, but frankly I think this is how it’s going to be with Microsoft for a while; they have to have time to detox the promotion-hungry nutjobs out of their review system.

Install Aero 8.1 (download here). All of the available Win8 themes make my eyes bleed. Just what the actual fuck is going on at Microsoft, that suddenly every single app and tool they ship looks like a PM with square plasticky glasses poisoned everyone with an ounce of design sense? This theme brings back relatively pleasant desktop backgrounds upon which it is possible to — shock! — see icons. Also, it doesn’t shout to anyone who merely glances at your desktop “Hey, I was a moron and installed Windows 8.1″. Um, yeah.

Related: Apply the usual sanity edits to Visual Studio 2013. Apparently the PM responsible for the uppercase menus in VS 2012 still hasn’t been dry-gulched [broad and unsubtle hint to the VS team here]. I also urge you to look for additional crazy in the editor settings (the defaultness of rearranging my identifier and parenthesis spacing is, um, irritating, but there’s worse hidden in there and you should definitely look). Also, if you have to write an MSDN article on it, and said article is linked to by about half the developers who run your tool, just maybe you should make it a checkbox item somewhere? Is someone afraid of getting fired?

All of these fixes point to a fundamental thing about Microsoft, namely that it seems to be impossible to call out bullshit there. bullshit. Whatever feedback mechanisms exist there are borken. The low-level folks seem to have their act together, but above the kernel things have gone off the rails. It makes sense, in a way: If you fuck up a file system or a scheduler then big and spendy customers will start looking elsewhere. Screw up a UI and it’s just unwashed gorks who didn’t even go to a design school in Paris who are complaining, and what do they know? “You’re so smart, you tell me what color the pointy thing you move around the screen should be.” Touch screens on PCs? I knew how that was going to turn out the moment they announced it. out.

I have no idea how many Derp Points someone had to spend in order to ship the Metro UI on Server 2012. That, dear children, is a WTF. Amazing work. Good job. Please fall on this red pointy thing.

—-

Usual soapbox about the need to install apps all over again. This was my morning. Installers are bullshit. Installers are a remnant of a world where 14.4K modems were high tech and everything came on seven floppy disks. Why can’t we just unzip a file into a directory, have the system find the stupid icons and be done with it? This worked on a Mac in 1984 (and probably before that on a Lisa, if anyone cared) and there’s no reason it can’t work today.

Delete your registry entries, throw off your chains, unhinge your blinders and make it tons easier to flip whole system setups onto new hardware: The entire PC industry will thank you, and since users will be able to upgrade systems more easilyyou’ll also get more money, which is more sincere. Also, you won’t have to trick people into buying new operating systems with UIs designed by someone who went to design college for a semester, only it was a cheap college in the wrong Paris (Mississippi) and all they had were six colors labeled in all-caps RED, BLUE, GREEN, REDDER, EVEN GREENER and WTF IS THIS COLOR I DON’T EVEN KNOW BUT IT’S THE SAME COLOR AS MY SQUARE GLASSES AND WHO EVEN NEEDS LOWERCASE ANYWAY.

I’m gonna go use a Mac for a little while. See you in a while.

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