Small / economy car deathwatch: we've passed "peak econobox" again

[ME_Andy]

The annoying thing about Mac is, they solder the RAM to the board. No upgrades.

[freebeard]

That's only annoying because Apple charges more for upgraded RAM than third parties.

What bothers me is the CSAM back door.

arstechnica.com: 4-year campaign backdoored iPhones using possibly the most advanced exploit ever

Chief among the discoveries: the unknown attackers were able to achieve an unprecedented level of access by exploiting a vulnerability in an undocumented hardware feature that few if anyone outside of Apple and chip suppliers such as ARM Holdings knew of.

“The exploit's sophistication and the feature's obscurity suggest the attackers had advanced technical capabilities,” Kaspersky researcher Boris Larin wrote in an email. “Our analysis hasn't revealed how they became aware of this feature, but we're exploring all possibilities, including accidental disclosure in past firmware or source code releases. They may also have stumbled upon it through hardware reverse engineering.”

Four zero-days exploited for years
Other questions remain unanswered, wrote Larin, even after about 12 months of intensive investigation. Besides how the attackers learned of the hardware feature, the researchers still don’t know what, precisely, its purpose is. Also unknown is if the feature is a native part of the iPhone or enabled by a third-party hardware component such as ARM’s CoreSight

The mass backdooring campaign, which according to Russian officials also infected the iPhones of thousands of people working inside diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia, according to Russian government officials, came to light in June. Over a span of at least four years, Kaspersky said, the infections were delivered in iMessage texts that installed malware through a complex exploit chain without requiring the receiver to take any action.
With that, the devices were infected with full-featured spyware that, among other things, transmitted microphone recordings, photos, geolocation, and other sensitive data to attacker-controlled servers. Although infections didn’t survive a reboot, the unknown attackers kept their campaign alive simply by sending devices a new malicious iMessage text shortly after devices were restarted.

A fresh infusion of details disclosed Wednesday said that “Triangulation”—the name Kaspersky gave to both the malware and the campaign that installed it—exploited four critical zero-day vulnerabilities, meaning serious programming flaws that were known to the attackers before they were known to Apple. The company has since patched all four of the vulnerabilities...

Besides affecting iPhones, these critical zero-days and the secret hardware function resided in Macs, iPods, iPads, Apple TVs, and Apple Watches. What’s more, the exploits Kaspersky recovered were intentionally developed to work on those devices as well. Apple has patched those platforms as well. Apple declined to comment for this article.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by ME_Andy

The annoying thing about Mac is, they solder the RAM to the board. No upgrades.

"IBM clone" laptops are doing that these days, too, even on higher end units.

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by ME_Andy

The annoying thing about Mac is, they solder the RAM to the board. No upgrades.

True. Which may be why my friend got the 64GB version. Nothing is upgradable, so you have to trade in the whole device if you need any sort of upgrade. But more than $4,000 on an a computer just to keep a couple spreadsheets going seems rediculous.

I feel I went overkill on my $400 PC build earlier this year with 8GB (later upgraded to 16) Core i5 12th gen (will upgrade to 13th when and if used 13th gen processors become cheap) and 2TB of storage (twice what my Mac friend has), that replaced my 12-year-old 2011 PC, and I do way more processor intensive things than that $4,200 Mac friend for a tenth the cost!

[freebeard]

...and I do way more processor intensive things than that $4,200 Mac friend for a tenth the cost!

How much power does it consume? This is Ecomodder after all.

What processor intensive things? If it's 3D rendering, there're software solutions:

huggingface.co: Introduction to 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting is a rasterization technique described in 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering that allows real-time rendering of photorealistic scenes learned from small samples of images. This article will break down how it works and what it means for the future of graphics.

This has only been around since 202308. Much more efficient than hi-poly meshes.

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by freebeard

How much power does it consume? This is Ecomodder after all.

Barely none. But so does the Mac that's half the price.

That's one good reason to get a Mac. They have about the best performance per watt of any personal computer out there. That's a great reason to get a Mac.

But their Pro versions aren't that much different than their non-Pro versions. For a while, the only difference between a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro was the Pro had cooling fans and cost a lot more. The cooling fans are not needed by most users.

Originally Posted by freebeard

What processor intensive things? If it's 3D rendering, there're software solutions:

While you need software for video editing and rendering, you also need the hardware to do it. It all depends on what you're doing, but computers are getting to the point that only in certain things do you need that extra umph, which is the point. 3D gaming and very complex video rendering and processing requires a lot of processing power, either CPU or GPU or both. Same with Crypto mining, although for non-productive reasons. There are also complex scientific equations that require a lot of processing power.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by JSH

Many if not most car buyers would rather spend their dollar to buy a larger and fancier used car instead of a new subcompact.

Subcompacts are only favored in other markets due to either sky-high fuel costs or some political circumstance favoring them, such as the "people's car" tax bracket for cars with 1.0L engines in my country, even though turbocharged 1.0L engines are being fitted into cars and SUVs that don't match the criteria of what a "people's car" used to be when I was a kid.

Not to mention the penny-pinchers who still buy a subcompact here as they see a car mostly as an appliance, instead of a fancy ego-hauler, yet SUVs became more common in recent years, and even a trucklet (Fiat Strada) had been the best-seller for at least 2 or 3 years recently.

[Isaac Zachary]

The Chevy Malibu is on the chopping block too.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

The Chevy Malibu is on the chopping block too.

Not just on the block - confirmed dead in November 2024. GM is retooling Fairfax Assembly to make the next gen Bolt EV.

[Isaac Zachary]

There's a rumor that GM is going to revive the Pontiac brand. There's an ad in Car and Driver about the brand. The weird thing is it looks like it could be just a joke, although why have a joke about bringing back the Pontiac brand?

Would a commuter, 40mpg or so near future Pontiac Fierro be at all possible??? My guess is that if they do bring Pontiac back, it'll be saddly made up of expensive $40,000+ gas guzzlers and no affordable Fierros.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FVBKs7cDGY