Spiria Tech Recap - № 376 - Mac Pro, Game Porting Toolkit, costly APIs, Zoom IQ, and Windows widgets

Mac Intel’s final bow

Mac Pro M2 Ultra, rack-mounted version. © Apple.

There are no longer any Intel computers in Apple’s catalog, with the replacement of the Xeon CPU-based Mac Pro by a model equipped with an Apple chip. It will have taken the company 3 years to complete the transition of the entire Mac range to its own ARM SoCs. The new Mac Pro still sports the characteristic “cheese grater” design, but under the hood, an all-new M2 Ultra SoC features a 24-core CPU, a GPU with up to 76 cores, and as much as 192GB of unified memory. The M2 Ultra actually merges two M2 Max linked by an UltraFusion bridge, with more than 2.5TB/s of interprocessor bandwidth.

The new Mac Pro has eight Thunderbolt-4 ports (six on the back and two on top), six PCI Express Gen 4 slots, and a Gen 3 that's already taken up by an I/O card that supports some rear ports: two HDMI, two USB-A and a 3.5 mm audio headphone jack. The Mac Pro is available in either tower or rack versions, with a price tag starting at CAD 9,000. The maximum set-up, with its 76-core GPU, 192GB of unified memory, 8TB of storage, Magic Mouse, and Trackpad, along with a set of the talk-of-the-town $500 wheels, will run you CAD 15,678.

If, like most people, you don’t need the PCI Express Gen 4 slots, you might consider the new Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra for a mere CAD 5,500, or its top-of-the-line cousin (76-core GPU, 192GB of RAM, 8TB of storage) for CAD 4,750 more (CAD 10,250). In comparison with the Mac Pro, the possibility of installing PCI Express cards is very expensive indeed.

Mac Studio M2 Ultra. © Apple.

⇨ Ars Technica, Samuel Axon, Ron Amadeo, “This is the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro.”

⇨ Apple Newsroom, “Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple silicon to Mac Pro.”

2023-06-05

Windows-games porting made easy with Apple

Elden Ring on a MacBook Air. Credit YouTube/Andrew Tsai.

At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple announced the launch of an environment that makes it easier and faster to port Windows games to macOS. It is a toolkit not unlike Valve’s Proton project for the Steam Deck console. It uses CodeWeavers’ CrossOver code, a solution based on Wine that runs Windows games on macOS. “The new Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment to run your existing unmodified Windows game and you can use it to quickly understand the graphics feature usage and performance potential of your game when running on a Mac,” explains Aiswariya Sreenivassan, project manager at Apple. This emulator adapts Intel x86 instructions and Windows APIs on the fly. APIs related to input/output devices, networking, file system, and Direct3D get translated to the corresponding macOS APIs. The toolkit contains a Metal Shader Converter that automatically converts HLSL GPU shaders to the Metal version. Apple also introduced a game mode in macOS Sonoma (OS 14) that marshalls more hardware resources for games in progress.

It mentioned that the emulation, which detects performance issues and bugs, is really meant to evaluate games before they’re ported to macOS, but nothing’s stopping you from installing the Game Porting Toolkit to test-run the games. As a matter of fact, some users were able to run Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo IV, and many others.

⇨ YouTube, “The Mac gaming DirectX 12 Revolution is NOW!”

⇨ The Verge, Tom Warren, “Apple’s new Proton-like tool can run Windows games on a Mac.”

⇨ Tom’s Guide, Roland Moore-Colyer, “Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit could be a revolution for Mac gaming — here’s the proof.”

2023-06-07

APIs hike fees

Apollo. Credit YouTube/Christian Selig.

When Twitter’s new API fee structure broke a month ago, several software services and research projects came to a grinding halt. WordPress, for example, turned off by a USD 42,000 minimum monthly fee for the basic “automatically share to Twitter” feature, unplugged the Twitter API in its Jetpack Social plugin. Reddit is also attempting to cash in. Apollo, the most popular iOS application for interacting on Reddit, is shutting down on June 30 because the upcoming API pricing structure now makes the app unprofitable.

Apollo developer Christian Selig went into detail in his Reddit post. He would have to pay more than USD 20 million yearly to keep the app running. “Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days,” Selig wrote. “That’s a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it’s just not economically feasible. It’s much cheaper for me to simply shut down.”

It’s not that developers are against API fees, but they can’t handle such a short notice, or such a massive increase. Compare Reddit’s USD 12,000 charge for 50 million API requests to Imgur’s USD 166 for the same. Other third-party clients will probably make like Apollo, unless Reddit backpedals when it’s faced with protestations from users.

⇨ Ars Technica, Ron Amadeo, “Reddit’s new API pricing will kill off Apollo on June 30.”

2023-06-08

Zoom’s AI feature is actually useful

Zoom IQ. © Zoom Video Communications.

If you’re an AI user, you can now catch up on Zoom meetings you’ve missed. Zoom announced this feature in March, and it is finally available for a trial period for “select plan” users. Zoom IQ, the application’s AI assistant, can generate text summaries of meetings and send them to users through Zoom Team Chat or by e-mail, without recording the meeting itself. Or help yourself to a summary of the meeting’s intro if you happened to show up late. The Zoom IQ feature is available as a free trial “for a limited time only” to Zoom One subscribers (Enterprise Plus, Enterprise, Business Plus, Business, Pro) and in some Zoom subscriptions such as Enterprise Named Host, Enterprise Active Host, Zoom Meetings Enterprise, Zoom Meetings Business, and Zoom Meetings Pro. The company emphasized that users can opt out of sharing their data with Zoom and that client data will not be used to train third-party models.

It’s not clear what this feature will cost after the trial period ends, but Lacretia Taylor, spokesperson at Zoom, told The Verge that the company would announce pricing information in the coming months.

⇨ The Verge, Emma Roth, “Zoom can now give you AI summaries of the meetings you’ve missed.”

2023-06-05

Helpful Windows 11 widgets

Credit Microsoft/Tom Warren/The Verge.

The Windows Widgets feature is slated for some handy additions that will give you an overview of the CPU, GPU and memory usage, as well as Wi-Fi or Ethernet speeds. Tom Warren at The Verge notes that these features will surely be more useful than “the usual widgets or the news feeds full of junk stories from MSN.” This information is available hither and yon in the system of course, but it’ll be neat to take a quick look at these widgets using the Windows + W shortcut. If you want to try out the new Windows 11 widgets for yourself, go to the Microsoft Store and install the Dev Home Preview app. You’ll find the widgets in the Windows Widgets section (Winkey + W) and you can add them using the + button at top.

While we’re on Windows, Microsoft recently started testing its modern file explorer interface and its integrated RGB lighting controls. The updated file explorer interface features a modern home window with large file thumbnails and a carousel display that pulls up recent and favorite documents.

⇨ The Verge, Tom Warren, “Windows 11 gets some useful widgets for CPU, memory, and GPU monitoring.”

2023-05-31