From a company that claim themselves as defender of Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right (when they see fit, i.e let's ignore China).
This is from Victoria Song, but given The Verge still published it I am going to give them some credit as well. Strange as Apple's PR machine doesn't seems to be working. But you can also pick up all the other media who had Apple's PR influence.
And for those who still dont know, you should read The Submarine from Paul Graham
A post mortem would be fun for me as software developer, but is ultimately of limited value to me or lay people because the cause is already communicated.
I understand that the subject of the issue, it being photos, might be a bit touchy, but the mechanics and the nature of the bug is nothing special and anyone who moved past their “Hello, world” phase will immediately understand the kind of bug that was in play here.
Photos are stored “in” a photo library.
On Apple systems the photo library is just a package (i.e., essentially a folder) and in it is an SQL database that keeps track of photos and their attributes based on a GUID in some 70 odd tables.
The photos and videos themselves are stored in folders within that package (i.e., the file system). But it is ultimately the SQL database that is deemed authoritative and that decides what you see in the Photos app.
Different daemons and chron jobs use the database to sync photos to and from the cloud and to clean up photos when marked for deletion.
All it takes for this to occur is for a photo to be marked as deleted, without it actually being deleted in the underlying folder, for it to seem deleted.
And all it takes for it to show back up is for 17.5 to index through the folders and based on what found “repair” the database.
The database also gets changed from time to time, so it could also simply be a new way of keeping track of deleted photos and in the process of migrating to the new database version taking a conservative approach and assuming that photos that are still present to be wrongly marked as deleted.
It’s always better to restore and let the user decide than to make destructive assumptions.
After this process resurfaces photos then they get synced with iCloud, just like any other photo.
The implication that this doesn’t explain the resurfacing of old photos from years ago and many devices ago is rather weird.
Most people don’t start fresh when they get a new Apple device and instead transfer data over or restore form a backup, putting in place the corrupted database. To say nothing of the database file being synchronized across devices via iCloud.
In fact, that only makes the corrupted database explanation more likely.
In the earlier days of iOS, Apple was still finding its way on how to effectively manage the library, making some significant overhauls in addition to overhauls to switch from Photo Stream to iCloud Photo Library.
So it’s not unlikely it was during that period this issue snuck into the database.
Like I said, it’s unfortunate that it affects photos, but otherwise not a shocking bug by any means and the solution to include orphaned photos back into the library as opposed to destructively deleting them is good practice.
The only thing that might’ve been better is if the user was provided with a prompt informing them of the find and perhaps asking them to make a choice.
It’s clear however that they didn’t think it would be an issue that would affect many users and using scary technical words like “corrupted” go against the kind of language and UX Apple tries to stick to.
A miscalculation perhaps, but hardly worthy of the drama that it’s being milked for.
> goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC
I know it’s en vogue to hate on Apple and make them out to be this big evil corporation, but you’re naming it sound as if they’ve been jerking off while sitting on TSMC’s capacity just to fuck with the competition and purely to make it impossible to compete, when in reality they’ve continued to make exponential improvements on their silicon platform.
> making Apple look good on benchmarks for 12-18 months or so
What are you on about? They’ve essentially been in a league of their own since the M1, especially if you take into consideration the power envelope and how performance is available with just passive cooling.
There isn’t really anything like it.
Even the salty argument of Apple hogging TMSC nodes just crumbles apart if you give more than a second of thought.
For starters, yes, sure Apple is great at managing their logistics and supply chain, which is why, when Cook was in charge of that, it impressed Jobs so much and it proved to be so essential to Apple’s success, that Jobs decided to hand pick Cook as his successor. I don’t see how that is a useful argument against Apple, moral or otherwise.
Nothing is stopping competitors from optimizing their process to the point where they can call TSMC and offer to buy their capacity for the next year or two. To say nothing of the efforts made outside of TSMC like Samsung GAAFET 3nm and MBCFET 2nm process and whatever Intel is dicking around with on their 2nm process.
More importantly though, it’s silly to make it seem as if that’s the only reason for the fruits of Apple’s labor.
Take AMD’s HX 370 for example, released last year, courtesy of TSMC’s N4P process. It still struggled to provide a PPA similar to the M1 Pro, which wasn’t only 3 years older at the time, it was a product of TSMC’s older N5 process.
Clearly having access to newer TSMC nodes isn’t a guaranteed win.
> and couldn't care less about performance
You’ve got it mixed up. Apple has never cared about raw specs, but they always have and always will care about performance.
If you’re inclined to read their every move through the big bad filter then you might say they never cared about raw performance because they’ve always been able to get more out of less and this way they could charge high spec prices without the high spec cost (and without, historically, advertising specs), and it clearly worked out for them.
Their stuff is being sold as if it’s given away for free, in doing so they’ve proven that the average user couldn’t give two fucks about bigger numbers as long as it works well, and their competitors have to pack their phones and other devices with higher specs and cooling solutions like vapor chambers (something Apple has managed to avoid so far) to keep up.
In a way they’ve always had to care more about performance than their competitors because they’ve mostly worked with hardware that’s “lesser” on paper to maximize their margins.
> to offer, a sense of novelty, excitement, taste
I don’t know about you but single-handedly making x86_64 look like an ancient joke with something that would’ve been considered a silly mobile processor 10 years ago is quite novel and exiting. If nothing else it lit a fire under Intel, even if they’ve seemed to have decided to let themselves be turned into a well done steak.
This was essentially what Intel had in mind with their Atom series for netbooks back in the day and Intel never managed to crack the code.
I remember being amazed when I received my developer transition kit, running macOS on an A12Z like it was nothing.
Even now, if I want to be more comfortable and do some coding or video editing work on the couch I can use my off-the-shelve base model M3 MacBook Air to do most of what I can on my M1 Max, that’s quite the leap in performance in such a short time.
There’s no accounting for taste or course and what I like might not be to your liking, and there is plenty about Apple that deserve legitimate criticism, so I don’t understand the need to make something out of nothing in this instance.