In practice, most common open source software is used and contributed to by hundreds of people. So it naturally does get audited by that process.
Just working on software is not the same as actively looking for exploits. Software security auditing requires a specialised set of skills.
Open source also makes it easier for black-hat hackers to find exploits.
Hundreds of people working on something is a double-edged sword. It also makes it easy for someone to sneak in an exploit. A single-character mistake in code could cause an exploitable bug, and if you are intent on deliberately introducing such an issue it can be very hard to spot and even if caught can be explained away as an honest to god mistake.
By contrast, lots of software companies screen their employees, especially if they are working on critical code.
There's actually a third option: Microsoft knew Starfield would sell, stinker or not, because Bethesda has a very loyal fanbase that will eat up anything they put out. It didn't matter to Microsoft whether the game was good or not, they knew they'd make their money either way.
That’s just option 2 I describes, in more words. Basically, they scammed Bethesda’s loyal fans.
The audit is not for you. Closed source software is audited all the time, but the results of those audits are generally confidential. This is about finding security bugs, not deliberate backdoors.
The key with this is who do you trust. Sure, open source can be audited by everyone, but is it? You can’t audit all the code you use yourself, even if you have the skills, it’s simply too much. So you still need to trust another person or company, it really doesn’t change the equation that much.
Let me guess, you haven’t written a single line of production code in your life?
Writing code is hard, writing bug-free code is neigh impossible. To give some perspective: the seL4 kernel is a formally proven microkernel, meaning they can actually prove is conforms to it’s specification. It took 3 years to write and prove this. It comprises 8,700 lines of C code and 600 lines of assembler. 9,300 lines or code in 3 years.
It is only feasible to do this for small bits of very critical code, like a microkernel. Even NASA doesn’t write code in this way.
If you wanted to do this, a game like Super Mario Bros. would probably not even be for sale, as they would still be working on it. It would probably sell for a couple of million dollars per copy.
Commercial software has in average 1 to 5 bugs per 1000 lines of code. Very critical and well tested software (think the software controlling aircraft) has maybe as little as 1 bug per 10,000 lines (and this will cost an absolute fortune to write and test).
Games have millions of lines of code and are certainly not critical. The idea that games can be bug-free is beyond absurd. Even a low number of bugs is a ridiculous ask. Or are you saying you’re willing to pay $10,000+ for a game?
I don't buy that it was purely trust. If you're going to spend $69 billion you have to do your due diligence. You want to know what you're buying. I can imagine Bethesda not noticing they had a problem, they have been working on it for years and if you're so immersed into the development it can be hard to take a step back and take a good look at what you've made. But Microsoft was looking at it with a fresh pair of eyes. There are only 2 options: Either the Xbox division at Microsoft is completely incompetent or they knew they had a stinker and decided to sell it anyway.
When Starfield was released Bethesda was already part of Microsoft. Sure, it was mostly done but Microsoft should have realized it was a turd and either delayed the release to rebuild the game or simply cancelled it. Instead they chose to take money from their customers for a game that is clearly not worth the asking price.
There definitely are good build quality laptops out there, like the Zephyrus lineup
Sure there are. That was not my point. My point was that when you buy an x86 laptop that ticks all the boxes that a MacBook does, you pay a similar or higher price.
My own laptop is a 2022 model of zephyrus g15. It was released a few months before m2 released. The CPU is a Ryzen 9 6900HS, that is just 4-5% slower in cinebench, and a 3070-ti gpu. The GPU is 20% slower than m2 max, but the laptop also cost only 2.4k, compared to 3.1k of M2 max. The battery lasts around 4-5h during video playback on the dedicated GPU.
Let's compare it. Your laptop is a little cheaper, but it also has a 2560x1440 display with a peak brightness of 300 nits, compared to 3546x2234 with a peak of 1600 nits on a 16" MBPro. The MacBook has over twice the number of pixels and is over 5 times as bright. You get 4-5h video playback, the 16" MBPro gets 22 hours of video playback. The MBPro has 3 40Gbit Thunderbolt ports, yours has zero.
I'm not saying it's a bad machine, but the higher price of the MBPro is justified by what you get.
Haven’t tested the energy saving method as I use it for work and I have locked it to max power settings.
Yet another thing I don't have to waste any thoughts on, there is no such setting on the MBPro, it's fast and power efficient. It also never throttles and is always silent. Can you say the same?
I have a 14" M1 Max, it's driving 2 external displays (4k and a 5k2k) and is used as a development machine. I regularly run big compile jobs that really puts load on the system. I'm not sure if the fans even run, because I've never heard them.
Edit: oh, and the zephyrus laptop is actually lighter than 16" MacBook pro
Sure, it's 200 grams lighter but it's also a smaller laptop. 15.6" screen vs. 16.2" screen. The 14" model is lighter than the zephyrus with the exact same performance as the 16" model, just with a smaller screen and 'only' 17 hours of video playback on battery.
For the same price as a decked out MacBook m3, you can get a laptop with a i9-13980hx. That beats the m3 max in single core cinebench by 12% and in multi core cinebench by 29%.
And that laptop has a similar size, weight build quality, battery life, display resolution/peak brightness,etc ? Or is it a plastic fantastic 'luggable' behemoth that runs out in less than 2 hours and throttles almost immediately under load? Link to that mythical laptop please.
Also, the laptops at that price point have a dedicated gpu.
You say that like it's a good thing. Discrete GPUs suck, especially for GPGPU tasks. Not having unified memory is killing for performance in anything but games. Copying data to/from VRAM is slow and discrete GPUs have very limited VRAM. Even a 4090 only has 24GB. Meanwhile you can spec out an M2 MacBook with 96GB RAM and have almost all of that available to the GPU.
We also got some desktops at work to give our team some dedicated compute resources when our central system wasn't able to keep up with the company's needs.
We just run all that stuff in the cloud, much easier to scale up and down.
And even in the high end where laptops can compete, there's a premium you pay for the smaller package.
Yeah, but does it matter? You can get a decked out MacBook Pro for less than €5k, that’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things. You can’t bring a desktop computer into a meeting, or to a customer, or home for a work from home day.
Have you looked? I mean, that question is rhetorical... No, you haven't.
Of course. Name one manufacturer that makes anything comparable to a MacBook Pro with M1
You should check out the competition. Samsung makes some great devices, razer makes some great devices. Even Google makes solid competition, though I prefer others over them.
Unfortunately, I have intimate experience with all of those and more. I’m a mobile developer, we buy a lot of phones for testing purposes. We literally have an entire closet full of phones, every even remotely popular model, we’ve got it.
The stuff I’m working on is quite demanding, think computer vision related. We have to make it work on both iOS and Android and the latter is quite a pain in the ass. Device fragmentation is a bitch and performance is significantly below that of iOS devices, even on the high-end models (and we also have to support the low-end stuff). So on Android we have to choose less advanced algorithms, process at a lower internal resolution and frame rate, stuff like that.
I wish Android manufacturers got their shit together and catch up to Apple. It would make my life so much easier if they did, but for now there is a pretty big performance gap.
The base amount of RAM is a bit low, I agree. But why would you order one with less RAM than you need? I have an M1 Max with 64GB and it just flies. No matter what I throw at it, it stays fast and responsive.
Just working on software is not the same as actively looking for exploits. Software security auditing requires a specialised set of skills. Open source also makes it easier for black-hat hackers to find exploits.
Hundreds of people working on something is a double-edged sword. It also makes it easy for someone to sneak in an exploit. A single-character mistake in code could cause an exploitable bug, and if you are intent on deliberately introducing such an issue it can be very hard to spot and even if caught can be explained away as an honest to god mistake.
By contrast, lots of software companies screen their employees, especially if they are working on critical code.