Perhaps they could do the audio+EM equivalent of LIDAR - put out a high frequency audio signal and than listen for EMF that matches.

A microphone is using so little electricity / voltage that I’d be surprised if you can detect anything even right beside it. It’s also not going to be tied to any fingerprint you’re trying to transmit.

And also do be doing positioning requires multiple spatially separated receivers (nothing like LIDAR). And good luck separating out other much larger sources of EM noise.

You seem to be pearl clutching a bit too hard. I am positive there are no legal issues.

It's not "pearl clutching" when there are enforceable laws like 18 U.S.C. § 1362.[0]

Were you even aware of this?

Can you actually cite a legal opinion about the device or similar applications? Otherwise, I'm assuming you are speculating, too.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1362

Fortunately random USB drives are unlikely to catch fire.

I would suggest importing binaries and metadata is going to be faster than compiling all the source for that.

You'd be wrong. If the build system has full knowledge on how to build the whole thing, it can do a much better job. Caching the outputs of the build is trivial.

If you import some ready made binaries, you have no way to guarantee they are compatible with the rest of your build or contain the features you need. If anything needs updating and you actually bother to do it for correctness (most would just hope it's compatible) your only option is usually to rebuild the whole thing, even if your usage only needed one file.

I see retail 3 slots for $1800, so a lot cheaper than you think. They can move to a Studio and buy a box for less than a Mac Pro replacement would cost.

Why don’t you just get a multi-slot PCIe box?

I could.

It would be even cooler if that box was also housing my computer and powered by the same power supply.

And then the PCIe lanes could just run to the CPU/SoC instead of having to be wrapped in Thunderbolt.

Are they really SSDs and not just flash boards with the controller part of the Apple Silicon?

I think it’s possible that Apple will support LPCAMM2 assuming it can done without risking the SOC but it is too cutting edge single vendor technology for them to be implementing it now.

Apple doesn’t end up with a lot of parts in warehouses because they control the supply chain so well.

I think “a lot” is heavily exaggerated- more like a few niche users.

Oh yeah, the market for these capabilities is tiny, no doubt. But at least historically, the people that wanted these things tended to be very big lucrative customers, and also tended to be very influential word-of-mouth Apple evangalists.

Just as a random personal example, my uncle was an Apple guy since the 80s, and when I was a kid in the early 2000s he always had a Mac Pro, several Macbook pros, and a bunch of other Apple gear. He played a big role in convincing all of his 3 other brothers that Apple was the way to go, and those brothers then raised kids in households with only Apple computers.

This uncle is still a mostly Apple user, but he's increasingly pissed at Apple, and definitely no longer evangelical in recommending it to people. He needs to have a linux server machine for his home NAS, and another one for some specialized work applications and it really frustrates him that Apple abandoned his market segment.

I think there's a real possibility that if Apple had pissed him off like this in the early 2000s instead of the 2020s, that our wider family might have not ended up as being so Apple centric, so Apple may have missed out on a lot more sales than just a couple of Mac Pros and expensive software licenses.