tech - Elixis Technology

Apple Wheels – It’s Wheely About Advertising

Elizabeth History, Marketing, Optimization, Uncategorized May 5, 2021

Ah, Complaining.

Apple Wheels

The Apple Mac Pro cost several thousand dollars, and it looked like a cheese grater. The little Apple-branded wheels to make it move cost about 700$, or approximately the price of the iPhone 8 at launch. Oh, but don’t worry – you can buy the feet for a mere 300$, if you just have to have Apple Brand. How did we get here? How did we, as a society, get to 700$ computer wheels?

Brand = Trustworthy

Branding by itself is an interesting mark of human psychology. It’s a shortcut to trusting something! The brand of an item itself purely imaginary – the brand, by itself, does not produce value for the final product except for the value the consumer gives it in their mind. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Look at IKEA: all those items come from different factories, so customers shouldn’t just blindly trust whatever they buy, right? But because IKEA has put their name behind it, consumers still buy the cheap shelves with the understanding that IKEA has endorsed them. If these shelves were somewhere else, and un-branded, consumers wouldn’t trust them as much. They’d sell less. Branding, in this way, is extremely valuable even though it’s intangible.

And it’s good for the customer, too! It allows them to make a more informed decision. Emotionally, people become loyal to brands that have served them well. Fortunately for the brand, they’ll stay loyal unless something seriously impacts their mental image of that brand.

All of this sounds totally logical and reasonable, right? It’s the way people have done business since cash was invented. It made sense for people to trust the smithy, who branded their creations, over someone who wouldn’t put their name to what they made.

Strange things start happening when people like the brand more than the products, and we’ll get there.

Even though consumers may know the store-brand comes from the same plant that the name-brand does, they may still pick name-brand. This is part of that trust – it is scary to try new things, and keeping one constant, the brand, the same, makes buying big electronics or new foods less scary. When consumers stop showing a brand loyalty, or they start complaining, the brand could do things like throw in warranties or spare parts for free and retain that good will. Store brand doesn’t stand a chance even if it’s literally identical.

Brand = Money

Branding can save a company even if they’re like modern day Pyrex, which has a different heat tolerance depending which factory you get it from. People post infographics online so consumers can identify the ‘good’ pieces, because they love Pyrex so much. A change to the glass manufacturing process means that the brand is no longer a reliable indicator of quality, but people still want to like Pyrex. Otherwise they wouldn’t go through all this effort to find the right Pyrex factory, they’d buy somewhere else. This is where brand starts to become more important than what it’s selling.

People will pay a premium for a brand they trust, and companies know this. We see this everywhere, from cars to computers. If something was good, some people will believe it’s still good. That’s the business principle of goodwill. Sears might have survived a couple years off of goodwill and nostalgia alone.

Branding, therefore, can become a phylactery in the hands of a new controlling board. As soon as a company starts to rely on goodwill to sell items that they know other companies would have ditched, they become like Apple. Unlike Apple, many of them don’t sell high-ticket items as a luxury.

For Apple, the brand is demand. Where Steve Jobs might have demanded innovation out of every item they released, the controlling board doesn’t. They know that the brand reputation he built will sell items because people love Apple, and they know people want to look like they have money, and by smearing Android products as ‘cheap’, Apple became a shortcut for ‘expensive’. Apple wheels are a natural result of a market that’s so hyperfocused on branding that it doesn’t care about functionality. A combination of goodwill and a little psychology gives us these overpriced items that are only overpriced for the sake of it.

The irony of all of this is that people will eventually buy the item as a ‘flex’, unironically, and then the product exists in a quantum state of sincerity. How does Apple live where others die?

Wheely Worth It

Apple sells sincere items alongside their ‘meme’ items. While Apple sells things like wheels and pens for hundreds of dollars, the past generations of phones are still about the right price for what the user gets. Factoring in things like R + D, factory overhead, and the materials to go into it, a comparable phone made by a third party would be cheaper, but not by much. They’re only at a small premium to other comparable brands for the same computing power, which makes sense with Apple’s well-known tech support. They haven’t gone full ‘Sears’ yet, and there’s still some value in the idea of their brand, and they still release ‘worthy’ items alongside the garbage ones. Why risk it with wheels that cost as much as an iPhone, a genuinely expensive item?

Simple: it’s for advertising, and it’s fairly cheap as far as campaigns go. Either ‘hype beasts’ (people known for buying branded clothing just because it’s expensive) buy it to flex on others, or regular people discuss how out-of-line Apple is. Either way, Apple’s name is out there. Apple might not actually expect to make money with these wheels, but the items are so cheap to make that a single purchase could finance the production of 50 more sets. Not to forget hype beasts!

This new trend of “flexing” expensive-but-nearly-worthless items has led to the creation of the Supreme Brick, the Apple wheels, and all sorts of other tomfoolery that relies on branding. Now, some brands use branding as a shortcut to ‘luxury’ instead of ‘trust’. Luxury clothing items have already been doing this for years, so while the material is thin, the manufacturing process cost cents on the dime, and shipping it en masse cost maybe a couple dollars, the final item is an 800$ shirt. Not because it’s made of especially good materials, or hardy – because it has a logo on it.

The only reason knockoffs are not worth as much is because the original brand has convinced people that their product is ‘better’ because it cost more, not that it cost more because it was better. And people believe it! Anyone self-conscious enough to get fake Airpods or a third-party Gucci shirt are still pursuing that image of luxury, which is fantastic for the brand. The same goes for Apple Wheels, and Airpods, and Supreme clothing… if the consumer values it, then they’re worth it. The Apple Wheels are worth 699$ to the people who want it, and that’s good enough to keep making them. They’re buying Apple Brand, after all.

Apple Wheel. It’s wheely about the advertising.

Sources:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-wheels-kit

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXNM2ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-feet-kit

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2020/02/26/shout-or-whisper-dissecting-quiet-and-loud-luxury

Magnetic Storage Types

Elizabeth History, Innovation, Technology April 19, 2021

Magnetic Tape

The most well-known version of tape-based magnetic storage is the kind used for media. When tape-based recording was first introduced, it revolutionized the talk show and DJ-ing scene of the time (mostly post WWII) because it enabled shows to be recorded and played later, rather than live. Music recording tech already existed, but it required physical interaction from the DJ, so it wasn’t as hands-off as tapes were.

The second-most well-known version is the kind used for computer memory! Data is stored on the tape in the form of little magnetic ‘dots’ that the computer can read as bits. Before each pocket of data dots is a data marker that tells the computer how long that pocket should be, so it knows when one set of data ends and the next begins. The polarity of the dot determines it’s bit value, and the computer can then read all these dots as binary code.

This method of data storage was a massive breakthrough, and other mediums continue to use the format even today! Tapes are still in use for big stuff – parts of IBM’s library rely on modern tapes, which can now store terabytes of information at a higher density than disks and flash drives alike. Other memory types relying on magnetic domains include hard disks and drums, to name a couple. All that separates them is material and know-how: the better the magnetizing material on the outside, the smaller the domains can get. The better the insulation between the domains and regular old entropy, the more stable the data is!

Carousel Memory

Carousel memory was an attempt at shrinking the space that magnetic tape took, but to the extreme. Instead of one very long piece of magnetic tape on a bobbin, the carousel memory system uses several smaller reels of tape arranged in a carousel pattern around the central read mechanism. To get to the right info is as simple as selecting the right reel! This has some issues with it, as you might imagine. Moving parts add complications and an increased risk of mechanical failure to any device, but a device carrying thin, delicate magnetic tape on it is an especially bad place to start.

However, it wasn’t all bad. Carousel memory was actually quite fast for the time because it didn’t have to rewind or fast-forward as much to get to the right area of code. It could skip feet of tape at a time! This advantage declined as tape tech improved, but it still helped companies trying to squeeze the most life from their machines. The bobbins and individual ribbons were all replaceable, so the tape wasn’t worthless if it got torn or damaged. The carousel itself was also replaceable, so the many moving parts weren’t as much of a curse as they’d be on, say, the first hard disks, which had irreplaceable heads.

Core Rope Memory

Core rope memory featured magnetic gromets, or ‘cores’ on metal ‘ropes’, and then those ropes were woven into fabric the computer could read. In ROM (read-only memory) format, if a wire went through the core, it was a ‘one’, or a ‘yes’. If it didn’t, it was a ‘zero’, or a ‘no’. In this way, the fabric is physically coded into binary that the computer can use. ROMd Core-rope memory involved quite a bit of complicated weaving and un-weaving to get the cores in the right spots.

Core rope memory was chosen over tape memory for the Apollo missions, mainly for weight purposes. Tape was great, but not nearly dense or hardy enough for the mission yet, and neither were the other similar core modules available to NASA. A read-only core-rope memory module could store as many as 192 bits per core, where erasable core memory could only manage one bit per core. Where each core on the final module depended on reading the wires to determine the bit’s state, the erasable model (core memory) read the core’s magnetic state to determine the bit state, not the threads going through it. The final module sent up to get to the moon was a total of 70-ish pounds and read fairly quickly. Tape, core memory, or hard disks available at the time couldn’t have gotten to the same weight or speed.

Core-rope memory has its place. It’s very sturdy, and since it relies on the cores to act as bits, it’s possible to visually identify bugs before the memory’s even used, unlike core memory. Both are sometimes called ‘software crystallized as hardware’ because of the core system. It isn’t seen much today, since it is still incredibly bulky, but at the time of its use it was revolutionary.

Core Memory

Core memory is the older sibling of core rope memory, and it stores less. However, the people who got to work with it call it one of the most reliable forms of memory out there! Core memory works much the same as core rope memory, where the bits are stored in cores.

However, the formats are different. If core rope memory is like a binary-encoded scarf, core memory is more like a rug. Thin threads made of conductive material are woven into a grid pattern, with cores suspended on where the threads cross each other. The computer understands these threads as address lines, so asking for a specific bit to be read is as simple as locating the X and Y address of the core. A third set of lines, the sense lines, runs through each core on the diagonal, and this is the thread that does the actual reading.

When asked to, the computer sends a current down the sense threads and sees if the cores flip their magnetic polarity or not. If it doesn’t, it was a zero. If it does, it was a one, and it has been flipped to zero by the reading process. This method is known as ‘destructive reading’ as a result, however, the computer compensates for this by flipping the bit back to where it was after the reading. Due to its magnetic nature, the core then keeps this info even after power to it is cut!

This link here is an excellent, interactive diagram of the system.

Even though this improved the bit-to-space-taken ratio, core memory still aged out of the market. With the price of bits decreasing rapidly, core memory got smaller and smaller, but the nature of its assembly means it was almost always done by hand – all competitors had to do was match the size and win out on labor. Soon, its main market was taken over by semi-conductor chips, which are still used today.

Magnetic Bubbles

Magnetic memory has had strange branches grow off the central tree of progress, and magnetic bubble memory is one of those strange shoots. One guy (who later developed other forms of memory under AT&T) developed bubble memory. Bubble memory never took off in the same way other magnetic memory styles did, although it was revolutionary for its compact size – before the next big leap in technology, people were thinking this was the big leap. It was effectively shock proof! Unfortunately, better DRAM chips took off shortly after it hit the market and crushed bubble memory with improved efficiency.

Anyway, bubble memory worked by moving the bit to-be-read to the edge of the chip via magnets. The magnetic charge itself is what’s moving the bits, much in the same way electrons move along a wire when charge is applied, so nothing is actually, physically moving within the chip! It was cool tech, and it did reduce space, it just didn’t hold up to semi-conductor memory chips. They saw a spike in use with a shortage, but they were so fiddly that as soon as DRAM chips were available again, they went out of style.

Semi-Conductor DRAM – Honorable Mention

DRAM chips are a lot like core memory, in that the device is reading the state of a physical object to determine what the bit readout is. In Semi-conductor chips, that physical object is a tiny capacitor, hooked up to a tiny transistor, on semiconductive metal-oxide material. Instead of determining magnetic state, the device is instead checking if the capacitor’s discharged or not. No charge = 0, yes charge = 1. These chips aren’t technically magnetic, but since they’ve killed so many of the other options, here they are!

DRAM stands for Dynamic Random-Access Memory, and it means that the memory can be accessed randomly instead of linearly. As long as the computer knows where the data’s stored, it’s able to pull it without pulling other files first. They’re still being sold today!

Magnetic Disk (Hard Disk Drive)

Hard drives work more like tape than core memory. A Hard drive is a platter (or a stack of platters) with a read-write head hovering above it. When you want to save data, the hard drive head magnetizes areas in binary to represent that information. When you want to read or recover that data, the head interprets these areas as bits in binary, where the polarity of the magnetized zone is either a zero or a one.

The zones of magnetization are incredibly tiny, which makes hard drives one of the more demanding memory forms out there, both now and back then.

Early hard drives could suffer from ‘de-magnetization’, where a magnetic disk’s domains were too close and gradually drew each other out of position, slowly erasing the information on the disk. This meant that the disks had to be bigger to hold the data (like everything else at the time) until better materials for data storage came along. Even though they held more capacity at launch, they were passed over for smaller and more stable stuff like tapes and core memory. The very early drives developed by IBM were huge. Like, washing machine huge. They didn’t respond to requests for data very quickly, either, which further pushed reliance on tape and core technology.

Over time, hard disks improved dramatically. Instead of magnetic zones being arranged end-to-end, storing them vertically next to each other created even denser data storage, enough to outcompete other forms of media storage entirely. Especially small hard drives also come with a second layer of non-magnetizable material between the first layer and a third layer of reverse-magnetized ‘reinforcement’ which keeps the data aligned right. This enables even more data capacity to be crammed into the disks!

Some time in the 80s, hard drives finally became feasible to use in personal computers, and since then they’ve been the standard. SSDs, which don’t have any moving parts whatsoever, are beginning to gain ground in the market, but they can’t be truly, irrevocably erased like hard drives can due to different storage techniques. Hard drives are going to stick around a while, especially for the medical and military industries, as a result!

Sources:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/space-age/software-as-hardware-apollos-rope-memory

https://www.apolloartifacts.com/2008/01/rope-memory-mod.html

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/vcr.htm

https://www.apolloartifacts.com/2008/01/rope-memory-mod.html

http://www.righto.com/2019/07/software-woven-into-wire-core-rope-and.html

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/253

https://nationalmaglab.org/education/magnet-academy/watch-play/interactive/magnetic-core-memory-tutorial

https://www.rohm.com/electronics-basics/memory/what-is-semiconductor-memory

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/nick/how-hard-drive-works/

https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/audiotape

https://www.engadget.com/2014-04-30-sony-185tb-data-tape.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9lbi53aWtpcGVkaWEub3JnLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAC5GC2YOKsvhOs9l4Z2Dt1oHX3-YxjPyJC60qfkq6_6h8zyckkBK9V9JJC9vce3rCmcgyehT-RB6aORBfzB9b5oiBoF1Fbic_3653XVM8fsUTHHnTgxKx4piCeEl65Lp54bkbMcebEEddwlq-EDnAcM7zuv49TXYHcgq9lmnrBln

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_memory (all primary sources regarding carousel memory are in Swedish)

Censoring Image Info: Do it Right

Elizabeth Cyber Security, Uncategorised February 3, 2021

Redaction.

Once upon a time, I stumbled into a forum thread about image censorship. The forum was made up of clipped images of funny Facebook posts, and at the time people were beginning to realize that you can’t just post names online willy-nilly. Censoring out the names attached to the posts was a requirement, and there were many ways to do it, but some of them could be undone.

What is Censoring, or Redacting?

That’s questionable. Merriam Webster gives a run-around definition, where censorship is the act of censoring, and censoring is the work of a censor, so I’m having to shave off the little bits of definition I got from each of those steps to make a cohesive definition here. Censorship is the act of keeping need-to-know info out of the hands of people who don’t need-to-know. This information could be moral (censoring swears out of public TV shows) private (people’s faces) or some other sort (no free branding). This isn’t a perfect definition, but it’s enough for this limited article.

The same goes for redaction, but with a little more intensity – need-to-know info has to be shared, but it could put people or property in danger. The easiest way to share that info without putting people in danger is to make them anonymous. By my own example here, redaction is the act of cutting out specifics (and anonymizing people) so the information can be shared.

People can guess – Tom Clancy is infamous for connecting dots to write what-if stories about redacted info – but the info is more or less anonymous to the general public.

Pixelate

Many choose pixelating over other methods of image redaction because it’s less harsh to the rest of the image, and destroys more than most kinds of “smooth” blurring. A lot of people can still make out what brand of soda a pixelated can is, and context will usually tell people that an obscene gesture is what’s behind the boxes on a TV show, but in general it works pretty well to get rid of the finer details that could identify somebody. More or less.

As machines get better and better at identifying patterns and finding the stop sign in Captchas, the human face is easier and easier to recreate. Gizmodo has an article on the subject here, and it’s a good demonstration of why – when the info is really important – it shouldn’t be used. Picture this: you have a 10,000-piece puzzle, most of it is one color, and you don’t have a box to look at. You do your best, but end up with a blob. This is early computers trying to un-pixelate an image.

It was great! It was very difficult to decipher who a protected witness was.

Then, further down the line, you get the box, and a set of glasses that lets you distinguish colors better – turns out that one color from before is actually like 30! So you get to work piecing it together. The box is blurry, so that’s a bummer, but other people with a completed puzzle can show you theirs. And someone posts to your database/puzzle forum an image very similar to the parts of the puzzle you’ve already completed. Suddenly you’re able to finish decoding the image for what it is: a human face.

That’s where we’re at right now. Pixelating the face of someone in the background of a TV show likely won’t lead to anybody going through all this effort to find them, but it could turn into a problem for folks being pixelated out of compromising images, court hearings, interviews, etc. where it’s very important that they aren’t found.

Text is even easier: picture the scenario above, but you know what letters are, there’s only two or three colors even with the glasses, and the puzzle’s only about 500 pieces. Don’t. Pixelate. Text. There’s a reason that governments go the permanent marker route. This article here does a great job of describing the undoing process.

Blur

Blur is very similar to pixelating, in a lot of ways. The pieces to the puzzle are much smaller, but you should begin to see a pattern with algorithmic censoring: once somebody knows how to do it, it can be undone. Fortunately, most people using it for important things know to go so hard on the blur factor that the image could have been a lot of things (or people), and poorly written AI can confuse matters further. Algorithms to undo blur aren’t perfect, so creating a face out of nothing doesn’t mean it’s the right face.

For example: a blurry picture of Barack Obama. It’s blurry and pixel-y, but still clearly former US president Barack Obama. The computer, instead, turns him into someone else, noticeably whiter. In a perfect world, databases would have perfect access to the entire population, but they don’t. They have access to what the researchers and engineers feed them. If your goal is to keep people from discovering someone’s identity, but you don’t want to slap a blackout square on their face, blurring is still a choice. Just make sure it’s too blurry for both people and machines to make out. Obama in this image has not been blurred nearlyenough to thwart human eyes, even though the machine can’t figure it out. As a side note, this is a great example of why facial recognition technology is too immature to use right now!

Black Out (And Sticker) Redaction

From Sci Fi shows to taxes, redacted documents pop up frequently. Completely covering text in a document with black ink or unremovable black squares should completely destroy data. It’s a government favorite for that reason! As long as it’s done right, the info is lost.

The problem is doing it right.

The American Bar Association has a blog post on the matter here. A failure to completely redact information digitally led to the case falling apart. Separately, the US government got into some hot water with the Italian government a while back over a document with information in it they were not supposed to see, including names of officials and checkpoint protocols relating to an Italian operative’s death in Baghdad.

The Stickers

In less serious stakes, digital stickers can be imperfect depending on the app used to place them on the document, but that’s more of a .png problem than a problem with sticker apps. Since these are mostly used to post funny exchanges online, rather than conceal government secrets, bulletproof security is normally not necessary. As such, you should treat them that way: security is not their main goal. Don’t use them for tax forms.

Additionally, printing the page, marker-ing over info to redact it, and then scanning it back in is an option if you truly don’t trust digital apps to completely destroy the data. It’s tedious, it’s annoying, and

it requires a scanner, but it’s an option. This is also not infallible, because even in real life things can look opaque when they aren’t. Kaspersky made this image with a digital marker, not an ink one, but it’s still a good demo. Use something marketed for redacting, not just some Crayola water-soluble marker.

Side Note: Government and Redaction Programs

Sometimes art programs store images in layers. Sometimes checking a PDF for redactions means making the redactions not permanent until publish. With these two problems in mind, mistakes like not merging layers, or using a program that doesn’t actually remove the text (as in, you can still copy it from behind the box) are somewhat understandable. That doesn’t mean it’s not a huge mistake. Redaction is there for a reason.

A major program flaw leaked government secrets. Users could simply copy the text behind the box, like it wasn’t even there. Why would you ever leave the text intact when that’s exactly the opposite of what it was advertised for? It wasn’t an isolated incident, either, as you can see mentioned above with the ABA and the Italian case. Other ways to unsuccessfully redact include putting a vector of a black box over the information in Word and cropping the image in an Office program. The entire picture’s still there, it’s just hidden, not destroyed. Don’t do that.

Swirl Redaction

Swirl is the worst of all of these options unless the others are executed very poorly. Besides being the ugliest option, it doesn’t do a good job at destroying information that other computers could use. Another algorithm doesn’t need to make assumptions like it would for pixelating. All of the information is still there, just stored in the shape of a crescent. That’s it. The algorithm stretches the image, and then warps it around a central axis, but everything is still there. See the side note below on the Swirl Man who assumed he’d done a good enough job of redacting his face. Now that this cure for swirling is out there, it’s basically obsolete.

Side Note: They Caught The Guy

A while back, police caught a child trafficker. He only hid his identity by swirling his face. Swirling, like any other computer effect, uses an algorithm. Algorithms follow rules.There’s a clear pattern in the swirling that can be undone to retrieve the original image. Simply knowing what tool he’d used was enough to reverse-engineer it and undo the face swirling. He was caught, thankfully, as a result of his own hubris. Here’s the Wikipedia article on his case and capture.

Sources: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/easily-pixelate-blur-images-online/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4047031/help-with-the-theory-behind-a-pixelate-algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelation

https://gizmodo.com/researchers-have-created-a-tool-that-can-perfectly-depi-1844051752

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4504589.stm

https://vowe.net/archives/005838.html

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/how-to-leak-image-info/34875/

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/shmat_imgobfuscation.pdf

https://help.adobe.com/archive/en_US/acrobat/8/professional/acrobat_8_help.pdf

https://talkingpdf.org/redacting-with-acrobat-8-professional-vs-redax/

How To Read Minecraft Computer Requirements

Elizabeth Uncategorized December 24, 2020

Shopping for a computer used to be so simple. You’d walk into a store, buy a desktop (likely one of two or three models the store had) and go home, and then let your new beige box-screen computer spend most of its days quietly, on your desk, only waiting to be used for AOL or maybe a game or two. Certainly not Minecraft yet. But now…

Now there’s thousands. And you want to play Minecraft. What do all these numbers mean? What does RAM even do?!

Desktop or Laptop?

We’re far past the era of desktops being the be-all end-all of computer strength. In fact, a decent laptop can keep up with a trash desktop any day of the week! For casual gaming, games that don’t require fine control of the mouse (although Bluetooth mice are very popular), or games that don’t take up a lot of space in your computer’s storage, a laptop is likely fine and more comfortable to use. After all, you can carry a laptop to the sofa or the desk, but the desktop is stuck where it is. A decent laptop should play Minecraft just fine.

What’s RAM?

RAM stands for Random Access Memory, and essentially acts like the short term memory of the computer. Think of your amount of RAM as your ability to multi-task, where a higher number means better -tasking; if you have a lot of RAM, you could cook breakfast and write an essay at the same time without burning your eggs. But if you only have a little, you’re gonna have to finish your food before you pick up that pen, because you’ll simply forget that there’s anything on the stove.

But what does that mean as far as Minecraft goes? Games can take a lot of RAM to play right, and if you’re looking to play the game with lots of mods, you’ll need a little more than the standard Mojang has listed on their website – mods are great, but they aren’t always optimized to work with each other at maximum efficiency. 4GB is a pretty standard size for a less-expensive modern computer. For the newest Call of Duty, or CyberPunk 2077 at full detail? It may come up a little short, but for regular minimally-modded Minecraft? It’s totally enough.

What’s a GB?

A GB (Gigabyte) is a unit of data storage, and likely something you’ve seen before to advertise USB sticks and memory chips. The amount of storage a game takes up is not directly linked to how long the game is, or how many areas of the game’s world there are. Things like textures, or the individual designs of the game’s items and environment, can eat up space, even if the game itself is short. The same goes for enemy AI and usable items, but textures can be adjusted to use less memory in play, where AI usually can’t be.

As a recent example, CyberPunk 2077 is notoriously hard on older computers because it’s textures are very, very detailed – players with older computers may be forced to sacrifice some visual quality to get the game to a playable state for their device. Minecraft textures are pretty simple (unless you download something to change that) and the programming that makes playing the game possible makes up most of the storage the game needs.

What’s a GPU? Or a CPU? Are They the Same Thing?

CPU stands for Computer Processing Unit, and GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit. The two do similar things (that’s the ‘processing’ part of their names) but they do it for different reasons. A GPU is making decisions that get the image onscreen faster, while a CPU is making decisions that allow the computer to do what you’re telling it to. Basically, the CPU has a smaller number of cores designed to complete a wide variety of tasks, while the GPU has a larger number of cores better suited to specifically the graphics of a game, which also includes generating the environment, calculating where the player should visually be within the environment, playing animations associated with tasks, etc. which all involve reacting to player inputs and commands.

Let’s talk about deciding which kind of GPU to get. If you’re looking at Minecraft’s system requirements right now, you’ll see that its minimum requirements are this mess: GPU (Discrete): Nvidia GeForce 400 Series or AMD Radeon HD 7000 series with OpenGL 4.4. What does that even mean?!

Brand

Let’s break it down into easier to read bits. The first word there is almost always the brand name. Here, it’s Nvidia and AMD. Next, the series: GeForce and Radeon. Now, looking up the brand will tell you more about what this name means, and unfortunately it seems like these are labeled like this for the same reason cars are named things like “Camaro” or “Malibu” – it’s meant to invoke a sense of something without actually definitively ranking. The numbers are a better indicator of approximate quality, as it’s more descriptive of a particular style’s place in the series – and when in doubt, try to find the manufacturer’s website, and bring a list of equal-to or better-than GPUs to what you need just in case the store or website you go to doesn’t have the exact one your game recommends.

Cores

There’s also the number of cores recommended for the CPU. When you see something like ‘quadcore processing’, that means that the machine has four cores that can follow a ‘thread’ of processing each. Quadcore = four threads. Octacore = eight threads. What number should you get? Well, it depends on the machine. Intel recommends a quadcore over a dualcore when upgrading – it’s possible for the CPU to bottleneck the GPU when processing is limited to two cores (which just means that the GPU’s done calculating the graphics before the CPU’s done with its part) and two cores are also much slower than four.

However, it seems like most people don’t really need octacore (eight core) processing – PC Pepper recommends octacore for streamers, and it looks more and more like CyberPunk needs all eight cores to actually work as intended on its highest available settings, but Minecraft seems to be fine on four (at least right now in 2020). Older cores will process more slowly than newer cores – but if the machine is older, it might be possible to shore up the demands of the game by turning down the viewing distance and texture quality, something many modern games include in their settings.

What’s an HDD?

A Hard Disk Drive is a set of disks coated in magnetic film and stacked together that stores and reads data with a ‘transducer’ (a head attachment that reads and writes on them) kind of like a record player’s record and needle. This is different than SSD, or a solid-state drive – SSDs are faster and frequently smaller, but they’re still somewhat cutting-edge; they have no moving parts and draw less power than HDDs. A modern HDD should have no problem keeping up with modern games, but if microseconds make a difference, like they can for streamers or top-tier competitive gaming, an SSD might be better. Depending on the computer manufacturer, the laptop you choose might come with an SSD as default. There’s really no reason to pick one over the other besides cost right now – don’t dismiss a reasonably priced computer based on what kind of drive it has.

Sources: https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360035131371-Minecraft-Java-Edition-system-requirements-

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2009/12/16/whats-the-difference-between-a-cpu-and-a-gpu/

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/cpu-vs-gpu.html

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/ssd-vs-hdd.html

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