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OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

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Re: OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

#161

Post by izacus »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #133
izacus wrote: post #97

Seriously, did Apple fire their OSX / macOS team? Pretty much all new features are spinoffs of their iOS infrastructure (Siri, handover, etc.) and the main OS development and innovation seems to have stalled. Not even a feature like telling software that you're on a metered connection and it shouldn't run backups! Is there anyone at Apple still working on innovating / improving OS X? Like people that tried to bring i…

That seems a little unfair. They did a bit of this in the last couple of rounds - introducing Metal, for example, or all the energy work they did a couple of releases ago. Baby steps :)

Metal is a proprietary 3D technology ported from iOS. Apple chose to do another closed tech instead of adopting Vulkan or fixing their slow OpenGL implementation.

If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Metal is about 30% faster than OpenGL on OS X, which is interesting because OpenGL is about 30% slower on OS X than on Windows. Which means they're forcing developers to use their proprietary API to get comparable 3D performance. How is that a good thing?

Re: OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

#162

Post by trjordan »

bhauer wrote: post #119
reacharavindh wrote: post #12

Copy/paste across iPhone and Mac is very useful. All the other features are Meh. I really don't want to be that guy talking to my Mac at work. I can't be sure that all my questions to Siri are not awkward to speak out. Would have been great to have a textual interface though. You know that Keyboard thingy that is always with a Mac?!

> Copy/paste across iPhone and Mac is very useful. I don't use a Mac or an iPhone, but I applaud this sort of device harmony. That said, I am worried that it would unnecessarily leverage the cloud. My guess is that instead of the two devices directly communicating with one another—that is, instead of leveraging the fact that they are probably on the same local network and should just work in concert—the clipboard dat…

P2P connections is a place that's generally terrible for mobile. You have to keep connections open to more devices, which is generally bad for battery.

You could imagine a copy/paste that waits for a message from the cloud (because Apple push notifications are pretty solid), then opens the new connection to the local device, so the data never leaves your network. At least to me, that sounds needless complex when the typical use case could just send the entire payload with the "go look for this device" message.

Re: OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

#163

Post by macintux »

cag_ii wrote: post #71
salzig wrote: post #55

- You can unlock your mac using you apple watch. - You can confirm payments using your apple watch. A thief having your mac and watch can do/buy everything? Is it just me thinging about it?

I'd imagine you would need to unlock the Apple watch before it would unlock the computer.

Indeed. It's actually an interesting cycle: you can unlock the iPhone with your thumb, which unlocks your Watch if on your wrist, which unlocks your Mac if nearby.

Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection.

Re: OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

#164

Post by coldtea »

imron wrote: post #139
matthewmacleod wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, the thing is - I use sync across multiple Apple devices. I have had zero problems with duplicated or missing entries, and it's one of the absolute killer features of the ecosystem for me. It's hard to get a real impression of what problems may or may not exist, unfortunately.

It works great - until it doesn't, and then you find all your music is deleted or something [0] They don't exactly have a stellar record on this sort of thing. 0 - http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/13/apple-officially-acknowledges-...

One random user? Which they officially acknowledged even?

This might be a less than a stellar record, but not because of that link.

Re: OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

#165

Post by archagon »

bhauer wrote: post #119
reacharavindh wrote: post #12

Copy/paste across iPhone and Mac is very useful. All the other features are Meh. I really don't want to be that guy talking to my Mac at work. I can't be sure that all my questions to Siri are not awkward to speak out. Would have been great to have a textual interface though. You know that Keyboard thingy that is always with a Mac?!

> Copy/paste across iPhone and Mac is very useful. I don't use a Mac or an iPhone, but I applaud this sort of device harmony. That said, I am worried that it would unnecessarily leverage the cloud. My guess is that instead of the two devices directly communicating with one another—that is, instead of leveraging the fact that they are probably on the same local network and should just work in concert—the clipboard dat…

To my knowledge, existing continuity features already do one better and communicate directly between devices, not even requiring them to be on the same network. (AirDrop is a good example.) But obviously we have no way of knowing if this will be the case here, or if there is a cloud-based fallback.

Re: OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

#166

Post by DannyBee »

Sanddancer wrote: post #123
oblio wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft is willing to ship GNU tools as a officially sanctioned extension to Windows , then Apple definitely has no valid excuse to avoid GPL v3.

Apple and Microsoft have different legal departments. Apple's still has questions over GPLv3, for better or for worse.

They really don't. They know exactly what they can and can't do. They don't think it's vague or ambiguous.

They just don't see it as worth the energy for them to use it.

I can't disagree with that strategy (if no one is really pushing you to do X, why bother), at Google we do the same with android mostly, but for different reasons:

We don't use GPLv3 because the OEMs/etc don't want it, and rip it out anyway :)

Similarly, i expect in Apple's case, they don't use it in parts they may keep common to ios/macos because then they can't keep them common.

In any case, the TL;DR is that there aren't open legal questions or magic things they are waiting to play out. They've made their choice and have been sticking by it.

Re: OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

#167

Post by hackaflocka »

coldtea wrote: post #158
izacus wrote: post #97

Seriously, did Apple fire their OSX / macOS team? Pretty much all new features are spinoffs of their iOS infrastructure (Siri, handover, etc.) and the main OS development and innovation seems to have stalled. Not even a feature like telling software that you're on a metered connection and it shouldn't run backups! Is there anyone at Apple still working on innovating / improving OS X? Like people that tried to bring i…

> Not even a feature like telling software that you're on a metered connection and it shouldn't run backups! I don't think they ever added features for deprecated technologies / limitations. The assumption going forward (and for the last several years) from all players is always on / cheap broadband, not "metered connections".

My relatives in /another country/ are on metered connections for everything (home internet, mobile, etc.). It's not a smart assumption for Apple to make.

Re: OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

#168

Post by izacus »

mozumder wrote: post #143
izacus wrote: post #97

Seriously, did Apple fire their OSX / macOS team? Pretty much all new features are spinoffs of their iOS infrastructure (Siri, handover, etc.) and the main OS development and innovation seems to have stalled. Not even a feature like telling software that you're on a metered connection and it shouldn't run backups! Is there anyone at Apple still working on innovating / improving OS X? Like people that tried to bring i…

> Not even a feature like telling software that you're on a metered connection and it shouldn't run backups! This is a keynote for the entire conference. They wouldn't mention something as trivial as this. Only major items get mentioned. The small features are mentioned throughout the week in the conference sessions.

Did they mention anything useful for us power users buying their most expensive machines for work?

Re: OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock

#169

Post by coldtea »

izacus wrote: post #125
jasonshen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who does not use or want Apple's mobile devices My guess is that most of Mac users do want/use Apple mobile devices, and that in fact the majority of their computing time is now on those devices so it makes sense that the team would focus heavily on the interface and overlap between iOS / MacOS.

Huh, in most of the world the mapping between iOS and macOS users is nowhere 1-to-1. There's huge amount of users who use either one or the other. Which doesn't really change the fact that even Windows 10 has been starting to pass them by with significant new features.

You'd be surprised.

Actually there are indeed more iOS users than OS X -- but OS X users almost all have an iOS device, which is what's important here.

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