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Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

techcrunch.com

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Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#231

Post by shmerl »

pjmlp wrote: post #224
shmerl wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS is not part of Vulkan working group, and neither is Sony, so they don't do anything to support it. It can be supported on their systems only when they don't stand in the way (like on Windows or Android). Nintendo on the other hand now has officially confirmed support: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod... Want to bet who will be next?

Regarding Nintendo, nice to see they are supporting Vulkan, but Nintendo Switch is not yet on sale and it remains to see how it will fare in the market against Apple and Google devices. All the other devices from Nintendo don't support Vulkan. So nothing relevant in market share for Vulkan.

> All the other devices from Nintendo don't support Vulkan.

No reason for them not to support it on any of their future devices. Older ones might not be possible, since Vulkan support has hardware requirements that not every GPU can fulfill (basically, no compute shaders = no Vulkan). Newer ones aren't a problem though, so I expect Nintendo to support it everywhere they can.

Also, think about it from GPU manufacturers perspective. Not only Nintendo have no need to reinvent the wheel anymore, they don't need to bug Nvidia about making special driver for them as well. They just use their Vulkan driver for their GPU (adapted for Nintendo OS which is FreeBSD based as far as I know). I.e. all win by stopping the pointless wheel reinvention (which costs money as well), and focusing on actually doing useful stuff. So I think Nvidia played a role here in pushing Vulkan through to Switch.

Same thing will eventually happen to Sony with whatever GPU they'll use then (AMD or Nvidia). MS will probably be the last to follow.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#232

Post by MagnumOpus »

WWLink wrote: post #209
pdimitar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I have the exact same feeling for this case as well. "We have so many amazing things in store that I am so excited about" Actions speak louder than words. The new MBPs are the most meh Apple laptops ever. The iPhone 7/Plus are the laziest iPhones ever made, too. Rehashes losing legacy ports and trying to impose new ones (although USB Type-C is the best decision they've made in the last several years; I think…

Only answering this because of the ecosystem comment. I wish manufacturers would make products that work well with anything. Like Apple watches with Android phones and vice versa, Apple TV running Amazon's Prime TV app, Amazon's Prime TV box running Apple's TV app, etc. All of these ecosystem-exclusive things are annoying and in some ways I believe holding technology back a little.

We all wish that and they are not just holding back things "a little" but by massive amounts. But alas companies are usually not in it to advance technology, but to make shedloads of money. Lock-in, incompatible ports, moats are all by design to reduce customer attrition from inferior products by some margin.

Peter Thiel's "From 0 to 1" opened my mind to this. SV VCs also don't care about your tech too much - but they are insanely focused on what your "moat" is. I.e. lock-in, patents, network effects etc.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#234

Post by scott_karana »

suprgeek wrote: post #152

I think this "assurance" pretty much confirms for me that Apple has internally begun to shift even more resources away from the Mac and the Macbook. The very weak nature of the response which really does not provide any specifics what-so-ever is very typical when the underlying reality matches the rumor but the guy in charge just can't say it yet. Tim Cook is Apple's Ballamer - An ops. guy, great for the bottom line…

> Tim Cook is Apple's Ballmer - An ops. guy, great for the bottom line but fundamentally stuck in the past.

"Stuck in the present" might be a bit more fair :)

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#235

Post by stinos »

atmosx wrote: post #133
enjo wrote: post #17

The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes. I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-cha…

> The new Linux subsystem thing is a god-send. Does that mean I get a UNIX env/shell on windows?

Yup, and to my (and many others' surprise), this thing works actually very well. Not every single app will run but all of the basics for what we need here (mainly gcc) seem to be fine. And it runs graphical apps as well: run an X server on Windows (Moba XTerm or so), export DISPLAY=:0 and of you go. Only tried it with SublimeText so far and that worked out so no complaints yet.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#236

Post by dom0 »

wineisfine wrote: post #184
lobster_johnson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also considering a switch, but Windows drives me up the wall whenever I touch it. macOS has been getting uglier and more awkward to use the last few years, but Windows is still the king of ugly. So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh…

Had the same thing. Turns out, I'm more of a design snob then I thought I was. Trying to move away from macOS and trying out Windows and a few Linux distro's, my god it's all ugly. I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS. Pretty lame.

Give an up-to-date KDE a shot.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#237

Post by ryanlol »

eps wrote: post #188
derefr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could keep a virtual machine on the SSD, with each docking host having the same VM software installed. Then you'd literally be able to hibernate the VM and physically move it.

Having a VM in picture decimates video and storage performance. I've tried this exact approach not a week ago. There's an NVMe drive with ~700MBps read speed and a GFX 10xx hooked up to a 4K display. The best I could squeeze from VM was 245 MBps in read and I couldn't get rid of a lag in cursor movement when running Visual Studio full screen. Going up and down one a page was OK, but when you get to the edge, there wa…

>Having a VM in picture decimates video and storage performance.

No, using shit virtualization software decimates those. You can pass through both the GPU and the disk directly to the VM.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#238

Post by toyg »

Clubber wrote: post #43
yakult wrote: post #35

What I take away from this is that they've devoted so little resource to Mac internally that people in the know are asking inconvenient questions, hence the need for this article. You don't hear him assuring people about the iphone.

I think they spend a whole lot of energy on the iWatch and it didn't pan out the way they hoped.

That and the iPad Pro were real duds. Good concepts, underwhelming execution ("let's just slap iOS on a big-ass screen, it will do").

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#239

Post by toyg »

lisper wrote: post #29
rbritton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upgradeability also includes things like the hard drive and card expansion slots. Those both let you extend the useful life of a computer a bit.

But you can already upgrade your hard drives through the USB interface. Nowadays that's plenty fast enough even for external SSDs. You don't really need SATA any more.

Except when anything slightly unexpected happens (sleep etc), your external drive is not cleanly unmounted and you risk heavy data loss, whereas internal drives are always handled properly.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#240

Post by fstephany »

m_mueller wrote: post #168
bsg75 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I always return to XFCE. It may not be rapidly evolving, but if I'm running a Linux desktop, I want simple.

On what Distro though? What should I try if I want something that pretty much works out of the box i.e. has acceptable battery life + WiFi + Sound + Suspend mode on a Macbook / Latitude / Thinkpad without me having to set up config files according to all kinds of internet sources for a day... or even a week?

I'm using a Thinkpad T460 with the latest Ubuntu and everything works out of the box. Even the smartcard reader works with my ID to sign my tax form.

Battery life is 12-14 hours of real work with the big battery (which costs something like 18$ more than the regular one).

I still use a Macbook Air for iOS development but I now boot the Thinkpad for everything else.

(Oh and if there's an engineer working for Spotify in the crowd, thanks for the Linux app!)

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