Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#841

Post by vbezhenar » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:20 AM UTC

sreque wrote: post #433

mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

This might just be a bargaining move on Apple’s part, but I don’t think so. I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see them make their own display screens. As an Apple customer, I like this idea also. For 20 years, I used to be a desktop Linux fanatic and later became a fan of Android. In the last few years, I have switched to using all…

I am a software developer, and I detest working on my mac laptop. At $lastjob I had a Linux desktop and it is, I believe, the most productive environment I have ever developed in. The job before, I had a windows desktop, and I prefer that to mac. You say you want to just "get things done expediently," but in my experience apple software is flat out inferior and OSX is the worst of the 3 major operating systems I have…

Windows is good, but getting hardware working is a lottery. I recently built a PC with pretty standard components (Asus MB, i5 CPU, Asus GTX 1060 GPU), installed Windows 10, it worked fine until I enabled Hyper-V. With Hyper-V enabled it BSODs few times a day because of buggy NVidia driver.. I had to disable it because of that. While macOS is pretty buggy and I experienced crashes, they are not that often, may be few times a month or less.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#842

Post by SZJX » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:24 AM UTC

So Apple seems to be willing to give up on the developer market almost entirely, and will turn the Macs into multimedia centers just as iPads then? Maybe that's indeed where the majority of their revenue lies, and they couldn't care less whether fewer developers buy their Macs if that means more home users buy them. But still, I doubt whether it will be the right move in the long run.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a change of processor architecture mean that the majority of the apps that currently run on Mac won't run anymore and would require the app developers to make extensive changes to make them run on the new architecture?

I've parted with my MBP after having used it for 4 years and switched to Arch Linux. It has been a blast so far, apart from the spotty HiDPI support and lack of built-in dictionaries. It's also much nicer than Ubuntu as a dev distro (not as a production distro of course) since you can install the newest version of almost any software you want in a flash without involving the messy PPAs. I was worrying about Apple's shifts in the recent years in the Mac line but they pale in comparison to this change. Gives me less of an incentive to use any Apple product for sure.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#843

Post by walterstucco » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:26 AM UTC

tjr225 wrote: post #590

bb88 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, 1. Getting packages with apt on ubuntu without installing homebrew. It's vastly simpler and natively supported by ubuntu. I can also update my entire system with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. 2. Native docker support. 3. On mac, I always ask the question whether something is ctrl-c or cmd-c, say. On linux it's always ctrl. 4. I don't have to login to the apple store to get the software I need.…

2 - docker works flawlessly on macos 4 - i cant think of a single application, outside of maybe xcode, a developer might need to sign into the app store for 6 - whatever reasons that youtuber might have for not using macbooks, i will never buy a non-mac notebook ever again. this 2013 13" mbp has been the best and most reliable computer I have ever had in 30 years and I bought it used! 7 - sure the apple brand is cool…

> 2 - docker works flawlessly on macos

not true

it works fine in a linux in virtualbox

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#844

Post by flomo » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:27 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #371

flomo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I think people tend to gloss over how smooth these transitions really were. From a creative professional perspective, they were huge short-term PITA until Adobe etc had everything ported over. Also Excel lost VBA support for several years.

Losing VBA support stinks, but do any professional Excel users even consider Office for Mac?

At least for me "professional Excel users" sent out stuff that I could not open, and that is not good for the for the platform.

"Spreadsheet macros" were like hot personal computing shit in 1983. Really not good if you cannot create them in 2008. , (Few complaints about the current Mac MS Office, FWIW) I'm just saying that breaking old stuff often takes year to fix.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#845

Post by walterstucco » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:28 AM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

This might just be a bargaining move on Apple’s part, but I don’t think so. I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see them make their own display screens. As an Apple customer, I like this idea also. For 20 years, I used to be a desktop Linux fanatic and later became a fan of Android. In the last few years, I have switched to using all…

>> The older I get, the more I want to get my work done expediently,

My experience is different

The older I get, the less I want my bike to have training wheels

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#846

Post by SiVal » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:29 AM UTC

Synaesthesia wrote: post #824

jernfrost wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd I find hotkeys much better on Mac. They follow a more logical predictable pattern and are much more standarized. E.g. what is the standard windows hotkey for getting info/properties of an object. Never found one. Also if an app doesn’t have configuration of hotkeys you are screwed. On Mac hotkey config is OS wide. The command console experience on windows is horrible. Office apps are better on Mac. Pages, numbers…

The Mac environment takes some getting used to, it took me years to learn all the little details, like if you select a bunch of folders and double-click, it will open all of them. To close them all, option-click the close button. I do find Finder to be inferior to explorer in almost every way. That tree pane on the left is too useful.

I'm far more of a Mac user, but I use Windows, too, and I agree that the Finder is quite inferior to Win Explorer. The simplest, most obvious things, such as having 2 side-by-side trees for file organization, or right-click on anything and create a new folder there--things that are easy and obvious--are NEVER going to come to Finder, which occasionally adds trivial eye candy such as "album flow" views or colored "tags", but basic workaday functionality, no.

Yes, you can buy a 3rd party replacement with the hassle of deploying and maintaining on multiple machines, if you have them, but my main complaint is what decades of not caring about the most fundamental of all Mac apps (the only one you can't quit) implies about Apple's strategic attitude toward the Mac overall.

For those of us who find the Mac the best pro dev platform, the implications are not good, because what we tend to like about it (desktop unix where all the client stuff just works) is just a historical accident that Apple would not create again and does not intend to maintain longer than necessary.

Rather than make the Finder more powerful to make the Mac better for serious users, Jobs took the approach that people who couldn't understand the difference between a file and a folder were the real market for Apple, solving the problem by creating iOS with no user view of the file system at all.

This turn from computer company to fashion accessory for those who don't care about computers per se was so successful as a business strategy that I can hardly criticize it. It just bodes ill for those of us who like the Mac for features its only supplier wants to be rid of.

Each time Apple has an event where Cook pointedly emphasizes that the iPad is "what we at Apple see as the future of computing", I google for an update on the current state of "best desktop Linux distro".

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#847

Post by bob1029 » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:30 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #72

AMD has the rights to produce x86 compatible CPUs. If Apple were to design the chips but AMD manufactured them on contract, would that avoid IP/licensing issues with Intel?

Yes. I am finding it almost bemusing that people are dancing so delicately around the only rational possibility here: A semi-custom AMD-produced x86-64 CPU, very much like the Samsung-produced A-series ARM CPUs for their phones and tablets. I see zero reason that the next Axxxx chip cant be a rebranded Zen core with Vega GPU and custom Apple IP magic sprinkled in - https://www.amd.com/en-us/solutions/semi-custom

Just because Apple says they are done with Intel and are making their own chips, does not preclude the possibility that they are simply working with a different x86 vendor on a custom/semi-custom design.

I see zero way Apple gets off the x86 architecture in the next few years, simply due to the tremendous software ecosystem that has grown up around the platform since the switch from PowerPC. They would have to offer a dual path for years to get their larger software partners prepared.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#848

Post by gyaru » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:36 AM UTC

KajMagnus wrote: post #557

davidy123 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't easily share media between the Apple ecosystem and others. You can't access some Apple services at all from Linux. There's no way to run userscripts/WebExtensions on IOS. Your device is no longer a user-focused tool to access media, your browser is closer to being a "smart tv" than a customize-able information explorer and augmenter essentially controlled by no one. You're giving up an awful lot for the sak…

> what's missing from a modern Linux desktop Networking, printer stuff, graphics stuff that works immediately after installation, without one having to search for various problems & fixes on the Internet. And that doesn't randomly break after kernel upgrades. Because of running into networking & graphics driver problems every now and then (and having to revert to older kernel versions), and problems with printers & d…

I'd be amazed if you even managed to break networking after kernel upgrades in the recent 5 years.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#849

Post by gyaru » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:38 AM UTC

welly wrote: post #481

davidy123 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't easily share media between the Apple ecosystem and others. You can't access some Apple services at all from Linux. There's no way to run userscripts/WebExtensions on IOS. Your device is no longer a user-focused tool to access media, your browser is closer to being a "smart tv" than a customize-able information explorer and augmenter essentially controlled by no one. You're giving up an awful lot for the sak…

> I also don't get what's missing from a modern Linux desktop A user interface that isn't ugly and laggy.

What's ugly or laggy?

It's not like there is a defacto user interface but there are plenty of them that sure doesn't lag or look ugly!

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#850

Post by mrweasel » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:47 AM UTC

nunez wrote: post #807

npunt wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2/3s of all PR activity on Github is on a Mac, for what it's worth. Certainly the platform punches above its weight relative to market share. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/102/?time=2...

I don't trust that for two reasons: 1) There is a lot of cargo-culting around the MacBook because hurr durr Windows is terribad (though, to be fair, Docker does work better natively with OS X than Windows, even under WSL), and 2) Most companies give their developers the choice of a MacBook or the shittiest Windows machines known to man (because of irresistable volume deals from Windows OEMs). I bet the spread would b…

While I do prefer MacOS over Windows, I believe that you have a point in regards to the computers companies (and people in general) run Windows on.

Most of issues people have with Windows can easily be explained by low quality hardware. If you need a decent laptop, you're looking at price tags above $1000. Depending on where you live, I wouldn't buy a Windows laptop below $1400, if you expect to be happy with it.

Honestly Microsoft should take steps to prevent the sale of Windows 10 on laptops without an SSD and at least 4GB of RAM. That would help the Windows brand tremendously.