Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

mondaynote.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 166 posts

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#101

Post by Torwald »

Laforet wrote: post #34
runjake wrote: post #11

For some context: the author of this article, Jean-Louis Gassée, was a former director at Apple, founded Be, Inc. and was chairman at PalmSource for a while. His background may help or hurt his viewpoint, depending on how you see things. I will say that I disagree with his points. And I'll also point out that the Mac ARM transition is happening right before our eyes with the T2 chip , which replaces a bunch of system…

I can't help but feel T2 chip is just another cynical ploy to gradually kill off third party repairs by baking software functions into proprietary hardware that only the manufacturer have access to. It may be a sound security decision, but I have doubts whether it's worth it for the end user. It also goes against a wider industrial trend of moving from ARM to RISCV and other architectures. On the other hand, do all t…

> I can't help but feel T2 chip is just another cynical ploy to gradually kill off third party repairs by baking software functions into proprietary hardware that only the manufacturer have access to.

But this is only a feeling. If you look at it rationally, you would have to point out at least one way in which Apple is suffering from third party repairs. Then you would have to make the case how said point is a cost heavy enough to justify these deep architectural changes. Go ahead.

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#102

Post by robdachshund »

runjake wrote: post #11

For some context: the author of this article, Jean-Louis Gassée, was a former director at Apple, founded Be, Inc. and was chairman at PalmSource for a while. His background may help or hurt his viewpoint, depending on how you see things. I will say that I disagree with his points. And I'll also point out that the Mac ARM transition is happening right before our eyes with the T2 chip , which replaces a bunch of system…

The T2 chip is a drive/ram controller. They are just using it so they can solder in ram and ssds. It doesn't do any processing on terms of the OS. Yes, it is ARM based, but no, it has nothing to do with them switching to ARM, which just seems like the natural evolution of things now.

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#103

Post by robdachshund »

mktmkr wrote: post #39
kalleboo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way to access the soldered-in NAND storage is through the T2 chip, which encrypts everything on-the-fly with a unique burned-in AES key. The T2 also acts as the SSD controller, controlling the raw NAND chips. You can see this in an iMac Pro teardown, as the removeable "SSDs" in it only have flash chips on them, no controller. The T2 is not involved with memory access AFAIK though. As for I/O, it does handle…

Seems like a distinction without a difference. On any PC with an SSD there is "a controller" and "some NAND" the difference with the recent Apple gear is they've changed which part you can remove and replace, and which you cannot. My computer also has NAND you can only address through a dedicated controller that handles the encryption, but I don't think of it as indicative of a revolution.

OP just doesn't know what they are talking about. Welcome to HN.

You are correct, the T2 chip is just a storage/memory controller.

A lot of apple fans think it's a magical coprocessor. It's only there so they can use cheaper soldered ram and ssds and prevent repairs and upgrades. Good ol apple marketing at work.

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#104

Post by jillesvangurp »

Couple of points here:

- Apple is about to ship a new mac os that comes with improved support for running ios/ipados applications as well as using an ipad as an extension of your screen.

- The reason for the Mac Pro and the Mac Book Pro to exist is to enable professional artists, developers, and other people that need this kind of hardware to do their thing. Mostly they use tools not developed by Apple. E.g. Adobe is king for anything related to graphics. There are a bunch of third party 3D tools out there. Same for video. Same for Audio. Porting all of that to a new processor architecture will take a lot of time. It also has a severe risk of alienating developers and users during the transition. E.g. Adobe took their sweet time launching optimized versions of their tools for Intel ten years ago and meanwhile some users moved to Windows.

- Mac developers targeting intel macs (i.e. all existing macs), would probably want to develop and test on the machines they are actually targeting. Building cpu/gpu intensive x86 software on an ARM architecture with an X86 emulator makes no sense. You'd want the real thing. Xcode on arm would be a hard sell (except for IOS developers).

- A key money maker on IOS/IpadOS is the app store and the whole point of an ipad is that all the software comes from there. The whole point of Mac OS is that pro users get a lot of their software outside the app store.

- VR/AR is slowly starting to happen and Apple has mostly ignored this on mac os and only done a little bit on IOS (AR mostly). Any hardware that Apple is going to launch here is extremely unlikely to involve Intel or AMD hardware. In fact I suspect this is the primary reason Apple has not pushed hard on this on mac OS: they are looking to disrupt this space with an Apple product that consists 100% of Apple hardware and software and are not interested in filling the gap short term by depending on third party hardware.

So, a processor architecture change on mac os would be short term disruptive and risky. They have a coherent strategy for getting mac users to buy an ipad and double dip in revenue and it seems they are pushing a lot of users toward that platform. Also the pro market is comparatively small but extremely lucrative in its current form.

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#105

Post by _bear »

detaro wrote: post #96
acollins1331 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I had to edit my comment because I can't imagine a laptop from 2002 that doesn't support a mouse.

You continue to miss the point. The cool thing about the iPad is not that's a laptop. It's that it's a great device in it's own category, that also more and more can replace a laptop.

In other words, all you do in use the iPad as a thin-client.

Which a Chromebook could do. Which your phone could do.

Which any of those laptops from 2002 could do.

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#106

Post by sokoloff »

fluffything wrote: post #86
Dunedan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extremely unlikely. The beauty about RISC-V is that it's open source and royalty free. Both arguments aren't that relevant for Apple, as they got an architectural license from ARM which gives them full access to everything and allows them to design their own chips and because the royalty charges are vanishingly small compared to the prices Apple charges for it's products. Apple has also already invested so much effor…

> Extremely unlikely. The beauty about RISC-V is that it's open source and royalty free The other beauty is that you can extend the ISA with whatever proprietary instructions you want. Others develop 99% of the ISA for you, and you focus on the 1% that differentiates your product. I'm not sure if the ARM licenses allows them to extend the ISA with "Apple-only" instructions, but RISC-V does and it allows Apple for mor…

I think Apple could stop Hackintoshing on Intel (in a practical sense) if they really cared to do so. There will always be the extreme fringe who would get it to work, but it's so easy at the moment to get a fully functioning Hackintosh (including iCloud, iMessage, App Store, etc) that I have to believe Apple is both aware and doesn't care to try to stop it.

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#107

Post by majewsky »

Torwald wrote: post #101
Laforet wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but feel T2 chip is just another cynical ploy to gradually kill off third party repairs by baking software functions into proprietary hardware that only the manufacturer have access to. It may be a sound security decision, but I have doubts whether it's worth it for the end user. It also goes against a wider industrial trend of moving from ARM to RISCV and other architectures. On the other hand, do all t…

> I can't help but feel T2 chip is just another cynical ploy to gradually kill off third party repairs by baking software functions into proprietary hardware that only the manufacturer have access to. But this is only a feeling. If you look at it rationally, you would have to point out at least one way in which Apple is suffering from third party repairs. Then you would have to make the case how said point is a cost…

> you would have to point out at least one way in which Apple is suffering from third party repairs

When a third party messes up their repairs, it'going to give Apple bad PR because people just see broken Macs.

This is not a problem for Windows PCs because enough vendors are involved and they can blame each other when something breaks. With a Mac, it's Apple all the way down, from software to hardware, and 99% of the blame will hit them, no matter how justified that assignment is.

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#108

Post by gridlockd »

jart wrote: post #19
runjake wrote: post #11

For some context: the author of this article, Jean-Louis Gassée, was a former director at Apple, founded Be, Inc. and was chairman at PalmSource for a while. His background may help or hurt his viewpoint, depending on how you see things. I will say that I disagree with his points. And I'll also point out that the Mac ARM transition is happening right before our eyes with the T2 chip , which replaces a bunch of system…

Is the struggle for microprocessor supremacy still even relevant? I'd ask, "who's going to build the best quantum processor?" rather than, "who's going to dethrone x86?"

> Is the struggle for microprocessor supremacy still even relevant?

Absolutely. Today, it's not about performance, but about performance/watt. Simply using a web browser is a huge power drain.

Even if that wasn't the case, getting rid of the "Intel dependency" and the "x86 premium" would make sense from a business standpoint.

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#109

Post by michaelt »

jackvalentine wrote: post #9

My prediction is an A-series Mac won’t start from the bottom up it’ll start top down - beginning with a Mac Pro addin card.

Seems to me if you write Mac software, supporting a new main CPU would be at the top of your backlog - whereas supporting an optional accelerator card would be much less urgent.

Re: Apple: No Macintosh Forks. But the iPad...

#110

Post by armitron »

eridius wrote: post #48
lyime wrote: post #33

I don’t believe Apple will transition away from x86 anytime soon but for different reasons. They would abandon the pro market if it moved to arm. Most x86 pro applications would have to be rewritten. What would be the incentive for software makers? Apple might very will be able to bring out a arm stack for consumer market but there is no indication that they can compete with x86 pro or server market.

They did a migration like this once already for PPC -> Intel (twice if you count 68k -> PPC).

PPC was niche compared to Intel. So they moved from a dying ecosystem to a thriving one.

If they moved from AMD64 to ARM, they would be doing the opposite. AMD64 is not going anywhere on the desktop and is by far the undisputed performance king. Not to mention how many shops and pro end-users they would instantly lose. The number of developers that run macOS and depend on AMD64 virtual machines must be enormous. Given how much Microsoft is embracing Linux, it would be commercial suicide for Apple to abandon the AMD64 platform since they would be driving all these devs to their competition.

Post reply on HN