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

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

#121

Post by scarface74 »

ajconway wrote: post #88
mjg59 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has made two transitions while retaining compatibility, in one case with emulation of the old architecture being around the speed of the previous (68k to PPC) and in the other with emulation being faster than the previous architecture (PPC to x86). There's no ARM that's fast enough to emulate an x86 in the same power envelope, so right now any transition would either require all performance sensitive apps to be…

Apple sells iPad Pros which they call “computers”. Those are powerful devices, but there is not much productivity software available, and UI is very different from traditional desktop interfaces. Apple could offer an Air-class machine powered by ARM with a familiar macOS, and most developers would be able to support it in a matter of weeks, if not days.

There is Microsoft Office and Adobe has previewed full Photoshop on it. What other mainstream productivity software do most people need?

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

#122

Post by scarface74 »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #89

I have realised a long ago that Apple has for a long time now been working towards steering the Macintosh way from its open, Unix-based foundation. I used to work with the old MacOS, long before OSX, and it was just the way they wanted it: a closed platform with a nice (for the time) user interface and giving Apple full control over what is being developed on it and how. Dropping this platform for NeXTSTEP-based OS X…

Apple full control over what is being developed on it and how.

What “control” did Apple have on what was developed on classic MacOS? Famously, the only decent compiler during the early PPC years was made by a third party.

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

#123

Post by scarface74 »

jfkwingmsk wrote: post #91
BerislavLopac wrote: post #89

I have realised a long ago that Apple has for a long time now been working towards steering the Macintosh way from its open, Unix-based foundation. I used to work with the old MacOS, long before OSX, and it was just the way they wanted it: a closed platform with a nice (for the time) user interface and giving Apple full control over what is being developed on it and how. Dropping this platform for NeXTSTEP-based OS X…

Which we’re going to see how that sits with antitrust law pretty soon.

The same as “it sits” with console makers.....

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

#124

Post by jmull »

simonh wrote: post #113
Moto7451 wrote: post #4

I don’t think the argument holds very well. Apple has made three processor architectural changes including one on the current OS. “Too complicated” doesn’t really align with the execution history Apple has. The fat binary support Apple has is a huge tool and the ability to add instructions and optimizations to their chips to help with x86 emulation is a big deal. I don’t know if Apple will ever actually do this, but…

The key argument is that transitioning low to mid end Macs isnt enough. They would also need to transition the high end pro machines. That would require engineering super high performance, massively multi core ARM CPUs with huge IO throughput, that would only sell in the tens of thousands of units range. There is just no way on earth they could ever be economically viable. The economies of scale are just dire. Intel…

I know this isn’t your argument, but that doesn’t make sense either.

Why hold back the entire Mac line for a model that might sell a few 10K units? Especially since Apple doesn’t know if the new Pro is really viable at all.

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

#125

Post by AJ007 »

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.

Between touch screen and the Apple Pencil I would say the mouse is the least important input device, unless you really want to play a first person shooter. If you are a keyboard centric developer then ideally everything is accessible by a keyboard shortcut.

Several years back I used my iPad remoting in to my desktop exclusively for about half of the year. There are terrible ways, mediocre ways, and good ways to simulate mouse input with a touch screen. The critical difference between touch and mouse is that a mouse can precisely hit much smaller UI parts (which, a lot of people are going to have trouble seeing anyways.) The Apple Pencil effectively does this — though not with the keyboard mouse pairing most are used to.

I’ve been using Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro for quite a while. Their iOS app is a 1:1 UI port from their desktop app. The app is basically Photoshop for illustrators and painters. It works way better than I would have predicted. Without the Apple Pencil, I don’t think the UI would be usable, but the Apple Pencil is the primary input device for the artist.

I’m expecting the iPad to behave very much like a desktop/laptop soon. My bigger concern is all of the software charging by subscription, which is a lot easier to implement with iOS than MacOS/Windows/Linux (kind of ironic that the unsustainable 99 cent price points makes subscription the only viable revenue model.)

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

#126

Post by ken »

_ph_ wrote: post #74
ken wrote: post #60

Every analysis I've read, including this one, assumes that Apple would start at the bottom rather than the top, as they have with every other CPU transition in the history of the company. Is there something especially difficult about making a high-core-count CPU? The A-series is already crushing single-threaded performance and they're competitive with Intel desktop CPUs for some applications. Once you have a high-per…

It isn't especially difficult, but is is expensive. The big challenge with CPU design is to make up for the costs and for that you need numbers. In the 90ies, there were plenty of high-performance CPU designs, Alpha, Sparc, Mips. They were alle killed by two mechanisms, that Intel had a lead in fab technology and that Intel had much higher numbers, consequentely could gain back much higher investments as the competit…

> The Mac Pro numbers certainly wouldn't pay for such a CPU development.

Again, though, what exactly does "development" mean here? Apple is already fabless. TSMC makes 32-core chips for AMD, so that scale is not new to them.

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

#127

Post by macintux »

wodenokoto wrote: post #57
ChuckMcM wrote: post #7

I see a lot of Surface Pro in the iPad[1]. That isn't a bad thing, it is great to have two design studios trying to out do each other. If you agree that these devices should work better on ARM chips rather than x86 chips, then the iPad has an advantage with an already ARM based ecosystem. Of course the Surface R/T tried that too, and stumbled. But I wonder if Apple saw that as a hint of where Microsoft might go. I fi…

This trope about jobs needs to die. He made fun of the idea of putting a color screen on the iPod and a year or so later presented the iPod color. Of course apple was gonna put a stylus on the iPad, with or without Jobs. Apple might be content with asking users to buy third party hardware to draw on Mac, but they aren’t stupid enough to say you need to buy a Citrix to draw on your iPad.

It needs to die for a more important reason: Jobs was specifically referring to devices which required a stylus because fingers wouldn’t work as well on their resistive touchscreens.

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

#128

Post by danaris »

_ph_ wrote: post #81
pjmlp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those developers would be better off supporting Linux OEMs. That is what I did with my Asus travel netbook (1215 B), which was sold with Ubuntu LTS pre-installed.

I can repeat what I wrote: people like me are dependant on MacOS and on Linux. Currently the Mac offers this ability. I would like to use a native Linux machine, but the only alternative for me would be Windows + VM. And in any case, if the developers are happy with a non-Mac machine, Apple shouldn't be :). Unless they really want to continue their course of driving anyone who does not depend on a Mac for living and…

All signs are pointing to Apple releasing a laptop with a new scissor-switch keyboard design Soon™.

I'm not sure what you mean about "realistic upgrade pricing"...it's not like you've ever been able to "trade in" an old computer to any manufacturer for a steep discount on a newer model (analogous to upgrade pricing of software)...

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

#129

Post by kalleboo »

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.

Oh I'm not claiming like OP that this is some revolution that proves that a Mac is basically an ARM computer already. I'm just correcting your claim that "the disk controller has moved into the disk". There is no "disk". Rather the disk controller has moved into the security controller.

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

#130

Post by classichasclass »

mjg59 wrote: post #61
Moto7451 wrote: post #4

I don’t think the argument holds very well. Apple has made three processor architectural changes including one on the current OS. “Too complicated” doesn’t really align with the execution history Apple has. The fat binary support Apple has is a huge tool and the ability to add instructions and optimizations to their chips to help with x86 emulation is a big deal. I don’t know if Apple will ever actually do this, but…

Apple has made two transitions while retaining compatibility, in one case with emulation of the old architecture being around the speed of the previous (68k to PPC) and in the other with emulation being faster than the previous architecture (PPC to x86). There's no ARM that's fast enough to emulate an x86 in the same power envelope, so right now any transition would either require all performance sensitive apps to be…

Rosetta apps were not faster in emulation. This gets repeated a lot and while the Intel Macs were clearly faster at native apps, Power Macs were still faster clock for clock at their own PPC code. Barefeats did some head to heads; at least one benchmark has a Quad G5 beating a Mac Pro 3.0GHz on PPC software, then Apple's top of the line, and the 2.66GHz was clearly slower.

https://barefeats.com/quad06.html

Yes, the Mac Pro was way faster on its own turf, but Rosetta's overhead wasn't overcome by that. Not until the wide availability of Universal apps was the speed advantage apparent.

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