I don’t think the switch is about Apple providing better performance, thermal efficiency or anything like that. I think it’s simply cost control. Consumer Intel chips haven’t improved much better in a long time but they still command an enormous profit margin. And since Apple controls the compiler toolchain along with the OS and much of the other hardware, it can make the switch without the consumers it cares about the most noticing.
Osborning the Mac, or not
31–40 of 253 posts
Re: Osborning the Mac, or not
#32I'd worry more about Apple iOSing the Mac.
There is likely to be yet more convergence towards iOS constraints. This seems inevitable, especially if Catalyst is central to how Apple carry out any ARM transition. It's very clear that Apple aren't catering to developers in macOS to the extent that drove OS X growth from 2004. For a time, many developers couldn't find fault with OS X and Mac hardware. I wonder how much more correction we'll see from Apple, now th…
I really hope Catalyst is a dead end and only exists because they somehow started working on it before realizing SwiftUI was the way forward. I've yet to see a Catalyst app that does not feel like a quickly hacked beta.
Re: Osborning the Mac, or not
#33> Mac revenue today represents only 10% of total sales; in 2006, it was 38% Wait... what? The Mac was only 38% of Apple's revenue in 2006?
The iPod already represented significant revenue in 2006.
Re: Osborning the Mac, or not
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is ridiculous. Mac revenue was roughly $25 BILLION dollars in 2019. The idea that they don't care about it is simply wrong. Same with the idea that they don't care about marketshare. Of course they care more about iDevices than the Mac. It brings in roughly 5x as much money as the Mac. But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time.
25 billion is still only 10% of their revenue. And they won't lose it all by making it a shitty transition. Heck, they won't lose most of it. But if they lose 20% of their revenue because of a bad transition, that's still only 2% of the total company revenue. Why would the spend money on protecting that 2%?
If the money they need to spend is less than that 2%, why WOULDN'T they spend the money?
Re: Osborning the Mac, or not
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
25 billion is still only 10% of their revenue. And they won't lose it all by making it a shitty transition. Heck, they won't lose most of it. But if they lose 20% of their revenue because of a bad transition, that's still only 2% of the total company revenue. Why would the spend money on protecting that 2%?
If the money they need to spend is less than that 2%, why WOULDN'T they spend the money?
The overhead of hiring people. The overhead of managing an extra team. The overhead of extra QA. The overhead of triaging extra bugs.
There are a lot of costs associated with backwards compatibility with very little payoff if it doesn't mean a lot to the bottom line.
Re: Osborning the Mac, or not
#36I don’t think the switch is about Apple providing better performance, thermal efficiency or anything like that. I think it’s simply cost control. Consumer Intel chips haven’t improved much better in a long time but they still command an enormous profit margin. And since Apple controls the compiler toolchain along with the OS and much of the other hardware, it can make the switch without the consumers it cares about t…
security/boot control might be more under control. There might be more unknowable attack surface with someone else's management unit as part of the boot stuff and around your T2.
Re: Osborning the Mac, or not
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple has never pulled off a transition like this before. None of your examples involved going from a popular architecture with broad software support to a less-popular architecture. That's exactly what the 68K-to-PowerPC transition was: Going from a widely used architecture (Mac, Amiga, ST, and others) to a brand new one.
I think 68K and PowerPC were both clearly much more of a dead end when they were abandoned than Intel is today. Also, I don't recall stories of Macs being able to dual boot AmigaOS, and there was nothing like virtualization in those days. There were emulators, I guess. All of those other platforms were less common than Windows is today. And there was never any threat that they would enforce sandboxing and code signin…
> Also, I don't recall stories of Macs being able to dual boot AmigaOS
They weren't. Amiga 68K systems had significantly different system architecture from Apple 68K systems, most notably in terms of their graphics and audio hardware.
> and there was nothing like virtualization in those days.
Weeelll... there were some special-purpose tools, but they were much more special-purpose than anything we call "virtualization" today. The Amiga version of Basilisk II [1] ran 68K code directly on the host processor, for instance. Later on, there were tools like Mac-On-Linux [2] which would run PowerPC MacOS on a PowerPC Linux system.
Re: Osborning the Mac, or not
#38> Mac revenue today represents only 10% of total sales; in 2006, it was 38% Wait... what? The Mac was only 38% of Apple's revenue in 2006?
The iPod already represented significant revenue in 2006.
Yes, certainly.
In fact I actually checked their Q4 2005 results and the iPod generated 1,212 M and the Mac 1,611M.
I knew the iPod was popular at the time (I had one) but never expected it to be that much.
Re: Osborning the Mac, or not
#39I'd worry more about Apple iOSing the Mac.
There is likely to be yet more convergence towards iOS constraints. This seems inevitable, especially if Catalyst is central to how Apple carry out any ARM transition. It's very clear that Apple aren't catering to developers in macOS to the extent that drove OS X growth from 2004. For a time, many developers couldn't find fault with OS X and Mac hardware. I wonder how much more correction we'll see from Apple, now th…
> This seems inevitable, especially if Catalyst is central to how Apple carry out any ARM transition.
That seems really unlikely to me. Catalyst is primarily a tool for porting iOS applications to macOS. Apple already has plenty of ARM-based devices that run iOS applications; there's no reason for them to muddy the waters by introducing another one and calling it a macOS system.
Re: Osborning the Mac, or not
#40I'm pretty convinced Apple's transition strategy for existing software will be "Recompile, retest, republish":
No built-in emulation or other support for x64 binaries.
In the past transitions they had to have a strong compatibility story. But I think that's not nearly as important anymore.
For software that is being actively developed, releasing fat ARM/x64 (or maybe fat bitcode/x64) binaries can be worked into a release over the upcoming months.
Software that is not being actively released... was pretty much mostly kicked to the side of the road due to the completion of the transition to x64 (if not sooner -- death by a thousand small transition cuts).
There will certainly be casualties to this approach, but I'm guessing Apple will prefer to reap the benefits of a much simpler and straight-forward transition. They may also see it as no great loss. E.g., software that is no longer being recompiled is also no longer receiving security updates.
If this happens, the big kicker will be dependencies. Your hyper-maintained, always-updated app will probably contain at least a few dependencies that stopped moving a long time ago, and you'll be forced to find alternatives.
Also: x64 emulation (slow though it will be) will happen in any case. But from third parties. VMWare Fusion, etc. I think there will probably be a market for some kind of x64 container that "shrink-wraps" an x64 app or library with an emulation core as an alternative when recompiling can't happen (there's a lot of existing tech to build this on top of, so I think it will come pretty quick -- actually, in different forms for different migration scenarios. Because of the performance/resource penalty, you'll want to wrap as little as possible)
edit: I meant to add: It will be funny to come back to this after Apple's ARM announcements and see how bad (or good?) my speculations are...