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Osborning the Mac, or not

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Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#41

Post by lunixbochs »

egypturnash wrote: post #10
egypturnash wrote: post #4

I’m just real glad that my personal upgrade cycle is at the point where I won’t be looking for a new computer until at least the second year of ARM Macs, when most show-stopping bugs should be ironed out of the OS and the Adobe tools I spend most of my work time in. I was an early adopter of PPC and OSX, I’m not gonna sit there trying to get work done via the old-cpu emulation again.

Also: On a desktop machine, there’s no benefit in lower power dissipation and slimmer bodies If you’re in a hot climate then every little bit helps. Lower your power bill due both to lower consumption on the part of your computer and due to the AC coming on that much less. Run the computers fan less. Maybe even have a Mini that does a surprising amount of what you’d buy a Pro for. Make the iMac that much more of a fl…

> On a desktop machine, there’s no benefit in lower power dissipation and slimmer bodies

The obvious win for me is shipping multiple times as many cores in the same TDP. If Apple used a chiplet strategy and good interconnect to make scaling easy - imagine a 16-core Mac Mini, 64-core iMac Pro, and something obscene (256 cores?) in a Mac Pro.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#42

Post by Wowfunhappy »

asveikau wrote: post #18
tosh wrote: post #9

The author mentions Nokia as an example, I didn't follow the transition closely. Was everyone really waiting for the Windows Nokia phones or did Nokia just lose mindshare (as I remember it)? Any other good examples for Osborne Effect? Wikipedia does list SEGA's transition from Mega Drive/Genesis to 32X and Saturn and I can see how this confused potential customers but I guess there must be more (better?) examples. ht…

In 2011 Nokia had several OSs. Symbian was the cash cow, successful in a number of markets. But not up to par with where Android and iOS were leading the industry. The prevailing wisdom seemed to be it needed some modernization or replacement. Maemo/Meego was their previous replacement candidate, based on Linux and Qt. Personally I liked this one. They never really allowed it to be on a path to cannibalize Symbian. I…

> Maemo/Meego was their previous replacement candidate, based on Linux and Qt. Personally I liked this one.

Meego—and the Nokia N9 it ran on—was so damn good. I can still remember the feeling of using it; it felt so good!

I am still pissed off that they killed it. For Windows Phone, of all things!

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#43

Post by Wowfunhappy »

duskwuff wrote: post #39
zerkten wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By my count, every new built-in app which Apple has introduced in the past two years has been a Catalyst app. It's possible I'm forgetting one, but the trend is pretty clear.

Stock apps set the example for how third party apps should use your platform. IMO, Apple is setting a pretty clear example.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#44

Post by huslage »

asveikau wrote: post #22
TMWNN wrote: post #11

Earlier 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…

PowerPC was far from a dead-end technology when it was announced. They had a very ambitious road map and were responsive to customer needs.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#45

Post by Wowfunhappy »

greedo wrote: post #24
jedberg wrote: post #19

Everyone here is very positive that the transition will go smoothly based on their last few transitions being fairly successful. I'm a bit more skeptical. Back then, their desktop/laptop business line was much more important to them. They needed it to go well. They were also a niche player and couldn't afford to lose more market share to PCs/Windows. But now, they barely care about their desktop/laptop revenue (being…

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.

This was my argument for why Apple shouldn't have killed Aperture. Sure, it was a tiny percentage of Apple's business, but it was beloved by customers and independently profitable—more profitable than plenty of entire businesses.

Apple still killed it.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#46

Post by renaudg »

jedberg wrote: post #28
greedo wrote: post #24

Earlier 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%?

Because the Mac and iDevices revenue streams are not as independent as you imply.

Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well.

Why do you think Apple still builds Pro apps like Logic and FCP ? They are almost certainly losing money given their ridiculously low price point, but they help with brand image and keeping the Mac the go-to platform for creatives. There’s indirect value in that.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#47

Post by comex »

jedberg wrote: post #27
lanna wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When they did the hardware transitions, they had a compatibility layer (Rosetta) that was supported for 5 years after the transition. But with the 32 bit change, the announced that it would no longer be supported in 2017, and dropped support in 2019, just 2 years later. You are comparing the time a technology was supported with the time it was announced a technology would no longer be supported. 32-bit apps were su…

From what I could find, the first announcement of dropping support for 32 bit apps was in 2017, and the support dropped in 2019. Why would an app maker update their old apps before an announcement was made that they would be deprecated?

> Why would an app maker update their old apps before an announcement was made that they would be deprecated?

Almost immediately after 64-bit support was added in 2005, it was the recommended path, not only for new apps but for existing ones to migrate to. For example, an document called "64-bit Transition Guide for Cocoa" [1] was first published in 2007. A few years later, another document [2] was more explicit:

> Should You Recompile Your Software as a 64-Bit Executable?

> As a general rule, in OS X v10.7 and later, the answer is probably yes.

OS X 10.7 was released in 2011.

Certainly, many – most – app makers did update their old apps. For example, Apple's refusal to support Carbon on 64-bit famously forced Adobe to scramble to update their apps to run on Cocoa, because they considered 64-bit support to be essential. Admittedly, one of the chief benefits of 64-bit was the ability to address more than 4GB of memory, and pro apps needed that more than your average app. But your average app was also easier to recompile, so in practice, pro apps were if anything the slowest to migrate. Even then, most of them did, long before the official deprecation.

By the time the deprecation was announced, let alone by the time Catalina was released, most apps that were still 32-bit were the ones that had ceased to receive updates altogether. From that perspective, the exact timing of the deprecation doesn't matter that much: most unmaintained apps aren't going to become maintained again because of an announcement by Apple. It was going to hurt no matter what.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#48

Post by Wowfunhappy »

renaudg wrote: post #46
jedberg wrote: post #28

Earlier 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%?

Because the Mac and iDevices revenue streams are not as independent as you imply. Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well. Why do you think Apple still builds Pro apps like Logic and FCP ? They are almost certainly losing money given their ridiculously low price point, but they help with brand image and keeping the Mac the go-to platform for cr…

I mentioned this above—I feel like Apple's pro apps are highly analogous to what happened to the Mac. That doesn't portend a bright future.

Apple killed Shake, which was an industry standard at one point. They killed Aperture, which lots of photographers loved. They replaced Final Cut Pro 7 with a much more limited Final Cut X, and seeded lots of ground to Adobe in the process.

There's also OS X Server, although there's a strong argument to be made it wouldn't have survived in the modern world anyway, and Apple just saw the writing on the wall.

Logic does seem to have done consistently fine, at least, so that's something.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#49

Post by Wowfunhappy »

pier25 wrote: post #38
jedberg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/q405data_sum.pdf

I feel like popular is an understatement—they were everywhere. They basically were the MP3 player market, and that was in turn how just about everyone listened to music. I can't say that today about the iPhone.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#50

Post by pier25 »

zerkten wrote: post #16
tyingq wrote: post #7

I'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…

> For a time, many developers couldn't find fault with OS X and Mac hardware

Totally.

I bought my first Mac in 2007 and from that moment until 2013 I only had small complaints about the Mac platform.

Then my MBP 2011 suddenly died and by the time Apple started a repair program it had been collecting dust for almost 2 years. Then Yosemite came and it was the absolute worst version of macOS I've ever used.

These days I'm happy with my iMac 5K but I'm still using High Sierra. I will probably upgrade to Mojave at some point but that's it. I will _not_ upgrade to Catalina. Thank god I don't need Xcode.

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