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Osborning the Mac, or not

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Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#71

Post by ginko »

dijit wrote: post #69
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Sweetheart deals with ex-Microsoft Executives leading the company. In my opinion: This is a cautionary tale of career executives. There was, however, an anecdote banded about the Helsinki R&D Nokia offices: "We have, easily, the most expensive clock application ever made, it's been rewritten so many times". So maybe the inefficiency was always going to kill it. That said, Nokia was betting on Meego replacing Symbian,…

The N9 clock app was a work of art though, super easy to use. I'm still sad that Meego didn't take off. It was the most intuitive, polished mobile OS I've ever used.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#72

Post by sod »

It's quite amusing that there is nothing official about this from Apple, but so many blogs & vlogs talking like it's inevitable.

Maybe they just transition to AMD CPUs and nearly nothing changes at all :)

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#73

Post by vetinari »

huslage wrote: post #44
asveikau wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the time of the announcements, there were G5s in the towers and G4s in the laptops. One of the big problem was, how to put G5 into laptop, as it was too power hungry and produced too much heat, and Motorola with IBM were not going to do anything about it. Moto went out of the PPC business and IBM was focusing on the servers.

Ergo, it was dead end for Apple products.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#74

Post by vetinari »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #61
pier25 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I envy your enthusiasm. Apple has not been quite as attentive regarding the Mac as it used to when those transitions happenned. I do believe ARM Macs will do fine, eventually.

Even for the Mac Pro workstations? I bet Apple Audio and VFX shops will not be happy

These would be among the last to switch.

Heck, these models went for years without any updates.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#75

Post by petercooper »

jmull wrote: post #40

I'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 rel…

With the App Store, would fat binaries even be needed for the most part? Just upload all the compiled versions to the store and it'll distribute the right one to the right devices.

For non-store software, I don't see a big deal in distributing x86 vs ARM builds separately, but that might be the developer in me speaking.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#76

Post by jasoneckert »

The biggest questions many of us have around this transition include:

a) Will this change be smooth and offer native enough app support (or emulation) at launch?

b) Will the performance and price be acceptable?

c) What will the ripple effect be throughout the existing Apple dev community?

d) Is this move going to do well for Apple, or the opposite.

I'm finding it tough to speculate on this one, but I've seen a lot of Apple misfires since 2013 when it comes to price, functionality and quality (should I dare say, "the butterfly effect"?).

In short, Apple's direction hasn't been great recently. Given this, I think it more likely that the negatives will outweigh the positives.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#77

Post by nextos »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #62
jmull wrote: post #40

I'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 rel…

> But I think that's not nearly as important anymore I used Macs during Classic to OSX and PPC to Intel transitions but I'd argue it's actually way more important this time. Back during previous transitions fully native apps were really the only option but now... Almost all modern actively developed software on Macs is just electron wrappers Only a few exceptions of actively developed cocoa apps come to mind, Sketch,…

I think also code using x86_64 vectorization (AVX, SSE) is going to be non-trivial to port. Same applies to JITs, which I guess are a lot less mature on ARM due to lack of users at the minute.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#78

Post by truculent »

jasoneckert wrote: post #76

The biggest questions many of us have around this transition include: a) Will this change be smooth and offer native enough app support (or emulation) at launch? b) Will the performance and price be acceptable? c) What will the ripple effect be throughout the existing Apple dev community? d) Is this move going to do well for Apple, or the opposite. I'm finding it tough to speculate on this one, but I've seen a lot of…

And yet the _most_ recent releases on the Mac lineup have been much improved. If that is the trajectory and not an outlier one could make the case for the positives outweighing the negatives!

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#79

Post by vetinari »

comex wrote: post #47
jedberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: > S…

And that's why in 2006 they introduced Macbook Pros which were 32-bit only?

If you want to switch to 64-bit, you don't introduce machines that cannot do that, that need their 32-bit ABI and have to be supported for years to follow.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#80

Post by jcelerier »

bitwize wrote: post #8
nicoburns wrote: post #2

There shouldn't be too much of an Osbourne effect with ARM macs. If anything, the sensible approach is the opposite: get in there quickly and get yourself an x86 mac while you still can. ARM macs make sense long-term, but the experience is likely to pretty rough at first while software support catches up.

We're talking about Apple here, the company that pulled off two seamless architecture transitions for its desktop platform -- something I believe no other desktop vendor even attempted. ARM Macs will do just fine. Backwards compatibility will be close to 100%. x86-64 apps may run a bit slow, but native software will benefit from running on the most powerful laptop money can buy, period.

> that pulled off two seamless architecture transitions

sorry what :-) I know people who still keep a PPC mac around because some critical software they use in e.g. art contexts has never been ported.

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