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Osborning the Mac, or not

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Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#81

Post by arrrg »

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…

I agree that the Mac trajectory wasn’t that great during the last decade with a lot of misfires. However, the most recent Mac picture is much more positive: Nearly the whole lineup is up to date, they butterly keyboard is out, many questionable design decisions were rolled back.

I get that after nearly a decade of disappointment that‘s not enough to rebuild trust completely and there is still more than enough to be critical of, however the most recent positive moves to make me cautiously optimistic.

Plus: Apple has managed these transitions extremely well in the past. That‘s something they are (or at least were) good at.

Here they could also be helped by the fact that these transition times usually put any other extreme experiments on pause. I don’t expect Apple to switch out the CPU and also offer up a radical redesign (where they can make many wrong decisions), at least not across the product line.

They also didn’t do that for the Intel transition.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#82

Post by bluedino »

sys_64738 wrote: post #56

Does the underlying CPU platform matter anymore for most people? If they have some non-standard proprietary apps then for sure that's a big issue. But if most OS apps are recompiled, then you have iCloud apps too, the bigger hitters being onboard is key (Microsoft, Adobe). If you pretty much hit those key points then it begins to look like it'll be relatively straightforward. ARM Macs will increase Apple's profit per…

>> Does the underlying CPU platform matter anymore for most people?

Developers. They want to run the same code on their machines as on their servers. Or in some cases a library might not be available (or behave differently) on one CPU family vs another.

In theory this could accelerate adoption of ARM servers.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#83

Post by yoz-y »

djxfade wrote: post #68
yoz-y wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A Catalyst app can be implemented with SwiftUI though, I don't see your point

Once you have a SwiftUI app you don't need catalyst to make it work on macOS. You can tweak the SwiftUI code specifically and the final user experience will be better. Catalyst only exists because UIKit does not work on macOS.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#84

Post by bluedino »

What are the possible reasons why they haven't done it already?

1. The power savings just isn't there. I find this hard to believe.

2. The performance of the chips just isn't there. This is very possible.

3. Not enough software is compatible yet. What are the crucial pieces?

4. Xcode isn't up to snuff running on ARM yet.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#85

Post by protomyth »

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…

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

For iOS Developers, I am not so sure. If Apple came out with Xcode for Windows at WWDC, I'm pretty sure a lot of iOS developers would be overjoyed. Now, a build farm is much easier among other advantages.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#86

Post by DCKing »

bluedino wrote: post #84

What are the possible reasons why they haven't done it already? 1. The power savings just isn't there. I find this hard to believe. 2. The performance of the chips just isn't there. This is very possible. 3. Not enough software is compatible yet. What are the crucial pieces? 4. Xcode isn't up to snuff running on ARM yet.

It's a combination of development in CPU performance. The peak performance levels of the Apple's ARM architectures have reached peak Intel/AMD levels around the Apple A12, so they haven't been at this level for that long. In addition, Intel has not been good at iterating on their hardware since Skylake in 2015 and don't look to be making great strides in the short term.

It's like the PowerPC->Intel story all over again. Intel was not at PowerPC levels that long before 2005 (PowerPC had substantial advantages from 1994 to 2002), and IBM was not showing evidence of improving the situation beyond 2005.

I think before 2018 it was unclear whether an ARM Mac would be superior in terms of performance/heat/power, but I think given Intel's lull and Apple's continued improvements I think the best decision is clear [if you think it is worth the transition, which is the most debatable item].

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#87

Post by yoz-y »

jedberg wrote: post #29
robertoandred wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Including 64-bit support until Catalina was effectively the same as Rosetta: support for deprecated tech. A Rosetta for 64-bit is just kicking the can.

Right but my point is they only did that for two years, instead of five.

The writing was on the wall for a decade. And most applications did get an update.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#88

Post by scarface74 »

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…

Also, if the transition from 32 to 64 bit is any indication, they don't care nearly as much about backwards compatibility as they used to. 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

Apple hasn’t sold at 32 bit only Mac since 2007. To Adobe’s chagrin they didn’t port Carbon to 64 bit with the rest of MacOS in 2007 and they deprecated it in 2012. Were developers really caught off guard that they shouldn’t be writing 32 bit software in 2017?

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#89

Post by scarface74 »

tosers4 wrote: post #65
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.

>But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time. No. Look at MS and the difference in quality. They are both samey in the $$$ department, but MS much larger focus and enormous dev base makes it not such a nice thing for products. Apple reduced scope is what lets them have quality thing. They do not have much manpower (I mean, they are one of the few trillion dollar company, their human resources don't look like tha…

Even back in 2006, there were at least 7-8 different ways to define a string on Windows depending on which API you were using.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#90

Post by mpweiher »

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,…

> it's actually way more important this time.

How so? All the old legacy apps that nobody wants to (or can) recompile were just jettisoned in the 64 bit transition, as TFA duly noted.

"In retrospect, the move to 64-bit software may have been made not just for its own sake, but in contemplation of the ARM transition."

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