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Osborning the Mac, or not

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Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#161

Post by toyg »

protomyth wrote: post #85
renaudg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Xcode for Windows would quickly end up like all software Apple makes for Windows: buggy, slow, lagging, and unloved. Not that it is much better as it is on Mac...

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#162

Post by claudeganon »

jmpman wrote: post #148

I buy iMacs for my personal use, as they spend the majority of the time running Windows 10 for gaming. Sure I could build/buy a dedicated gaming machine, but I like the hardware (Great monitor, quiet, sleek, mostly trouble-free) and my iMac can play any game at 1080p. Without bootcamp support, I’m going to abandon the Mac hardware for personal, and then for business use. There’s no way an ARM processor is going to be…

Yeah, this has got me debating whether I need to bite the bullet and buy a high-spec 2019 model, despite their lingering, myriad problems. I have too much stuff to worry about in my day-to-day usage to gamble on whether Apple is going to stick the landing with this transition.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#163

Post by goatinaboat »

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…

But now, they barely care about their desktop/laptop revenue (being only 10% of their revenue) and they don't seem to care much about their marketshare either because they don't seem to be doing much to expand it. They care a lot more about their iDevices now.

The selling point of iDevices is that so much content/code works perfectly on them, and that is because it is created on the OSX platform originally. If Apple think they can maintain that experience for customers while developers flock to WSL or Linux they are kidding themselves.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#164

Post by auggierose »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #154
jmpman wrote: post #148

I buy iMacs for my personal use, as they spend the majority of the time running Windows 10 for gaming. Sure I could build/buy a dedicated gaming machine, but I like the hardware (Great monitor, quiet, sleek, mostly trouble-free) and my iMac can play any game at 1080p. Without bootcamp support, I’m going to abandon the Mac hardware for personal, and then for business use. There’s no way an ARM processor is going to be…

A theoretical possibility: Apple could make Bootcamp support Windows on ARM. I don't know that they'll do it, but they could and it would be interesting. The choice will also say something about how Apple views these ARM Macs: Are they iPhone-esque devices made exclusively for Apple software, or are they (relatively) open-ended computing platforms capable of booting alternate operating systems?

Just observing the pain of getting Linux to run on new Macs, the answer should be obvious. Not that I think this is a bad thing, there definitely is space for an operator like Apple and exactly what many people need.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#165

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

saagarjha wrote: post #146
awinder wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not every app as far as I know because I believe you can opt out of BitCode, but this would be widely the case with exceptions: https://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/06/17/apples-biggest-devel... https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translatin... (other direction but clearly demonstrative of what apple can do here)

Yes, Bitcode is not a requirement for the Mac App Store. Furthermore, Steven’s blog post is misleading: it implies that Apple can just seamlessly translate IR into a different architecture, and shows it kind of working for the simple example he has there. The problem is that this falls apart for anything that is more than mildly complicated (which, of course, is not mentioned in he blog post) because of ABI differenc…

Anything that uses a 32-bit uintptr_t will blow up.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#166

Post by andjd »

I would be surprised if apple transitions all of their macs to ARM at once. Consumer-level macs (macbook air, mac mini, iMac) would go ARM now, while keeping the macbook pros, imac pro, and mac pro x86 for at least a few years. This could happen tacitly with the latter computers being sold in their current form (maybe with minor spec bumps). This allows Apple to make the transition without abandoning their creative pro users, and the makers of pro apps will be incentivized over time to port their software to access the growing ARM-only mac user base. That, or apple has already been working with (and probably paying) Adobe, Avid, Autodesk and other makers of marquee pro apps to port their code to ARM so that Apple can claim that their ARM macs will be pro ready from day one.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#167

Post by [deleted] »

scarface74 wrote: post #125
Steltek wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have missed GP's point. Microsoft is casts a very wide net, running on a huge array of hardware and trying to do everything from mobile to console gaming to datacenter servers. The dev experience is equally diverse: you don't even need a Windows box to develop for Windows. Apple jettisoned all of that diversity to refine a few precious use cases to earn that "quality" aura. I think this move to ARM is signali…

How is that “wide net” working out? - Microsoft is a non starter in mobile - trying to run Windows on low end Surfaces is painful - Windows is horrible as a touch first interface. - even with Azure there are more Linux VMs than Windows. -it takes literally years and multiple failures every time that MS tries to release a new version of Windows. - They finally through in the towel when it came to IE and was forced to…

[deleted]

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#168

Post by sjwright »

jmpman wrote: post #148

I buy iMacs for my personal use, as they spend the majority of the time running Windows 10 for gaming. Sure I could build/buy a dedicated gaming machine, but I like the hardware (Great monitor, quiet, sleek, mostly trouble-free) and my iMac can play any game at 1080p. Without bootcamp support, I’m going to abandon the Mac hardware for personal, and then for business use. There’s no way an ARM processor is going to be…

My prediction of Apple’s moves here are far less dire. These are just predictions mind you, but the point is Apple could do this without ruining the platform for enthusiasts.

1. They’re going to have some kind of breakthrough with x86 emulation where the Apple ARM CPU has a translator, or an accelerator, or a co-processor, or something that will make x86 run at decent speeds.

2. Apple will move to a long term two-CPU strategy with ARM on economy and low power SKUs, and Intel chips for the “Pro” SKUs.

3. As an alternative to 1 and 2, the direction might just be a killer next-gen iPad Pro and new iPadOS which substantially raises the bar for multitasking, trackpad, etc on that platform. I wouldn’t even dismiss the possibility of an “iPadBook” for want of a better name.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#169

Post by freehunter »

mprev wrote: post #122
mikece wrote: post #116

1. Apple designed chips are already faster per-core than a top-end MacBook Pro. 2. There's no reason dedicated ASIC modules for specialized tasks (like video rendering) can't be connected by Thunderbolt 3 just as external video/compute modules are now. 3. There's no reason a dedicated x86-64 dongle can't be sold for ARM-powered Macs that need to run software that hasn't been ported yet. It would be a spectacular coup…

When it's a laptop, I'm quite the fan of having as much as possible built into the machine as a single unit. That's the point of the form factor, after all. I think the last thing the MacBooks need are more dongles.

Is that actually the point of the form factor? Seems like laptops (designed to be easily portable) should be as small and portable as possible with optional add-ons for specific use cases. Desktops can have as much as they want because they’re not designed to be moved very often.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#170

Post by Wowfunhappy »

sjwright wrote: post #168
jmpman wrote: post #148

I buy iMacs for my personal use, as they spend the majority of the time running Windows 10 for gaming. Sure I could build/buy a dedicated gaming machine, but I like the hardware (Great monitor, quiet, sleek, mostly trouble-free) and my iMac can play any game at 1080p. Without bootcamp support, I’m going to abandon the Mac hardware for personal, and then for business use. There’s no way an ARM processor is going to be…

My prediction of Apple’s moves here are far less dire. These are just predictions mind you, but the point is Apple could do this without ruining the platform for enthusiasts. 1. They’re going to have some kind of breakthrough with x86 emulation where the Apple ARM CPU has a translator, or an accelerator, or a co-processor, or something that will make x86 run at decent speeds. 2. Apple will move to a long term two-CPU…

> 2. Apple will move to a long term two-CPU strategy with ARM on economy and low power SKUs, and Intel chips for the “Pro” SKUs.

How is this going to work for developers or Apple? For how many years will everyone need to test and ship universal binaries?

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