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Osborning the Mac, or not

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Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#211

Post by toyg »

mrkstu wrote: post #188
toyg wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unlikely Adobe will be on board. Porting their apps to ARM, even with a virtualization layer, is going to be hell. They dragged their feet last time around, I bet they will do that 1000x now. MS might decide that "the web is good enough" and just drop native Mac apps for the time being.

Considering that Adobe has been actively porting creative cloud programs to iPad, I'd say the opposite. They've already been optimizing the existing code base for ARM, maybe with a heads up from Apple that this would be a good preparation for changes coming down the pipe on Mac...

"Porting" is a big word, in my limited experience. The i-apps from Adobe are nowhere near their desktop counterparts.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#212

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

What would keep Apple from shipping machines with both ARM and Intel CPUs in them? The ARM CPU would run the OS and decide when to ship jobs over to the Intel CPU. I can’t imagine that the home-grown ARM CPU would add much to the total price of the computer.

Recall that at one point Apple shipped laptops with two GPUs; one for low power work that was more power-efficient, and a more powerful one that was turned on as needed.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#213

Post by pinteresting »

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…

Faster per watt I agree. Per clock, they could be somewhat similar with caveats. Per Core, the clock speeds that can be achieved with intel are much higher (even if it throttles). I think both are good enough for 90% of the population.

I don't see anyone building an external compute/accelerator platform around an ARM Mac ecosystem. It's a niche market as is and the direction has always been to integrate functions like this onto the chip / package directly. I think the latter is certainly an opportunity apple will choose as they will be able to claim their new processors have a special sauce that intel does not have and charge an apple premium for it.

Are you suggesting plugging in a dongle that has a CPU on it? I'm very confused if true. As the bandwidth between RAM and CPU is ~50GB/s, any external dongle would not be able to communicate with the system RAM without a huge slowdown, so the dongle would need it's own RAM too, how this would communicate with a GPU is questionable again and this is already a weird crazy expensive dongle.

I think this is the part that will make 3rd party developers give on on the Mac. Mac ports are given the least love as is, mostly because apple will break your application on such a regular basis it's not worth the cost to port/support, but this change adds so much more burden to the developer, I think most will wait a few years before making a commitment unless apple throws money as them.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#214

Post by protomyth »

toyg wrote: post #161
protomyth wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think a large part of their crappy Windows software was there need to make it look like the Macintosh version. I get the feeling if they are putting Xcode on Windows, they will not feel the need to make it anything but a Windows app.

I would also imagine they would remove anything having to do with the Macintosh except perhaps the Catalyst compiles which should decrease some of the neglect problems causing bugs.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#215

Post by ksec »

scarface74 wrote: post #207
arvinsim wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lump together "PCs are doomed" in the same category as "Apple is doomed". Both are not even remotely true.

PCs aren’t doomed no more than Android devices. They are just both a low margin commoditized product that compete on price.

Being a low margin business does not equate to no one cares about PC business any more.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#216

Post by greedo »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #134
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…

Takes me back to the Apple IIe that I used to develop 6502 controllers with in assembler. It had a Z80 add on that ran CP/M and Wordstar that I used for writing the documentation.

I remember the Orange PC cards that let you run DOS/Windows inside a Mac. Slow as hell though...

https://www.macworld.com/article/1014858/orangepc.html

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#217

Post by scarface74 »

ksec wrote: post #215
scarface74 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PCs aren’t doomed no more than Android devices. They are just both a low margin commoditized product that compete on price.

Being a low margin business does not equate to no one cares about PC business any more.

From a business standpoint, IBM abandoned it years ago and HP has gone back and forth between whether it wants to keep their PC unit for years.

Almost all of Apple’s former competitors are either dead or worth nothing. From a business standpoint, Apple’s strategy seemed to have been the right one. Apple probably makes more on computer sells than any one else and they only make up 10% of Apple’s revenue.

So HN posters can complain about Apple’s strategy until the cows come home, but the market has decided it was the right one.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#218

Post by greedo »

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…

I think this enchanted land ("many developers couldn't find fault with OS X and Mac hardware.") isn't grounded in reality. I only started using Macs around 1999 (though I had an Apple IIc prior.

Apple hardware has always had bugs, flaws, and failures. I had a Mac Pro G5 that leaked (it was liquid cooled). I had the first Intel Mac Pro, and the GPU died several times (and was like $700?). Luckily it was covered under warranty.

Laptop batteries bulged, screens delaminated, cases displayed wear because wrists get sweaty. iTunes on Windows sucked. And obviously keyboards butterflied.

Software has been up and down, sometimes secure, sometimes not. Sometimes fast, sometimes buggy.

But the reason the Mac came back was because despite these perennial flaws and issues, it was WORLDs better than the alternative.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#219

Post by toyg »

scarface74 wrote: post #203
toyg wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS was on mobile before mobile was mobile (pun intended), and part of the issue was probably that they got in the game so early that, by the time tech was actually mature, they were out of gas. Ballmer thought he'd seen it all, and he had not; when he realized, they panicked and reacted like headless chickens. It's a cautionary tale for the ages, but it could have easily gone the other way around. On the other hand,…

There was nothing in the justice department ruling that forced them to stand still when it came to browser development. Apple moves faster with Safari/WebKit after they started with KHTML. Apple wasn’t exactly a large company when they introduced Safari. They also lost billions of dollars on the console market. Is it even as profitable as the AirPods now? As far as getting in mobile too early. Failing at the Newton d…

> There was nothing in the justice department ruling

Between that and the EU ruling that forced them to implement the somewhat-silly browser-choice system, it was a "hostile environment" where the political message was fairly clear. Combined with a situation where IE was effectively dominant, it sapped any appetite to take it forward or take risks with it.

> Is [the console market] even as profitable as the AirPods now?

That is not the point, the point is that they pivoted just fine when they wanted to. They even had something genuinely novel with the gesture-tracking system. And how could they not? Windows and Office are a license to print money, even today.

> Failing at the Newton didn’t exactly hurt Apple

That was 1 device. Microsoft and their partners tried tons of different iterations of formats, some that didn't even exist at the time (kindles, book-like, palm-like - I had an HP that, without a stylus, looks now like a thick iPhone, but was produced in 2003)... but screen tech and cellular bandwidth simply were not good enough at the time.

I'm not talking of exhaustion because of financial losses (Microsoft was printing money, they could have done the same 10 times over), but of a shared weariness for the effort. At one point they basically gave up. I believe the famous Ballmer snark on the iPhone announcement was sincere, in the typically-disdainous way of his: Ballmer thought he had seen it all and this was just one more, nothing to write home about. They had failed so many times in the space that they had lost faith in the possibility of success.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#220

Post by ksec »

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.

Action speaks louder than Words.They only acted when the sales number or Data shows. And that was already too late. That is not caring by old Apple's Standard.

Apple sells roughly 18-20M Mac per year. According to their own words more than 50% of these are completely new to the Mac platform. ( And most of them are form China ) You would have expected 9-10M new Active Users every year if no one was leaving the platform. Instead from 2014 to 2018, during that 5 years they managed to add 20M. ( Genuine Question, Did anyone notice there are less Mac users in US? ) There are also 20M registered developers, which adds to the bottom-line of Mac. What used to be annual Active User number reporting stopped in 2019. And even stopped mentioning satisfactory rate of Mac. Mac Pro was done not because they cared, but because a few closely connected real professional customers threaten to leave the platform before they took action. ( And many left before they notice )

It is like in a marriage when your partner keeps telling others in public how he/she loves you. But did not show any care or action during that time. For years He/She dont even talk to you or notice you. You try talking to him/her about having problems but he/she completely ignore you. One day you publicly file for divorce and He/She rushed out and tell others how much he/she cares and are working on it. That is not caring, it is called saving faces.

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