601–610 of 1001 posts
For me, running Windows in a VM was the killer Mac app. There's always one or two Windows applications that don't have good Mac equivalents. I spent a good portion of my career as a Windows developer working on Mac with a Windows VM.
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It was pretty much the same with PowerPC to Intel... Steve Jobs demoed OSX first. Then surprised everybody by saying, OSX had lived a double life in a secret building for many years (with photo), and that he had been running on an Intel Pentium 4 during the demo all morning. Nothing about performance. There was also a developer system back then; an Intel Pentium 4 in a PowerMac case. In a lot of ways, this is far mor…
Your "buts" are dead-on. Everything felt so distant and unauthentic. They should require their execs and presenters to not read from somewhere else and do it live.
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They already have a mobile chip that is as fast as an active-thermally cooled notebook chip.
Isn't that for specific benchmarks though such as some geekbench/specint or web browsing benchmarks? I worry about non-gpu floating point for example. There is so much hand-optimized AVX/SSE code out there in big apps.
I’d be interested in estimates of how much hand-written AVX/SSE your computer actually runs. The apps I’ve seen usually have a fairly small core of AVX/SSE code.
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Yeah, I tried out a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop replacement and pretty much everything is supported except for proprietary stuff like games.
Eh... that was not my experience: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook... (Unless you're speaking almost entirely of webapps, which mostly run fine even on the measly 1.5 GHz 4-core Pi ARM processor.)
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Agreed on all points. I saw speculation elsewhere that this change, along with AWS's addition of Graviton-based (their own ARM processors) instances at much more competitive price points relative to x86, are bound to spearhead the change to "ARM by default." If your devs are already using ARM, and ARM's notably cheaper in the cloud, that's a compelling case. If you're already using Kubernetes / Docker heavily, you're…
This claim doesn't really hold up. The problem here is the vast majority of non-Apple laptops & desktops that are in use. THOSE will still all be x86 for the foreseeable future as ARM CPUs not made by Apple all have terrible per-core performance. Graviton2 compensates by just throwing 64 cores at the problem, but that's not going to do anything for your Electron-based text editor that struggles to use 2 CPU cores in…
It'll be interesting to see how fast improvements are made in both Apple's and AWS's processors. That's another factor I see contributing to this: if Apple's pace of processor improvements continues as it has for iPhone and iPad, it'll be tougher year after year for competitors to stick with the status quo.
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> Logic isn't worth much without plugins… Rosetta 2 cross-compiles Intel binaries to ARM. Why would VST/AU plug-in binaries be an exception?
Will an ARM version of Logic support loading x86 plugins? Last time Rosetta was on a process by process basis, so you might have to make some unfortunate choices. Edit: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou... > The system prevents you from mixing arm64 code and x86_64 code in the same process. Rosetta translation applies to an entire process, including all code modules that the process loads d…
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> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gain…
> Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped Whom is Apple going to sell binned A14s to? Where does everyone think margin comes from in the chip business?
Of course, yield is still a physical constraint, but apple sells a wide range of products and shouldn't have any trouble finding homes for defect-ridden chips.
Apple ported many Pro Apps to ARM , especially their Logic Pro, Photoshop and they were showcasing Maya on ARM. That is about as Pro as it gets for Mac. That reads to me Apple isn't going to have Intel for some high end Pro machine. They intended to go all in with ARM. i.e There will be a Mac Pro with High TDP ARM Chip. I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel. Qu…
> Logic Pro Logic isn't worth much without plugins, and I expect many smaller developers not to port to ARM, and there's nobody to fill the gap in the first years. If that is indeed the case, Apple will begin losing market share where it currently reigns. When there's no pro software, the mac will be just an iPad with a keyboard. It's quite a gamble. But I've been too pessimistic before.
A lot of people do say that, including a lot of professionals, but in my opinion Logic with its stock plugins is already absolutely great. Some people buy a lot of plugins because they don't know how to use the builtin plugins, and some because they enjoy playing with new stuff more than making music (and yes, some who know what they're doing too).
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Apple doesn’t control their machine learning stack. The models they ship are likely created and trained on PCs running Linux and NVIDIA GPUs. It’s entirely possible they’ll extend the Neural Engine to be useful for training but they’d still need to contribute or convince others to contribute to the existing tooling.
The enduser doesn't care about training. iOS devs just care about APIs that Apple has built for them.
I think some worries are warranted.