Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#201

Post by eertami » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

Bud wrote: post #63

spijdar wrote: post #22

> However, that marginal improvement hardly seems worth upsetting the entire Mac OS developer and consumer software ecosystem. Really? This entire article is really dismissive, but this line especially struck me. I'm not convinced the M1 chip is some strange alien tech bypassing the laws of physics, but it seems clearly superior at its specific niche (single processes with an emphasis on low power usage, using fewer…

The author clearly and obviously has no clue about M1. Calling its performance a "marginal improvement" is laughable. The entire article reads as a desperate attempt to distract people from the obvious advantages of the M1. I'd be desperate too if I were trying to pretend Android is a serious competitor performance-wise when the CPUs are 18-24 months behind and the gap is still widening.

>I'd be desperate too if I were trying to pretend Android is a serious competitor performance-wise when the CPUs are 18-24 months behind and the gap is still widening.

I open WhatsApp on an iPhone XR. It launches instantly.

I open WhatsApp on a five year old Oneplus. It launches instantly.

Honestly who cares unless you have some niche use case or play mobile games. Having a class leading CPU isn't an advantage if it offers an indiscernible performance increase.

What I do care about though is having a respectable battery life and useful features like a headphone jack. A brand new phone (iPhone SE) should not have worse battery life than a phone from 2015 with its original battery that cost half its price.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#202

Post by valuearb » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

dhruvmittal wrote: post #149

jsgo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope so, but Apple implemented the wholesale Metal Only (not Metal Only unless you run a command in terminal) update which killed off using Nvidia cards for those of us who bought MBPs for eGPUing Nvidia cards. Considering Apple hardware doesn’t have a Nvidia option and people like me are probably niche to bring their own GPU (even though CUDA exists), it’d be highly unrealistic to think that Nvidia would rewrite the…

Possibly naive question but does anyone know if CUDA is supported on the new M1 macs? I think I heard on a podcast last week that eGPUs would no longer be supported, but I can't find a reference.

EGPUs aren’t supported for the M1, but Big Sur still identifies and connects to them, implying Apple may restore this feature in the future.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#203

Post by valuearb » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

drieddust wrote: post #198

socialdemocrat wrote: post #68

The truth is somewhere in the middle, so while this article has some good points it is too colored by a strong dislike for all things Apple and borderline conspiratorial thinking. I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store. Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan ho…

My wife was an apple fan until she bought an iPhone and got locked out when she forget the password. Apple support refused to cooperate despite repeated cries of help. M1 feels like a stepping stone in the same direction on laptops. Personally it feels wrong to pay for a device someone can lock you out of and then refuse to unlock. It's like paying ransom without getting kidnapped.

Why did she put a passcode on it if she didn’t want it to be secure? You can use an iPhone with no passcode at all.

Blaming Apple for “locking you out” when you were the one who locked the door and lost the key is silly.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#204

Post by chillaxtian » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

drieddust wrote: post #198

socialdemocrat wrote: post #68

The truth is somewhere in the middle, so while this article has some good points it is too colored by a strong dislike for all things Apple and borderline conspiratorial thinking. I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store. Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan ho…

My wife was an apple fan until she bought an iPhone and got locked out when she forget the password. Apple support refused to cooperate despite repeated cries of help. M1 feels like a stepping stone in the same direction on laptops. Personally it feels wrong to pay for a device someone can lock you out of and then refuse to unlock. It's like paying ransom without getting kidnapped.

Apple Support cannot do anything if you forget the device passcode, there is no back door. Best advice I can think of is, is ask her to restore an iCloud backup, after erasing the phone.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#205

Post by bromonkey » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

drieddust wrote: post #198

socialdemocrat wrote: post #68

The truth is somewhere in the middle, so while this article has some good points it is too colored by a strong dislike for all things Apple and borderline conspiratorial thinking. I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store. Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan ho…

My wife was an apple fan until she bought an iPhone and got locked out when she forget the password. Apple support refused to cooperate despite repeated cries of help. M1 feels like a stepping stone in the same direction on laptops. Personally it feels wrong to pay for a device someone can lock you out of and then refuse to unlock. It's like paying ransom without getting kidnapped.

I mean that sucks for your wife, but what prevents literally anyone else from impersonating someone and unlocking a device? There are very good reasons that Apple does not "cooperate" in theses situations. Passwords are not supposed to be bypassed by third parties.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#206

Post by valuearb » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

Multicomp wrote: post #16

> At some point in the not too distant future, old x86 applications will cease to run on Macs, as emulation support won’t run forever One thing I can credit Android some, and Windows a lot (even 10 with all its manifold privacy and user-hostility problems) with is that they are backwards compatible. exceptions to every rule, etc., but I can run all old versions of Android apps on an Android 11 phone, same for Windows…

I started developing iOS apps for iOS 5, and me my first apps still run on iOS 14 unchanged. Not sure what you are on about?

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#207

Post by bsdubernerd » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

fredoralive wrote: post #36

Tepix wrote: post #3

It will be interesting to see how long Rosetta-2 will be supported. macOS 10.15 took away 32bit apps, which was a sizeable chunk so clearly Apple is willing to alienate some of its users in the name of progress and slimlining.

A quick look at previous transitions shows... Classic Mac OS support (both 68k and PPC): OS X 10.0 was released March 2001, dropped with 10.5 released October 2007. So about 6 years, 8 months. PowerPC Mac OS X app support: First Intel Mac January 2006, support dropped with 10.7 in July 2011, so 5 years 5 months. 32 bit iOS app support: iPhone 5S with 64 bit CPU released October 2013, 32 bit app support removed in iOS…

I was on the last PPC during the ppc->x86. My experience on it was that after a year it was starting to be hard to find new releases containing a ppc build already, and those who did very frequently were poorly tested. Although OSX releases continued to support ppc, at the user level it was pretty clear I was on a dead end. Even on the OSS front I had to rebuild for PPC frequently myself, as more often than not the x86 build was the only one available.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#208

Post by dangus » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

This article has decent points but is definitely just sort of coming from the perspective of being completely unfamiliar with the Mac platform.

Worrying about the App Store taking over on the Mac is misguided. The Mac has never forced the App Store on anyone and the Mac App Store doesn’t even seem to be particularly popular.

“Emulation” (it’s not emulation) is apparently this big problem, except that early M1 Macs show faster Rosetta performance with still-better battery life in many cases.

And yes, Rosetta won’t be around forever, but we have been here before. It wasn’t a problem going from PowerPC to Intel either. If the authors at Android authority ever used a Mac they’d already know this. Anecdotal, but I can’t think of a single pre-Intel program that was lost to the Intel transition that I was using at the time. All the developers checked the box and recompiled, and the dinosaurs like Adobe eventually trudged along.

For those of us who actually used Macs back in the PowerPC days and earlier, there was no such thing as Hackintosh or Boot Camp. The fact that those are going away is essentially inconsequential, especially now that the Mac platform is vastly more popular than it was in 2006.

Why would I want to run Windows on my Mac? It’s been a shitty experience anyway, because even in Intel-land the hardware has been heavily macOS optimized including things like fan and power control. The trackpad driver on Windows was always worse, for example. And again why would you want to run Windows when you spent all this money to not run Windows? It doesn’t make sense especially since so many programs (e.g. 1Password) have their best versions on Mac.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#209

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

If you look at Intel's mediocre-at-best improvements over the last few years, it makes perfect sense that Apple want to move to their own silicon. They also could have moved to AMD, but they probably started thinking about this move before Ryzen happened, and given Apple already make great chips for iPads, it's no great stretch to put them in MacBooks too.

Sure, it gives them more control, but they already had the ability to exercise platform control on x86. They could have disabled Boot Camp etc on the T2 chip Macs if they wanted to, it's not about the CPU.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#210

Post by apecat » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

whynotminot wrote: post #182

apecat wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed the same thing. I admittedly do have an obsession with ranting about Android, but I find that there are fewer reasons to rant than five years ago. So I rant less. As the Android platform has improved over the years, I find that the main reason I don't want people around me to use Android is the ridiculously short product lifecycle of many Android phones, and the risk of non-techies using unpatched device…

This to me is perhaps the primary reason I view Android as simply irresponsible as an ecosystem. The average lifespan of their phones is kind of sad. Most people keep their iPhones for many, many years. But if you try to do that on the Android side you're putting up with a lot of hardware pains or putting yourself at risk using a device that's no longer getting security patches. Totally understand that people have di…

And last time Greenpeace did a checkup of this, it seemed like it was only Fairphone and Apple that even had attempted to work on their processes to limit the environmental impact of their products. It's really hilarious, especially considering the limited user serviceability of Apple products https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/greener-electronics-2...

iPhones have actual resell value, too.

I switched to iPhone in 2012 after I got super annoyed about the poor quality of and lack of software support my HTC Desire Z was receiving. Since then, every phone I've had, has served out its full 5 or 6 year lifecycle with family members.

I generally switch iPhones every two years, and as of late, the only reason I do it is to prevent family members from ending up with garbage Androids. From iPhone 6s forward, I feel that the 'useful lifespan' of these products for someone who wants something snappy, has only increased.

Here in Finland, one can buy phones from carriers unsubsidized, but with years of interest-free installment. After two years, the market price of my old phone is pretty close to the remainder of my installment.