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Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

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

#301

Post by andrekandre »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #236
socialdemocrat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked as a mobile app developer primarily on iOS, I quickly learned that many Android fans has an unhealthy obsession with Apple bordering on mental disorder. My Android developer co-worker has to use every opportunity given to rant about how superior Android was and how terrible iPhone was. Not to mention how downright evil Apple was.

As an android user, I hate that iPhone users put up with insane bs that Apple does. They normalize abusive behavior and that spreads to the Android ecosystem too. Which hurts me. Case in point: headphone jacks

its annoying and anti-consumer (imo) to remove things like headphone jacks (especially when there is plenty internal space left for one) but it seems what your really angry at isnt apple per-se but market behaviors and competition (where companies rush to imitate the market leader)

this happens (for better or worse) all over the place, with fast-food, cars, fashion, electronics etc

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

#302

Post by tbodt »

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…

They added 32 bit x86 support to Rosetta apparently just to get CrossOver to work. This could be a reason for them to never remove Rosetta. Maybe they'll just remove the x86 userland.

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

#303

Post by andrekandre »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #79
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…

It is always a trade off. Prioritizing backwards compatibility does not come for free. One result I see from this is that MS keep creating new APIs whole old ones languish in obscurity. On Macs in contrast Cocoa is part of a lineage all the way back to the 1980s. I can still use Objective-C skills I learned even before macOS X was released. The same cannot be said for Windows. Nobody in their right mind writes Win16…

> So ironically the backwards compatibility MS offers it users come at the expense of backwards compatibility for developer skills.

im not sure this follows necessarily: whats to prevent ms from say, writing a wrapper that packages up said legacy apps and supplies the libraries they need, so they can keep running and ms can still dump thier old frameworks and stop supportimg them in newer os's?

basically, what im saying is, for legacy apps, they can be "bottled up" and still run on newer systems without harming developer compatibility and modernizing (wine proves this imo)

but maybe im missing some important detail...

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

#304

Post by valuearb »

drieddust wrote: post #297
valuearb wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I lose the keys to my home, I can break the lock or if required break the door and get into my house so why I can't reset and reconfigure my iPhone?

Because you can reset your iPhone if you forget your passcode?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204306

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

#305

Post by floatingatoll »

This article leaves two billion-dollar market opportunities on the table: Online testing and multiplayer gaming^.

Apple’s recent announcement of a web authentication API includes if your system is booted in fully secure mode^ an attestation that the OS is in secure mode, crypto-signed by the secure kernel whose own signature is by Apple.

This provides something that no desktop/laptop today can provide: certainty that the user isn’t tampering with the operating system to try and cheat. The entire stack, from hardware to UI, is signed and verified to have integrity, and modifying any component of the stack will result in the “secure” attestation being withheld. So instead of having to deal with insane anti-cheating spyware and kernel extensions and system monitoring, testing software and multiplayer game modes can simply require you to be in secure mode to login.

This is available today, immediately, if anyone were to implement it. Of course no one has yet, because no one is thinking of the iOS and macOS platforms as tamperproof computing for the Internet world, and so Apple’s quiet announcement of this in a technical API footnote has gone unnoticed.

Apple will probably always let you shut off anti-tampering on macOS with reboots and terminal commands, and then you can tamper to your heart’s content, but they will never allow your system to attest that it’s in tamperproof mode to third-parties, and that crypto signature can’t be spoofed since the Secure Enclave is involved in generating it.

This ‘tamperproof’ market opportunity is worth billions of dollars, and Apple made it there first. I can’t wait to see what happens when all the industries that suffer undetectable tampering today realize this.

^ Multiplayer FPS developers have had little incentive to develop for Metal prior to now, but Apple Silicon has the capability to easily unseat 5950X/GTX3090 as peak PC gaming performance for a tiny fraction of the cost and heat. Someday the Apple TV will get an Apple Silicon chip that can run FPS games using Metal at 4K/60/HDR, which should noticeably alter that cost-benefit equation.

^ I believe this is signed-sealed OS partition, SIP enabled, kernel extensions disabled; though I may have missed one or two bits.

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

#306

Post by mlindner »

A website that's got "android" in the site name is saying false things about Apple, what a surprise. There's nothing in Apple M1 that is about platform control any more than x86 in Mac was about platform control. They could have locked down the x86 Mac and prevented you from installing other OSes trivially, but they didn't. In fact they already allow you to install other OSes on Mac, if those OSes had support for the M1.

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

#307

Post by valuearb »

drieddust wrote: post #296
rootusrootus wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who had their bank account compromised by a successful social engineering attack on the account representatives, I'm okay with Apple giving us a technical solution that even they cannot break. It's up to me to remember the key, of course, but I like knowing that even Apple can't break into my device if they want.

That's an apples to oranges comparison (pun intended). If I forget passcode my device, why I shouldn't be allowed to reset and configure it from scratch if I am willing to lose my data? There can be numerous situations in which this can happen like a child trying passcode repeated. You will be happy if apple bricks your M1 laptop if you forgot the password due to any reason. What happened to spirit of HN culture?

Stop spouting falsehoods. You can reset your iPhone without your passcode

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204306

and Apple isn’t changing anything about how M1 Macs are secured over other Macs, and certainly not bricking them for lost passwords.

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

#308

Post by barnacled »

klelatti wrote: post #300
barnacled wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their GPU _is_ imagination's GPU in my opinion. Heavily customised (they had a full ARM-like license to do so) but the fundamentals are all the same. Apple claimed that they'd completely reinvented a GPU that didn't rely on any hardware IP owned by IMG whatsoever, provided no evidence of that and recent phones have bug-for-bug compatibility (as far as I heard form a friend who ran some tests). I can't tell you 100% t…

Thanks - that's dreadful. It always seemed remarkable that Apple was able to come up with a leading GPU architecture without in some way infringing someones' IP (and that would be most likely to be Imagination's given the circumstances). I guess taking your biggest (ex)customer to court isn't something that any company would do lightly especially when that company has the deepest pockets in the world and you're not i…

No IMG would have happily taken them to court it just wasn't financially viable and apple have effectively infinite resources. IMG were fools to rely on apple so much but this isn't a new development.

Apple have repeatedly done this same process to a number of suppliers. There was a good website that listed all of the offices apple opened near suppliers before cutting them off, but it went offline :(

IMG should have been much more careful but instead went all-in splashing the cash they got from apple and acting like it was forever. Pretty dumb.

Apple can rely on the media giving them positive coverage. At the time I was amazed at even how much benefit of the doubt even the BBC gave them (US company bankrupting a UK one you'd think they'd back the UK one eh?)

I was also amused to be 'inside' a story discussed on HN, and unsurprised at how far off many were. Tons of apple rationalisation syndrome as usual and lots of 'how dare IMG be so arrogant' etc.

The reality is Apple are extremely ruthless and have been trying to take control of everything for quite some time now.

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

#309

Post by neura »

addicted wrote: post #237
mfer wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple changed on this the press and customer sentiment would be terrible. Oh so terrible. I'm sure they are aware of that. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising. If you're most vocal work of mouth folks turn than this would be bad for sales.

Apple is aware that they constantly change their story mid steam and the majority of the media simply buys it.

Sure, but the main point here is switching the MacOS platform to "app store only", which they could have already done. Using their own hardware vs Intel hasn't prevented that. Do you think there's something else that has prevented them, related to their hardware? If they limited it a year ago, people would have the option to just use their macbook for Windows or Linux? Now they won't?

I'm just genuinely confused as to why people seem to think that [a] Apple is planning to switch to a locked down ecosystem on their notebooks and [b] Apple has been somehow limited in doing this until they had their own "silicon".

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

#310

Post by rootusrootus »

drieddust wrote: post #296
rootusrootus wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who had their bank account compromised by a successful social engineering attack on the account representatives, I'm okay with Apple giving us a technical solution that even they cannot break. It's up to me to remember the key, of course, but I like knowing that even Apple can't break into my device if they want.

That's an apples to oranges comparison (pun intended). If I forget passcode my device, why I shouldn't be allowed to reset and configure it from scratch if I am willing to lose my data? There can be numerous situations in which this can happen like a child trying passcode repeated. You will be happy if apple bricks your M1 laptop if you forgot the password due to any reason. What happened to spirit of HN culture?

You were not clear, and your implication was that Apple would not help you unlock a locked phone. Not that you had a bricked phone because of activation lock.

It is somewhat difficult to lock your own device so that you cannot factory reset it. You wouldn't just have to lose the passcode, you would also need to lose the credentials to your iCloud account as well as your purchase receipt for the phone. Then you become indistinguishable from a thief.

I am okay with Apple's choice on this, as I prefer the security and the theft deterrence. I keep several methods for recovering my iCloud account, and I keep the receipt for my expensive devices.

Does activation lock even apply to Macbooks?

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