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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#201

Post by recursive »

jolux wrote: post #170
goatinaboat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not fashion. Unfortunately you are wrong. Everything we call tech is in fact driven by fashion. My older version Mac is badgering me to upgrade to Bug Sur. Top feature: 100 new emojis. That is what Apple prioritised. Why the hell are emojis even part of the OS let alone its top feature! Truth is GUIs are done, were a decade or more ago. All there is left now is change for the sake of change. And Apple can’t thin…

Emoji are part of the OS because they’re frequently displayed on websites and in applications, so the system font needs to support them to render them correctly.

So does MacOS require an operating system update to get a new font?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#202

Post by dwaite »

cosmotic wrote: post #132
sedatk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reference counting releases memory as soon as it gets dereferenced, while GC cleans up memory periodically, which means higher memory usage (more than what's actually in use at any moment).

with lots of tiny, short lived objects, reference counting can be hugely inefficient.

Systems that can reap no longer needed objects rather than walking them can help here. The automatic approach is a copy collector, which is typically the more often approach of a generational garbage collector. Since a copy collector typically works by following references, this also increases data locality for machines with a small amount of L1 cache.

Garbage Collectors and JITs typically work best with hardware support, as you need to check pointer reads and writes as objects are being moved around or code is being rewritten. A lot of these systems use MMU gymnastics, such as mapping the same memory page into multiple locations with different permissions.

You also have systems where you create the objects knowing that they will be tiny and short-lived with a fixed lifetime, which can be hugely efficient. This is how Apache Bucket brigades work, since they know that other than a few special cases all memory allocated while handling a request will be garbage once a response is returned.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#203

Post by kstrauser »

CountSessine wrote: post #78
trevyn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They stuff the reference count in the unused bits of the 64-bit pointers.

Yikes. That's the same shenanigans that got them into trouble with the 68000. Everyone stuffed data into the top 8 bits of pointers because even though the 68000 had 32-bit addressing registers, it only had a 24-bit address bus and the top 8 bits were dontcare's. Then, the 6802x came out with more address lines and... ...and that's basically why x86_64 was specified to require a particular bit pattern in high-order b…

Eh, the jump from 16-bit addressing to 32-bit was a factor of 65,536. The jump from 32-bit to 64-bit is 4,294,967,296x. Throwing away the top 8 bits drops it to an address space "only" 16,777,216 times bigger than 4GB. It seems like there's some headroom for growth in there.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#204

Post by nbzso »

jolux wrote: post #175
nbzso wrote: post #77

Those of us who are long enough in UI design know what is a result of attention to detail and professional GUI. We have all used Os X not only for UNIX like core (Darwin) but for consistent UX and UI libraries. In some point in time Apple was influencing our work in really meaningful way by setting the standard (remember Apple Human Interface Guidelines pre Yosemite). For me personally Soundtrack Pro is most polished…

Oh hey another emacs user! You can turn off all the telemetry in macOS and they ask you if you want it on when you setup the computer. Agree to disagree on Big Sur, I love the new look. Keep in mind they’re calling it macOS 11, so there are probably bigger and less superficial changes down the road.

Yep, as a consumer I completely agree, this is firs iteration we will see better (may be). As a UI/UX designer I am hardwired to think in layers of interaction (created ergonomically by mouse pointer), flow and graphical representation. Look in broad term has an emotional impact and is a sum of lot of elements (lines, colors, whitespaces, iconography, animation etc.). But when we are speaking about interface - functional thinking is the heart of design. There are a lot of principles and usability guidelines that must be present. MacOS Big Sur in this context is breaking those desktop paradigms (which we want) but actual implementation is to much touch oriented (iOS). Anyway, this is an open discussion and every point of view counts, so thanks for reply.

PS. Emacs is great, and I am thankful that Apple decisions have pushed me to replace Devonthink and start using Org Mode instead.:)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#205

Post by threw234342543 »

neilpanchal wrote: post #4

I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is. Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a m…

Oh man, how I wish we could run linux on this puppy.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#206

Post by jozzy-james »

jozzy-james wrote: post #37
jrm4 wrote: post #6

At the risk of being that (Linux) guy -- What is gained here if we're just still applying faster cycles to Apple-esque wasteful (and perhaps harmful, as we're apparently learning re: their telemetry) software? If people really dig their Apple stuff, great. But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff d…

depends on what you do, for most people - chromeOS would be plenty fine for 'getting stuff done'

not sure why the downvotes, i said most people - not most HN readers

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#207

Post by chrisabrams »

redelbee wrote: post #69

I have an iPad Pro with keyboard and a 15-inch MacBook Pro I got when my previous MacBook Air couldn’t handle the video editing I was dabbling in. I desperately want one machine (and probably in the iPad form factor) but I don’t know if Apple is ever going to get me there. What say you HN? Is there a future where I can have a single machine? Any other suggestions for what I can do about it today? I’ve test driven Sur…

I remember how disappointed I was when the iPad 1 came out and it didn’t run OS X...some of us have wanted an OS X tablet for 20+ years...

I really do think that a 13 or 15 inch MacBook Pro 2 in 1 like the Dell xps would sell pretty well...

[edit] fixed spell check

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#208

Post by pilsetnieks »

pcr910303 wrote: post #133
neilpanchal wrote: post #4

I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is. Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a m…

While I won’t go that far, arguing that macOS with a Windows 95 UI is a good idea, I do agree that Big Sur’s current UI is a mess. Traditional macOS users valued the Mac user interface deeply, and IMO that was why while iOS 7 got a big refresh, macOS got a much smaller one, only with flatness refinements. Big Sur feels like the iOS 7 for the Mac, and I’m very sad that I’ll have to wait at least 4~5 years to see the n…

I don't even care about the UI flourishes and whatnot, I just want them to observe their own HIG and preventing 3rd parties from abuses, and that would be a huge win.

It used to be that focus stealing on OS X was a cardinal sin and now no one cares. If they only fix a single thing in the entire OS, it should be this.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#209

Post by iJohnDoe »

I’m starting to wonder if this is the reason we had some serious problems with macOS and iOS in recent months and years. Serious bugs and serious security flaws.

The A-team was working on getting everything ready for M1. The B-team was working on the usual releases.

If the M1 is as good as everyone says, then that means they had the best people on it.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#210

Post by phillco »

neilpanchal wrote: post #4

I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is. Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a m…

> I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.

You don't even need to go as far as Windows. Classic Mac OS would be just fine.

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