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The first conformant M1 GPU driver

rosenzweig.io

251–260 of 699 posts

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone. I would never use an iPhone for certain software and UX related issues (biggest is the missing back gesture/button). My Pixel does better photos than ANY iPhone on the market. Macbook Air M1, just look at Dell XPS series. Samsung S9 tablets have an OLED display. OLED... you don't get that on any iPad. Apple Wa…

> I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone. Because Google... I could live with not having iMessage or AirPlay, that's annoying but something I could live with. So it's either a de-googled Android phone or iPhone, and I do need a few apps which are only available in the App Store or Play Store, so I figure I'm limited to phones that can run something…

>I could live with not having iMessage

So, literally any messaging app, something that non-Apple users have to do anyways, and have to deal with your bullshit about only going through iMessage when they have to send you SMS.

>AirPlay

Chromecast is infinitely more ubiquitous. Also, if Apple didn't patent AirPlay and refuse to share it with anyone, you wouldn't be in this situation.

I will absolutely agree with Google being an absolutely dreadful steward of Android, but make no mistake: you gave Apple full support in locking themselves down in their own little playground, and now you're complaining you can't get out.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#252

I wonder if support for OpenGL, Vulkan, etc will improve now that Apple is partnering with nVidia, Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc around the OpenUSD rendering/animation/CAD/3D-scene format? Considering the whole schtick of OpenUSD is "one file format that renders consistently everywhere" (paraphrasing), I would be surprised if Apple doesn't use it as a means to cement more 3D software vendors into macOS land. It's r…

OpenUSD is a way of bundling and specifying the data to be rendered. It doesn't relate to which API the app uses to accelerate rendering. Adobe, Autodesk, Blender, and most others support different backends per operating system including Metal on macOS already.

Yeah, I know it's just a file format for scene description.

I still believe rendering would work better for the industry as a whole if they could agree to all support, say, Vulkan.

I doubt it'll ever happen, but a consistent graphics driver/API standard across operating systems would be pretty rad.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use to be 100% linux person. I've gone through many thinkpads. M1 Air is so far beyond them it's not even close. Battery life is (not exaggerating) 5x or more in my experience. It's honest to god, much faster. Completely silent and cool. (one of my thinkpads almost burned me it got so hot, and the fans get so loud) I've never had a single crash, random restart, failure to sleep, failure to charge, driver problem, tou…

A 5x battery life improvement seems like the baseline had some issues, unless your MacBook goes like a week without charging.

Most recent Thinkpad was X1 Carbon with Kubuntu, running intellij / browsers / docker would last around 3 hours or so. M1 Air is 15+.

I also have a Anker 737 battery, with it I can double the macbook's battery if fully charged. The Thinkpad would only charge partially, so wouldn't even double.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#254

I wonder if support for OpenGL, Vulkan, etc will improve now that Apple is partnering with nVidia, Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc around the OpenUSD rendering/animation/CAD/3D-scene format? Considering the whole schtick of OpenUSD is "one file format that renders consistently everywhere" (paraphrasing), I would be surprised if Apple doesn't use it as a means to cement more 3D software vendors into macOS land. It's r…

> In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist

Apple supports a number of open standards. I think I’d modify your statement to say Apple doesn’t want to depend on any standards it doesn’t control. And while that may appear nefarious, I get Apple’s implied position there. They have really tight coupling between hardware and software in order to deliver on the UX that they intend (whether or not you like all or some of it). If they’re designing their own software and hardware, I can see why they’d also want to implement standards that they can control to some degree - otherwise their UX is dependent on others. This is also why I think Apple sometimes implements new industry standards, USB-C being one example - if no one else has made an effort yet, they can influence the direction by being first movers.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#255
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery life, stability etc. is concerned. The ThinkPads are pretty good laptops, especially if you put Linux on them.

I've used Linux+Thinkpads for years. W-series, P-series, top of the line Switched to Mac M1 this year, and....longer battery life, better performance, higher resolution, brighter screen...it's not even close.

I have an M1 Pro 14 and a work-issued P14s, which is awful. Creaky plastic, the worst trackpad I've ever used, has a terrible display, spongey keys and runs unfathomably hot. All. The. Time. Every time I see someone recommending Lenovo, I cringe. It is night and day when compared to the MacBook Pro.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts. Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one. At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performanc…

Apple did find a solution in mobile Safari for touchscreen hover states on the Web. However the Web platform generally offers more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did, which I'm sure helps.

If I'm not mistaken the solution was to make touching an element trigger the :hover state and the click action unless the :hover state changed the visibility of another element. If the :hover state changed the visibility of another element, then the click action was not triggered until a user tapped again.

This is possible in HTML because it's trivial to determine whether or not a :hover changes display or visibility properties of other elements. As you've supposed, Flash did not afford browsers with that sort of ability.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#258
post #19

Asahi and Alyssa are the titans of reverse engineering. Their work is pretty unbelievable. I would bet Apple is planning to hire them, or has tried already and they refused.

Employment is a poor proposition. Typically employees make poor money in comparison to what kind of profit they generate, that especially applies to IT.

Anyone with a talent, should rather seek to incorporate and sell their services at fair price.

Unfortunately in some countries, big corporations managed to lobby governments to put a stop to that.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts. Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one. At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performanc…

That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV). Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to…

Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.
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