Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1

It’s always nice to see Dolphin news. I dunno why they’re so surprised over the JITs syncing in some games, though. I suppose a lot could go wrong, but only a few games seemed to have especially strong reliance on floating point behaviors to begin with, and I sort of expect the behavior of JITs to be influenced by the interpreter a bit due to the way things are laid out in dolphin.

I tried porting a much simpler JIT to M1 and ran into the problem that Rosetta 2 was simply better at translating an AMD64 JIT than my attempt at a JIT. It could’ve been related to W^X performance, but I actually suspect the real answer is that Rosetta’s optimization passes were doing things the JIT did not do natively. I don’t know how to debug that, though, because from the debugger’s PoV, emulated processes look just like native Intel processes.

By that same reasoning, should we be concerned about iOS-exclusive apps (ie, Apple Arcade)? Should we be concerned that you need an iPhone to sign up for an Apple credit card? Or that iMessage isn't available on other platforms?

The situation between iOS and Android is very similar to the situation you're scared of with a theoretical 3rd-party app store. Consumers don't have a clean choice between device ownership and a managed device. They also have to consider hardware concerns, network effects, exclusive apps/games and services.

It probably sounds dismissive to you if someone says that you can just choose not to use Facebook or Fortnite if they're not on the official Apple store. In the same way, it's a bit dismissive to say that I can just choose to ignore arguably the only privacy-respecting credit card on the entire market just because I want to use NewPipe on my phone. People often don't get to choose their phone based on one specific design aspect of that phone.

> For better or worse, the App Store being the exclusive way into the iPhone forces third parties to deal.

I do agree with this, and I think this is the heart of the conflict. A lot of people are arguing about whether iOS is a monopoly. That's not really the most important part of this conversation, the important question we should be asking is: "do we want iOS to be a monopoly?"

Being a (semi) monopoly and gatekeeping access to a substantial portion of the mobile market allows Apple to force companies to do certain things. Some people want Apple to have that power, because they think Apple will force companies to be more private and to adapt more consumer-friendly policies. Some people don't want Apple to have that power because they don't trust them with it, they don't trust them not to shut down technologies like game streaming or adblocking.

Apple has used its monopoly power to do some great things with privacy, their stranglehold over browsers on iOS is one of the biggest reasons Chrome hasn't taken over already. But Apple has also hampered the open web and is stalling on PWA features, largely because those features compete with the App Store. They also (imo) almost single-handedly created a low-quality mobile games market by maintaining a strict position for years that games were not artistic statements and by locking serious games out of their platform entirely. Apple's privacy-preserving disposable email system is great, their severe neglect for adblocking is bad. Their requirements around accessibility are extremely helpful, their war against adult content is extremely harmful. It's a situation with both pros and cons.

This debate is not really about whether or not Apple has power over the market, obviously they do. Facebook isn't just dropping iOS after its recent privacy changes. If Apple didn't have any kind of outsized control over the market, then companies wouldn't go along with their changes, they would just support Android instead. If the market allowed it, they would do exactly what you're afraid of with a 3rd-party app store -- they would abandon iOS and only support Android. But they don't, because they can't.

So the debate isn't about what power Apple has, it's really about whether or not Apple should have the power over the market that they obviously do have.

This is an opinion, and Apple does not believe this opinion, nor do they have to. Furthermore, I think that if you look at the comparison of malware prevalence on Android and iOS, the claim that you can have security and openness simultaneously does not appear to be true.

Guess what? No one does or should care about your opinion of Apple’s software restrictions or corporate philosophy here.

As per the article, those visiting the comments were primarily interested in discussion about JIT performance, comparisons between ARM and x64 instruction sets, GameCube/Wii emulation, etc.

Instead, every single post on HN even tangentially involving Apple is taken over by these self-important haters and their mindless takes, which are often full of false assertions anyhow.

You are a platform war spammer and nothing more. It’s a shame the admins won’t put a stop to this, as it’s turning Hacker News into a vehement cesspool for discussion.

> But they advertise the iPad as a computer, and yet their software restrictions make it a portable TV.

That's not at all true. It's not useful for some subset of what certain geeks want to use it for. It's very useful for all the other things a highly portable computer hooked up to a bunch of really cool sensors and a very capable peripherals ecosystem is.

Ordinarily I'm all for arguments that we, as an industry (software developers, that is) are laughable failures, but I don't think we've failed so badly that computers are useless if you can't—for any reason, including personal inability or lack of interest—run (e.g.) Python on them.