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Osborning the Mac, or not

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Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#191

Post by mrkstu »

scarface74 wrote: post #94
TMWNN wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I was an early adopter of PPC and OSX, I’m not gonna sit there trying to get work done via the old-cpu emulation again. The lowest spec of the very first PowerPC Macs (the 6100) was faster than any 68K Mac, including emulated software. The first Intel Mac Mini was faster than the G5 Mac Pro. EDIT: Sorry, I misremembered; 68K emulation did impose a performance penalty versus contemporary 68K Macs. PowerPC-native perf…

I’m glad you did the edit. I was about to tell you a story about comparing my Mac LCII with an upgraded 68030-40 and my PPC 6100/60 running emulated software.

Yeah- you were generally standing still at best. The nice thing though is that as your apps (and OS) updated, you were continually getting 'free' speed boosts.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#192

Post by Wowfunhappy »

toyg wrote: post #172
scarface74 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that “wide net” working out? - Microsoft is a non starter in mobile - trying to run Windows on low end Surfaces is painful - Windows is horrible as a touch first interface. - even with Azure there are more Linux VMs than Windows. -it takes literally years and multiple failures every time that MS tries to release a new version of Windows. - They finally through in the towel when it came to IE and was forced to…

MS was on mobile before mobile was mobile (pun intended), and part of the issue was probably that they got in the game so early that, by the time tech was actually mature, they were out of gas. Ballmer thought he'd seen it all, and he had not; when he realized, they panicked and reacted like headless chickens. It's a cautionary tale for the ages, but it could have easily gone the other way around. On the other hand,…

I agree with the thrust of your post but I want to nitpick one thing:

> They won the Browser War I and would have likely done it again in BWII, were they not forced to behave by authorities.

Rephrased: Microsoft won Browser War I by using illegal tactics, and lost Browser War II because authorities made them stop using illegal tactics. IE/Edge was always a bad product, and its success was due to external factors.

That said, Microsoft has lots of resources and I don't doubt they could have made a good browser. By extension, I don't see Chromium Edge as a loss for Microsoft so much as an informed decision to throw in the towel. How does Microsoft benefit from spending millions of dollars on a custom rendering engine, when Google gives Chromium away for free? Microsoft can fully rebrand it, and put in their own ads, tracking, and default search engines. From my vantage point, Microsoft just saved an enormous amount of money and lost very little.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#193

Post by cpeterso »

sjwright wrote: post #168
jmpman wrote: post #148

I buy iMacs for my personal use, as they spend the majority of the time running Windows 10 for gaming. Sure I could build/buy a dedicated gaming machine, but I like the hardware (Great monitor, quiet, sleek, mostly trouble-free) and my iMac can play any game at 1080p. Without bootcamp support, I’m going to abandon the Mac hardware for personal, and then for business use. There’s no way an ARM processor is going to be…

My prediction of Apple’s moves here are far less dire. These are just predictions mind you, but the point is Apple could do this without ruining the platform for enthusiasts. 1. They’re going to have some kind of breakthrough with x86 emulation where the Apple ARM CPU has a translator, or an accelerator, or a co-processor, or something that will make x86 run at decent speeds. 2. Apple will move to a long term two-CPU…

> 2. Apple will move to a long term two-CPU strategy with ARM on economy and low power SKUs, and Intel chips for the “Pro” SKUs.

That makes sense to me: a two-CPU strategy (ARM for laptops and x86 for desktops where power usage is less important) would lessen the Osborne Effect. Mac developers would have a strong motivation to support both laptops and desktops (and thus ARM and x86 macOS) so consumers would not have to fear buying a soon-to-be-obsoleted computer.

Shipping bitcode instead of ARM/x86 universal binaries would also mean that eventually Apple could drop x86 and those bitcode applications would be forward compatible with ARM desktops.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#194

Post by coredog64 »

sjwright wrote: post #168
jmpman wrote: post #148

I buy iMacs for my personal use, as they spend the majority of the time running Windows 10 for gaming. Sure I could build/buy a dedicated gaming machine, but I like the hardware (Great monitor, quiet, sleek, mostly trouble-free) and my iMac can play any game at 1080p. Without bootcamp support, I’m going to abandon the Mac hardware for personal, and then for business use. There’s no way an ARM processor is going to be…

My prediction of Apple’s moves here are far less dire. These are just predictions mind you, but the point is Apple could do this without ruining the platform for enthusiasts. 1. They’re going to have some kind of breakthrough with x86 emulation where the Apple ARM CPU has a translator, or an accelerator, or a co-processor, or something that will make x86 run at decent speeds. 2. Apple will move to a long term two-CPU…

While they might like to go that way, I would say the subpar UX of iPadOS with keyboards/pointing devices suggests that they will need to pour a lot of money into the effort.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#195

Post by jdofaz »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #3
nicoburns wrote: post #2

There shouldn't be too much of an Osbourne effect with ARM macs. If anything, the sensible approach is the opposite: get in there quickly and get yourself an x86 mac while you still can. ARM macs make sense long-term, but the experience is likely to pretty rough at first while software support catches up.

As a very, very long time Mac user, the transition from 68k to PPC, then Mac OS 9 to OS X, then PPC to x86 was fairly smooth for the most part. Apple's relatively firm iron grip on their ecosystem due to their vertical integration gives them a lot of latitude to make moves like this be minimally disruptive to their user base. Now this is of course often annoying and disruptive to its developer base, and I've been on…

You may have blocked out memories of error type 11 :)

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#196

Post by Wowfunhappy »

saagarjha wrote: post #119
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By my count, every new built-in app which Apple has introduced in the past two years has been a Catalyst app. It's possible I'm forgetting one, but the trend is pretty clear. Stock apps set the example for how third party apps should use your platform. IMO, Apple is setting a pretty clear example.

Music, TV, and App Store are “native”. (Yes, they suck.)

Wow, those aren't Catalyst?! They certainly fooled me!

Mind, I'm not sure that's any better: Apple is still setting a pretty clear example for future Mac apps. Mac-specific UIs are out, iOS-esque paradigms are in.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#197

Post by robertoandred »

unicornfinder wrote: post #150
robertoandred wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catalyst has nothing to do with ARM Macs.

Not directly, no, but it's an excellent reflection of the declining software quality and attention that the Mac is starting to get from Apple...

That attention being their work to expand the Mac's software base and its reach with software developers?

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#198

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jcelerier wrote: post #80
bitwize wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about Apple here, the company that pulled off two seamless architecture transitions for its desktop platform -- something I believe no other desktop vendor even attempted. ARM Macs will do just fine. Backwards compatibility will be close to 100%. x86-64 apps may run a bit slow, but native software will benefit from running on the most powerful laptop money can buy, period.

> that pulled off two seamless architecture transitions sorry what :-) I know people who still keep a PPC mac around because some critical software they use in e.g. art contexts has never been ported.

^ Not sure if it's what you're thinking of, but FreeHand seems to be a big one in this domain: https://www.adobe.com/mena_en/products/freehand/

I've never used it, I've just seen people gush wistfully on the internet. :)

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#199

Post by marcosdumay »

comex wrote: post #60
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then why were there so many 32 bit apps? 2005 is, what, a year after the Intel transition? Surely not all of those apps were written during that one year. Not to mention, for better or worse, games in particular were 32bit through 2018 at least. I imagine this must have had something to do with cross platform compatibility, although I can't imagine what.

> Not to mention, for better or worse, games in particular were 32bit through 2018 at least. I imagine this must have had something to do with cross platform compatibility, although I can't imagine what. Well, here are the Steam Hardware Survey results from some random date in 2014: http://web.archive.org/web/20140318083854/https://store.stea... If you click on "Windows Version", you can see that a substantial percen…

While you are talking about games, it's relevant to remember that Unity had different licenses for their 32 and 64 bits engines just up to a few years ago. I think the free license was 32 bits only, what locked a lot of people in it.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#200

Post by mrkstu »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #187
mrkstu wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Apple has moved to a home-grown stack for it graphics and deprecated OpenGL and moved wholly to Metal. There is no way Apple would create a Windows driver for that custom silicon- it has always relied on AMD or Nvidia for those drivers in the past, it has no in house code base or expertise to write the requisite code in Windows and none of the silicon has been optimized for it.

This is an interesting point—but, are you expecting Apple to move entirely to in-house GPUs? On the laptops that currently have integrated graphics, sure, but I'd expect the higher-end Macbook Pros and iMacs to still have AMD cards inside. Perhaps that just becomes a prerequisite for Bootcamp—there's probably a lot of overlap between the types of people who want Bootcamp and the types of people who buy Macs with dedi…

Potentially keeping AMD as a partner is graphics on the high end is a good point- i.e. iMac Pro/Mac Pro.

But since its 99% likely that all the other Mac's will be SoC with no Windows driver support for any of the underlying silicon, I'd find it very surprising if Apple went to the trouble just for the high end.

That said, I thing Intel Mac Pros will be a thing for a long while, even is a 256 core ARM variation came out, just to keep the pros happy until they can comfortably transition to the new stack. Apple has spent too much human capital recently on the pro team to make me think otherwise.

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