Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#501

Post by szatkus » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #459

sreque wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a software developer, and I detest working on my mac laptop. At $lastjob I had a Linux desktop and it is, I believe, the most productive environment I have ever developed in. The job before, I had a windows desktop, and I prefer that to mac. You say you want to just "get things done expediently," but in my experience apple software is flat out inferior and OSX is the worst of the 3 major operating systems I have…

You seem to be conflating macOS with Macs. Have you running Linux on Apple hardware?

Not GP, but I'd like to share my perspective.

Apple creates their products for a specific customer (which covers most of population looking at its popularity among people, who have enough money to buy their products), but not for me. Using Macs or iThings feels like using devices which aren't design for my workflow.

Macbooks are well-built, but they are optimized for Mac OS. Dells and Lenovos are good enough for me and work nice with Linux. I like physical buttons and keyboards which are... well, hard to say what I don't like in Mac's keyboards, but they are not going well with me.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#502

Post by reaperducer » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

saas_co_de wrote: post #475

sreque wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a software developer, and I detest working on my mac laptop. At $lastjob I had a Linux desktop and it is, I believe, the most productive environment I have ever developed in. The job before, I had a windows desktop, and I prefer that to mac. You say you want to just "get things done expediently," but in my experience apple software is flat out inferior and OSX is the worst of the 3 major operating systems I have…

> in my experience apple software is flat out inferior and OSX is the worst It is almost absurdly bad. The only OS that still hangs, freezes, and crashes regularly. It is like Windows 98 quality wise and seems to get worse instead of better. The whole UX is also insane. Every feature is hidden behind some obscure keyboard shortcut that you have to google or you just get used to working with this useless toy os. The t…

> The only OS that still hangs, freezes, and crashes regularly.

Tell that to my Windows 7 box. It crashed last week because I tried to copy a PNG on the desktop into an Outlook e-mail message.

(IT still hasn't cleared Win 10 for company-wide deployment)

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#503

Post by potta_coffee » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

sreque wrote: post #433

mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

This might just be a bargaining move on Apple’s part, but I don’t think so. I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see them make their own display screens. As an Apple customer, I like this idea also. For 20 years, I used to be a desktop Linux fanatic and later became a fan of Android. In the last few years, I have switched to using all…

I am a software developer, and I detest working on my mac laptop. At $lastjob I had a Linux desktop and it is, I believe, the most productive environment I have ever developed in. The job before, I had a windows desktop, and I prefer that to mac. You say you want to just "get things done expediently," but in my experience apple software is flat out inferior and OSX is the worst of the 3 major operating systems I have…

I like Linux better than Mac which I like better than Windows. I don't use Linux for work right now because HiDPI support just isn't there for a lot of Linux software.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#504

Post by tambourine_man » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

apetrovic wrote: post #340

Lramseyer wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remember back to the mid 2000's when Apple switched from PowerPC to (Intel) x86, the higher end machines still ran with PowerPC chips in them while the mid-low end products had x86 chips. All of the old applications that weren't yet ported to x86 had to use "Rosetta." It wasn't until a little while later, presumably once most of the professional software companies had good working x86 versions of their softwar…

There's two problems with that story: first, the famous switch from PowerPC to Intel happened when the desktop was the king, and app developers had strong incentive to recompile programs to the new platform. Right now? Not so much. Second, while Apple's mobile processors are currently the best in ARM world, for "pro" desktop computers Apple needs desktop-grade processor. Making something comparable to i7 isn't such a…

Adobe for one is making a boatload of money from CC subscriptions, record numbers, so I wouldn't worry too much about that (I imagine MS is equally happy with Office 365 on the desktop).

Besides, there's no Carbon to Cocoa or CodeWarrior to Xcode port, so aside from a very small percentage of optimized assembly code, it shouldn't be nearly as hard.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#505

Post by Myrmornis » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

sreque wrote: post #462

Myrmornis wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What apple software do you need to use? Sure, it's annoying not having the GNU command-line utilities. But `brew install coreutils` basically fixes that for me. I admit I don't work heavily with compiled languages on macOS so I can't comment on technical aspects of that. iTerm2 is not inferior to linux terminal emulators. The Apple laptops are quite obviously the best hardware experience out there. I mean obviously i…

I've heard it said that the greatest minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. However, I feel like the greatest minds of our generation are spent trying to figure out how to enable people to build Linux software on OSX. Whether it is: * a convoluted process involving Vagrant, Docker, or both, because you depend on one or more pieces of software that don't run at all on OSX, including D…

I did maintain a Linux laptop (Ubuntu) for all my personal and development usage, from 2003-2011. Based on my experience at that time, it is entirely incorrect to claim that the experience with device drivers (wifi, bluetooth) and sleep/suspend/hibernate is better on Linux. Those things basically never worked right, battery experience was terrible, and many times during that era I lost a day's work because something was broken early in the boot sequence, and I couldn't even start X Windows.

In 2011 I switched to macOS due to my job and I have never had to deal with any of that. Ever. Perhaps the Linux laptop experience has improved significantly since then though.

Furthermore, there was no hardware nearly as nice as Apple laptops on which to install linux. (Yeah, other than Apple laptops, but I felt like I didn't have the money to justify that).

However I of course agree with your points regarding Vagrant/Docker and shell scripting. It is a shame that MacOS could not be based on Linux.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#506

Post by samcat116 » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:06 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #323

Bud wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "likely" at all. Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition, even though the Apple processors in question are designed for mobile devices and have much less power to work with. Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.

That's not remotely true. There is some crossover, which is notable. But that means that the fastest iPhone is faster than some of the slower desktops. Intel's current single core leader is a coffee lake running at 4.7 GHz with like 12MB of core-speed cache. Be real.

Gotta remember that all these previous ARM chips have been designed in the context of the phone. If you suddenly tell the chip designers they have 10x the power and thermal headroom, theres a lot you could do.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#507

Post by Myrmornis » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:07 PM UTC

unclepresent wrote: post #495

sreque wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it said that the greatest minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. However, I feel like the greatest minds of our generation are spent trying to figure out how to enable people to build Linux software on OSX. Whether it is: * a convoluted process involving Vagrant, Docker, or both, because you depend on one or more pieces of software that don't run at all on OSX, including D…

for everyone who wants to expirience a hell of developing software for linux under OSX i suggest to try to build apache httpd server from source on mac. it seems to be a trivial task on Linux but it is a hell of nightmare on OSX. I am saying this just because having a custom build version of apache is a commin need for many web projects.

Once you've got to the point of needing to match your production server technology, doesn't it feel like you should be using a VM or docker (assuming you're tied to MacOS as the development environment)?

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#508

Post by JohnTHaller » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:07 PM UTC

For everyone speculating that this means a move to ARM and they'll write an emulator for x86 code, it's good to note that the first Windows tablet based on ARM, the $1,000 HP Envy x2, has pretty terrible performance for x86 code when running on a Snapdragon 835. The Celeron N3450 launched almost 2 years ago found in super low end $200 Windows laptops outperforms it by ~50%. And ARM on Windows can only run 32-bit apps (no 64-bit apps, no drivers, no system level utilities).

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#509

Post by zeveb » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:07 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

This might just be a bargaining move on Apple’s part, but I don’t think so. I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see them make their own display screens. As an Apple customer, I like this idea also. For 20 years, I used to be a desktop Linux fanatic and later became a fan of Android. In the last few years, I have switched to using all…

What I'd like is for a company like Apple to provide me (and others) the tools & APIs we need in order to take advantage of that integration, without locking us into their UI paradigms. I would like everything to Just Work™; I wouldn't mind a Macintosh laptop; I would hate to be stuck using the macOS UI.

A lot of what Apple really does is hardware integration. Let me use the hardware to run a free OS, and also take advantage of the excellent hardware integration. Let me use a free operating system, StumpWM, emacs and some nifty APIs which let me talk to the integrated hardware system.

Give me, in the words of Steve Jobs, a 'bicycle for the mind,' not a tram to nowhere.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#510

Post by jrnichols » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

"according to people familiar with the plans." usually = "stuff we made up." Same with the WSJ. They're known for Apple news stock manipulation. went from 167 to 164, which at a decent volume and buying at the lower price, could net a nice profit.

"Intel shares dropped as much as 9.2 percent, the biggest intraday drop in more than two years, on the news."

Ahh. That too.

Plus all of the ad revenue from all of the people clicking on this startling article. I don't trust Bloomberg for anything related to Apple.