511–520 of 548 posts
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Unix based OS where sleep and hibernate work flawlessly, decent UI, with good commercial and open source software support? Also all the hardware works? I like Linux, but it’s no where near as polished as Mac OS. Wasn’t 20 years ago. Isn’t now. Hell, I’m thinking I should just reinstall windows and use WSL2.
That first paragraph isn't accurate.
"...in my opinion."
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UNIX with good taste and a decent UI.
That makes up for Apple being Apple?
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Lol they highlighted running Linux in the first announcement of the ISA switch , they see no threat in Linux at all. Their business model would need to change dramatically for that to happen. They’re a hardware company that makes the hardware more attractive with software, service and device integration. Their software restrictions are part of the value proposition, but anyone fully ejecting from that would be on the…
+1. The real problem is not software incompatibilities or restrictions, but simply the lack of any vendor support and documentation. For a Linux port to "fail" (in the sense of very low usability), Apple doesn't even have to do anything actively, staying unresponsive and unsupporting is sufficient. Without comprehensive documentation, the development will be a long struggle. - First, having good hardware support even…
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Yes, but they make macOS not Linux. The amount of HW sales generated by Apple putting people on writing code to support Linux on their HW will be less then the Apple sales teams collective bar tab.
> Yes, but they make macOS not Linux. And why is that? Instead of maintaining an entire PC OS themselves they could build macOS XI as a desktop environment on Linux and benefit from the vast ecosystem. But they don't, because...? Presumably because they value total control.
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For the record, I disagree with some of your points, but the one point I agree with is really important. There's no clear guarantee that there will be other performance-competitive arm64 CPUs in laptops anytime soon. I don't think anyone has as much incentive as Apple does. Who else is as incentivized to make a laptop/desktop-class arm64 chip? Maybe ARM themselves ... but without a mainstream OS to run it on (with ma…
Eventually they will come. And I think they will be linux laptops, not windows. The legacy support of closed source software windows has is working against them atm. Qualcomm for example already has hardware that is one or two iterations away from being competitive with the M1( with different strengths and weaknesses) and they can mainline their drivers if they want.
Perhaps - if it makes sense, cost/performance/power-wise to put a core like that in an Android mobile phone. I guess it would? But in the next 5 years?
Remember that anything Qualcomm makes will be optimized for mobile phones and only mobile phones. They won't waste any die-area at all on anything that isn't required by the Android phone market. The Android phone market is the only market for these chips that sells enough units to pay for their design, and it's fiercely competitive.
Especially with ARM's own designs improving so much and Samsung abandoning their own under-performing designs in favour of ARM's, Qualcomm is going to get a lot more competition in the next few years.
Anything they put on those chips that makes them more expensive or use more power than competitive chips is going to cost them design wins. No way will they sacrifice 10% of their mobile market for some pie-in-the-sky, maybe-maybe-not ARM laptop market that doesn't exist and will depend on lots of theoretical buy-in from Microsoft/Redhat/Canonical/Adobe/Lenovo/Dell/etc.
The legacy support of closed source software windows has is working against them atm.
That's pretty outlandish. Try saying that to someone who uses Excel or After Effects or Photoshop for their work. A performance linux-based arm64 laptop has everything working against it that a windows arm64 laptop does, and arguably even more.
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I don’t understand why people complain instead of taking FOSS they like, packaging it as an app, distributing it on the App Store & publishing the source. Does Apple prohibit that? I remember the days of very little Apple compatible software on the shelf at retailers, and no games. I was probably one of the first students to use a MacBook with OSX for CSCI 101 because many classes required Windows. That was lack of f…
> I don’t understand why people complain instead of taking FOSS they like, packaging it as an app, distributing it on the App Store & publishing the source. Does Apple prohibit that? Apple does not, but the GPL does.
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For the record, I disagree with some of your points, but the one point I agree with is really important. There's no clear guarantee that there will be other performance-competitive arm64 CPUs in laptops anytime soon. I don't think anyone has as much incentive as Apple does. Who else is as incentivized to make a laptop/desktop-class arm64 chip? Maybe ARM themselves ... but without a mainstream OS to run it on (with ma…
Amazon have their own ARM server chips out since some time. They are competitive: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...
But my point stands - 3 years ago Microsoft was talking about deploying arm64 to Azure, and those plans were cancelled with Zen 2. Given that GCP will be gone by 2023, that leaves half of the cloud titans with arm64, and the other half without. Will AMZN sell Annapurna chips to other services? My guess is they won't.
Someone has to make arm64 chips for other data centers and cloud providers, and Cavium/Marvell and Ampere have failed trying. It's a huge investment for an uncertain payoff. Annapurna had buy-in from the rest of Amazon.
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For the record, I disagree with some of your points, but the one point I agree with is really important. There's no clear guarantee that there will be other performance-competitive arm64 CPUs in laptops anytime soon. I don't think anyone has as much incentive as Apple does. Who else is as incentivized to make a laptop/desktop-class arm64 chip? Maybe ARM themselves ... but without a mainstream OS to run it on (with ma…
Eventually they will come. And I think they will be linux laptops, not windows. The legacy support of closed source software windows has is working against them atm. Qualcomm for example already has hardware that is one or two iterations away from being competitive with the M1( with different strengths and weaknesses) and they can mainline their drivers if they want.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
As you say, Qualcomm is probably the closest to being competitive, but there is a lot of work to do to catch up. Nvidia is trying to acquire ARM, so they seem to be interested in moving into the space. Samsung and AMD are now working together in ARM processors, so they are another player. Intel used to have an ARM presence via their DEC acquisition, but that was sold to Marvell about 10 years ago. Marvell might move into the space. There are also some ARM startups, some of which were founded by Apple engineers. Lots of activity. Intel is probably the biggest loser in all of this. Sad to see that. They will respond, but it will take time.
At any rate, in terms of desktop market size, Windows is the biggest (76%) and getting a chunk of that processor revenue is a big enough payoff to warrant the required investment. Doubling or even tripling Linux desktop share is comparatively small potatoes. Microsoft is mostly agnostic so they will encourage cannibalizing X86 Windows in favor or ARM Windows rather than lose market share. I think we are going to see a big uptick in ARM Windows investment and product announcements.
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“I know Apple A-series had some edge over Snapdragons, but was the gap between Android processors that big?” Absolutely
Remember there is the 5nm advantage.
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I don't think you understand very well how hardware design works. Most hardware designers write code just like software developers. Most of them have never used a hot air gun, and most of them can't explain in much detail how a transistor works at the physical level (they learned this once in their education, but have since forgotten, simply because they don't need to know this in their daytime jobs). Yes, once you n…
> Most hardware designers write code just like software developers. You're talking about people doing FPGA work which is a totally different skillset than making your own PCBs - and even more lacking in people contributing to open-source projects because it is (at least in my opinion) even harder to get a grasp on, and capable FPGA development boards cost a boatload of money.