Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

reviews.ofb.biz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 801 posts

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#531

Post by dijit »

troupo wrote: post #528
dijit wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an actual dyed in the wool game developer. There’s no such thing as “native”, all the things you’re talking about are translation layers for hardware instructions themselves, and the overhead for doing software based translation is significantly less than hardware accelerated virtual machines- and we as an industry love those. The reason for this is because the translations are very cache friendly and happen in us…

Stadia's impact on gaming in general is next to zero. And given that the vast majority of gaming on Linux is happening via Proton, its impact on gaming on Linux is similarly next to zero.

What games have you made to justify this statement?

I worked closely with productions using proprietary game engines, I feel qualified in stating that Stadia had an outsized impact on our development process in a way that helped proton succeed.

That you don’t see it as an end user, is exactly my point.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#532

Post by troupo »

pjmlp wrote: post #466
boudin wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a failure. Linux distribution and diverse ecosystem brings a level of complexity. The only way to support it long term is to either having your team continuously update and release builds of the game to cater for that which is an impossible task to ask for a lot of studios. The initial approach of runtimes did help but it's still has its limitation. If now a studio just need to test their game under a…

So it is not really a failure when the solution is to adopt Windows and Direct X translation API? I thought only Apple had a distortion field.

It's a complete failure across the board to create any compelling graphics APIs for desktop platforms (both Linux and Mac) beyond DirectX.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#533

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #427
pjmlp wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean translating Windows and DirectX APIs is great, there is hardly a Linux gaming ecosystem. Proton is the acknowledgment of Valve's failure to entice game studios, already targeting Vulkan/OpenGL ES/OpenSL on Android NDK, Switch (which has OpenGL 4.6/Vulkan support), or on PlayStation (Orbis OS being a FreeBSD fork) to target GNU/Linux. I rather have the real deal, not translations.

As an actual dyed in the wool game developer. There’s no such thing as “native”, all the things you’re talking about are translation layers for hardware instructions themselves, and the overhead for doing software based translation is significantly less than hardware accelerated virtual machines- and we as an industry love those. The reason for this is because the translations are very cache friendly and happen in us…

[deleted]

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#534

Post by isodev »

virtualritz wrote: post #508

It's curious how the author mentions iMessage. No Apple user among my friends in Europe uses that. Zero. I guess in the US this is very much not so. It's all WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal here, nowadays. I.e. they wouldn't know about bugs in iMessage as they never open it. I'd be curious to hear about other regions of the world. Do people there use iMessage?

iMessage is a very limited and glitchy app when it comes down to it.

Just from the top of my head: no E2EE by default. Gifies are restricted (and censored). Reactions are clumsy (there are two rows of different kinds of emojis to choose from now). Adding photos or sharing location is complicated compared to Signal or Whatsapp.

Search is ... well, I hope you don't really need to find anything. Delayed notifications on macOS for no apparent reason, and in 2025 you can still end up with multiple entries for the same contact...

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#535

Post by latexr »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #196
nextos wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS had the same battery autonomy, despite Safari being much more energy efficient. The real problem is that, just like the grandparent post pointed out, Apple's software quality has been declining. The Tiger to Snow Leopard epoch was incredible. Apps were simple,…

What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Because right now it’s clearly so far down, beneath dozens of other priorities, that expecting it to just happen one day seems futile.

> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities?

Unrelenting bad press. People talking about nothing else but the decline of their software quality. We can already see that with the recent debacle which caused executive shuffling at the top of the company.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#536

Post by thaumasiotes »

trbutler wrote: post #459
thaumasiotes wrote: post #449

> In an era when people still paid money for operating system upgrades every few years (anyone else remember standing in line for Windows 95?) No, and I would have been too young to purchase it. But I'd be surprised at the idea of massive demand for an upgrade to Windows 95. What we did was buy a new computer that had Windows 95 on it. Computers used to go out of date very quickly. We kept our older computer that ran…

Believe it or not, it was a huge deal. I went to two launch parties -- one hosted by CompUSA and one by a local place -- the night it came out. This wasn't in Silicon Valley, but in the U.S. Midwest (St. Louis, MO). Hundreds of people stood in line at midnight to get the first copies at the two places I went to and the same thing happened all over the world. (Of course, CompUSA also had a whole display of upgrades to…

The value just wasn't there in giving your old computer a software update.

Most notably, that computer with Windows 95 on it also had a CD drive.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#537

Post by bigpeopleareold »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #92
thewebguyd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_). I'm there as well. I've been really enjoying desktop Linux lately, but I can't go back to a non-Apple laptop at this point. There's just nothing…

Also while Apples software quality has definitely diminished over the years, Windows in the same period has utterly CRATERED. Like I get along fine with 11 for my gaming PC but with every single update one feature or another becomes notably broken.

My job gave me an expensive high-specced laptop with Windows on it. This is the first time I am stuck using Windows daily. It's W10. With Windows Defender and a bunch of windows, it starts to slowly become unusable. Today, it blue screened for me just fixing again (and again and again) the bluetooth headphones never gets automatically switched to when I turn them on. Forget about having Visual Studio open on it for an extended period of time.

Meanwhile, my 7-year old laptop with Fedora on it I type this is wonderfully snappy and stable. I started to get tempted to actually switch back to a Mac just to get some predictability and stability, but I have avoided macs for years. (And - never having to deal with constant line ending issues)

All I hear from other co-workers is how their perfectly specced laptops lag with Windows. It's freaking Stockholm Syndrome here!

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#538

Post by rpastuszak »

grishka wrote: post #529

> Apple’s iMessage and SMS tool is an essential app for communication for me and, I suspect, the vast majority of Apple users. For the majority American Apple users, sure. But I myself hardly ever remember that this app exists. The thing that drove me nuts in particular in Sonoma though, is their "improved" text fields. Where it would show the stupid little popup with the active keyboard layout icon next to the curso…

> Oh and Mail, yes, it would sometimes stubbornly refuse to load new messages, or delay them by minutes. It worked fine the previous 10 years. It would've been free to just leave it alone.

Oh man, Mail is almost comically bad, to the point that I occasionally miss messages from people since they're drowned in crap. A native version of Google Inbox that is not Google-owned would be enough for me. (or whatever version/implementation that integrates nicely with my devices)

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#539

Post by yard2010 »

hamstergene wrote: post #375

I keep being tempted to write same post but named "Does all software work like shit now?", because I swear, this is not just Apple. Software in general feels more bugged as a new norm. Most websites have an element that won't load on the first try, or a button that sometimes needs to be clicked twice because the first click did nothing. Amazon shopping app needs two clicks every now and then, because the first one di…

Don't get me started on Google Home. It was working good-ish for years. Lately it started to respond with "sorry, I didn't understand" no matter what I asked, happily doing it the 2nd time I asked. It became unreliable which is ironic because I can build this tool by myself now in a 24h hackathon using basic openai/anthropic apis..

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#540

Post by onli »

bolognafairy wrote: post #510
onli wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What dou you mean with more integrated? It is a regular desktop PC with an apu (like is totally common for office PCs, just bigger) and soldered instead of upgradeable ram. It would be kind of funny, but also very sad, if Apple guys mistook the copying of apple's worst behaviour - producing throwaway devices - as a sign of quality. Though I think we are there for years now with phones, I wouldn't expect such thinking…

I really wish everyone would stop entertaining these borderline crackpot hypotheticals that all rely on the notion of “those damn Apple dummies not getting it!” It’s absurd.

Thanks, what a nice characterization.

As someone who actually studied human computer interaction, and since I had to work with borderline unuseable macs multiple times in my career now, plus as someone seeing the utter failure of relatives in just using an iPhone (bought since "it is so much easier", now not even able to call from the car system since it is so buggy), the Apple popularity is absolutely a case where you have to look at external factors like social status. And if that translates to "the users are dummies" to you, then that's your interpretation. Plus yes, translating marketing/status concepts like a bogus "integrated" status absolutely is interesting, thus my intent to clarify whether that is really happening here (plus some criticism, admittedly).

Probably not worth it going further into this though, it will only derail.

Post reply on HN