Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#71

Post by Someone » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:46 PM UTC

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #35

Bud wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that even a serious criticism? Users had about ten years of warning before 32-bit went away. The real impact of that on real users is minimal.

There are some non-trivial apps used by real users that are 32-bit only, in particular the pre-subscription versions of Adobe Creative Suite.

And those aren’t the worst examples, as alternatives exist (subscription only and/or more expensive, possibly, but they do exist)

Especially in companies, there may be that ‘essential’ app somebody wrote in two decades ago that nobody has the source code to or, if they have, uses a language dialect no modern compiler supports, requires third party libraries of companies long out of business, etc.

Also, hardware support may be an issue. Expensive hardware can have long lifetimes, and hardware companies tend to be bad at upgrading drivers order hardware they don’t sell anymore.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#72

Post by sgerenser » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:46 PM UTC

Bud wrote: post #42

_ph_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there were warnings, but what can I as a user do about it? I am impacted by 32 bit going away and I cannot do anything about it. That is why I am running Mojava instead of Catalina. On the bright side, whenever I am going to buy a new Mac, the ARM processor effectively doesn't cause any additional troubles on the compatibility side, and that was probably the reason for Apple to kill 32 bit with Catalina.

But there is something you can do about it. You're already doing it. You can run Mojave. You want the platform to be weighed down with cruft forever because of a 0.01% use case? Do you want 8-bit support in there too, for the 68000?

68000 Mac apps were never 8 bit, the CPU had a 24-bit address space!

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#73

Post by swiley » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:47 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #40

> Don’t be duped by performance, Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control Yes. That's the biggest benefit, and another reason I'm buying it (on top of great performance for my NLE apps). I want the Mac to be it's own platform, and be under Apple's control and vision. If it's also made foul-proof and air-tight, so much the better. I don't want another lowest common denominator OS converging on the same point.…

Apple's walled gardens don't solve the maleware problem. People get code Apple doesn't approve of onto their platforms all the time.

What these things do make more difficult is community maintained software, which is what made the platforms you feel nostalgic about so nice.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#74

Post by dalbasal » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:47 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #40

> Don’t be duped by performance, Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control Yes. That's the biggest benefit, and another reason I'm buying it (on top of great performance for my NLE apps). I want the Mac to be it's own platform, and be under Apple's control and vision. If it's also made foul-proof and air-tight, so much the better. I don't want another lowest common denominator OS converging on the same point.…

This is the very definition of off topic and tangential but...

Walled garden is a rich metaphor. You can contrast a walled garden to a community garden as you did. That's about controlling who comes in.

Anyway.. the "garden" part has is rich too. What's the contrast to garden? Wilderness? I think what makes a garden is being artificial. The gardner makes the garden. Everything in the garden is natural and the garden itself is inevitably an ecosystem. But, if the gardner abandons it, the garden will quickly evolve into something else. In that sense, the garden is an moderately unstable state being maintained by a gardner.

Besides biodiversity, that's my way of quantifying wildness. What will happen if people leave? How different will it be? I think that's why we associate forest so strongly with wilderness. The forest will remain a forest. The amount of tension between what a garden is now and what nature would like it to be.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#75

Post by holstvoogd » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:47 PM UTC

Bud wrote: post #63

spijdar wrote: post #22

> However, that marginal improvement hardly seems worth upsetting the entire Mac OS developer and consumer software ecosystem. Really? This entire article is really dismissive, but this line especially struck me. I'm not convinced the M1 chip is some strange alien tech bypassing the laws of physics, but it seems clearly superior at its specific niche (single processes with an emphasis on low power usage, using fewer…

The author clearly and obviously has no clue about M1. Calling its performance a "marginal improvement" is laughable. The entire article reads as a desperate attempt to distract people from the obvious advantages of the M1. I'd be desperate too if I were trying to pretend Android is a serious competitor performance-wise when the CPUs are 18-24 months behind and the gap is still widening.

They're just jealous and need to write 'apple bad' blog to validate to themselves why they are years behind ;-)

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#76

Post by segfaultbuserr » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:48 PM UTC

Veedrac wrote: post #28

Apple is about platform control. Apple Silicon is about performance and efficiency. A friendly, open-hardware Apple would have moved to their own chips too, though they'd have documented their GPU, and a walled-garden Apple without a competitive laptop chip would have locked the system down anyway, as, in fact, they were doing on Intel.

> Apple is about platform control. Apple Silicon is about performance and efficiency. [...] A friendly, open-hardware Apple would have moved to their own chips too

Well said. But is it even possible to separate them anymore? What if they are practically both sides of the same coin? Apple uses its platform control to finance the development of Apple Silicon, which in turn strengthens its platform control. In an alternative universe, will the open-hardware friendly Apple even have the resources to develop a top-performance Apple Silicon (as seen in this universe) to begin with?

I'm afraid that x86 vs ARM has become a "pick your poison" game, unless a serious competitor to Apple Silicon emerges... Well, if someone can show me that Linux or BSD runs perfectly on Mac w/ Apple Silicon with working periphrases and not-too-bad power management before the end of 2022, I may change my mind and buy one...

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#77

Post by terramex » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:48 PM UTC

Bud wrote: post #50

terramex wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users had about ten years of warning before 32-bit went away. Citation needed. I remember 32 bit being deprecated just 12 months before its support removal and there were no signs earlier. I just had to recompile my apps to x64, but some 3rd party tools I use never got an update and my 2013 Macbook will stay on Mojave forever.

64-bit apps debuted something like 12 years ago on the Mac. The writing has thus been on the wall for circa a decade, as I said. You figured 32-bit would be supported for what, 20 years? 30?

> The writing has thus been on the wall for circa a decade, as I said.

So do you say that there is writing on the wall for removing 32-bit support in Windows and Linux too? I certainly don't. If Apple deprecated 32-bit while introducing x64 then the writing would be on the wall but they kept supporting and updating 32-bit.

> You figured 32-bit would be supported for what, 20 years? 30?

At least one hardware generation lifetime from moment of deprecation (5 years would be bad, 10 would be great). There were 32-bit AU plugins still being sold in 2018 and some of them never got an update. KORG never updated some of their synth control apps for synthesisers that are still on sale - they just updated docs and wrote that macOS is not supported anymore.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#78

Post by Someone » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:49 PM UTC

my123 wrote: post #21

formerly_proven wrote: post #12

In one of the older threads someone asked whether you'd eventually be able to run Linux on this, and someone responded that this would be annoying to do, since there aren't any docs. Is that actually true? The Apple A SoCs don't boot random kernels, so I would think the Apple M SoC does not, either, and requires bootloader/kernel to be signed by Apple, just like iPhone firmware.

They can be configured to boot other operating systems, see https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-ma... .

From that page:

“Review the following security options:

Full Security: Ensures that only your current OS, or signed operating system software currently trusted by Apple, can run. This mode requires a network connection at software installation time.

Reduced Security: Allows any version of signed operating system software ever trusted by Apple to run.”

⇒ it appears ‘other’ still requires OSes signed by Apple, but it allows you to run an OS even if Apple has no longer trusts it. Or am I misreading that?

So, there might be Apple-signed Linuxes, but I wouldn’t hold my breadth for that.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#79

Post by socialdemocrat » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:50 PM UTC

Multicomp wrote: post #16

> At some point in the not too distant future, old x86 applications will cease to run on Macs, as emulation support won’t run forever One thing I can credit Android some, and Windows a lot (even 10 with all its manifold privacy and user-hostility problems) with is that they are backwards compatible. exceptions to every rule, etc., but I can run all old versions of Android apps on an Android 11 phone, same for Windows…

It is always a trade off. Prioritizing backwards compatibility does not come for free.

One result I see from this is that MS keep creating new APIs whole old ones languish in obscurity.

On Macs in contrast Cocoa is part of a lineage all the way back to the 1980s. I can still use Objective-C skills I learned even before macOS X was released.

The same cannot be said for Windows. Nobody in their right mind writes Win16 or Win32 apps today.

So ironically the backwards compatibility MS offers it users come at the expense of backwards compatibility for developer skills.

When you ban breaking changes in an API you also stop that API from modernizing and staying relevant.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#80

Post by mightybyte » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 12:50 PM UTC

auganov wrote: post #25

Never owned an Apple product and generally don't have too great of an opinion of this ecosystem. But the M1 MacBook Air is perhaps the first Apple product that really caught my attention. A fan-less (without overheating issues) ultrabook with crazy batter life outperforming every comparable offering out there for $1,000. Pretty much the best deal on the market, unless you have specific issues with it. Which in my cas…

As a counterpoint...I've been using Mac laptops for 10 or 11 years after having grown up staunchly anti-Apple and previously using Linux for some years. I will not be buying an M1. I was already about to ditch Mac after the escape key debacle, but they realized their mistake and lured me back this year. Well, no more. I'm not willing to support the vendor lock-in and privacy invasions with the recently discussed ocsp phoning home.

Sorry Apple, this is a bridge too far. I'm out.