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

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

#931

Post by awinter-py »

1. apple likely believes intel's hardware division benefits from apple's large investment in compilers. In general, apple is attacking all its technology partners to cut them out of the stack (i.e. qualcomm).

2. apple seems to be underestimate the value of openness in driving certain kinds of customers to their hardware (developers, for example). Further splitting the ecosystem will drive some users to linux laptops. (Hear hear).

3. intel's incentives are now highly aligned with the linux community (esp given msft's windows shutdown)

4. this is the first time since 2005 that there's a legitimate spread trade between intc and aapl.

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

#932

Post by davidy123 »

reaperducer wrote: post #523
davidy123 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As usual, a lot of the innovation you probably take for granted happens through side channels, user-favouring features that would never appear unless they can be "unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking. I understand that some people value convenience above all else, but maybe you never experienced the bad old days when everything was locked down. It's good that Apple still has competition and others are conscious of…

>"unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking. There are iOS ad blockers on the Apple App Store, and extensions for MacOS Safari. I'm not sure how much more authorized it can get than that unless you want Tim Cook to hold your hand through the process.

The point I didn't make clearly enough is ad blockers probably wouldn't exist if others hadn't introduced this kind of feature through userscripts and add-ons. If only Apple can enable these abilities, it's up to other ecosystems to innovate and define access.

In my opinion, the most important branch the Web could take right now is going from transparent content to opaque content. Now I can filter, transform, organize and augment content accessed through my browser, and even remix it, all enabled by the inherent organizing of the technology, which suggests to the larger society more can be done. It's an open question though, and that technology could be changed to restrict what can be done with content.

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

#933

Post by super_mario »

FabHK wrote: post #874
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…

The macOS system shell, python, compiler etc. are out of date, and out of your control. They're good enough for basic tinkering. However, as soon as you develop on a Mac professionally, you should create your own dev environments and stack independent of the macOS maintained one, starting with brew for example.

I thought it was common knowledge that you should not rely on system provided Python, Ruby, Tcl etc. They are there for scripting the system and nothing else.

If you are Python developer, install specific version your project needs and use that. Same for any other language.

Not sure what you mean by outdated compiler? For what? C, C++ etc are distributed with Xcode and clang is usually standard compliant and recent.

BASH is the only problem. Newer BASH versions switched to GPL v3 and Apple will never upgrade to that.

My personal solution for that is to disable system integrity protection, build latest bash and install in /bin.

This way most scripts that have #!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash and rely on new BASH features just work.

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

#934

Post by amelius »

sneak wrote: post #447
davidy123 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't easily share media between the Apple ecosystem and others. You can't access some Apple services at all from Linux. There's no way to run userscripts/WebExtensions on IOS. Your device is no longer a user-focused tool to access media, your browser is closer to being a "smart tv" than a customize-able information explorer and augmenter essentially controlled by no one. You're giving up an awful lot for the sak…

- decent video calling - imessage (signal is getting warmer, but the integration is still lacking) - adobe creative suite - video editing - audio production apps - photo management and post processing (darktable is still garbage) - sleep/wake and connecting/disconnecting external displays - not-ugly fonts

I suppose you only have looked at free Linux software, as opposed to paid-for software?

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

#936

Post by wilsonnb »

stuntkite wrote: post #548
sneak wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- decent video calling - imessage (signal is getting warmer, but the integration is still lacking) - adobe creative suite - video editing - audio production apps - photo management and post processing (darktable is still garbage) - sleep/wake and connecting/disconnecting external displays - not-ugly fonts

Audio production on linux is pretty good, well not for everyone, but it's got a lot to offer. I spent years with logic / Ableton live on OSX. I'm moving to a more barebones approach these days with linux and supercollider. Still nothing for the creative suite except for wine though.

You might be interested in looking at Bitwig Studio for audio production. I've heard it's similar conceptually to Ableton Live and it runs natively on Linux.

https://www.bitwig.com/en/home.html

I agree that audio production on Linux is pretty good these days. Ardour is a pretty good DAW. The only problems are jack being a PITA sometimes and the lack of plugins.

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

#937

Post by scarface74 »

Dunedan wrote: post #806
scarface74 wrote: post #654

I've read through a lot of the comments, but no one asked the question - why would Apple invest the R&D resources to create and support ARM based Macs when Macs are such a small part of their revenue and profits? Would they make more money by selling ARM based Macs? Why not just add capabilities to iOS and make an iOS laptop? The only thing I see missing is true multi-user support (not the hack they do in the educati…

> why would Apple invest the R&D resources to create and support ARM based Macs when Macs are such a small part of their revenue and profits? They already invest a lot in the development of their ARM-based processors for iOS. I don't think the additional investment for making them ready for Macs would be that high. Take the 12" MacBook for example. I can even imagine they could simply stick the current A11 processor…

They would still have to develop their own custom thunderbolt controller, an emulator, etc.

The only thing changing as far as cost would be the processor. Let's say they save $100 on the processor (not likely). They sell about 14 million Macs a year. That's only $1.4 Billion - pocket change to Apple.

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

#938

Post by sleavey »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #912
sleavey wrote: post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft released Visual Studio for Linux [1] a little while ago. I find it to be excellent; it gives comparable functionality to Atom but with a lot of the stuff you get with plugins already built in. [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/

VSCode is a good text editor, but it doesn't compare to the full Visual Studio IDE.

Out of curiosity, what are the killer features of the full IDE over Code?

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

#939

Post by evilduck »

jcoffland wrote: post #851
Entalpi wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on what work you do. As for writing software macOS is nice since it is quite close to Linux and does contain a lot of the UNIX-thinking. Windows is, IMHO, a user experience mess. Mac is more gentle and aimed to be simple and useful for everyday people. Windows feels like it was designed by a lot of different groups that in the end glued their pieces together in order to ship it.

> As for writing software macOS is nice since it is quite close to Linux and does contain a lot of the UNIX-thinking. You know what's even closer to Linux?

OpenBSD?

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

#940

Post by derefr »

reaperducer wrote: post #527
derefr wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of funny to compare Linux vs. macOS if your experience of macOS primarily comes from using a Hackintosh. (No sleep/wake support for me! Unplugging my HDMI cable causes a hard-reboot! Etc.) Which is to say: Linux is pretty good on Macs, whereas macOS is pretty broken (after weeks of intense debugging with other Hackintosh folks) on hardware that would run Linux just fine.

You admit you're using a hackintosh, and then blame Apple when stuff doesn't work? That's one heck of a mental disconnect.

I didn’t say I blame Apple. It’s not Apple’s responsibility to write drivers for machines they don’t claim to support.

I’m more saying that—although Linux’s support for things like sleep/wake on random machines might be sometimes wonky, the best efforts of the Hackintosh community don’t get macOS to support those same machines any better. It’s the machines that are wonky. (Usually by having horrible off-spec ACPI tables that get patched over with drivers the manufacturer releases only for Windows.)

Which is further to say: it’s not really a failing of macOS or Linux if your hardware won’t sleep/wake correctly, or won’t connect/disconnect from external displays correctly. In either case, it’s because your machine is nonconformant to the specs the drivers were written to follow. The only way to succeed in such an environment is to spend man-decades (Linux) or at least man-years (Hackintosh) reverse-engineering the brokenness and writing heuristics into your drivers that patch over it—or by being such a monopoly player that the OEM does that for you (Windows.)

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