rcfa

foregoneconclusion said:

rcfa said: Likely neither. Apple itself pushes “universal apps” where one license, for one price, installs on both macOS and i(Pad)OS.

That's one vote for "freebie".

A paid app is not a “freebie” <facepalm>
It’s up to the developer to figure out his costs and price the app accordingly, and users shouldn’t have to pay extra because the app runs on one hardware or another. You don’t buy separate licenses for “full screen mode” apps, laptop apps, desktop apps, etc. 
An iOS version is simply another display mode for the same code, one would hope, and not a toy version of the app, at least not in 2021 on an M1

CPU instruction set architectures barely are relevant, that’s what compilers are for (sure, in times of slow computers, there were pieces of hand optimized machine code here and there for better performance, but hardly anyone is still doing that)

the big transitions are:

Mac OS 9 => Mac OS X ++ (proprietary to Unix based)
Carbon => Cocoa (utterly different API)
big endian => little endian 
32bit => 64bit (software can break because data structure sizes may change)

These changes matter A LOT more than if there’s some Motorola CPU or another, some intel, sparc, MIPS, hp-pa, or ARM chip in there.

NeXT had a quad-fat OS with quad-fat binaries, and it was “just normal”.

Good riddance! Another entitled brat who tried to politicize the workplace, and get a fat payout as a result.

In a country like Russia, they would have a car accident.

In the US they will sue, until the company will settle for a large sum of money under an NDA not admitting any guilt, just to avoid the damage to the reputation the continued legal action causes. You can bet that’s the endgame of her and her lawyer.
She’ll try to claim whistleblower status (even though there was nothing to blow a whistle about) and then sue for wrongful termination.
Some woke idiot in Hollywood, likely from competing corporations like Netflix or Amazon Video, might even offer a dramatized movie deal, where “based on actual events” something despicable is covered up in a company called Prune Computer, Inc., just different enough that Apple can’t sue for defamation…

Bad behavior gets rewarded these days, because due to entitlement, wokeness, nobody dares to tell such people anymore: “You’re a loser, pack up your sh*t and f*ck off!”

A generation that wants communist equality, at a capitalist level of wealth, while being lazy and irresponsible.

Annoying grey screen bezel! Yuck!

black border please! Or at least same color as the case, so one can pick dark blue, or silver.

two colors on the front is just annoying 

Not happy about the lack of touch bar.
The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.

The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.

If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.

radarthekat said:

Wait, let me understand….  You’re saying that China didn’t know about CSAM database scanning and couldn’t, without Apple introducing the hash on device, have told Apple and others that it wants them to implement on-device photo scanning for anything they want to spy on?  Of course China could have.  So there’s NOTHING inherent in Apple doing this that suddenly allows China to make such a demand.  They could have done so last week or a year ago, requiring Apple and other vendors to implement code to scan photos, or next month even if Apple undoes it’s changes.  So please tell me, what has changed?

It’s difficult to impossible to demand an infrastructure that needs to be working at the lowest levels of the OS to be built.
Governments have and do force the inclusion/exclusion of Apps and App-level functionality.

An infrastructure matter is hard to force, because a company like Apple can say it doesn’t fit into their OS’ architecture, etc.

None of these apply, once the infrastructure is actually in place. China, to stick with the example, may simply demand that they are in charge of the database and that they (rather than some NPO/NGO) be notified, citing “privacy laws” and “sovereign jurisdiction over criminal matters” as well as “national security concerns” as reasons, and on the surface, they are correct. After all, who guarantees that NPO isn’t an NSA front, and the hash database doesn’t contain items of concern to the Chinese government?

Once China is in charge of the hash database used in China, and violating notifications don’t go to Apple or an NGO but to Chinese authorities, it’s game over. After all, what’s a human rights violation and what’s a legitimate national security concern, is just a matter of perspective. We get (rightly) outraged at how Russia treats Navalny or China treats supporters of the Dalai Lama, yet many are blind to the plight of Snowden and Assange.

It’s one thing to architect a system that has no provisions for backdoors, it’s another to try to deny a government access to a back door that actually exists.

I own an iPad since the first model that Apple brought to market. I justified the purchasing prices for my by now three iPads (original, Air, Pro), by comparing it with the cost, weight, bulk and hassle of producing, maintaining and carrying paper photo albums vs. carrying an iPad.

Everything else, like watching Netflix in bed, jotting down a note, or quickly checking an e-mail, are fringe benefits. Despite the latest iPad of mine being a 12” A12X based iPad Pro with 1TB of storage, it NEVER was more for me than a photo album and media consumption device, and certainly NOTHING that deserved the name Pro, not even for something as trivial as e-mail does it deserve that name, for what sort of “Pro” solution is an e-mail system that doesn’t allow the user to inspect a messages RAW content to see if something is real or an elaborate phishing e-mail? At best, it might qualify as a semi-pro accessory to a Mac, if one uses it as a Wacom Tablet replacement with Sidecar or some third party software like AirDisplay.

When the MagicKeyboard hit the market, it endeavored into an expensive experiment: would a MagicKeyboard change how I worked with the iPad Pro? Would a cigarette box sized Raspberry Pi 8GB RAM Linux system attached, networked and powered over the USB-C connection and operated over RDP, make up for some of the shortcomings of iPad OS (e.g. by running a real e-mail client like Thunderbird on the Raspberry, by having Mathematica on the Raspberry, by having development and network testing tools on the linux system, etc.)?

The answer was a resounding YES in both cases, but more importantly, it showed me that the iPad Pro with MagicKeyboard was the HARDWARE I always wished a MacBook Air would be: Much better screen, touch screen, pen input, etc. At the same time, the more I worked with the MagicKeyboard, the more painful the shortcomings of iPadOS became.

Yes, I get the difference between a mouse/trackpad&keyboard driven UI and a touch UI. I get that macOS is the former and iPadOS is the latter…
…BUT, branding aside, macOS and iPadOS are fundamentally the same OS (Darwin), with different UI layers. With the new iPad Pros (A12X and up with 6GB RAM or more) there is no hardware issue with running macOS. And just as macOS apps can have a windowed mode and a full screen mode, there’s nothing that stops the same app from in addition having a touch UI mode. So one could have an adaptive OS, which adjusts the UI based on whether docked with pointing device and keyboard, or used standalone in touch UI mode.

With the M1 version, and its up to 2TB of SSD and 16GB RAM, there could be even another solution: virtualization. Run macOS virtualized in an iPadOS app, and switch to it when docked, and suspend it when undocked. 

Even working on a slow-poke system like a Raspberry Pi “remotely” over USB-C and RDP makes the iPad Pro feel like a seamless laptop, that lets me miss nothing (except for macOS rather than Linux), so how much better would a virtualized macOS be, that would run at nearly native speed, and would gain tablet input, and instant switching between iPadOS and macOS? How cool would it be to run Xcode on the virtualized macOS system, and then test the app directly on the iPad?

It would be awesome, beyond words. And what would Apple have to do to make this possible? Nothing. Less than nothing. All they would need to do is to stop actively sabotaging virtualization apps on iPadOS, and a third party solution would spring up in short order.

Now, why is Apple getting in its own way?

The answer is easy: they don’t have “software and hardware divisions”, which if they did, they wouldn’t care which of their operating systems you ran on which of their hardware devices, but they have “Mac, iDevice, aTV, etc. divisions”, and so the Mac division has no interest in driving iDevice sales by spending man hours making their software available on the competing division’s hardware, while digging their own hardware’s grave. The video of how the iPad division went to steal the M1 chip from the Mac division, was in a strange way revealing of why we have the problems as Pro users with the iPad Pro and its media consumption platform operating system.

osmartormenajr said:

You know who doesn't give a damn? Regular Apple customers. You know, people with real jobs and life worries, that don't abuse children, and invest in Apple hardware because they think it is better than the competition's. They are also people that don't agonize about some very technical and narrow definition of privacy, […]

Talk about an overblown "first world" problem.

Talk about utter naïveté!

This isn’t about “some very technical and narrow definition of privacy” this is about an infrastructure that can be used for arbitrary things. Just because, initially to sell it to the public, they limit it to child abuse, doesn’t mean there’s anything technical that limits the expansion to other domains.

In adaptation to your Brazilian saying: “It’s stupid to think just because a jaguar was slain, the jungle is no free of dangers.”

“People with real jobs and live worries” are bred, such that they prevent the solution of problems. Poor people desperate for a job won’t demonstrate or block the deforestation of the Amazon, they didn’t prevent the rise of Hitler to power, they were easily recruited by the Stasi in exchange for a little privilege and a small pay raise. They are the henchmen of any evil system, and then act surprised, when the powers show up at the door and drag them to a KZ or gulag.

Tell the GeStaPo you’re not a criminal, when they knock at your door for having looked at the wrong web site, tell yourself “me being deported is just an overblown first world problem.”

And that right there proves that CSAM scanning would turn into an unmitigated disaster, as demands for control over the content of the hash database and notifications of matches be in the hands of government agencies would come as soon as the “feature” would be deployed.

It also shows why side loading and authenticated root access by owners of a device must be possible: to load apps that Apple can’t or doesn’t want to offer on its brand, sales, and local laws driven AppStore:

users must be able to have the ultimate decision over what software runs on their devices and have the ability to inspect the running system for spyware etc.

The “just trust us to do the right thing” and “do no evil” approach has run its course. It’s time for “trust but verify”…

The real issue of M1 Max is: NO ECC RAM!!
And unfortunately almost nobody gets why that’s important…