mdriftmeyer
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Apple planning to ditch Intel chips in Macs for its own custom silicon in 2020
As a NeXT/Apple alum you folks are blatantly ignorant of the meaning of Fat Binary. Fat binaries were the binaries of NeXTSTEP/Openstep that were built binaries of the OS to run natively on different hardware architectures instruction sets.
Apple continues working on shoring up the custom ARM based CPUs of its own design and still licenses the IP in order to produce them has nothing to do with leaving macOS to fend for itself on ARM based only instruction sets.
More importantly, the effort to create OS X even with decades of x86/PPC/Moto/SPARC expertise took 5 years to get a limped version out the door, and that was already with a platform native on x86. The Rosetta was a compatibility layer on top of it.
The logical solution moving forward is for Apple to license IP from AMD to have them build custom ASIC designs of SoC APUs and use their discrete CPUs/GPUs with the upcoming Thunderbolt licensing [now royalty free] to have a custom Thunderbolt controller designed by Apple on their boards, that are compatible with AMD's x86 chipsets, thus freeing Apple from relying solely on Intel. -
Video shows early competing iPhone prototypes developed by Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall
Soli said:rogifan_new said:davidmalcolm said:I honestly would love to see Forestall back at Apple. I think iOS has really gone stagnant after iOS 7. It's a heck of a lot of more of the same. Don't get me wrong I love my iPad Pro with Pencil, and I love my iPhone SE. But my iPhone SE is the same design that was there when Scott was there, and the software UI hasn't moved that much at all. And I think he probably could have gone along with a flatter UI. Sometimes I wonder if Ive just wanted Forestall out because of personal conflicts and didn't actually have much planned for the UI aside from flattening it. Where as Forestall had a TON of ideas.Steve spent most of his time at PIXAR after 1993 and the release of Openstep for Intel. We weren't making black hardware anymore and PIXAR was working on Toy Story. Steve didn't invest much time at NeXT until WebObjects and even then later he was mainly back at PIXAR. When the merger was a possibility he immediately re-engaged on NeXT and the possibility of being the special consultant advisor that later became iCEO moved him from 100% PIXAR to 100% Apple.
Steve was really a Hardware man. He expected the OS to work as meticulously as he expected the hardware to be both aesthetically ideal and as reliable as possible. He hated to have an idea and later discover it would take time to develop it. It's also one of the reasons he loved being on the forefront of controlling the OS and Hardware. It was also a problem for NeXT because instead of being just ahead of the industry curve we were always ten years ahead, which translated into no one being interested.
Tim Cook seems to prefer being 6 months ahead and thus irritates the hell out of those more in favor of Steve's 18 months ahead of the competition. If you are just barely ahead of the competition most people will overlook your innovation as nothing special. But nearly two years and everyone will be a copycat.
Scott was very much respected, but let's be honest, a lot of the folks today who are Senior VPs weren't even senior managers at NeXT. Most of the top brass moved on and out of the industry entirely after the merger. Some people are better at seeing the big picture and others have big egos who were given a huge title to match.
Believe it or not, but Craig is a dick and butted heads with a lot of former colleagues he worked with at NeXT and later after he came back to Apple by leapfrogging others more qualified than himself. People rave about his ``keynote'' entertaining moments, but he's actually not the most laid back person to be around. Forestall was far more qualified to demo OS X, iOS than Federighi ever would be. Craig's focus at NeXT was EOF (Enterprise Objects Framework) and that was it. Scott was one of the principal architects of AppKit and much more.
A fellow colleague of mine and friend to this day that was better than all of them at charisma, showmanship and always made the best in-house demos is Mark Tacchi. He garnered fame by creating the Java Gamelet Toolkit on a whim, while at NeXT. He's the founder and CEO of Vendini. Also founded one other company named HipBone.
If anyone would have been Steve's successor it would have been Mark, but during the merger people offered him a ton of cash to bolt and run a new startup software engineering division at more than double what Apple was willing to pay. He's just an all around great person who knows how to engage, is amazingly compassionate and a keen eye for building teams, while having a grounded ego.
Guys like Faddell are pure opportunists. Guys like Tacchi wanted to work at NeXT because of it's unique vision and its founder's history. They are rare.
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Video shows early competing iPhone prototypes developed by Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall
davidmalcolm said:I honestly would love to see Forestall back at Apple. I think iOS has really gone stagnant after iOS 7. It's a heck of a lot of more of the same. Don't get me wrong I love my iPad Pro with Pencil, and I love my iPhone SE. But my iPhone SE is the same design that was there when Scott was there, and the software UI hasn't moved that much at all. And I think he probably could have gone along with a flatter UI. Sometimes I wonder if Ive just wanted Forestall out because of personal conflicts and didn't actually have much planned for the UI aside from flattening it. Where as Forestall had a TON of ideas.Scott was a colleague and one of the main architects of AppKit. Ives doesn't know a damn thing about Software Design or Development. Steve Jobs never would have ousted Forstall. He was one of his most favored top architects at NeXT and Apple. Scott was very good at his job.
The problem we see isn't just a few folks, but a lot of key architects from NeXT left between 2007-2012. When you lose people like Bertrand Serlet you lose far more than someone like Chris Lattner. Bertrand was a guiding force behind Openstep and later OS X. He is brilliant as well as being a very engaging and personable human being, who not unlike a conductor of an Orchestra knew how to make it all cohesively work and meet deadlines.
Also, losing the creator of the Mach Microkernel and Senior VP Avie Tevanian was a monumental blow that most people don't grasp.
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Apple Silicon M1 Macs do not support eGPUs
mazda 3s said:Mike Wuerthele said:curtis hannah said:22july2013 said:Maybe it was just an embarrassment to Apple to support external GPUs that had slower speeds than their internal one.
The new Radeon RX 6800 for instance:
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Apple officially acquired NeXT 23 years ago, changing everything
mangakatten said:It is often mentioned that Apple was 6 months from bankruptcy when they acquired Next. What was the deal for Next? What would have happened if Apple did go bankrupt? Would Next be able to continue on it’s own? Seems like a kind of stupid idea to sell to Apple at that time. If Steve Jobs wasn’t their boss, would they ever had agreed?
We were about to have an IPO at NeXT but believe me it was not a multi-billion dollar IPO and with the fact the world was embracing Java instead of WebObjects/EOF/NeXTSTEP would have meant a very short-lived IPO or eventually become another Java Service Provider. Everyone of my fellow NeXT colleagues were either psyched about the merger or psyched that their phones were ringing off the hook for double and triple their current salary offers. I wish more had come along with the merger because we lost some exceptional people due to short-term greed. I have yet to know one who did not regret not taking their shares to Apple. -
Apple engineer who led development of A7 through A12X chip cores departs company
Leaders of departments don't develop the actual products, folks. I know my former company. They are extremely high level and manage the assets and have weekly report meetings with key members. That's it.A little, FYI, several of my fellow NeXT alum have returned to Apple of late--especially Engineering to ``fix'' stuff.
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Review: macOS Catalina 10.15 is what Apple promised the Mac could be, and is a crucial upg...
ElCapitan said:StrangeDays said:ElCapitan said:StrangeDays said:elijahg said:Bloody hell is DED trying to break the world record on longest article? Catalina really doesn’t add enough for what’s taken away for me, namely 32 bit application support. Seems a bit ridiculous to eliminated 32 bit support entirely. 32 bit apps can be sandboxed for security and 32 bit libraries can stay linked but unloaded until they’re required, so the extra RAM usage and security is a non-issue.
No man, it’s not ridiculous. It streamlines the OS, the future processors, and is the direction the future is moving. Move past the denial stage and accept it.Linux has focused primarily on the server space in order to stay feasible and it came with billions invested by IBM, Oracle, RedHat [now owned by IBM], Cisco, Qualcomm, Google, etc.After nearly 30 years of development it is still a constantly broken [it's our philosophy update often] platform. It is the reason the Long Term versions of a few select distributions have been picked and supported by AMD, Intel, ARM, IBM, etc. With roughly 3 major kernel releases per year the typical Professional Linux distribution is 2 to 3 years old.Apple will never port their Frameworks to third parties. I recall being interviewed by Real Networks and ultimately finding out they hoped I would give them a shortcut into Apple's plans for QuickTime as they wanted to buy it. Real Networks never was too bright.During the early merger days I'll never forget the shit storm when Linus arrived at Apple Engineering and overreached his importance when he was interviewed to become a member of the Kernel team.He wasn't the only person in the industry who has interviewed over the years with Apple to be irritated that he really wasn't going to have the same ``influence'' he did before interviewing. I guess people really don't research Apple before interviewing because when you arrive you discover it's a hive of the top minds the world has to offer. Back on topic.32 bit deprecation and Linux
Linux is deprecating and nearly completely deprecated 32 bit apps itself. Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat have all deprecated them. When Debian says goodbye very soon that will include Ubuntu and many other ``Debian derived distributions'' who survive solely because of the hard work by the talented folks that make Debian continue to sustain itself.Steam will soon move to 64 bit only. That should end the whining on 32 bit. Adobe dumped 32 bit quite a while ago. Hell, they dropped it in Photoshop back in 2012. Move on or become obsolete. -
Apple shuts down Epic Games developer account
Rayz2016 said:mdriftmeyer said:GeorgeBMac said:seanismorris said:I wonder what Epic is thinking...
I get they are frustrated with the 30% “Apple Tax” but their actions make no sense.
I'm thinking that for them, they can only win. They can't lose:Their game is to break down the walls of the walled garden.-- If they succeed then they win-- if they don't succeed then they go back to obeying the rules -- and have lost very little (but gained a bunch of free publicity!)It's only a matter of time before Apple releases a mature Gaming Engine/Environment to leverage the hoard of new Metal based APIs that will be optimized for Afterburner and the DSP/FPGA assets being built into their forthcoming motherboards for Macbook/Macbook Pro/Mac Mini, MacBook Air, never mind the iMac and a future iMac Pro and the eventual Mac Pro line.
You're really quite stuck on this 'keep skin-scalding PC tech in the Mac' thing aren't you? :-)
Apple is chasing high performance, low-heat, low-power.
I'm not sure that 1 out 3 is going to do it for them.
Your lack of understanding how Apple is going to design their new Motherboards and subsystems is severely obvious. Apple will achieve today's performance at 20-30% less power consumption in three years or less. Not because the CPU design, but because the offloading of the vast majority of the asset production with their built-in FPGA subsystems. If you understand the actual power of the new Mac Pro--Afterburner you'd realize how much of an impact its offspring will have moving forward.
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Judge orders Apple can't block Epic's Unreal Engine, Fortnite to remain banned
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Next-gen Apple TV could output 120Hz video, beta code suggests
22july2013 said:1. How many existing programs (TV or movies) have already been recorded in 120 FPS so far? Couldn't be too many, since I could find only 3 doing a 3 minute web search.
2. Have Apple's programs for Apple TV+ been (secretly?) recorded in 120 FPS?
3. For countries with 100 Hz power limitations, would Apple TV be limited to 100 FPS there? (To match the TVs?)
4. I've heard of some computer games that can do 120 FPS, but that requires special video cards. If this rumour is true, that the chip in the Apple TV can render at 120 Hz, does that imply that Apple's next M chips will have the ability to render at 120 FPS?
5. I remember when Ted Turner wanted to colourize his back catalog of movies. He did some. It wasn't too will received. Will people want old non-120Hz shows to be 120-ized using similar technology? I would think that animated films could "remaster" their programs more easily than live action shows. Especially when the movie is generated from computer software. It wouldn't be too hard to get Pixar films re-rendered to 120 FPS.
Nearly every model of TV is now standardized on 120Hz and upscaling to 240Hz. Wake up. 120Hz isn't that impressive, just a necessary bump to make sure the new Apple TV is viable.
Apple Arcade is expanding considerably. Anyone who thinks playing that w/o an AppleTV must want to stream directly from their Mac to the TV. I'll prefer the AppleTV to house the games and Streaming TV services thank you very much, especially when older quality TVs get locked out.