mdriftmeyer

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.

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.

Forstall wasn't let go because he didn't support a "flat" UI. That's ridiculous. Go back and read the press release and then some of the reporting around that time. There were reports that Bob Mansfield wouldn't meet with him unless Tim Cook was present. There were reports that he was slagging off other teams to his team members in emails. In a BBC interview Tony Fadell said Forstall " got what he deserved". None of that has anything to do with flat UI.

Was there a change in his attitude because he wasn't chosen as Jobs' successor and/or is this a situation where he was always difficult but was able to be controlled by Jobs since he started back at NeXT?

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.

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.

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.

Well one of the main concerns was for most MacBooks, anything close to high end AMD GPUs wasn’t an option, we’ll just have to see how these perform to see if an eGPU option is really necessary (again, most pro users would save the eGPUs for the MacBook Pro or iMac or something that’s not today’s introduced Macs, so it’s a low bar).

Given the (limited) data that we have now for performance, the integrated GPU in Apple Silicon with eight GPU cores is about the same as a RX 590.

Huh? Apple said the onboard GPU in M1 is good for 2.3 TFLOPs. Intel Iris Xe in Tiger Lake is 2.1 TFLOPs. Radeon RX 590 is 7.1 TFLOPs

Most people are ignorant of how powerful GPUs are.

The new Radeon RX 6800 for instance:

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 three months from bankruptcy before Steve laid off 5,000 [half the employees with one-third ready to go on twelve weeks paid sabbaticals] and then took twenty-three marketing departments and converged them into one. Then the hardware gutting down to a two by two matrix with a few products yet to be achieved--one being the iPod. Those changes occurred during 1997, and by early May of 1998 the iMac was released.

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.

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. 

Christ, they’ve deprecated and announced the planned end of life for 32-bit apps years ago, and yet people are still gonna get butthurt and whine about it when it finally happens. 

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. 

Let the migration to other platforms begin.  Am in the process of moving a lot of solutions that ran brilliantly on Apple kit to Linux as it is no longer viable for macOS. 

Awesome. Guess that means we won’t have the constant butthurt to look forward to in the near future? Have fun playing the drivers game on Linux, the bastion of easy computing...lol

You sound as idiotic as always. Get yourself pulled out of the Apple Stockholm syndrome you're locked into. 

Having 30 years of NeXT/Apple OS X and 20 years of Linux the ABI broken model that is Linux is one of the most crippling aspects of the platform, never mind the UX which has taken basically everything Apple HIG develops and slowly adopted it within GNOME. KDE is a swiss cheese approach to everything is modifiable and slow as molasses on the desktop.

32 bit deprecation and Linux

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.

hucom2000 said:

Sounds like a competent guy, this judge.

Yes, she sure is indeed.

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.

They're all recorded in 120Hz or higher. They just bouncing down to 60Hz when releasing them to the public. Movies are being recorded in 8K/16K standard with much higher FPS but you don't see the original cuts. Or do you think what you see on the TV was the original 1:1 from the Camera/Audio/FPS to the theater/home?

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.