knowitall

gatorguy said:

TBH I would love for this to be an FCC mandated feature for ALL smartphones, at least in the case of a regional or national emergency. Hurricanes, state/region wide power outages, "other" national issue. 

No need for that, each iPhone contains a frequency synthesizer, that can be tuned to the free and open  walky-talky radio frequencies.  
This ‘project’ could be completed in a few days (including the app).

linkman said:

Intel is running up against the fact that wavelengths of light can get only so short (10 nm is pretty stinking short) and physics is going to win at attempts to get much smaller. A transistor can't get smaller than an atom. Progress on ICs is getting slower and will need some sort of breakthrough (like power reduction, using neural-type processing, memristors, light instead of electricity, etc.) before we can see performance improvement rates that we've experienced over the last 40 years.

An atom is a 50th of 10nm, so a lot of room to grow (eh, shrink).
Feature size can be half that of the wavelength, so 5nm should be possible.
Power reduction is a consequence of reduced feature size and no breakthrough.
Neural processing on chip is a special layout of transistors and has nothing to do with speed (and feature size) perse.
Computing with light is related to speed, not feature size.
Memristors have to do with ram ...

Apples prices are still too high to overcome a new wave of DIY and opensource hardware/software designs hitting the market/home.
Industrie in the future will be totally distributed, and as such non existent.

Kudos to Carole Adams.

mdriftmeyer said:

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.

No, it is about applications running on multiple 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.

Nonsense.

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.

Nonsense, it’s just a recompile away, and macOS already runs on ARM.

 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.

Your right that Apple needs to add a thunderbolt controller to its ARM socs.

ihatescreennames said:

As I mentioned in another thread, there’s nothing illegal about having a monopoly (in the US). Abusing monopoly power is where corporations run into trouble.

Even if it can be proven that the App Store has a monopoly, which I think will be difficult for obvious reasons, how is Apple abusing that power?

By taking a 30% cut and not allowing other means of app distribution.
Apple should ask for a fixed amount for a fixed set of ‘services’ needed to run the store.
As I mentioned before, apps can be signed by Apple (after some sanity and virus checks) and distributed via any digital means. App developers can put the apps on their home page (or whatever) and pay apple a few cents for signing only and skip the hosting fees. This adds the benefit of even better visibility for the app because Google can find it directly.

You forgot the most important one: iPhone has iOS.

MacBook ARM sounds logical.

It will be the best move of Apple, ever.

It is also important to do it as fast as possible, late 2020 is already a bit late.
Maybe no one sees this coming but competition from opensource hardware and software designs will be intense.
Pine64 makes ARM hardware with Linux on it (not Android!) which is a decision as good as Apples macOS (Unix) on ARM.
The point is that a Pine phone costs $150, and no it isn’t junk at all it is pretty impressive.
On such hardware it is possible to install (for example) openbsd, one of the most secure and unhackable oses of this time,..
I’m doing that as a project on my Rock64.
Not being in a closed system has a lot of important benefits.
 

Nice, but I do think that distributed production is the future, the end of dependency on big Corp is nigh ...