InspiredCode

bulk001 said:

tyler82 said:

Apple is on the wrong side of this battle. 

I agree with you but think Epic is the wrong company to fight it was it seems they charge devs a percentage of the sales themselves. There needs to be a way to install apps on the phone / pad without going through the AppStore if you don’t want to. Those who only want to use the AppStore are free to do so but those who want to get it from another source can too much like you can with your Mac. Apple could even put up a nice little warning about the dangers of 3rd party apps etc. 

It is different since devs can go with a different engine or store if they don't like Epic's terms and still target the same users.  Epic is also a really good deal for both the Engine and the Store. That said, Xamarin built a C# layer for Unreal Engine and Epic changed their terms to not allow it since they presumably worried about losing control over the platform. That is very similar to Apple's behavior.

entropys said:

All articles I have read fail to specify exactly what patents Apple is supposed to have infringed. More interested in the controversy I suppose.

From what I can sort of gather, it is a general patent applying to blood oxygen sensors being on the wrist. Which tbh is a joke of a patent. Happy for more details in the next article please.

Masimo is a very large company. Whining about how much more Apple Pay’s its former staff is tragically sad, as Masimo clearly weren’t paying them what they were worth.

You have the gist of it. The patents describe a sensor attached to a wrist mounted computer and some basic properties of its appearance (much of it cosmetic or unrelated to the workings of the sensor). There is nothing about the algorithm. The actual patents are: 10,945,648 (claims 12, 24, and 30) and 10,912,502 (claims 22 and 28). The other claims were struck down. You can look up at patents.google.com patent search. The claims are at the end of the patent filing (last couple pages usually).

I don't think Apple is charting the right path, but something needs to be done about all the broken games on iOS and macOS.

For games, I think there should be a subset of Apple APIs that are guaranteed not to change (including a stable architecture using Rosetta or LLVM bitcode). People like their games to be able to run forever. If a game can never break API compatibility, we wouldn't have the problem of so many games that stop working. This would also help promote games to a form of media. Media should never stop working just because it is older.

There is a *BIG* reason why game publishers think the 30% cut they pay to Xbox and PlayStation is fair, but they feel the 30% cut to Apple isn't. Those platforms guarantee a game will run for the life of the platform without changes. If the game publisher doesn't have to retain developers to support the game throughout its lifespan they are getting their money's worth. They would make more money over the long term and they wouldn't have to face angry gamers when the game stops working. If Apple can provide the same guarantees, I think they can argue that they are pricing fairly.

jdb8167 said:

I know that Apple's Arm CPUs use micro-ops but I don't know anything about if or how they are cached. The caching of micro-ops is the source of this vulnerability. In general RISC CPUs have much simpler decoding so it is possible that micro-ops aren't cached at all or the cache structure is much simpler. Someone with more knowledge of Arm CPU Architecture should chime in.

Edit: And apparently SMT (also known as hyper-threading) is involved. Since Apple's ARM SoC cores don't use SMT, it looks like they are safe from this.

The memory model of ARM makes these types of attacks more difficult. Micro-ops are fixed length and shouldn’t require much caching unlike Intel/AMD. This is also one of the main reasons M1 has such amazing single threaded performance since it isn’t limited by the decoder. The x86 ISA should die already.

Rayz2016 said:

mdriftmeyer said:

red oak said:

The performance + battery improvements alone are enough to fundamentally change Apple's unit market share in the PC industry.    This analyst seems to be missing that fundamental point.   A lower priced SKU variant is just the icing on the cake.  

It'll be generations behind AMD in performance and won't gain much now that AMD will own Xilinx. Both will be introducing FPGAs and more DSPs to their CPU designs. AMD has the most advanced CPU designs in the world.

Prices will be the same but their profit margins will increase due to being the CPU designer.

I see you’re still butt-hurt that your favourite chip house didn’t figure into Apple’s plan. 

You haven’t seen ASi, and you haven’t seen AMD’s new whatever, so you don’t know which is faster and which runs cooler. 

You also don’t how much it cost to develop the new chips, or do you think Apple’s chip designers work for free?

Right. There is a huge penalty to keeping the x86 architecture. Before factoring in energy savings, ASi outperforms Intel and AMD by 4-5x on some operations because they are not stuck with legacy decisions. ASi has a better memory model for concurrency which can boost multi-threaded code. The ASi memory model is also much more secure than Intel/AMD which is obviously important to Apple. Same on the GPU side where Apple is using TBDR and Intel / AMD / NVIDIA are still using pseudo immediate mode rendering for compatibility reasons. Apple has much more control over how their developers build software to help make this kind of transition.

This is so obviously a bad take by the government. Exactly why we don’t trust politicians to make regulatory decisions. Interoperability of some core services could be a goal, but not with Apple’s private backend servers.

I agree with Apple on this. Tracking cookies have been abused for too long

Hopefully Apple patents their new design this time so Masimo doesn’t steal it again. This patent Apple violated came out after the series 6 and just blatantly copied Apple’s design.

Pretty awful that it is for Unity Pro only ($2200 per year per developer or artist, $185/mo billed per year). That means it will mostly just be used for ports that are already generating revenue. Unlikely to be used much for new development or by Indies. Other major platforms like Meta Quest are not locked to Unity Pro.

Unreal is also working on AVP support and may end up a better option despite their fight with Apple. Disney uses Unreal heavily and may be a big reason Epic is still working on AVP support despite their feud. Unreal pushes MaterialX for shaders in UE5, a standard for shaders that Apple is also pushing. MaterialX is artist friendly and works across different vendors shading languages. Unity doesn’t have support for MaterialX, although there is partial support to translate Unity shader graphs to MaterialX for Unity’s RealityKit backend.

We may see more use of RealityKit for games. Although RealityKit is more suited for AR or casual games. It is missing features normally expected for heavily immersive games. It is a great artist-friendly engine, but you are not going to write a AAA game with it.

You have to remember no technology, no data was "stolen" here. It's the nature of the US patent system to award patents that are as generalizable as possible, such that the patent is basically an idea that anybody can think of, and they leave it to courts to have the patents invalidated, modified, and to have the companies fight it out.

Right. And if you want to read the patent it is very clear this is what is happening. Not only that, one of the two patents was Masimo patenting Apple’s design after they released it. I saw on one patent news site that observed this was a strange aspect that rarely happens. Apparently so trivial that Apple forgot to patent it themselves. The second patent was struck down as prior art, contested, then brought back in. It is also very trivial.