kiltedgreen

Peza said:

kiltedgreen said:

Peza said:

If the road this ends up going down means the same apps on a Mac are the same apps on an iPad, then surely Apples PC market share is going to shrink even further, everyone will just buy a much cheaper iPad. 

I’m not questioning Apples silicone prowess here, I’m questioning if developers will follow them down the path. 

That isn’t how apps are developed. Apple are not changing the silicon so they can write the same apps for both, as was explained in the Keynote. They are doing it for a lot of other reasons. Thinner laptops being one I’d imagine!

Apple already have Safari, Keynote, Photos, Mail, Maps, etc, etc, etc running on both platforms. They are not the same apps and putting the same processors in each won’t change that at all.

It will take effort, money and resources for a developer to make their programme that runs on X86 PCs also run on Mac OS Apple Silicone machines, and when Apple has a single digit market share, how many are going to do that? Even more so if they have an iOS app I think most will just let that be the programme for the new Macs instead, better value for the company and those share holders, Mac users get a lesser experience though. 

A lot of apps will simply need to be recompiled. Some will need more. Almost all apps are written for an OS, not a chip. That’s why we have compilers - they take the C, C++, Swift code or whatever and turn it into code that targets a particular processor. Unless you do bit manipulation and some other clever stuff I’ve had no experience off, the processor in the computer is irrelevant when writing an app.

the Swift code I write is the same right now whether it’s designed to run on a Mac or iPadOS- the Swift language that is, not the libraries which ARE different.

for example. Download Xcode for your Mac and if you have an iPad, Swift playgrounds for iPadOS. Write swift code to create variables, functions, structs and more in a Swift playground on the Mac. Run it and see the result. Select your Swift code’s text and copy it into the playground on your iPad. Run it. It will do exactly the same thing. Two different OSs, one Intel, one A series. You didn’t write for a processor, you wrote Swift. That’s how it goes.

i have a Mac App on the Mac App Store. When Big Sur is released I will just launch it in Xcode, Build, archive, upload to the App Store and bingo, I will have an app that runs on an A series chip. That, for many developers, is all that is needed.

Afarstar said:

Fantastic news. Anything Apple can do to screw the EU is fine by me. At least we’ll get all the features in the UK. 

Oh dear.

Yep, all the EU features like a single market, customs union, free movement, no roaming charges, being part of multiple cross-country organisations and initiatives. No, wait. We lost all those, and more, when we left. Never mind though ‘cos if Apple can stick it to the EU then who cares?

ggwill0 said:

That's what they get for telling an American company what to do...

How utterly dare anybody tell an American company what to do. The very idea.

This talk about the EU attacking American companies is rather silly. The EU legislation is targeting the behaviour of mobile OS strategies and when it comes to mobile phones on sale in the world, who are by far the main suppliers of mobile operating systems and associated apps? Google and Apple . Any European companies? No. So the companies affected by definition will be American ones. They are not targeted because they are American but because the ones who between them probably control 99% of such OSs in the world are American. 

ianbetteridge said:

ssfe11 said:

The EC once again shows how clueless grandstanding politicians can cause havoc. The EC taking lefts and rights from Apple, Meta and now Microsoft. The only way to beat these ignorant folks is to band together and that’s what looks like is exactly happening. Nice!

It seems odd to come to AppleInsider and find people  repeating Microsoft PR talking points, but here we are. Strange times indeed.

To understand what’s going on, you need to go back to the 1990s, when Microsoft was unconstrained by any thoughts of antitrust or monopoly law, and spent quite a lot of time and effort decimating the third party software industry. It had a massive advantage over the likes of Novell, Lotus, WordPerfect and the rest because it could create and use APIs that were private, while making second-rate APIs public.

It could also deliberately break third party software with Windows updates. While “DOS isn’t done till Lotus won’t run” was a myth, the truth was that if an update broke a competitor’s app, that was good news for Microsoft. And they definitely weren't going to go the extra mile to fix something that affected 1-2-3 if it didn't affect Excel.

Eventually this got the attention of regulators including the DoJ and EC (European Commission). It’s EXACTLY the kind of behaviour that you are absolutely not allowed to do under antitrust law. When you have a dominant position – and no one doubted, or doubts, MS has this in operating systems – you just can’t get away with it.

In 2004, the EC case was pretty-much over. Microsoft agreed it had been bad, and offered to publish its APIs, and apply a level playing field – which meant its own applications weren’t allowed to use special “Microsoft-only” APIs. Anything Microsoft’s apps could do HAD to be available to others.

Did Microsoft stick to this agreement like a good little boy? Of course it didn’t.

So in 2006, a group of software companies complained it to the EC, through a coalition called the European Committee for Interoperable Standards (ECIS). Despite the name, ECIS was largely US companies, including IBM, Adobe, Oracle, and McAfee. By 2007, the EC had investigated and found that yes, Microsoft had failed to live up to its agreements. It got fined, and the EC asked Microsoft to propose new, specific remedies to make sure it didn’t happen again.

In 2009, those agreements were signed. And in them, there is a specific part – section C (42) – which deals with security software. Now you might get the impression from what Microsoft is saying now, something that’s being repeated by people who can’t be bothered to look up agreements AKA “pundits”, that this mandates kernel level access for third parties.

Reader, it does nothing of the sort. It simply states that Microsoft has to make available – and document – whatever APIs its own software uses. The company could do what Apple has done and move access for EDR (endpoint detection and response) software out of the kernel. It has chosen not to do this.

So no, Microsoft hasn’t been “ordered” by the big bad EU to do anything other than stop its old tricks of giving its own applications advantages that no third party could ever have. It hasn’t moved EDR out of the kernel because, at least back in 2009, the Windows kernel was a mess and developing equivalent APIs was going to be expensive.

Do I blame Microsoft? Not really: Windows is what it is, and keeping it secure is hard. I don’t believe its the platform vendors fault if, using legitimate methods, a third party messes up a patch. That’s entirely down to Crowdstrike.

But is it the EC’s fault? Absolutely not. Stopping companies like Microsoft from destroying competition not by better products but by leveraging ownership of a platform is exactly the thing antitrust bodies are set up to do. It’s what the DoJ did to IBM in 1956, and without that judgement we would all be still using mainframes from Big Blue.

OMG! Someone who knows what they’re talking about instead of the uninformed knee-jerk anti-EU drivel purveyors who have read too much online “comment”. Thank you Ian.

Anilu_777 said:

Silver_Fox said:

Hopefully that won’t effect us here in England
Thank god for Brexit.

I hope England isn’t grouped with “Europe” anyway. British tech people need to lobby Apple to make sure this is understood. 

Too late, by several hundred if not a thousand years!

England is part of the UK … which is in Europe. We are very regrettably no longer in the EU but of course still have to abide by their rules to sell to them even though, unlike prior to 2016 when we were actually involved in drafting them.

Lobbying Apple? Apple, being a smart global company, are well aware we are not in the EU which is why the multiple browser choices in 17.5 and the like never appeared for me during my OS updates.

Our so called government is the most useless ever in my lifetime (and I’m getting on!) but conflating them with the Labour Mayor of London is odd to say the least. I don’t know what power Mr Khan would have in this area at the kind of national/global level being discussed.

As for editorialising, the media does it every single hour of every single day. Every article you read has an angle - some state it up front whereas others (the BBC comes to mind) claim to be impartial. There is no impartiality from the majority of the world’s media and I personally find it refreshing to have the complete incompetence and stupidity of the current shower occupying Number 10 listed. The UK media let them get away with an obscene amount, allow them avoid answering awkward questions and not pulling them up on their never ending stream of lies. One of the main reasons we are living with the nightmare of Brexit is because the media are so supine and never questioned any of the rubbish being spouted at the time. Media behaviour has real world consequences, but when it’s owned by billionaires, what do you expect? They might just have a point of view …

I have a few apps on the App Store and it’s been blindingly clear for years that Apple breaks its own guidelines by anccepting apps that flaunt them.

One of my apps was for the Mac (I know) designed for writers to encourage them to write, not getting sidetracked into editing and so to get the bare bones down as a start. It allowed you to create a file, but not open one. You could only delete back 5 characters, paste was disallowed, the arrow keys had no effect and you could not save your work until you’d written at least 500 words. Apple initially rejected it because they said that it didn’t offer any particular functionality over existing text based apps. I replied and spelt out all the notable ways it differed from an ordinary text app and they let it through.

Then look at the thousands of hidden object games, the thousands of “Texas hold ‘em” style games, and many more. You don’t have to look far to see a huge number of games that apart from different images are virtually carbon copies of other apps by the same developer or other developers. This has been going on for years so it does not surprise me at all that the apps you mentioned got approved. It’s virtually built-in to the “review” process.

KTR said:

I personally think if Steve Jobs was still alive, he would pull out of the EU

The single largest trading bloc outside the USA? Really?

9secondkox2 said:

The EU is an extortion racket. Change my mind. 

The US is a violent force destabilising peace across the world to suit its own ends. Change my mind.