mario
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Stop panicking about Apple's rumored switch from Intel to its own chips in the Mac
Typical consumers should not and will not care nor understand what you are even writing about here. They will just buy a Mac and use it.
People who are concerned have vested interests in things continuing the same way.
Things are not that simple if you are a software engineer. Transition from PPC to Intel wasn't as smooth as some like to believe. PPC was big endian and Intel is little endian. If you had C/C++ or ObjC code that did low level bit twiddling and assumed byte order, you could not just recompile the code for new CPU arch. You had to re-write the some code in architecture portable way. People use and compile code from decades ago (I know I do), and having to re-comple everything again to get my tooling right is non-trivial task (that is if I can even find source repos for some of the things I use).
There is also issue of virtualization. These days pretty much all software deployed to production is virtualized, even things like Node.js (JavaScript source code), and if you cannot install say Docker on your machine and test software as it will run in production (production is usually Linux on x86_64), then Mac becomes unviable software development option.Considering that today majority of code committed on github.com is from Macs, this would impact quite a few people.
Another issue is performance. High end Apple chips (which are by the way using 5 W TDP) are getting close to low power Intel CPUs, but currently there are no Apple CPUs that can compete with desktop Core i7 or i9 or Xeons. Not that Apple could not make one, but as it is now you will not get much faster CPU to emulate a slower one. It will be slower CPU emulating a faster one. Intel code on arm64 will run much slower, leading to poorer performance and use experience during transition. -
Apple debuts colorful 24-inch iMac with M1, upgraded camera and audio
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How to measure your Mac's network performance with iPerf3 in Terminal
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Apple design chief Jony Ive to depart later this year, create new studio with Apple as cli...
Bigger news here is that designers at Apple are now reporting to the Chief Operating Officer (which is highest ranking human resources title). Let that sink in.The Chief Design Officer role has departed with Ive. If Tim Cook understood how creative people work, he would have kept the role and filled it in from within the company hopefully. -
Apple's new 11- & 12.9-inch iPad Pros sport a massive redesign and gain Face ID, USB-C
kruegdude said:mario said:Give us Terminal, filesystem, Xcode and it could become viable computing device. Until then, this is glorified facebook machine. -
Apple rebrands OS X as macOS, announces Sierra with Siri, plus focus on Continuity & iCloud
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Some Mac Pro support pages archived by Apple, will no longer be updated
The question isn't will they discontinue Mac Mini Pro, but will they discontinue the Macs altogether. Apple wants to be the dumb terminal company. Real computers are going to run in the cloud and be owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others.
Apparently, these days everyone thinks computing is so ridiculously hard that it should be left to mega corporations only, mere mortals should only use locked down appliances and fetch content from real computers in the cloud.
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Apple launches iOS 10, tvOS 10 & watchOS 3
thewhitefalcon said:volcan said:No more "Slide to Unlock" now it says "Press Home to Open"
It actually makes more sense for TouchID devices, since I (and many others) usually press the Home button to wake the screen anyway.
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Too soon? Apple's new iPhone 7 ruffles feathers with Lightning audio, Home button changes