mjtomlin

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

This is not about choice. It is about control. Facebook wants to control the ads you see. Apple wants to control the apps you use.

Yeah, not so much. Apple doesn't want to control what apps people use, they want to control what developers can and can't do on their platform. And there are several reasons for that...

1. Device security
2. User privacy
3. Platform advancement/stability
4. User experience

As a user, I am free to download Apple's Developer tools and write ANY app I want and run it on my devices and I am free to distribute that code to anyone else I want and they can compile it and run it on their own devices. All Apple "controls" is my ability to upload that app and distribute it via the App Store.

Two things...

1. Rosetta is not emulation (as others have pointed out). It translates x64 code so that it can run natively on the M1's CPU and GPU cores.  That translation happens when the application is installed or run for the first time after an update. It can also happen JIT (just in time) when arbitrary x64 code is executed.

2. The point of the comparison wasn't about the performance of the hardware (M1 vs. SQ1), it was about the real world performance of the system, including the operating systems. This is the performance a user can expect to get out of the system.

tzeshan said:

Does Swift Playground work on M1 Mac? I will buy one M1 Mac if it works.

Yes it does. It is a Universal app.

wood1208 said:

... It takes lot and years of handwork, innovation to create big successful company like Facebook, Google, Apple, etc...

Agreed, but the problem arrises when that company forgets what they went through to get to that point. Innovation dries up and the only way to remain on top is to basically squash competition rather than compete on their own merits. I don't have a problem when one company buys another, but I do have a problem when one huge company buys another competing company - that rarely ever works out well for the market or users/consumers. In an open and free market it is the spirit of competition that mainly drives innovation. Consolidation has the opposite affect; when you stomp out competition, you no longer have a reason or drive to stay ahead, so innovation stalls.

chasm said:

Was I hallucinating when Apple appeared to devote a half-minute or so to the emulation powers of the M1, including an on-screen demonstration of some flavour of Linux running just fine on it?

Sure, that probably wasn't a native version, but if it runs fine in Rosetta 2 I don't see any rush to develop an Apple-native version -- not to mention that the software people tend to want to run in Linux won't be up to speed for a good long time. I'm glad to see another community understanding the great potential for M1 and beyond, but this project seems like an ego trip for "one guy" to take on rather than to organize a team to tackle such a big project.

I don't doubt Hector's qualifications but this just doesn't seem to be the right approach to solving this particular problem IMO.

That was a Linux demo was virtualization not emulation, so yes, it was running natively. I think what this project aims to accomplish, is to get an Apple Silicon Mac to boot up under Linux. To do so, you would need many Apple specific drivers, since these systems are almost completely custom.

Apple was very supportive of Yellow Dog Linux that ran on their PPC Macs, so who knows, maybe they'll work with the Linux community - they mainly seem to target and support Ubuntu Linux in their open source projects.