verne arase

jdiamond said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

Apple is also part of the RISC V consortium. As soon as Apple announced Macs as having “Apple Silicon” and not “ARM-based CPUs” I knew it’d be a possibility that they’d always remain open to other ISAs.  If RISC V continues on its current trajectory— and continues to attract all the talent — it may happen by 2035–40. 

I completely agree.  Apple's not going to get caught again being tied to an ISA.  The agreement with ARM is likely just to guarantee terms on Apple using ARM for the next 20 years - Apple could drop at any time like they did with Imagine and GPUs.

Apple doesn't license processor IP from ARM - just the Instruction Set Architecture.

AFAIK, there is nothing in the ISA that limits Apple - in fact it's rumored that ARM designed ARMv8 at Apple's request so Apple could create Apple Silicon's deep pipeline out-of-order execution model (which ultimately resulted in the up to eight simultaneous execution unit of Apple's Firestorm processor).

There's nothing magical about an instruction set - provided it doesn't limit deep pipelining by doing old-gen stuff like ARMv7's inclusion of condition code execution in every other instruction.

The only advantage of something like RISC V is licensing - and Apple's already got all that covered.

gatorguy said:

lowededwookie said:

Didn’t Apple already open up the iMessage protocols but the industry didn’t care?

Nope, not as far as I know. It was promised when first announced, but Apple reneged, as is their right of course.

You're thinking of FaceTime … Apple may have thought about doing iMessage at one time but no promises were ever made.

Let's not kid ourselves … this is all about protecting Spotify.

Spotify has been tugging on mommy's sleeve for quite some time, and this is the EU/EC political response.

So … who is the EC protecting?

The EC has a long history of protecting EU consumers and EU companies … and that's all they seem to care about.

The artists who compose and make the music that Spotify is based on? They can go pound sand.

Spotify pays the lowest royalties in the business, and has actually sued the artists for asking for a bigger cut of the pie. So the content creators - the ones who make the music which is at the core of the streaming business - get no protection from those capitalizing on their work.

If they wanted to, the EC could come up with regulations to protect the artists and establish a minimum payment for steamed music back to the artists - but the EC doesn't care about them. They're just the creatives: the force behind the whole business.

As long as the consumers get cheap music and Spotify can distribute it at minimum wage, the EC is happy.

And that, my friends, is why the EU countries have dropped from the European Center of intellectual property development into an also ran block of bureaucratically connected counties.

There is no longer any respect for the rights of the creators.

I dumped Apple stock at the beginning of November, and repurchased recently.

I like Apple, but don't feel compelled to ride the stock down when the company suffers from their own stupidity (doggedly insisting on manufacturing in China) - increased my share count by about 17.45% as a consequence.

twolf2919 said:

Going forward, Apple may have some growth issues.  While iPhone sales might still increase a few percentage points and similarly now Apple Watch sales might still incremental sales increases, I think Mac sales will be flat or down in the near future.  Apple has benefited from its move away from Intel and the home-bound demand during covid, but those waves are gone.  Increasingly, folks won't move from PC to Mac simply because they can't or won't because some critical or favorite software isn't available on the new Mac.  One example I can think of is Turbotax for Business.  Intuit never made a macOS version - but with x86-based Macs you could at least run the software in Parallels Desktop's virtual machine offering or dual-boot your Mac.  Now that is gone.  I got a new Mx MBP, but I am keeping my old x86-basd MBP around - just for that reason.  Others simply won't/can't do that.

Actually, you can.

If you run ARM Windows 11 in a Parallels virtual machine, it has the ability to run x86-64 code in emulation similar to the way the Mac runs x86-64 Mac code in emulation in Rosetta.