Maurizio

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Maurizio
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  • The new MacBook Pro: Why did Apple backtrack on everything?

    MaurizioMaurizio
    While i agree on the fact that new design is more pro and less design oriented, i would like to stress the fact that the discussion about ports is fake and the position that the 2016 mac book pro had less ports is a myth. I had a Mac Book Pro 2011; had it more ports ? Well, actually not. It just had two usb ports. Yes, it had an Ethernet port, of absolutely no use unless you had a cabled network. I hadn’t. Yes, it had a Firewire port; it was legacy already, never used it. It had a displayport connection, very useful to people using an external screen. Not me. Well, but at least you could connect it with a single cable to a dock, so you could charge it, connect to studio HD and audio interface ? No way. While some Windows computer had some expensive docking option, no Mac had one. Si, essentially, just two usb port. Yes, i used the display port a couple of times, in three years. So yes, the Mac Book Pro 2019 that i owns today have 4 physical ports, but being them multipurpose, i can use them in a lot of different situations. The new Mac Pro, if you are on batteries (or use a Usb C or Thunderbolt screen) have exactly one port less of my 2019 Mac Book Pro. Happily, it has three Thunderbolt controllers, so more bandwidth for more docks and dongles. Essentially, stop believing the trolls that online press helped diffuse, and look ti real life use cases. Some gains, a lot not.
    mcdavedewmechiamattinozwatto_cobraAlex_V

  • Steve Jobs predicted the Mac's move from Intel to ARM processors

    MaurizioMaurizio
    Just a side point: if you do a technical analysis, and not a market analysis, you should trace the history of NeXTSTEP, and not the history of the Mac.
    The more you go inside MacOS X, the more you find the NeXTSTEP origin, up to its BSD+Mach kernel.
    So the history of platform changes of NeXTSTEP is more interesting in terms of the technical potential of such a change.
    And the truth is, NeXTSTEP is a multi platform system from the beginning, based on portable code: in its early days, it moved from 680xx to the Motorola 88k risc family, then to Intel, PA-RISC and SPARC. With Apple, it moved to PowerPC, it become MacOS X, it moved back to Intel, and then, under some form, to ARM, as the basis for iOS and tvOS.

    And these are just the commercially available version; i am sure that in the labs there were and there are more.

    Other technical point: no, most of the modern application will not need a big effort; modern software technologies are a lot less platform dependent, even in performance oriented code (after all, how many developers have the faintest idea of how the intel processors works internally ?). My personal bet is than in more than 95% of the cases,
    porting will be as hard as clicking on "Build" on XCode. Remember that the iOS development environment compile and run the iOS application code on intel processors.

    Of course, than you need a big testing phase.
    And of course, it is still possible to write platform dependent code, and somebody if forced to do it; but as long as the compiler is the same, it will not be a problem for most of the developers.

    Maurizio
    fastasleep