John Lockwood

With regards to running Intel binaries on an Apple Silicon Mac in macOS 28 and onwards...

• You could run macOS 27 in a VM via Parallels (or other) and macOS 27 will still provide Rosetta2.
• You can also run older versions of macOS - that is Intel only versions of macOS e.g. macOS Catalina in UTM on an Apple Silicon Mac.
  

"In addition, lower performance emulation is available to run x86/x64 on Apple Silicon as well as ARM64 on Intel."

See 

https://mac.getutm.app/

The performance of running an Intel macOS and Intel apps via UTM on an Apple Silicon Mac will obviously be much slower, however as this article indicates, an Apple Silicon Mac especially an M4 or newer is so much faster than an Intel Mac that this might still be acceptable.

Saying all this, I despise app developers who out of laziness chose not to update their apps to be Apple Silicon native, Apple made this as easy as possible using their developer tools. I encountered the same blinkered attitude way back when Apple moved from PowerPC to Intel. In more recent times I found many anti-virus product makers had not updates their products and relied on Rosetta2. Whilst they did work via Rosetta2 I regarded this as an unacceptable risk because of the small possibility Apple would make a change during a macOS update that would 'break' Rosetta2 so that Rosetta2 might need redownloading/installing after a macOS update resulting in the risk that the anti-virus tool would at least temporarily become disabled.

(Ironically Microsoft Defender turned out to be the most compatible solution for Macs at that time and I therefore migrated the entire global organisation to Defender as a result.)

Apple for me at least although I suspect a lot of others has badly positioned the new iPhone 16e if the intention was to provide a solution to encourage holdouts also like me who have stuck with older now obsolete iPhone models.

It is much more expensive than the previous SE 3 model - with some justification but has one key expected feature omitted allegedly to save Apple money and presumably keep the cost increase down which is the omission of MagSafe. I personally do not feel the cost to Apple for including MagSafe support would have been that significant. One aspect of the historical design of the SE models and the iPhone 16e is to reuse existing slightly older components e.g. the camera and screen. Therefore Apple would have been expected to reuse an existing MagSafe design and components.

The result is the 16e is too expensive to be an SE replacement and too limited to justify the significant price increase if the intention is to provide a model to encourage holdouts to upgrade. (MagSafe is not the only omission but by far the most significant.)

I am therefore like I suspect many people going to continue to hold off upgrading and to wait and see what further new models bring to the table. Apple might be intending and hoping this will result in people moving further up the model spectrum and this may indeed happen in a significant number of cases. I am indeed considering the iPhone 17 Air, however I suspect this will be priced much nearer the top of the price scale and I am currently anticipating a price of $999 which is more than double the SE 3. This will probably make it too expensive for me to justify.

(As an aside, I have some concerns that the iPhone 17 Air might also omit MagSafe support if this is deemed necessary by Apple to achieve the thinness of the new design. This might then actually provide a marketing justification as to why MagSafe is being omitted from the 16e.)

I therefore suspect a lot of holdouts may then wait even longer to see what the rumoured iPhone 17e might offer and at what price. Here the fact Apple chose to name this new model the 16e and imply moving to an annual cycle further shoots Apple in the foot if the intention has been to get holdouts to upgrade now.

Note: My own prediction is that if the iPhone 17e is launched next year and if it includes MagSafe support it will not include reverse charging whereas other higher end models might. I would be ok with that. If the iPhone 17e continues to have the best battery life of any model it ironically might be considered to be the most suitable to use reverse charging with.

Politicians and hence Governments are idiots and are in particular technically and scientifically illiterate.

Whilst most of the responses criticise - in this case the UK Government over their miserably bad (in)ability to do IT projects the reality is that the UK Government itself generally does not do these projects but outsources them to various IT consultancy firms or IT software firms. Most of these go to big and appallingly bad firms. They might send an initial senior and (hopefully) competent person to represent them during the bidding process but by reputation once they win it they then delegate it to an infinite number of monkeys. (If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.)

Worse they will stick to the absolutely literal interpretation of the contract and will not correct obvious errors in the specification because they know once it goes wrong they will get even more business fixing these mistakes. Even when they deliver something that (mostly) works it is generally ugly as sin and horribly unfriendly and from a user perspective used to modern, simple, fast and friendly Internet systems - primitive beyond belief.

Government departments at least in the UK also seem stuck in the 20th or even 19th century. HMRC for example still insist all evidence be submitted in paper form by post. This is despite the fact that financial service institutions - not generally regarded as being beacons of modern IT, all have moved to emailing PDFs to you or at least making them available to download rather than posting paper documents to you. The NHS still uses Windows XP  and fax machines! Not exclusively of course but these should all have been removed decades ago. The UK telecoms companies are rapidly discontinuing all ye olde analogue telephonic lines - you therefore cannot get a new analogue line so presumably they are using ATA - Analogue Terminal Adapters to keep their dinosaur thermal roll fax machines going. (Shudder!)

So, yes the UK Government is stupid to do this both because they are very, very bad at it, and also because it is reinventing the wheel and having multiple wallet apps is crazy. I would not regard the US as being perfect here - it is absurd how slowly US states are being in getting their driving licenses added to e.g. Apple Wallet - so far it is only about 10 or 11 out of fifty of the US states who have achieved this. At least here in the UK it would be the entire country.

Note: The current UK driving license being a physical only ID is currently effectively the same format as EU ones. However again due to the UK Government currently planning to (re)invent their own solution it is likely to be a uniquely UK one so UK citizens visiting the EU and vice versa - not to mention freight drivers will face issues whereas currently the UK and EU share the same physical format drivers license which as far as I am aware therefore all work via the same OCR solutions.

I think this is a case where Apple needs to use EU law to fight back against Meta and 'hoist them by their own petard'. This would be payback as Meta would be punished for trying to use EU laws to abuse EU laws.

Apple could firstly try using GDPR against Meta. Secondly Apple could go to the European Court of Justice and accuse the EU of having insufficient measures to protect EU citizens data the basis by which the ECJ previously ruled that the 'Safe Harbour Agreement' between the US and EU was invalid as the US did not sufficiently ensure the data of EU citizens was protected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Safe_Harbor_Privacy_Principles

Apple and gaming…

• Yes Apple Silicon means sealed non-upgradeable Macs can in terms of performance potentially match custom built PC gaming rigs (and despite the perception of an Apple hardware tax, might be price competitive as well)
• Yes iOS has been (and is) extremely successful as a gaming platform
• Yes Apple has been providing more recently some tools to help game developers e.g. Game Porting Toolkit
• Yes the consistency of platform between iOS, iPad OS, TV OS, macOS helps - in theory, encourage developers to release macOS games

Is the Mac therefore now considered a serious gaming platform - hell no

Is Apple themselves serious about Mac gaming? We don't know. Evidence so far says the answer is still no. What is more important is that the overwhelming industry perception by developers etc. is also no and backed up by decades of experience of Apple.  

This is an area that Apple are keeping any plans they might have very much hidden. My own perception is that they still are not treating gaming as a serious category and that this is a huge mistake.

I have a number of ideas that could completely transform this and I feel ultimately add tens of billions of dollars of revenue. If Apple are interested they can contact me,  

Sadly history indicates Apple is still not interested in gaming.

Most of us will recall Steve Jobs was anti-gaming and this arguably still shapes Apple. The irony is that one of the first steps in Steve Jobs (and Steve Wozniak's) careers was working at Atari!

https://blisscast.wordpress.com/2023/04/24/breakout-atari-apple-english/