svanstrom

mattinoz said:

So no real predictions as yet as to what way Apple Silicon will go next! 

anonconformist said:

svanstrom said:

anonconformist said:

maximara said:

darkvader said:

pulseimages said:

When will I stop receiving onscreen messages telling me 3rd Party Software installed on my Mac won’t be compatible with a future version of Mac OS and to contact the developer? It’s not the customers job to remind the developer to update their software to be compatible. 

Never.  Apple will do this to you again and again.

It would be trivial for Apple to support 68k software in System 11.  It would be trivial to support 68k, PowerPC, 32-bit Intel, and ARM software at the same time.  The only programs that truly couldn't handle it would be things like disk utilities. 

But in the next few years you can expect that Apple will again f you over when they intentionally break 64-bit Intel software, just as they did for every previous architecture.

I'm done.  No M1 for me.  Xubuntu is looking really nice these days, and it'll run on standard x86 hardware for the foreseeable future.  Hardware that also doesn't make me get new dongles for every new port that comes along because it still includes the old ports.  And with just a tiny hack, I can run x86 Mac software in VMware Workstation.  I can even get it to run Apple's last really good version of Mac OS X, 10.6.

For now, I'm telling my clients to buy Intel Macs while they still can, avoid the M1 garbage like the plague it is.  That'll get them at least 5 years of reasonable functionality, then we can move on to what's next, which at this point isn't likely to be Apple.

Microsoft OSs suck.  But did you know you can still run some 16-bit Windoze 1 software on current Windoze 10 20H2?  You can. 

Intentionally breaking compatibility is insane.

That backwards compatibility comes at a cost - a huge increasingly complex OS that has numerous issues because developers took shortcuts that make going to the next level.  Look at the horrid performance of Microsoft's x86 emulator vs Apple's translator.  Like it or not x86 has likely reached the end of the road of how it can be improved without getting into the 'doubles as a space heater' jokes again.  Nearly everybody (even AMD) has seen that ARM is the future be it Opterron (and the M1 competitor AMD is rumored to be working on) or the M1.  Hanging on the dying past is why Sears, Blockbuster, and dozens of other business are either walking undead are all but dead.

I can run a World Builder, a 32-bit 68000 assembly program from 1986 via emulation on a modern Mac.  If you want to run old software there will be a market for emulators.  If their isn't a market not enough people really care about act old software...otherwise there would be emulators QED.

It’s interesting to me while DarkVader says Microsoft operating systems suck, Apple is f-ing over people by blowing away backwards compatibility.

The engineering tradeoff is there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch: for DarkVader he wants the backwards compatibility Windows is famous for, despite claiming the OS sucks, while saying Apple sucks for not having it. Well, here’s the thing: all that backwards compatibility is what causes the perception of it “sucking” as an OS as it absolutely has a HUGE amount of overhead in maintaining/fixing/updating/adding features for the OS, not to mention system performance. Backwards compatibility exists in Windows to a large degree because of something called shims, which accounts for various applications and groups of applications expecting the OS to behave in some particular internal-detail method that it no longer does: this is what shims are for. If applications only use APIs as formally documented, there’s lots of backwards compatibility with zero efforts.

Windows over time has had major changes as hardware capabilities have changed (SMP, multiple sockets, sound hardware, GPUs arriving, etc.) and natural performance characteristics of underlying hardware has changed assumptions that made sense in the past, but remember: Microsoft focuses on big enterprise customers, and they loathe rewriting applications that have no functional need to change, as that’s huge money: enterprises tend to be tied together with a lot of custom applications designed only for them, paid for only by them: Microsoft Office updates are cheap by comparison.  New sets of APIs are created also when it’s figured out there are better ways of doing things.

Apple doesn’t care about backwards compatibility beyond a handful of years. They keep rewriting a lot of things and changing them out entirely, and any given software will usually work fine without major changes just as long as the support lifespan of any of their sold machines, which is fine for most non-enterprise consumers. This has a logical result in a lot less resource usage, and increases the chances of having cleaner code in the OS with far fewer odd special cases as well to account for third-party application software or device drivers (which, btw, Windows has a HUGE array of what’s supported compared to every other OS, especially MacOS for a mainstream OS).

Windows and MacOS are close to being mirror opposites of each other in how/why they are what they are: you don’t get a sleek minimal-resource-using OS with backwards compatibility, it can’t be done.  You can’t get a sleek OS with maximal device driver support for the same reason.

Backwards compatibility could in theory be offered in other formats than what we usually think it means.

For instance, in many cases I could setup a virtual machine that would run an operating system just as if it'd been a regular hardware computer; and then run my choice of operating system on top of that. So I could run most software from most eras.

So in theory Apple could allow backwards compatibility simply by running some sort of loader that analyses the app you're trying to run, and then downloads the correct (walled) environment for it (meaning virtualisation from the hardware and up). So none of the mess of every version of the OS having to "natively" handle every API and whatnot of every earlier version.

So you could in theory have a situation where you just click on anything, and at most the OS give you a warning about potential license fee, if it is a huge download, and whether or not your current hardware will be able to run the environment at 1x speed or not. It wouldn't matter if it'd be software for Windows, NES, Jaguar, Linux, Mac, iOS, or anything else.

However, that wouldn't allow much of an integration between those environments, nor between them and your host OS; and there would be a huge hit in perfomance (which wouldn't matter with older stuff, but might be crippling with more modern environments).

The point being that as this separates the environments you would have the benefit of a lean OS to develop with new features, at the same time as you can offer more complete (but different) style of backwards compatibility. So a new style of backwards compatibility might be reasonable to pursue for a business like Apple; because it could allow whole back catalogs of software to without any effort at all be sold in Apple's AppStore.

And… as far as the comment about Apple not caring about backwards compatibility beyond a handful of years… Well, I don't think I've ever gotten less than 5 years of running the latest and greatest on any Mac that I've bought; and I think I in two cases hit 9-10 years before the hardware had to be retired. That's actually really good, and great value.

Certain things can’t be virtualized in a manner to provide acceptable results, such as Bluetooth as one I’m very familiar with being very problematic. The best virtualization of it by any vendor still sucks, and doesn’t have full functionality at all when virtualized, even then.

TCP/IP networking is actually far easier to virtualize, though there are still some complications you can run into.

Things get more complicated with other external hardware hooked up via hardware buses that no longer exists on newer hardware but (in theory) can be used with adapters, as in the Apple universe there’s often a tighter tie between newer OS versions with newer hardware and dropping of drivers.

Windows 10 out of the box has Hyper-V and it works quite well for things with no special I/O requirements but again, there are practical limitations.  

FastLane said:

This wasn't mentioned in the article (but is a big delta for 5G)...  S21 5G modems will be the Qualcomm X60 versus X55 on the iPhone 12.  This means simultaneous multi-band 5G (including carrier aggregation) versus only one band at a time on the X55.  This is critical in that 5G is a "layered" network with some bands not penetrating buildings and others (low band) doing that well but at a lower bandwidth.  You want a modem that can talk to them all at the same time and pick the best -- or even merge them.  This allows for a more reliable and consistent 5G connection.

The X60 is also a 5nm part which means when using 5G it will pull less power than the X55 (which is 7nm... 2x the physical layout size) on the iPhone 12. 

The iPhone 13 will have this but it was a huge miss for the iphone 12.

Qualcomm overview on the X60 and it's benefits versus X55:   

radarthekat said:

lkrupp said:

svanstrom said:

Truth is that Apple would be f*cked if they straight up just left China; and if they don't leave China they will keep on finding human rights issues.

So what to do?

At what point will we consumers walk away from Apple if they don't move more of their production out of China?

Aaaaand… even if they move their production out of China, does that really help if the factories are still owned by Chinese companies. (Like with the AirPods Max: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/12/10/apple-airpods-max-are-made-in-vietnam-but-still-by-chinese-firms.)

So what other manufacturers are you willing to walk away from in addition to Apple? Nearly all manufacturing worldwide happens in China now. We were in the market for a new vacuum cleaner and I read the list of American brands, almost all of which have moved or are going to move manufacturing to China.

So don't you think you’re being hypocritical by singling out Apple for abandonment? As I said in another post, neither you nor anyone else is going to walk away from Apple because you have no other manufacturer to go to. All you are going to do is cluck your tongue, shake your head, and continue to buy Chinese manufactured goods.

Oh and the vast majority of prescription drugs are manufactured in and imported from China. Will you be walking away from your life-sustaining drug too?

You post brings up a good point.  A lot of folks seem to be castigating Apple not because they aren’t doing what they feel is enough, because if that were the case they have to be shouting even louder about the many many companies manufacturing in China that are doing far less.  They are castigating Apple for setting a very high bar and not quite clearing it.  While others just say nothing and shamelessly walk under the bar.