linuxplatform

civa said:

Okay, this is gong exactly where I thought it would go. 

Apple announces they are completely switching architecture. 

Softbank suddenly decides to sell ARM Holdings. 

A competitor swoops in to pull the rug out from under Apple

OK. This is exactly where it is going. No one cares about Apple using its own chips for its own computers ... but people who use Apple computers. (And even then a tiny subset of people who use Apple computers. Most Apple computer users see their Macs as locked boxes and know/care less about their internals than Windows/Linux users. The same for iPhone/iPad owners versus Android device owners. They buy Apple products because they "just work" - and when they don't they just take advantage of Apple's legendary support - and do not have to think about the underlying technology.)

Seriously, who you think regards themselves as being in competition with Apple in the PC market? Nvidia? In what way? They don't manufacture PCs. They don't manufacture PC CPUs. And Apple doesn't even buy their GPUs for the vast majority of their products. So what on earth would Nvidia gain by denying Apple licenses for ARM and forcing Apple to continue using Intel? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

How about someone who actually makes PCs then? Dell. Dell buys ARM, keeps Apple from making ARM Macs. Guess what? Apple still keeps making Intel Macs. Apple's market share remains the same. And Dell keeps getting hammered by Lenovo. And Dell - who is already financially struggling from their failed VMWare purchase that they are going to have to write down billions from - will also have another worthless acquisition in ARM. Lenovo? More of the same. Virtually no one on this planet who would even think of buying a Mac would buy a Lenovo because they don't have the brand name that IBM once did. HP? Acer? Asus? Yeah, no. There aren't very many people who would say "will I buy a MacBook Pro or will I buy an Acer Predator?" either. (By "very many" I mean absolutely none.)

wonkothesane said:

Thank you. Can we now move on please and spend effort on real abuse of market power? 

And who performs "real abuse of market power" pray tell?ihatescreennames said:

Not a surprise to me but I’m not sure the same can be said for many who post here or to others going after Apple for their “unfair” App Store practices.

”But Apple has a monopoly on iOS!”

Looking at it from the other side of the argument ... compare to Windows back in the day when they were a monopoly. You could actually install a competing web browser - plenty did - but just not make it the default browser. You could also install applications from any source that you wanted, not just applications provided by Microsoft. 

Apple does have a monopoly on iOS. Not in the sense that there are no alternatives if you want a mobile device - but more on that later - but rather if you own an iOS device or if you are an app maker who wants to access owners of iOS device them Apple is the only way for you to get apps on that device or reach Apple users. So in that sense Apple has more of a monopoly on the billions of iPhones, iPads, watches and Apple TV devices that it has sold than Microsoft ever did on Windows PCs. The fact that Windows had about 98% of the PC market at the time wasn't the issue. The DoJ never did anything to, say, force the adoption of Macs or Linux. They simply altered the way that Microsoft handled Windows.

Now back to "no alternatives if you want a mobile device" ... I dare say that Apple advocates try to have it both ways. 99% of the time, Android is a garbage ecosystem privacy and security issues and bad products that offers no quality apps to its users and no way for developers to make money that everyone should stay away. That leaves Apple with a monopoly on the ability to reach enterprises and affluent users on a platform that offers privacy, security and quality control. Maybe this isn't a compelling argument for the promulgators of free-to-play mobile games than can effectively run on cheap hardware like Epic Games and Fortnite, but if you are BaseCamp - or Microsoft - and need to be able to offer a secure, private consistent user experience to paying customers then iOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS is the only way to go. And to those customers Apple is the only gate. 

Again, Apple advocates are 100% in favor of this argument in every other context. In every other context Apple advocates claim that a developer is wasting is time dedicating any resources to putting apps on Android because he will never make any money on anything except games that force you to watch an ad every 3 minutes or lootbox/gacha type games that target developing countries. Or Apple advocates claim that developers should reject Android on principle even if they could make money because they should want no part of the privacy, security and copyright infringement issues that Google, Samsung, Xiaomi and the rest are clearly guilty of. It is only when the anti-trust arguments are raised that these very same people say "what monopoly? Android exists! Android is a great platform for targeting enterprise and affluent customers! So anyone who doesn't want to play by Apple's rules can just put their apps on Android, advertise them and get rich! The banks, hospitals and government agencies that require security and privacy with their devices, apps and data? Let BaseCamp use Android to target them! They'll be completely fine and NEVER get sued because some data snooping app that Google allowed in the Play Store stole classified government or sensistive user information!" 

Again, all the people who believe this in any context other than to avoid Apple getting sued for anti-trust, raise your hands. All the people who are really happy going around reciting "Android is for poor people" and "no one" (or no one but Google and Samsung) makes money off Android" and "Android is just a spyware platform for terrorists and foreign governments" in every other use case ... you know who you are. And the people who are filing these antitrust lawsuits as well as the regulators and judges who are going to weigh them know the arguments of this type that Apple advocates have been advancing in blogs, the mainstream media etc. for over 10 years too. All these plaintiffs have to do in order to stop the "what about Android?" argument in its tracks is cite Tim Cook's own repeated public statements attacking Android over security and privacy. Or cite Phil Schiller's statements stating that school children who use Chromebooks and other Google platform products are going to fail because they aren't going to have the superior engagement that iPads offer. It is going to be impossible to claim that Android is a viable alternative for enterprise app developers when you have Apple executives like Cook and Schiller saying that it isn't! All app developers have to do is say that they avoided Android because Apple executives like Schiller and Cook have spent the last 10 years telling them what a terrible idea it is to put apps on an insecure platform that is based on a stolen product in the first place!

And everyone who sincerely believes that Cook, Schiller etc. are wrong ... say so. And do it in contexts other than Apple getting sued for antitrust. You won't and everyone knows it.

All right people. This is what is going on. Microsoft has an initiative going on that might finally work. Shocker ... it is based on what they have learned from what Google does with ChromeOS and is going to do with Fuschia.

ChromeOS: takes the stripped-down OS that was minimal Linux plus graphics libraries and the Chrome browser - able to run well on 2 GB of RAM and a 15 year old Intel dual core processor - and added Android and Debian(esque) Linux containers to significantly extend the functionality. Fuchsia: is going to be a completely modular micro-kernel based OS (all well known OSes today run monolithic kernels).

So, Microsoft created Windows CoreOS. To Windows CoreOS they can add modules to allow it to run what a device needs, or leave those modules out if the device doesn't need it. Windows 10, then is just a flavor of Windows CoreOS. Windows for XBox ... another flavor. Windows 10X ... another flavor.

Legacy Windows and the applications that their customers need that is written in it and will never be updated is Microsoft's biggest hurdle right now. CoreOS deals with that hurdle by leaving legacy Windows out of it. So you will only buy legacy Windows support if you need it. If you don't, you can buy another flavor of Windows and face the future instead of fighting it. 

So Windows 10X is Windows 10 without the legacy applications. Can it run on ARM? Yes. Can it run on Intel? Of course. Why not? So can Linux. So can ChromeOS. So can Android. A software company would be crazy to limit itself to a single architecture in this era. But here is the deal: Windows 10X on ARM would not need to run in emulation because there would be no x86 apps to emulate. It would just run UWP apps as well as Linux apps via WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). Yes, utilizing Linux to make up for the "app gap" on your native OS is something that Microsoft learned from Google. So again, if you need your old apps, you can buy an Intel or AMD-based machine and run the version of Wndows that has legacy support. If you don't, you can buy the Intel or AMD-based machine ... or you can buy a Qualcomm ARM one. 

Also, Google is working on the legacy support on ARM too. WIndows CoreOS supports containers - or the Windows equivalent - so they are going to try to run x86 as a layer inside a container - similar to what Google does with Android and Linux - on ARM devices. If they can get it to work, that should give much better performance than emulation. At the very worst, only apps x86 apps will need to be emulated. Which isn't a problem since legacy apps - written back when 2 GB of RAM seemed like science fiction - won't use much resources anyway. So long as emulating the containerized/sandboxed/virtualized x86 apps doesn't slow down the UWP apps and everything else - which is the case with Windows on ARM currently - then they are fine.

Microsoft is delaying it because they haven't worked out all the issues yet. See, Microsoft isn't Google. Their products get used by serious enterprise customers. So they wouldn't be able to get away with having a major feature in beta for two years, as Google has done with Linux on ChromeOS (and for that matter they are still resolving issues with Android apps on ChromeOS and that's been out for 4 ... and with there are even some issues with tablet/touchscreen support which ChromeOS has allegedly ahd for 6). 

And no, this isn't something that Microsoft has undertaken because of a fear of macOS. (If anything it would have been because of a fear of Google.) Instead, looking for ways to modularize operating systems has been the rage with operating systems ever since containers took off in 2013. Put it this way: Google's original plan for Android apps on ChromeOS? Install them in the browser the way you do extensions. (No, seriously. They called it ARC Welder with ARC standing for Android Runtime for Chrome. So people with Chrome browsers on their Windows and macOS desktops would have had full Android apps embedded in them. Which isn't as big a deal as you think ... most mobile apps are no bigger than browser plugins, plus the average person has like gigabytes of data in their browser cache files - more than the entire 16-32 GB storage space of a mobile device - anyway). But then Docker and their containers blew up and they were like "yeah we'll do that instead." Which led to them doing a bit more digging until they rediscovered microkernels - an idea that has been around since the late 60s but has never taken off in a commercial OS - for Fuschia.

Windows CoreOS isn't a microkernel OS, but it conceptually implements the same idea: start with a core small enough to power an IoT sensor and scale up to a massive server that provides SaaS to thousands of simultaneous customers through the cloud. Curiously Google created - and Microsoft quickly adopted - the microkernel concept for APPLICATIONS with node.js but are now drilling down to do the same with the operating systems itself.

So if you think that Microsoft - and for that matter Google - are scrambling to keep up with ARM-based Macs, you need to pay more to the distinction between software and hardware companies. Instead, Microsoft and Google - as well as Red Hat, Ubuntu etc. - are working on next generation operating systems (even if they are based on an old idea) where things like CPU architecture and instruction sets flat out aren't going to matter (much). 

dewme said:

cpsro said:

An intentional delay of 10X might be a strategy to slow/undermine Apple's migration to ARM.

I don’t feel that there is any connection whatsoever between Microsoft’s ARM strategy and Apple’s ARM strategy. 

Apple is in a far better position than Microsoft when it comes to figuring out how to exploit ARM to its strategic advantage, most notably in the mass deployment of several generations of high performance iOS and iPadOS computers that constantly demonstrate increasing performance and greater power efficiency year over year. 

Speaking of ARM, I’m very impressed by the performance and usability of 64-bit Linux (Ubuntu Mate 20.04 beta) on Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer (8GB). There’s a pretty wide swath of people whose entire set of computing needs could be met with a $50 computer main board, especially if they grab the monitor, keyboard, and mouse from their existing claptrap laden Windows setup. 

If a $50 ARM based main board can deliver solid basic computing needs and be so pleasant to use, just imagine what Apple will be able to do with its massive engineering staff, resources, and experience in designing world class ARM processors. 

The other advantage that I believe Apple has over Microsoft is that they’ve done a major architectural change before. I’d imagine they had to refactor and “genericize” a fair amount of code in the process. Microsoft has been camping on x86 for so long that I’d bet that the level of cruft in their code base is quite thick and gooey. 

The only "major advantage" that Apple has over Microsoft is that the former is a hardware company and the latter is a software company. Being a hardware company Apple can just say "here's our hardware - which we will support 100% for the next 7-10 years - and you run whatever you want on it." But being a software company Microsoft needs to provide backwards compatibility to a huge customer base that is still running old software. It isn't that Microsoft doesn't have the technical capability to ditch x86. They could do it yesterday. It is that they can't afford to lose the customers that it would cost them were they to ditch support for the legacy code. Because if Microsoft stops supporting their legacy code, what will they need Microsoft for anyway? Why bother with Windows? Linux does the exact same thing and is 100% free. Why bother with SQL Server? MariaDB and PostgreSQL ... again free. 

Xed said:

mpantone said:

My guess is that Microsoft hit the pause button after having second thoughts about bolting on a half-baked 64-bit Windows fork onto what appears to be a touchscreen netbook to compete against the next generation Apple desktop operating system and the mature iPadOS.

Microsoft does not have the luxury of screwing this one up otherwise they'll end up with another Windows Mobile debacle. They already conceded the paradigm shifting smartphone market.

It would be great for someone to come up with a competitive alternative to Apple's offerings but Microsoft can't put out something that is appears to be three years behind to the marketplace. In fact, the points that it is running 64-bit and on ARM instruction CPUs isn't all that important to Joe Consumer. It just needs to perform well.

Windows 10X competes more with Chromebook than it does Macs. Unfortunately for MS they’re having to fight on multiple fronts for both the massive low-end market and the profitable high-end market. Neither of these will be their undoing but it surely doesn’t help their bottom line.

Both the low end market and the high end market are profitable. Selling 10 items at a $1 margin is the same as selling 1 item at a $10 margin. Especially since you can also sell services to those 10. Also for Microsoft the "high end market" is servers and cloud where Apple doesn't compete at all. And please realize that Microsoft sells PLENTY of Office 365 licenses to Chromebook and MacBook owners. So either way they are fine. The Windows desktop market could completely dry up for them and they would still be a Fortune 25 company. In other words, this isn't the Gates/Ballmer Microsoft.