cloudguy

KBuffett said:

Apple really should have dominated the Gaming and Streaming markets by now. They seem to be going things by halves far too often now, rather like Google’s long list of failed offerings.

Please know that no top Apple executive has ever had much of a regard for video gaming. I don't blame them and neither should you. Study the video game industry and its history. Similar to Hollywood, video gaming is an industry that is very difficult to break into, extremely expensive to maintain traction in, yet ultimately isn't very lucrative. At all.

The top video gaming companies? Let's exclude Microsoft, who only gets a very small fraction of their profits from gaming. You have:
Sony (who gets a much bigger slice of their revenue from gaming than Microsoft but it is still a small part of what they do)\
Tencent (I don't like including them ... but no choice really)
Nintendo
Valve
Epic
Electronic Arts
Ubisoft

Don't you realize how comparatively tiny those companies are? Even if you take Sony and Tencent off the board, Apple could gobble the rest of them up with their spare pocket change.

I know, you are asking: "if video gaming is so unimportant why did Microsoft invest so much in it"? That goes back to the "learn video game history" part: Bill Gates got it into his head that consumers might start buying PlayStations instead of Windows PCs. I know, it makes absolutely no sense, but in his defense, it helps to remember that Sony was a huge deal back then - the world's leading consumer electronics company - and that PCs were way more expensive back then (where now a decent Chromebook costs less than a PS5). The more technical people at Microsoft had more legitimate concerns: that developers were going to abandon DirectX for the PS2 platform - which Sony originally intended to be used for more than gaming consoles - so Gates' paranoia was actually beneficial for their own purposes. But please note that neither Gates or the Microsoft tech architects ever cared about video gaming for its own sake. Why? Because there isn't a whole lot of money in it, and the money that does exist in it is extremely hard to make.

Google came to the same decision when they killed their Stadia studio: they would have needed to invest hundreds of millions in order to maybe make $1 billion years down the line. They'd make much more money easier and faster by expanding YouTube TV and making a Pixel phone that's actually decent (positive developments on towards both were announced this week). 

rob53 said:

Is Apple required to push their Apple developed ARM designs back to the main ARM design architecture? It appears v9 will include many of the ideas Apple has developed. 

As for Nvidia buying Arm Ltd there better be a whole lot more investigation into how Nvidia will be allowed to control the architecture and its users before they’re allowed to buy them. 

You are wrong on both counts.

1. The v9 contains things that ARM developed independently that are inferior to Apple's tech.
2. Apple WILL NOT be required to push their ARM designs back. First off, as a co-founder with a permanent architectural license, Apple is for all intents and purposes an independent entity here. Second, even if they weren't, the other ARM licensees like MediaTek, Huawei, Qualcomm and Samsung don't either. This is a real issue because for awhile both Samsung and Qualcomm were able to develop custom CPU cores that were significantly better tham ARM's generic CPU cores. (Samsung fell behind and gave up; Qualcomm's are only slightly better.) And Qualcomm's Adreno GPU design is MUCH BETTER than ARM Holdings' Mali. (The bad ARM GPUs are a major reason why Google uses Intel for Chromebooks. Samsung ditched Mali for an AMD GPU design. Nvidia's mobile GPU design - hardware and software - is much better also.) So if generic licensees like Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia aren't required to give up their IP to ARM Holdings there is no way that Apple - whose license is on far better terms - won't.

Basically Nvidia buying ARM has nothing to do with Apple. Nvidia doesn't even want in on the CPU game anyway. They tried that already: they made CPUs for the original batch of Android devices. When companies abandoned them for the Qualcomm/Samsung/MediaTek trio they tried to manufacture and sell their own devices - the Nvidia Shield tablet and the Nvidia Shield set top box - but that failed also. Even the Nintendo Switch uses Nvidia CPU designs that are like 4 years old because Nvidia exited that market and never updated them. The Nintendo Switch Pro will have a slightly updated Tegra CPU, but it still won't use the latest ARM cores or the latest process. Nvidia buying ARM is all about cloud, edge and IoT stuff plus ML/AI stuff, and those are areas that an end user consumer hardware company like Apple only dabbles in.

xbit said:

I wonder how much work was involved - was it a case of Microsoft simply upgrading to Electron 11 or was there additional work that needed doing?

Not a lot of work as Linux ARM versions of VSCode were already available. Unlike Visual Studio, which is 100% Microsoft proprietary software, VSCode was an open source project from the beginning making it an easy port to various architectures. There was also no real rush ... not many programmers are going to be using the entry level devices anyway. They are waiting on devices that have more than 16 GB of RAM and - in particular - support more than 2 screens. So when the 16' MBP, the Mac Mini Pro etc. launch with 32 and 64 GB RAM versions that support up to 4 monitors this year, VSCode will be ready and waiting for them (as will be Javascript, Python and OpenJDK Java.)

VSCode isn't "Microsoft's long-standing app development software." That would be Visual Studio. VSCode is a free, lightweight open source tiny subset of Visual Studio that was released in order to stop the bleeding of scripting programmers - i.e. Javascript and Python - from Visual Studio to competing free and open source scripting IDEs. The older IDEs - Visual Studio, NetBeans, Eclipse etc. - were designed around full blown programming languages like C++ and Java. But for scripting languages full blown IDEs were overkill. In addition in some instances the IDEs were proprietary software that cost a ton of money and aren't available on all platforms (see Visual Studio Enterprise). 

Basically, Javascript is replacing Java for a ton of client (Angular and Express) and server (node.js) for a bunch of applications ... the MEAN stack is now supplanting the LAMP stack - the rage 10 to 15 years ago - for ecommerce sites. (C/C++ was never widely used for web servers and applications, though it is very possible to do so, and Microsoft has made some attempts to push it with their IIS web servers.) And then you have Python and R used for data science. Microsoft was losing a huge chunk of the next generation of programmers, so they created and open-sourced VS Code to get them back. Fortunately for them VS Code is excellent software so that plus the Microsoft name worked like a charm: it is the de facto standard. Including for people who are now using it for Java and C++ instead of Visual Studio. 

lkrupp said:

I put this right up there with the paranoids who complain that their new iPhone battery health went from 100% to 99% in just a week. And let the journalistic terrorists splash their headlines that M1 Macs ‘die’ in a year. 

'Even so, just an official confirmation that it is examining the issue will probably go a long way to ease concerns -- even if Apple ends up determining there's no ultimate issue.”
 
Online yellow journalism is a cancer. Anybody can say anything and not have accountability. Just consider the Bloomberg bullshit about servers having tiny chips the Chinese military put on them so they can spy on Americans.

For goodness sakes. This isn't driven by the mythical anti-Apple tech journalists that you folks insist exist despite it being long proven that media and other creative professionals strongly prefer Macs - at one point they were practically the only ones using them - as well as iPads and iPhones. When was the last time you even saw a journalist mention Android (for example) that wasn't in the context of A. fragmentation B. malware C. lack of privacy and security D. lack of updates E. lack of apps or F. giving a review unit that was sent to them for free that they would never buy for personal use a midding review because of A-E?

Instead, this story is driven entirely by people who bought this device talking about it on social media. Since they bought this device with their own money you can assume that they are ardent fans of Apple devices. Also, issues like these are inevitable with first generation devices. Which Apple folks don't see too often because Apple 1. generally has a much smaller product lineup than other companies and B. generally only introduces products after the innovators went first, often by several years. But - yeesh - anyone remember the 1st generation iPhone? It was not the device that everyone - well 15% of the market anyway - now knows and loves. 

Right here: ARM-based PCs are a new thing. ARM-based mobile devices? Nope. ARM-based servers? Not really. But ARM-based laptops and desktops? The wilderness. You basically have ARM Chromebooks like the Lenovo Duet who use the same storage that is used in smartphones and tablets and you have Windows-on-ARM devices that A. also often uses mobile device storage like the 64 GB version of the Surface Go 2 and B. no one really buys anyway. These Macs are the first ARM-based PCs where their SSDs are being used for things like programming, data analytics and 8K video editing. By contrast the ARM-based Chromebooks are running PWAs and mobile apps (we haven't seen any Qualcomm 7CX or MediaTek M8195 Chromebooks capable of running anything more demanding than LibreOffice on Linux yet) and the Windows on ARM Chromebooks are running ... well they can't even emulate x86 applications yet so who knows what they are running. We don't even have ARM-based Chromeboxes (the same as a Mac Mini except running ChromeOS) or Windows-on-ARM desktops yet as prior to the M1 Macs that entire market was ChromeOS and Windows on ARM 2-in-1s (and 7 or 8 years ago, ARM-based ChromeOS netbooks that really were only capable of running the Chrome browser and PWAs that had only 16 GB of flash storage).

So Apple is doing something truly new here instead of trailing Samsung in smart watches and truly wireless earbuds, or training Amazon and Google in smart TV boxes and smart speakers. (Even there, the HomePod needed quite a few updates AND a second generation device to become competitive and relevant.) Even the iPod: preceding devices got the basics (storage, playback/pause, audio out) right and Apple's success was more of the first to nail the software/business model with iTunes. And when you do that, bugs like this on devices that have barely been commercially available for 3 months are going to happen.