asdasd

lkrupp said:

Fear and panic have won the day. Ebay has banned the sale of masks and hand sanitizer to prevent price gouging. Shelves are empty, people are running around with their hair on fire screaming, I wonder what would happen if some real apocalypse occurred. We're like frogs sitting in a pot of water, blissfully unaware of the rising temperatures caused by climate change as the temperature rises until we are boiled alive. But nobody cares about that. In the end we are just mindless beasts no different than our prehistoric ancestors.

melgross said:

randominternetperson said:

I expect Apple has pretty solid data about what applications Mac users actually use.  I'm sure a decent chunk of the market (such as my wife) use no applications beyond a Web browser, the applications Apple provides, and Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.  And push comes to shove, many people in this category could do without the last 3.

One approach for Apple would be to target this market with a high-quality, low-price, super portable MacOS laptop (that just happens to have very little third party support initially).  But is there enough of a market for this since the same audience can do just fine with an iPad and external keyboard.

Office is extremely important on the Mac. It’s so important, that Apple never tried to have iWork rival it. They just gave up. We had hoped Apple would enhance it to become a real rival, which they could have, but they didn’t.

in fact, in the late 1990’s, when Apple found Microsoft had their hand in the QuickTime cookie jar, one of the requirements Apple made to Microsoft was that Microsoft upgrade Office for the Mac for at least 5 years.

melgross said:

lkrupp said:

Any ideas on how Apple will handle the X86 code of current apps to run on ARM architecture? I am not educated on this. Is ARM close enough to X86 that the transition will be easy or will it require a Rosetta-like translation framework like the move from Moto 68000 to X86 did. Will we have universal binaries again or something else during the transition?

This is the problem I’ve been wondering about for some time. While some people dismiss this as an issue, or in most cases, don’t even think about it (aren’t aware it is an issue), it’s the biggest issue apple will need to deal with. In previous changeovers, even Apple was very lax in getting their own big apps out. It took a year for them. It took a long time for Adobe and Microsoft, with their massive software, to come over too.

ARM is not close to x86. It’s optimized for battery life over performance. Apple and ARM have made significant advances on that front, but the instruction sets are different enough. We know from previous attempts at emulation, that a processor family needs to be 5 times as powerful in order to be able to run software at the same speed as the family they’re emulating. This hasn’t changed. Microsoft supposedly does it now, with their “universal” sdk. But they don’t, really. They require software to be rewritten, and recompiled for ARM. And there have still been issues with performance, specific features and bugs.

im not saying it can’t be done, because obviously it can. But if Apple is really going to release a device next year, there will either be significant limitations, or they’ve figured out a way around them. My suggestion, which no one here has ever commented on, from my memory, is to add a dozen x86 instructions to the chip. It’s been found that 80% of the slowdown between chip families is from about a dozen instructions. The chip, or OS, could hand that over to those when native x86 software needs them. Individual instructions aren’t patented, or copyrighted, as far as I know. If true, that would give Apple a way around the problem.

razorpit said:

asdasd said:

SpamSandwich said:

sumergo said:

Hey Larryjw.

Welcome to the unacceptable face of US Capitalism.
Americans made less over the last 20 years because they didn't want to do the work that other poor people in other countries would do at 0.001 of the US cost.
As "Exceptional Americans" we just wanted to buy cheap goods - we sold our jobs for cheap toasters at Walmart.  The US capitalist system failed working Americans.

I think you’re conflating free market capitalism with “capitalism”. We don’t have free market capitalism, we have a highly regulated economy and we have industries which are also highly regulated. Virtually every form of trade is regulated in the US. The difference between China and the US is the US Federal government does not own and direct large numbers of corporate interests, but there are a number of corporations which are powerful enough that they are able to limit competition with regulations. This is corporatism.

However, don’t for even one second pretend that there’s a problem with capitalism. Competition and capitalism are responsible for bringing more people out of poverty than any other system in world history.

That’s a variation of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. 

That’s a variation of the straw man argument

lkrupp said:

China has the West by the gonads and they know it. Turns out that almost 100% of generic drugs are now manufactured in China too. So that cheap generic blood pressure pill or cholesterol pill you take is made in some Chinese factory by god knows who. There have been several recalls of a drug called Losartan (blood pressure) because of potential contamination by carcinogens, all made in China. Damn near everything you see at your local convenience store, your local department store, Walmart, comes from China. As entitled and materialistic as we are our lives would descend into chaos and depression if China chose to put their thumb on us. People here are already bitching about how long it takes to a pair of AirPods Pro.