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The Genius In Apple's Vertical Platform

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the a-tad-optimistic dept.

Precision found a nice little piece of speculation on the real reason behind Apple's recent efforts to restrict app development to XCode. While the standard given reason is to kill competition from Flash and other stacks, this story speculates that the real reason has to do with the unusually large die size of the A4 processor inside the iPads. Worth a quick read.

3 of 432 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't account for all the wording by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not only does Apple restrict you to compiling your code in c, c++,objective c with the iphone sdk, they prohibit any code that was not originally written in one of those languages. The article would make sense, if the only restriction Apple had in place was that they code be compiled by the iphone sdk. That is not the case, as far as I know.

    --
    Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    1. Re:Doesn't account for all the wording by marcansoft · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The guy who wrote the article is clueless.

      These ridiculous claims remind me of that "tapionvslink" guy who swears that the Wii has a GPGPU with programmable shaders and twice the RAM and all sorts of things that the homebrew community knows are bullshit, just because he did some broken math on die sizes. He still maintains that we're all ignorant and just haven't figured out what real Wii games are doing with the GPU. Riiight.

      Seriously, if the iPad were PowerPC, don't you think we'd know by now, considering it's been jailbroken? Chipworks also tore down the chip and found nothing unusual; it's just another mobile ARM. Also, no one in their right mind would ever use a CPU emulator on a mobile platform OS. It's one of the best ways to completely nuke your battery life, not to mention performance. It's a cute theory, but it's so thoroughly impossible it's not even funny.

  2. Apple Fanbois by nhtshot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Disclosure: I'm writing this from a Mac. I like my Macs. I like Apple. I'm not delusional like this guy.

    If you didn't RTFA, there's no need. It's just some Apple fanboi trying to find genius and conspiracy where there isn't any.

    Are you serious? Constricting developers because you're going to change the platform? Really? I wonder if the article author even believes this crap.

    Emulating a cpu you could just as easily install for real? Never mind going back to an architecture (POWER) that you've already EOL and that is wholly unsuited for the platform (high power consumption, high heat output).

    He's right that Apple is a story in vertical integration. They're doing it the same way Rockefeller did. They want to control the entire platform.