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Apple Intern Spent 12 Weeks Porting Mac OS X To ARM
An anonymous reader writes "Apple hasn't released a Mac OS X device running on ARM yet, but a recently discovered thesis from a former Apple intern going by the name of Tristan Schapp details a 12-week project carried out in 2010 to port the OS to the ARMv5 architecture. The port got as far as booting to a multi-user prompt, but then hit hurdles to do with drivers and cache. The good news is that same intern now works for Apple as part of the CoreOS team. With rumors last year that a MacBook Air running on ARM could appear by 2013, could he be part of a team making that happen? If he is, I bet it will use the new ARMv8 architecture announced late last year."
NVIDIA is also working on high-end desktop/workstation ARM CPUs, under "Project Denver".
If something compelling emerges, perhaps ARM could be a player for sheer compute power.
Fat binaries might be useful again... ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to recognize Apple's freedom to run their business however they want.
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to stop using rhetorical hyperbole posted on websites as a basis for decisions.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It's always disconcerting to be on the wrong end of the power/performance curve when it means your computer will have less raw CPU in search of lower power requirements.
However, a change of platform generally means new compilers and fresh code.
I'm not convinced there will be any real-world performance difference when this is factored in.
I have some hope that Apple will open up some more under Cook.
Regardless, Apple is certainly not any worse than Microsoft, the maker of the only other viable desktop/laptop OS, in the "do no evil" department.
Apple also produces some of the nicest products, and what's widely regarded as the best user experience - and has the highest customer satisfaction for its products of any of the big players.
Apple innovation has also outshined the rest of the industry in a big way over the last few years.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
*pushes Tristan out the door*
Sorry for the disturbance, folks. The fellow had a little too much schnapps and was starting to bother people.
Software engineer with proven track record seeking challenging position.
Qualifications:
C
ObjectiveC
Various build and integration tools
Job experience:
Apple 6/2011 to just recently
Internships
Apple 6/2010 to 8/2010
Education
BA - comp sci - 6/2011
*references available upon request
Its not like Apple hasn't changed CPU architectures before. 68K->ppc->intel and if you want to count the Apple II, you can also include 6502->68k
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
You have to click through a lot of links to get there, but the PDF of his dissertation is online at his university's website: http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:2f66fe0c-4080-4148-a01c-acd530160797/Report_BSc_complete.pdf
You can download it here
... Telling me that the AC who wrote this is actually Tristan Schapp.
Apple learned their lesson last time with the G3/G4/G5 chips, and I find it hard to believe they would do something as stupid as introducing a third chipset (Intel, A4/A5, ARM) into the mix, especially with one of their mainstream laptops. Nobody wants to go through that - not the users, nor the developers.
A more likely scenario is a MacBook Air based upon iOS with a built-in touchscreen.
Sounds like standard intern hazing.
"Hey, Tim, take this source code (*drops huge book of source on desk*) and port it to... uh... ARM."
**12 weeks later.**
"Holy crap, he made it work."
At least it wasn't SPARC.
As how meany big apps will want to change architecture on apple yet again?
This may brake Photoshop plugins as well
Dropping X86 will take away windows dual boot as well.
Steam games and other games may also die on the mac
I have some hope that Apple will open up some more under Cook.
It would actually be interesting to hear more about what Tim Cook is, umm, cooking. After Jobs passed away, I don't remember seeing any Cook news in Slashdot, for example.
Does it actually matter what CPU your platform is running when the OS is totally locked down?
Yes, I still haven't gotten rid of my last ppc mac, darn thing just won't die, all the intels are upgraded to the most recent OS and software but the old ppc is the odd man out. Runs itunes just fine, and not worth the money to upgrade it (Not going to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to merely do what it already does just fine). Now we'll have equally incompatible ARMs floating around too. Great.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So he spent 12 weeks porting a kernel that had already been ported 3 years ago? iOS and Mac OS X are already the same kernel. Of is the real story that he was back porting lion advancements to the iOS version.
Assumption is its for the new mac book.
Would be funny if it turns out to be the much rumored apple tv.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Nicest product is based on your personnal preference. It appears that there are quite a lot of other devices that appeal to a lot of people. The best user experience is certainly not the case. Being locked in quite destroy the user experience for a lot of people. Having to delete the content of the ipad when syncing someone else new app to try it out is certainly not a good user experience. Hell, even Woz says that there are things better done on his Android.
Finally, most of the products of apple aren't innovation. They certainly didn't make the first cellular phone, nor the first mp3 player, or tablet. But they did it differently enough, with a touch, at the right time (they've failed before for certain of those devices, too), and with incredible marketing. I'd say that's their best point. An example is that they've been littering all movies for years, and it's finally been paying off.
If you really like freedom a little bit, you need to be on your guard lest all manufacturers of computing devices priced for home users collude to design their products to take away the computing freedom of home users. This already happened decades ago in the video game industry.
Apple already have a lot of things that are open source...
now compare that to microsoft....
It's no secret that one of the reasons Intel is subsidizing manufacturers over $100M for the Ultrabook project is to keep ARM at bay. This is compounded by Microsoft offering a ARM version of Windows. Apple putting out a really nice A8 MacBook Air could really shake things up.
However, the real issue Apple is going to have is MacOS or iOS. There's a lot of compelling reasons to move to iOS for Apple, but ultimately the closed nature of iOS would likely alienate the large programmer base they have built up.
I don't know anyone that did a free internship as a developer. Most interns in this industry are quite well paid.
Apple also produces some of the nicest products, and what's widely regarded as the best user experience - and has the highest customer satisfaction for its products of any of the big players.
News flash: Mercedes drivers are very content about their cars. Your statistics however, do not work. I'm glad for apple customers that they are happy, the rest of the world does not buy Apple and are also happy with that choice.
Apple innovation has also outshined the rest of the industry in a big way over the last few years.
How long have we have to hear this mantra? Apple releases nice products yes, but they did not invent anything themselves, or 'shine out' as you say. If anything shined, it are the chip and display manufacturers.
I don't care Apple users being spoiled digibete users. I do care them praising their product as if it was divine. It's just electronics, like any other. Software, like any other. And not even better software, just more limited software. Count the number of forum threads that are like 'how do i do this or that with my mac' where the answer simply is: you can't. No choice, no alternative, you wanted something and you can't. Yet those customers are most happy with their apple. It are also the people who think Apple computers are the most secure, invulnerable for viruses, etc.
Don't get me wrong, i like the products and their styling. But when it comes to useability, i have no illusion at all that Apple is any better _for me_ than any other OS like redmonds or a desktop linux.
So can you please stop thinking that because of 5% of the customers think their product is 'the best', that the other 95% are utterly stupid. The other 95% did _not_ buy Apple. And it was for a reason. Do not abuse statistics.
Getting in the door with an internship is quickly becoming the best way to not get paid to do something you weren't hired to do.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I do think Apple are worse than MS. Apple is responsible for translating the closed Console ecosystem to phones, tablets, and soon, PCs. Insisting on a 30% cut of whatever they do allow you to sell on their platform is quite bad.
MS are malevolent old-school nerds. Apple is monopoly 2.0.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
If they don't have ass, where's all this crap coming from?
Gosh, even Slashdot is with this OS X on ARM bullshit. The guy worked porting Darwin, the kernel used by OS X, to some ARM plattform.
But guess what? Darwin is also used by iOS, since the very beggining - Darwin on ARM is hardly news since 2007.
Since the various ARM SoC devices are radically different in how they boot and ennumerate devices a 12 week port time is pretty impressive but Darwin aready runs on arm v5 (and v7). iOS uses the darwin kernel. Since this was a marvell and not a samsung/apple A device a lot of work would have to be done to get the kernel to boot but the basic build system already fully supports ARM.
It's not a secret Apple keeps their options open arch-wise. After the switch the Intel it came out apple had an x86 build of darwin running for years before the switch was decided on. Keeping code portable is a good way to flush out bugs you might have otherwised missed and allows apple to try projects like iOS without a massive effort to get the basic system up and running.
iPAD and iPhone will obiovusly be getting arm v8 chips in a few generations. And I could see apple doing a hybrid macbook air that uses an arm chip to do background network access and the like but it's going to be a long time before ARM chips are playing in even Sandy Bridge territory, let alone what Intel will have in 2 years. I really don't see an arm-only apple notebook anytime soon.
Apparently you don't understand that the 30% is essentially the cost of running the store. Apple makes only a little bit of profit on the App Store.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
OS X is nowhere near "totally locked down".
But to answer your question, it matters to anyone who wants to be able to run apps written and compiled for a different CPU.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Please elaborate in which way OS X is locked down in any form?
Mac OS X is an UNIX system and not to the least bit locked down. Not at all.
I have some hope that Apple will open up some more under Cook.
It would actually be interesting to hear more about what Tim Cook is, umm, cooking. After Jobs passed away, I don't remember seeing any Cook news in Slashdot, for example.
That's because people don't hate Cook ... yet. I'm sure as soon as he does one thing that Apple haters don't like they will wish upon him the same fate as Jobs.
I believe obarthelemy was referring to the $99 per year to run programs that you compiled on a machine that you purchased. Apple copied this from Microsoft's XNA Creators Club (now called App Hub), along with the rest of the pricing structure for the iOS developer program.
Yep. I know some interns are unpaid--maybe a majority for all I know--but I was paid well when I did an internship in the mid 2000s.
Maybe that has changed with the economy, but I kind of doubt it. There has always been two camps and probably always will be: Those who use internships as free labor, and those who use internships to look for potential hires. The latter are extremely likely to do what they can to make the job appear desirable, including actually paying their interns.
Arguably, MS seeks an outcome where their market power allows them to command high margins on the most lucrative parts of the IT business, particularly its corporate side.
Apple seeks an outcome where they cryptographically control all the devices and you can buy back the ability to do certain things with them.
These outcomes are known as 'a distorted market economy' and 'feudalism' respectively.
Yeah, phones and tablets were soooo open before Apple got involved.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
So, first they uesed the cheapest factory and labor from China, and now they are actually paying ZERO dollars (as it is the normal salary for any intern) to get their OS ported to ARM!!! What the...... Honestly, i think these guys don't even have ass, or even if they have, i could not imagine putting anything inside, that's how tight they are.
Yeah. Interns should just make coffee and run errands. How dare they give them the experience of porting an OS from one platform to another. Its outrageous!
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
I've been hearing a great deal about ARM and it's rise in popularity throughout the Mobile world. But I have to ask: what's so great about it? I'm honestly curious. Can anyone explain it to me?
~theCzar
s/Apple/Google/
FTFY.
--
Jordyn
http://www.osnews.com/story/25588/No_Mac_OS_X_wasn_t_ported_to_ARM_by_an_intern
I'm reminded of this joke.
http://www.tensionnot.com/jokes/operating_systems_and_airlines
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Some people get all the cool gigs.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
>> anyone who wants to be able to run apps written and compiled for a different CPU.
The "I want to run my old ARM app" argument is bogus here. There's a lot more to binary compatibility that it just being compiled for the same CPU. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to run another ARM platform's apps on your ARM-based Apple.
You do need a password to log-in; I can't believe Apple would do that to us!
Um the closed console model for phones existed long before Apple. The reason most people don't remember back then didn't buy many apps because they were all shit. And back then it was the carrier controlling the access not the phones manufacturer. And you were lucky to get if the store only took 45%.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
" Apple releases nice products yes, but they did not invent anything themselves, or 'shine out' as you say."
Then why does the rest of the industry keep trying to copy what Apple is doing? Over and over and over again.
iPods
iPhones
iPads
Ultrabooks
UI
As for your 'statistics', you might want to see who the number 1 PC vendor in the world is.
http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/apple-storms-past-hp-lead-global-pc-market
Office mac top's out at $280 does it really cost $84 per unit to run a store?
CS 5.5 costs $1,299 - $2,599 apple store max's out at $1000 and does it really cost $390 - $780 per unit to run a store?
For big apps apple will need to have a lower cut and a much better way for site licenses and multi unit pricing systems / let app makes set a lower price per unit for say packs of 25, 50, 100 and so on.
Do you really think it costs that much to run a software repository? Come on.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Compared to iOS, OS X is a hippie commune all smoking freedom joints in a big freedom love-in; but it has its quirks...
Tim Cook is the new John Sculley.
That is what I think.
Sell Apple stock now.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Who said anything about running "old ARM apps"? (I'm not an idiot; I don't think that you can run old Newton apps on an iPad just because they both have ARM processors.) I was answering your question about why anyone would care whether OS X was running on ARM or Intel: because apps compiled for Intel processors wouldn't run on an ARM CPU (at least not without some performance-sucking battery-draining deal-killing emulation layer).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
That's like saying America is socialist because of the welfare state or is laissez-faire because we have a robust capitalist system. Neither is true and it is a matter of degrees.
Not being open source doesn't make something "completely locked down." If that's what you want, more power to you, download Linux or FreeBSD.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Then everybody just wants OSX Air... :|
Regardless, Apple is certainly not any worse than Microsoft, the maker of the only other viable desktop/laptop OS, in the "do no evil" department.
Are you really that stupid that you can't use google?
Google: Linux --> About 195,000,000 results (0.23 seconds)
Google: Desktop Linux --> About 417,000,000 results (0.24 seconds)
Google: Linux Desktop Environments --> About 3,130,000 results (0.27 seconds)
Google: How to make Linux look like windows: --> About 56,100,000 results (0.28 seconds)
Google: How to convert a windows user to linux --> About 397,000,000 results (0.29 seconds)
So I guess your right after all the only OS for desktops or laptops is Windows.
Yeah, that 30% cut for handling all the credit card processing, hosting, bandwidth, servers, storefront etc... Such a travesty.
Seriously, the 30% cut just for managing the payment stuff *alone* is a bargain, as anyone who has ever had to handle a merchant account and payment processing will tell you, especially for small transactions. It is very expensive and time consuming to deal with.
Apple's official financial statements have confirmed year over year that they do not make much at all on the store - the 30% really just covers the cost of running the thing. That's not the point of the exercise for them, though - the store exists to drive hardware sales, and the third party developers are a major part of that.
If you're stuck thinking that the 30% cut is some sort of daylight robbery or "quite bad" then you really have no idea what the costs (in time, resources and hassle) it is to handle distribution yourself.
Also, "responsible for translating the closed console ecosystem to phones"? How short is your memory?! Phones were anything *but* open before Apple entered the market. If anything Apple has made it more open, by driving the success of its main competition - Android.
An acadmeic thesis that was actually read!
[Industry-wide lockdown] already happened decades ago in the video game industry.
Happened decades ago with everything Apple too.
I agree with you that it happened long ago with iPod and iPhone, but how "decades ago" and how "everything Apple"? A copy of Xcode is bundled with every Mac (or at least was bundled with a Mac mini in the third quarter of 2009), and the computer's user can use it to develop Mac apps on a Mac without paying any separate annual fee.
Do you really think it costs that much to run a software repository?
Do you really think that the app store is a simple software repository? Apple writes and maintains the software to interface with the apps, runs the billing system and pays the credit card fees, vets apps and handles legal issues, buys bandwidth and server space, performs advertising, etc.
This is all done on a much larger and more involved scale than the usual "set it and forget it" software repository. Obviously Apple does make some profit from the app store but there's no doubt that they have significant expenditures in running the thing. Is 30% too much? Not when you compare it to how much other distribution channels take off the top. I'm sure if there is more competition then you'll see that 30% get shaved but right now 30% is pretty darn nice for what you get.
Sapere aude!
+5 insightful? I guess this confirms it, slashdot has less technical knowledge that a random selection of Facebook posters. No wait, Myspace posters.
I'm struggling to find a fact in your comment, although I suppose you could have been trolling. If so, well played. You have a future with Fox News if you want it.
But nothing about apple is good news..
Sorry, but I find it *VERY* hard to believe that Apple's overhead is 30% of the purchase price of anything on the App Store(s). They're the highest valued corporation on the planet, with well under 10-15% market share. They're making piles of cash.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Due to a wonderful concept called "free markets" this will almost certainly not happen.
An oligopoly isn't especially a free market. Microsoft has announced that it will require OEMs of devices running Windows 8 for ARM to configure UEFI such that it won't boot anything but Windows 8.
That is, unless perhaps the government decides that "free computing" is dangerous, and mandates that all PCs are locked down.
This almost happened with the SSSCA/CBDTPA proposal. It's also starting to happen with a patent land grab on the part of companies opposed to free computing, namely Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft in particular rakes in royalties for Android equal to those for Windows Phone 7.
Until then, someone will always offer "unlocked" computers due to market demand.
Take this scenario for example: A locked computer costs $200, and an unlocked computer costs $2,000, and you have to be an established business with a secure office to qualify to buy an unlocked computer (source: warioworld.com among others). To what extent will the market demand unlocked computers under such conditions?
One of the more interesting developments in the area of "cheap, general purpose computing" lately is the sub $50 Raspberry Pi. Now there's a hacker platform if I've ever seen one!
But will it stay sub $50, or will the price shoot up as they run out of stock and people start reselling them for a 300% premium or more on eBay, like a recently launched game console?
Nicely done. Nicely done.
This could make MIcrosoft's demand that OEM's make ARM based hardware Microsoft exclusive a bit more interesting...
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/01/14/0236244/microsoft-taking-aggressive-steps-against-linux-on-arm
Check your premises.
I still keep around my 2001-era "TI-book" (G4 powerbook) simply because I never bought a desktop CD-R/RW drive and occasionally need to burn an ISO. It also makes a great backup computer if I need access to a FW400 port or IR port.
moox. for a new generation.
Have you ever run a software repository that 250M people download stuff from on a daily basis?
And then provide a nice interface to all?
And then provide financial transactions to the developers of all the software?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Only if you want to ignore scale and depth and scope. Just because an average Slashdotter can set up a FTP site, it doesn' mean that is the same as iTunes. So how much would it cost you to set up an infrastructure that handles 200 million+ users and delivers billions of apps a year to computers and mobile platforms. And handles billing in multiple currencies. On the backend, it has to handle all the details of deployment for thousands of developers and over 100,000 apps. And it has it has to be redundant and very responsive to high loads (like Christmas day when millions of apps were purchased). Then there are those tiny details like data center power and cooling. That's like saying if you make a brand new search engine on your computer at home, Google surely can't be spending all that much on their computer farm.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That and all the phones ran very limited capability hardware and RTOSes. Smartphones are much more powerful now and we should be seeing an increase in capability and freedom for the end user. Instead we're seeing a growing attack on that freedom that's spreading from phones, to tablets, and I have no doubt we'll see it hit the PC sooner or later.
If you like freedom even a little bit you need to tell Apple to fuck off. If you buy anything from Apple, even some itunes shit, then you're just a bitch.
Absolutely. If you care about freedom, you'll buy from Microsoft, where you have the freedom to active whatever you bought either online or over the phone. Your choice. You get to choose!
Unlike Apple, which uses its draconian control to force you to just pull your Mac out of the box and use it. Want to activate online? Can't do it! Want to activate over the phone with the help of a friendly foreigner? Can't do it! You're on your own!
One undergraduate spending 12 weeks porting Darwin (!) to a new CPU architecture as part of their senior internship should not be used to infer anything about what Apple will be doing moving forward. Have people lost their minds? This is the biggest non-story I've ever read. He could just as easily been doing this with *BSD or Linux or OpenVMS or whatever. Honestly.
TFA says he ported Darwin - the open-source version of the OS X kernel - and got as far as a multi-user login prompt (he'd need some of the BSD toolchain to get that far, but you could run BSD on the ARM-based Acorn Archimedes in the early 90s). Not to be sneezed at as an intern project - but a long, long way from porting "OS X".
Its the difference between porting "Linux" (in the correct sense of the name - i.e. the kernel) and porting Linux + GNU tools + X.Org + KDE/Gnome + ... in order to make something resembling modern Linux distro.
Not that its remotely unfeasible to port OS X to ARM (nobody outside of Apple knows how much of iOS code is directly ported from OS X but economic common sense says "as much as possible") and I'd be unsurprised if Apple had an ARM-based Mac lashed up behind a closed door at Infinite Loop. Apple know a thing or two about supporting multiple processor architectures and It might just make sense as a stop-gap between the iPad and the Air if it offered size/weight/power savings over Intel. Feasible, but probably not likely.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Yes, if you stretch the definition of PC to include phones and tablets, then yes, you may be able to claim Apple is the #1 PC seller.
However, if you limit it to actual desktops and laptops, they aren't even in the top 5 worldwide according to Gartner (although they're #3 in the US).
For that matter, who is Canalys? I've heard of Gartner (hence why I linked to them) because they're the industry standard in PC sales metrics.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
<Connery> Shay that again and I'll "Schnapp" your bloody neck!
I'll take "Anal Bum Coversh" for 300.</Connery>
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I do think Apple are worse than MS. Apple is responsible for translating the closed Console ecosystem to phones, tablets, and soon, PCs. Insisting on a 30% cut of whatever they do allow you to sell on their platform is quite bad.
MS are malevolent old-school nerds. Apple is monopoly 2.0.
Yeah, those 30%. You know that Google asks the same? You know that Amazon for some things actually asked more before Apple forced them down? Why don't you stick buying from Amazon and see if Apple cares?
Fandroids hate facts.
Oh, so an iPad is a PC now? That's included in their count for global PC sales: "Apple shipped over 15 million iPads and five million Macs, representing 17% of the total 120 million client PCs shipped globally in Q4. Overall, the total client PC market, including desktops, netbooks, notebooks, and pads grew 16% year-on-year."
I'm sorry, but I find it "VERY" hard to believe you have any basis for your complaint. I doubt you ever had to run a business, pay a payroll, pay taxes on the business, pay taxes on income taken out of a company, pay 1/2 of all the employee SS taxes, pay for overhead, pay for ....
30% is NOTHING for that. Their making piles of cash come from selling devices, lots of devices, and having a lock on the latest hardware production for years to come. The APP store is not where they make money, and from your complaint, it sounds like you think Apple should be running it like a charity.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Sure you can. I use "DIR /S" ;)
Can't agree with you more. Sometimes the comments here from actual technical folk about how 'simple' the App Store infrastructure is just boggles.
For the same reason that Apple copies what other people are doing: it is profitable to draw some inspiration when your competitors have good ideas. Or are you going to claim that Apple also doesn't use other people's ideas?
You do have freedom. Apple has never said that they were it. If you want freedom go for Android. But the flip side is you are more likely to get malware.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You can't necessarily run one x86 platform's applications on a different x86-based platform, yet I use plenty of Windows applications on Xubuntu (sudo apt-get install wine). If iOS didn't have the App Store lockdown, someone might probably already have cooked up a Wine-like layer to run other ARM platforms' applications.
MS didn't.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I do think Apple are worse than MS. Apple is responsible for translating the closed Console ecosystem to phones, tablets, and soon, PCs. Insisting on a 30% cut of whatever they do allow you to sell on their platform is quite bad.
Actually, Apple doesn't take 30% of everything. Apple pays 70% of the retail price to developers, but you are assuming that Apple gets 100%. I regularly find some shop that sells Apple Gift Cards at 20% rebate or so and use those; you can be quite sure that if I pay £20 for a £25 gift card then Apple is getting less than £20 from that sale, but developers would get 70% of £25.
Very untrue. Windows phone sucked, but they could get content and apps from anywhere. As did Palm stuff.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Not so. Windows and Palm phones could get apps and content from anywhere.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Tim Cook is the new John Sculley.
That is what I think.
Sell Apple stock now.
No. Wait for the share price to increase by 50% as it did with Sculley.
If that was the case, wouldn't they ban free apps?
That's like saying if you make a brand new search engine on your computer at home, Google surely can't be spending all that much on their computer farm.
Here's a great comparison. Google can apparently afford to parse my search query, find my query in an enormous database, and return the results to me for what, a fraction of a penny? How much do you think they actually get from that one little pink text ad at the bottom of the page?
Now it's true that an iPad app is going to be larger than a search query. But bandwith is cheap, all sorts of hosting providers do this for free. So the major cost has to be the back end stuff. But Google's database is by far bigger than Apple's database, so I really can't see that that is a major cost either.
The only other cost I can think of is billing. Mastercard and Visa do this for 2% of the sale. How this all adds up to 30% is beyond me.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yeah actually phones were wide open. Google and Apple are trying to close them.
I have a boatload of GPL'ed software on my Windows Mobile 6.5 phone (upgraded from 6.1). In fact all of the software I put on it except for Opera is GPL'ed.
Sorry, but I find it *VERY* hard to believe that Apple's overhead is 30% of the purchase price of anything on the App Store(s).
Even the free stuff? You have a fucking limited believe. Which wouldn't matter if you had any reason. Too bad, ehh.
Fandroids hate facts.
Apple didn't invent the app store for phones. And previous stores claimed a lot more than 50%. As for PCs, you're making a prediction, a prediction that a lot of people have been making for quite a while and have been wrong about for quite a while.
I'm not sure about Palm, but neither Symbian nor Windows Mobile were anywhere near so locked down as iOS. You could install whatever apps you wanted, tweak almost everything, run as whatever the OS's equivalent of "root" was easily, and in some cases even build and custom install custom ROMs quite easily. iOS has none of that.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The Mac Pro under my desk is running 3 different operating systems - two of them have nothing to do with Apple, yet Apple has not prevented me in any way from doing this.
I guess some just have an axe to grind with Apple.
Two things: 1) Windows and Palm were not the only plaforms that existed before iPhone. 2) Even with Windows and Palm, the payment cut was much higher than 30%. While you could install whatever you wanted on these platforms, from a developer side, it was expensive to distribute your apps regardless of platform. If you used another platform, you didn't have the freedom either.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I bet this comment was most-moderated-up-and-down-of-the-day today :-)
Rule number 1: Do not wast mod points on an Apple thread.
Like the volunteer efforts to get Ubuntu running on the Asus Transformer series, perhaps there's a niche for a device that can run iOS and Mac OS - AT THE SAME TIME! The next-gen ARM chips support hardware virtualization.
Dock a keyboard and your iPad becomes a mobile OS X workstation for those who need to 'get real work done'. Not all of us need 'legacy' amd64 apps like Photoshop. :-) All the iApps would seamlessly share settings from a common home directory - surprising? not really, same code underneath, just reskinned.
Developing iOS apps in Xcode on the same CPU architecture via a hypervisor should be trivial. Apple would instantly double their iOS developer base, as the disincentive to have to additionally buy a $1000 Mac disappears. And yeah, these quad core CortexA15 ought to be grunty enough to run Xcode provided they're partnered with a decent amount of RAM.
I haven't owned any Apple products since the days of 68k but I'd strongly consider a device that supported seamlessly running both OSes rather than fiddle getting desktop Linux running on a tablet designed for Android (no acclerated drivers for Xorg etc.)
I guess I'm not the target market though...
And considering an intern could port a complete OS port in a mere 12 weeks, shows how portable it is. This person presumably had never touched the OS-X source before, yet manages to pull it off ...
It sounds more like Darwin that Mac OS X in a form the average user would recognize. From the summary: "The port got as far as booting to a multi-user prompt, but then hit hurdles to do with drivers and cache." If so he probably was familiar with it since Darwin is open source, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Darwin-1-0-Open-Source.html.
That said, the intern did great work, I'm happy he got hired by the CoreOS team.
... I suppose portability is simply part of the demands by management ...
I would not be surprised to find that this is just an internal effort to verify portability. Replacing PowerPC as the "other" architecture since ARM represents a viable contingency. It might be wishful thinking to expect an ARM based Mac at any time in the near future.
... I don't think Microsoft will have such an easy time if they were ever to switch to another architecture.
Windows NT was portable from day one of internal development, MIPS and x86. Windows NT 4 shipped with four supported architectures on the standard retail CD: x86, MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC. While subsequent commercial versions of Windows NT only supported one architecture, well two if you count x86 and amd64 separately, Microsoft supposedly continues to build internally on some "other" architecture to maintain portability.
Here's a great comparison. Google can apparently afford to parse my search query, find my query in an enormous database, and return the results to me for what, a fraction of a penny? How much do you think they actually get from that one little pink text ad at the bottom of the page?
And you've conveniently ignored the fact that Google spends about $500M on each data center. The other thing it Google operates on a scale much different than Apple. Google probably handles millions of searches and each ad payment is a microtransaction. Apple spends about $1B on each data center but they have fewer of them. Their systems handle purchasing, delivery, and payment.
Now it's true that an iPad app is going to be larger than a search query. But bandwith is cheap, all sorts of hosting providers do this for free. So the major cost has to be the back end stuff. But Google's database is by far bigger than Apple's database, so I really can't see that that is a major cost either.
Again you are ignoring capital costs and most other operating costs. Bandwidth is not the only cost involved.
The only other cost I can think of is billing. Mastercard and Visa do this for 2% of the sale. How this all adds up to 30% is beyond me.
This is the perfect example of why you don't understand infrastructure. The credit card fee is only what is Apple is being charged by the credit card company. That isn't the sum of all their costs to receive payment. Somehow, Apple has to build and maintain a system that feeds their customer's purchases to the credit card company. Apple does not have interns at HQ all day swiping cards. Buying or building the system isn't cheap considering security, scalability , and the handling multiple currencies and exchange rates. That's just so they can get paid. Distributing the money to the developer is probably another massive system.
So you've never answered my question: How much would it cost you to build a site for 200+ million users to deliver billions of products and handle the payment systems as well as backend management?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Twelve weeks is a specious number. Interns (i.e., no life) given an interesting project (and they're more likely to be interesting to interns) or trying to impress will often put in 80+ hours a week, so 12 weeks can easily mean 24 or 36 weeks. Granted there'll be some time wasted due to lack of knowledge, but that'll be more than compensated for in poor quality; Not necessarily in terms of errors, but quality in terms of usability by whoever takes over after the internship term ends. (Maybe Apple had to hire the intern.) As someone else posted, "Free lunch!" Indeed!
IOW, the real news has very little to do with the inaccurate, misleading title.
And you've conveniently ignored the fact that Google spends about $500M on each data center.
I haven't ignored the fact, it's irrelevant. Whatever Google invested in their data centers they are able to recoup with a few small text ads at the bottom of their page. Apple should be able to do the same.
So you've never answered my question: How much would it cost you to build a site for 200+ million users to deliver billions of products and handle the payment systems as well as backend management?
I don't know. But I'm willing to bet that Google could do it for a lot less than Apple has.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Lets start with being able to get source code for the OS ...
Core OS, filesystem, etc ... sure:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Darwin-1-0-Open-Source.html
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
... or any of the apps ...
Mac OS X runs the same console and X11 apps as Linux. The X11 display server is well integrated into Mac OS X.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.7/en/mchlp2276.html
... Then we'll continue by discussing the DRM.
What is there to discuss? The record industry initially required audio files from the iTunes Store to include DRM but Apple eventually got them to abandon DRM. Mac OS X does not require DRM or the use of the Mac App Store. You can distribute binaries directly to users if you wish. You can distribute open source apps if you like.
P.S. I'm aware that Google charges 30% on the Android market. That's ridiculous too. But we can't expect Google to leave money on the table if people are willing to pay such rates.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And when the market for getting your apps from "anywhere" is so small as to be effectively insignificant?
This is what I was talking about - the current state of Android is light years ahead of where Win Mobile and Palm were before the iPhone. Unless you really are going it alone and writing all your own software for your phone, you're better off in the current environment.
While Apple does not offer you the freedom to change the hardware, why would a consumer want to anyway, Apple does not lock you in with regards to operating systems which is what we are talking about here in reality.
If Apple switched to another hardware architecture, your current Mac would still be able to run any other major operating system on the market today including Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, *BSD and so on. What "lock in"?
Finally, most of the products of apple aren't innovation. They certainly didn't make the first cellular phone, nor the first mp3 player, or tablet. But they did it differently enough, with a touch, at the right time
Who are you to say there's no innovation in their products? No, they didn't make the first of any of those things. But they definitely iterated and innovated on the core concept of those devices and turned out something that was pretty damn good. To say there's no innovation involved is complete bullshit.
And no, they aren't just marketing. If they were only marketing, and their products were not extremely good as well, they would not have captured the MP3 player market like they did. They would not have a phone which is constantly one of the top sellers, if not the top seller, through each of it's 5 iterations.
I was an intern in this same platform group in 2007. I worked on the iPhone project and was paid $23 an hour. Overtime was $34.50! That was a lot of money to someone who hadn't yet finished 2nd year of university.
Apple pays their interns as does Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
the rest of the world does not buy Apple and are also happy with that choice.
Given stuff like the OP, it seems this statement is not true. Either they aren't happy with their choice, or they aren't happy that others have the choice to use Apple.
but they did not invent anything themselves
So? Are you trying to say that the only source of innovation is by inventing the entire thing from scratch? I guess that means there's no more innovation in the tech sector anymore.
I don't care Apple users being spoiled digibete users. I do care them praising their product as if it was divine. It's just electronics, like any other. Software, like any other. And not even better software, just more limited software. Count the number of forum threads that are like 'how do i do this or that with my mac' where the answer simply is: you can't. No choice, no alternative, you wanted something and you can't. Yet those customers are most happy with their apple. It are also the people who think Apple computers are the most secure, invulnerable for viruses, etc.
I'm sorry, this is just complete and utter bullshit. There is absolutely nothing in this paragraph that is rooted in reality.
i have no illusion at all that Apple is any better _for me_ than any other OS like redmonds or a desktop linux.
Then take your own advice and shut the hell up about it.
If you believe what's said over on the MacRumors website, they already hashed this possibility out pretty thoroughly and the consensus was that Apple has no real interest in trying to place iOS on a notebook form-factor piece of hardware. The iPad has plenty of room left for improvement and will probably serve as their dominant iOS platform for quite some time.
I have no doubt Apple is working on (even finished?) an ARM port of OS X, but if it's like last time (developed an Intel x86 port of OS X they kept secret and sat on for years, until they decided to leverage it), it'll be something else they keep under wraps, "just in case".
What I think you might see are new computers from Apple running OS X with a touch-screen. That's really the only sensible reason OS X Lion bothered to port over the iOS app screen/launcher. Practically everyone says that's useless/pointless on their Mac, *except* for the possibility it would make a user-friendly option if a touchscreen was present.
The only reason Apple would really be motivated to switch the Air to an ARM processor would be a scenario where Intel quit giving them "first dibs" on new or custom-designed CPUs they'd want. If, say, Toshiba or HP or Dell paid off Intel to get some special treatment Apple couldn't get until after their products were in the pipeline, and it involved making faster, slimmer, lighter notebooks than the Air -- THAT might prompt Apple to retaliate with a switch to ARM.
2%? They have a two tier system now, there is a fixed cost and then a variable cost (you can look those up on wikipedia if you don't know them).
Unless you have any actual, hard evidence to back up your statement that they are going to impose a closed ecosystem on PCs, shut the fuck up about it. I'm tired of hearing this Chicken Little "The Sky is Falling!" bullshit with absolutely nothing to back it up.
Insisting on a 30% cut of whatever they do allow you to sell on their platform is quite bad.
Not when you realize that 30% takes care of CC processing, billing, hosting and distribution.
Seriously, if you think it's that bad, why don't you go look at what some of the agreements were BEFORE Apple got into the game. Look at what it costs to sell software at retail. Look at what a lot of the carrier's software stores had. With a lot of them, you were lucky if YOU were the one taking the 30%.
They're a public company. You can look at their expense reports and see how much they're spending on running the iTunes store and how much they're bringing in through the 30% cut.
But bandwith is cheap, all sorts of hosting providers do this for free.
You've just proven your ignorance if you think that, with the amount of bandwidth we're talking about for the App Store, that providers would do this for free.
Actually, my Windows Mobile phone was supremely open. My rooted Android comes close, but isn't quite as fully open as my Windows Mobile handhelds before it were. Apple fights tooth and nail to avoid open platforms.
AJ Henderson
I don't know. But I'm willing to bet that Google could do it for a lot less than Apple has.
You would think, but they haven't. Not only is their thing costing the same, but for the longest while, the Android Market sucked large portions of ass compared to the App Store in terms of searchability and usability.
So Apple is completely evil for doing it, but when Google does it, they're just "not leaving money on the table"?
And I find it very hard to believe you were actually able to get dressed in the morning, with the lack of thought you show with this statement.
Here's a hint: They're a public company. You can go look this shit up.
Which led to a completely different problem, in that it was hard to actually find software.
And how is that Apple's fault?
I agree with you that this is not Apple's fault, and it won't be until Apple itself starts promoting the iPad as a VNC terminal. I just wish some fanboys would stop making the argument that the ability to remote into an SSH/VNC/RDP application server is enough to balance out the closed business model of iOS.
They do now.
I agree with you that it's not conclusive, but it raises warning flags that I can't ignore.
It doesn't matter how much you think it *should* cost to run a software repository. It doesn't matter how much the App Store *actually* costs to run. It's Apple's store and they can charge what they want. You (and anyone else) are legally free to circumvent their trusted computing model and install software without using the App Store. Or you can not purchase an iOS device in the first place. I know it may be hard to believe, but there are actually many competing brands of tablets and smartphones, most of which run a gem of open source software known as Android.
Windows NT was actually developed originally on MIPS - and ironically, on DECstation 3000s - a DEC MIPS based workstation that was sold w/ only Ultrix - not VMS, and not NT. It was later ported to Intel and Alpha, and when released, it was released for x86, MIPS and Alphas. Silicon Graphics was one of the first companies w/ an NT box based on the MIPS R4000 called Magnum, while DEC released an EISA based PC based on the 21064. Since then, a number of companies tried building NT boxes based on either MIPS or Alpha, but Windows on RISC failed to make any market inroads.
Problem was that while NT was a hybrid architecture to start with, more and more things were moved from user to kernel when NT went from 3.1 to 3.5 to 4.0. As a result, unlike NEXTSTEP, NT became less portable. Also unhelpful was the fact that MS never made any serious attempts to make NT/RISC successful the way they did w/ Windows 95. E.g. the only Office port they did was Word and Excel, ignoring things like Access. End result was that those platforms never took off, and finally, Microsoft canned its support for all of them, including the PowerPC. While ARM has supported Windows CE, on which Windows Phone 7 is based, ARM does not support NT, so Windows 8 on ARM will really be the first port of NT to the ARM, as opposed to the sixth port of NT to the x86. Which is another thing that ensures that Windows 8 on ARM will be a dud. Oh, and incidentally, count Itanium amongst the dead platforms that once ran any version of NT.
Which is why Microsoft doing their phone version of Windows 8 on ARM makes no sense. Anybody who gets anything that runs Windows will expect to somehow run the software they've probably paid good money for on their new tablets or even phones, which won't work if it is based on ARM. I understand that Microsoft may have finally done what they could to make Windows 8 more micro-kernel-ish in order to improve portability, but 10 years after the demise of most RISC platforms, I'd say it's rather late in the game, and it still doesn't solve the issue of ARM not running Windows. A more sensible approach would have been to take AMD's Fusion platform and make a tablet out of it, and use that as the reference platform for Windows Phone 8 or Windows 8 Compact Edition. That way, at least people can be sure that if they manage to install their PC apps on their Windows tablets, it has at least a prayer of working.
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to recognize Apple's freedom to run their business however they want.
I do not recognize a freedom to run a business however a person wants. For example, I wouldn't recognize a freedom to run a business that commits murder or theft.
In my opinion, intellectual property is theft. It is theft of a right that belongs to other people: the right to do whatever I want with my own property, including the right to store bits however I like. The theft is legal and sanctioned by both government and by large swaths of society, but I still recognize it as immoral, and I don't recognize a right to run a business this way. Your freedom ends where my nose begins, as they say.
The copyleft licenses use intellectual property law against itself, but they would be completely unnecessary if the law did not grant such monopoly privileges in the first place. Many people of course believe such monopoly grants are necessary and indispensable, but that is their belief, and not mine, and I don't recognize a right for people to force their beliefs onto others.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Yeah, that 30% cut for handling all the credit card processing, hosting, bandwidth, servers, storefront etc... Such a travesty.
Seriously, the 30% cut just for managing the payment stuff *alone* is a bargain, as anyone who has ever had to handle a merchant account and payment processing will tell you, especially for small transactions. It is very expensive and time consuming to deal with.
There are other cheap options. Apple's flat 30% is cheaper if you're selling your things for less than $1.11, google checkout is cheaper for anything at that price or above. Depending on how many customers you have downloading the thing per month, hosting and bandwidth can be found for free. If you've got thousands of customers paying you over $1.11 in one month, you'd have to pay for hosting, but you'd be doing pretty well, and you'd be better off handling it yourself rather than letting apple do it.
Also, "responsible for translating the closed console ecosystem to phones"? How short is your memory?! Phones were anything *but* open before Apple entered the market. If anything Apple has made it more open, by driving the success of its main competition - Android.
I had a WinCE smartphone before the iPhone days. There used to be a special version of Visual Studio 6 for embedded systems. Compile, run anything you want. And that was MICROSOFT.
Lets start with being able to get source code for the OS or any of the apps.
Please point me to the OS source for AIX or HP/UX - a couple of other UNIXes.
When did I say Apple was evil?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Would probably help with your prejudices if you actually did that. I am not going to do it for you.
Sure and the devices were niche devices. App devs had to distribute and advertise totally on their own. There was little common infrastructure for getting software. I had a Palm Zire 71 and I remember having such a hard time finding good apps to run on the damn thing. If it had a "root" account or custom ROM capability, I didn't notice because I don't care about those things. My goal then (as it is now with my iPod Touch) was to consume music and video and occasionally browse the internet and play a few games. The Zire wasn't very good at any of those things. On the other hand I love my iPod, it does exactly what I want it to!
Maybe in the ultra-low end market, like smartphones and tablet. The PowerVR deffered tiled rendering architecture has been king on the ultra-low spec for ages.
But Nvidia might be targeting something bigger. Like light-wieght laptops. Device which might require a little bit more graphical power than what can be delivered by a PowerVR or a Tegra, while still benefiting from the massively reduced power consomation that an ARM can provide. (when couple with an SSD and other such low-power components).
(Some DELL Latitude did feature a hybrid ARM/x86 architecture. Same screen, same keyboard. You could either boot into x86 and run a full scale Windows. Or boot into the ARM and run an embed Linux. The ARM/Linux had an impressively better battery life. Okay that came also because the ARM mode didn't power up the harddrive nor the discrete graphic card nor the USB ports).
One could easily imagine a dual-GPU solution, with a Denver containing the next gen Tegra, for when an absolutely low power is needed, and a discrete low-end/low-power GeForce for when the netbook is plugged and needs more graphical omph.
(Somewhat like the current OPTIMUS switching mode between the embed intel graphics and the discrete GPU depending on demand. Excet that a Denver project could bring much longer battery life while in low-power mode, while the discrete GPU could give better performance than a PowerVR, smartphone oriented SoC).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And considering an intern could port a complete OS port in a mere 12 weeks, shows how portable it is.
Not to minimize the intern's work, but it also shows that some of the iDevice work was also leveraged and recycled.
The GUI might be completely separate between iOS and OS X, but from what I've heard, some code is shared between the lower components of the OSes.
(The kernel is supposed to be the same, for example). So work for some of the component of Mac OS X has already been partly done.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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And with the new MacOSX on ARM you'll have to buy ALL your software over again as it won't run on it, just like you had to when they switched from powerpc to x86..
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I was saying that most of their products aren't innovation, as they did it once, then they brought it over a range of device. I wasn't saying it was only marketing, but that it was definitely one of their best shot.
He was probably paid. I've made $13-$20 an hour interning as a programmer during my summers. Of course, apple may be able to get free interns on brand name alone.
This isn't a high-end ARM chip. Apple is already using this chip in a released product:
https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+marvell+88F6281
In other words, Apple wants the Time Capsule / Airport Extreme to run Darwin instead of NetBSD as it currently does, which makes perfect sense. All the hype about the MacBook ARM is uninformed media nonsense.
If you're willing to include software that was developed, but not released, there are:
m68k (original NeXT hardware)
i386 (NEXTSTEP for Intel processors)
SPARC (NEXTSTEP for SPARC)
HPPA (NEXTSTEP for PA-RISC)
Motorola m88k (NeXT RISC Workstation - never released, but a working copy was at Apple when I worked there)
PowerPC (Mac OS X Server 1.0, later developed into Mac OS X)
Significant bits of NeXT software were also ported to Intel i860 and DEC Alpha, but not enough of the OS to actually qualify as a "NEXTSTEP port"
The copyleft licenses use intellectual property law against itself, but they would be completely unnecessary if the law did not grant such monopoly privileges in the first place.
Not true. GPL forces conditions on people that has no relation to copyright.
If I modify some GPL code, and distribute the binaries, the GPL forces me to make my modified source-code available as well. In the case of no copyright law and no GPL, I wouldn't have to do that.
The GPL uses copyright to achieve it's aims. Aims that are not about abolishing copyright. GPL is therefore pro-copyright, not anti-copyright.
Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
In what way is Cook the new Sculley? I mean, other than being an Apple CEO that isn't Steve Jobs.
Hell, even Woz says that there are things better done on his Android.
Woz says he was misrepresented.
An example is that they've been littering all movies for years, and it's finally been paying off.
That's a result of having the nicest (best designed) products.
I'd be willing to put a reasonable amount of money at risk predicting that Apple will eventually ship something that's not an iPhone or iPad, which runs the full version of Mac OS X on the ARM architecture. Given how smooth (relatively speaking) the PPC-to-Intel transition went, it'd be a minor speed bump for most developers, not a major disaster. If you're already supporting PPC and Intel, then ARM is just a testing burden - you already need to code for big- and little-endian architectures, for example.
Given the Mac App Store, there's a lot less in the way of friction to just recompile something and put it out there, as opposed to trying to get boxes on retail shelves. Yes, third-party developers will complain, and so will users if they can't get whatever apps they depend on right away. Given that Macs already come with all the basics (email, web, music/video playback), probably 75% of typical users wouldn't even need to buy anything for an ARM Macbook Air to get plenty of use out of it.
Please read this OS News article, which explains why this does not mean "Mac OS X was ported to ARM", and the actual thesis before commenting.
tl;dr version of the OS News article - it's just a port of Darwin, using the existing ARM support, to an ARMv5 platform, that included fixing bitrot in the ARMv5 support.
His name must be Tristan Schaap. Not Schapp.
He used to work for me, but Apple made him an offer he couldn't refuse. When he left, he said he was going to work in security. Apparently they found something else for him to do :-).
As far as I know he went to apple for an internship, and after that they asked him: finish your studies and come work for us after that.
Canalys are a market research company based in the UK. Like Gartner they make their money by sellling their research to companies for eye-watering amounts per copy.
They've been putting out market share studies every quarter for more than a decade to my knowledge, and for the mobile phone market have more credibility than Gartner. Gartner are better known for PC metrics, but that doesn't mean Canalys numbers aren't credible.
but there was competition between appstores and no built-in device lock-in.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
And yet no one really bought apps in these open stores. And no one liked the lack of selection in the closed stores. So no one was making any money. And there still is competition today. Don't like the walled garden? Buy Android.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
My company has run ARM9 embedded products since 2004. And since 2004 the ARM processors have always been s..l..o..w.. due to a minuscule L1 cache and no opportunity or support for L2 or L3. Moving the identical applications to Linux x86 PCs, our prior estimate was that the ARM9 processors were 25X slower, clock for clock, than then-current Xeon processors. That turns out to have been wildly optimistic. Running identical code, the Xeons were at least 100X faster than the ARM9s: adjusted for clock rate (533MHz ARM9 vs. 1.8GHz Xeon) we could easily run more than 100X simultaneous processes on the Xeon that contained the entirety of the ARM9 code, barely blipping the CPU load. We ended up being limited by the maximum number of multicast addresses Linux supports.
We were running VxWorks 5.6 on the ARM9 processors and Centos 5.4 Linux on the Xeons.
This was a really lightweight port of just the kernel and a few apps. It looks like they had an existing ARMv5 BSP that was out dated. He went back and got it working and did some work on the l2 cache code for the specific ARM chip. Presumably they have a current port for ARMv7 for the A5 CPU for iPhone & iPad, etc. This was a great project for an intern.
Unfortunately Apple management are going to have freaking kittens when they see the thesis. He outlines some of their internal OS development as well as things that could be considered very proprietary (include an internal svn: path to his code, radar id, some example code with an Apple copyright on it).
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Actually, they are as of Q4 2011. They surpassed HP as the number one manufacturer of laptops and desktops.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=apple%20surpasses%20hp&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDwQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.cnet.com%2F1606-2-50119225.html&ei=MLMxT_fyIejCsQL-r8D9Bg&usg=AFQjCNFjnWuwKEw_iuVIUfV3jUn32V9uRg
Your using old data.
> Do you really think that the app store is a simple software repository?
OK. So it's a "store" instead of a repository.
The same criticism holds.
They are a monopoly taking a monopoly cut rather than just your usual garden variety retailer that has to compete with the rest of the market and who may have very narrow margins despite of "all of the burdens" involved.
No mere consumer should be making excuses for jacked up prices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Is that not all it takes for Apple to fail though?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
First off, starting with its parent Next, OS X has always been designed to portable. We know they had x86 support years before the changing world of CPU price/performance meant they actually needed to ship it. We know that most of OS X's foundations already runs on ARM anyway--you know iPhone & iPad. I'd be shocked if they don't have internal versions still running on PowerPC. I wouldn't be surprised if they have internal versions running on SPARC, nor if there were an Itanic version floating around somewhere.
Now, put on your thinking cap and ask yourself this question: what does it mean that they tasked an intern with updating ARM support??? HELLOOO... It means that keeping the current version running on ARM is an extremely low priority.
Yes. It is their little monopoly playground.
This should shock and dismay even Apple fanboys.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Is that not all it takes for Apple to fail though?
Not enough data points for a trend. I'd link to that xkcd about marriage, but I'm just too damned lazy.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Google site:slashdot.org windows 8 arm uefi gives Microsoft Taking Aggressive Steps Against Linux On ARM.
If they don't have ass, where's all this crap coming from?
Fandroids who are so busy building then burning strawmen that they cannot take a break long enough for a good bowel movement.
If you try to exprapolate rules from a single occurence, then more the fool you.
I thought you had nothing, and sure enough you don't.
Give yourself root on an OS X system (easy peasy) and see how "locked down" the OS is to you. You can delete stuff, you can compile programs, you can replace modules, you can install kernel extensions, etc. Are there some locks on the system? Obviously. Are they "total"? Only if you have the hacking skills of my mom.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Apple has spent years and millions on research and development into LLVM which while not currently ideal as a solution for producing VM code friendly with both ARM and x86 or ARM8 and x64, is in theory supposed to be able to handle this. Apple has worked very hard to develop the LLVM project in such a way that it will sooner than later take over the role GCC currently plays on Mac OS X. LLVM and CLang have certainly reached a level of maturity where GCC can soon be the optional compiler as opposed to the main compiler on the platform.
In reality, with the exception of a small amount of code to get the LLVM virtual machine functioning on start-up, it would be possible to get the majority of the system up and running without the need for fat binaries. In fact, even if Apple simply stays with x64, this is a better option than using GCC in the long run since it would allow improvements to LLVM make improvements to how the system performs otherwise. Also by improving the kernel link loader, it would be possible to perform tracing JIT optimization across library boundaries at run-time. This could in theory improve system performance between 10 and 50% depending on how many calls across library boundaries are made.
So, fat binaries, while entertaining are of little use today. Especially when you're talking about two little-endian processors with an instruction set which, while different fundamentally, mirrors one another's capabilities quite closely.
Oh.... and in the area of "compute' power where the GPU is being used for general purpose computing, a more advanced LLVM back-end could in theory recompile certain traces of code to produce GPU specific code. This isn't "that useful" in normal every day code, but it can be extremely useful if any of the languages supported by CLang were extended to support SIMD types like float4 of float8.
> Seriously, the 30% cut just for managing the payment stuff *alone* is a bargain, as anyone who has ever had to handle a merchant account and payment processing will tell you, especially for small transactions. It is very expensive and time consuming to deal with.
Nonsense. Payment transaction charges are nothing like 30%.
I used to work for a company that handled credit card processing, hosting, bandwidth, web servers and designed web storefronts for third party companies. Our cut was nowhere near 30%. AND we warehoused, sorted, picked, packed, and dispatched real physical items. They just told us what products they wanted to sell, and we did the rest.
So, yeah, 30% is a lot for the actual services being provided. What Apple are charging you 30% for is the ability to appear in the App Store, which they have a monopoly over.
RS
I don't know. But I'm willing to bet that Google could do it for a lot less than Apple has.
The problem with your whole argument is that you ignore again scale, scope, and depth. A simple software repository is cheap to set up for a few users. Something on the scale of iTunes (or Amazon) for hundreds of millions of users is not cheap to create or run. If Google had to charge users for every search, their system would quickly get costly and complicated. Also Google charges advertisers every time they show the ad and a different rate if the link is used. Apple collects nothing on many apps as they are free.
Also in your other post, you admit, Google charges exactly the same as Apple so you've proven yourself wrong.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I agree. My rights end where other people's rights begin.
Murder or theft would of course involve the misuse of someone else's property: either their possessions or their person.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Your entire fucking rant. You bitch about Apple taking the 30%, saying there's no way they need that much. Then when confronted with the fact that Google does the same thing, you just shrug and go, "Well, they can't leave money on the table." It shows that you're biased against Apple and for Google, and that your opinion on the matter should not be taken seriously at all.
Your using old data.
My "old data" is Gartner's official Q4 2011 data, published 3 weeks ago.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I have two, hopefully three, interns coming to work for me this summer. They will develop interesting, but non-critical, add-ons to our core product. If one succeeds, we'll have a better UI. If the second succeeds, we'll have a stepping-stone towards better sound. If the third accepts && succeeds, we'll have a cool demo of a customer-controlled vertical solution.
Anyway, if Apple did release OS X on ARM, they would need to do something about all those x86 binaries. Remember, kids, Apple just barely finished dealing with all those powerPC binaries.
xoxo
Which, if alive today, would have been a perfect target for ReactOS - not dependent on Microsoft for ported apps, but which FOSS developers could have targeted for the fastest workstations available. Too bad that Alpha had to die b'cos HPaq believed in that clusterfuck called Itanic.