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Apple Considering Switch Away From Intel For Macs
concealment sends this quote from Bloomberg:
"Apple Inc. is exploring ways to replace Intel processors in its Mac personal computers with a version of the chip technology it uses in the iPhone and iPad, according to people familiar with the company's research. Apple engineers have grown confident that the chip designs used for its mobile devices will one day be powerful enough to run its desktops and laptops, said three people with knowledge of the work, who asked to remain anonymous because the plans are confidential. Apple began using Intel chips for Macs in 2005."
At the earliest... maybe. A lot can happen in five years.
How about No?
Because no one who bought an Intel Mac ever used any other operating system.
Apple for a while now has been moving away from performance parts. No real beefy GPU in the Mac Pro. The best GPU in a MBP is an upper-mid tier card. Their server is gone. Its not surprising to see them move more and more away from HPC parts. I'm just a little curious how this will affect people dependent on 'pro-tools' (in the future that is).
Using Mac power-level, vs iP* voltages.
Then you also get alternative/thin boot of iOS.
Doable. Quickly. See you in 2014.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So <insert company name here> is doing research that may or may not ever see the light of day to keep its options open and avoid single-source lock-ins. This is news?
I can see the switch from PowerPC as IBM and Motorola could not keep up with supplies or advances. To switch from Intel to ARM on PC's will be suicide as performance in PC's far outweigh any negligible benefits in power savings. People using Macs are designers, programmers and heavy users. For those advocating unifying the mobile experience with the desktop, please STOP. I produce content on my desktop. I consume it on my iPad.
To be blabbing about so-called "confidential" work @ Apple.
I'm no Apple fan at all but that's just rude to disclose competitive secrets like that.
So has Linux and Microsoft. The fact that Apple too would do so for their Mac line on top of their iOS line now that it has proven itself out for the past 5 years should not be news for anyone.
I'm pretty happy to see the move towards vertical integration inside all these 'software-esque' companies: Apple, Google, Microsoft. Heck, even Facebook is hardware-ing it up.
I'm tired of hardware engineers who are consistently undervalued, and consistently paid MUCH less than software engineers. A software MASTERS earns more than a hardware (EE) PHD. Wtf ?
... It certainly isn't impossible. People already look at iPads and iPhones as "devices" and not what they really are underneath all that glass and aluminum. Just smaller, simpler "computers". I'd say it's a safe bet that 99% of the Slashdot readership at one point had a computer that looks positively ancient compared to last year's iPhone models, but most people simply don't understand the magnitude of what's been accomplished in technology over the last 30 years.
Now that people look at iDevices and their non-Apple kin as devices, it just takes some time to convince them that the idea of a "computer" really isn't what they ever wanted. They've always wanted devices, and with OSX and now Windows drawing more and more from the closed ecosystem models they spawned off for the mobile realm, people will eventually come around.
I give it around two years before Apple comes out with a new line of ARM-based Macbook Airs, though that could change depending on how effectively Intel and AMD (really, just Intel) stave off the situation by getting lower powered x86 options into the marketplace.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Only Apple gets away with completely changing their computing platforms and getting everyone to follow along and pretend it's no big deal. I remember having a Mac guy go on and on for hours about how the x86 couldn't do the things a PPC could do. Then, the x86 Macs come out and suddenly all those "deficiencies" are no big deal. Anyway, what an insane platform.
The only reason why I have a Mac Mini is because you are running a modified version of UNIX. This pleases me. But be forewarned: If your future plans include replacing BSD UNIX with your shitass iOS, I am so fucking gone. Your shitty phones are already on my do not buy list, and I have no qualms with dumping your PCs.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Apple would be stupid not to explore alternatives that may only become viable years down the road. Every tech company does it. Bloomberg is just trolling.
No. Apple has been awesome about apps being moveable, and making it simple for developers.
Just reinstall from the store as usual. No big deal.
There's not really enough information yet to tell if this is a good idea, at least to me. It would be nice if it happened, since you're paying ~$1000 basically for an operating system, since the hardware is more or less what you'd find in a good PC. But how will this effect performance?
is about to go off the cliff. The first clue is when the CEO is asleep at the wheel, and the car starts wandering aimlessly.
This is one of those times.
...said three people with knowledge of the work...
Cue witch hunt in Apple HQ in 3... 2... 1
May Peace Prevail On Earth
4-8 A6 CPU to motherboard for desktop and you get serious calculation power.
If you're about to negotiate some new contracts with Intel.
Linux works fine on ARM.
Not on a device whose bootloader cryptographically prevents you from installing it.
And I just recently got all my software updated to Intel, too.
I think they're doing in concert with the software manufacturers so they gouge us for replacement software to run on the new processors.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Right now, Apple's ARM stuff isn't powerful enough for anything above the Air, and even that's a stretch. Sure, long-term they might want to push for it, but it will be a long, long time before they even replace their laptop chips with their own design, let alone their desktops (unless they ditch their desktops completely, which isn't beyond possibility).
However, they'd lose market share doing so. The PPC->Intel transition was fueled by PowerPC being increasingly slow and power-hungry, while Intel was getting their shit together with Core. It was difficult for consumers to survive through the switch, but it was tolerable because you were getting a more powerful system, and the emulation capability was good.
Now, though, Intel is working just fine. And between ARM being less powerful, and x86 being painful to emulate, you'll have an even rougher transition. The only reason for Apple to switch away is for pure profit - they don't want to be giving Intel money. While some customers might go along with The Great Apple, most won't. It'll be especially bad for Apple, as they brand themselves as "the best, regardless of cost" - switching to weaker processors to save money goes completely against that.
Unless it's an application in one of the categories for which Apple makes no provision in the Mac App Store, such as system administration utilities or tools that process all files in a folder tree.
Um, no. Apple has a very good track record regarding backwards compatibility regarding hardware architecture changes. Things just "worked" when they changed to PPC (mixed mode manager) and then to Intel (Rosetta).
Apple acquired PA Semiconductor (RISC based CPUs) several years ago and have probably been working on "possibilities" for years (especially for their laptops).
Then you also get alternative/thin boot of iOS.
That or Apple will follow Microsoft's lead with Windows RT's lack of sideloading and use the transition to ARM ISA as a chance to remove the option to run software that's not signed with an Apple Developer ID. This means Apple would get to charge owners of ARM Macs $99 per year to rent the ability to run Xcode or any other compiler on their own hardware, just as Apple presently does with iOS.
I'm totally not going to do it again.
68k to PPC was a disaster, applications that didn't need to be just PPC were just PPC. Everyone who had a recent 68k at the time was boned very quickly. If it wasn't for CodeWarrior (I loved the sh*t out of that back in the day) that transition would have been even more disastrous.
PPC to x86 Apple just turned around and spit in everyone's [existing ppc userbase] face. They promised more updates that they never delivered and the patches they pushed out just made the platform slower and slower. My PowerBook would run like greased lightning with a clean OS install, HD videos and the works. Let MacOS update it self and it suddenly grew 10 years older with a few patches. I did try formatting it and starting from scratch but it ended up with the exact same behavior.
I'm not going through another architecture migration because Apple just doesn't care about their existing user base, they already have their money.
My current iMac x86 doesn't have firmware to reinstall the OS, so after the HDD failed I found I was totally screwed. The Apple store I visited told me I would have to purchase apple care to reinstall MacOS since it's now physical media free (I already had a new drive in it). After this attempt to bend me over, I'm not taking another slap to the face.
Ableton Live for instance, won't like this. Similarly for many other audio packages.
I guess it will force the die-hard Ableton users to spend 3 days configuring windows to make it usable for low-latency audio without dropouts. That's what I currently do, if I can't get an Apple. Apple is certainly the easier solution though.
Maybe porting would be easy, but I seriously doubt it for this kind of high-performance sophisticated software.
Not to knock ARM, but A: I don't know that they have a design for a desktop processor yet (most of their designs seem to be in the Atom/Bobcat realm tops) B: With the absolutely massive amounts of money Intel put's into their Tick-Tock development cadence they have both pretty much the most optimized desktop/laptop architecture their is, and probably the most significant process advantage in the history of semiconductors. Honestly given the way both Intel and AMD have been able to use out-of-order execution and pipelining to achieve multiple Instructions Per Clock and multi-gigahertz clocks on a CISC-backed-by-microcode architecture I'm not convinced RISC actually has an advantage in practice. In addition Apple is stuck with the foundries, the same as pretty much anybody but IBM, and so pretty much CAN'T begin to produce a chip that will compete with Intel's best when comes to raw performance or performance-per-watt. For those reasons this would be pretty foolish any time in the next several years. Even if a decade from now they can work past it they will still be stuck fighting off the suspicion that they don't have the advantage they claim to, the one that more or less was true at the end of their use of PowerPC chips.
Im glad their investigating it. I don't think they will.. but why not look into it?
Remember Apple had OSx running on intel since the beginning (4 + years) before they actually released it.
They have more money than they can spend, why not investigate the possibility?
Yeah, like how they had no provisions for the switch from PowerPC to Intel... right?
According to Ars Technica, Apple's R&D budget is 3.4 BILLION dollars (3.4x10^9). That's enough money to "explore" all kinds of crazy stuff. Just because they're spending money looking into something, doesn't make it part of their business plan.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
But how will this effect performance?
Microsoft requires all software that runs on its ARM platforms (Windows Phone 7 and Windows RT) to come from the official store, enforcing this with cryptographic locks. Apple already does the same on its ARM-powered smartphones and tablets. In the worst case, Apple could try doing the same thing on ARM-powered Macs. So to answer your question, software obtained outside the store would have to be written in JavaScript and run in a web browser. Now consider how would running inside a web browser would affect an application's performance.
Have you heard about ARM's big.LITTLE new heterogeneous, multicore chips? Still to come to market, but might be a good choice.
ARM chips are still slower than the PowerPC chips Apple moved away from in 2005.
This is rumor is pure BS.
2013 is bringing out an all new OOO execution Intel Atom core on 22nm process. Intel might start dominating Android phones leading to next years rumor that Apple will be moving iOS to Intel.
I don't see either move as likely in the foreseeable future. Beyond that is pure 100% BS.
I had an Acorn A3000 from 1989 and then upgraded to an Acorn RISC PC in 1994 which at the time was faster than equivalent PC technology. I put together one of the first distributions of ARM Linux for that machine a few years later. Admittedly Intel has caught up and over taken ARM on the desktop and in the laptop but with the introduction of the 64 bit ARM 12s, the power per watt, and the size of the processors, there's no reason why they shouldn't be comparable.
This might make more sense if you realize that ARM doesn't actually build chips... it just designs them. Like has happened a million times before... ARM.. the up and comer smaller time player has been getting bigger and better and will soon be in a position to challenge the (overly comfortable) market leader on their home turf if given the right opportunity.. and Apple could give them that. They could also acquire ARM if this works out and further push the tight integration of their platform.
Samsung is the biggest investment competitor to Intel in the chip market, right? [ http://tinyurl.com/samsungintel ] What does Apple need Intel for, give the guys at Samsung a call. What could go wrong?
Gently reply
Kepler mobile graphics in the new iMac are nothing to laugh at...
And as a postscript.
Acorn actually took Apple to task when they advertised "the worlds first RISC desktop machine" since the Acorn A310 came out before the Apple PowerPC machines. Apple had to retract the advertisement.
Keep in mind that Apple "considers" a lot of things that it doesn't ultimately do. A quick look through their patent portfolio will show you all sorts of technology that they've developed, but which has never made its way into a product. The OSX86 project would've remained a footnote in Apple history if the PowerPC architecture had worked out better. See also: Pink, Copland.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I would love to see future MacBooks that are equipped with both x86 and ARM processors. It would of course be difficult to engineer but imagine being able to run OS X apps and iOS apps side by side on a future touch screen MacBook air. People keep chastising Apple for not being revolutionary anymore and it seems to me that unification of the iOS and OS X lines in a way that doesn't compromise the desktop OS X would do it.
Todays portable lightweight low-power CPUs are yesterdays Workstation CPUs with 4 times the power. Apple has been trading off processing power for energy efficiency, design and small enclosures for quite some time now. It's one of the main reasons for their success. F.E.: I'm typing this on a 5 year old x86 mac mini, for which I have yet to find a competing non-apple product that matches it.
Yer Olde Desktop Setups are quickly going the way of the dodo. Fanless thin clients are as powerfull as a full-blown decked-out workstation in 2004, internal storage on HDDs is just plain silly once you've used an SSD device and you get highpower 4+1 multicore cpus in 199$ tablets with a batterytime of 8+ hours these days.
It sure wont be long before apple pushed out iMacs as thin as a slim screen, with 8+ cores for processing power. It could very well be that their ARM variant is the way to go for them.
However, Intel isn't exactly lagging behind in the low-energy CPU game either, and you can allready get viable Atom desktops. It might very well be that come the time Intel is up for the task of lowering their energy requirements for their CPUs and Apple stays with Intel.
There is interesting things to come, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple would lead the innovation here once again.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is yet another negotiation tactic by Apple.
Intel wouldn't really notice if Apple stopped buying CPUs from them. Apple hold around 12% marketshare in PC sales and have no server footprint.
Do something groundbreaking and just ship FPGAs.
Nobody's processor limited anyway in most situations, so who cares if a FPGA core is a bit slower than dedicated hardware or ASICs, and when you are processing limited, nothing shovels like totally custom FPGA application specific code. So don't buy a hardware processor (other than microcontroller level bootloaders etc) just stick a couple really big FPGAs in there and let er rip.
You want an intel core, fine load one of the multiple FPGAs with an intel compatible core. Compressing video? F that simulated intel core stuff, do it directly in FPGA hardware, probably faster than realtime. Want a bit accurate simulation of an iphone for dev work? Load one of the multiple FPGAs with a FPGA version of an iphone.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Rumor has it that Apple is very interesting in AMD so it can own the whole vertical supply of it's machines. They tried to make their own x86 and intel said no. They almost used AMD APU for the mac book air but backed at hte last minute.
It doesn't make performance sense for an ARM. With AMD they can own the ATI graphics market too.
Unfortunately for us that is bad news with less competition. But I could see the appeal. They can put DRM into the cpu's and do custom configurations for their tinkering.
http://saveie6.com/
Where you see a walled garden, I see a prison.
Where you see a prison, I see an zombie-proof enclave.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Them porting OS X to a new chip (presumably one of the A's) so that tablets, and phones use the same as the desktop not porting it so that the desktop can use a mobile CPU.
To switch from Intel to ARM on PC's will be suicide as performance in PC's far outweigh any negligible benefits in power savings.
It isn't about power savings for the sake of power savings; it's about power savings for the sake of thinness. Same reason the latest iMac started using notebook parts in the latest iMac. It's a bloody desktop and there are almost no scenarios where shaving 7mm off its thickness is anything but a detriment except to marketing and Ive's ego, yet they went and did it because thinness is more important than performance even for an Apple desktop computer,
Nothing to write home about, either.
I'm trying to convert my office to Macs that run Windows in parallels. Looks like it's back to (ugh) Dell for me.
Up to this point developers have had no pressing need to design well-parallelized programs. But that does not mean it is impossible. The enormous amounts of money in the *truly* mobile computing business will make developers learn how to use all the low-power, multi-core resources.x86 laptops are hot and heavy kludges with miniscule battery lifetime.
There was a time office workers were perfectly OK with 32 MHz 486 processors and current mobile processors easily match that performance. Just do some proper software engineering work and a 486 will be perfectly OK for almost all use cases. The Wintel Bloat is just ridiculous from an engineering and from a usability point of view. How Many Batteries To You Want To Carry Today ? (Or - How Do You Want Your Balls Fried Tonight ?
The company I work for has a product that was last re-written back in 1999. At that time it worked both on Macs and PCs.
Now here we are 13 years later and it still works on the PC side, but not at all on Macs.
It is currently being re-written, luckily it is going web based.
Since AMD will start producing ARM chips in the future, this would be an interesting option for Apple - AMD will be able to supply both x86 and ARM chips.
"My guess is it's just to fuck with people"
I'm glad you still categorize Intel as "people". :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
apple need to look out for the professional market.
As say abode CS for Linux may be trun very bad for apple as pros who don't want deal with windows switch over.
Also windows 7 is not that bad and lots of pros switched over due to apples lack of good hardware.
Try to do the ios lock down on mac os will kill the professional market and the adobe apps on apple.
what about thunderbolt connector ? By the way, it would be very unlikely that Apple would ditch Intel platform for ARM yet for another few years I guess.. but who knows..
OS X applications are still single threaded, like 99% of all applications. You ever tried writing code for multi-core? Thought not.
Between GCD and blocks and various graphics frameworks, any modern Mac (or iOS) developer has been writing for multiple cores for years now. It's just that most of the tricky work is hidden away.
Developers? What OS X developers!?
Well first of all there are the 500k+ iOS developers, who run on Macs. And then there are hordes of Ruby/UNIX/Java developers, who often use Macs to develop on.
Perhaps you just meant "what developers are writing apps for OS X". I guess someone is, since there are thousands of apps on the OS X App Store now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The only reason why I have a Mac Mini is because you are running a modified version of UNIX. This pleases me. But be forewarned: If your future plans include replacing BSD UNIX with your shitass iOS, I am so fucking gone. Your shitty phones are already on my do not buy list, and I have no qualms with dumping your PCs.
In regards to your letter, yes, we are fully aware you are our bitch. Thank you for acknowledging that. Much in the same way you initially complained about our switch to Intel chips back in the dark ages of our partnership with Motorola, we are also quite aware that your opinion on our change to ARM chips will suddenly and mysteriously reverse once we have executed that next step of our master plan. There is no need to argue on this matter; each of you will act exactly the same and be happy afterward, as we know from experience.
Incidentally, just as a curious note, have you ever had a good long look at the space approximately two inches to the left of Mac Mini's power button? I mean, a really, really good look? See it now? Yes, that's the one. No, don't worry, it won't show up on any hardware scan known to humankind, so we're certainly not at risk. However, that small IC with the tiny radio on it will, in the fullness of time, make eeeeeeeverything better. Just you wait. You'll feel so much better once we turn it on, trust us. Yes, we are aware your muscles just now refused to tear it out, even though you commanded them to do so and it looks so easy. We're very, very aware of that.
-Apple
..and I can attest all the self-trained amateurs who permeate software engineering waste most processing power because they are, well, Clueless Idiots. They don't know how to efficiently implement hash tables, they don't know that allocating objects on heap in large numbers and destroying them almost immediately is inefficient. They don't care to pass a reference when they can use the copy constructor. They perform idiotic low-level "optimizations" when they should re-think their processing concept. They don't understand what it means when the disk light is bright while the CPU is idle.
I steadily replace all that crap with sane code and I incrementally parallelize the program. Yes, it's risky as that can bring problems which are extremely hard to track to the root cause. One thread damages memory and some random other one hits the problem at a random place in the code. But the results are dramatic - speedups of 10 are quite frequent.
If all software engineers in this industry had a clue, we could do the same things on ARM as we currently do on the hot, heavy and battery-draining x86 machines. Get yourself an algorithms book and learn some actual concepts instead of The API Of The Day.
It's happened before. Don't buy a x86 mac the last year or so if you want to use it in the long run.
I suppose one reason could be if it prevents hack to run on other hardware.
They'll migrate back to Windows just like they did when Apple ruined Final Cut Pro. The mass exodus to Adobe Premiere running on Windows left FCP as pretty much a non-player at this point for serious video editing.
Apple doesn't buy large companies.
ARM-based chips will be locking out third-party kernels (via UEFI) in the Microsoft world. Apple is probably trying to accomplish the same thing.
Liberty in your lifetime
...a 286 with 16MHz and 1 Meg RAM was more than enough to compile reasonably complex programs in a few seconds. That means a proper Turbo-Pascal-style compiler would need no more than a 50MHz ARM CPU to fulfill a developer's needs.
Just eliminate the software bloat and you get all you need from a random ARM tablet.
I'd be a little sick of all these major technology shift.
If Apple really wants to do something to differentiate the Mac from Wintel systems, how about they add in ARM chips to offload cycles from the Intel CPU and increase overall system performance. Basically the same thing they do with GPU, but in a different way.
Personally I like having as many boot OS options available as possible, switching to an ARM only system would be a mistake IMHO
Hot, heavy, short battery runtime, chock-full of viruses and virus scanners which eat even more battery capacity. Don't complain when you have failed.
..that's what your comment is. Apple has jumped through lots of hoops to first let people run 68000 programs on Powerpc and then to run PPC programs on x86. It's called Binary Translation and it actually works like a breeze, as DEC, HP and IBM discovered a long time ago. But when you are Intel, of course everybody must run Hot, Heavy and Power-Hungry.
I know many people that develop Web applications on Macs and deploy on Linux servers. The technologies range from php to ruby on rails, node.js etc. If the servers stay on x86 there might be subtle incompatibilities between development and production environments. Furthermore you won't be able to run a VM with your server on your Mac. I wonder if they'll have to switch to windows or Linux.
If there are compelling devices with extremely long runtime, because of low power consumption, then developers will remove the cruft from their apps to make them perform on that hardware platform. You are taking bloat for granted, like those SUV-driving bozos who bitch about petrol cost.
I haven't been keeping up on processors lately. Is "Two 3.06GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon" not real beefy?
Isn't this Apple returning to their PPC roots?
Their processors are the heaviest, nosiest and the most power-hungry. But they also have the most horsepower like GM trucks. They are definitely NOT leading in Work done per Joule, which is the accurate unit.
Nobody really needs the Intel horsepower. What people want are truly mobile devices and these depend on sane use of batteries. Like ARM or MIPS CPUs.
..even more Power-Hungry in the making ? Excellent. That will speed up their destruction, which they fully deserve for their attempts to corner the market. Look up how they kicked hundreds of millions into Dell to keep them from buying AMD in serious numbers.
Hackintosh users are gone the moment OS updates require an Apple id. More generally, professional users do not need or want social network / cloud integration or walled dungeons constructed around integrated app stores. Short of Apple and Microsoft releasing an OS with these features trimmed back, pro workstation users will be increasingly forced onto linux.
..it's not my jargon, but the jargon of computer science. Here's a Nickel, boy. Buy yourself an algorithms& data structures book.
It is a generation old now, and has been for many months. Also, the parent said 'no real beefy GPU' - GPU, not CPU. Both are true, though, and the fact the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in a long time now underscores Apple's apparent move away from performance computing.
William George
windows 7 aka win XP 2 will last a long time and MS will have to do what the enterprise users want.
MS can afford there windows 8 test of new ideas and fix them by SP1 or windows 9
This. Especially the last sentence. Using a mobile processor where it isn't necessary (and in particular, can be outperformed by non-mobile solutions) is such as enormous leap backwards that should not ever be worth considering.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It would make a logical sense for them since AMD is struggling to survive and Apple happens to be one of the richest tech companies on earth and can afford to invest in already proven technology to make it that much better. They get control over the CPU's and graphic cards. They also get a shitload of patents. Might I remind you that Apple is an extremely litigious company and will eat it's own babies to protect it's IP.
Too bad too, I support AMD and love ATI cards too. But if they get bought by Apple, I will 100% switch to Intel and nVidia. I have to use a 27" iMac at work and it's so over hyped for an overpriced, un-expandable, outdated machine.
They'll migrate back to Windows just like they did when Apple ruined Final Cut Pro. The mass exodus to Adobe Premiere running on Windows left FCP as pretty much a non-player at this point for serious video editing.
Word. I've seen them migrate with other Adobe products too, just because they have to use windows for one purpose, so they start using it for others.
Thankfully the Xserve debacle caused some higher ups to realize that Linux on cheaper servers is a better option anyway.
its beefy if you want to pay extra for year old hardware on your cutting edge pro workstation
I wish that Apple would support emulation for all past Macintosh software all the way back to MacOS1.0. Heck, they should go all the way back to the AppleI. There is a tremendous amount of educational software that was created during the 1990's that has never been redone for Intel and MacOSX. It used to run under Classic but Apple abandoned it. They are destroying both cultural heritage and educational resources. There is also a lot of small business and graphic tools that were made then and never released for MacOSX. I need these tools as do many other people I've spoken with. Apple has the money to keep up the emulation and it would vastly expand the media available to run on their machines which would make more people interested in upgrading to the latest and greatest hardware thus promoting more Apple sales and more money for Apple's pocket. Heck, they could even offer full Windows, DOS and CPM emulation and take over the whole market.
Please switch! Closed source / binary ABI focused ecosystems do so well when you switch processors!
Between this brilliant idea and the Win 8 faceplant, I've never seen a stronger opportunity for Linux (or Android) to have another credible shot at the desktop. Linux can switch to ARM easily. OSX and Windows can't.
Given the defaults on Mountain Lion, I absolutely expect this... And it'll be the day my MBP is running Linux
Until the day your MBP breaks, and all Apple sells are ARM-based products without any concept of Boot Camp. These won't boot Linux because Linux isn't signed by Apple.
Of course you can get one; you just have to work as an employee for a company in the same industry for five years and then start your own company with a dedicated secure office. This is how the video game console market already works.
In some states, lock picks are totally legal
If what you mean by this is that people should leave states where lock picks are completely banned without a license, then consider what happens when Hollywood and the the walled garden proponents try to justify banning unlocked computers on grounds of copyright or commerce among the several states, which are areas over which the Constitution grants jurisdiction to Congress.
Because who the fuck knows what Apple is going to do in the future, I'm keeping my ProTools and Cubase licenses up to date with current versions of the software. At some point, Apple will probably fuck Logic up beyond recognition, then I'll have no choice but to switch back to a PC (or just use old, outdated Macs like I'm doing now).
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Macs have not used BIOS on their intel macs for years. They've used Sun's OpenBoot EFI.
Is EFI available on ARM? Seeing as other manufacturers are putting "secure boot" into their EFI, I don't see any reason for Apple not to.
Steve Jobs was pissed at Adobe for screwing Apple by not releasing Photoshop for OSX and working on Microsoft Windows versions of their products, so Apple developed Aperture. Steve was honked off at Avid for focusing development on the Windows platform instead of OSX, so Apple developed Final Cut Pro. I'm not sure Tim Cook is as angry as Jobs, but judging by the shit-tastic Pages / Numbers / Keynote on the Mac & iDevice platform, Apple will never develop a threat to important products like Microsoft Office, and they've already pushed away their pro customers to Avid Media Composer & Adobe Premiere so Logic is probably the next product to be dumbed down like Final Cut Pro X was.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Video game consoles are more locked down than iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad. Anyone can develop for an iProduct by paying $750 for the first year (for Mac mini and developer certificate) and $100 each additional year (for certificate renewal). To develop for a Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony game console, you have to first move to another state and work for a company that's already licensed to develop for a console for several years to build "relevant video game industry experience", and then you have to start your own company with a dedicated secure office. (Source: Warioworld.com)
And no dual boot, and they can continue with the plan to make OSX into desktop iOS, complete with walled garden.
With such impressive "features" they might as well name it Alcatraz.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
All companies evaluate platforms. I think ARM is great, but they haven't even begun competing with Intel. They are basically winning a race where they are the only entrant. Once Intel takes this market seriously (and Haswell is a good indicator that they are), I would expect to see some great, low-power alternatives from Intel. Let's not get too excited yet.
Why wouldn't professional users want to get everything from an app store? It's a hell of a lot more efficient than installing shit off 20 different CDs every time you set up a new workstation...no, my friend, the only people bothered by a locked down app store would be pirates not professionals, see professionals actually buy their software...
their roots are pure motorola cpus
Have the people cheering about ARM considered a career in sales and marketing? The arguments in favor of ARM dominating Intel on the desktop seem about as shallow and vacuous as the CISC vs RISC "debate" that occurred during the 90's, exactly what I'd expect from enthusiasts who have no understanding of how computers work. Yes, ARM does some great things in it's space, but claiming they will wipe Intel off the map is the kind of hyperbole I expect from uninformed stock market analysts, or for that matter a tech magazine looking to generate a few extra page hits (including slashdot), not serious engineering types.
that's trivially disprovable if you actually try using one for the minute or so that it takes to enable sideloading
I was under the impression that sideloading using a developer certificate would disable itself after a month, and Microsoft had ways to detect "fraudulent use of a developer license" as a sideloading method. What other method of sideloading were you talking about? The one that involves buying a 100-seat sideloading license for $3000?
Yeah Intel might lose a lot of sales of chips (but not a staggeringly large amount - Windows still accounts for 92% of the DESKTOP market (the oft floated 7x% that Windows has dropped to includes smartphones), so we're only talking about a small number of PCs collectively. Sure it won't be good for Intel but it's not devastating.
You know who should be worried? ARM. Why? Ask Motorola and Samsung how much Apple is paying for the patents of theirs they are using? Coz from what I read, it's $0 because Apple "hasn't settled on a price with them yet". That's like me walking into a shop and stealing a bunch of things because I haven't settled on a price yet. Apple has no intention of paying Motorola -ever- for the FRAND patented items they're using. They will almost certainly do the same thing to ARM.
The problem is the graphics GPU, not the CPU. The Mac Pro desktop has a ATI Radeon HD 5770 card. If you look at ATI's 5000 series list, you'll see that's right in the middle of the product line. Considering how much the system as a whole costs, some people feel that's not good enough.
The "Retina" MacBook pros have an even worse problem. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M is also nowhere near the top of their mobile line. But the resolution being driven is one of the highest available. A fair number of people pushing it hard have discovered it's really not capable of keeping up with that system's 2880 x 1800 display very well.
the sandboxing kills cross app workflow, the rules for apps get in the way, apples cut of the price of pro software is very high 30% of the price os adobe CS and MS office is likely to high
and it slows to a crawl, like every other arm tablet out there.
There are some things (even common ones) where you really do need a couple gigs of RAM and a reasonably beefy CPU. (But "reasonably beefy" isn't hard, pretty much anything x86 better than an Atom qualifies.)
Also, are you seriously talking about doing nonlinear video editing on an ipad?
Apple is a company that has to produce product to make money, the iDevices and infrastructure are making money, Mac Pros are a luxury. Just because Apple is looking at dumping Intel, does not mean that it will, companies explore alternative all of the time. So my money backs both paths, a move that puts MacOSX on other hardware, or stay with Intel, Apple has moved core platforms before, it can do it again. Summary.. No news here, move along, move along..
thoughts of PWRficient only to me or to others also? Blending the best of ARM and Power architectures would be pretty cool. Yak, makes my mind dance!
Premiere Pro's on Mac, as well, why would they have to migrate?
The overpriced server is gone but the Mac Mini can be purchased with OS X server preinstalled.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
The company I work for has a product that was last re-written back in 1999. At that time it worked both on Macs and PCs.
At the time, mainstream desktop Windows supported Win32 (not quite to the same degree as NT, but still not too bad) on x86. At the time, did Mac OS 8 or 9 support Carbon and, if so, did you use it? Even if you did, you would have had to build it as PEF rather than Mach-O, as OS X wasn't out yet, so you would have had to switch to Mach-O in order to survive the PPC -> x86 transition except under Rosetta.
Now here we are 13 years later and it still works on the PC side, but not at all on Macs.
...and Windows NT 6.2, or whatever it is they're calling "Windows 8", still supports Win32 on x86, but OS X no longer supports PPC binaries or PEF, so you might have had to make significant changes to the way you built your app (and significant changes to the app itself if you weren't using Carbon).
So, to some degree, it's a matter of bad luck - if you'd had a reason to rewrite it in, say, 2001, you might have had something not so hard to make work natively on OS X and not so hard to port from (big-endian) PPC to (little-endian) x86.
Final Cut Pro is a non-linear video editing software developed by Macromedia Inc.
It would be good if they released a Darwin LiveCD again or help people at puredarwin.
Shrug, I push the retina display, a cinema display. and 2 additional 1680x1050 monitors without problems Thats 12.3MP, over twice the 5MP of the retina display itself. Current high end games are an issue with 4kx1650 resolution I admit, but then I just drop down to any single display and things are fine for most everything I deal with. Call of Duty4 (not the newest I know) gives me 80FPS, not really anything to bitch about is it? Of course, it is a laptop with battery life of about 5-6 hours when I'm coding on it, so I don't bitch about not getting 100FPS.
Could it be more powerful? Yes. Is it a low performance slouch? Not even close.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Given that I've killed a "server quality" Time Capsule via heat death of the built-in power supply, I don't think I'd trust a "server" Mac Mini for anything important unless I could keep it air conditioned below normal room temperature, with lots of air flow around it.
Which isn't really what you'd expect to do with something in that form factor, you'd probably expect to be able to stack a few of them in a corner somewhere.
- chrish
There are practically lines outside the door to Apple stores with customers demanding that they make their Macs slower! WE WANT SLOWER! Who needs top of the line gear? Not them! They only care about how long it takes them to load apps and if it's not long enough, it's a waste of time.
Until the day your MBP breaks
my existing MBP will run linux just fine
Until it breaks. By "breaks" I meant hardware failure, not incompatibility with newer versions of Mac OS X. A machine that "breaks" might not be able to boot at all, even to Linux, or the screen is broken and Apple no longer offers repair, or the battery won't hold a charge and Apple no longer offers replacement, etc.
But they aren't because there isn't much use for the cores beyond the second (heck, not a lot of use for that second one) in applications run by users at the moment.
A serious overhaul is necessary to get your nerdvana happening.
Nooo! This would be the end of the good days of being able to use Macs for computational work (at least, for me it would).
Think of it...if MAC OS is ARM (or whatever they end up using) compatible then Apple eventually has one uniform OS for all devices...something we all wanted from the start. Microsoft may have the leading edge with Win8...or possibly 9 by the time Apple makes a move when it comes to one OS for all types of devices. Win8 RT isn't exactly the best of moves but a Win8 Pro on any device is going to hit home runs and Apple may be just be a follower instead of a leader in this aspect.
We all know the world of nicely dressed people works soooo well. Their banks run efficiently and don't embezzle other people's wealth. Surely. Looks matter most.
Apple once day was concerned about performance, now it is just a gadget company.
Windows Adobe site license, but not Mac? Maybe they see the writing on the wall for general-use computing for Macs. See also the the lack of high performance hardware in Macs.
I produce content on my desktop. I consume it on my iPad.
I both produce and consume on my desktop, mostly because I can't stand any screen smaller than 22". How can anyone tolerate watching movies on a tiny screen? It's a miserable user experience. The answer, I imagine, is that people are still impressed by the novelty of their new mobile devices. Are people going to come to their senses and allow that novelty to wear off in the next few years? Or is this a "new normal" that people will just mindlessly settle for?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Its funny how this story just exploded everywhere recently without any real information based purely on a quote from Steve Jobs:
"It's been 10 years since our transition to the PowerPC, and we think Intel's technology will help us create the best personal computers for the next 10 years."
I don't think Steve Jobs was being literal about only supporting Intel for 10 years, only relating the fact that PowerPC gave them 10 great years so Intel should be "metaphorically" good for the next 10 years.
Some dumb-ass reporter read this quote and did some math like: 10 - 8 years since Apple adopted Intel equals....OMG, Apple will drop Intel soon!.
While I am not saying that Apple has to stick with Intel, I could care less even if they shoved a bunch of squirrels into a Mac and run the things on nuts, this "news" is just retardedly interpreting a Steve Job quote and turning it into something its not.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I still use my Mac Mini G4 and run a couple of XServe G5s, so I think I have some experience on this topic. I can't run software that requires Snow Leopard or later on my old machines, not everything requires this but there are plenty of applications out there unavailable to me. And there are plenty of features and products from Apple that are unavailable to me on my Tiger and Leopard systems.
I am forced to upgrade or forced to run old software. You could substitute the word force with the phrase "given a choice", if you want to argue semantics of my statements. But force has the connotation I wished to convey.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
One day. Maybe far off, but one day.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The Mac Pro desktop has a ATI Radeon HD 5770 card. If you look at ATI's 5000 series list, you'll see that's right in the middle of the product line. Considering how much the system as a whole costs, some people feel that's not good enough.
The problem isn't that a midrange 5000 series isn't "good enough" (it actually is for a lot of people), it's that the 5770 is getting pretty old in the tooth. The Mac Pro hasn't been seriously updated in ages.
The "Retina" MacBook pros have an even worse problem. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M is also nowhere near the top of their mobile line
No, that's not actually a problem at all. The only reason the 650M isn't regarded as "top of the mobile line" is that NVidia's top "mobile" GPUs are ridiculous 100 watt chips which are only found in ridiculous 10-pound 17" Alienware gaming "laptops", and the like. In other words, they're chips which are "mobile" in name only.
The 650M is pretty much the fastest GPU NVidia makes for practical laptops (that is, ones which are thin, light, and have a decent battery life). And unlike the situation with the Mac Pro, it is a current generation GPU.
A fair number of people pushing it hard have discovered it's really not capable of keeping up with that system's 2880 x 1800 display very well.
Links? Most people I've seen said something along the lines of "scrolling was a bit herky in 10.7.x but is just fine in 10.8".
Now, if you're talking gaming rather than ordinary desktop use, then yeah. 2880x1800 is a lot more pixels than 99% of desktop gaming GPUs are expected to drive, so it's not too surprising that lots of games slow down. But that's easily fixed by rendering at a lower res and upscaling, which looks better than you might expect.
apple could have locked down the boot proccess with a secure boot implementation on x86 years ago, and no one would have said or done shit.
Apple used compatibility with Windows as a selling point back then. But because Windows RT is available only preinstalled, and a previous head of Apple announced an intent to go thermonuclear on the most popular Linux-based GUI, there's not quite as much need for an analogous selling point should Apple switch to ARM.
ARM at this point still doesn't have [enough] bang for single thread buck
I thought Apple implemented libdispatch and C closures precisely to encourage application developers to get away from relying on a single thread.
Web browsers' I/O can be restricted arbitrarily. Good luck reading the microphone or camera on a browser without getUserMedia (that is, most of them). And good luck reading connected USB or Bluetooth gamepad on a browser. For three years, JavaScript applications running in Safari for iOS couldn't even access the orientation of the device.
The Windows user, however, isn't likely to have the slightest problem finding useful apps in every imaginable product category
Including apps to create apps and share them with friends? Or apps to act as drivers for hardware that a hobbyist has reverse-engineered?
Sorry, but Apple was never interested in "performance computing," they have always been interested in how they can take cheap, off the shelf components and make them work as fast as higher performance kit. The basic trick is what we often hear decried here on /.: they control all aspects of hardware, especially the number of possible choices of hardware that are possible for the kernel to interact with. Then, they optimize the kernel to run with that gear which means that their cheaper gear appears to (and really, actually does) run better and faster than equal or better gear.
Some fanbois make the mistake of thinking that this is some software magic, or hardware "designed" for Apple and therefore special and wonderful; nope. The hardware and software ARE well integrated, which linux fanbois can do by tuning their kernel updates as they come in which will give a healthy kick to the apparent speed of the computer overall.
So, it is the walled garden that hides the reality of what they do, and this is not really different from what they have done all along.
Good luck with that fanboi^H^H^H^H^H^H confirmation bias.
You misspelled "decades of experience in field"
Good luck with finals!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I missed your bits about SCM on OS X before, BOY are you wrong there!
OSX tends not to play well with code repositories like Subversion.
What nonsense is this? Does BSD also have problems with SVN? It's the same client... I've used SVN multiple times, just fine.
BUT what you are missing is that OS X has the best SVN GUI client ever built, Versions. If you must be using SVN instead of GIT, you'd be insane not to be using Versions.
Coders doing local builds are also falling off Mac because it's too hard to get an off the shelf SSD working in one.
How odd since I bought an SSD from a third party and am using it in my three year old Macbook Pro with no issue.
Why spend $4000 on a Mac Pro when the better performance can be gained out of sub $2000 box
No one is buying a Mac Pro or the $2k desktop. They are buying laptops. ANd the reason why you might want to pay $100 more is so that it will last a few years longer, and have a trackpad that actually works.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Funny, the only reason there are "retina displays" in the first place is that Apple required them. I'd call a retina display a "performance part." Additionally, Mac Pro's can have 2, 4, 8 and 16 cores. I'd call those 8 and 16 core processors "performance parts" as well. Maybe if Apple opens up to legitimizing "Hackintoshes" you can build that "end all" liquid cooled video editing workstation with 100% performance parts.