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iMac Pro Will Have An A10 Fusion Coprocessor For 'Hey, Siri' Support and More Secure Booting, Says Report (theverge.com)
According to Apple firmware gurus Steven Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo, the upcoming iMac Pro will feature an A10 Fusion coprocessor to enable two interesting new features. "The first is the ability for the iMac Pro to feature always-on 'Hey, Siri' voice command support, similar to what's currently available on more recent iPhone devices," reports The Verge. "[T]he bigger implication of the A10 Fusion is for a less user-facing function, with Apple likely to use the coprocessor to enable SecureBoot on the iMac Pro." From the report: In more practical terms, it means that Apple will be using the A10 Fusion chip to handle the initial boot process and confirm that software checks out, before passing things off to the regular x86 Intel processor in your Mac. It's not something that will likely change how you use your computer too much, like the addition of "Hey, Siri" support will, but it's a move toward Apple experimenting with an increased level of control over its software going forward.
Apple is motivated to protect their customers at the moment, but if there is enough pressure or investment from those wishing otherwise, the secure coprocessor becomes just another back door.
davecb@spamcop.net
will the thing have an "emoji touch bar" or actual function keys?
people asked for a competitively priced powerful computer with a powerful, upgradable GPU, with internal expansion options.
we get a $5000 iMac with a dedicated Siri chip.
christ on a cracker.
Waiting for the next MacMini to just be a cluster of ARM chips.
If Apple does it and it works it means everyone else is going to start doing it.
do you want your computer listening all the time? Is there any way to turn Siri off short of pulling the plug out?
Yeah that was the first thing to come to mind. No thanks!
I don't like Apple, but we've found us an Einstein, judging by his refined way of putting things.
Who the hell asked for Siri voice commands? People wanted a removable battery and a power board that didn't overheat and die. Fucking billionaire morons again.
Icepick through the internal mic and use of an external mic when needed (and turned on) should fix that problem.
http://newosxbook.com/articles...
Isn't this more like an ARM A10 powered iMac Pro with an Intel x86 coprocessor for running existing legacy code on?
The ARM handles booting up the machine and a lot of the security controls.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Seems to me all they want is to prevent another hackintosh-run by their most loyal and profitable customer base (read: the pro artist). I bet that if this happens to be the case, they won't launch another Mac Pro in at least another 5 years. And obviously price will stay mostly unchanged throughout as the good Nintendo Apple is on this subject.
...recently being cracked, Apple is building their own secret (black box to the user) engine.
What could possibly go wrong...
This is about control, nothing more. Be sure to read the EULA before buying. You likely won't even own the hardware any more.
Einstein wasn't known for effeminate expression.
The direction Apple keeps moving towards never ceases to amaze me.
Granted, it probably is a good thing to prevent hipsters and grandmothers' machines from getting infected with some sort of boot-level trojans and other sophisticated malware, but in the process of doing this it would seem as if Apple is moving closer and closer to a time when the rest of us long-time OS-X users will just altogether give up on this new hardware because it arguably has gotten to the point where it comes encumbered with too many restrictions.
It truly seems as if they keep probing to find out what this breaking point is.
Maybe it's just people such as me becoming overly suspicious and paranoid, but I have a feeling that this will not end well for the pro users (those Apple no longer cares about). Mostly because these moves are making it clear that they appear dead-set against users having any rights to do anything with the hardware they buy and are slowly moving towards keeping it all locked down; Even if we don't realize it it's in our best interest after all, they obviously know better than anyone else what's good for us.
I don't discount that for a majority of users this may actually be a positive feature, but only if they somehow still offer to those who want to tinker with their hardware the ability to do as they please, in order to customize it the way they need it to be and not only the way they are told it has to be.
Beside all this, OS-X is now fairly mature and there doesn't seem to be many game-changing features in the cards, I could well see people just running the current versions of the OS for a long time on Hackintosh boxes, and that's that.
Meaning you can't install an alt-OS to it?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Remember, speakers can be used as microphones, so icepick those too.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
...asset, would be way to cool...
Theoretically - most amps pass signal one way, and speakers make poor microphones. It's unlikely Apple would design the thing to use speakers as microphones, but an always-on mic is more likely.
Apple has made a business out of catering to the 90%, not to the 1% who'd icepick their mic.
Intel is not requiring Secure Boot, even after 2020 -- you'll still be able to install an OS of choice.
A couple dozen comments in, and no one has pointed out the silliness of touting "Hey Siri" as a defining feature for a supposed pro workstation.
#DeleteChrome
With all the recent news about potential vulnerabilities in Intel's Management Engine, I wonder if Apple's motivation for this is to bypass Intel's ME black box and replace it with something they have complete control over.
Would be nice if the OS ran off the ARM chip and used the x86 processor only for heavy lifting
Unity isn't terrible -- hopefully someone will take over development from Canonical.
Hereâ(TM)s how you should setup your desktop:
-Powerful PC at half the Apple price
-Windows 10 Pro
-MS Office
-Visual Studio
-Hyper-V with Linux
You get the productivity of Windows and can develop for Linux (even better than developing ON Linux).
Questions?
Yes, ALL Tech companies are trying to get to the complete walled garden approach where you will only be able to run very limited apps from the App Store only. Next version of gatekeeper to enforce and they will probably stop us from booting from any other drive with pre Has already done this with Windows 10S The goal is to essentially turn the Mac from a powerful general purpose computer into a mere appliance like the IPad is. This is all down to Apple and Steve Jobs in the first place with the original App Store. This is great for Apple in the short term. However, if they create such a sterile and barren landscape by discouraging all the power users 'geeks' etc then innovation will be massively stifled which will harm everyone. It goes without saying that sandboxed "apps" will be less powerful than a program wihich can access the whole power of the machine.
So you cut the wires to your phone's microphone? Yeah, thought not.
Powerful PC running Linux. Run Windows 10 in a nice, safe little VirtualBox padded cell for anything that Linux can't do -- or dual-boot.
What would be nice is if all my Applications ran on my iOS devices and all my Apps ran on my MacOS devices. Ooo... We could just have a unified OS that adapts to the hardware. How radical would that be! Too bad Apple is vehemently against such simplification. I really want all the power of what ever machine I'm using without the different OSs getting in the way. Apple has created Babylon with all their different OSs.
Apple, under Jobs, did good with figuring out the niches and filling them appropriately. Now the rate of improvement in the niches has slowed dramatically because to a large degree of the focus on the highest selling product, the iPhone. Apple is making a mistake not to also keep those niches vibrant.
I'm not seeing this put into all Macs just because it would add to the cost. It makes a difference on a $1000 computer.
More secure booting. So it will take at least an eleven year old to crack it?
or are there others who feel that people at work who talk to their computer should be beaten to a pulp with a lead pipe? Since the mid 1990s there has always been some inconsiderate two legged piece of shit who tries that fad at about 3 year intervals.
I haven't a Linux GUI in years. Linux constantly, buy only command line on servers. Has the UI not improved? I only ask because at work I had to switch to Windows 3.11... I mean Mac OS, and it feels like they haven't left the 80s.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
This could be the great OS convergence that Apple users have been waiting for.
...and everybody looses their minds!?
No need to cut wires, it's barbaric. Light it on fire.
GNUstep was supposed to be source-compatible with the OpenStep API and its successor Cocoa, but it wasn't funded enough.
Disable Hey Siri
workstations also need easy to remove storage when the system is shipped out for repair. HP and DELL yet you destroy HDD's that are under warranty on a swap out. That is a big data leak risk with apple non user replaceable storage.
If Apple doesn't get off their collective ass and start updating their products they are doomed to fail.
Hey Apple, Steve Jobs would be firing most of your asses by now, since your latest hardware is lame as crap.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
Secure boot. User audio sent to the mothership. Do these two things cancel out?
as Linux is a big deal and some Kernel Modules may have secure boot signing issues.
Intel can't give up on Linux or esxi AMD Will make a big deal by saying we don't force any thing on OEM and point to a list of stuff from supermirco and others that can do all of your booting needs. Even pixie boot in bios mode / raid / sas cards in bios mode / etc.
but if you want enough memory to browse the web, or god forbid run pages. it's gonna cost ya...
Apple success inertia is such that even "Apple releases new emoji" makes the headlines. This story gives a sense of "inertia is fading out". In a couple years, this news will be of nobody's interest.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
No need to cut wires, it's barbaric. Light it on fire.
Luckily Samsung Note 7 users have that feature built-in to their phones
The Mac is a Unix system, there always will be "apt-get" equivalents for the Mac, like brew, port or fink.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
They should probably fix android first
crap
...so they made one themselves.
There are parts of the system that you can't modify with sudo. Right now it's largely irrelevant as it's all stuff even power users are unlikely to want to touch, but they could easily extend it if they want to nerf the unix-y parts.
Your argument would make sense, if not for the fact that Apple has been moving in the other direction recently. For example, you can now install any app on iOS devices that you compile for yourself. A useful feature for geeks, not so much for average consumers.
As to sandboxing, the principle of least privilege is good engineering. As long as the user can define the restrictions and can run things with full privileges when required.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apple is just implementing more blocks to actually running their PC OS in emulation.
It sounds like they are planning on setting up something similar to Intel Management Engine (ME). This opens the host computer up to a whole range of persistent attacks. This is probably why so many people are working on disabling this from running on Intel boxes [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffTJ1vPCSo
Apple was never known to stick around and 3Rd party vendor too long anyways.
The 2005 era when they moved to Intel processors is only an era. Being Apple is now the largest company in the world they may want to use their resources to make their own chips. For good or for bad (depending on your point of view) Apple tends to get what it wants and make a product their way and not like how everyone else does it.
We had a period where the Apple PC were inline with the technology with the other PCs but that is about it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Except this time, Apple doesn't like people running it on better hardware ;)
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
My phone isn't recording and reporting back to home base lemming.
Probably all you need is slap a RasPi into the whole deal somehow.
I somehow question Apple's ability to make sensible hardware anymore. They forgot everything else that made them stand out and be the pinnacle of user friendliness, why should they still be good at this?
Given how well their more recent developments worked out, you'll probably have to hack, tinker, toy, update, upgrade and send in for repairs a lot anyway, so why not go all the way and just do it yourself from scratch?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That they're now trying to sell you an old AMD cpu in their pro line
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+A10-4600M+APU
Back when computing power and memory was at a premium, Apple decided to offload functions to dedicated ROM chips. It's almost like it's a cycle with them now.
More people will lose their mind over your misuse of "looses".