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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
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.
This could also be the start of a push to using ARM chips in Macs. It's not like Apple are scared of changing horses half way through the race having switched from M68k to PPC to x86 to x64 and then with 32-bit and 64-bit ARM cores running the same OS kernel on mobile devices.
The latest Apple A-series chips in the iPhone 8 and X also seem to hold their own in benchmarks against the x86 processors used in (the admittedly outdated hardware in) the MacBook Air and the (not quite as outdated) MacBook.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
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.