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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
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?
Icepick through the internal mic and use of an external mic when needed (and turned on) should fix that problem.
This is an iMac, not a laptop. No battery other than the NVRAM backup.
This being said, can Apple, please, please, please NOT glue the screen over the internals of future iMacs. The current models (from 2013+) require a scalpel or pizza cutter to replace anything internal to them!
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.
I had an iMac a couple generations back but once I realized that there was no upgrade path I moved to a MacPro and a couple Dell monitors.
I don't think I'll continue down this path since the OS hasn't really brought anything to the table for power users (people who can touch type).
I was really hoping to get a 12 core 64G laptop by now but for now, in the mac world, 16G is enough.
I'm not sure who is in control of the desktop/server OS anymore but it can't be someone who uses it every day. They should spin off the computer division to people who will do it justice.
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.
Unity isn't terrible -- hopefully someone will take over development from Canonical.
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.
If Apple wanted to quash the Hacintosh community, they could have done that back in 2006.
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.
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.
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
This could be the great OS convergence that Apple users have been waiting for.
Was anyone talking about legality as opposed to technical ability? :)