Apple announces ‘One More Thing’ event for November 10th
theverge.com
theverge.com
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It's in companies' (and the websites' who write about them) interest to make it to the trough as many times as possible, but our interest is to wait until there's something new to discuss.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://www.macworld.com/article/1048842/livekeynote.html https://www.wired.com/2006/01/one-more-thing-/
In other words, it is not just about better performance. It is also about Apple removing your freedoms with your own hardware in the name of 'security'. (I am not saying that there isn't increased security, but at what price?)
I'm not in love with macos though and there's more good options nowadays than there was in 2013.
This will be a good excuse to start a mass upgrade but I won’t be an early adopter.
Thinkpads are ok though. I haven't murdered one of them. Yet. I've tried and failed several times from coffee to catapulting them and they just eat my hamfistedness.
I just bought a replacement iPad for my daughter for the one that we bought in 2013 though. Stuff can last a long time.
It's Microsoft's fault that they don't sell Windows for ARM so including Bootcamp would have no reason (as despite us power users, the primary use case for Bootcamp (it's even in the logo) is running Windows).
I am a light weight user in the Mac world, browsing and some games. However the few games left after the Catalina change to drop 32 bit support are still important to me. One of the publishers has preemptively dropped support for Mac and its near impossible to tell if others will continue support into AS.
I know, there is a crowd out there that loves to declare "you should not use your Mac for games" along with "Buy a system for games then". Well let me be blunt, if it cannot serve both purposes then it serves none which means leaving the platform behind.
So I look at AS with excitement and trepidation all at the same time with the realization my current Mac may well be my last.
And it’s not like your old hardware will suddenly stop working. If you want to place PS2 games you need an old PS2, and this is the same.
Also, along the line of your old hardware still working: no need to upgrade any time soon.
If the Apple silicon is powerful enough, it might not matter if there is a huge performance hit for the emulation. It’ll be an interesting next 5 years for sure.
Honestly I think x86 games will run better on these ARM laptops. Keep in mind x86 on laptops don’t work great. Apple could outperform most of their x86 laptops with a passively cooled ARM tablet.
An ARM laptop with active cooling will destroy their x86 lineup.
Besides you also get the whole iOS games catalog now which is much larger than the macOS game selection.
I think the success of gaming on the platform will come down to game engine devs like Unreal and Unity. If they can optimize exports to target Apple silicon with minimal overhead, that’s the best bet to see gaming live on. Otherwise, I don’t see how any AAA studios can find it worth their time to build for 2 completely different architectures.
One interesting exception might be EA, as The Sims is hugely popular among casual crowds that might have a MacBook for college or something. But in the case of EA, they also will create a new Sims game and then milk it for a decade, thus paying back their R&D costs. Other studios who frequently make new games and want to push the hardware may not be as inclined to spend that with such a small install base.
Well of course... Give it some time for the patches to come. Recompiling for multiple processor architectures is easier now than it used to be.
> I know, there is a crowd out there that loves to declare "you should not use your Mac for games" along with "Buy a system for games then". Well let me be blunt, if it cannot serve both purposes then it serves none which means leaving the platform behind.
I think you SHOULD use a Mac for games. Most people saying that are not in fact Mac users. The ARM transition isn't going to push Mac games out of existence. In fact it'll probably push Microsoft to properly treat ARM as a first class citizen so companies will be compiling their software for two different architectures anyway.
Because I wont be able to run Windows in Fusion without a very big performance hit.
I like PopOS a lot, but they didn't have fractional scaling support. It looks like they do now as of Oct 5!
The rest is pretty good. Like the core UI, file manager, virtual desktop management, configuration etc works very well. Much nicer than the Windows mess.
What about Arm Macs pushes you away from the platform?
1. the big sur ui is not very attractive (i know it sounds arbitrary, but big sur just looks very non-desktop, very fischer price, and i have no alterantive since catalina wont be supported)
2. virtualization for x86_64 apps, that wont last forever, and at some point those x86 binaries wont work anymore (i already lost a ton of apps with catalina...)
3. for my work i already need vmware alot, and the idea of running even half-speed at best is a non-starter
--
that being said, as a consummer oriented device, or an iphone/ipad app developer machine i think its defintely going to do well
I find these "this look fischer price/non-desktop" like hearing goth teenagers wanting something darker and more edgy -- well, the "pro" mentality equivalent, where if it doesn't look boring and beize it's not good.
It's a mighty fine look, nothing fischer prize about it, and hardly that different from the previous iteration. If anything it much less fischer prize than the original Aqua interface and its 4-5 next iterations, which was praised as a great looking ("lickable") UI.
its kind of obvious that for the need to compromise the ui of mac in order for ipad/iphone apps to look "at home" and im sure in apples calculus its worth the hit in the near term, but for this person its a bit too far...
*ive been using the big sur betas on and off for a while now
> Aqua interface and its 4-5 next iterations, which was praised as a great looking
sure, aqua got a lot better after the next iterations, so lets keep an eye out and see what happens...
I think AS laptops are also getting touchscreens (now or on the first design refresh).
But I welcome bigger screen elements myself, it means better hit targets (Fitt's law), and less cluttered UIs -- easier on the eyes too.
As for the wasted space, it's not like they're removing menu items or icons or cutting out features to accomondate the larger buttons. Just larger looking bezels and edges.
If anything, it's the contrary: it would become easier to use with the higher precision mouse, because targers would be even larger.
The key insight here is that they wont make the mouse lose precision: instead, they make the targets the mouse has to hit bigger -- which, given that the mouse retains the same precision, makes it even easier to hit them!
I need to be able to run Windows in Fusion or Parallels without emulating x86.
Much as I dislike some of Apple's practices I think making ARM more mainstream is a trend I want to see continue.
x86 is plenty fast anyway, and still wins on code density in single-threaded scalar (i.e. NOT using the vector units) branchy code of the sort commonly found in average applications.
There’s a small hardware consulting company in Palo Alto whose main differentiator is that they have a bunch of folks in China who manage to generate docs they can use. I’m guessing this involves a lot of under the table leaks and late night alcohol-fueled discussions.
Apple aren't moving to Arm for no reason though so I think it's worth considering the reasons why this might be the case: power efficiency (probably the most important), price, ability to incorporate custom silicon, a single ISA to support, full control over the stack, access to best manufacturing process.
On the last point, I think Apple (Tim Cook especially) has probably lost faith and patience with a company that has overpromised and underdelivered for a number of years.
A lot of people into Linux seem to go through a phase where they try out a rolling release distro like Arch or Gentoo, and then after a couple years get sick of dealing with broken systems & switch to something more stable like Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint/etc. As I get older, the amount of system administration and customization of my system that I want to do is dropping rapidly. I barely even change the desktop wallpaper any more.
I would say top desktop distros (from most popular to least) are: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mint.
Anything outside of this list is for tinkers who are not easily frustrated with issues.
I’ll do a ridiculous amount of work on some hobby project, but if a system update breaks my WiFi adapter, then I’m tinkering around and facing frustrating issues with WiFi drivers, which sucks, when I really want to be tinkering around and facing frustrating issues with my hobby project, which is awesome.
It’s like: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/asfgcj/bad_screen...
Same reason I switched to AMD GPUs. Getting the Nvidia cards working on Linux is just a distraction from whatever I really want to do.
I was looking at Arch + KDE plasma and it’s really tempting.
I returned a 16inch MBP recently as it kept crashing on shutdown. macOS on intel is a mess and so is the T2. And I’m a fanboy.
I’ve made a deal with myself. If these new Apple Si machines are blow away I’ll try again. Else I’m buying a Lenovo Legion and moving to Arch.
Not sure what to do for a phone but probably stay with iOS.
I'm a bit worried for my precious free time that will be wasted on fending off the thousand-cuts onslaught of bugs, but I'm willing to try.
It's gotten to this Tim (and Jony). After ~15 uninterrupted years.
macOS on Intel is a mess because a particular 16inch MBP "kept crashing on shutdown"? As if Windows and Linux running machines don't have cases where they keep running on shutdown?
macOS/T2 has bugs like all software, but this is not some general state of macOS/T2, which runs fine without "crashing on shutdown" for hundreds of millions of other people (including those with MBP16).
How about it's some particular production run / unit, and or some particular app?
(Which can happen for any vendor / OS)
I had 3 replacements. Each one I could reproduce a hard crash on reboot. There are many many kps.
It’s widespread.
I think ARM is the nail in the coffin of the non-laptop Mac brand though.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/02/apple-smaller-mac-pro-a...
iMac and Mac Mini are also small enclosures which will benefit from ARM performance wise.
All that matters is really watt per performance and dollars relative to performance and there ARM already beats intel. To beat an x86 intel is just a matter of throwing in enough cores.
AMD will be harder as their performance relative to cost is better than ARM and intel. But there is nothing special about beating intel at this point.
I had one, top of the line, and I hated it -- it ran crazy hot all the time even when I wasn't doing much of anything. Connected to an external monitor, it would fan up just from surfing ordinary sites with Safari. From lots of googling around it seemed that many, many people had this problem.
I was actually quite thrilled when I was able to send it back to HQ, and am now back to loving my 2014 13" MBP.
Having dealt with those thermal engineering problems, I am both very hopeful for Apple Silicon, and very wary of buying newest-release Macs.
Apple has, of course, famously resisted the hybrid/convertible form factor, a decision largely proven right by Microsoft's advance into and subsequent retreat from a universal touch-and-pointer UI in Windows 8. The addition of trackpad support to iPadOS this year was an interesting hybrid-like evolution of Apple's tablet UI, but something as complex as MacOS is going to be a lot harder to take in the other direction without turning into Windows 8.
Whatever Apple's solution is to avoid making the Mac into a "fridge-toaster" will be unveiled alongside the new hardware, and I'm quite curious what it will be.
However for drawing and writing a stylus is very nice. But that is a much smaller user segment than those benefitting from a touch interface.
It doesn't require a touchscreen and I would be very surprised if any apps are unusable without it.
Huh? What? Doesn't everything bit of hardware Microsoft sells have a touchscreen? Windows 10 has solid touchscreen support. Why are we talking about Windows 8 or a retreat?
I don't need a crazy desktop computer at this point but I already have a 34-inch ultrawide 4K monitor. I'm even willing to try the new system architecture as a computer.
Clearly Apple has considered this at least for the initial developer model. So I'd love if they decide to also put out a consumer one with the final Silicon SOC.
Still it could be that they still firmly believe that touch screen on laptops are unnecessary and provides a poor user experience, something that I happen to believe that they would be right in.
While I would love to see the touchbar go away, I don’t see any use case from a touch screen on laptops, in my line of work. It’s just as much a gimmick as the touchbar, in my case. If they do introduce it, I would hope it’s optional, like the touchbar should be.
If you want a touch based OS from Apple, then that already exists. It is called iOS.
Why would you want a touch interface on an interface optimized for mouse and keyboard?
You cannot have both. What works well for touch will be terrible with a keyboard/mouse interface.
Microsoft was morons trying to merge the two paradigms. Win 10 is one of the worst OS’s I have used.
This event really has to be about the Apple silicon machines— but that’s not what was announced and the headline shouldn’t say it was.
If only actual serious political newssites "facts" were as solid as this "mere" prediction that the event will be about Apple Silicon.