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I very much doubt it. This is nothing like the transition to Intel, which offered a huge benefit to the 95% of users who were trapped in the Windows ecosystem.

I very much doubt it. This is nothing like the transition to Intel, which offered a huge benefit to the 95% of users who were trapped in the Windows ecosystem. In the last 8 years or so, Apple's big ideas for the Mac have been complete duds (the trashcan Mac Pro, their entire laptop lineup from 2015 to 2020...) Mac OS X recently dropped support for 32-bit software, and this should have freed up their OS engineers. Instead, the most recent release of Mac OS (10.15, Catalina) is widely viewed as one of the worst releases in recent memory. I don't want an ARM Mac. I want Apple to refocus on the basics of Mac hardware and software.

phren0logy 7y ago
Your argument doesn’t make much sense to me. I want them to focus in good software, too. But Apple likes to make all the key elements of their stuff, and this would give them significant independence. Seems like a very Apple move.
laichzeit0 7y ago
There is something seriously wrong with their engineering vision when they can dedicate developers to adding new emoticons to iMessanger when they don't even have Time Machine backups to iCloud for MacOS.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Note that the first is used by at least an order of magnitude more people.
- chongli 7y ago
  All of my documents (macOS) are backed up to iCloud. You don't need Time Machine to do this. It happens automatically with iCloud Drive.
  - gschrader 7y ago
    Having the latest version of a file online isn’t a backup.
    - anonsivalley652 7y ago
      You have some good points, however Apple has allowed (even if temporarily) third-parties to exist on the periphery to fill-in solutions. TarSnap, SpiderOak One and BackBlaze all seem like viable options. Perhaps even Carbonite too.
    - chongli 7y ago
      MacOS has built-in file versioning since Lion. Whenever you save a file, it creates a version. You can browse and restore an old version using the program that created it. Admittedly, this only works for applications that use the API. For anything in plain text you should probably be using a git repo though.
- anonsivalley652 7y ago
  I think the bigger priority should be stop adding features / taking away the ones we use for a UI refresh, and spend some serious time fixing their giant, growing backlog of bugs. macOS and iOS/iPadOS are progressively getting worse in too many ways to enumerate and some bugs have been around for many years. Furthermore, they don't appear to (or don't have time to) listen to you or I submitting a bug report, so most people don't bother anymore. It's a shame because their products have gradually become like American healthcare: more expensive and worse. I think Apple needs a new CEO who can bring prices down, and quality, durability, and innovation up.
Lammy 7y ago
Moving away from Intel sounds like a huge benefit to me due to the number of ways they have held back computers over the decades. I believe that ECC memory, for example, would be standard in all desktops and laptops today if Intel didn't use it for market segmentation. That doesn't even touch on all the security issues.
- catblast 7y ago
  > I believe that ECC memory, for example, would be standard in all desktops and laptops today if Intel didn't use it for market segmentation. This is an extraordinary claim. Don’t get me wrong, I love ECC, but it has a very real cost associated with it. Why would any alternative to Intel change the pricing dynamic?
  - Lammy 7y ago
    We can't know, because choosing ECC or non-ECC based on price vs features isn't a choice most Intel consumers get to make. I do personally think the benefits would have proven themselves worth the cost over the previous couple of decades if The Market wasn't artificially constrained by an intentional limitation in the processors 99% of people use. Prices would come down with additional volume too.
    - dogma1138 7y ago
      The memory controller supports ECC if Apple cared about it they would’ve forced Intel’s hand a long time ago it would not be particularly difficult for Apple to request a custom SKU with ECC enabled.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Zandikar 7y ago
  > the number of ways they have held back computers over the decades. Nonsense. There's a lot of valid reasons to be critical of Intel (largely stemming from general malicious business practices and greed), but suggesting they haven't been pushing computing forward and being market leaders and innovators is just plain untrue. They were making 8c/16t Xeons back in 2010, and core counts there have continued to improve on the high end, and increment and propogate across their stack. It's taken till recently for most consumer software or usecases to really leverage more than 8 threads as well, so the demand on the consumer side wasn't really there. If it were, the AMD Phenom's likely would have been more successful given their multithreading performance advantage over their consumer intel contemporaries. Instead they delivered gains in performance per watt, lithography, IPC, idle performance, and instruction set/acceleration gains (AES-NI, AVX, QuickSync, etc), to say nothing of pushing the market forward in Memory and Storage as well. Clock speed gains were realized as well but pushing much passed 4Ghz starts pushing into limits of physics/thermodynamics given current fabrication tech/science. ECC gives no benefit to most consumer applications, and actually would more likely be a detriment in most implementations, as it increases costs and limits performance while it's two primary benefits would largely go unnoticed if not entirely unused (error correction and improved total capacity). That's like suggesting you should make the entire frame of a car out of Titanium. Sure, it's technically better, but it's gains aren't worth it's costs and largely lost on most consumer buyers anyway, so why bother. > That doesn't even touch on all the security issues. No argument from there. Worth pointing out that exploits will often target the dominant marketshare holder of any given industry/segment (eg, Windows for OS, Android for mobile OS, Intel for x86 CPU's), but that doesn't discount the flaws that intel had implemented and their handling of said flaws/exploits. But that's not holding computing back so much as a matter of corruption/morality.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

phren0logy 7y ago

Your argument doesn’t make much sense to me. I want them to focus in good software, too. But Apple likes to make all the key elements of their stuff, and this would give them significant independence. Seems like a very Apple move.

laichzeit0 7y ago

There is something seriously wrong with their engineering vision when they can dedicate developers to adding new emoticons to iMessanger when they don't even have Time Machine backups to iCloud for MacOS.

saagarjha 7y ago
Note that the first is used by at least an order of magnitude more people.
chongli 7y ago
All of my documents (macOS) are backed up to iCloud. You don't need Time Machine to do this. It happens automatically with iCloud Drive.
- gschrader 7y ago
  Having the latest version of a file online isn’t a backup.
  - anonsivalley652 7y ago
    You have some good points, however Apple has allowed (even if temporarily) third-parties to exist on the periphery to fill-in solutions. TarSnap, SpiderOak One and BackBlaze all seem like viable options. Perhaps even Carbonite too.
  - chongli 7y ago
    MacOS has built-in file versioning since Lion. Whenever you save a file, it creates a version. You can browse and restore an old version using the program that created it. Admittedly, this only works for applications that use the API. For anything in plain text you should probably be using a git repo though.
anonsivalley652 7y ago
I think the bigger priority should be stop adding features / taking away the ones we use for a UI refresh, and spend some serious time fixing their giant, growing backlog of bugs. macOS and iOS/iPadOS are progressively getting worse in too many ways to enumerate and some bugs have been around for many years. Furthermore, they don't appear to (or don't have time to) listen to you or I submitting a bug report, so most people don't bother anymore. It's a shame because their products have gradually become like American healthcare: more expensive and worse. I think Apple needs a new CEO who can bring prices down, and quality, durability, and innovation up.

Lammy 7y ago

Moving away from Intel sounds like a huge benefit to me due to the number of ways they have held back computers over the decades. I believe that ECC memory, for example, would be standard in all desktops and laptops today if Intel didn't use it for market segmentation. That doesn't even touch on all the security issues.

catblast 7y ago
> I believe that ECC memory, for example, would be standard in all desktops and laptops today if Intel didn't use it for market segmentation. This is an extraordinary claim. Don’t get me wrong, I love ECC, but it has a very real cost associated with it. Why would any alternative to Intel change the pricing dynamic?
- Lammy 7y ago
  We can't know, because choosing ECC or non-ECC based on price vs features isn't a choice most Intel consumers get to make. I do personally think the benefits would have proven themselves worth the cost over the previous couple of decades if The Market wasn't artificially constrained by an intentional limitation in the processors 99% of people use. Prices would come down with additional volume too.
  - dogma1138 7y ago
    The memory controller supports ECC if Apple cared about it they would’ve forced Intel’s hand a long time ago it would not be particularly difficult for Apple to request a custom SKU with ECC enabled.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Zandikar 7y ago
> the number of ways they have held back computers over the decades. Nonsense. There's a lot of valid reasons to be critical of Intel (largely stemming from general malicious business practices and greed), but suggesting they haven't been pushing computing forward and being market leaders and innovators is just plain untrue. They were making 8c/16t Xeons back in 2010, and core counts there have continued to improve on the high end, and increment and propogate across their stack. It's taken till recently for most consumer software or usecases to really leverage more than 8 threads as well, so the demand on the consumer side wasn't really there. If it were, the AMD Phenom's likely would have been more successful given their multithreading performance advantage over their consumer intel contemporaries. Instead they delivered gains in performance per watt, lithography, IPC, idle performance, and instruction set/acceleration gains (AES-NI, AVX, QuickSync, etc), to say nothing of pushing the market forward in Memory and Storage as well. Clock speed gains were realized as well but pushing much passed 4Ghz starts pushing into limits of physics/thermodynamics given current fabrication tech/science. ECC gives no benefit to most consumer applications, and actually would more likely be a detriment in most implementations, as it increases costs and limits performance while it's two primary benefits would largely go unnoticed if not entirely unused (error correction and improved total capacity). That's like suggesting you should make the entire frame of a car out of Titanium. Sure, it's technically better, but it's gains aren't worth it's costs and largely lost on most consumer buyers anyway, so why bother. > That doesn't even touch on all the security issues. No argument from there. Worth pointing out that exploits will often target the dominant marketshare holder of any given industry/segment (eg, Windows for OS, Android for mobile OS, Intel for x86 CPU's), but that doesn't discount the flaws that intel had implemented and their handling of said flaws/exploits. But that's not holding computing back so much as a matter of corruption/morality.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]