6 ms·

This is an anti-technology point of view. It's astounding to read (on HN of all places) a complaint about this major new processor advancement, because it won'

This is an anti-technology point of view. It's astounding to read (on HN of all places) a complaint about this major new processor advancement, because it won't support all his legacy desktop apps. Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades. As another commenter here says: just use an old computer to run your old software. When your old computer breaks, buy another on ebay. Ebay won't run out anytime soon.

heavyset_go 6y ago
> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades. Yet I can run statically compiled Linux binaries from 20 years ago just fine, and play Windows games that were released over 20 years ago, too.
- SuperscalarMeme 6y ago
  That's because you're locked into the x86 paradigm. Look at the leaps and bounds Apple is making with performance/Watt by moving away from x86. This is the cost of legacy.
  - posguy 6y ago
    Architecture emulation like QEMU provides is commonly used, just a matter of how much investment is made into backwards compatibility by those who build your operating system/platform. Apple works hard to break backwards compatibility every few years, while other operating systems will happily run software from decades ago as they care and invest in not breaking userspace.
    - yagya 6y ago
      Apple really likes being on the bleeding edge of computers, and it often comes at the cost of older programs and features being killed off in that process.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    binfmt_misc[1] would like to have a word with you. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binfmt_misc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binfmt_misc
- spijdar 6y ago
  The key is that they're statically linked. Even so, you will begin to run into some issues in that time frame. My last experience trying to deal with ancient Linux binaries on an ARMv5 device running linux 2.4 was pretty abysmal. There were some breaking changes in the mid 2000s, I believe regarding threading? Old executables wanted LinuxThreads while modern linux uses NPTL. Not sure though. Might have just been a userland/libc problem. Sometimes, even Linux breaks backwards compat to progress.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
paxys 6y ago
Heck there will be a time (already happening in some cases) when these same apps will run better/faster emulated on new hardware. Your computer today can run old DOS applications a lot better than the IBM PC 5150 ever did.
- rz2k 6y ago
  You can replicate a Mac Plus at about 1:7 scale, just with an esp32, which is important if you need to see flying toasters: http://spritesmods.com/minimacplus/toaster-optimized.gif http://spritesmods.com/minimacplus/toaster-optimized.gif - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBiQgLlgcnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBiQgLlgcnA - http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus, http://spritesmods.com/minimacplus/mac_full2_tmb.jpg http://spritesmods.com/minimacplus/mac_full2_tmb.jpg, - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880450
mooreds 6y ago
> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades. Tell that to people running DOS programs: https://blog.storagecraft.com/dos-quite-dead/ https://blog.storagecraft.com/dos-quite-dead/ It's a choice that Apple gets to make. And that consumers, who buy or don't buy from Apple, get to make too.
- khazhoux 6y ago
  That was my comment you're replying to, and yup: I have a full Amiga development environment on my Macbook. Good times!
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  This is the problem. They could bundle an emulator for old hardware, but they don’t bother. Why should they? Customers are signaling a willingness to buy new hardware that simply won’t run some of their software.
hugi 6y ago
I am furious that my Sinclair Spectrum games don't run anymore! What the hell was wrong with the Z80?
kllrnohj 6y ago
Emulation & virtualization isn't exactly a new thing, either. In the same way we have DOSBox for running old DOS stuff, we'll end up with an OSXBox when Rosetta 2 is EOL'd or whatever. Or just fire up a copy of Sierra in VirtualBox for your old software needs - we're not going to forget how to execute x86 in a few years or anything like that.
Apocryphon 6y ago
> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades. This seems like the truly anti-technology opinion, to claim that technology lacks the ability to progress into the future without losing sight of the past.
kanox 6y ago
> As another commenter here says: just use an old computer to run your old software. Developing emulators is a much easier solution than preserving compatibility at the hardware or even the OS level. The fact that 20-year old windows games work fine is a product of Microsoft spending insane resources to maintain vendor lock-in. Emulators themselves tend to be highly portable, for example I suspect that zsnes and dosbox will "just work" on arm64 macs or even RISC-V.
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  > The fact that 20-year old windows games work fine is a product of Microsoft spending insane resources to maintain vendor lock-in. And x86/x86-64 supporting legacy instructions smh.
- wk_end 6y ago
  Otherwise I agree but: ZSNES is probably a bad example. It's written in inscrutable 32-bit x86 assembly language and hasn't been updated in nearly 15 years, so it's unlikely to be ported anywhere.
  - thristian 6y ago
    A better example would be the SNES emulators bsnes and higan, written in modern C++, which did just work when compiled on an ARM Mac the other day.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    But can’t you simply run an emulator in an emulator (or a VM)?
    - wk_end 6y ago
      Sure :) although I don't know if that still means that the inner emulator is "highly portable" or "just works" exactly - at least compared to any other software. (At the end of the day you shouldn't be running ZSNES anyway. In terms of accuracy, compatibility, even security: way better SNES emulators out there.)
leetcrew 6y ago
> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades. microsoft and x86 have entered the chat... in all seriousness, there is a legitimate tradeoff to be made here. the accumulated legacy cruft can make it quite annoying to write code targeting windows. but once you get it done, you can be confident that it will work for a long time. on macOS, the APIs tend to be a lot cleaner, but you pay for that with features that are routinely deprecated, triggering major rewrites. as a developer, I do prefer microsoft's stance. I don't use macOS enough to have a real opinion as a user, but it is nice that I can run pretty much any windows software from the last twenty years without spinning up a VM or booting an older machine.
- noelherrick 6y ago
  Here's a thought I just had: backwards compatibility will keep old customers happy while breaking changes make a certain percentage of them quit your platform or perhaps just complain loudly on Internet forums. But if you keep your product modern and flexible, free of cruft, then you're able to pivot quickly when new technology, new markets, and new products demand it, and address the ever growing market. New customers and developers are being born every day or in the developing world coming into the market. These will outstrip any losses you have from grumbling ex-customers. Being able to address their needs is probably more profitable. Sidenote - it's funny that Microsoft is so stable for their customer base while just constantly churning their frameworks and APIs. I worked in an MS shop, and boy, it seemed like they were introducing a new GUI or Web framework every six months, while of course slowing down or deprecating the older ones.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    you're not wrong; it's definitely a tradeoff. different points along the continuum of new features vs compatibility will make sense for different products. imagine a word processor that made breaking changes to its file format every year. there's no new feature that could be worth that amount of hassle in 2020. in markets that are still changing rapidly, it's okay to be more aggressive with phasing out support for older versions. from my perspective, the desktop OS is already mature. more than anything else, I just want it to not break things that already work.
breakfastduck 6y ago
Apple Silicon is good for everyone. If it succeeds, it shows other businesses how powerful ARM can be. Apple does not need to dominate the PC market to make money. What they deliver pushes other competitors to improve. I, like the commenter I've replied to, can't believe that we're even able to frame a processor power shift like this in a bad light. It shows companies they can build something big without x86 - that's good for hardware in the long run, irrelevant of whether it's Apples variant or not. It's our responsibility, as enthusiasts, to make sure legacy lives on. Plenty of people are building emulators, making home networks with old hardware. It would be much easier if Copyright/Patents expired shorter after the big money has been made. Things should become open source to let everyone in after the inventor has reaped the benefits of their creation.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  >If it succeeds, it shows other businesses how powerful ARM can be. You say that as if it's about ARM. Plenty of ARM chips on mobile side - none of them come close to Apple mobile performance. Maybe I'm missing something but it looks like Apple has a good chip design department and I don't see how this translates to other ARM devices - Microsoft had their surface with Snapdragon and AFAIK the performance/usability was nowhere close.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    It's not that I meant to be even ARM specific, but it shows that you can build a modern, performant system with your own chips without x86. That sucks for Intel but is fantastic for everyone else. Other vendors using ARM chips means virtualization becomes easier between platforms. Linux servers are going to be running ARM soon with Amazon etc designing their own chips so web devs will want to be ARM native. AMD can essentially take the high end x86 market and dominate gaming alongside Nvidia GPU's and others can experiment elsewhere!
    - schoen 6y ago
      Maybe that will help RISC-V for the same reasons, too!
uncomputation 6y ago
> This is an anti-technology point of view. Except it’s really not though? OP loves technology, saying it revolutionized several industries and really appreciates the power and innovation desktop publishing specifically brought. All they’re asking for is a stronger ecosystem for porting older applications, not for Apple to go back to x86. OP is even way more open than most (surely than I would be) to all the steps it takes to convert between the various proprietary file formats over the years.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lambda_obrien 6y ago
I wish a research group would start from scratch and design the best PC and server hardware and software for today's world, not taking any backwards compatibility in mind, just pure, new stuff that's designed with all of today's advancements in mind.
- valzam 6y ago
  Isn't that pretty much what Apple did?
  - guidoism 6y ago
    Apple was not starting from scratch, they used NeXT for software and ARM for hardware. Those are both from the 1980s.
    - alwillis 6y ago
      Apple was not starting from scratch, they used NeXT for software and ARM for hardware. That got them started but Apple has written a ton of frameworks since 2000 when the first version of MacOS X shipped. The point being made was that Apple didn't attempt to be backwards compatible with classic Mac OS. The Mac didn't try to be backwards compatible with the Apple II that came before it. The iPhone wasn't compatible with any of the phone platforms and standards in 2007.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Like the Mill? There is a huge amount of problems to solve before a new architecture is usable. This may be not viable at all.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    What's a Mill? A supposedly modernized CPU architecture that failed?
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
nicoffeine 6y ago
> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades I agree to some extent, but at some point we (as in society) need to come up with some sort of standard for file formats and for user interfaces that will last for decades. Part of what makes technology useful is that when a tool is invented, it's function and our interface to it don't significantly change for sometimes thousands of years. Take a hammer as an example. Even though there have been advancements in design and durability, any human who has ever used one can use another. That's why so much of the actually important stuff still runs inside the Windows ecosystem. Until the ribbon redesign, you could take anyone who knew excel, sit them in front of any newer or older version, and they could get to work. What I don't understand is why the technology industry can't deliver one UI paradigm per decade, loosely couple the UI to the services that manipulate the state, and then allow the user to stick with one interface to get their work done for as long as their career. Then every 30 years you could break the oldest UI -- not sure why you would need to, but whatever -- and then the whole world could save trillions of hours of lost productivity instead of dragging themselves through redesigns that only exist because they give VPs a line in their resume. (In this fever dream we all work four days a week. Programmers have time to produce immaculate, well documented, and bug free code. The hacker gods are now roboticists putting the finishing touches on fully automated luxury space communism.)
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Please don't make me tear up. :( Really well put comment! People padding CVs / resumes are a huge problem in our area and everybody is suffering -- programmers, IT/sysadmins, and the users. I really can't understand why is this tolerated. I mean, I can... but it's a figure of speech. I dream of the day when programming and UIs will be much more strictly regulated (yes, actually regulated) but I am 40 now and I am not sure I'll live to see the day.
nwellinghoff 6y ago
Easy problem to solve. Apple needs to allow macos to run virtualized, on non Mac hardware. Get over the hill already Apple, your wasting our time.

heavyset_go 6y ago

> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades. Yet I can run statically compiled Linux binaries from 20 years ago just fine, and play Windows games that were released over 20 years ago, too.

SuperscalarMeme 6y ago
That's because you're locked into the x86 paradigm. Look at the leaps and bounds Apple is making with performance/Watt by moving away from x86. This is the cost of legacy.
- posguy 6y ago
  Architecture emulation like QEMU provides is commonly used, just a matter of how much investment is made into backwards compatibility by those who build your operating system/platform. Apple works hard to break backwards compatibility every few years, while other operating systems will happily run software from decades ago as they care and invest in not breaking userspace.
  - yagya 6y ago
    Apple really likes being on the bleeding edge of computers, and it often comes at the cost of older programs and features being killed off in that process.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  binfmt_misc[1] would like to have a word with you. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binfmt_misc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binfmt_misc
spijdar 6y ago
The key is that they're statically linked. Even so, you will begin to run into some issues in that time frame. My last experience trying to deal with ancient Linux binaries on an ARMv5 device running linux 2.4 was pretty abysmal. There were some breaking changes in the mid 2000s, I believe regarding threading? Old executables wanted LinuxThreads while modern linux uses NPTL. Not sure though. Might have just been a userland/libc problem. Sometimes, even Linux breaks backwards compat to progress.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

paxys 6y ago

Heck there will be a time (already happening in some cases) when these same apps will run better/faster emulated on new hardware. Your computer today can run old DOS applications a lot better than the IBM PC 5150 ever did.

rz2k 6y ago
You can replicate a Mac Plus at about 1:7 scale, just with an esp32, which is important if you need to see flying toasters: http://spritesmods.com/minimacplus/toaster-optimized.gif http://spritesmods.com/minimacplus/toaster-optimized.gif - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBiQgLlgcnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBiQgLlgcnA - http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus, http://spritesmods.com/minimacplus/mac_full2_tmb.jpg http://spritesmods.com/minimacplus/mac_full2_tmb.jpg, - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880450

mooreds 6y ago

> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades. Tell that to people running DOS programs: https://blog.storagecraft.com/dos-quite-dead/ https://blog.storagecraft.com/dos-quite-dead/ It's a choice that Apple gets to make. And that consumers, who buy or don't buy from Apple, get to make too.

khazhoux 6y ago
That was my comment you're replying to, and yup: I have a full Amiga development environment on my Macbook. Good times!
erik_seaberg 6y ago
This is the problem. They could bundle an emulator for old hardware, but they don’t bother. Why should they? Customers are signaling a willingness to buy new hardware that simply won’t run some of their software.

hugi 6y ago

I am furious that my Sinclair Spectrum games don't run anymore! What the hell was wrong with the Z80?

kllrnohj 6y ago

Emulation & virtualization isn't exactly a new thing, either. In the same way we have DOSBox for running old DOS stuff, we'll end up with an OSXBox when Rosetta 2 is EOL'd or whatever. Or just fire up a copy of Sierra in VirtualBox for your old software needs - we're not going to forget how to execute x86 in a few years or anything like that.

Apocryphon 6y ago

> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades. This seems like the truly anti-technology opinion, to claim that technology lacks the ability to progress into the future without losing sight of the past.

kanox 6y ago

> As another commenter here says: just use an old computer to run your old software. Developing emulators is a much easier solution than preserving compatibility at the hardware or even the OS level. The fact that 20-year old windows games work fine is a product of Microsoft spending insane resources to maintain vendor lock-in. Emulators themselves tend to be highly portable, for example I suspect that zsnes and dosbox will "just work" on arm64 macs or even RISC-V.

PartiallyTyped 6y ago
> The fact that 20-year old windows games work fine is a product of Microsoft spending insane resources to maintain vendor lock-in. And x86/x86-64 supporting legacy instructions smh.
wk_end 6y ago
Otherwise I agree but: ZSNES is probably a bad example. It's written in inscrutable 32-bit x86 assembly language and hasn't been updated in nearly 15 years, so it's unlikely to be ported anywhere.
- thristian 6y ago
  A better example would be the SNES emulators bsnes and higan, written in modern C++, which did just work when compiled on an ARM Mac the other day.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  But can’t you simply run an emulator in an emulator (or a VM)?
  - wk_end 6y ago
    Sure :) although I don't know if that still means that the inner emulator is "highly portable" or "just works" exactly - at least compared to any other software. (At the end of the day you shouldn't be running ZSNES anyway. In terms of accuracy, compatibility, even security: way better SNES emulators out there.)

leetcrew 6y ago

> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades. microsoft and x86 have entered the chat... in all seriousness, there is a legitimate tradeoff to be made here. the accumulated legacy cruft can make it quite annoying to write code targeting windows. but once you get it done, you can be confident that it will work for a long time. on macOS, the APIs tend to be a lot cleaner, but you pay for that with features that are routinely deprecated, triggering major rewrites. as a developer, I do prefer microsoft's stance. I don't use macOS enough to have a real opinion as a user, but it is nice that I can run pretty much any windows software from the last twenty years without spinning up a VM or booting an older machine.

noelherrick 6y ago
Here's a thought I just had: backwards compatibility will keep old customers happy while breaking changes make a certain percentage of them quit your platform or perhaps just complain loudly on Internet forums. But if you keep your product modern and flexible, free of cruft, then you're able to pivot quickly when new technology, new markets, and new products demand it, and address the ever growing market. New customers and developers are being born every day or in the developing world coming into the market. These will outstrip any losses you have from grumbling ex-customers. Being able to address their needs is probably more profitable. Sidenote - it's funny that Microsoft is so stable for their customer base while just constantly churning their frameworks and APIs. I worked in an MS shop, and boy, it seemed like they were introducing a new GUI or Web framework every six months, while of course slowing down or deprecating the older ones.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  you're not wrong; it's definitely a tradeoff. different points along the continuum of new features vs compatibility will make sense for different products. imagine a word processor that made breaking changes to its file format every year. there's no new feature that could be worth that amount of hassle in 2020. in markets that are still changing rapidly, it's okay to be more aggressive with phasing out support for older versions. from my perspective, the desktop OS is already mature. more than anything else, I just want it to not break things that already work.

breakfastduck 6y ago

Apple Silicon is good for everyone. If it succeeds, it shows other businesses how powerful ARM can be. Apple does not need to dominate the PC market to make money. What they deliver pushes other competitors to improve. I, like the commenter I've replied to, can't believe that we're even able to frame a processor power shift like this in a bad light. It shows companies they can build something big without x86 - that's good for hardware in the long run, irrelevant of whether it's Apples variant or not. It's our responsibility, as enthusiasts, to make sure legacy lives on. Plenty of people are building emulators, making home networks with old hardware. It would be much easier if Copyright/Patents expired shorter after the big money has been made. Things should become open source to let everyone in after the inventor has reaped the benefits of their creation.

reader_mode 6y ago
>If it succeeds, it shows other businesses how powerful ARM can be. You say that as if it's about ARM. Plenty of ARM chips on mobile side - none of them come close to Apple mobile performance. Maybe I'm missing something but it looks like Apple has a good chip design department and I don't see how this translates to other ARM devices - Microsoft had their surface with Snapdragon and AFAIK the performance/usability was nowhere close.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  It's not that I meant to be even ARM specific, but it shows that you can build a modern, performant system with your own chips without x86. That sucks for Intel but is fantastic for everyone else. Other vendors using ARM chips means virtualization becomes easier between platforms. Linux servers are going to be running ARM soon with Amazon etc designing their own chips so web devs will want to be ARM native. AMD can essentially take the high end x86 market and dominate gaming alongside Nvidia GPU's and others can experiment elsewhere!
  - schoen 6y ago
    Maybe that will help RISC-V for the same reasons, too!

uncomputation 6y ago

> This is an anti-technology point of view. Except it’s really not though? OP loves technology, saying it revolutionized several industries and really appreciates the power and innovation desktop publishing specifically brought. All they’re asking for is a stronger ecosystem for porting older applications, not for Apple to go back to x86. OP is even way more open than most (surely than I would be) to all the steps it takes to convert between the various proprietary file formats over the years.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

lambda_obrien 6y ago

I wish a research group would start from scratch and design the best PC and server hardware and software for today's world, not taking any backwards compatibility in mind, just pure, new stuff that's designed with all of today's advancements in mind.

valzam 6y ago
Isn't that pretty much what Apple did?
- guidoism 6y ago
  Apple was not starting from scratch, they used NeXT for software and ARM for hardware. Those are both from the 1980s.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    Apple was not starting from scratch, they used NeXT for software and ARM for hardware. That got them started but Apple has written a ton of frameworks since 2000 when the first version of MacOS X shipped. The point being made was that Apple didn't attempt to be backwards compatible with classic Mac OS. The Mac didn't try to be backwards compatible with the Apple II that came before it. The iPhone wasn't compatible with any of the phone platforms and standards in 2007.
marcosdumay 6y ago
Like the Mill? There is a huge amount of problems to solve before a new architecture is usable. This may be not viable at all.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  What's a Mill? A supposedly modernized CPU architecture that failed?
  - marcosdumay 6y ago

nicoffeine 6y ago

> Technology can't simultaneously progress while still remaining backwards-compatible for years or decades I agree to some extent, but at some point we (as in society) need to come up with some sort of standard for file formats and for user interfaces that will last for decades. Part of what makes technology useful is that when a tool is invented, it's function and our interface to it don't significantly change for sometimes thousands of years. Take a hammer as an example. Even though there have been advancements in design and durability, any human who has ever used one can use another. That's why so much of the actually important stuff still runs inside the Windows ecosystem. Until the ribbon redesign, you could take anyone who knew excel, sit them in front of any newer or older version, and they could get to work. What I don't understand is why the technology industry can't deliver one UI paradigm per decade, loosely couple the UI to the services that manipulate the state, and then allow the user to stick with one interface to get their work done for as long as their career. Then every 30 years you could break the oldest UI -- not sure why you would need to, but whatever -- and then the whole world could save trillions of hours of lost productivity instead of dragging themselves through redesigns that only exist because they give VPs a line in their resume. (In this fever dream we all work four days a week. Programmers have time to produce immaculate, well documented, and bug free code. The hacker gods are now roboticists putting the finishing touches on fully automated luxury space communism.)

pdimitar 6y ago
Please don't make me tear up. :( Really well put comment! People padding CVs / resumes are a huge problem in our area and everybody is suffering -- programmers, IT/sysadmins, and the users. I really can't understand why is this tolerated. I mean, I can... but it's a figure of speech. I dream of the day when programming and UIs will be much more strictly regulated (yes, actually regulated) but I am 40 now and I am not sure I'll live to see the day.

nwellinghoff 6y ago

Easy problem to solve. Apple needs to allow macos to run virtualized, on non Mac hardware. Get over the hill already Apple, your wasting our time.