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Do you really believe one of the most valuable companies in the world that just on-the-fly transitioned half their product line to a different CPU architecture,

Do you really believe one of the most valuable companies in the world that just on-the-fly transitioned half their product line to a different CPU architecture, released their flagship desktop OS for the new architecture and thrown in a compatibility layer that works like magic for good measure, somehow doesn't understand how computers work? Whatever they did, they did on purpose. The good and the bad.

Larrikin 6y ago
Do you really think the engineers at Apple are gods incapable of mistakes? The MacOS division in particular has been a prime example of "don't upgrade until you have to" with how buggy each new update has been.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Do you really think the engineers at Apple are gods incapable of mistakes? Read the comment the parent is replying to. It implies that the cruft of legacy architectures is to support these scenarios and Apple didn’t realize that. Both things are laughably wrong and the parent pointed out why the latter is so ridiculous.
aprdm 6y ago
You make it sound like all of those changes weren’t many years of effort by many engineers...
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  Unfortunately I don't know everyone's names, so I'm using "Apple" as an umbrella term for Apple engineers.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    I love that in this thread we have one fanboi defending apple about this by saying that bugs happen and that they're often found in the least tested software parts (fucking reinstall? Not tested?) And then we also have someone complaining they just did this on a whim and that they did it because they're basically gods and how dare you question them.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      And then all of this conversation is based on the assumption of a bug someone heard about from a Best Buy employee. We’re arguing about a scenario (re-install wasn’t ever tested) based on a shitty game of telephone.
rbanffy 6y ago
> on-the-fly transitioned half their product line to a different CPU architecture And did that for the third time nonetheless. Ok. For the second time, because the first one was on an entirely different OS.
waheoo 6y ago
AP was clearly making the link between apples "on the fly" transition and software rewrites by newcomers to a system that will often make the same mistakes that the old system had already figured out solutions to. Nobody claimed apple doesn't understand computers, thats your mischaracterization of the AP.
floatboth 6y ago
Well, they did everything on purpose… with the purpose of satisfying business constraints – shipping a shiny end product within the deadline, and nothing else. So they quickly repurposed all the iDevice stuff, minimally expanding the boot process to be more open and general-purpose-computer-like. They could've built the SoC differently (with standard Arm components – GIC, SMMU, PL011… – instead of custom ones), could've used UEFI+ACPI, storing the firmware on a typical SPI flash chip, and so on. But that was not done because that stuff doesn't do much for the business objectives of the company, since what's being marketed is the full experience with macOS, not an interoperable standard platform for your favorite Unix. And so they went the easy, lazy, proprietary way.

Larrikin 6y ago

Do you really think the engineers at Apple are gods incapable of mistakes? The MacOS division in particular has been a prime example of "don't upgrade until you have to" with how buggy each new update has been.

kortilla 6y ago
> Do you really think the engineers at Apple are gods incapable of mistakes? Read the comment the parent is replying to. It implies that the cruft of legacy architectures is to support these scenarios and Apple didn’t realize that. Both things are laughably wrong and the parent pointed out why the latter is so ridiculous.

aprdm 6y ago

You make it sound like all of those changes weren’t many years of effort by many engineers...

Toutouxc 6y ago
Unfortunately I don't know everyone's names, so I'm using "Apple" as an umbrella term for Apple engineers.
- waheoo 6y ago
  I love that in this thread we have one fanboi defending apple about this by saying that bugs happen and that they're often found in the least tested software parts (fucking reinstall? Not tested?) And then we also have someone complaining they just did this on a whim and that they did it because they're basically gods and how dare you question them.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    And then all of this conversation is based on the assumption of a bug someone heard about from a Best Buy employee. We’re arguing about a scenario (re-install wasn’t ever tested) based on a shitty game of telephone.

rbanffy 6y ago

> on-the-fly transitioned half their product line to a different CPU architecture And did that for the third time nonetheless. Ok. For the second time, because the first one was on an entirely different OS.

waheoo 6y ago

AP was clearly making the link between apples "on the fly" transition and software rewrites by newcomers to a system that will often make the same mistakes that the old system had already figured out solutions to. Nobody claimed apple doesn't understand computers, thats your mischaracterization of the AP.

floatboth 6y ago

Well, they did everything on purpose… with the purpose of satisfying business constraints – shipping a shiny end product within the deadline, and nothing else. So they quickly repurposed all the iDevice stuff, minimally expanding the boot process to be more open and general-purpose-computer-like. They could've built the SoC differently (with standard Arm components – GIC, SMMU, PL011… – instead of custom ones), could've used UEFI+ACPI, storing the firmware on a typical SPI flash chip, and so on. But that was not done because that stuff doesn't do much for the business objectives of the company, since what's being marketed is the full experience with macOS, not an interoperable standard platform for your favorite Unix. And so they went the easy, lazy, proprietary way.