7 ms·

Mac OS Monterey Features Unavailable on Intel Macs

49 points by bgorman 5y ago

jereees 5y ago
Somehow impressive that they’re able to ship Universal Control (think Synergy only built-in) without M1 or U1. I wonder how do devices know where they are positioned relative to each other in physical space.
- jurmous 5y ago
  The device does not know where the other device is exactly although it knows it is clode because of Bluetooth. It will assume you want to move to the device you interacted with most recently when you move your mouse pointer past the edge of your Mac. From that moment on it will assume the device is on that side. Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523613/macos-monterey-wwdc-apple-ipad https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523613/macos-monterey-ww...
  - szhu 5y ago
    Rearranging displays to match their physical placement is incredibly annoying. I'm so happy Apple finally decided to innovate here.
  - jereees 5y ago
    Thanks for the concise explanation!
- johnwalkr 5y ago
  U1 doesn’t directly know direction between iPhone and airtags either. You have to move your phone around for it to deduce the direction. At least, that’s how it works right now.
cyrksoft 5y ago
Apple’s forced deprecation back at it again. They claim to care about the environment and for reasons other than technical decide not to support Intel devices (even though they still sell them TODAY!)
- Uehreka 5y ago
  The day they stop selling Intel Macs, there will be an uproar from people who claimed that X months was not enough time to refresh their workplace's MacBooks--which need to be Intel because in spite of Rosetta 2 and the speed at which libraries and apps are being recompiled there's still some obscure thing that doesn't work yet on M1. They're kinda damned if they do, damned if they don't. But enough of that, let's look at whether they decided this "for reasons other than technical". A lot of the features (the FaceTime image processing, the dictation and speech stuff, etc.) seem like the kind of thing that was built against their Neural Engine. Intel CPUs don't have custom circuitry for running neural nets, let alone an API that is congruent with Apple's. It makes sense that computers with certain advanced hardware are going to get features that other computers without equivalent hardware can't support.
  - rimunroe 5y ago
    Is it possible to use virtualization and x86 emulation at the same time now? I’d gotten the impression that people didn’t think that was ever going to happen, and it seems like a pretty non-obscure reason to want Intel support to continue.
- acdha 5y ago
  > decide not to support Intel devices They're only not supporting new features which have specific requirements of the device — the features it had when you bought it are still supported. The listed hardware support goes back to 2015 and historically they've continued shipping security and stability updates for the previous OS release, so whichever of those old devices are still running won't leave security support until the release of whatever comes _after_ Monterrey (presumably in the fall of 2022) when Big Sur falls out of support.
- zepto 5y ago
  > They claim to care about the environment and for reasons other than technical… This is not true. The reasons are technical.
bydo 5y ago
>Portrait Mode blurred backgrounds in FaceTime videos >Live Text for copying and pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos >An interactive 3D globe of Earth in the Maps app >More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London in the Maps app >Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish >On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline >Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance) Most of them make sense; the M1 has the Neural Engine and ISP, and Intel Macs don't. Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though.
- ksec 5y ago
  >Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though. Text to speech uses Neural Engine as well. Rendering Globe likely uses newer version of Metal only supported on M1.
  - saurik 5y ago
    But only for those languages?
    - plorkyeran 5y ago
      Sure? It suggests they have a new TTS engine which they used for the new languages, but they kept the old engine around for Intel macs rather than dropping existing functionality.
    - Uehreka 5y ago
      Feels like the kind of thing where maybe there was an architectural initiative to move from a cumbersome speech data format to something more elegant that required the Neural Engine. Since they already had the old languages in the old format, they kept that data around, but for the new languages opted to only ingest the easier-to-work-with format. But hey, I’m guessing and you’re Saurik: I have a feeling you know more about this than me and may have considered and dismissed this possibility for a good reason.
rad_gruchalski 5y ago
But there is no 16” M1 model. That’s totally unlike Apple. Is M1 16” coming in September then?
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Nobody knows for sure but the rumours say it's been delayed due to a hold up in mini-LED displays. Probably will be something by September. But who knows?
dreamcompiler 5y ago
> Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish > On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline > Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance) >> It’s because Intel Macs don’t have the neural engine these features require. This is of course utter horseshit. Text-to-speech might be slightly easier with a "neural engine" but the fact that it can be done just fine in other languages without a "neural engine" belies this statement. Dragon Systems (among others) was doing completely offline speech-to-text dictation on Macs that were 1000x less powerful than today's Macs 20 years ago, and doing it well. If Apple doesn't know how to do it today, that says a lot more about the competence of Apple's programmers than about their hardware.
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Yes they had text to speech, but not as good as today, not nearly as robust, you had to train it. Google do also have on device speech transcription, for their own phones with neural engines. Their blog post points out that it's quite a resource intensive method of doing things. https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-speech.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-sp...
- zepto 5y ago
  > Dragon Systems (among others) was doing completely offline speech-to-text dictation on Macs that were 1000x less powerful than today's Macs 20 years ago, and doing it well. Not even close to modern standards.
- musicale 5y ago
  "Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag!"
deeblering4 5y ago
Generally speaking these features maybe are faster on M1 but I don't fully buy into the claim that this is a technical requirement. Seems more like a technical decision to me. As a user it would be vastly preferable for Apple to deploy these features to both cpu architectures, and sure M1 would offer acceleration and better performance. Considering that Apple hasn't finished fully migrating their hardware lineup to M1 (and are still selling intel macs), this deprecation feels a bit rushed.
- zepto 5y ago
  > but I don't fully buy into the claim that this is a technical requirement. It’s a technical requirement if the designers specified a required performance level.
- Daedren 5y ago
  I remember the iPhone 4 being denied Siri, on supposed grounds of microphone quality. Jailbreakers found a way to enable Siri on it, and it honestly felt exactly the same as the 4S.
pdimitar 5y ago
I have an iMac Pro that I wanted to hold on to for a long time. F*ck me, right? :(

49 points by bgorman 5y ago

Somehow impressive that they’re able to ship Universal Control (think Synergy only built-in) without M1 or U1. I wonder how do devices know where they are positioned relative to each other in physical space.

jurmous 5y ago
The device does not know where the other device is exactly although it knows it is clode because of Bluetooth. It will assume you want to move to the device you interacted with most recently when you move your mouse pointer past the edge of your Mac. From that moment on it will assume the device is on that side. Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523613/macos-monterey-wwdc-apple-ipad https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523613/macos-monterey-ww...
- szhu 5y ago
  Rearranging displays to match their physical placement is incredibly annoying. I'm so happy Apple finally decided to innovate here.
- jereees 5y ago
  Thanks for the concise explanation!
johnwalkr 5y ago
U1 doesn’t directly know direction between iPhone and airtags either. You have to move your phone around for it to deduce the direction. At least, that’s how it works right now.

cyrksoft 5y ago

Apple’s forced deprecation back at it again. They claim to care about the environment and for reasons other than technical decide not to support Intel devices (even though they still sell them TODAY!)

Uehreka 5y ago
The day they stop selling Intel Macs, there will be an uproar from people who claimed that X months was not enough time to refresh their workplace's MacBooks--which need to be Intel because in spite of Rosetta 2 and the speed at which libraries and apps are being recompiled there's still some obscure thing that doesn't work yet on M1. They're kinda damned if they do, damned if they don't. But enough of that, let's look at whether they decided this "for reasons other than technical". A lot of the features (the FaceTime image processing, the dictation and speech stuff, etc.) seem like the kind of thing that was built against their Neural Engine. Intel CPUs don't have custom circuitry for running neural nets, let alone an API that is congruent with Apple's. It makes sense that computers with certain advanced hardware are going to get features that other computers without equivalent hardware can't support.
- rimunroe 5y ago
  Is it possible to use virtualization and x86 emulation at the same time now? I’d gotten the impression that people didn’t think that was ever going to happen, and it seems like a pretty non-obscure reason to want Intel support to continue.
acdha 5y ago
> decide not to support Intel devices They're only not supporting new features which have specific requirements of the device — the features it had when you bought it are still supported. The listed hardware support goes back to 2015 and historically they've continued shipping security and stability updates for the previous OS release, so whichever of those old devices are still running won't leave security support until the release of whatever comes _after_ Monterrey (presumably in the fall of 2022) when Big Sur falls out of support.
zepto 5y ago
> They claim to care about the environment and for reasons other than technical… This is not true. The reasons are technical.

bydo 5y ago

>Portrait Mode blurred backgrounds in FaceTime videos >Live Text for copying and pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos >An interactive 3D globe of Earth in the Maps app >More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London in the Maps app >Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish >On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline >Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance) Most of them make sense; the M1 has the Neural Engine and ISP, and Intel Macs don't. Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though.

ksec 5y ago
>Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though. Text to speech uses Neural Engine as well. Rendering Globe likely uses newer version of Metal only supported on M1.
- saurik 5y ago
  But only for those languages?
  - plorkyeran 5y ago
    Sure? It suggests they have a new TTS engine which they used for the new languages, but they kept the old engine around for Intel macs rather than dropping existing functionality.
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    Feels like the kind of thing where maybe there was an architectural initiative to move from a cumbersome speech data format to something more elegant that required the Neural Engine. Since they already had the old languages in the old format, they kept that data around, but for the new languages opted to only ingest the easier-to-work-with format. But hey, I’m guessing and you’re Saurik: I have a feeling you know more about this than me and may have considered and dismissed this possibility for a good reason.

rad_gruchalski 5y ago

But there is no 16” M1 model. That’s totally unlike Apple. Is M1 16” coming in September then?

Synaesthesia 5y ago
Nobody knows for sure but the rumours say it's been delayed due to a hold up in mini-LED displays. Probably will be something by September. But who knows?

dreamcompiler 5y ago

> Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish > On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline > Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance) >> It’s because Intel Macs don’t have the neural engine these features require. This is of course utter horseshit. Text-to-speech might be slightly easier with a "neural engine" but the fact that it can be done just fine in other languages without a "neural engine" belies this statement. Dragon Systems (among others) was doing completely offline speech-to-text dictation on Macs that were 1000x less powerful than today's Macs 20 years ago, and doing it well. If Apple doesn't know how to do it today, that says a lot more about the competence of Apple's programmers than about their hardware.

Synaesthesia 5y ago
Yes they had text to speech, but not as good as today, not nearly as robust, you had to train it. Google do also have on device speech transcription, for their own phones with neural engines. Their blog post points out that it's quite a resource intensive method of doing things. https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-speech.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-sp...
zepto 5y ago
> Dragon Systems (among others) was doing completely offline speech-to-text dictation on Macs that were 1000x less powerful than today's Macs 20 years ago, and doing it well. Not even close to modern standards.
musicale 5y ago
"Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag!"

deeblering4 5y ago

Generally speaking these features maybe are faster on M1 but I don't fully buy into the claim that this is a technical requirement. Seems more like a technical decision to me. As a user it would be vastly preferable for Apple to deploy these features to both cpu architectures, and sure M1 would offer acceleration and better performance. Considering that Apple hasn't finished fully migrating their hardware lineup to M1 (and are still selling intel macs), this deprecation feels a bit rushed.

zepto 5y ago
> but I don't fully buy into the claim that this is a technical requirement. It’s a technical requirement if the designers specified a required performance level.
Daedren 5y ago
I remember the iPhone 4 being denied Siri, on supposed grounds of microphone quality. Jailbreakers found a way to enable Siri on it, and it honestly felt exactly the same as the 4S.

pdimitar 5y ago

I have an iMac Pro that I wanted to hold on to for a long time. F*ck me, right? :(