Apple Thread - The most overrated technology brand?

[LegoTugboat]

Well, it's interesting because in 2018, Apple used Rise of the Tomb Raider to show off how much faster the new Mini was over the previous Mini, which they said was 60%.

Even if it's emulated, the dev minis might be able to give us an idea of graphics with the same game. Hopefully they'll be on par with the iPad Pro 2020, which uses the same CPU.

In all, I'd say this is more a 'maintenance/standardisation update', albeit a fairly interesting one.

 

[Basil II]

Is this the legendary desktop ARM shift that's been prophesized?

 

[Joe Swanson]

Is this the legendary desktop ARM shift that's been prophesized?

No this is just PowerPC 2, Electric Boogaloo

 

[Least Concern]

Is this the legendary desktop ARM shift that's been prophesized?

This is the year of Linux ARM on the desktop!

RasPis are great but don't seem to have been able to rise beyond the hobbyist toy market to any great degree. Microsoft seems to release WindowsRT tablets and convertibles now and then but seemingly do nothing to promote their benefits to the market at large. Maybe, like adopting USB and keyboardless touch screens, this will be something Apple doesn't do first so much as drags kicking and screaming into the mainstream through sheer force of will. If there is some there there in terms of absolute performance, they're going to have a massive head start with their vertical integration.

Well, it's interesting because in 2018, Apple used Rise of the Tomb Raider to show off how much faster the new Mini was over the previous Mini, which they said was 60%.

Big thanks to Sqeenix and Feral for bringing the series to Mac, by the way. Now how about Just Cause? Or even a JRPG or two? C'mon…

 

[Citation Checking Project]

RasPis are great but don't seem to have been able to rise beyond the hobbyist toy market to any great degree.

You forgot about ChromeBooks though. They exist. My personal theory is the point of ARM chips isn't 60 fps gaming, but long battery life for a SaaSS-oriented thin clients. Grandparents and instagramers don't need a beastly hexacore proc: it's all about iPhones with keyboards now, which is more or less what these devices are going to be.

 

[Least Concern]

You forgot about ChromeBooks though.

Yes, I did. Just goes to show how forgettable those are.

My personal theory is the point of ARM chips isn't 60 fps gaming, but long battery life for a SaaSS-oriented thin clients.

Well, in the keynote, Apple showed off an ARMac editing video and running Photoshop. That's not thin client stuff.

 

[Citation Checking Project]

Well, in the keynote, Apple showed off an ARMac editing video and running Photoshop. That's not thin client stuff.

Adobe® GIMP isn't that computationally heavy though. I think the biggest bottleneck is memory use, so a high-end chromebook should be expected to run it well enough. In fact it's already available on iPad, ergo seeing it on an iPad with a keyboard is not that surprising imho. Looking at the "super smooth" video editing in the Keynote, hardware acceleration is nothing new it's not surprising that they have it. And they admit that they have "performance-per-watt" considerations, so I maintain that they are high-end chromebooks.

 

[LegoTugboat]

Here's the thing, though. If Apple announced this, and the new ARMacs were at least on par, or god forbid, slower, then they would look like fucking idiots, and would be endlessly mocked and scorned.

In order for it to work, they'd have to be a decisive amount faster, more efficient, or both, then an Intel CPU. Possibly something similar to the original Intel Core Duo Mini to the G4 Mini.

So hopefully, the dev Minis are basically as fast as stabbed rats.

 

[Never Scored]

Here's the thing, though. If Apple announced this, and the new ARMacs were at least on par, or god forbid, slower, then they would look like fucking idiots, and would be endlessly mocked and scorned.

In order for it to work, they'd have to be a decisive amount faster, more efficient, or both, then an Intel CPU. Possibly something similar to the original Intel Core Duo Mini to the G4 Mini.

So hopefully, the dev Minis are basically as fast as stabbed rats.

It doesn't matter how fast it is as long as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Disney Plus, Twitter & Google work well. Anyone who buys a new Mac now is either some kind of professional in graphic arts or something who is locked into it and has no choice or a retarded consoomer. They don't even look at specs. Anyone who gives a shit about specs at this point will just build their own PC.

This is about being able to easily slap iphone/ipad apps onto macbooks with nothing but UI changes because computers are a tiny fraction of Apple's business now and they don't want to devote resources to them. PC sales have been steadily declining for years. You'll still be able to get a laptop or be able to buy the shit to build a PC for the foreseeable future, but the writing is on the wall and Apple tends to generally be a forward looking company. I bet your average person under 20 doesn't use anything but a phone now.

 

[Least Concern]

Here's the thing, though. If Apple announced this, and the new ARMacs were at least on par, or god forbid, slower, then they would look like fucking idiots, and would be endlessly mocked and scorned.

I predict that in terms of raw power, the first ARMacs - shipping ARMacs; I'm sure the dev Mac minis will be benchmarked and much will be made about those results, but it's not really fair to make judgments based on non-final, non-shipping hardware - will be much more efficient than current-gen Intel chips, but also decisively slower. So mock and scorn will be due, I suppose, though bored people in this thread are heaping it on them already.

If you're expecting the first ARM MBP to be faster than the otherwise equivalent Intel MBP that came before it, at least in terms of benchmark numbers, you're almost certainly going to be disappointed. I bet there will be a massive improvement in battery life, though, and hopefully we'll see prices become more competitive as well ().

Apple releases some details about Rosetta, most interestingly related to VMs:

What Can't Be Translated?
Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn’t translate the following executables:

• Kernel extensions
• Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms

Rosetta translates all x86_64 instructions, but it doesn’t support the execution of some newer instruction sets and processor features, such as AVX, AVX2, and AVX512 vector instructions. If you include these newer instructions in your code, execute them only after verifying that they are available.

So current VM tools aren't going to work, though I'm not clear why - I guess it doesn't support newer VM-related instruction sets that modern VM tools expect to see? Maybe they can pull off some trick where Rosetta is used for most stuff but non-supported instructions are emulated in userspace or something like that.

I guess this also confirms that the Linux instance Apple was showing running in their own VM tool was running an ARM distro.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Adobe® GIMP isn't that computationally heavy though. I think the biggest bottleneck is memory use, so a high-end chromebook should be expected to run it well enough. In fact it's already available on iPad, ergo seeing it on an iPad with a keyboard is not that surprising imho. Looking at the "super smooth" video editing in the Keynote, hardware acceleration is nothing new it's not surprising that they have it. And they admit that they have "performance-per-watt" considerations, so I maintain that they are high-end chromebooks.

Some things takes a lot of resources especially if you're fiddling and want to see immediate changes, the problem is that Photoshop doesn't use much GPU acceleration so it depends heavily on the CPU. Maybe that's not true for what they have developed for the iPad, it's a system with unified memory between CPU/GPU so maybe they have something going on there that they use on the ArmMac as well.
I'm not familiar with Final Cut Pro, but the footage they show emphasized that it was 4K and that's not that much of a problem if the footage is either converted to or already in ProRes, a format developed by Apple that trades decoding/decompressing time for storage space. My computer huffs and puffs when editing 4k video in h264, but if I export that footage into an uncompressed .tiff sequence, which is really stupid, no problem, SSD goes brrrrr. Takes up insane amounts of space per minute though.

 

[Citation Checking Project]

unified memory between CPU/GPU

I am 99% sure they mentioned having that on ARMacs during WWDC but I cant pinpoint it right now, sorry. Sure rings a bell though.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I am 99% sure they mentioned having that on ARMacs during WWDC but I cant pinpoint it right now, sorry. Sure rings a bell though.

Yeah, they showed something like computer properties and it listed A12Z I think, and they have been developing their own GPUs for a long while, they split with Imagination a couple of years back, they have also been transitioning their desktop products to their own GPU API(the same as their mobile products) so it seems like that's what they are going for, vertical integration where they control and make everything. If you look at it another way you see consoles becoming PCs and Apple sort of meeting them in the middle with their upcoming computers being a bit like consoles. ARM is a license deal and maybe in 10 years they will be able to cancel that as well when they have their own CPUs that no longer uses any of their IP.

 

[Least Concern]

ARM is a license deal and maybe in 10 years they will be able to cancel that as well when they have their own CPUs that no longer uses any of their IP.

That's an interesting thought. Wouldn't that require creating a whole new instruction set? So we'd have to do yet another transition after that?

 

[Ex Cummunicated Sasser HD]

Anyone buying a new intel based Mac after today’s announcement is playing with fire. I don’t see Apple doing people dirty like when they switched from power pc to intel, but they’re definitely going to cut update support of intel Macs prematurely.

Yeah, I have been burned by this in the past... Bought 2 G5's and 12 G4 Powerbooks literally within a week of them announcing the move to Intel.. Within a year it was a dead architecture, as hardly anyone making software was focusing on PPC then final nail in the coffin... Snow Leopard wouldn't even work on PPC...

I own a lot of macs, but mainly because I'm a nerd, (like everything from the classic 64k, the FDHD, the color classics, quadras, the LC2's, the 20th Century and all the G series "pro" versions up all the way up to the G5's) but in my opinion the best mac now is a Hackintosh, and will be for a few years.

Can't wait to see other companies offering up arm chips soon, and Windows jumping back onto arm, because they are going to need to... Windows RT was a mistake, it was just too soon. I can see in a few years time arm is gonna be the standard if it all goes to 5nm and fast enough to not make things bad.

Apple have managed this twice, (three times if you count macos classic on osx workarounds but that was a software change) ...both from motorola to PPC, then PPC to intel... Because of the speed benefits of each iteration, it was actually faster running Adobe CS2 on Rosetta than running it native on the old G4's, and G5 was Only a bit faster than rosetta on the original intel macs...

Doom 3 ran like shite though on Rosetta, like 3-6fps FPS if it didn't just crash, but that was more to do with no dedicated GFX on the first intel macs, and even the ones that did have gfx, rosetta couldn’t take advantage...

This Tomb Raider thing they showed gives me hope for Rosetta 2, even though it looked a bit stuttery... To be fair, tomb raider is like that anyway on macos, run it on a mac running windows and you get at least a 15-20% frame increase on the exact same hardware.

 

[Dr. Sexbot]

MacOS: Big Slur (the runner-up in another thread was "OSX Vista" ouch)

I've wondered for a long time when they'd finally pull the trigger on this. Rumor has it they've had marginally functional in-house ports to ARM for years now, ready for whenever the scales tipped. I honestly don't think Apple worries much about hackintoshes, as it's a niche thing and they're a bit fragile, but this will absolutely kill it once they decide to quit releasing x86-64 OS updates. Bit of a shame as I'm about to build a new machine, and the case has room for a 2nd ITX mobo...

Edit: I'm assuming they're using TSMC on a 7nm-ish process for these chips. AMD saw a nice jump when their chips moved over a node, so Apple may be at a pretty good starting point performance-wise. Like everyone said, they probably wouldn't announce this if the new machines were gimped -- you have to dangle that carrot of performance in front of the user if you want them to (re-)invest.

 

[Tookie]

So current VM tools aren't going to work, though I'm not clear why - I guess it doesn't support newer VM-related instruction sets that modern VM tools expect to see? Maybe they can pull off some trick where Rosetta is used for most stuff but non-supported instructions are emulated in userspace or something like that.

I wonder what the implications of that is going to be for people relying on Docker or anything utilizing VirtualBox. That's a big oof, chief.

 

[LegoTugboat]

Reports going around that Apple started getting ready to move from Intel after the Skylake debacle in 2016.

Intel insider claims it finally lost Apple because Skylake QA 'was abnormally bad'

Ex-Intel principal engineer, François Piednoël, believes he witnessed the inflection point three years ago with Skylake.

www.pcgamer.com

Apple also revealed that iOS, iPadOS and tvOS will support the XBox Adaptive Controllers and the Elite Wireless Controller 2. And also, we had a decent little game drop today.

Spoiler

Steam release is estimated for mid-July, so don't worry.

 

[Pickle Dick]

 

[Coffee Shits]

The Big Sur sounds are nice. Light, glassy. Overall pleasant.

The icons got slapped with the ugly stick.