All things Apple, the tech not the fruit

[MC Fresh Breath 4,074]

 

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

So, are we excited about Big Sur?

I was confused that I got yet another update to Catalina within the past seven days or so.

[52-80 19,144]

All the ultra nerdy technical sites (not the consumer "tech" sites) says the new apple silicon in the Macs is going to smash it out of the park.

 

A few years ago I rotated out of Apple products - out of curiosity, not deliberately - and it looks like I'm rotating fully back.  

 

Intel is really shitting the bed.  NVDA, AMD, ARM, and TSMC are all eating their lunch.

[Tailgate 3,021]

13 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

All the ultra nerdy technical sites (not the consumer "tech" sites) says the new apple silicon in the Macs is going to smash it out of the park.

 

A few years ago I rotated out of Apple products - out of curiosity, not deliberately - and it looks like I'm rotating fully back.  

 

Intel is really shitting the bed.  NVDA, AMD, ARM, and TSMC are all eating their lunch.

Now is a good time to rotate back in. Their ecosystem is only getting stronger and their UI, design and performance are tough to beat. I’m an NVDA fan thanks to my gaming PC but it’s the one PC I’ve ever owned versus hundreds of Mac products. And you’re right, if you watched the presentation/event yesterday...their slides on the performance and energy use of their silicon (M1) was impressive. And this is just the beginning.

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

1 hour ago, 52-80 said:

All the ultra nerdy technical sites (not the consumer "tech" sites) says the new apple silicon in the Macs is going to smash it out of the park.

Like Tailgate said, the ecosystem is strong.

And now that the iPhone/iPad/macOS ecosystem is becoming unified, and you can run your iPad/iPhone games and apps on macOS, you'll see even more developers giving it a look, since they only have to develop for one platform, yet will have access to 150-200 million iPads in use, over 700 million iPhones in use, and then Macs.

And you are in a good position, not being tied down to legacy Mac stuff (older apps, etc.) - if you are coming in new, you'll most likely be using apps that are already ready to go for all of the new changes.

I'm still surprised at how fast it came together, and a little leery about things - I'd like them to keep Intel Macs around for a few more years, but I also want one of the new Apple CPU-based Macs, preferably a MacBook Air.

Edited November 12, 2020 by atomheartbevo

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

3 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

So, are we excited about Big Sur?

Yes and no, although my concerns are probably more with the hardware and the transition.

Last time around, Rosetta only lasted 3 years.  Not a big deal in hindsight perhaps, at least for many, but there were a lot of apps that could not be ported to Intel.  Yeah, 3 years is plenty of time to find an alternate, but still, it was a shame to see older stuff fade away.  But 15 years later, there's plenty of emulators for those previous versions of the OS that do just fine.

This time around, in theory, most of the apps many of us use regularly are already going to handle the transition just fine.  So that part of Big Sur will be fine.

My big concern is how long will Rosetta 2 last, and will there be support for eGPUs (there currently isn't, which is apparently a hardware limitation of the architecture), and just how well will virtualization software run - Parallels devs say that Parallels Desktop will run many apps/OSes just fine, and in some cases runs much better, but so far I've only seen Linux running on it - I want to see Windows 10.  The Windows 10 apps I use in my current VMs don't have heavy hardware requirements (older games, like 15-20 year old games, some publishing software, genealogy software, etc.), so I'm not that worried, but Windows 10 in a virtualized session runs damn fine on my Mac mini and my MacBook Air.

And hell, I'm already planning on building a small gaming PC running Windows, so I can give up the hardware-heavy stuff.

[Francisco 2.0 32,386]

8 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I'm still surprised at how fast it came together, and a little leery about things - I'd like them to keep Intel Macs around for a few more years, but I also want one of the new Apple CPU-based Macs, preferably a MacBook Air.

Since they have said they would support Intel Macs for the foreseeable future, you could always pick up one in the next year or so.

 

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

One thing that concerns me is that they neutered the fuck out of the Mac mini they just released.  I have an older Mac mini that I am running 64GB of RAM in, and the new ones are limited to 16 (and not user-replaceable), and they had their ports cut down.

A friend who is a dev, and has been working with this for a few months said he was told by an Apple engineer that this was a hardware limitation in this first generation (he implied that the MacBook Air/MacBook Pro, and Mac mini are using virtually the same system board), and that there will be more expensive Mac minis down the road that have much better specs.  Although the rumor mill says there will be smaller/cheaper Mac Pros released to cover that gap between a cheap Mac mini and a crazy-expensive Mac Pro, so who knows.

For those on the fence about a new MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro - they have the same processor (one of the MBA models has one less core), the MBP has longer battery life, and the MBP has active/fan cooling, while the MBA has no fan (and so will throttle more quickly).  I'd go MacBook Air unless you do a lot of A/V stuff.

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

3 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Since they have said they would support Intel Macs for the foreseeable future, you could always pick up one in the next year or so.

Yeah, that's going to be something that I have to look at it - in the Intel transition, they supported PPC Macs with OS releases for four years.  I just really need to sit down and figure out what I want my computing situation to look like going forward.    

Maybe I just build a really nice little gaming/Windows setup, keep my Mac mini around for whatever, and then go all in on an Apple CPU laptop with max memory and a shitload of storage to replace a lot of my current desktop stuff (web design/dev, photo and video work).

[Francisco 2.0 32,386]

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

Yeah, that's going to be something that I have to look at it - in the Intel transition, they supported PPC Macs with OS releases for four years.  I just really need to sit down and figure out what I want my computing situation to look like going forward.    

Maybe I just build a really nice little gaming/Windows setup, keep my Mac mini around for whatever, and then go all in on an Apple CPU laptop with max memory and a shitload of storage to replace a lot of my current desktop stuff (web design/dev, photo and video work).

I picked up a 2019 16" MBP back in the winter.  Not that I had any insight into Apple's plans, but it suited my needs at the time.  Judging from the benchmarks posted earlier, it appears that my laptop is antiquated now CPU wise, but everything else about it (aside battery life, obviously) is still relevant in the Apple world.

I may get one of the Airs for the bride to replace her 2018 model.  

I still use some vintage Apple gear (a 2010 Mac Pro, for instance) so I'm used to having something around that Apple doesn't support in one fashion or another. 

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

14 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

I still use some vintage Apple gear (a 2010 Mac Pro, for instance) so I'm used to having something around that Apple doesn't support in one fashion or another. 

I had a 2009, and I loved those towers, although in hindsight they were big, loud, and hot.

I also ran a Hackintosh for years as a photo/video beast, and file server.  Guess the Hackintosh days are kind of numbered.

Edited November 12, 2020 by atomheartbevo

[Francisco 2.0 32,386]

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

I had a 2009, and I loved those towers, although in hindsight they were big, loud, and hot.

I also ran a Hackintosh for years as a photo/video beat, and file server.  Guess the Hackintosh days are kind of numbered.

Mine's not loud; I run a utility to limit the fan speed and the most noise coming from it are when the  4 4TB drives spin up (have OS X on a SSD on a PCI card).  But yeah, that bitch can warm up the office (2 CPU's) when I'm encoding.  

 

 

 

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

I haven't been in the Apple ecosystem (still am not really) long enough to worry about compatibility with older apps.

I am pretty dependent on LibreOffice though, so I hope the changes don't fuck that up anytime soon.

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

3 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

I am pretty dependent on LibreOffice though, so I hope the changes don't fuck that up anytime soon.

LibreOffice for Mac is build on Xcode, so shouldn't be any problems, and there are already ARM versions of LibreOffice.  I would follow this thread:

But even if it wasn't, apparently a lot of newer apps compiled for X86 are running quite well on the new M1-powered Macs under Rosetta 2.

You can always wait a bit and go into an Apple Store and have an employee install it on a new M1 Mac in front of you.

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

5 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

LibreOffice for Mac is build on Xcode, so shouldn't be any problems, and there are already ARM versions of LibreOffice.  I would follow this thread:

But even if it wasn't, apparently a lot of newer apps compiled for X86 are running quite well on the new M1-powered Macs under Rosetta 2.

You can always wait a bit and go into an Apple Store and have an employee install it on a new M1 Mac in front of you.

Yeah I am probably good with my MBP for a while.  And I am fairly OS-agnostic, but W10 does kind of drive me batshit in trying to help FIL fix stuff (it's like Windows dumbed-down). But now that the PC world is fairly competent at building ultrabook-type machines, I'm not sure if I will stick with Apple on the next round or not.  I went Air and then MBP due to the at the time incomparable build-quality.

Edited November 12, 2020 by TwiceHorn

[52-80 19,144]

I kept flip flopping between the air vs pro for 16/512 configuration....then just ended up getting a 8/512 air. 

 

Figured the memory on chip integration and fast PCIe reduces dependency on RAM, because it's trivial to page between ram and storage

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

1 hour ago, 52-80 said:

I kept flip flopping between the air vs pro for 16/512 configuration....then just ended up getting a 8/512 air. 

 

Figured the memory on chip integration and fast PCIe reduces dependency on RAM, because it's trivial to page between ram and storage

I would probably still be on the Air, but I evidently put it down on or next to a puddle of coffee or coke in someone's conference room and the fans proceeded to distribute it over the interior of the machine, which eventually manifested as an erratic T key.

By then, the Air was obsolescing, so I replaced it with an MBP.

[Jkwellborn 6,686]

Can I get an external hard drive and hook it to a MacBook just to put office365 stuff on it?

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

Fucking dickbrains.

Tried to dl/install the update and it failed, apparently because they're having service problems.

And whatever it's doing in the background is near crippling my machine.

Thank God for chromebook.

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

Well, apparently the big slowdown was their app-signing servers took a big shit.  Or they were pointed to the wrong place.

Still won't install or even download.

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

This has been an abomination for Apple.  I have yet to see anyone on various apple forums successfully install Big Sur.

[UnivTex34 1,763]

15 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

This has been an abomination for Apple.  I have yet to see anyone on various apple forums successfully install Big Sur.

Yeah, I’m usually day one kinda guy, but I was on the beta, and crazy busy with work. Dodged a bullet. Downloading 14.3 beta now for that ProRaw though, so hopefully servers are coming back online.

[Francisco 2.0 32,386]

Tried to download on my iMac at work earlier; it failed.

Came home and tried on two laptops:  one connected to Apple, one through a VPN to an Australian endpoint  (where you could download it easily some reported on Macrumors) and a third on a wired desktop here at home.  The desktop finally got the download around 7 this evening.

I've already updated it, along with the two laptops.  All seems well.  I'll tackle the other stuff here that can run Big Sur in the next few days.

Not a good look for Apple, but signs are pointing to Akamai having the issues.

 

[Rimbo 25,910]

Funny that y'all are talking about rotating back into Apple. I just rotated out.

It's the touchscreen, stupid.

I want my high-end laptop to have a touchscreen. Not a "touch bar" that idiotically gets rid of the Esc key, a key I use a metric fuckton of the time.

[52-80 19,144]

51 minutes ago, Rimbo said:

Funny that y'all are talking about rotating back into Apple. I just rotated out.

It's the touchscreen, stupid.

I want my high-end laptop to have a touchscreen. Not a "touch bar" that idiotically gets rid of the Esc key, a key I use a metric fuckton of the time.

Smudges would drive me mad.  Also the ergonomics of reaching out to poke a vertical screen.  On a tablet or foldable where the screen rests on your lap, yes.  On a laptop?  Still prefer touchpad

[Rimbo 25,910]

1 hour ago, 52-80 said:

Smudges would drive me mad.  Also the ergonomics of reaching out to poke a vertical screen.  On a tablet or foldable where the screen rests on your lap, yes.  On a laptop?  Still prefer touchpad

A touchpad or mouse is a requirement, so I'm not sure why you're portraying it as some either/or thing.

Some things, like adding my signature to a PDF, drawing, etc, just work better with a touchscreen.

Heck, even something as basic as scrolling is just easier with a flick of a finger on the screen.

Edited November 13, 2020 by Rimbo

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

Affinity lead did some benchmarking.  Damn. The MBP and MBA are going to be workhorses for a lot of folks.

 

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

Well, finally got it downloaded and installed last night. Nice eye candy.  The mail app has nicely enlarged default text, so that's kind of nice.

Other than that, it ate 6GB of my ssd and works about the same.

Only one piece of software doesn't work that I have discovered.  I use something called CDock to make my dock transparent and tweak some other things about it.  It freezes the dock after a while.  Also, the widget sidebar, when you try to edit widgets makes the proc go bananas and the fans spin.

The dark mode dock is ugly af.  It may have been ugly af in Catalina.  Thanks to cdock. I was unaware.

Edited November 13, 2020 by TwiceHorn

[NAVY 6,740]

Just downloaded Big Sur. 10 minutes no issues. Will report back when install is complete 

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

Not sure if it's my abortive efforts to install cDock or what, but my dock is freezing and killall Dock doesn't work.  Renders the thing damn near useless.

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

Well, scratch that, it's something else.  It won't switch apps, I have to use spotlight to start anything.  Relaunching finder doesn't help.

Fucking piece of shit.

[Tailgate 3,021]

Alien Techonology? You tell me.

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

Should this be under Nerds?

Oh, and get your shit together Adobe

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-and-macos-big-sur.html

 

[Francisco 2.0 32,386]

https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-complete-d4fa771f0f2c

 

Quote

“Look, Clayton, I’m a busy man and I don’t have time to read drivel from academics but someone you told me you had this theory… and I’m wondering if you could come out to present what you’re learning to me and my staff and tell us how it applies to Intel.”

 

 

Quote

So begins the story that Clay Christensen would love to tell about how Andy Grove of Intel famously came to be a convert to the theory of disruption. Christensen shared with Grove his research on how steel minimills, starting at the low end of the market, had gained a foothold and used that to expand the addressable market, continued to move upmarket, and finally disrupted the giant incumbents like US Steel.

Grove immediately grokked it.

 

 

Quote

A couple of years later, after Grove had retired as CEO of Intel but remained its Executive Chariman, he stood on stage at Comdex. He told the world that the book he now held in his hands — Christensen’s just-published The Innovator’s Dilemma — was “the most important book he’d read in a decade”.

 

Spoiler

Grove used the learnings of Christensen’s research to guide Intel over his tenure. One of the most famous examples of this was Grove pushing Intel to do something that companies rarely have the appetite to do: launch a low-margin product that cannibalized its high end products. But Intel did it — they introduced the Celeron processor in 1998. It did cannibalize their Pentium processor to an extent, but it also enabled them to capture 35% of the market they were competing in. Perhaps more importantly still though, it staved off threats from the low end.

Under Grove’s steady hand, Intel built the chips that effectively powered the personal computer that soon sat in in every home and on every desk. Alongside Microsoft, it became synonymous with the desktop computer — and famously valuable.

It was not until 2005 that Grove retired from Intel. That happened to be the same year that Paul Otellini took over as CEO. Things seemed to be off to an auspicious start for Intel and Otellini — Apple, whose Mac business was on a tear at the time — was basically the only desktop computer manufacturer that was a holdout from the x86 world that Intel represented.

And Apple converted. Steve Jobs invited Otellini on stage at Macworld to make the announcement:

Intel’s victory seemed complete.

Indeed, that deal between Apple and Intel was more important for Intel than it could have ever possibly realized. But it wasn’t because Intel had sewn up the last of the desktop computer processor market. Instead, it was because Intel had just developed a relationship with a company that was thinking about what was coming next. And when Apple were figuring out how to power it — and by it, I’m talking about the iPhone — they came to their new partner, Intel, for first right of refusal to design the chips to do.

How did Intel respond?

Well, we’re fortunate to have an interview of Otellini in his last month on the job as Intel CEO. Here’s what Otellini decided to do, when presented with the option to power the iPhone:

"We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we'd done it," Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”

Otellini presented it as a single decision. Of course, the truth inside any big organization is often more complicated than just this — there are a whole host of decisions that led them to the point that they decided to pass on such an opportunity. My co-host of Exponent, Ben Thompson at Stratechery, characterized it like this:

Intel’s fall from king of the industry to observer of its fate was already in motion by 2005: despite the fact Intel had an ARM license for its XScale business, the company refused to focus on power efficiency and preferred to dictate designs to customers like Apple, contemplating their new iPhone, instead of trying to accommodate them (like TSMC).

Either way, though, the end result was the same. Just like its partner in the PC era, Microsoft, Intel was so ensnared by its success in the PC paradigm that it couldn’t see out of it. With that — and the margins associated with its success — it saw no need to question its winning formula: that of integration of chip design and manufacturing. A promising customer comes knocking with something that doesn’t look to have the same margins as the existing business?

Not interested.

Yesterday, Apple announced the first Macs that will run on silicon that they themselves designed. No longer will Intel be inside. It’s the first change in the architecture of the CPU that the Mac runs on since… well, 2005, when they switched to Intel.

There’s a lot of great coverage of the new chips, but one piece of analysis in particular stood out to me — this chart over at Anandtech:

What about this chart is interesting? Well, it turns out, it bears a striking resemblance to one drawn before — actually, 25 years ago. Take a look at this chart drawn by Clayton Christensen, back in 1995 — in his very first article on disruptive innovation:

He might not have realized it at the time, but when Grove was reading Christensen’s work, he wasn’t just reading about how Intel would go on to conquer the personal computer market. He was also reading about what would eventually befall the company he co-founded, 25 years before it happened.

The causal mechanism behind disruption that Grove so quickly understood was that even if a disruptive innovation started off as inferior, by virtue of it dramatically expanding the market, it would improve at a far greater rate than the incumbent. It was what enabled Intel (and Microsoft) to win the computing market in the first place: even though personal computers were cheaper, selling something that sat in every home and on every desk ends up funding a lot more R&D spend than selling a few very expensive servers that only existed in server rooms.

Similarly, Apple’s initial foray into chips didn’t produce anything that special in terms of silicon. But it didn’t need to — people were happy to just have a computer that they could keep in their pocket. Apple has gone on to sell a lot of iPhones, and all those sales have funded a lot of R&D. The silicon inside them has kept improving, and improving, and improving. And their fab partner, TSMC, has gone along with them for the ride.

Finally, today marks the day where, for Intel, those two lines on the graph intersect. Unlike the last time the two lines intersected in the personal computer market, Intel is not the one doing the disrupting. And now, it’s just a matter of time before the performance of ARM-based chips continues its march upmarket into Intel’s last refuge: the server business.

Things are not going to go well for them from here on out.

 

 

[52-80 19,144]

10 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Should this be under Nerds?

Oh, and get your shit together Adobe

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-and-macos-big-sur.html

 

predictable... adobe has been long becoming the EA of professional software

[52-80 19,144]

11 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

  Hide contents

 My co-host of Exponent, Ben Thompson at Stratechery, characterized it like this:

Intel’s fall from king of the industry to observer of its fate was already in motion by 2005: despite the fact Intel had an ARM license for its XScale business, the company refused to focus on power efficiency and preferred to dictate designs to customers like Apple, contemplating their new iPhone, instead of trying to accommodate them (like TSMC).

Either way, though, the end result was the same. Just like its partner in the PC era, Microsoft, Intel was so ensnared by its success in the PC paradigm that it couldn’t see out of it.

...

What about this chart is interesting? Well, it turns out, it bears a striking resemblance to one drawn before — actually, 25 years ago. Take a look at this chart drawn by Clayton Christensen, back in 1995 — in his very first article on disruptive innovation:

 

Isn't this article really intellectually lazy though?  Firstly, trying to pin Intel's recent failure on a decision from 2005.  Firstly, not even Apple saw the magnitude of the success of the iPhone.  Secondly, they ate their competitors lunch for the next 10 years.  If you gave that forward prediction to the executive management (probably none of whom were still around in 2015), they would do it again in a heartbeat. 

 

It's only in the last few years that their stagnation allowed AMD and NVDA to rocket ahead.

 

And calling back to that generic ass abstract graph as if its soooo unique to could have only been prescient instead of coincidental and inevitable... pfft

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

I think the premise of the article is reasonable.

But Intel has been monomaniacally undiversified since a few years into the PC revolution, and that is the bigger issue.

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

3 hours ago, 52-80 said:

Firstly, not even Apple saw the magnitude of the success of the iPhone.  Secondly, they ate their competitors lunch for the next 10 years. 

I think they saw the market was there and knew it would be massively successful.   They had seen a need for the iPod and executed on it 4 or 5 years earlier.  Even though plenty of other companies had MP3 players out there, Apple came in with a better design and larger capacity, and started raking it in.  And they already had the Apple Newton to give them some insight on a small computing device.

It was only natural that they turn their sites to Phones - they already knew people wanted to only have one device in their pocket, that was both a (smart)phone and an MP3 player.

I was a Palm and Pocket PC/Windows Mobile phone user in that early 2000s era right before the iPhone curb-stomped everybody.

Palm and PPC/Windows Mobile phones were just on the edge of being amazingly useful for even non-technical people, but they were an absolute pain in the ass to get data and apps onto and off of them, and most of them had shit for storage (music, apps).  You had to buy from various little stores (depending on the app) and then get the app on the device, and you had to make absolutely sure that you were buying the right version of the app, since apps might vary widely between the hardware platforms.  You had a mixture of small input areas, even physical keyboards depending on the device - while Microsoft and Palm had their hardware guidelines (if I recall, Palm had a more consistent platform), you saw, with the PPC/Windows Mobile devices, everything form a display that was the full size of the device with a slide-out keyboard, to a tiny little square display with a tiny physical keyboard.

These were top Windows Mobile smartphones before the iPhone

  

and Palm phones

iPhone came in fully polished, and apps and music were easy to load, and typical users didn't have to worry about which App Store to use, what version of the app would work with their screen/keyboard, etc.

[Francisco 2.0 32,386]

Bloody hell.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-benchmark/

 

Quote

The new Rosetta 2 Geekbench results uploaded show that the M1 chip running on a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM has single-core and multi-core scores of 1,313 and 5,888 respectively. Since this version of Geekbench is running through Apple's translation layer Rosetta 2, an impact on performance is to be expected. Rosetta 2 running x86 code appears to be achieving 78%-79% of the performance of native Apple Silicon code.

 

Quote

Despite the impact on performance, the single-core Rosetta 2 score results still outperforms any other Intel Mac, including the 2020 27-inch iMac with Intel Core i9-10910 @ 3.6GHz.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 16, 2020 by Francisco 2.0

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

24 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Bloody hell.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-benchmark/

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

If Parallels and VMWare can get their virtualization stuff running solidly, this is going to be amazing.

Parallels:  We have a working version, and Apple was running Linux under Parallels Desktop on Rosetta 2 back in June, and it was just fine.

Adobe:  We are having problems saving and exporting files.

[Francisco 2.0 32,386]

9 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

If Parallels and VMWare can get their virtualization stuff running solidly, this is going to be amazing.

Parallels:  We have a working version, and Apple was running Linux under Parallels Desktop on Rosetta 2 back in June, and it was just fine.

Adobe:  We are having problems saving and exporting files.

 

I'm thinking that Microsoft will sell directly in the App Store an ARM version of Windows 10 that doesn't need a VM; it will be a self contained app version of Windows.   Just buy it, download it, double click and answer a few questions.  

 

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

3 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

I'm thinking that Microsoft will sell directly in the App Store an ARM version of Windows 10 that doesn't need a VM; it will be a self contained app version of Windows.   Just buy it, download it, double click and answer a few questions.  

Wouldn't surprise me, they could easily package it to run as a self-contained version, since they have a lot of virtualization experience.

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

Damn, the MacBook Air is fanless, and therefore throttles faster than the MBP, and yet it's still handily beating 8-core i9s in multi-core scores.

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

And the MBA is holding its own against the MBP.  Granted,  I doubt it can sustain that kind of performance for too long, but if it's that fast and efficient, it won't need to.

Edited November 16, 2020 by atomheartbevo

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-silicon-m1-graphics-performance#xenforo-comments-3662289

Quote

If the Apple M1's processing power didn't leave you impressed, maybe the 5nm chip's graphical prowess will. A new GFXBench 5.0 submission for the M1 exhibits its dominance over oldies, such as the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and Radeon RX 560.

Quote

 If you're looking for a point of reference, the M1 ties the Radeon RX 560 (2.6 TFLOPS), and it's just a few TFLOPS away from catching the GeForce GTX 1650 (2.9 TFLOPS).

 

[52-80 19,144]

kinda sucks the apple showroom is all closed down, i wanted to poke and prod at the laptops again (amazon order is delayed).  think they hvae them displayed at best buy tho

[atomheartbevo 89,623]

Hundreds of thousands of Mac fans cried out "when will Blizzard role out a universal/native WOW client?"

After talking to a friend who is a developer, just to reiterate something earlier, get 16GB if you have any questions about what you need.  The way it handles memory, etc. is amazing and efficient/fast, but if you needed 16GB before, you will still need 16GB now.

FWIW, he said he had no problems playing with 4K video on the developer machine.

[torre 1,285]

Concerning.          Excerpts:

 

Apple said Monday it'll change the way it logs data from your Mac about the apps you launch. Cybersecurity experts pointed out Thursday that a security feature was sending the information to Apple along with your IP address, which effectively ties data about the apps you use to your location. The data was also transmitted to Apple over the internet without any encryption, meaning that it'd be easy for a third party to intercept and read.

The result of the data collection, security blogger Jeffrey Paul wrote, is that "you simply can't power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored."

While the data collection was happening in previous versions of MacOS, Paul found that the tools some tech-savvy iMac and MacBook owners used to stop the data collection no longer work on computers running the latest version, Big Sur. Apple released the new operating system to the public on Thursday.

Additionally, Apple's collection of IP addresses can no longer be defeated with a VPN, a service that masks your location with a proxy IP address. That's because the security feature (and some other Apple services) can circumvent VPNs on devices running the Big Sur operating system, according to security researchers who focus on Apple products, collecting users' true IP addresses instead.

Now, Apple says it has stopped logging user IP addresses collected by the feature, and will delete previous logs of IP addresses. Without IP addresses, there's far less danger that records of app usage could be tied back to users. The company said it has never collected Apple IDs or other information that can identify a user's specific Mac with the app usage data.

Apple also committed to other changes within the coming year. It'll encrypt data about app usage while it flows over the internet to the company's servers, and it will let users opt out of the security check that collects the data.

 

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-says-itll-change-how-it-collects-data-on-the-macos-apps-you-launch/

Edited November 16, 2020 by torre

[TwiceHorn 31,438]

4 minutes ago, torre said:

Concerning.          Excerpts:

 

Apple said Monday it'll change the way it logs data from your Mac about the apps you launch. Cybersecurity experts pointed out Thursday that a security feature was sending the information to Apple along with your IP address, which effectively ties data about the apps you use to your location. The data was also transmitted to Apple over the internet without any encryption, meaning that it'd be easy for a third party to intercept and read.

The result of the data collection, security blogger Jeffrey Paul wrote, is that "you simply can't power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored."

While the data collection was happening in previous versions of MacOS, Paul found that the tools some tech-savvy iMac and MacBook owners used to stop the data collection no longer work on computers running the latest version, Big Sur. Apple released the new operating system to the public on Thursday.

Additionally, Apple's collection of IP addresses can no longer be defeated with a VPN, a service that masks your location with a proxy IP address. That's because the security feature (and some other Apple services) can circumvent VPNs on devices running the Big Sur operating system, according to security researchers who focus on Apple products, collecting users' true IP addresses instead.

Now, Apple says it has stopped logging user IP addresses collected by the feature, and will delete previous logs of IP addresses. Without IP addresses, there's far less danger that records of app usage could be tied back to users. The company said it has never collected Apple IDs or other information that can identify a user's specific Mac with the app usage data.

Apple also committed to other changes within the coming year. It'll encrypt data about app usage while it flows over the internet to the company's servers, and it will let users opt out of the security check that collects the data.

 

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-says-itll-change-how-it-collects-data-on-the-macos-apps-you-launch/

I'm fairly sure windows does that too, for "license check" reasons moreso than "security" or compatibility.

[Francisco 2.0 32,386]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-silicon-m1-macbook-pro-earns-7508-multi-core-score-in-cinebench-benchmark.2268880/

 

Quote

The new M1 Macs are now arriving to customers, and one of the first people to get the new M1 13-inch MacBook Pro with 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, and 8GB unified memory has run a much anticipated R23 Cinebench benchmark on the 8GB 13-inch MacBook Pro with 512GB of storage to give us a better idea of performance.

Cinebench is a more intensive multi-thread test than Geekbench 5, testing performance over a longer period of time, and it can provide a clearer overview of how a machine will work in the real world.

The M1 MacBook Pro earned a multi-core Cinebench score of 7508, and a single-core score of 1498, which is similar in performance to some of Intel's 11th-generation chips.

 

Quote

Comparatively, a 2020 16-inch MacBook Pro with 2.3GHz Core i9 chip earned a multi-core score of 8818, according to a MacRumors reader who benchmarked his machine with the new R23 update that came out last week. The 2.6GHz low-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1113 and a multi-core score of 6912 on the same test, and the high-end prior-generation MacBook Air earned a single-core score of 1119 and a multi-core score of 4329.

Other Cinebench R23 scores can be found on the CPU Monkey website for both multi-core and single-core performance. 
 

 

Quote

It's worth noting that the new M1 Macs are lower performance machines that aren't meant for heavy duty rendering tasks. The M1 MacBook Pro replaces the low-end machine, while the MacBook Air has always been more of a consumer machine than a Pro machine.

Apple does have plans for higher-end Pro machines with Apple Silicon chips, but the company has said that it will take around two years to transition the entire Mac lineup to Arm-based chips. The Cinebench scores for the MacBook Air bode well for future Macs that are expected to get even higher performance M-series chips.