|
Binary Badger posted:There are currently existing ARM workstations with PCIe slots, if Apple makes an ARM Mac Pro I doubt they'd refuse to put in some. Atto, OWC, *maybe* StarTech and HighPoint.
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 00:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 11:08 |
|
|
Jobs was a well renowned rear end in a top hat so I am confident that he had a huge effect on Apple’s products. Ive? I never really heard him described as such so I doubt the products’ end attributes can be ascribed as definitively to his vision or intervention. A pursuit of thinness for the sake of thinness sounds more like the fingerprint of MBA fart huffers at Apple who are doing a thing that worked previously but don’t understand the context of why it was so important. Making things thinner in the 2000-2010 era rwas incredibly important; pushing for 0.5mm after 2010 was a continuation of that trend without the underlying technological need and innovation.
cowofwar fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Aug 8, 2020 |
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 00:19
|
|
|
It’s not that Jobs wasn’t hugely important and influential, more that it wasn’t like literally everything he touched turned to gold. Many of his ideas were stupid.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 00:24
|
|
|
Ive has always been highly regarded at Apple just as a Jobs favourite, plus he had the title. I'm pretty sure Ive had a lot of impact.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 00:25
|
|
|
It's been well documented that Jobs had final say and a lot of design feedback on a lot of their key devices, successful or not. That doesn't mean there aren't legions of people with advanced degrees or plenty of experience who aren't contributing. And not every idea originated with Steve Jobs, or Ive, or any of the others at the management level. But if Steve Jobs wanted something thinner, or more flexible, or to not use a stylus, the design teams did their best to make sure those expectations were met.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 00:29
|
|
|
Fun Jobs stories: 1) sometime around 2001 he decided that it would be super cool to do a Willie Wonka-style Apple HQ tour for the fans. Like, he literally wanted six golden tickets distributed in iPod (or Mac?) packages, and he wanted to get a purple Wonka-style suit with a top hat and get songs made and maybe film the whole thing...and fortunately the board talked him out of it. 2) he got into a yelling match with board members because he wanted iPods to remain exclusive to Macs and the board overruled him (at one point he apparently said something to the tune of “you’re all a bunch of assholes” and stormed off). He quickly recanted when Apple started printing money hand over fist from iPod-curious PC users like myself. 3) the Mac Cube was his baby through and through, and he loved that thing. There’s a story about him gushing to a journalist over how they got the disc drive ‘just right’ to where it would just sense and magically yoink a CD from your hand, and then getting pissy when the journalist asks why it didn’t have an eject button (“we worked so hard on making this magical experience and you wanna ruin it with a button!?”). Then when the Cube, like, immediately tanked Apple released a statement that they were “putting Mac Cube on ice” and he memory holed that poo poo so fast...but you saw vestiges of it all over the place going forward (buttonless SuperDrives, Mac Mini, 5th Ave Apple Store, etc). Tldr- Jobs was famously very stubborn and moody but he was very good at turning on a dime when he accepted that he was wrong about something. Or just pretending that he hadn’t been that excited about the bad idea in the first place. And an Ive story- apparently Ive was in the office when one of the design teams streamed Samsung’s Galaxy Fold event (this was 2019 and he was already on his way out at this point/hadn’t been doing day-to-day management for several years) and he said something like “that’s going to bomb immediately” and it turned into him holding court and doing an impromptu q+a about all of the many ways that Apple had tried prototyping folding/dual-screen devices before deciding to pass on them. According to witnesses present the explainer got really granular, with Ive going into stuff like glass tensility and manufacturing limitations and how apparently Apple has a lab just for making and testing hinges.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 01:12
|
|
|
Crunchy Black posted:Atto, OWC, *maybe* StarTech and HighPoint. Not sure I'd put OWC in there as a vendor/developer, they only have one PCIe product and it's basically a redesign of the Apricorn Velocity Duo, which isn't made anymore. Their other self-branded PCIe product was a generic SATA card that they sold for a while then mysteriously shitcanned that people bitched about towards the end of its 'life.' Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Aug 8, 2020 |
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 01:54
|
|
|
Ok Comboomer posted:And an Ive story- apparently Ive was in the office when one of the design teams streamed Samsung’s Galaxy Fold event (this was 2019 and he was already on his way out at this point/hadn’t been doing day-to-day management for several years) and he said something like “that’s going to bomb immediately” and it turned into him holding court and doing an impromptu q+a about all of the many ways that Apple had tried prototyping folding/dual-screen devices before deciding to pass on them. I really hope this is true, and I really hope some day I’ve writes a memoir, or at least does more interviews. I can think of only a few people who’ve been in charge of products produced at that scale that are pretty well regarded, it’d be a waste if we didn’t get to hear more from him. I think about his little segment in Objectified a lot and how it was probably the most interesting part of the film.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 04:52
|
|
|
Ok Comboomer posted:I hope they don’t kill the current MP design with the ARM transition but I think it’s likelier that they do that than Apple bringing PCIe expansion card compatibility to their ARM chips. Hope I’m wrong! The iMac Pro always seemed like a stop gap for a "pro" desktop cause Intel's consumer core counts continuing to rise (while the Xeons were pushing bigger and hotter), although I was expecting the chassis to be silently recycled into the regular iMac while killing the iMac Pro.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 05:11
|
|
|
I had basically decided to wait for Apple Silicon, but now Costco has the base MBP for $1100 with tax and now I'm not sure. I am running a 2014 MBA right now so it is kind of a dog. And I can get $200 on a trade in for this one. Decisions... $900 for a much better machine and transition device to ARM isn't terrible.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 05:53
|
|
|
Binary Badger posted:Don't really know why Apple is even bothering to sell the iMac Pro at this point. Splinter posted:I think part of the reason for the iMac Pro was once they finally admitted their mistake with the trashcan Pro, they wanted to make some newer workstation CPU/GPUs available in the meantime while they worked on the new Mac Pro design. Also, they looked at their own numbers and the iMac was already, without a Pro version, the most popular desktop Mac for users with "pro" needs. They revealed that during the 2017 press event where they admitted the trashcan wasn't a success. https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives Based on that, the iMac Pro can be seen as both a stopgap product and a future direction. Lacking a way to get at the RAM is because it's a stopgap: the Pro moved from SODIMMs to full size DIMMs and a CPU that needs a board layout where the CPU sits between two groups of DIMM sockets, so the door would have to be ginormous, and that just doesn't work without a total redesign of the chassis. So they just used the space where the door was for new cooling vents, a much smaller change. But clearly their data from a few years back showed that a high end iMac can serve many pro-user needs, so I don't think they want to discontinue or neglect it. What's going on right now is that Intel's product lineup and release schedules make things awkward. Intel traditionally didn't want to let client CPUs have many cores, usually releases server/workstation CPUs of a given design generation about a year after the related client products, and usually gives client CPUs higher clocks. Now that Intel is being forced to increase client core counts, you get situations like this, where the latest 10-core client chip makes the older 10-core workstation chips look bad. And to quantify "older", it looks like the last wave of Intel Xeon W chips suitable for iMac Pro launched in Q4 2019. A bunch of W SKUs launched Q2 2020, but they're mostly laptop parts. No "W" CPU with more than 10 cores has debuted in 2020. So, maybe we'll get an iMac Pro refresh as soon as Intel ships their part of the refresh. I doubt it will have a redesigned chassis though. Those resources have probably mostly been going into designs for ARM Macs the past few years, which makes sense out of why they just kept shipping the initial Intel iMac Pro design.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 08:40
|
|
|
Cozmosis posted:I had basically decided to wait for Apple Silicon, but now Costco has the base MBP for $1100 with tax and now I'm not sure. I am running a 2014 MBA right now so it is kind of a dog. And I can get $200 on a trade in for this one.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 08:41
|
|
|
Cozmosis posted:I had basically decided to wait for Apple Silicon, but now Costco has the base MBP for $1100 with tax and now I'm not sure. I am running a 2014 MBA right now so it is kind of a dog. And I can get $200 on a trade in for this one. Don’t forget the 2 year warranty, 4 if you pay with their credit card and a discounted AppleCare if you want that instead. I was in the same boat as you but jumped on the 10th gen 13” that Best Buy has for $200 off plus 10% back with their credit card. Might be a bad move but for me the Windows stopgap was worth more to me than the ability to run iPad apps. Plus I can always flip it if I regret it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 09:01
|
|
|
Yeah, the Costco benefits and Apple resale is always a winner. My one concern, really is will the market on the Intel models fall off once the ARM transition happens, and that I prefer more storage and more ram but I suppose I don’t NEED either of those things.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 16:08
|
|
|
I think Intel machines are going to be basically worthless 3-5 years from now. Exactly what happened with powerpc -> Intel.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 16:46
|
|
|
redeyes posted:I think Intel machines are going to be basically worthless 3-5 years from now. Exactly what happened with powerpc -> Intel. I'm not sure - I think the difference will be that the rest of the world is still on x86. Nothing else really used PowerPC other than Apple when they switched to Intel. I guess game consoles did for one generation but other than that...
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 16:54
|
|
|
"Are C2D Macs still usable?" Not for anything development-related. #1 you can't run the last version or two of Mac OS, #2 it takes like...30 minutes to build something like OpenSSL so if you're going to use Homebrew, go mow the lawn or something while you wait for poo poo to install. Funny enough this is what it was like developing before SSD's and poo poo. I remember waiting like 4 hours to built Qt back in the day on my Thinkpad.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 16:56
|
|
|
FCKGW posted:Don’t forget the 2 year warranty, 4 if you pay with their credit card and a discounted AppleCare if you want that instead. FYI in case anyone cares, Apple stuff doesn’t apply to the Bestbuy rewards program. Kind of a rude surprise to me when I was expecting a decent gift card after buying my 16” there.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 17:04
|
|
|
Ok Comboomer posted:2) he got into a yelling match with board members because he wanted iPods to remain exclusive to Macs and the board overruled him This is a very strange model of corporate governance. Boards generally don’t have the ability to overrule the CEO on product decisions without replacing the CEO outright. I wonder if Apple’s corporate bylaws are public anywhere.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 17:47
|
|
|
redeyes posted:I think Intel machines are going to be worthless 3-5 years from now. Exactly what happened with PowerPC -> Intel. Nah. The shift from PPC to Intel is hugely different. Back then, the tech was changing at a much faster pace than it is now. Within a few short years, macs went from single-core, 32bit, sub-3GHz G5’s to dual and quad-core 64bit 4+GHz Intels with SSDs. Nowadays a modern Intel PC will easily last ten years before needing to be replaced. I don't foresee Apple cutting x86 support for at least that long. FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Aug 8, 2020 |
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 17:56
|
|
|
Subjunctive posted:This is a very strange model of corporate governance. Boards generally don’t have the ability to overrule the CEO on product decisions without replacing the CEO outright. I wonder if Apple’s corporate bylaws are public anywhere. A person or group that can fire someone can tell them how to do their job by issuing ultimatums. Whether or not the power exists de jure doesn't really matter. The board can say "no" to a specific decision or approach by saying, "if you go forward with this, we would have serious doubts about your ability to lead the company."
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 18:16
|
|
|
Space Gopher posted:A person or group that can fire someone can tell them how to do their job by issuing ultimatums. Whether or not the power exists de jure doesn't really matter. The board can say "no" to a specific decision or approach by saying, "if you go forward with this, we would have serious doubts about your ability to lead the company." I mean, I’ve sat on boards large and small, and I’ve discussed Apple board meetings with a member of that board (though they were not there during the iPod-Windows decision era specifically); I‘m familiar with the power dynamic. He had presided over the revival of the company and the launch of the transformative iPod. No threat to fire him over not porting iTunes to Windows was going to be credible to him, and he didn’t give a poo poo about anyone’s “serious doubts”. Jobs’ relationship to his board was not a deferential one, like you often see with serial CEOs-for-hire. This isn’t even a matter than needs board approval or advisement. I’d be more surprised that it got time at the meeting but the Apple board meetings are well known to have been whatever Steve wanted them to be, with legally-required governance jammed in around the edges.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 18:26
|
|
|
ratbert90 posted:Nah. The shift from PPC to Intel is hugely different. Back then, the tech was changing at a much faster pace than it is now. Within a few short years, macs went from single-core, 32bit, sub-3GHz G5’s to dual and quad-core 64bit 4+GHz Intels with SSDs. PPC was supported for a long time but the thing is the performance was trash through Rosetta.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 18:28
|
|
|
Binary Badger posted:There are currently existing ARM workstations with PCIe slots, if Apple makes an ARM Mac Pro I doubt they'd refuse to put in some. If a vendor is already writing device drivers for Intel Macs, they're obviously capable and willing. The design of Apple's driver system means that porting an existing Mac driver to ARM shouldn't be a challenge in most cases. Both IOKit and DriverKit drivers are written in C++, not x86 assembly. Most device drivers only have to worry about low level interactions with the widget they're running, because Apple-provided framework APIs abstract away all the typical CPU-specific things a driver might want to do. Unless a driver was written to fight the design of the system (*), the initial port from x86 to ARM is likely to be a simple recompile. Some might need a few changes to compile clean, but honestly this is less likely than it would be in an application. Drivers are usually tiny relative to apps, and tend to be very on-the-rails code. This is extra true in Apple's world, where most drivers are written by inheriting from an Apple-provided base class and overriding methods as appropriate to customize for a specific widget. So, for cleanly written drivers, the main work is going to be debug and test. * - Most likely scenario for that is a lovely port of a Windows or Linux driver. Drivers shouldn't be ported from one OS to another with the intent of keeping the codebase intact or shared in any significant way. Nevertheless, this being the real world, bad things happen sometimes. I once had to read the source of a really gross and terrible Windows-to-Linux driver port... and the reason I needed to read it was that it had some dumb problems I had to debug.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 20:25
|
|
|
redeyes posted:PPC was supported for a long time but the thing is the performance was trash through Rosetta. Yeah, but I have a hard time believing that Rosetta2 will be bad, as Apple owns the CPU this time.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 20:51
|
|
|
Cozmosis posted:Yeah, the Costco benefits and Apple resale is always a winner. My one concern, really is will the market on the Intel models fall off once the ARM transition happens, and that I prefer more storage and more ram but I suppose I don’t NEED either of those things. I dunno, I could see there being on ongoing secondary market for the last Intel Macs available on account of Boot Camp.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 21:16
|
|
|
I get the sense that very, very few Mac users actually use Boot Camp.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2020 22:05
|
|
|
Maybe ten years ago, but uh, really, what do you need windows for?* * not counting games, duh
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 01:11
|
|
|
Ugh, rebooting.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 02:40
|
|
|
KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:I get the sense that very, very few Mac users actually use Boot Camp. Only way to game, man. Even with games released on MacOS side by side, playing it on Boot Camp meant better graphics and framerates.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 02:50
|
|
|
Fallom posted:FYI in case anyone cares, Apple stuff doesn’t apply to the Bestbuy rewards program. It does if you use the credit card, so you would get the 10% bonus mentioned.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 02:56
|
|
|
EL BROMANCE posted:Ugh, rebooting.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 07:25
|
|
|
Any particularly nice macOSX compliant/friendly WIRED keyboards? I am thinking about buying one of the mid range fancy docking stations with a charging capability, hooking it up HDMI for my tv, while using my awesome trackball, connecting my synth, and that gives space for 1 more usb port. I freak out of I have something that requires charging, I want to keep it simple having a wire so never have to say 'oh no i have to charge it again.' *goes on rant about life revolving around charging my dead battery iphone, and charging my dead battery mpb*
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 08:39
|
|
|
Binary Badger posted:There are currently existing ARM workstations with PCIe slots, if Apple makes an ARM Mac Pro I doubt they'd refuse to put in some. Well good news since kexts are basically deprecated and replaced with user mode drivers via system extensions
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 08:46
|
|
|
excellent bird guy posted:Any particularly nice macOSX compliant/friendly WIRED keyboards? I am thinking about buying one of the mid range fancy docking stations with a charging capability, hooking it up HDMI for my tv, while using my awesome trackball, connecting my synth, and that gives space for 1 more usb port. I freak out of I have something that requires charging, I want to keep it simple having a wire so never have to say 'oh no i have to charge it again.' You could get Apple's magic keyboard 2. Same layout as your laptop's keyboard, and obviously the most Mac friendly keyboard you're gonna find. Yes, it's a rechargeable bluetooth keyboard. With a non-replaceable battery, so once the factory one wears out... I am not, however, more than mildly trolling you at this time. See, you charge it by using an included cable to connect it to your computer's USB port. While it's wired up, it functions as a wired USB keyboard - you can turn the bluetooth radio off and it'll still work. So it's both what you hate and what you love rolled into one product.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 10:56
|
|
|
Hmmm. Thanks Bob but you know what, I think I'm just going to keep using it as it is. NOT buy a docking station, and just deal with what I got and learn to like it. I think this would be the wisest course of action, compared to throwing more money in towards peripherals. Yes yes sounds like a good plan, my mind has been made up.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 11:32
|
|
|
excellent bird guy posted:Any particularly nice macOSX compliant/friendly WIRED keyboards? I am thinking about buying one of the mid range fancy docking stations with a charging capability, hooking it up HDMI for my tv, while using my awesome trackball, connecting my synth, and that gives space for 1 more usb port. I freak out of I have something that requires charging, I want to keep it simple having a wire so never have to say 'oh no i have to charge it again.' I use a Keychron K4, you can use it wired or wireless. https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k4-wireless-mechanical-keyboard
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 14:39
|
|
|
phosdex posted:I use a Keychron K4, you can use it wired or wireless. thank you. love some gateron blue switches. Bookmarked
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 14:53
|
|
|
cowofwar posted:Jobs was a well renowned rear end in a top hat so I am confident that he had a huge effect on Apple’s products. Ive? I never really heard him described as such so I doubt the products’ end attributes can be ascribed as definitively to his vision or intervention. A pursuit of thinness for the sake of thinness sounds more like the fingerprint of MBA fart huffers at Apple who are doing a thing that worked previously but don’t understand the context of why it was so important. Making things thinner in the 2000-2010 era rwas incredibly important; pushing for 0.5mm after 2010 was a continuation of that trend without the underlying technological need and innovation. It's hard to deny that Apple has lost a bit of its edge since Jobs parted. He spearheaded the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Devices that shook computing and society itself. That said, one could argue after his death there is only so much more one could innovate. It's not like everything he touched was gold (Apple TV). I just wonder if Apple would still be as "cutting edge" today as they were previously if Jobs was still at the helm.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 22:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 11:08 |
|
|
punk rebel ecks posted:It's hard to deny that Apple has lost a bit of its edge since Jobs parted. He spearheaded the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Devices that shook computing and society itself. That said, one could argue after his death there is only so much more one could innovate. It's not like everything he touched was gold (Apple TV). I just wonder if Apple would still be as "cutting edge" today as they were previously if Jobs was still at the helm. You mean the A-series of chips and the incoming switch to “Apple Silicon” aren’t “cutting edge”? Putting a functional electrocardiograph into a waterproof GPS Dick Tracy phone-watch and shipping it for under $500 isn’t “cutting edge”? We’ll never truly know what Apple 2020 would look like if Jobs hadn’t died, but to say that they’re dramatically less “cutting edge” now feels like it draws as much from the Jobs personality cult as from evidence. It’s definitely true that the Mac feels a lot less interesting these days. But aside from the assumption that Steve would’ve probably been way meaner to the keyboard team than Tim, everything you or I could come up with would get super speculative and woo-woo super quick. But I think it’s just a lot harder to be impressed by a tech company these days in general. We’re rightly a lot more critical of corporations and their leaders, and of ‘technocracy’ and its proponents. We’re a lot more critical of tech-capitalism. Also pretty much all of Silicon Valley and Redmond have modeled their modern/post-2010 image and operating style on what Apple was doing. Compare Nadella-era Microsoft to the early Ballmer days. Post-ultrabooks there’s a lot less water between the industrial design language of an Apple product and a Windows/Linux or Android/Chrome device. MacBook Pros felt like the premium brushed metal future in 2007 when compared to the pigs Dell was shipping at the time. That’s much less of a thing these days, but it has way less to do with Apple dropping their game IMO than it does with these other companies raising theirs.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2020 23:25
|
|