The Behind-the-Scenes Changes Found In MacOS High Sierra (arstechnica.com) 205
Apple officially announced macOS High Sierra at WWDC 2017 earlier this month. While the new OS doesn't feature a ton of user-visible improvements and is ultimately shaping up to be a low-key release, it does feature several behind-the-scenes changes that could help make it the most stable macOS update in years. Andrew Cunningham from Ars Technica has "browsed the dev docs and talked with Apple to get some more details of the update's foundational changes." Here are some excerpts from three key areas of the report: APFS
Like iOS 10.3, High Sierra will convert your boot drive to APFS when you first install it -- this will be true for all Macs that run High Sierra, regardless of whether they're equipped with an SSD, a spinning HDD, or a Fusion Drive setup. In the current beta installer, you're given an option to uncheck the APFS box (checked by default) before you start the install process, though that doesn't necessarily guarantee that it will survive in the final version. It's also not clear at this point if there are edge cases -- third-party SSDs, for instance -- that won't automatically be converted. But assuming that most people stick with the defaults and that most people don't crack their Macs open, most Mac users who do the upgrade are going to get the new filesystem.
HEVC and HEIF
All High Sierra Macs will pick up support for HEVC, but only very recent models will support any kind of hardware acceleration. This is important because playing HEVC streams, especially at high resolutions and bitrates, is a pretty hardware-intensive operation. HEVC playback can consume most of a CPU's processor cycles, and especially on slower dual-core laptop processors, smooth playback may be impossible altogether. Dedicated HEVC encode and decode blocks in CPUs and GPUs can handle the heavy lifting more efficiently, freeing up your CPU and greatly reducing power consumption, but HEVC's newness means that dedicated hardware isn't especially prevalent yet.
Metal 2
While both macOS and iOS still nominally support open, third-party APIs like OpenGL and OpenCL, it's clear that the company sees Metal as the way forward for graphics and GPU compute on its platforms. Apple's OpenGL support in macOS and iOS hasn't changed at all in years, and there are absolutely no signs that Apple plans to support Vulkan. But the API will enable some improvements for end users, too. People with newer GPUs should expect to benefit from some performance improvements, not just in games but in macOS itself; Apple says the entire WindowServer is now using Metal, which should improve the fluidity and consistency of transitions and animations within macOS; this can be a problem on Macs when you're pushing multiple monitors or using higher Retina scaling modes on, especially if you're using integrated graphics. Metal 2 is also the go-to API for supporting VR on macOS, something Apple is pushing in a big way with its newer iMacs and its native support for external Thunderbolt 3 GPU enclosures. Apple says that every device that supports Metal should support at least some of Metal 2's new features, but the implication there is that some older GPUs won't be able to do everything the newer ones can do.
Like iOS 10.3, High Sierra will convert your boot drive to APFS when you first install it -- this will be true for all Macs that run High Sierra, regardless of whether they're equipped with an SSD, a spinning HDD, or a Fusion Drive setup. In the current beta installer, you're given an option to uncheck the APFS box (checked by default) before you start the install process, though that doesn't necessarily guarantee that it will survive in the final version. It's also not clear at this point if there are edge cases -- third-party SSDs, for instance -- that won't automatically be converted. But assuming that most people stick with the defaults and that most people don't crack their Macs open, most Mac users who do the upgrade are going to get the new filesystem.
HEVC and HEIF
All High Sierra Macs will pick up support for HEVC, but only very recent models will support any kind of hardware acceleration. This is important because playing HEVC streams, especially at high resolutions and bitrates, is a pretty hardware-intensive operation. HEVC playback can consume most of a CPU's processor cycles, and especially on slower dual-core laptop processors, smooth playback may be impossible altogether. Dedicated HEVC encode and decode blocks in CPUs and GPUs can handle the heavy lifting more efficiently, freeing up your CPU and greatly reducing power consumption, but HEVC's newness means that dedicated hardware isn't especially prevalent yet.
Metal 2
While both macOS and iOS still nominally support open, third-party APIs like OpenGL and OpenCL, it's clear that the company sees Metal as the way forward for graphics and GPU compute on its platforms. Apple's OpenGL support in macOS and iOS hasn't changed at all in years, and there are absolutely no signs that Apple plans to support Vulkan. But the API will enable some improvements for end users, too. People with newer GPUs should expect to benefit from some performance improvements, not just in games but in macOS itself; Apple says the entire WindowServer is now using Metal, which should improve the fluidity and consistency of transitions and animations within macOS; this can be a problem on Macs when you're pushing multiple monitors or using higher Retina scaling modes on, especially if you're using integrated graphics. Metal 2 is also the go-to API for supporting VR on macOS, something Apple is pushing in a big way with its newer iMacs and its native support for external Thunderbolt 3 GPU enclosures. Apple says that every device that supports Metal should support at least some of Metal 2's new features, but the implication there is that some older GPUs won't be able to do everything the newer ones can do.
I see BeauHD has learned to use paragraphs... (Score:2)
that's not the way forward. (Score:3, Informative)
it's clear that the company sees Metal as the way forward for graphics and GPU compute on its platforms.
No.... an Apple only proprietary graphics API is not the way forward. Vulkan is the way forward. It will be available on Windows, Linux, smartphones, BSD, everywhere... except Apple, apparently.
Metal is about vendor lockin, but they don't have enough of the total computing market to make that work out in their favour.
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MSFT : DirectX
Apple : Metal
I'm all for Vulkan but Apple is not one to let others control an essential API. Remember when DirectX was behind OpenGL at the beginning and then passed OpenGL in speed and feature set?
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No, it's about performance. If OpenGL could do what Metal can, they'd stick to it.
I guess Vulkan doesn't exist then, huh? Most of the arguments both for and against Vulkan seem to be that it's more explicit than metal. This makes it harder to program but has more opportunities efficiency available. Also, of course Apple released Metal long before Vulkan, but that's mostly because their OpenGL implementation was lagging shockingly far behind the standard.
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Also, of course Apple released Metal long before Vulkan was announced
FTFY.
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No, Metal is about vendor lock-in. To boot, we already had a graphics API called MeTaL, made by S3, back when the first Unreal Tournament came out. It was shit then, and I'll wager on this new API being shit when Apple tries to put it out.
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The OP didn't mention OpenGl. The comparison is metal to vulkan. Vulkan is an industry standard. Metaql is just not going to get much game support.
Ohh, maybe he wanted to compare it to something that actually existed when Metal was first shipping, not something that only was announced half a year later.
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What? You'd rather have the 90%? Especially when supporting the other 10% means redoing 50% of the work? You don't think it's worth the investment to redo 50% of the work that the 10% might not pay for? I think you might be right about that if you're actually asking the questions I'm implying you should be...
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Vulkan is the way forward.
Have you actually read the Vulkan spec?
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You don't realize that you can call external libraries from any language... do you?
You can also use a motorbike as a moving van by hooking a trailer up to it.
In practice, using most libraries in most languages requires a layer of glue. The bigger the impedance mismatch between the library and the language, the thicker the layer of glue.
Objective-C is a case in point. It's a more "object oriented" language than Java or C++, since it is more serious about late-binding. That makes it difficult to do a direct translation of an Obj-C API into C++. It's even worse in Java, which only provides n
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Ok? And that has stopped countless game developers from using OpenGL on macOS... when?
Just in case I didn't make this clear, you can indeed use C libraries in almost any other language.
The converse is not true. See DirectX and Cocoa for further details.
Re: that's not the way forward. (Score:2)
The interesting thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Replacing HFS with APFS brings a lot of new features similar to ZFS but it's also going towards the Android/iOS security model where the system and user data are separated and the system read-only without a root user anymore.
Although it will probably be trivial to break out, we're moving more towards commercial ecosystems that no longer will support tinkering with the OS.
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no longer will support tinkering with the OS and apple that can be app store only and maybe apple only drivers for usb / TB / PCI-E stuff. Just wait for the cost of adobe CC to go up by 30% to cover apples cut.
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some apps still need an system wide ini / settings folder. Also it maybe an system wide folder per for games that can be used for mods / user maps / user add ons.
also an map edit .exe should be able to write to the main app folder.
and other app stores like steam can not be locked out. That can install apps / update apps / install workshop stuff and mods to apps.
To me most interesting is automatic switchover (Score:3)
Replacing HFS with APFS brings a lot of new features similar to ZFS but it's also going towards the Android/iOS security model
Sure that's fine and all but I don't think many users will see a difference, power or otherwise. It's just more secure for those that leave the locks in place.
To me the more interesting thing is, Apple is not phasing this in as an optional FS you can install, but instead going balls-out and making conversion the default option for every install! That means millions of Mac users wh
Re:To me most interesting is automatic switchover (Score:4, Interesting)
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they have a debug interface that connects to Apple-controlled software for collecting problem reports
You mean like the telemetry that people keep complaining about whenever Microsoft tries to do it? Did I just hear someone imply that Apple does the same thing?
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Although that's a great point that they did a similar conversion for iOS, to me that's not nearly so impressive because in IOS the operating system has tight control over how the file system changes... it doesn't have third party deffraggers or a bunch of hard links the user added or any one of a million other odd things people could choose to do with the filesystem in an open system.
The developer beta probably does help shake out major issues though as they would be a group more likely to have messed with
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Were there any major issues of APFS in iOS devices? I have not seen and heard of any since its public stable release.
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Switching to a totally new filesystem is also a slick way of making sure people don't revert back to an earlier version of MacOS. The old MacOS will no longer read your drive after the upgrade.
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Time Machine will still be HFS+, so you can roll back easy enough.
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Not true. 10.12.4 (Sierra) has full support for APFS, just not as a boot volume.
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Not true. 10.12.4 (Sierra) has full support for APFS, just not as a boot volume.
If you can't boot from it, is that full support? When you couldn't boot ZFS on Linux, we didn't call that full support.
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Fair enough. I should have said it provides native read-write support. I'm not sure why it can't boot from it; maybe the boot loader is missing critical bits or the frameworks get confused when running on a non-HFS+ volume in some subtle ways. Either way, the point is that you don't lose access to anything. It just makes reverting a royal pain in the you-know-what.
And if it is a boot loader issue, then there's a nonzero possibility that Sierra reinstalled on top of High Sierra would be able to boot fro
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That does not make much sense.
On HFS user and root stuff is seperated as well, just as on any unix system.
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No, they're taking away the root user out of the OS, no more daemons running as root, no more sudo. And they're separating the file system as in creating different volumes (a form of partitioning) for the /System and the /User and making /System read-only.
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There always will be a system/root user. /System is mounted read only, during upgrades it would need to be remounted, or the "upgrade process" would need special abilities to byass the file systems permissions.
Otherwise you could not make upgrades. E.g. if
Any links for the stuff you mention? It sounds interesting.
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Insert verbiage here about 'the hood of the car welded shut.'
Why would you want to touch the engine? Eeeeew! You'll get your hands dirty!
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Apple's stated goal is to have /System reside on a different volume than /User and mount /System read-only and the only way in would be through a signed boot loader and/or update. They will also take out disabling SIP and remove the root user completely (no more daemons running as root or sudo).
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Stated where?
[citation needed]
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developer.apple.com -> Download the APFS Beta or view the WWDC workshops on it. This is not yet implemented in the current beta and most of the information is 'confidential' but your Apple Enterprise rep has a slide on the end of monolithic imaging. They want enterprises to start using DEP (where your device gets bound to your organization during ANY (re)install), Apple Store and MDM for any releases after High Sierra.
HEVC and HEIF (Score:5, Informative)
The main problem with HEVC is the patent licensing. In order to use HEVC you need to get 3 different patent licenses from 3 different patent pools (MPEG LA [mpegla.com], HEVC Advance [hevcadvance.com], and Velos Media [velosmedia.com]).
There are some companies with HEVC patents, like Technicolor [technicolor.com], which aren't in any patent pool so you also need to get a patent license from them. Technicolor says they have done this "to enable direct licensing" of their HEVC patents. Sounds convenient.
The patent licensing situation has reduced the x265 developers to begging the patent pools [x265.org] for better licensing terms. I recognise the x265 team is trying to make a buck but I think they'd be better off focusing on building an AV1 implementation than throwing their lot in with HEVC. HEVC's licensing is just not web friendly.
Luckily, the HEIF image format is content format agnostic (presentation [apple.com] and slides [apple.com]). In principle you could use HEIF with VP9 [webmproject.org] or with AV1 [aomedia.org]. Apple may never support VP9 but I don't think they can avoid adding support for AV1 in future. AV1 will have too many advantages over HEVC (better performance, royalty-free licensing) to ignore.
It's silly to support HEVC and not VP9 (Score:4, Informative)
While HEVC is probably going to be useful in the future, since it does offer good compression and the licensing is likely to get sorted one way or another, VP9 is useful NOW. Google will send you videos in VP9 format if it can since not only is VP9 Google's format, but it gets better per-bit quality than MP4/AVC. Well given that Youtube is, by far, the big name in video hosting for the 'net, makes sense to support it. On top of that, Netflix has started making use of it as well. They are the very biggest commercial streaming service. So between the two it is a massive amount of use.
I can't see why you'd want to add HEVC, which is brand new, still having licensing issues and thus has next to zero adoption before VP9 which is already a major force. I mean shit even Edge supports VP9 these days. Safari and IE are basically the only browsers that don't these days (and IE is deprecated).
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Apple owns some essential HEVC patents
What do they have? The only thing that had in the H.264 patent pool was a token patent relating to the QuickTime container format (which is why that became the standard container format for MPEG-4). That's probably expiring soon, if it hasn't already, and I haven't seen much CODEC R&D from Apple in the last decade.
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Apple owns some essential HEVC patents
What do they have? The only thing that had in the H.264 patent pool was a token patent relating to the QuickTime container format (which is why that became the standard container format for MPEG-4). That's probably expiring soon, if it hasn't already, and I haven't seen much CODEC R&D from Apple in the last decade.
ProRes 4444 XQ - oh, wait, that's not for people pirating movies(*), so it obviously doesn't count.
(*) Unless they do so professionally
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What do they have?
Apple has a number of patents [mpegla.com] in the MPEG LA [mpegla.com] pool.
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HEVC is out now, and has broad industry support from embedded hardware manufacturers (set top boxes, roku-a-likes, cameras, camcorders, etc.), as well as software players like Microsoft and Apple.
I feel that VP9 is a dead-end in many ways: It's a "standard" that really has only one controlling interest: Google. VP9 has virtually zero mindshare outside the Googleplex; I'm not aware of any dedicated cameras, camcorders, set top boxes, etc. that support VP9.
AV1, on the other hand, looks very compelling... i
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HEVC is out now
VP9 is out now and has broader use than HEVC.
as well as software players like Microsoft and Apple
Microsoft supports VP9 in Edge [windows.com].
VP9 has virtually zero mindshare outside the Googleplex
Netflix [medium.com] uses VP9. Wikipedia [wikimedia.org] uses VP9. And, of course, even though it's inside the Googleplex it's difficult to ignore that YouTube [googleblog.com] uses VP9. YouTube no longer offers 4K video [9to5mac.com] to Safari by default due to Safari's lack of VP9 support.
set top boxes, etc. that support VP9
Roku [roku.com] has VP9 support, Chromecast Ultra [google.com] has VP9 support, Android phones [android.com] have VP9 support, etc, etc.
AV1, on the other hand, looks very compelling... it actually has broad industry support, from big players like Microsoft, Cisco, Netflix, Google, all the way down to silicon makers like Broadcom, Xilinx, RealTek, ARM, AMD, and NVIDIA.
Right. Just like VP9. When will Apple add VP9 support?
It's disingenuous to complain that Apple isn't going to include AV1 when it isn't - and won't be - ready before High Sierra.
Show me where I complained that AV1 won't
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In the meantime, let's acknowledge that Apple hasn't joined the Alliance for Open Media [aomedia.org]. When will Apple join?
Why single out Apple? It's not like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Canon, Nikon, LG, Philips, HP, or Lenovo are members either..
It's silly to criticize Apple for adding support for a codec which "all of the above" are also supporting.
Honestly, I'm all for open codecs, but after waiting years to see Vorbis, Opus, Theora, and VP6-VP8 adoption stand at an effective Level of Zero, in spite of being competitive (or better) while not having a patent minefield, I've grown wary of the ever-growing next shiny thing that
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Why single out Apple?
Because Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla have joined. Apple is the last major browser maker who hasn't.
VP6-VP8 adoption stand at an effective Level of Zero
VP6 and VP7 were used by Flash and by Skype, VP8 is mandatory to implement on Android and is used in video calls, and VP8 is used in WebRTC [google.com].
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You realize there's a big world outside of the web browser, right? Take a look at the home theatre isle at your local electronics store; visit a camera shop. When I see a codec move into that market, I take it seriously.
It's not at all surprising to see Google's codec is mandatory on Google's Android OS and Google's WebRTC. That's a no brainer.
Apple has patents in the HEVC pool, and if memory serves, the late Steve Jobs lead the (failed) charge to try to get VP8 into the MPEG patent pool, so there may be ba
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You realize there's a big world outside of the web browser, right?
It's not so big. More than half of YouTube views [youtube.com] were from mobile in 2016. Regardless of whether that's mobile browser or mobile app, it's bigger than any other electronics category.
Google's WebRTC
It isn't "Google's" WebRTC. All browsers implement WebRTC, even Safari 11 [peer5.com]. Here's a blog post about Microsoft's WebRTC implementation in Edge [windows.com].
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Opus
And I should also add that all browsers support Opus in WebRTC (even Safari in Safari 11) and Opus is mandatory to implement on Android since Android 5. Skype also uses Opus (the SILK encoder comes from Skype).
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And yet, I cannot plug a flash drive with my music in Opus format into my 2017 model car's stereo and expect it to play.
Nor can I plug it into my brand new Blu-ray player and hear music.
A big wide world exists outside the web browser, and in many of them, MP3 is the only game in town.
I'll be thrilled if BlueTooth's next iteration mandates Opus support for its A2DP profile. I suspect I'll be disappointed, as few device makers implement anything other than its only mandatory codec, SBC. (Though there is spor
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And yet, I cannot plug a flash drive with my music in Opus format into my 2017 model car's stereo and expect it to play.
I can't help you with your buyer's remorse. I can tell you that Vorbis and Opus audio and VP8 and VP9 video play just fine on my iPhone 7. VLC for iOS works well. Maybe get an iPhone 7 and plug it into your car.
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why do you keep insisting that the embedded market doesn't matter? It dwarfs the PC/phone/computer market.
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Re:HEVC and HEIF (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone explain to me how this is bad when both nvidia and amd's newer cards do hardware HEVC encoding?
Because the royalty licensing cost is passed on to you as the end user. You're paying extra for the codec rent. Additionally, there are, for example, content distribution royalties [hevcadvance.com]. So a company like Netflix is paying extra for merely transmitting HEVC content over the Internet and those costs also get passed on to you as the end user. Additionally, the Velos Media [velosmedia.com] patent pool hasn't even announced its royalty rates. Who knows what they'll charge.
In the end, this anti-web licensing creates a pay-to-play environment where only the big boys can afford to play. I don't know about you, but that's not the web I want.
Secondly, as a end user if I want to play back HEVC videos there are many arm TV boxes I can get for under $100 which do hardware HEVC decoding.
There are many ARM TV boxes that you can get for under $100 which do VP9 decoding. There will be plenty of ARM TV boxes which you can get for under $100 which do AV1 decoding once AV1 is finished.
Formats, like HEVC, which require payment for patent royalties work against your individual interests. Don't support such formats.
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No they don't. Patents support innovation, by allowing people to make money on their inventions.
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this isn't a problem
If it wasn't a problem then the Alliance for Open Media [aomedia.org] wouldn't exist and they [aomedia.org] wouldn't be developing AV1 [wikipedia.org].
But it does. And they are.
Sell it to us (Score:4, Insightful)
Sell me macOS to use on the Intel box of my choice or in a VM. Thanks!
Re:Sell it to us (Score:4, Insightful)
So, Apple never supported the lame parallel port because it was, well lame. When firewire became useful, SCSI, which was incredible useful and fast, was pushed out the door. It was possible to transition between processor families because the old stuff could go away.
Remember that the need to support legacy products pretty much meant the MS Windows could not really take full advantage of the new chips, so the x86 Intel and AMD development were basically starved because the gamers and few HPC customers could not support development. It was Apple's move to Intel that gave it the funds to progress.
In reality if you can figure out how to get the OS to run on cheaper hardware, Apple really does not do anything t stop the private consumer. I have never seen a lawsuit where Apple has sued an end user for using it's OS on unsanctioned hardware. What Apple is not going to do it support its use because there is no upside or profit in it. People who want cheap hardware are not going to spend any money, and not going to support the advanced technology that Apple represents.
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MS Windows is a beautiful OS because it is designed to be used on any POS hardware that falls off the back of a truck. This is incredible useful, and represent a significant technological advancement. It also results in serious compromises that limits what the OS can do, and limits the type of legacy thing the OS no longer needs to support.
That's the beauty about standardization, there are much fewer compromises. We are not talking embedded software on a custom chip a-la PS1 and Saturn (and newer consoles to some extent). We are talking the x86 instruction set as it has evolved over the years. Mac OS and Windows don't differ here. The only difference is custom drivers, which Windows pushes to third parties and Linux has managed to do fairly well for years.
So, Apple never supported the lame parallel port because it was, well lame. When firewire became useful, SCSI, which was incredible useful and fast, was pushed out the door. It was possible to transition between processor families because the old stuff could go away.
Except the old stuff never really went away. People hold on to their Mac's for years. I
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You didn't read the OP's post very well. He said, sell us a version that can run in a VM. That's a lot easier and more like the existing Mac ecosystem. Apple could even sell the OS with their own VM software that provides a certain set of custom virtual hardware. That would make the OS useable for a lot of people, and would provide a quite decent user experience.
I concede that's not in Apple's interest of course, since they make their money selling the hardware.
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There's no reason Apple couldn't make a VM that provided a specific set of hardware to the virtual machine, and this VM could run anywhere, on any hardware combination.
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People who want cheap hardware are not going to spend any money, and not going to support the advanced technology that Apple represents.
Not true at all . . . many of us spend tons of money on hardware per year but refuse to pay a ridiculous price for commodity Intel-based hardware in a pretty aluminum case. My company's workstations are tools, not toys or fashion statements -- I don't care what they look like as long as they do what we need them to do. We build monster-class workstations sourcing our ow
I'm a nerd. I recommend Apple to everyone. (Score:2)
Because:
1. My "friends and family" IT support role drops to basically 0 when those friends and family have Apple products.
2. As a nerd, I know good engineering when I see it.
Lots of nerds like Apple products. In my experience people who really understand technology have respect for Apple products & Apple's philosophy (even if it doesn't fit their needs).
The people who hate Apple, by and large, are tech wannabees who think that spending all day on stackoverflow to figure out how to print to a wireless pr
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Apple is a hardware company. They sell computers, phones, tablets and watches. If you don't want to buy one of their computers, phones, tablets or watches, they don't care that you are not using their operating system.
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I ran Sierra for some months... then eventually reformatted and went back to El Capitan.
Why?
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Junk mail is organised in a hierarchy. There's a top level junk mail folder where you can see all your junk mail and it has a child junk mail folder for each mail account. Seems like the best of both worlds.
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It's coming, Pro Bro (Score:2)
First of all if you really need some high performance Macing, there's the iMac Pro [apple.com] coming out at the end of this year...
But I don't know why you are even asking where the Mac Pro is, since everyone who cares already knows [macrumors.com] it's coming after 2017.
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Apple has to wait until the processor they are designing into the new Mac Pro goes obsolete before they can release it. Jony is that way about the insides of the computer. He loves retro, but not on the outside of the box.
Pretty sure opposite is true (Score:2)
Jony is that way about the insides of the computer.
I don't think you understand, he's more like a robot that does what he is tasked with to obsession.
The guiding principal this time is "replicability". You wanted replaceability world? Well Ive is going to give you a computer you can replace individual pins on the CPU on if you desire, or think alternating silver and gold would simply look cooler.
Each fan blade of the 300 whisper quiet micro-fans will be detachable, each core of the CPU removable and lovin
Re:Metal 2? Idiocy (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll say, as a game developer that has written a) OpenGL, b) Metal, and c) Vulkan renderers, I have no problems with Metal.
A year since "release" and Vulkan is still half baked - we're up to sub point release FIFTY ONE. Sit down and write the basic Vulkan code required to just cope with the swapchain and get back to me. In 2 weeks. It will make you self harm.
Metal is actually quite nice. They've hit a nice level of exposing power vs not making you have to fuck with every bloody register setting in the driver. The main problem is the Obj-C interface. Doing profiling and seeing how much time is eaten by obj_msgsend() will make you sad for a "high performance" API. But taking some time and making C++ shadow classes for some of this mitigates it.
It's now a year since Google featured Vulkan at IO and the Android situation is the typical cluster fuck. We've done the work, but have no intention of shipping until Qualcomm (Adreno) and the Mali people make drivers that aren't hot garbage.
Not an apple fanboy by any stretch (Want me to rant about xCode? Got a free week?) but uninformed people should stop constantly pushing for Vulkan without appreciating what a mess it is - especially on mobile. It will probably get there -- enough people are invested to make it happen. But it's not there yet.
We're only a 15 months past initial release, and the extension fiasco that is OpenGL is starting in Vulkan...
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It's just a shame that your public don't spend. If you want to actually make money as a developer, Android isn't your target.
Re:Metal 2? Idiocy (Score:4, Interesting)
And what exactly are the advantages of Vulcan over Metal? No, really... serious question. Because just about every time I've seen an argument for Vulkan vs. Metal it's been all ideological purity, not technological superiority.
Does Vulkan have features that are missing in Metal (And Metal 2)? Is the performance better? Do they control patents that are being denied to Apple? If I don't care so much about free software, the GPL, and all that, but want to be able to use the better product, what's the BFD?
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And what exactly are the advantages of Vulcan over Metal? No, really... serious question.
Industry support. Vulkan will allow the same code to support every other major OS outside the Apple ecosystem, so will have 20X as many games as Metal ever will, not to mention better graphics drivers.
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Metal is what you do when you're the market l
iOS and Mac OS unification... (Score:2)
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> I don't understand why Apple is resisting the Vulkan API
Because Apple suffers from Not Invented Here [wikipedia.org] (NIH) syndrome.
Sometimes they are correct, others times no.
If they would just fix their shitty OpenGL 4.5 support everyone would be happier instead of inventing yet-another-standard [xkcd.com]
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Half of what I hear about Vulkan is that it's an "industry-standard" dumpster fire; it came out considerably after Metal and DX12, and still reeks of half-baked thoughts rushed to market.
Were I calling the shots, I'd give Vulkan more time to polish out its issues.
For those that feel differently, there's even moltenvk [moltengl.com] which appears to layer Vulkan on top of Metal.
And, of course, many of the major graphics engines just abstract DirectX, Vulkan, Metal, and OpenGL away from the game developer anyway, so it's ha
Metal (Score:2)
I really miss the glam metal of the late 80s-early 90s. Guys like Motley Crew, Twisted Sisters, Trixter, Black 'n Blue, Queensryche, Vixen, Ozzy, & so on
I don't own a Mac, but heck, if I'm getting METAL, it might be worth the price
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I would DEFINITELY like to subscribe to your podcast, and listen to it backwards.
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Wall Street refers to Apple as a 'gadget maker.' They really only see the iPhone. Any other product lines are seen as side products. People in Wall Street look at Apple and basically consider the Apple Watch and the Macintosh as about the same thing: a side distraction for Apple.
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I think that Apple does not want users to be able to run comparable benchmarks
But you can run Windows on a Mac.
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>1. Siri everywhere! No thanks. It's helpful to turn speech-to-text when I'm driving two tons of car. If I'm at a computer, I have a keyboard. Don't get me wrong, good speech-to-text (and in reverse) is awesome when it helps somebody. But as an ordinary able-bodied computer user, I don't trust any corporation that is recording everything you say to their device.
I'm writing a book. It's technical so has quite a lot of mathematics in it, but also a lot of normal text. I'm using Latex. I figured it might be
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My problem is that I can't help but assume that the Danish screamo band gets 2/3rds of a cut, and Apple gets the other third
If that were true, then this would a a much better deal for the artists than pretty much any distribution mechanism other than CDBaby. I suspect that Apple's cut is actually a lot higher.
Re:I thought about upgrading to Sierra (Score:4, Informative)
8. Photos library! As a technically minded user of Apple products for many years, having lived through spotty transitions between iPhoto, Aperture and Photos, I don't trust Apple to curate my photo library at all. Instagram is better.
Dumbing down iPhoto into Photos by taking out user-designed folder organization was a change that has sold millions of copies of Adobe Lightroom.
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One of the mild annoyances of using macOS/OS X is the littering of the dot underbar (i.e., "._foobar") files. Does this go away with APFS? Thanks in advance.
Also, does High Sierra fix any of the myriad of problems macOS has with mounting NFS? Have they added support for NFSv4 yet?
What about the Icon\r litering my git repos?
Re:Does APFS do away with "._" files? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does Apple still have a QA department? (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like you have bad RAM or a bad hard drive. I mean sure, buggy HFS+ implementations (e.g. in the early days of Linux on PowerPC Macs) can result in some of the most spectacular corruption I've ever seen, but Apple's implementation is *amazingly* solid. In two decades of running multiple Macs, I've only seen corruption that didn't get auto-repaired a few times, and every instance has either involved faulty hardware or a sparsebundle served over AFP (Time Machine to an ABS).
No, the big benefit of a modern filesystem is not reliability so much as the ability to take snapshots and back up those snapshots without worrying about files changing while you're backing them up. This might even be enough to make Time Machine and iCloud reliable without bizarre surprises. For example, a few years ago, a friend of mine lost his entire iPhoto library because he kept iPhoto running all the time; iPhoto keeps its library open, and Apple foolishly made the iPhoto library an opaque bundle, so when iPhoto kept the library open, it prevented not only the library metadata, but also the photos themselves from getting backed up. Supposedly that got fixed a long time ago, but I still have a fair amount of distrust towards Time Machine as a result of that incident, and the whole reason behind not backing up open files was that you couldn't reliably snapshot the bundle at a given moment in time; that epic failure would never have happened if Time Machine had been built on top of proper snapshots to begin with.
Databases have the same problem. You can safely back up a MySQL database (with InnoDB, anyway), but to do so, you have to snapshot the entire database, including its journal, all at once, not copy it a file at a time. And so on. There are entire classes of problems that go away when you have proper volume-level snapshotting capabilities. That's why not switching to ZFS was, IMO, the single dumbest mistake that Apple's senior management made in the past twenty years, and possibly in its entire history. Now that we're getting APFS (a decade later), maybe we'll finally get the robust backups that we should have had back in Snow Leopard.
Don't get me started on Xcode, though. Its problems, IMO, have less to do with a lack of QA and more to do with Xcode being what happens when you take a 16-year-old piece of software (ProjectBuilder) and combine it with a 10-year-old piece of software (Interface Builder) and then continue developing the resulting software for another nine years. It started out too complex, and when they had the chance to fix that in 2003, instead of actually simplifying the fundamental architecture, they gave it a re-skin and hid a bunch of the functionality. And then they added IB to the mix and then they started piling on all the code signing stuff and tried to cram installer package support into it and... well, the result is that "Xcode : an IDE :: iTunes : a music player", and the result is unsatisfactory for precisely the same reasons. But I digress.
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Was it a 1 TB Seagate drive, perchance?
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This is probably why you're seeing corruption, and why HFS+ pretty much sucks as a modern file system.
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Actually, that's kind of depressing, because it means that IMO, their PMs are completely out of touch with where the major problems actually lie. The editor is really the only part of Xcode that I haven't had significant problems with. I have never once had a crash while selecting or typing. The worst bug I've found in the editor is that if you Command-/ to comment out the second line of a multiline macro, it won't let you comment out the first line. If that were the worst bug I had seen in Xcode, I wo
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Re: fuck apple (Score:2)
Done changes?!
What are you, a fucking Okie??
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Women become rampaging bull-dikes.
No, that's just because you're using your Mac at a university.