Former Mac boss predicts PC makers will have to dump AMD and Intel to ‘go ARM’

[leadeater]

49 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Windows 95 was Microsoft copying off Apple

 

 

Quote

With the specs for the SmallTalk GUI in hand, Apple released the Lisa in 1983, the first commercial computer to feature a "windows" GUI. Jobs would use a similar GUI for the much more popular Macintosh models. When Bill Gates, who wrote software for the Mac, released Windows 2.0 in 1987, Apple sued Microsoft for blatantly stealing the Mac's look and feel -- something Apple stole long ago from Xerox [source: Reimer].

 

Apple eventually lost the case and Microsoft's subsequent dominance of the PC market made "windows" synonymous with Windows.

[Lord Vile]

17 minutes ago, Hakemon said:

Windows 1 did NOT use a GUI licensed by Apple, and I guess you forgot where Apple stole from the Xerox Alto as well.

Either way, you're speaking strictly of software and GUI more specifically.  The CPU architecture had influence on the PC's.  Otherwise something would have happened when Apple went from 68k to PowerPC and that didn't happen either.

 

It simply will not happy, PC's will not change.

https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/1988-apple-sues-microsoft/

 

Everyone stole Xerox I don't think it can even be classed as theft at this point. 

 

If ARM chips can beat x86 ones in performance and power consumption then they will.

 

 

[Master Disaster]

52 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Windows 1 used a GUI licensed from Apple.

Incorrect. What actually happened was Apple approached MS to help them design a UI for the original Macintosh, Microsoft did the work and in return Apple licensed MS to use certain elements of the Mac UI in Windows 1.0 (things like overlapping windows, draggable resize bars etc etc). Microsoft went on to release Windows 2.0 and Apple tried to sue them claiming the license only covered one version of Windows and by using those elements in V2.0 MS were in breach of the license. Microsoft argued that they helped to create some of these things in the first place and that UI elements shouldn't be copyrightable anyway. Ultimately the judge agreed with MS and threw the entire case out.

[Lord Vile]

4 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Incorrect. What actually happened was Apple approached MS to help them design a UI for the original Macintosh, Microsoft did the work and in return Apple licensed MS to use certain elements of the Mac UI in Windows 1.0 (things like overlapping windows, draggable resize bars etc etc). Microsoft went on to release Windows 2.0 and Apple tried to sue them claiming the license only covered one version of Windows and by using those elements in V2.0 MS were in breach of the license. Microsoft argued that they helped to create some of these things in the first place and that UI elements shouldn't be copyrightable anyway. Ultimately the judge agreed with MS and threw the entire case out.

I literally just posted an article that contradicts you. Gates got hold of a mac in 84 and copied parts to windows, an agreement was made for the license after the fact. 

[Master Disaster]

6 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

I literally just posted an article that contradicts you. Gates got hold of a mac in 84 and copied parts to windows, an agreement was made for the license after the fact. 

Except that it doesn't. You omitted the fact that MS got hold of the prototype directly from Apple to create software for it for Apple. It says it right in the article you posted...

Quote

Anyway, Microsoft and it’s leader Bill Gates were the first outside developer to get a Macintosh prototype before its release in 1984. The company was to create productivity software (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) for the Mac.

Microsoft came up with some of the UI elements that would go on to become normal in "windowed" operating systems while creating software for Apple.

[Lord Vile]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

Except that it doesn't. You omitted the fact that MS got hold of the prototype directly from Apple to create software for it for Apple. It says it right in the article you posted...

Microsoft came up with some of the UI elements that would go on to become normal in "windowed" operating systems while creating software for Apple.

Yup but they copied stuff from the unit, built that into windows and then had agreed to get a licence retroactively. 

 

Whilst also coping the GUI from the Mac OS. 

[Master Disaster]

[Citation Required]

 

I mean, Apple didn't sue MS for stealing any of their ideas plus the court case lasted for 5 years and the judge sided with Microsoft. Apple only sued MS in 1988 (3 years after the fact) because MS released Windows 2.0, even then Apple had to be forced to provide the court with a list of UI elements they thought MS were using out of license. if they were going to the trouble of suing for breach of license then why wouldn't they also sue them for literally stealing?

 

Seems to me like this is nothing more than an internet myth being regurgitated as a fact.

 

What you fail to realise is that Microsoft had been working on Windows for 4 years prior to releasing it (conception was 1981, release was 1985) and they had literally poached people from the team behind PARC to help them achieve this goal. Since its widely accepted that Apple copied their design from PARC and its public knowledge that MS employed former PARC developers to create Windows its no surprise the 2 OSes ended up having similar elements.

 

To think that MS got a prototype Mac in 1984 and managed to clone its entire GUI in less than a year is crazy. By the time MS got their hands on that Mac Windows had been 3 years in development and was around 6 months away from planned release, a deadline they missed by a few months.

[jagdtigger]

22 hours ago, Sauron said:

Check it out

it runs just fine - the problem is app compatibility, which is in my personal opinion the only reason to ever use Windows.

Yeaaaah, runs fine on a 1000 USD+ machine, not an impressive argument........ (BTW for that much you could get a laptop with a x64 CPU that would eat that thing for dinner)

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Yeaaaah, runs fine on a 1000 USD+ machine, not an impressive argument........ (BTW for that much you could get a laptop with a x64 CPU that would eat that thing for dinner)

Macs tend to cost more than $1000 and well... the machine in the video is a lot thinner than most laptops that would "eat it for dinner"...

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Macs tend to cost more than $1000 and well... the machine in the video is a lot thinner than most laptops that would "eat it for dinner"...

They might be thin but run red hot, need a bag full of dongles, glued in battery, etc..........  So yeah, i would pick up a "fat boy" any day instead one of these flimsy overpriced junk.

[Sauron]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

They might be thin but run red hot, need a bag full of dongles, glued in battery, etc..........  So yeah, i would pick up a "fat boy" any day instead one of these flimsy overpriced junk.

That's completely off topic though.

[PocketNerd]

I blame Apple for poorly designed thermal management on their MacBooks.

 

I mean, seriously, who in <insert diety's name here> puts the fan AWAY FROM THE HEATSINK?!

 

If you want to go thin and light, don't put a goddamn i7 or i9 in it, either!

 

To stay on topic. I can certainly see AMD/Intel going the Big/Small approach with newer generations of CPU to match ARM. But we ain't dropping x86 any time soon.

[jagdtigger]

@Sauron

Not really, im just demonstrating how wrong to say that ARM will run fine windows. High end? Maybe. Low end? It will be even worse than celerons  and pentiums. And even the high-end does not make any sense after you factor in the dongle fest and external storage. (BTW my current laptop is ~2,7 cm thick, not super thin but it compensates it with proper IO and performance. And it was about the same price as the base model in the video you linked.)

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

The only problem with that is if you are not careful you are just moving the pivotal position of power from the likes of Microsoft to these essentially middle ware makers who then get to dictate what is and is not support and the performance of said platforms, much like Unreal Engine.

 

Abstraction and outsourcing is also giving up or handing over control and you become subordinate to that, there are benefits to doing it but one thing you cannot abstract or outsource is risk, in fact doing so can increase that.

 

Basically it can be done well but if any single entity gains too much influence you will start to see a disparity between hardware/platforms.

You can see this mess already with frameworks and transistion API's.

 

Pretty much every framework is a middleware collection of libraries and tools to do one thing, and when the vendor of the middleware decides to make something breaking, they make a new version (sometimes a full version sometimes a point version (see python 2.x vs 3.x , php 5.0 vs 5.x vs 7.x)) and then expect everyone to upgrade rather than just keep using the version they built it for. With game engines it's actually substantially worse, as licenses for the middleware may have completely expired by the time the product shipped, and you almost never see a game get recompiled for a new target. Look at all the 16-bit Win3.x games that were never recompiled for Win32s/Windows95. None of those games work on Windows 10. Games compiled for Win32s can work, but they only use WinG, not DirectX. Photoshop 3.x used WinG. WinG was depreciated and removed from Windows 98.

 

DirectX has this history too, Every version before 9 was based on separate 2D and 3D API's, with directdraw being depreciated in DX7 and removed in DX8. So Microsoft wrote their own wrappers for translating calls for these API's to DX8, DX9, etc. This means that middleware software built on them, like SDL1 has to be rewritten to use the native API again otherwise you are wrapping API's that are wrapping API's, and that has it's own penalty in performance. Like literately the worst thing I see C++ devs do is wrapping external library calls to standardize their own function naming, thus creating an entire extra layer of performance penalty that wouldn't exist if they statically compiled that library in and let the compiler optimize all that out.

 

On the PC, with Windows, you have system libraries which are your Achilles heel. You can statically compile all the third party libraries, and the C/C++ runtimes but you can't get around the DirectX, MFC and GDI. So if at some point Microsoft decides to release an ARM version of Windows with no legacy libraries (eg DX12 only) you can't just recompile a SDL1 game for ARM, there won't be a DX5 library to run against. I do not know if it's presently the case, but it seems kinda silly to support pre-Win10 API's on a device that can only run Win10 and has no legacy software to support.

 

With Apple, OSX does go back to 2001. It crosses three different CPU types (PPC, Intel, and now ARM.) But it also dropped API's all over the place. the Carbon API, which is what Adobe hung on to well into CS4 in 2010. Apple literately twisted Adobe's arm by not releasing a 64-bit version of Carbon. Otherwise they would never have switched at all. That's Apple for you, my-way-or-the-highway. That's really ballsy when you're not the market leader and that directly impacts the products your platform is known for supporting. So in 10.15 no 32-bit, thus no Carbon API software works.

 

This is the problem that happens when you, as a game developer, actively use middleware (eg Unity, Unreal) and the middleware drags it's ass in keeping up with these API changes, and meanwhile has no problem making the same version-breaking changes on you. So you get slammed with "when will you release a version for (OS/Platform)" but to do so, you have to update your software to use the current version of the engine, which might have thousands of breaking changes to get there. You can't just get 64-bit Android version of Unity 3 as a specific example. You have to port your game a second time to the current engine, which may as well be a new game.

[mr moose]

10 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Except that it doesn't. You omitted the fact that MS got hold of the prototype directly from Apple to create software for it for Apple. It says it right in the article you posted...

Microsoft came up with some of the UI elements that would go on to become normal in "windowed" operating systems while creating software for Apple.

Pretty much this, apple would not exist today if it were not for Microsoft.   Not only did MS write most of their office apps and operating system in the early days, but they bailed them out of a bankruptcy hole in the 90's as well.   

 

This whole idea that any one company invented anything has to stop, it is fundamentally flawed as a reflection of reality.   Apple did not invent from scratch anything they have released, MS did not steal whole ideas from apple nor invent much themselves,  If anything is true it is that Xerox took the lead with the whole mouse and windowed approach to user interfaces,  and even then I believe they got the idea from the defense force who had been developing this shit in the 40's to control radar interfaces. 

 

So yeah,  product evolution is always incremental improvements over time by multiple designers/companies, it is not individual invention and "game changing" innovation that wouldn't have happened otherwise.  It always happens otherwise,  if it weren't apple making multitouch en masse it would have been nokia or sony, if it weren't for watt's patents on steam trevithick would have made trains a full 30 years earlier.  It's time to stop pretending individual companies are the sole inventors of anything.

 

   

[Guest willies leg]

Jean-Louis Gassée, perhaps the 2nd worst CEO at Apple.

Of course, the worst one is obviously Tim Cook.

Wish they would bring back Scott Forstall, even though he wasn't good at presentations he had a kick-ass team that did great work under his leadership.

 

The only processor transition they should be making right now on the desktop is Intel -> AMD.

[jagdtigger]

29 minutes ago, comander said:

This will take a while and a lot of older stuff won't work. 

 

At that point, why not go Linux? Seriously. If power management gets worked out, a slightly tweaked Ubuntu could make for an awesome parent machine. 

Not to mention debian(and thus ubuntu) has its entire sw library recompiled for arm for several years now.....

[sora.sky]

2 hours ago, willies leg said:

Jean-Louis Gassée, perhaps the 2nd worst CEO at Apple.

Of course, the worst one is obviously Tim Cook.

Wish they would bring back Scott Forstall, even though he wasn't good at presentations he had a kick-ass team that did great work under his leadership.

 

The only processor transition they should be making right now on the desktop is Intel -> AMD.

Well the cat is kinda out of the bag on that one.

Anyways, if any computer manufacturer can execute a shift away from x86-64 it would be Apple. They have legions of enthusiastic developers at their heel and beckon. 

A majority of the Mac end-user population will benefit more from having access to the iOS app store catalog natively running on macOS than the benefits of Ryzen. 

[Guest willies leg]

9 hours ago, comander said:

This will take a while and a lot of older stuff won't work. 

 

At that point, why not go Linux? Seriously. If power management gets worked out, a slightly tweaked Ubuntu could make for an awesome parent machine. 

At that point, why not go Linux? Seriously. If power management gets worked out, a slightly tweaked Ubuntu Debian Testing could make for an awesome parent machine. 

 

FTFY.