Hating Apple is Getting REALLY Hard - WWDC 2023

[silentdragon95]

10 hours ago, ToboRobot said:

Corporate type work... Developers.  Simulations.  Meetings.  Product briefings.  Client presentations of things like architecture. 

I'd like to add that in those cases, the alternative sometimes is to literally have a highly paid expert fly across the globe just to give a presentation and then fly back.

 

Sure, the headsets are expensive, but they'll pay for themselves really quickly if companies no longer need to do that. Not to mention that cutting down on flights is also good for the planet.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

The hardware looks great, but Apple is not really known for giving unfettered access to their hardware.

Microsoft's Hololens seems more promising to me to build corporate applications on.

[maplepants]

I was really hoping for expandable GPU power on the Mac Pro. To me, that's much more disappointing than the lack of RAM upgrades.

[AAVVIronAlex]

53 minutes ago, maplepants said:

I was really hoping for expandable GPU power on the Mac Pro. To me, that's much more disappointing than the lack of RAM upgrades.

Honestly, I think that the Mac Pro is a downgrade compared to the 2019 intel version, I hope they add GPU support and RAM upgradeability in the upcoming releases. Otherwise, I wish that they could stay with intel so we could have Hackintoshes guaranteed after 2029. I really like the M2 chips on mobile devices, but I do not understand why they use them on desktop and workstation devices where people really do not care about efficiency. I hardly think that the M2 Ultra can beat the 2019 version equipped with some top of the line graphics cards in demanding tasks, and unlike Apple, I do not think that 192GBs of RAM is greater than 1.5TBs of RAM.

[maplepants]

6 minutes ago, AAVVIronAlex said:

Honestly, I think that the Mac Pro is a downgrade compared to the 2019 intel version

For a lot of workloads, it is. Sure the video encoding tasks that Apple optimises for like ingest and encoding are going to have the 2023 Mac Pro absolutely stomp on the 2019 Mac Pro (even with an Afterburner). But there's just more raw GPU power available to the 2019 Mac Pro because you can cram it full of GPUs.

8 minutes ago, AAVVIronAlex said:

I wish that they could stay with intel so we could have Hackintoshes guaranteed after 2029. I really like the M2 chips on mobile devices, but I do not understand why they use them on desktop and workstation devices where people really do not care about efficiency

I don't really care about Hackintoshes and I don't think Apple does either. They're generally a pretty sub-par experience, break very easily, and users have to stick with old, potentially vulnerable, OS versions for far too long.

 

That said, I think the M1 & M2 desktops are quite good computers. And given the energy prices in Germany, I do care about efficiency. In everything except gaming, these computers compare really favourably to the Intel NUC 12 Extreme, and ThinkStation's in the same size class.

 

23 minutes ago, AAVVIronAlex said:

I hardly think that the M2 Ultra can beat the 2019 version equipped with some top of the line graphics cards in demanding tasks, and unlike Apple, I do not think that 192GBs of RAM is greater than 1.5TBs of RAM.

The M2 Ultra will beat the 2019 at the tasks that Apple optimized for, compiling code, ML, video ingestion, colour work, 8k Pro Res playback, etc. But personally, I don't think "better than the 2019 Mac Pro at most tasks" is enough. It should be better than the 2019 in every way, just like the 2019 Mac Pro was better than every previous Mac Pro in every imaginable way.

[Kronoton]

22 minutes ago, maplepants said:

The M2 Ultra will beat the 2019 at the tasks that Apple optimized for, compiling code, ML, video ingestion, colour work, 8k Pro Res playback, etc. But personally, I don't think "better than the 2019 Mac Pro at most tasks" is enough. It should be better than the 2019 in every way, just like the 2019 Mac Pro was better than every previous Mac Pro in every imaginable way.

 

Even a M1 Mini could beat a MacPro in select tasks, just to show how "different" AS is to an Intel/AMD combo.

 

The 2019 MP being faster on everything as a 2013 MP is easy as it is just newer/better versions of the same Xeon and Radeon chips used in the older ones.

 

So yes it will be quite a while till a M3/4/5 can beat a 2019 MP in every task and there will most likely never be a time where it will beat a then current PC at every task, but we are and will seeing select use cases where an entry level AS chips beats an high end PC (and other were it is the other way round).

[ToboRobot]

9 hours ago, gjsman said:

 

Apple stated in the presentation that apps, and websites, cannot see where the user is looking. There's apparently a way to provide glance-based interaction without the app or website being aware. They said this was by design as a tracking prevention tool.

I assume this means tracking will be opt in.

[maplepants]

51 minutes ago, Kronoton said:

 

Even a M1 Mini could beat a MacPro in select tasks, just to show how "different" AS is to an Intel/AMD combo.

 

The 2019 MP being faster on everything as a 2013 MP is easy as it is just newer/better versions of the same Xeon and Radeon chips used in the older ones.

 

So yes it will be quite a while till a M3/4/5 can beat a 2019 MP in every task and there will most likely never be a time where it will beat a then current PC at every task, but we are and will seeing select use cases where an entry level AS chips beats an high end PC (and other were it is the other way round).

That's all true. The M3 or M4 Ultra will definitely be better than the 2019 Mac Pro. For me though, the real question is will the M3 or M4 Ultra will have raw GPU power that competes with other workstations.

 

The 2019 Mac Pro didn't compete with the Titan RTX, but the gap between the Titan RTX and a 2019 Mac Pro stuffed with the maximum of GPUs it can hold is much less than the gap between a 4090 and an M2 Ultra.

 

Maybe by the M3 they'll have the rumoured quad M3 Max design and then the lack of expandable GPUs will sting less. But for right now, the M2 Ultra Mac Pro is just less capable than I was hoping for.

[Kronoton]

6 minutes ago, maplepants said:

For me though, the real question is will the M3 or M4 Ultra will have raw GPU power that competes with other workstations.

Even that will depend on the task at hand. For example everything NVidia or AMD will struggle if the 192GB of RAM the M2Ultra-GPU can access are utilized.

At a certain point it also depend on how you define "other workstations" which might be really dedicated server HW in a tower case sucking in 1000++W.

[maplepants]

10 minutes ago, Kronoton said:

Even that will depend on the task at hand. For example everything NVidia or AMD will struggle if the 192GB of RAM the M2Ultra-GPU can access are utilized.

At a certain point it also depend on how you define "other workstations" which might be really dedicated server HW in a tower case sucking in 1000++W.

That's a good point. We really only see comparative benchmarks where all of the GPUs can actually complete the task, and with so much more RAM there are lots of things that even the M1 Max in my Mac Studio can do that the RTX 3080 in my gaming PC cannot.

[gjsman]

8 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Microsoft's Hololens seems more promising to me to build corporate applications on.

Ha... I wish. HoloLens is way worse - it only can run UWP apps. That's it. It can't run Win32 except for what is available in OneCore... which is such a subset that many apps, even those run through the "Desktop App Converter," will fail on a HoloLens meaning that Win32, even if you can get it to run, support is very sparse. Surprise - Microsoft doesn't talk about Win32 on HoloLens, and Microsoft knows UWP is dead and encourages people to build apps using their Unity SDK which then publishes to UWP and OpenXR.

 

Let's just say that Apple's APIs are far better understood and more capable than UWP is. Recent OpenXR is better if you've developed for Oculus, but it's still... there's way more Apple developers than Oculus or UWP / Win32-subset developers. 

 

Also, it's Microsoft. Google is the king of abandoned consumer platforms, Microsoft is the king of abandoned developer platforms. 

[Xiee]

21 hours ago, gjsman said:

Even if, despite all that, wouldn't AirPods Pro latency be an issue? 

Yes, I wouldn't think of anyone using "wireless" to listen to their mixes while they record or work on their music.

I have a friend who's in a local band that records and mixes his own music and I've helped him a bit on occasion when he needed to borrow my PC for FL Studio (since his laptop was crap at running it). He always brought along his AKG and Sony studio headphones for that matter. When I asked him, why why not go for wireless, he says he can discern the sound somewhat and it sounds like crap and the latency would screw with his mixing.

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

On 6/6/2023 at 5:12 AM, kitnoman said:

Well the same way, that people are thought to hate the sin, but not the sinners. Personally, I think very few hate apple. They just think they do. That's why there are a lot of people who's using apple products. But even those who use them and locked to the apple ecosystem, hate some of the things they do(probably most). Yeah I guess most... 

oh no i definitely hate apple, I work in geeksquad and apple repair system is very frustrating, as for other things i still cannot understand why you cannot connect your apple phone to a computer and treat it like a usb drive. I could go on but im actually here on the forum to try to fix a server issue i have

[sub68]

16 hours ago, maplepants said:

For a lot of workloads, it is. Sure the video encoding tasks that Apple optimises for like ingest and encoding are going to have the 2023 Mac Pro absolutely stomp on the 2019 Mac Pro (even with an Afterburner). But there's just more raw GPU power available to the 2019 Mac Pro because you can cram it full of GPUs.

16 hours ago, AAVVIronAlex said:

Honestly, I think that the Mac Pro is a downgrade compared to the 2019 intel version, I hope they add GPU support and RAM upgradeability in the upcoming releases. Otherwise, I wish that they could stay with intel so we could have Hackintoshes guaranteed after 2029. I really like the M2 chips on mobile devices, but I do not understand why they use them on desktop and workstation devices where people really do not care about efficiency. I hardly think that the M2 Ultra can beat the 2019 version equipped with some top of the line graphics cards in demanding tasks, and unlike Apple, I do not think that 192GBs of RAM is greater than 1.5TBs of RAM.

Only pro environment I see is the music industry for the mac pro and I/No one in the industry would buy apple silicon due to plugins incompatibly.

(Yes, rosette exists but running stuff in emulation shouldn't be done due to crashing during live)

[AnonymousGuy]

I could see myself being a buyer if they get some game support behind them before launch.  Yeah it's expensive but what else is there?  Oh here's some $500 480p headset that needs an entire room dedicated to having tracking cameras installed in 4 positions to have mediocre tracking.  And BTW this is the best we could do after 3 iterations on this product.   The whole reason I haven't bought a VR headset yet is because none of them seem to be "there" in terms of being a polished product with good specs.

 

I look at it like a billet engine.  Yeah you can go pull a motor from a junkyard and build it out, but it won't have the capability of a $70k engine custom machined for the task.  Are you getting 30x more performance?  Noooope, but if you want the top end you pay top end.  It's classic Apple: they do it better than anyone else does because no one else can command the price point.  There's loads of shitty $10 earbuds but nothing works better than Airpods.

[Issac Zachary]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

There's loads of shitty $10 earbuds but nothing works better than Airpods.

I've never tried Airpods, but when I get earphones, I get Skullcandy ones for like $5, but they sound fine to me.

 

The problem I see with this device is if you have a family. I've never bought an iPhone or any phone for more than $500 (except maybe my wife's phone) because once one family member has one, then everyone wants one. Our TV cost less than $400! Now a pair of Apple Goggles for everyone?! I think we'd be better off buying an Oled TV before getting even one of these.

[maplepants]

8 hours ago, sub68 said:

Only pro environment I see is the music industry for the mac pro and I/No one in the industry would buy apple silicon due to plugins incompatibly.

(Yes, rosette exists but running stuff in emulation shouldn't be done due to crashing during live)

This makes sense in a way, as the music industry can often move slower. 

 

But one of my first jobs out of uni was at an FM radio station in the mid 2000s where all On Air systems were Windows NT or 2000 and *.mp2 was the only audio format supported for broadcast. I hadn't seen mp2 since high school, and didn't even know you could buy music in that format at that time. 

[gjsman]

3 hours ago, maplepants said:

But one of my first jobs out of uni was at an FM radio station in the mid 2000s where all On Air systems were Windows NT or 2000 and *.mp2 was the only audio format supported for broadcast. I hadn't seen mp2 since high school, and didn't even know you could buy music in that format at that time. 

Curiously, according to Wikipedia, MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (MP2) is actually still pretty popular for broadcasting to this day. It just seems to have caught on in that industry, got embedded, and never left. This may be because, at the time, FLAC and ALAC didn't exist, so your only hope for uncompressed audio was WAV/AIFF. That's obviously too large and unnecessarily complicated to store and distribute especially back in the 90s/2000s. MP2 for whatever reason (allegedly) got hardware-level decoding and encoding faster than MP3 due to the simpler design.

 

In the US though it's not as common anymore. In Europe they still have DAB and such, but the US switched to "HD Radio" which runs over the proprietary HDC codec (a significantly modified version of High-Efficiency AAC which is already niche compared to standard AAC). You can obviously encode MP2 to HDC, but considering we now have FLAC, ALAC, and way more storage than we did back then, there's far less penalty for using lossless.

[gjsman]

7 hours ago, Issac Zachary said:

I think we'd be better off buying an Oled TV before getting even one of these.

Buy an OLED. The Vision Pro right now could be best described as a luxury item, as though an OLED isn't a luxury item already. At least you won't be afraid of the slightest chance of damaging your headset if you drink any liquids while wearing it. 

 

I still think the Vision Pro might make sense right now for a remote worker, like myself, who hates WFH, but has no other option, and would like to work in a library or a park, but doesn't want to lug around a monitor, and wants to save his back from chiropractor visits from hunching over a laptop. It's cheaper than anything healthcare-related in the US. 

 

Or, here's an idea to justify it to yourself: Forgo coffee. The average American spends about $1,100 a year on coffee. Convince yourself to quit coffee completely for 3 years, and spend the savings on a Vision Pro. 

[AAVVIronAlex]

On 6/7/2023 at 1:52 PM, maplepants said:

For a lot of workloads, it is. Sure the video encoding tasks that Apple optimises for like ingest and encoding are going to have the 2023 Mac Pro absolutely stomp on the 2019 Mac Pro (even with an Afterburner). But there's just more raw GPU power available to the 2019 Mac Pro because you can cram it full of GPUs.

I don't really care about Hackintoshes and I don't think Apple does either. They're generally a pretty sub-par experience, break very easily, and users have to stick with old, potentially vulnerable, OS versions for far too long.

Well if you build a PC specifically for Hackintoshing, like with specific hardware that is almost identical to the ones in the builds you will get a cheaper and, in some cases, a more powerful Mac-like experience. As for Apple, they care, but they hate people who do it. Think of it like Jailbreaking, Apple likes to keep their products proprietary, so I do not think they like it when people make and use Hackintoshes just like they do not like people Jailbreaking and using Jailbroken iPhones.

On 6/7/2023 at 1:52 PM, maplepants said:

That said, I think the M1 & M2 desktops are quite good computers. And given the energy prices in Germany, I do care about efficiency. In everything except gaming, these computers compare really favourably to the Intel NUC 12 Extreme, and ThinkStation's in the same size class.

I still think they are best in laptops, especially because they do not burn your skin everytime the laptops are used on your lap (which they are made for). I think they do game well too, now that I think of it, at least, in the games supported. You should consider CS:GO or more Valve games that support the platform on one when you get your hands on it.

On 6/7/2023 at 1:52 PM, maplepants said:

The M2 Ultra will beat the 2019 at the tasks that Apple optimized for, compiling code, ML, video ingestion, colour work, 8k Pro Res playback, etc. But personally, I don't think "better than the 2019 Mac Pro at most tasks" is enough. It should be better than the 2019 in every way, just like the 2019 Mac Pro was better than every previous Mac Pro in every imaginable way.

Optimisation is not always the best example to market something with, raw performance will not show age, while optimisation is clearly controlled by the company. Slowdowns are guaranteed especially if Apple chooses to make people buy new hardware. Things like this will be harder to achieve on faster hardware. The 2019 could run other OS' which is a BIG improvement. The 2019 compared itself to the Cylinder which came out in 2013 and which had a inferior case design, which I do not like to call a fair comparison. The M2 however is lacking the power of x86 because it is widely known now, that even if the transition of ARM was a success and in some cases even a big success, it is not how Apple initially intended it to be which, I reckon, is partially because of COVID.

[sub68]

4 hours ago, maplepants said:

This makes sense in a way, as the music industry can often move slower. 

 

But one of my first jobs out of uni was at an FM radio station in the mid 2000s where all On Air systems were Windows NT or 2000 and *.mp2 was the only audio format supported for broadcast. I hadn't seen mp2 since high school, and didn't even know you could buy music in that format at that time. 

Not the industry the developers of the plugin or software individually have to redo all the programming to have it on apple silicon.

 

Mp2 might be because radio is mono and mp3 would take all the bandwidth.

Also seeing windows 2000 and nt makes sense as those probably manege something.

 

[Paul Thexton]

14 hours ago, sub68 said:

Not the industry the developers of the plugin or software individually have to redo all the programming to have it on apple silicon.

Only if their plugins were written in assembly, which given the importance of latency, might well be the case.

 

However, if the plugins are written in C/Obj-C/C++, then they just need to recompile the code, and other than some very unusual specifics, they won't need to do anything more than that.

[maplepants]

17 hours ago, gjsman said:

Curiously, according to Wikipedia, MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (MP2) is actually still pretty popular for broadcasting to this day. It just seems to have caught on in that industry, got embedded, and never left. This may be because, at the time, FLAC and ALAC didn't exist, so your only hope for uncompressed audio was WAV/AIFF. That's obviously too large and unnecessarily complicated to store and distribute especially back in the 90s/2000s. MP2 for whatever reason (allegedly) got hardware-level decoding and encoding faster than MP3 due to the simpler design.

 

In the US though it's not as common anymore. In Europe they still have DAB and such, but the US switched to "HD Radio" which runs over the proprietary HDC codec (a significantly modified version of High-Efficiency AAC which is already niche compared to standard AAC). You can obviously encode MP2 to HDC, but considering we now have FLAC, ALAC, and way more storage than we did back then, there's far less penalty for using lossless.

That's pretty interesting. I never did know why they stuck with it as that stuff basically all just worked and while I was there I never had to touch it. Most of my time was working with the absolutely cutting edge, for the time, part of their IT stack: Active Directory. We were transitioning everyone from per device accounts to Active Directory. 

 

I also worked with the tape backups some. I was in Canada at the time, and the "CanCon" rules required you to have the last month of broadcast recorded in order to verify that you'd actually been complying. So the company had set of 31 numbered tapes, and a recording device that was basically on the end of the stack right before it got sent out to the transmiter site. At a specific time each day, you'd take off the previous day's tape and put on the tape with today's number. I believe it was standard practice for the time and always impressed me with its elegant simplicity. 

16 hours ago, sub68 said:

Not the industry the developers of the plugin or software individually have to redo all the programming to have it on apple silicon.

Would they? VST plugins are written in C++, and so I always assumed that most were either written in C or C++. Recompiling the code should be pretty easy since the gcc compiler has worked on Apple Silicon for a couple years now. I assume the hard part would be anything that depends on non-MIDI hardware components. 

[maplepants]

16 hours ago, AAVVIronAlex said:

Well if you build a PC specifically for Hackintoshing, like with specific hardware that is almost identical to the ones in the builds you will get a cheaper and, in some cases, a more powerful Mac-like experience. As for Apple, they care, but they hate people who do it. Think of it like Jailbreaking, Apple likes to keep their products proprietary, so I do not think they like it when people make and use Hackintoshes just like they do not like people Jailbreaking and using Jailbroken iPhones.

A friend of mine is and has been a dedicated Hackintosher for years, but honestly I've never envied his Hackintoshes over my regular Macs. Mostly because even though he'd have beefier hardware, his software experience was terrible. iMessage often didn't work or if it did, it wouldn't stay working for long. Real Macs had "Universal Clipboard" for ages before he could convince his Hackintosh to do it. And generally just maintaining the thing was a shitload of work. And he never really got any jailbreak like benefits out of it.

 

I really dislike debugging my desktop, I want it to just stay out of my way and let me get my work done. It's why I run macOS or the current Ubuntu Desktop LTS on anything where I actually need to be productive. Sure a Hackintosh can get you better performance for a given price relative to an Intel Mac, but that juice just ain't worth the squeeze.

16 hours ago, AAVVIronAlex said:

Optimisation is not always the best example to market something with, raw performance will not show age, while optimisation is clearly controlled by the company. Slowdowns are guaranteed especially if Apple chooses to make people buy new hardware.

Agreed, this is why I was hoping for the ability to cram the Mac Pro slots full of GPUs. Because I don't think the CPU performance of the M2 will age poorly, but the GPU market is different.

16 hours ago, AAVVIronAlex said:

The 2019 could run other OS' which is a BIG improvement.

Apple Silicon Macs are 100% capable of running different operating systems. There's already a version of Linux for them: https://asahilinux.org. If Microsoft made an ARM version of Windows which supported the hardware, that would work too. But for now the Microsoft blessed way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac is in a VM.

 

Sure there aren't many operating system choices for these machines, but that's not because Apple prevents you from installing something other than macOS.

16 hours ago, AAVVIronAlex said:

The M2 however is lacking the power of x86 because it is widely known now, that even if the transition of ARM was a success and in some cases even a big success, it is not how Apple initially intended it to be which, I reckon, is partially because of COVID.

I disagree that the M2 lineup lacks power. It's a decent sized jump from the M1 for being on the same process node. But generally, the M2 lineup is quite powerful.

 

Making a more powerful system is possible, but it comes with significant trade offs.

 

Some goes on the desktop. My gaming PC with a RTX 3080 is much better than my M1 Max Mac Studio, in some benchmarks but I would never want that thing sitting on my desk blasting heat at me all day. Nor would I want the bump to my power bill.

[sub68]

8 hours ago, Paul Thexton said:

However, if the plugins are written in C/Obj-C/C++, then they just need to recompile the code, and other than some very unusual specifics, they won't need to do anything more than that.

 

6 hours ago, maplepants said:

Would they? VST plugins are written in C++, and so I always assumed that most were either written in C or C++. Recompiling the code should be pretty easy since the gcc compiler has worked on Apple Silicon for a couple years now. I assume the hard part would be anything that depends on non-MIDI hardware components. 

Yes thats what they would do.

However this is the music industry they are very slow on doing changes.