I agree. ISPs will continue to squeeze more money out of us the more we depend and rely on bandwidth for everyday applications. Unfortunately, unless something drastic happens, I only see bandwidth prices increasing (for consumers) and caps decreasing. A win for the ISPs but major loss for everyone else.
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Apple to Begin Merging iOS and OS X With Quad-Core A6 Chip Next Year?
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I agree. ISPs will continue to squeeze more money out of us the more we depend and rely on bandwidth for everyday applications. Unfortunately, unless something drastic happens, I only see bandwidth prices increasing (for consumers) and caps decreasing. A win for the ISPs but major loss for everyone else.
By very nature ARM is always playing catch up... what happens when Intel jumps to the next generation chips down the line? (I'm talking next major generation-- optical, etc.-- not simple year over year revisions). ARM is great for mobiles... it will not be great for desktops. Adding more cores and upping the clock speed doesn't necessarily make it a direct competitor to Intel-- it more comes down to chip architecture (see mhz myth, etc).
Windows 8 is exactly a merged OS with tablet OS and desktop OS. Why the hell would Apple make a beef cake OS ? I don't even see a reason to do soo. Seperating iOS and OS X is for the exact reason to improve development and the user experience for each device.
Needs full backward compatibility
It's more than that. I want to be able to keep my data and applications for more than just a few years. Apple is forcing abandonment of old apps by abandoning Classic, PPC, etc emulation. People have a tremendous amount of data in old applications that is not accessible through any iOS or new MacOSX applications. It would be easy for Apple to spend just a tiny bit of their 74 BILLION dollars in cash to maintain total backward compatibility. Emulate all of the old OSs. Heck, emulate CPM, DOS and Windows too and really broaden their market.
Apple should be maintaining compatibility for all applications all the way back. The computers, even an iPodTouch, have the computing power necessary to emulate all the previous machines. There is a tremendous amount of software that was never upgraded to PowerPC and then to Intel. Developers went out of business. But many users, especially in small businesses and education, still use that software. This is a great resource. It is a shame for Apple to abandon it. If they're doing this for Quicken they should do it for all applications.
Some people say upgrade to alternative software but are no alternative titles for a lot of the software. Apple should not be abandoning Rosetta and they should not have abandoned Classic. They are an enormous company with tremendous resources. They could easily keep emulation for these older systems going.
It is irresponsible of Apple to create obsolescence of hardware by discontinuing operating system and technical support for older systems. This policy of Apple's creates more trash filling the landfills and is a waste of resources.
The solution is for Apple to make new software intelligently scaleable such that it recognizes the hardware it is being installed on and adjusts to fit within the memory footprint and hardware's capabilities. Yes, certain new features like transparent window shadows will not be available but there are many improvements which can be continued to offer for older hardware such as the folders in the new iOS which do not need any advanced hardware capability.
The benefit to Apple is they can continue getting sales of operating systems each year as they offer new versions of the OS with new features. Additionally Apple will gain more market penetration as the old hardware is kept active and passed down in families resulting in a larger user installed base. Charge for the technical support - obviously. Just keep offering AppleCare.
Apple should also encourage developers to support the furthest back operating systems and hardware possible.
It's more than that. I want to be able to keep my data and applications for more than just a few years. Apple is forcing abandonment of old apps by abandoning Classic, PPC, etc emulation. People have a tremendous amount of data in old applications that is not accessible through any iOS or new MacOSX applications. It would be easy for Apple to spend just a tiny bit of their 74 BILLION dollars in cash to maintain total backward compatibility. Emulate all of the old OSs. Heck, emulate CPM, DOS and Windows too and really broaden their market.
Apple should be maintaining compatibility for all applications all the way back. The computers, even an iPodTouch, have the computing power necessary to emulate all the previous machines. There is a tremendous amount of software that was never upgraded to PowerPC and then to Intel. Developers went out of business. But many users, especially in small businesses and education, still use that software. This is a great resource. It is a shame for Apple to abandon it. If they're doing this for Quicken they should do it for all applications.
Some people say upgrade to alternative software but are no alternative titles for a lot of the software. Apple should not be abandoning Rosetta and they should not have abandoned Classic. They are an enormous company with tremendous resources. They could easily keep emulation for these older systems going.
It is irresponsible of Apple to create obsolescence of hardware by discontinuing operating system and technical support for older systems. This policy of Apple's creates more trash filling the landfills and is a waste of resources.
The solution is for Apple to make new software intelligently scaleable such that it recognizes the hardware it is being installed on and adjusts to fit within the memory footprint and hardware's capabilities. Yes, certain new features like transparent window shadows will not be available but there are many improvements which can be continued to offer for older hardware such as the folders in the new iOS which do not need any advanced hardware capability.
The benefit to Apple is they can continue getting sales of operating systems each year as they offer new versions of the OS with new features. Additionally Apple will gain more market penetration as the old hardware is kept active and passed down in families resulting in a larger user installed base. Charge for the technical support - obviously. Just keep offering AppleCare.
Apple should also encourage developers to support the furthest back operating systems and hardware possible.
Exactly, most iOS users have never used or even seen OS X. The halo effect from the iPhone is still a major factor in the growth of OS X usage and Mac sales. Winni is trolling as usual.
In any case this whole iOS merging with OS X debate is based too much on the current situation of both OS-es. Advocators of iOS are afraid because they suspect invasion of OS X and advocators of OS X fear it the other way around.
No-one here has a clear view of where these two OS-es will be in 3 to 5 years, so it might well be that Apple will find some middle ground that will satisfy both camps. However unlikely that might seem to everyone currently.
Since Lion has been predicted to be the last OS X version, I'm really interested to see in what way OS XI or whatever will be different from OS X. I will remain a customer as long as it will satisfy my needs as both iOS and OS X do now.
Honda make great cars.
Honda make great motorcycles.
If Honda management came out and said 'We're going to bring our car and motorcycle production together in the name of convergence, so from now on, all our cars and bikes will have three wheels!', would you think:
a) There's some forward thinking management going on right there!
or
b) WTF are these retarded monkeys doing?
I have a perfectly good mobile OS on my iPad, and I have (as I've gone back to Snow Leopard) a perfectly good OS on my Mac. I don't want one or other messed up in an effort to make them both look the same.
Honda make great motorcycles.
If Honda management came out and said 'We're going to bring our car and motorcycle production together in the name of convergence, so from now on, all our cars and bikes will have three wheels!', would you think:
a) There's some forward thinking management going on right there!
or
b) WTF are these retarded monkeys doing?
I have a perfectly good mobile OS on my iPad, and I have (as I've gone back to Snow Leopard) a perfectly good OS on my Mac. I don't want one or other messed up in an effort to make them both look the same.
But both of those were totally necessary transitions. 68k was dead, and PPC near the end was just frankly embarrassing.
Intel is strong and almost surely will continue to be strong in 2016 unless they make radical changes to their roadmaps and maybe a couple of meteors wipe their R&D facilities out.
It isn't about changing architecture but rather...
merging architecture.
If you look at the litigious history between AMD and Intel, AMD almost always came out on top. Japan has already ruled that Intel has a monopoly with its various x86 patents. Now that OS X has moved to using x86 exclusively, the argument is even stronger that Intel should not have sole control over the x86 instruction set.
In addition, in 2009 Intel settled its lawsuit with AMD by paying 1.25b AND renewing its x86 license for another five years.
Soooooooo, imagine in 2012 Apple begins to offer OS support for both ARM and x86 (similar to Tiger, etc support of PPC and x86). In 2014, AMD, Apple, NVidia, etc, wage war against Intel taking away their exclusivity for the x86 instruction set. At this point you see ARM chips beginning to support x86 instructions. By 2016, Apple would then be able to design their own chips in house for their entire line of products and said chips would have none of the limitations that hobbled PPC.
Just a crazy idea by a noob.
merging architecture.
If you look at the litigious history between AMD and Intel, AMD almost always came out on top. Japan has already ruled that Intel has a monopoly with its various x86 patents. Now that OS X has moved to using x86 exclusively, the argument is even stronger that Intel should not have sole control over the x86 instruction set.
In addition, in 2009 Intel settled its lawsuit with AMD by paying 1.25b AND renewing its x86 license for another five years.
Soooooooo, imagine in 2012 Apple begins to offer OS support for both ARM and x86 (similar to Tiger, etc support of PPC and x86). In 2014, AMD, Apple, NVidia, etc, wage war against Intel taking away their exclusivity for the x86 instruction set. At this point you see ARM chips beginning to support x86 instructions. By 2016, Apple would then be able to design their own chips in house for their entire line of products and said chips would have none of the limitations that hobbled PPC.
Just a crazy idea by a noob.
Intel is lightyears ahead of most chip companies. Its a position they've always held. Intel's chips are becoming less power hungry and faster. Intel will stay strong for more then a decade at least.
And OS X is basically a layer of SomeBSD, like NextStep.
Still, different APIs, different toolkits, different interface guidelines are involved to make a Mac a Mac and an iPhone an iPhone (sic).
The end goal is blurring the line between them, because the line between "smartphone/tablet" and "computer" will be less and less definite in the future.
Completely irrelevant, but the radio is playing a song called "Price Tag" as I type, which makes me want to kill someone.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)
These reports are highly simplistic. I'm sure iOS can be grown to accomplish what has been stated here--no merge necessary. The only thing Apple would have to gain is majoring leverage of a one system campaign.
These reports are highly simplistic. I'm sure iOS can be grown to accomplish what has been stated here--no merge necessary. The only thing Apple would have to gain is majoring leverage of a one system campaign.
Backwards compatibility is the reason why PCs were still running DOS-based versions of Windows less than a decade ago (Windows 9x). Before everybody was concerned with security (outside of enterprise users) we were always hearing about stability. OS9 wasn't very stable either because of it's ancient roots. It is important to some, but not important to most. Apple has handled all their transitions (68k -> PPC, OS9 -> OSX, PPC -> Intel, etc) quite well and maintained backwards compatibility for at least five years in nearly all cases. That's plenty of time. If the software relied upon this, blame the people who didn't update the software (and also keep an old system around).
Speaking of ancient roots, the x86 architecture is holding us back too. The SIMD extensions sets and x86-64 extension set along with the extra cores and SMT are what make it so powerful. Synthetic benchmark performance improvements from one architecture generation to the next go unnoticed by the majority of people too because they never utilize that extra power. Speaking of power, I still believe that PPC is a better architecture than x86 but that's just my opinion. I also believe that the Intel transition was a great move on Apple's part.
As far as switching to ARM in the future and having a unified single OS. Well as already mentioned, iOS already is OSX. If you've jailbroken your device and used the terminal, the file system is very similar (it is BSD unix afterall).
I don't think that the article is saying that all the bloat from the desktop release would carry over to the phone. I've always thought that Apple's intent was to make OSX more iOS-like and unify the two in the future. Even MS's Windows 8 is going to have an ARM release.
On the PC side, Intel has the advantage today, but from a performance-per-watt standpoint ARM kills it on the mobile side. A while back I saw a test where a single core ARM CPU was nearly equal to a single core Atom CPU except that it consumed a fraction of the power. Computing will move on from x86, it has to. Mobile is huge and x86 doesn't get along with mobile. Having a single OS and single computing architecture for both mobile and PC just makes a lot more sense. Techy geeks who boast about their 'ZMG 16 cores!' probably don't realize that it could be better if we moved away from x86
Speaking of ancient roots, the x86 architecture is holding us back too. The SIMD extensions sets and x86-64 extension set along with the extra cores and SMT are what make it so powerful. Synthetic benchmark performance improvements from one architecture generation to the next go unnoticed by the majority of people too because they never utilize that extra power. Speaking of power, I still believe that PPC is a better architecture than x86 but that's just my opinion. I also believe that the Intel transition was a great move on Apple's part.
As far as switching to ARM in the future and having a unified single OS. Well as already mentioned, iOS already is OSX. If you've jailbroken your device and used the terminal, the file system is very similar (it is BSD unix afterall).
I don't think that the article is saying that all the bloat from the desktop release would carry over to the phone. I've always thought that Apple's intent was to make OSX more iOS-like and unify the two in the future. Even MS's Windows 8 is going to have an ARM release.
On the PC side, Intel has the advantage today, but from a performance-per-watt standpoint ARM kills it on the mobile side. A while back I saw a test where a single core ARM CPU was nearly equal to a single core Atom CPU except that it consumed a fraction of the power. Computing will move on from x86, it has to. Mobile is huge and x86 doesn't get along with mobile. Having a single OS and single computing architecture for both mobile and PC just makes a lot more sense. Techy geeks who boast about their 'ZMG 16 cores!' probably don't realize that it could be better if we moved away from x86
Intel is most certainly light years ahead of most chip companies which is part of the problem. Chips built on ARMv7 architecture are comparable in performance to single core Atom chips while consuming a quarter of the power. Intel is always improving the performance-per-watt of the Atom, but I have doubts if they'll ever have a phone-worthy x86 chip that can compete with ARM.
IMHO they should just work on a competitive non-x86 architecture. They've had problems in that area though. Itanium wasn't as good as competitive RISC architectures like Power. They found themselves competing for the most part with x86 (themselves). It didn't help that a lot of software being used was running through a slow x86 emulator either.
Amen to that.
If for your mission critical tasks/data you rely on a piece of software written by some unknown company, released on a closed source basis, and don't have enough money to persuade them to port it to a different/newer system, given that they are still around... well, you are not being a wise IT manager.
If a different CPU is a worry to you in terms of backward compatibility, you are simply not doing it right.
Frequent architecture changes are GODSEND to ensure that the last managers who believe in the cornflakes approach to software either change their mind or go doing something else.
Yeah.
Point is, we must differentiate "architecture" and "products".
x86 is no better than PPC or ARM.
Only, Intel delivers better products by a mile, because they have the resources and the technology to get a good product out of an average architecture.
PPC: great architecture, but is there a chipmaker in the world that makes PPC CPUs that are not stuck in the pleistocene when it comes to manufacturing process, die size, extensions, etc?
But, here we go: we've had HUNDREDS of different ARM-based chips, as you know ARM is slightly different from other architectures because it works on a license-only basis.
Does Apple have the resources to make some great ARM-based chips?
Right now, not really.
But Apple has a history of buying entire factories and, perhaps - not sure -foundries.
Apple has lots of money stashed away.
Is it possible that Apple can make a kickass general purpouse ARM CPU in the future?
HELL YES!
+1
I think you are very much right, Sir.
...now that I think of it, "ARM" and "Intel" aren't mutually exclusive.
What about an ARM-based chip developed by Apple and Intel?
What about an ARM-based chip developed by Apple and Intel?
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple stopped making desktop computers in the medium term. Replacing OSX with iOS is probably a matter of when, than if...
You are correct which is why I don't think that transitioning away from Intel is forgone conclusion; however, as others have pointed out Intel for all its strengths still can't muster the power-to-watt ratio of ARM and ARM has a development history just as long as Intel with a rapidly growing and diverse investment as a consortium of chip makers want to push it to its limits.
While I concede this is a debatable point, when the Intel transition happened the Mac Pro wasn't initially a big step over the PowerMac G5. The big advantage was in the portable sector with Core Duo vs. G4. I imagine when/if Apple makes the switch (in *5* years . . . well into Intel's "we think this'll work but we don't have the tech yet" roadmap) the portables will be better or comparable but the heavy lifting pro machines will be a step back.
As a side note I would be very surprised if Apple switched to being heavily cloud dependent--at least while Jobs is alive. While the Pro machines haven't gotten a lot of love lately, or rather haven't gotten what *they* wanted and instead what Apple thinks they should use, I don't think Apple will abandon the upper-high-end market. They don't do gaming, they don't do racked servers, and they most certainly don't do low-end so what else are they doing but delivering high-end computing machines, albeit to consumers?
Intel has actually already offered its foundry expertise in manufacturing ARM based processors for clients. Not sure if this has actually happened.
This is preposterous. And this analyst has no brain.
Although I could see Apple doing something like this after ios and osx have evolved much more (maybe 5 years from now or something), I still think it would be a terrible move on their part. I really think apple moving to intel was one of their smartest decisions. It was a huge factor in me buying my first mac. It gives people the option of running windows as well, because we all know some software is not, unfortunately, made for mac. But the big thing here is, why move away from intel? It's INTEL! They are THE leader in chip making. Even if apple moved to AMD or something, that would be one thing, but going to a completely different architecture that would be incompatible with the rest of the computing world... I think that would hurt Apple. And it would be a huge pain for consumers, developers, etc.
Although I could see Apple doing something like this after ios and osx have evolved much more (maybe 5 years from now or something), I still think it would be a terrible move on their part. I really think apple moving to intel was one of their smartest decisions. It was a huge factor in me buying my first mac. It gives people the option of running windows as well, because we all know some software is not, unfortunately, made for mac. But the big thing here is, why move away from intel? It's INTEL! They are THE leader in chip making. Even if apple moved to AMD or something, that would be one thing, but going to a completely different architecture that would be incompatible with the rest of the computing world... I think that would hurt Apple. And it would be a huge pain for consumers, developers, etc.
As fast as ARM architecture has the potential to be, historically intel chips have been about an order of magnitude faster. I can't see any advantage to this unless 1) ARM approaches intel in speed, 2) it results in much cheaper products, 3) ARM processors are still fast enough to handle most everyday tasks and higher end models like macbook pros, imacs, and mac pros remain with intel. The issue with #3 and the reason why this will likely never happen is that this would create a situation where apple would have to support 2 processor architectures for osx, which is a whole lot of extra work.
Has this moron.... err analyst got any proof? Apple would not make such a stupid move, nobody wants a unified OS for all of their devices. Look at the feedback from the windows 8 Metro UI. A desktop OS should be just that not iOS not WP7 and Not ubuntu unity. Lets leave the tablet OS'es to the Tablets. I Want OS 11 or Xi or whatever, not iOS and certantly not an ARM chip in my macbook. The whole point of intel is COMPATABILITY that is how they got so far up the ladder. Not Because of PowerPC. Really People think of how many times this speculator... dammit i mean analyst has been wrong.
I guess I should buy myself a fully loaded mac pro right now so i can go without having to downgrade to a crap "A6" chip for a while.
Seriously apple, last time you tried having your own processor for your products, they couldn't compete with what the major processor manufacturers had to offer.
And if apple takes away the advanced functionality of OS X just for a stupid merger with their mobile platform, then i'm not going to be a mac user for much longer.
Seriously apple, last time you tried having your own processor for your products, they couldn't compete with what the major processor manufacturers had to offer.
And if apple takes away the advanced functionality of OS X just for a stupid merger with their mobile platform, then i'm not going to be a mac user for much longer.
I am sure the Apple engineers are really keen on putting an ultramobile chip on a high-end workstation.
When on EARTH did Apple manufacture or design their own desktop processors?
They were part of the consortium that designed the PPC (which was a good CPU before the G5 circus), and probably were very keen on adding some 680x0-like instructions to the RS/6000, but by these standards you could say that Microsoft invented SSE and John Carmack designed the first GeForce...
And if apple takes away the advanced functionality of OS X just for a stupid merger with their mobile platform, then i'm not going to be a mac user for much longer.
For the sake of precision, would you care to mention which kind of "advanced functionality" you see disappearing from OS X in the future?
Gestures?
Versioning?