Especially GB. Right now I have Logic open (64 bit) and using 8.5 gigs of ram. Anything that requires realtime processing like audio and video really needs to make the best use of ram and CPU cores (and I know that cores are a separate issue from 64 bit code, just mentioning it).
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iLife '11 Still 32-Bit
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Especially GB. Right now I have Logic open (64 bit) and using 8.5 gigs of ram. Anything that requires realtime processing like audio and video really needs to make the best use of ram and CPU cores (and I know that cores are a separate issue from 64 bit code, just mentioning it).
What's the hurry with a captive audience?
Are they afraid their proles are going to have the
audacity to think different and get Winbloz computerz?
This is so true. Your photos will show up with black spots where the bits are missing.
Wait a sec, ilife are commercial lifestyle applications, they sell for $50 and at that price they are a STEAL, it really is the best deal out there as Steve said in terms of a bundle of multimedia apps.
They also come free with new macs.
They are not expected to have pro capabilities, if you want to record your new album of studio film, get the pro apps. You seem intelligent I am sure you understand this. You can't be expected to record a commercial music album on an app that costs you less than $10 or is freely bundled on your mac, or do you expect this?
You can still do that of course with gb (and similarly imovie) just slower and with less options.
Still regardless of their perceived shortcomings the real bottleneck here is the use of the cpu cores in parallel, and that's certainly a complex issue that's not affecting apple solely but the whole industry. At least apple has made one first attempt at this with grand central dispatch no matter how undersupplied it still is.
Are the iLife apps intensive enough to benefit from 64 bit?
No.
The only component that has any use at all of being 64-bit is the encoding process in iMovie, and that is passed along to QuickTime, which is 64-bit.
I suppose if you're using iPhoto to manage truly enormous photos (over 4 GB each photo, such as truly monstrous 48-bit-color TIFF files - for comparison, the highest resolution digital still camera, saving in RAW mode, produces files under 100 MB,) it might benefit.
There are only two benefits of switching to 64-bit mode: The ability to utilize more than 4 GB of RAM (again, with the possible exception of iPhoto, none of the iLife apps need this, since the memory-intensive parts of iMovie are pawned off on QT
and a slight speedup (0-15% depending on code,) because the 64-bit mode in x86 has more registers. The other benefits of 64-bit mode are things that were already optional in 32-bit mode (the use of SSE instead of the standard x86 floating point unit, etc.) The code speedup only even applies to Intel, as on PPC, there is *NO* speedup, since PPC was designed from the ground up to be 64-bit, so there are no real architectural differences between PPC-32 and PPC-64. (The speedup is from getting rid of some ancient x86 cruft, and adding a couple features that weren't possible to just bolt onto 32-bit mode. In every test, the speedup is less than 15%, with the average being about 5%. For applications that aren't CPU-dependent, this is not worth the effort until really needed.)
In short: WHO CARES!?!?! (Photoshop, on the other hand, has a very legitimate reason to go 64-bit...)
What's the hurry with a captive audience?
Are they afraid their proles are going to have the
audacity to think different and get Winbloz computerz?
Oh you are so wise, you 've read Orwell, and you can now refer to pretty much most of the rest of the forum as lower class simpletons.
Oh mother superior, oh lady Godiva open up our eyes, we the plebes who buy apple beg you to open our eyes to our delusions. We don't care about the insults, just show!.
I don't consider running well to be a "pro capability". Nor do I consider a low price to be an excuse not to update to 64 bits.
Of course these are consumer apps. But apple has piled on feature after feature that is demanding on the machine, but not equipped the apps to run at their fullest potential.
Along the same lines, Apple is now selling iMacs with 4 cores (plus hyperthreading) that can have up to 16 gigs of ram. If their consumer machines are going to offer this, their consumer apps should take advantage of that hardware.
I'll agree with you that that's a big factor as well. It's nice that they put GC in the OS, but is the new iLife software actually using it? Does it use all cores or not?
You say it's no use at all...then you say there's a potential speedup of up to 15% (sure sounds like a Yes to me). I'll take that speedup, thank you very much. I'm baffled, how foolish would someone have to be to not want their software 15% faster? And the iApps could definitely use it, performance has never been great.
I wouldn't worry unless you're not under warranty. Apple supposedly designed these things to handle full load and not melt to the center of the Earth.
My Macbook managed to survive nearly two weeks of Handbrake early on.
I don't get it. What is the big difference between 32 bit and 64 bit? I'm not saying there *isn't* a big difference. I'm simply asking?
No.
The only component that has any use at all of being 64-bit is the encoding process in iMovie, and that is passed along to QuickTime, which is 64-bit.
I suppose if you're using iPhoto to manage truly enormous photos (over 4 GB each photo, such as truly monstrous 48-bit-color TIFF files - for comparison, the highest resolution digital still camera, saving in RAW mode, produces files under 100 MB,) it might benefit.
There are only two benefits of switching to 64-bit mode: The ability to utilize more than 4 GB of RAM (again, with the possible exception of iPhoto, none of the iLife apps need this, since the memory-intensive parts of iMovie are pawned off on QT
The code speedup only even applies to Intel, as on PPC, there is *NO* speedup, since PPC was designed from the ground up to be 64-bit, so there are no real architectural differences between PPC-32 and PPC-64. (The speedup is from getting rid of some ancient x86 cruft, and adding a couple features that weren't possible to just bolt onto 32-bit mode. In every test, the speedup is less than 15%, with the average being about 5%. For applications that aren't CPU-dependent, this is not worth the effort until really needed.)
In short: WHO CARES!?!?! (Photoshop, on the other hand, has a very legitimate reason to go 64-bit...)
What an excellent post, this should have been on the article on the main page itself, it would have saved us all from this thread going downhill and we would have started off from a good starting point to have an intelligent discussion so we could dig a bit deeper get better grasp of what's really going on besides the fud.
@milo, @ skinny.
See above.
Yeah, if only someone had earlier pointed out the potential 15% improvement in performance. Sure sounds like a good reason to want 64 bit to me.
No 64bit?! So many years later!?
Apple is LAZIER than ADOBE, then.
Maybe Steve should banish iLife from the Mac.
But yeah, the same ones who cast the big rocks against Flash, now run to defend iLife....
Apple is LAZIER than ADOBE, then.
Maybe Steve should banish iLife from the Mac.
But yeah, the same ones who cast the big rocks against Flash, now run to defend iLife....
Actually, he's right (at least with the default settings). 32-bit versions of Windows will only dish out a maximum of 2GB to an application *unless* you make a configuration change which allows it to dish out up to 3GB *and* the application's binary is edited to allow it to ask for more than 2GB.
There's utilities to be found for some of the more common apps that people want to allow to access more than 2GB, such as Visual Studio.
On a 64-bit Windows platform I believe a 32-bit app can get up to 3.5GB, though I'm not sure why it doesn't allow the full 4GB. (I could be remembering this incorrectly, but we had a discussion a couple months back about why allowed RAM allocation is different than you'd expect in various circumstances.)
Thanks @ bouncer1.
15% speed boost. Meh. I can't think of a single time I've used iPhoto and needed it to do something faster. ...and I use iPhoto all the time for both business and personal stuff.
15% speed boost. Meh. I can't think of a single time I've used iPhoto and needed it to do something faster. ...and I use iPhoto all the time for both business and personal stuff.
Really, are iTunes and iPhoto actually running short on the 4GB of RAM they can access as 32-bit apps now? If not, there's not a whole lot to be gained by going to 64-bit just yet. iMovie and GarageBand are the two I'd expect to see moved over first, but not until after their respective 'Pro' versions are done. Show me a user who would actually notice a difference between a 32-bit and 64-bit version of Keynote or Pages. Really, try it. 64-bit has some advantages, but it's not magic.
The signs of demise are a bit upsetting. Apple is asleep in many of their application development areas. Final Cut has been virtually the same for the last three iterations (and please don't read me the useless feature list. I use it professionally, and no one on the block has changed a thing about how the use the product).
iWeb is "almost" a preferred way to make websites, but without simple options to name a page what you want (file name that is) it leaves pros who just want a little boost unable to publish things. Photo galleries that have been updated in iPhoto don't update in iWeb. Still major Javascript problems when Windows browsers view anything above a web page.
iPhoto's work flow is horrible. You view a photo, click Edit, make your changes, then click Done and you return to a gallery view, and not the detailed view you were in prior to editing. Let's fix that before adding more features, and please let me turn off face recognition. I don't need that data, and I certainly don't need snoops stealing that data.
Quicktime got completely nerfed in the last release. Glad I still have Leopard's version. I should be able to "copy" a frame from my own quicktime to use in Photoshop. Instead, I have to use VLC or DivX to get the job done. All the editing features have been destroyed save the very cool "trim" feature. I shouldn't have to launch iMovie or FCP to capture a small portion of a video from a master clip.
iChat continues to have debilitating proxy / firewall problems, while Skype walks right past the problems with no issue. Would be nice to start using iChat for the first time since it was invented.
iDVD was pretty much done on the first release...can you spare some more themes?
iMovie is just a mess, and in DIRE need of 64 bit processing. And for the love of God, STOP MAKING ME PROCESS THUMBNAILS! If you're going to do your big "thumbnail" feature, at least do it in the background. Quake 4 can do 120 FPS and iMovie can't process thumbnails from a consumer HD movie in less than 45 minutes on an 8-core Mac Pro? Please.
The iWork suite is damn near PERFECT. No complaints.
Remote Desktop, perfect on the first day.
Safari, can you please fix my URLs? If I typed .cm instead of .com, and the URL fails, can you please redo it for me? Just a little thing.
Mail, can you automate my filters for me? If I drag an email from the INBOX to a folder, can you prompt to ask me to create a filter for that person in that folder? Or add the person to an existing folder filter?
Finder, can I please have a smart trashcan? Something with unerase for non-secure deletes? Let me configure it perhaps? Can you remember how I've positioned and configured the views per folder? Can the EJECT icon NOT turn into a "?" when a DVD isn't in the drive?
System, can we start cleaning up the File Sharing protocol? It's 2010, and you need to investigate binary protocols. FTP kills File Sharing, but isn't consumer friendly. Is it too much to ask to know who's subscribed to my computer? Like back in the System 7 days?
Dashboard, can you please make it possible to see my dashboard widget while I'm still in the finder? Like a cool HUD? Something that allows me to see the total I just calculated in calculator? Perhaps what time it is in London? A path a flight coming in?
Plenty of room for EASY innovation that the users will love.
iWeb is "almost" a preferred way to make websites, but without simple options to name a page what you want (file name that is) it leaves pros who just want a little boost unable to publish things. Photo galleries that have been updated in iPhoto don't update in iWeb. Still major Javascript problems when Windows browsers view anything above a web page.
iPhoto's work flow is horrible. You view a photo, click Edit, make your changes, then click Done and you return to a gallery view, and not the detailed view you were in prior to editing. Let's fix that before adding more features, and please let me turn off face recognition. I don't need that data, and I certainly don't need snoops stealing that data.
Quicktime got completely nerfed in the last release. Glad I still have Leopard's version. I should be able to "copy" a frame from my own quicktime to use in Photoshop. Instead, I have to use VLC or DivX to get the job done. All the editing features have been destroyed save the very cool "trim" feature. I shouldn't have to launch iMovie or FCP to capture a small portion of a video from a master clip.
iChat continues to have debilitating proxy / firewall problems, while Skype walks right past the problems with no issue. Would be nice to start using iChat for the first time since it was invented.
iDVD was pretty much done on the first release...can you spare some more themes?
iMovie is just a mess, and in DIRE need of 64 bit processing. And for the love of God, STOP MAKING ME PROCESS THUMBNAILS! If you're going to do your big "thumbnail" feature, at least do it in the background. Quake 4 can do 120 FPS and iMovie can't process thumbnails from a consumer HD movie in less than 45 minutes on an 8-core Mac Pro? Please.
The iWork suite is damn near PERFECT. No complaints.
Remote Desktop, perfect on the first day.
Safari, can you please fix my URLs? If I typed .cm instead of .com, and the URL fails, can you please redo it for me? Just a little thing.
Mail, can you automate my filters for me? If I drag an email from the INBOX to a folder, can you prompt to ask me to create a filter for that person in that folder? Or add the person to an existing folder filter?
Finder, can I please have a smart trashcan? Something with unerase for non-secure deletes? Let me configure it perhaps? Can you remember how I've positioned and configured the views per folder? Can the EJECT icon NOT turn into a "?" when a DVD isn't in the drive?
System, can we start cleaning up the File Sharing protocol? It's 2010, and you need to investigate binary protocols. FTP kills File Sharing, but isn't consumer friendly. Is it too much to ask to know who's subscribed to my computer? Like back in the System 7 days?
Dashboard, can you please make it possible to see my dashboard widget while I'm still in the finder? Like a cool HUD? Something that allows me to see the total I just calculated in calculator? Perhaps what time it is in London? A path a flight coming in?
Plenty of room for EASY innovation that the users will love.
Why do you have to misconstrue what the man said, only imovie would have arguably benefited on an average of 5% say, that's what he said. Do you have raw image files of a few gis in iphoto? If you are like most you don't. Again this a a consumer app, not a pro app, if apple is to be held responsible for pushing a 5% limit for a single app within a whole suit that's pretty snappy to begin with when every six months or so this 5% is rendered completely irrelevant with the new cpus that come out, ok then hold them responsible for it, I mean what can I say on that?
Simply unbelievable comment, he completely ignores everything everyone else has been saying thus far and equates a fast efficient suite of apps that does all sorts of things for all sorts of people with the piece of junk that is flash on the mac (and on linux and in general). Unbelievable.
Yeah maybe Steve should banish iLife from Mac, that's the conclusion here, maybe Steve should banish iLife from the Mac.
Let me just go leave some feedback to apple on that, I 've had a revelation.
I too was hoping for 64 bit. I live in Aperture, but I'm getting into video more and more. As such, 64 bit operations would have been a nice update for some of the more intensive tasks in iMovie like stabilization, import/export, etc. I do have 8GB of memory. So, the headroom is there in my setup. From Aperture 3, I can attest that running on the 64 bit kernel is a big speed boost, especially when I'm applying adjustments to many images. So, in the right settings 64 bit is a big win.
Even without 64 bit, I do believe that new iLife apps are taking advantage of some of the improvements that were implemented in Snow Leopard to take advantage of multi-core and GPU. I've tested a few projects, and intensive operations are noticeably faster. It seems like threads are being managed more efficiently. So, there are performance improvements that most users will feel.
Anyway, the audio enhancements in iMovie are enough to justify the new discounted price for me, and there are nice bits of polish and reduced steps here and there that are quite welcome.
Plus, all the new iPhoto slideshows extend into Aperture. Bonus. Now, let's talk books...
Even without 64 bit, I do believe that new iLife apps are taking advantage of some of the improvements that were implemented in Snow Leopard to take advantage of multi-core and GPU. I've tested a few projects, and intensive operations are noticeably faster. It seems like threads are being managed more efficiently. So, there are performance improvements that most users will feel.
Anyway, the audio enhancements in iMovie are enough to justify the new discounted price for me, and there are nice bits of polish and reduced steps here and there that are quite welcome.
Plus, all the new iPhoto slideshows extend into Aperture. Bonus. Now, let's talk books...
There are many valid points here, I could add a few myself, but I don't think apple is falling asleep on the wheel here. Come summer a new os will be around, much earlier than that a new iwork suit.
Nobody is perfect and if I start mentioning my nuisances about something as simple as say safari, it would be a long list too. I hope your post doesn't go to waste and that you do go into the trouble of posting this in the feedback section to apple.
Having said that there's always that fine line between offering options and making too many options available for the end user that will ultimately confuse, I don't think most of your points fall in the latter category, but I am just saying it's an important consideration.
Apple have indeed entered an important stage in their history, they might develop or they might become complacent.
But it's important that public forums are places were people can post some of their valid day to day nuisances with using os x and apple products. I don't agree with everything you are saying, I might not be well versed with all the problems you are mentioning, but it's important that you mention them.
It's sad though that such quality posting amounts to about 5% of this thread, and I am being generous.
And I am asking you this. If apple are showing signs of becoming complacent then what about sites such as this one who are riding the coattails of apple's success? If people who are supposedly close to apple as a community of users, and who are making a fair amount of cash along side, do not safeguard these forums and instead start topic discussions relaying sensationalist, misleading news, from other sites, with not even a semblance of analysis, with not even rudimentary attention to the type of discussion they foster, how much are they helping the user and the user's experience with their devices? If you think apple don't care about what you said, ask these guys here how much they care about it.
Today we 've had one misleading fud post on the availability of flash on the air, and another fud piece on 32 vs. 64 bit on ilife. And a galore of hateful and uninformed comments ensued (who would have expected that...). But who cares, there are a few hundred tweets and digs and what have you, and above all publicity and ad monies keep on coming...
If the very same places that are supposed to complement apple in terms of community support are not interested in that, if they are not really interested in making the systems we use better, or setting up the fora for some decent level of criticism apple certainly isn't to blame there.
So give me a climate conducive to criticism and I can be apple's harshest critic, where it matters, and push for what they have to do (as opposed to what I would prefer they did), but put everyone in a climate of snakiness, derision and imbecility and only bad is going to come out of this. And this is very important as apple grows and incorporates lots of younger users and users with a pc mentality. But it's nowhere to be found here it seems, not on the main threads anyway, or if it is it's very well hidden and I can't find it. And these are supposed to be the largest apple forums online, for us "proles" as a frequent poster/troll/(sockpuppet?) said a few posts back.
Anyway, it's probably back to the small fora for myself. At least I tried to give it a go here.
Good, 64-bit sucks. It uses way more RAM. What's so good about it??
Maybe do a little research before you make such an ignorant statement.
I NEED the 64 bits!
Please... I need some help. I NEED THE 64 BITS! I heard that Apple has the 64 bits but doesn't always give us the 64 bits.
I have a computer with the 64 bits but iLife is only the 32 bits? I don't understand! I know the 64 bits is what I NEED! All the cool kids have the 64 bits. I feel like people might question my manhood if my iLife doesn't have the 64 bits. The 64 bits is the future of the computers.
Help me attain the 64 bits! Without them, my computer is the useless. When I open a program that's the 32 bits I can't even keep it open because I KNOW it's the 32 bits which is less than the 64 bits.
I NEE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-D the 64 bits! How did people even use their computers before the 64 bits!?
(Also, I need the i7 and the ATi 60000 in my 7" laptop with the 64 bits.)
Please... I need some help. I NEED THE 64 BITS! I heard that Apple has the 64 bits but doesn't always give us the 64 bits.
I have a computer with the 64 bits but iLife is only the 32 bits? I don't understand! I know the 64 bits is what I NEED! All the cool kids have the 64 bits. I feel like people might question my manhood if my iLife doesn't have the 64 bits. The 64 bits is the future of the computers.
Help me attain the 64 bits!
Without them, my computer is the useless. When I open a program that's the 32 bits I can't even keep it open because I KNOW it's the 32 bits which is less than the 64 bits.I NEE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-D the 64 bits! How did people even use their computers before the 64 bits!?
(Also, I need the i7 and the ATi 60000 in my 7" laptop with the 64 bits.)