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What if you ran the mac division at apple

Preserve the desktop metaphor, above all.

Give more powerful hardware (graphics, mainly, I do not know why Mac always had lousy graphic cards for its range) at lower price (If Tim or Levinson approve, of course).
 
StellarVixen said:
Preserve the desktop metaphor, above all.

Give more powerful hardware (graphics, mainly, I do not know why Mac always had lousy graphic cards for its range) at lower price (If Tim or Levinson approve, of course).
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They won't.
 
Dronecatcher said:
Are you really saying a 2007 iMac with 2Gb RAM will run just as well on El Capitan as Mountain Lion (following the hardware requirements)?
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Good point.

A new OS could be optimized on older hardware. I think the iOS devices have been hit harder on this than the MacOS HW.

I think what is worse is when Mac HW was officially unsupported by a new OS due to silly reasons, like the Mac Pro 1,1.

It is perfectly capable of handling Maverick and El Capitan, running much better than HW that is half its age.

Although, iOS is much worse when it comes to older HW. After updating my iPad Mini 2 to iOS 9, it made it unusable. iOS 10 made things a little better, but it is still sluggish and the battery life sucks.
 
vertical smile said:
Although, iOS is much worse when it comes to older HW. After updating my iPad Mini 2 to iOS 9, it made it unusable. iOS 10 made things a little better, but it is still sluggish and the battery life sucks.
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If iOS was more customizable, the upgrading experience would be closer to that of a Mac. Tweak it out the wazoo to max speed and efficiency.

But because your own damn device is so closed off, there's little you can do aside from hope Apple does a good job on the optimization. Otherwise, you have an up to date, but unusably slow device.

Thus, Librem 5 FTW. (second sig link)

But until that releases, Symbian Belle is serving me nicely. It's kind of cool to be on a 100% dead and forgotten OS, for some reason.
 
I am so unfortunatley stuck with my rooted kyocera hydro icon, and a dell latitude d630 (which dosdude1 did a vid on becuase he got one from like a goodwill or something). Thats my whole setup aside from a powerbook 170 on my shelf
 
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Dronecatcher said:
re you really saying a 2007 iMac with 2Gb RAM will run just as well on El Capitan as Mountain Lion (following the hardware requirements)?
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In my experience, it's certainly usable on both computers, and I'd dare say that El Capitan may be an overall more polished and stable OS than Mountain Lion.

If the subject computer has a GMA 950, even ML is a stretch, but then that GPU should have never been used in a Mac. That's not the case with a 2007 iMac, though(or 2007 MacBook Pro, which I would lump in the same category).

The experience will certainly be much better in either OS with an SSD and more than 2gb of RAM...but at the same time I "deployed" more than a handful of MBP 3,1s(late '07) with 4gb, a spinner, and El Capitan and the users were/are plenty happy with them.
 
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If I ran the Mac division at Apple, I would bring back PowerPC, but not in the way you would expect...

First, the Mac Pro would get a new version, that is actually usable as a Pro computer. It would have a IBM POWER9 CPU, you can upgrade the CPU yourself, with any Sforza POWER9 chip, you can have anywhere from 4 cores/16 threads all the way up to 22 cores/88 threads. Mac Pro would have 8 DIMM slots, each accepting up to 128GB DDR4 ECC sticks. Also, there would be enough PCI-e lanes for any cards you want. It would use a AMD WX 3100 GPU, and a Universal Audio DSP card.
I would commission a team to port the newest MacOS back to Power9, and build a program like Rosetta, but in reverse so that any Intel MacOS program would run 100% seamlessly. And I would bring back universal apps. There would be an 8-port SATA controller, and 8 drive bays, and an optical drive(for quad-layer re-writable blu-ray support), and an additional 5.25" drive bay. Lastly, this would all be in a case that is very similar to the old PowerMac G5 case.

Also, just for Sh*ts and Giggles, I would port the newest MacOS to PowerPC G5, and charge $50 for it.. And it would also have the new Rosetta program...
 
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mzs.112000 said:
If I ran the Mac division at Apple, I would bring back PowerPC, but not in the way you would expect...

First, the Mac Pro would get a new version, that is actually usable as a Pro computer. It would have a IBM POWER9 CPU, you can upgrade the CPU yourself, with any Sforza POWER9 chip, you can have anywhere from 4 cores/16 threads all the way up to 22 cores/88 threads. Mac Pro would have 8 DIMM slots, each accepting up to 128GB DDR4 ECC sticks. Also, there would be enough PCI-e lanes for any cards you want. It would use a AMD WX 3100 GPU, and a Universal Audio DSP card.
I would commission a team to port the newest MacOS back to Power9, and build a program like Rosetta, but in reverse so that any Intel MacOS program would run 100% seamlessly. And I would bring back universal apps. There would be an 8-port SATA controller, and 8 drive bays, and an optical drive(for quad-layer re-writable blu-ray support), and an additional 5.25" drive bay. Lastly, this would all be in a case that is very similar to the old PowerMac G5 case.

Also, just for Sh*ts and Giggles, I would port the newest MacOS to PowerPC G5, and charge $50 for it.. And it would also have the new Rosetta program...
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You just described the Talos II.

And I'm pretty damn sure the G5 couldn't handle 10.14+.
 
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colin348 said:
But didn’t the Wii U systems have PowerPC processers? They made those game consoles up until 2017. I don’t think it would be too difficult to implement them agian.
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The Wii U used a very specialized processor designed by IBM specifically for Nintendo. It was still a G3 processor, but they made it a Tri-Core processor, the only ever G3 multicore processor. But while Nintendo could definitely go with that, the resulting product was poor. It was still old technology propped up, and it was difficult to program for. And due to the lack of consumer demand (people either didn't know it was a console, most thinking it was an overpriced Wii addon that they didn't need, or just did not care due to the lack of games), developers quickly abandoned ship. Now Nintendo switched the Switch to ARM, and it's working for them. Just like how I imagine it would work for Apple if they switched Macs to ARM in the future.
 
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Daniël Oosterhuis said:
The Wii U used a very specialized processor designed by IBM specifically for Nintendo. It was still a G3 processor, but they made it a Tri-Core processor, the only ever G3 multicore processor. But while Nintendo could definitely go with that, the resulting product was poor. It was still old technology propped up, and it was difficult to program for. And due to the lack of consumer demand (people either didn't know it was a console, most thinking it was an overpriced Wii addon that they didn't need, or just did not care due to the lack of games), developers quickly abandoned ship. Now Nintendo switched the Switch to ARM, and it's working for them. Just like how I imagine it would work for Apple if they switched Macs to ARM in the future.
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Great explanation.
 
z970mp said:
And I'm pretty damn sure the G5 couldn't handle 10.14+.
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Definitely not per default, but much of it is optimization, or better said the lack of optimization. Software developers these days code for the mightiest machines where it should be the opposite. Software isn't refined to be efficient but to look good and have many (more or less) useful features
 
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amagichnich said:
Software developers these days code for the mightiest machines where it should be the opposite.
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It is nice when you see developers optimize their software for older hardware.

This kind of reminds me of Blizzard. Most of their games, at least up until recently, were multi-platform, and ran really well on older hardware.

They didn't push the graphical limits of the latest hardware, but they still looked pretty good.
 
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z970mp said:
You just described the Talos II.

And I'm pretty damn sure the G5 couldn't handle 10.14+.
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Talos II is nice, but it doesn't run MacOS natively...
When looking at OSes, from 2009(when Leopard was released) to now, in reality, system requirements have not increased that much... In fact, Windows 10 uses less RAM than Windows 7, even though Windows 10 is far more advanced.
A modern KDE Neon Linux install, after you add in all of your favorite apps, is far more advanced than Leopard, but only uses 480MB RAM on startup.
 
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I'd find it's a much harder job than that I thought while I was sitting behind a computer screen on a couch at home making unlimited critical judgements without knowing all the pieces of the business.

It was a run on sentence but it was worth it.
 
Eightbitgamer757 said:
here is the proof that indeed newer OS's are more optimized

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Exactly. I find now, with my computers all running Linux at the moment, 4 years ago Linux Mint would consume 400MB of RAM at startup, now it uses the same 400MB on startup, but Cinnamon has gotten far more advanced...
Really the only reason companies like Apple drop support for older hardware is because if forces people to buy new hardware, which is where Apple makes most of their money...
 
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ActionableMango said:
Click the pictures above to go to the artist's website. There are additional renders.
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Wow! That guy's work is incredible - thanks for sharing.
[doublepost=1534840908][/doublepost]
Eightbitgamer757 said:
here is the proof that indeed newer OS's are more optimized

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I think this is a little misleading - the amount of RAM used getting the OS to desktop alone is no indicator of how lean the OS is - using it is what matters.
 
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AphoticD said:
I would also fully support a shift to Apple's ARM chipset. At least for the portable range. This could certainly give the Mac an 'edge', much like PowerPC provided during it's heyday. Surely Apple could invest their billions into beating Intel at their own game.

There was a time when Mac users were proudly "Thinking Different" and this differentiation between a Mac and a "PC" was more than just the price tag and a gimmick or two.

The shift to Intel was good to sort out supply and performance issues with the IBM and Motorola chips, but I believe the Mac deserves to be in it's own category again. To stand tall on it's own without needing to be able to boot Windows as a selling point. If we want a Windows machine, we can spend far less and buy a great little PC notebook, so why does the Mac need to be able to run x86 software?
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Personally, I'd never ever want a Mac(-Book) with an ARM CPU because that would prevent me from virtualising x86 operating systems – x86 emulation, even on a top-of-the-line ARM chip, would likely be too slow to be useful to me. But that's because I've always loved and owned small and light ultraportable laptops, yet have used them for the same things that I have used my desktops for, which includes virtualisation because I sometimes want access to Linux or Windows applications, at full speed, essentially requiring x86. I don't buy the "ultraportable laptops are not for heavy-duty tasks" argument – if I wanted an iPad with a keyboard, I'd get one. But I want a computer, with a full OS and applications.

And what about "legacy" x86 software? Would it not run on ARM-based Macs at all, or would it run using a translation layer, incurring a performance hit? Speaking of performance, Windows 10 performs terrible on Snapdragon 835s (especially the x86 emulation), so I'm skeptical about the performance of Mac OS X macOS on ARM for now.

Just my two cents. Apart from that, there's some great ideas here, some I'd gladly pursue if given the choice to. :)
 
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@Amethyst1 , I completely understand the need for x86 virtualization. I suppose the idea behind an ARM switch would be for Apple to take a risk, flex their $$$ muscles and put that all to good use to blow the portable CPU / SoC market right out of the water. It's unlikely to happen across the board though as Apple are sitting too comfortable to make any kind of risky moves, whether it's a solution that is good for all existing users or simply a shake up for the sake of breaking new ground.

I think we are very likely to see an ARM based portable Mac in the near future (replacing the MBA & ultrathin MacBook line), but it certaintly wouldn't mean the end of Intel components in "Pro" Apple hardware, at least not in the near future.

In terms of ARM supporting "legacy" software, it would be no different to the switch from PowerPC to Intel. The active devs would recompile a universal binary as a free update and non-UB software would run in a compatibility layer like Rosetta. Performance is never going to be ideal in any emulated enironment, but given how GRAND these new Apple CPUs are going to be, it should handle things just fine :)
 
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