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CNet:
Apple will start selling Macs that use in-house processors in 2021, based on ones in upcoming iPhones and iPad Pros, Bloomberg reported Thursday. The company is apparently working on three of its own chips, suggesting a transition away from traditional supplier Intel.
The initial batch of custom chips won't be on the same level as the Intel ones used in high-end Apple computers, so they're likely to debut in a new type of laptop, the report noted. These processors could have eight high-performance cores and at least four energy-efficient cores, respectively codenamed Firestorm and Icestorm.
Just another brick in the wall[ed garden]?
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Apple Will Reportedly Sell a New Mac Laptop With its Own Chips Next Year
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You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pkrasimirov on Friday April 24 2020, @11:19AM (2 children)
As a consumer I approve -- the more the active CPU platforms the wider the options I have. And serves their agenda too: now everything hardware/software will be incompatible with the "legacy products" and people are expected to pay (again). My feeling is the engineering was unhappy with Spectre and sales gladly chimed in for the reason above.
Eventually the companies will understand the only way to ensure peroper quality in huge systems is transparency, i.e. open source. Meanwhile let them build their wall.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 24 2020, @01:47PM
What companies are those? I work for a big corp with peroper quality and they're melting like the Greenland glacier was 100 years ago with respect to adopting open source. Maybe in another 100 years you'll start to notice some changes.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday April 24 2020, @05:35PM
Practically speaking, I can't see how this move makes Macs more closed than they were before.
Hardware upgrades are non-existent outside of the most high-end product, the Mac Pro. Macs have always had "blessed hardware", and the current Mac Pro is no different. It's even more closed off than ever before. You aren't going to be upgrading any Apple product with non-Apple-approved parts with current tech any more than you are with an ARM-based CPU.
Apps for them are developed in XCode. XCode will surely support cross-compiling to all targets in "fat bundles" like during previous transitions (PowerPC->x86 & x86->x64).
I think the only practical downside here is that Intel-based Macs will see support for new software dry up in a few years. At that point, your only upgrade path for the old hardware will be installing Linux. But that is an option.
Oh, and some software will never be updated for the new architecture. But that happens all the time. It's not limited to architecture changes, although it always happens when those happen. It's not even limited to Apple products, although it is more frequent in them.
And sure, free software is a better model. But "open source" in the enterprise is not really the gold standard here. If you really want quality, then what you need is to be part of a de-centralized network of pro-bono free software and hardware developers. What you need is a democratic and meritocratic process to select the best systems designers to lead the network. What you need is iterative improvements to the quality of the abstractions everyone else relies upon so that the size of the network can scale without requiring each new developer to understand the same percentage of its growing complexity.
None of that is going to happen in the corporate world, because the corporate world will always be trying to keep its users out of its design process. If the user is capable of modifying the software, the user is capable of designing a competitor to the software. No one will pay for a product once they know how to build their own.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?