Jean-Louis Gassée on Apple Silicon and the passing of Wintel

Jean-Louis Gassee formerly of Apple and also fo BeOS has an article on the new Apple Silicon and how it could be the death knell for Wintel, the powerful combination of Intel hardware and Windows.

His take is that since ARM is in fact a more efficient processor and if Apple manages to push the hardware and software to be faster than Wintel (which is could be since it is RISC instead of CISC) it will push Microsoft to really get behind it’s ARM version of Windows that it has been playing with and releasing, but without enough support. And that will push Intel to have to get back into ARM processor development or break the WINTEL partnerdship.

Let’s hope Apple Silicon is eventually that much more powerful and faster and more efficient than anything Intel comes out with, because with Apple writing the software it will mean a sea chance, and for once it would be awesome for Apple to be faster than WINTEL, but pushing Microsoft to ARM I hadn’t even thought about as the fact that Microsoft haven’t even made versions of all their software for their arm hardware, and yet they are working on it for Apple Silicon.

If I have my mac not restart apps when it restarts, why does it launch all previously launched apps if it crashes?

I pretty much said it all in the title, but if I have my mac set to not restart apps when it restarts, why when it crashes does it restart all the previously open apps? In all likelyhood it is one of the apps that crashed, so why not honor the setting that I have been using and not open apps if it crashed?

AppleInsider reports on the possibility of Apple not supporting 3rd party GPU’s with Apple Silicon

Credit: Apple

AppleInsider has an article on the possibility that Apple Silicon will only support their own GPU’s and not 3rd Party GPU’s. This graphics shows that Apple Silicon Mac doesn’t support NVIDIA or the currently supported AMD GPU.

This is really scary. The Apple Silicon GPU will certainly be OK for laptops or low end machines, but for high end computers this would literally be a death knell.

Let’s hope this just means for the current development system, because otherwise it means the new MacPro was a huge bait and switch. Oh look at this we can make the highest and most powerful machine, but you know at the same time they were already working on End of Life-ing that machine with Apple Silicon.

I don’t want to move to Wintel, but if their is no 3rd party GPU support, WINTEL will be the only solution.

OMG my problems with Apple Music it’s iTunes replacement never end, and having called the same thing as their music subscription service is also stupid

So I run an iMac Pro and  have JBOD drives in an external OWC USB 3 housing. It is an older model as I have a newer one for a Raid, but it doesn’t always show up when I restart. It does sometimes, but often I have to power it down and then back on to get it to connect.

The problem is that I keep my iTunes Library on it, and if I accidentally try to play a song in iTunes instead of just saying it can’t find the library, Music instead resets the location of the library to my main drive, where none of my music is and when I reconnect the external drive and re-asign it it I often have to wait whole it rescans everything, and I keep losing the view options I have set for all my playlists, and that annoys the living shit out of me!

Yes I have done the technical support with OWC and they really tried to help, but nothing seemed to help. Sometimes the drives just don’t show up and I don’t know why. Likely cause it is older hardware. They are fine once connected, but just sometime don’t connect.

I just hate Music’s response, just tell me it can’t find the file, don’t reset the library position every time. Wait until I reconnect or tell you to make a new library file! Fuck!

Will Apple Silicon support PCI Expansion and if so how hard will the switch from CISC to RISC be for drivers?

So Apple will soon be making it’s own processors, and the next OS Big Sur supports it, but the jump to arm also comes with a change from CISC processors to RISC processors. Now Apple has updated Xcode to help software run easily and the transition is stated to not be very hard, but my question is with PCI expansion.

The MacPro’s claim to fame is it’s expansion capabilities, and that involves PCI cards. PCI card rely on much more system level drivers to get them to work, and the move from CISC to RISC will obviously mean that they are programmed differently, but to even attempt to program them developers will need hardware that has PCI slots so they can run them. The Development kit doesn’t even have Thunderbolt, so PCI support if it ever comes, may be buggy for a very long time, because how can developers even attempt to support the new hardware without having something to use to develop it on?

We are likely at least 2 years away from seeing what the high end Mac will be on Apple Silicon, and we see if PCI will even exist for it, and even if it does it may be a long haul from them to get working drivers.

Sometimes I just wish Apple was a little more transparent.

How was the Apple Silicon Transition Kit running the apple 6K Pro Display XDR which requires thunderbolt?

So when Apple showed off it’s new Apple Silicon chip it showed it running on what looked like Apple’s new 6K Pro Display XDR monitor in the 2020 WWDC Keynote.

That was what they showed Maya running on, and they claimed that they were running on the Apple Silicon Transition Kit, but there is a problem there.

The Transition Kit does not in fact support Thunderbolt, which is a licensed Intel Technology. So either they were running on different hardware from the transition kit, or they have hacked or new versions of the monitor capable of running off of USB C.

Either way Apple was fudging the truth a bit here.

Honestly they should have figured out a way to include Thunderbolt 3. They have previously bet so much on the technology, and if they drop it WILL HAVE HUGE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE PRO MARKET.

Does Apple Silicon mean that it is less likely that iPad software will make it to the Mac?

So the follow up to Catalina, Big Sur has been revealed and as I talked about in my last post it is all the start of a transition for Apple from Intel to ARM based Apple Silicon. And a huge new feature is that basically all iPad and iPhone apps will now run on a Macs without any changes. This is a very cool thing, but it sounds like it leaves all of us with Intel macs out of the loop.

They have Rosetta 2 to convert Intel software to run on Apple Silicon, and they were previously working on tech called Catalyst to convert iOS and iPad Software quickly and easily to a Mac, but will this fall by the wayside for us Intel users? Is there no Rosetta to run Apple Silicon software on Intel? There was no mention of it so it seems unlikely it will be there, as they obviously will want people to move to Apple Silicon, but what about Pro Users, who are at least 2 years away from having pro Apple Silicon?

Apple’s move to ARM from Intel Processors will only take 2 years

At Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, the WWDC yesterday Apple announced that they will be moving all of their processors from Intel to Apple Silicon ARM processors in 2 years.

Rumors of this switch have been going on for years now, since Apple has been creating it’s own ARM processors for iPhones and iPads for the last 20 years. And it makes sense for their laptops for sure, since they use less power, and have better graphics than Intel’s low and mid range processors. It will mean more speed and more battery life for most laptops.

And they have brought back Rosetta which was used in the Power PC to Intel transition and showed it using Maya in their keynote. And Universal 2 will allow developers to compile versions for both Intel and Apple Silicon in a single binary. And they said Adobe is working on the transition already, so some software will certainly work, but what about other pro software, like AVID and DaVinci and all the plug ins.

My question has always been what will it mean for the high end pro market. And their are currently no high end ARM processors that match Xeon processors. And can they even support PCI cards? Hell the Dev box they are letting developers buy doesn’t even have Thunderbolt, which is an Intel technology and that all pros have moved to including me. Will none of my hard drives work on new Mac hardware ever again? That will be a huge fuck you to Pros. Was the new MacPro a hoodwink to bring pros back and then it is the last truly pro machine that Apple every releases? And all it’s vaunted upgradeability is useless because Apple will never release any new hardware for it. If so what a fucking waste. It does look like Intel is open sourcing Thunderbolt, but not having it on the first hardware is scary.

Sure it is possible that Apple plans a MacPro with Apple Silicon, but it seems unlikely, especially since they never mentioned it when they could have. Sure it would stop or slow down current sales, but it would give some assurance.

I mean it took AVID this long to get a version that works for Catalina, and it is basically a re-write that breaks all compatibility with past versions. Hopefully this switch won’t be as drastic, but who the fuck knows?

Will all plug ins need to be re-written, that is very likely, which means years for Apple to catch up again with where it is, and a huge expense as you know most will involve a cost to the end user.

And so if it turns out the high end can’t compete with Intel, and not even AMD graphics cards, Pros will be done with Apple for good. And maybe iPad’s with Keyboards will end up as the high end of macs, as it is likely that more high end software will be more easily ported since it will be on the same silicon.

So once again I come away from a WWDC more scared for Apple’s future than I was before it. Maybe Apple has solutions or maybe they will just be going for the low end portable market and dropping the high end, but that is a question I would love answered.

Sure Intel will remain supported for years, but not forever.

More ways that Apple Music is messed up for those who moved from iTunes and some ways to fix things with some work

I have been chronicling all the problems I have had since moving my iMac Pro to Catalina with Music, formerly iTunes. Since Apple broke iTunes into multiple apps I have had nothing but problems with the app.

One of the big ones for me is that in the move to Music, Apple decided to ignore all the years of column organization you did with your playlists. They defaulted every playlist to the Playlist view, which only shows your album artwork, song titles, album title and time of the track.

There is a much superior Songs view, but even it starts with only limited columns, but as with iTunes if you customized the main songs list to have the columns and widths that you want, then they would propagate to all new playlists you create. Now the problem arrises, because all your playlists from iTunes were reset to the default Songs layout, so you either need to change each and every playlist (over 3100 for me) or it is time for a trip to Doug’s Scripts.

Doug’s Scripts has been around for a while now previously having the best applescripts for iTunes, and now slowly updating scripts to work with Music if they work. My only complaint with the site is that you should be able to search for scripts that just work with Music, and maybe it could use a voting system to vote on old scripts and see if they can be made to work on Music, as their are few that I really miss. Still it is just an awesome site.

And Doug has updated an old script to fix this very problem, Assimilate View Options V 5.1. This script brings up a window with all of your playlists and you can select them and hit process and it will go through and duplicate the playlist and add all the tracks in the same order with the current View Options baked in. It’s only issue, is that pesky view being automatically set to the Playlist view instead of the Songs view you want. So you will still need to switch every playlist to Songs, view, but Doug has a tip to set a keyboard shortcut to the Songs view so you can at least speed up the process.

I still can’t fathom why apple doesn’t let you specify a default view in Music. And it is worse that Apple chose to ignore your organization from iTunes when importing into Music, but I am assuming that was easier for them, but hell if they would have just let you update the view options first so that all the playlists imported with your default would have been amazing. That is assuming Apple still cares about people using local music libraries and I am pretty sure they don’t. So for now this is at least a solution.