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.

Canon has announced the R5 and R6 and at least on paper the video specs are impressive, with 8K internal Recording on R5 and full autofocus during video recording

The high end Canon EOS R5 for $4000.

And the more consumer $2500 dollar EOS R6 have been announced.

They use the new RF Lens Group, and must use and adapter to use EF or EF Lens with a slight crop.

The R5 is 45 Megapixels with an ASA up to 102400 while the R6 is only 20.1. with an ASA up to 204800. They both have super fast 1053 zone autofocus with up to 20 FPS and both use dual cards, though the R6 is just UHS-II while the R5 has a single CFExpress which is required to required to run 8K RAW (and strangely it doesn’t do 4k RAW at all).

So for video the R5 does 8K DCI and 8K UHD, as well as 4k DCI and 4k UHD at 120 FPS, with a 20 minute recording time. And the 1 TB CFExpress card for about $800 will hold 53 minutes.

The R6 only shoots 4K UHD at 29.97 or 23.976, and doesn’t record in RAW at all.

The screens on the back are fully articulated and touch screen, but the R5 has a slightly larger higher resolution screen and the R6 also removes the LED from the top of the camera.

Can’t wait to see how these cameras shoot video, because we know the stills will be good, but lets hope for little jello.

It looks like Canon has finally stepped up with DSLR’s for video that are very impressive, if a bit expensive!

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?

H.266 is coming out and like H.265 does the same quality at half the data rate

So the H.266 video compression standard has been announced, and just like H.265 it again cuts the data rate by half while keeping the same quality, which is very impressive.

And this will be great for video streaming and camera compression and the like, but once again it is going to be very processor intensive, and from what I have seen not many people are even using H.265 because it is so processor intensive both on compression side and playback side, and H.266 will be so much more processor intensive.

Better compression for video is always a good thing, but it will be a while before anyone sees any benefits from this.

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?