Clues That Apple's Bought Another Processor Design House 183
According to Ars Technica: "Apple's gigantic bankroll may be burning a hole in its pocket. Almost two years after purchasing PowerPC designer P.A. Semi, Apple appears to have snapped up ARM design house Intrinsity. According to a report that first appeared on electronista, a number of engineers at the company have indicated that they are now or soon will be employed by Apple. Some of them have even gone as far as to change their LinkedIn profiles, with one reverting it, possibly out of fear of drawing the wrath of his new, secretive employer." Updated 20100404 1:15 GMT Brian Dipert points out the earlier coverage at EDN, from which both of the above reports draw.
I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder how long it'll take the otherwise intelligent geeks at /. to finally figure out that Apple is just as dangerous as Microsoft. They (Apple) just haven't gotten to the market share level they need yet to take over the world as it were.
I know I'll get modded down by all the Jobs Koolaid drinkers, but Apple is every bit as hungry and willing to use any means necessary to dominate as is Microsoft. MS is on the wane while Apple is on the rise. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
Could this "story" (Score:4, Insightful)
possibly be any more slanted? I'm no Apple fanboy. I've never owned any Apple products and don't like the way Apple does business, nor their history of employee relations, but come on. Claiming someone "possibly" changed their LinkedIn profile due to fear of Apple is out of line.
It's nothing more than rank speculation. If fear of Apple--use of intimidation against the engineers by Apple is implied--was the motivation for changing a LinkedIn profile why didn't the rest of the engineers change their profiles back? Was Apple capable of intimidating only one out of several engineers? Are the majority of the engineers too stupid to know what Apple is like?
The slant taken by this story assumes way too many facts not in evidence.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
It’s much more general. Any company, that has the sole goal to make money (always with nobody asking why), will have exactly those priorities.
The problem is, that when there is competition, in our “society”, the one with the least scruple, is the one “winning”. (And then destroying itself with the exact same tactic; making place for the next one.)
I dispute that EVER part (Score:4, Insightful)
I loved my //e
Its a question of interests (Score:5, Insightful)
if Apple is a competitive threat, its to the makers of media players and to the producers of content, due to their homogenising influence on the market and their major-media-outlet status. Its less likely to directly affect us....
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
In most lines of business, there isn't one winning. There are usually a variety of companies, with none holding a monopoly sized share of the market. Nor do they rise and fall in a continual succession. People way overgeneralise from the IBM->Microsoft monopoly transition in computing.
Re:I wonder... (Score:1, Insightful)
MS never sued their direct competitors when they produced a better product.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm? And what crimes has Apple been convicted of? What SCO equivalent has Apple created to try to destroy Linux? I could go on; I suspect you're astroturfing. I hope it's not successful - there are valid complaints about Apple, but you haven't brought any of them up, merely flamed the fans of paranoia with hyperbole.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except Apple is increasing market share by producing new products, innovating and taking risks.
Microsoft is only where it is today due to being rather lucky with getting IBM to take their vapour ware OS product DOS. Most of Microsoft's revenue still comes from Windows and Office, in fact they make more from Office than Windows!
There are many big technology companies and nobody was complaining when Sony entered the games console market and dominated it? So why should Apple be prevented from doing well in the consumer electronics market?
Just because they are good at it and other brands release products that are largely inferior doesn't mean Apple should be stopped.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well they are a lot more innovative than Microsoft are that's for sure.
When Microsoft released a tablet PC it was just a tablet with Windows and some trivial extensions. The head of the Office team wouldn't rework Office to work with the tablet controls as he "doesn't like touch screens".
Hardly the sort of thing you want to buy is it, a tablet running an OS designed for a mouse and keyboard with some hacks on the top to make it try to work with a stylus.
Why is it "drinking koolaid" to want to simply buy a computer and use it? have the hardware and software working in unison to give a good user experience?
I'm well versed with Linux, Windows etc.. I've built up MythTV media centres using Linux (compiling my own kernel and all that). I choose to own a Mac because computers are just a tool to get things done. They shouldn't be like a car requiring lots of maintenance.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
I totally agree. Its a human nature thing. "
Although the expression "human nature" is common, and human beings do have tendencies which they almost always repeat, similar to nature, where humans have come from, humans can also break their tendencies and go against them, which is basic to human evolution. So if there is a human nature, it is to modify his own natural conditions. At this point in history, this is still rather primitive and not too visible. (Not my ideas, I got them from humanism. )
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's funny, i only buy apple products because they meet my needs (wants) that other companies seem unwilling to.
Small example. Bought a first gen Zune as it was a little nicer then the iPod 5g that had come out a year before. Problem Is I wanted a video store.
After all what the hell is the point of a nice screen, for um music?. I wanted my tv shows.movies to go and I wanted them now. Microsoft said they were getting a video store so I waited... and waited... and waited. Finally got a iPod instead. It took microsoft till 2008 3 freaking years after apple to get a video store. Apple, funny thing opened their store in 2005.
Let them dominate. Let them make a zillion dollars as long as I get what I want. When they start making what I don't want I will stop buying.
what evil? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OSX on ARM (and I don't mean a tattoo) (Score:3, Insightful)
OSX will build on ARM without a problem and the ARM CPU would be better than the Intel Atom in a netbook.
Provided you didn't expect your desktop apps and games to run on your netbook. Give it a few years until everything is browser- or virtual machine based and that's not a problem, but here and now if people perceive their "netbook" as a portable version of their main computer, they'll want application compatibility.
Sure, Apple are past masters at seamless CPU emulation, but that overhead will probably wipe out the benefit of ARM vs. Atom.
However, as the world inside the Reality Distortion Field now knows, netbooks will never sell because no one really wants them and anyway, as a failed product
No distortion field required: the original netbook concept (e.g. the EEE PC 700) was a small, non-windows computer for web browsing, email and casual gaming. It failed* (sure, it sold by the shedload, but it was a dead end: hands up if you have an original EEE PC gathering dust - or serving some nerdy purpose like a mini-server or SSH terminal). I do, because even with its size, the iPod Touch is a better instant-on internet appliance.
Go out to buy a netbook today and what you'll be offered is an entry-level, full-featured subnotebook. Nothing like the original concept.
, they have been replaced by the magical iPad.
Which is Apple's attempt at doing the original "netbook" concept properly, using hardware that can't be seen as a replacement for a full-size laptop or desktop.
Ideally, you are reading this post a) on your iPhone or b) while waiting in line to buy your Really Big iPhone.
No, because, after spotting a few interesting /. threads on my iPod Touch while sitting in the comfy chair in the lounge, I fired up my real computer to comment, because its easier to type on. Sounds like, on the iPad, the threshold is higher, and short replies and emails would be do-able, but ultimately the iProducts are devices for consuming content.
(* Blame Asus for using an obscure Linux distro, doing a half-baked job of optimising the key applications for a small screen and then Osbourning it by announcing a new model every five minutes, or blame MS for reviving XP and dumping it on the netbook market at silly prices...)
Re:what evil? (Score:3, Insightful)
s/never/generally somewhat/g (Score:5, Insightful)
I see. Anyone at Slashdot that doesn't believe that Apple is the new Microsoft (despite marketshare, history, and product differences) and that doesn't find Apple's products to be mediocre is a Koolaid drinker and fanboi.
Just about the most irrational and blinkered topic on Slashdot in years, this Apple emergence. A broad swath of Slashdotters (presumably the last/youngest wave of those that felt special just for being well-versed in technoesoterics) clearly feels their identities and statuses deeply threatened by the (relative) success of Apple, who is having influence out of all proportion to their marketshare as a result of the fact that much of the public finds them to be a tremendous innovative and specifically NON-Microsoft-alike company.
Not true. (Score:3, Insightful)
Please see my post in yesterday's anti-Apple party [slashdot.org] for a discussion of why your'e wrong.
I owned other phones with touch screens for years before buying an iPhone. The user interface makes it substantively different.
I owned a Creative MuVo2 and a Diamond Rio before an iPod (which I no longer own, replacing it with my iPhone). The user interface made it substantively different.
I keep an installation of Mac OS X 10.5.8 on a ThinkPad partition for cases when I need to run Mac apps for compatibility with someone's files. The user interface makes it substantially different.
I owned a Fujitsu Stylistic, a Vadem Clio, an Asus R2H, and most recently a Toshiba M200, all tablet PCs. Having seen the iPad demoed and used the iPhone for some time, it is clear that the user interface will make the iPad substantively different.
The user interface is perhaps the single most important substantive component of the computing experience, yet posters like you routinely pretend as if it isn't even there.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
MS wants to lock all computer users into aspects of MS.
Re:Could this "story" (Score:1, Insightful)
From what I gather, it goes like this: (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Regular people like Apple products.
2. But Apple products have nice user interfaces and can be used by most anyone.
3. Therefore they are like a totalitarian dictator marching the unwashed masses to their graves.
4. Plus they're just sexy, not real.
5. Therefore, anything Apple does is evil.
6. And anyone that doesn't think so is a blinded member of the politburo or a metrosexual fashionista.
7. Plus, OSX sucks and is just like Windows, iPod sucks and is just like Zune, iPhone sucks and is just like Blackberry, and iPad sucks and is just like Microsoft tablet PC.
8. 1337 H4x0rs Ru13!
I think I covered everything.
Seriously, the walled garden property sucks and I'd love to be able to use a bluetooth keyboard with my iPhone without unlocking it. But the Apple hate around the online tech world is truly a sphere of irrationality to behold right now, out of any proportion to anything anyone has done; Microsoft and Microsoft users were never even talked about this way.
Re:s/never/generally somewhat/g (Score:5, Insightful)
I must be a fan of the Koolaid then. Tastes groovy.
Apple are clearly a larger and more relevant player than they were five years ago. Being the next Microsoft does not immediately follow from that. There are some extra requirements (like breaking intercompatability, sabotaging the competition, throwing chairs etc).
My main machine is a macbook. It the only decent unix laptop I could find. Yes, I am familiar with linux on laptops, no it doesn't cut it. I want a POSIX environment with a full tool-chain and all of the other command-line goodness that I'm used to. But I want the user interface to work and a decent level of integration between the two (provided by open -a and pyappscript). Windows doesn't cut it for that kind of work, and linux only solves half the problem. To me the concept of 'freedom' is far less important than day-to-day productivity here and now.
My phone is a n900 (and it is still in the new toy honeymoon phase so can do no wrong). So why not an iPhone? The nicely packaged concept of a Walled Garden may have taken smartphones into the mainstream, but it is not for me. Again I want a decent POSIX environment on my smartphone with all of the tools that I am used to. Maemo certainly seems to be good fun there and now that I've found the python interpreter and the Qt bindings it is going to be exactly what I'm looking for in a phone - but then again I'm not the mass-market.
Everything that is wrong about the iPhone for me is what ha made it a mainstream success story. Sitting on a bus back from the airport the other night almost every person (across a wide age range) had a smartphone. 90% of them were iPhones. Packaging up a chunk of functionality (even if it is as simple as a web-page with some live data) into a a funky icon and selling it was a stroke of marketing genius. I, like many geeks, am left scratching my head and saying "What? You'd pay for that shit?".
So they have in a real sense made the smartphone market. Just as they made the mp3 player market. They didn't invent either product, but they found the right form to convince people that they needed it. Is that Microsoft? Nah, that's bloody good marketing that it. Hats off to them.
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry. I can't swallow this shit. The PC industry owes its existence to Microsoft. While just about every other player in the industry was working on either big iron type systems (IBM, DEC) or absurdly unprofitable business models (Apple, BBC), Microsoft was paving the way with a simplified operating system that was cheap enough to develop that there were no huge R&D costs to recoup and that worked on commodity hardware cheap enough to become the modern day one-in-every-home PC.
Nobody else at the time would have done it, and it possibly would have happened eventually without MS, but give credit where credit is due. That they have become too big for their boots, turning into a bully does not take away from their past achievements. It's like criticizing Mohamed Ali's sporting record on account of his present poor level of physical fitness.
It's easy for us to look at them now and claim to have been all visionary like "oo I never liked them I knew they were bad guys". Bullshit. You had a PC, and you loved it. You played games on it. You did *not* know that in the late 90s MS would become an industrial and political bully.
Kinda like now, really. In 5-10 years all you groupies will be saying the same thing "oo I was never an Apple/Google fan, I always knew they were up to no good!".
Re:s/never/generally somewhat/g (Score:2, Insightful)
There are some extra requirements (like breaking intercompatability, sabotaging the competition, throwing chairs etc).
1. breaking intercompatability: iTunes. Works with other media players in the way that Internet Explorer works on other operating systems. Ever tried syncing iPhone with anything other than iTunes? Ever tried putting MacOSX on anything other than Apple hardware?
2. sabotaging the competition: here [slashdot.org], here [slashdot.org], here [slashdot.org], here [slashdot.org], here [slashdot.org], here [slashdot.org].
3. Alas, I was unable to find a YouTube vid of jobs throwing a chair. You win that point.
Godwin's Game (Score:4, Insightful)
People, take a quick bunny hop through List of cognitive biases [wikipedia.org] and ask yourself how many of these constitute cognitive feeder arteries for Godwin's law [wikipedia.org].
Every so often a topic comes up where everyone simultaneously decides to let their amygdalas off the leash in the same dog park, who all quickly pair up for a circular open-jaw square dance. After the dust settles, what do you have? A giant patch of lawn to circumvent until the next heavy rainfall.
I suppose the game is a bit more earnest for the born complainer, who does have to somehow realign the pole of supreme evil with every successive regime change. Those of us with the attention span to get through the first page of Anna Karenina understand that evil has a multitude of poles, any one of which can erupt into the supreme pimple in the rapidly shifting context of real life.
if anybody shakes MS loose from that, my bet would be Google rather than Apple
Apparently, slashdotters don't read Swift, either.
There are at least half a dozen major players tugging on different fingers of the Beast of Redmond. Sony is doing their ineffective best tugging on the pinky finger with their once-powerful PS3 franchise. The unholy alliance Snoracle has a firm but limp-wristed grasp on the middle finger on office suite revenue streams. Linux/Apache/Firefox inflicted a hairline fracture on a wristbone. Google extracted a fingernail from the ring finger when it became the ultimate talent drain. That had to hurt. And now they're proceeding to bend back the index finger by sucking up the air supply in online search. Learn from the best. A horsefly named Gnome Evolution landed on the thumb and carted off the largest divot of flesh it could manage, which considering all the other wounds, is of no real consequence whatsoever, unless horseflies are a vector for Ebola, and so far it appears that they aren't. All things considered, I think that Microsoft can hang there by their relatively undamaged, enterprising thumbs for another thirty years or so.
The biggest risk with Apple is that they manage to leverage their carefully cultivated charisma (if it survives their having become a big enough company to matter in these discussions) to make DRM palatable to the masses.
Sony is far more evil in the DRM department (witness the recent "other OS" rescindment fiasco) but they suffer from a bad case of cartoon evil: whatever their grasping ambition, it's soon equally matched by their incompetence. They managed--on the back of a half billion dollar war chest--to leverage their dominant Play Station franchise into a slow and lukewarm victory in a dying physical media platform.
This rivals anything accomplished by the Hudson Bay Company (oldest corporation in North America) which once laid claim to half the natural resources in Canada, but decided the crown jewel was retailing dress shirts. If Warren Buffett had gained control of HBC in the late 1700s, America might now be the 11'th Canadian province, or an economic protectorate, like Puerto Rico. (If BG gained control of the HBC in the late 1700s, Russia would now be the world's great democracy and white knight of freedom.)
Wish the Sony/HBC disease were true of Apple, but it isn't.
I could continue grave digging in this vein for another day or two, but hey, it's Easter, and whatever your opinion on the back story, there was an important lesson in there about the rush to judgement.
Re:Not true. (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank you.
I often point out that almost every cellphone I've ever had did more on paper than the iPhone. The reason I love my iPhone, though, is that it actually does the things it says it does on paper, and does them with an ease that makes you likely to do them.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is probably the only thing you wrote that makes sense. Apple can not make inroads into the corporate market despite all attempts (and they have been trying, the sheer amount of Apple propaganda that comes out of universities is staggering) because MS knows that if it sells a business the tools and leaves them well enough alone they can collect another cheque next year. Google is following the same strategy with a lot less gusto.
Wrong, Apple is doing far more harm to Open Source by showing that it can be taken, locked down and nothing of note contributed back. Apple is doing exactly what the GPL is meant to prevent.
And you honestly think Apple will not bring the same fantastic lockdown to their desktop line. Look at the Ipad, it is the first step in moving all of Apple's "computers" into their device line utilising an ARM processor all running the Iphone OS. Six or twelve months down the track Apple release the A4 Imac (A5, A6 or whatever the latest generation ARM chip is labelled), then the ARM macbook, then finally they phase out x86-64. This will be done for the following reasons.
1. The Iphone has proven that people will accept any abuse and limitations if you continue to produce enough spin that panders to their ego (the Iphone makes you cool/attractive to the opposite sex, you'd have to be a fool not to have one, ad nauseum).
2. Homogeneity, Apple prides itself on keeping everything simple. Maintaining two disparate operating systems is the antithesis of the "just works" philosophy.
3. Finally control. By removing x86 and moving to an ARM processor with a proprietary component which the OS is dependent on will practically eliminate the idea of the hackintosh.
Apple is buying up processor design houses, hiring ARM experts (HW and SW). This to many does not look like a concerted push towards moving their entire product line to ARM?
Apple is becoming exactly what Stallman is arguing about (and for the record, I think Stallman is a borderline nutcase), slowly our rights to our own devices and computers are eroded, this can be done imperceptibly over time with sufficient spin applied. I don't think Apple are becoming the new MS, they've already become the new MS, now they are going beyond MS, all Microsoft wanted was money, Apple wants control.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why they use such "locked in" codecs like H.264, AAC, and "locked in" protocols like NFS, and a "locked down" OS core, and "locked down" human readable preference files, or "locked down" standard PC components, or "locked down" non-DRM, non-encrypted, install disc with no serial numbers or online activation...
Ok, so the iPhone OS is controlled. They *do* do other things, y'know.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
You really have to mention it on slashdot, because if you don't, your opinions are dismissed as a clueless noob because you haven't done any "real" computing, or that you've somehow "settled" for Apple because you simply haven't experienced the wonder of Linux yet.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple "fears and despises" backwards compatibility?
Is that why Rosetta exists, or the Classic environment, that they kept around for a very long time, post-OS X change, or the universal binary format, or the fact that AppleTalk has only just been dropped with the release of 10.6, or the fact that the dev tools feature targeted build modes that allow you to compile apps targeted at older versions of OS X...
Apple goes out of its way to try to maintain backwards compatibility where possible, but inevitably some things break as they do with most forward progress in OS development.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
HINT: He's done this before, Mac OS has switched architectures twice.
Three times, if you count the move from OS 9 to NextStep..., er, sorry OS X as an architecture change.
However, in all three cases, they went to great lengths (the 68k-on-PPC emulator, Rosetta, Classic mode in OS X) to ensure that legacy software would run on the new system. Plus, OS X represented a massive opening up of the system and the bundling of development tools and a bevvy of programming languages - all on Jobs' watch. See, we can all cherry pick the elements of Apple's past behavior which support our case.
as all the non technical and most of the technical Mac users I know (and /. reflects this) use Mac's because its not MS.
Really? That may be a factor, but I use Mac because it runs Unix, has a better GUI than Linux, runs most of the open source software that I would prefer to use yet can still run industry-standard applications from MS and Adobe when I'm obliged to use them for work. Prior to OS X, I preferred Windows to Mac. I suspect that many mac-using slashdotters feel the same.
1. OS X needs it. Wrong. Intel chips are vastly overpowered for OS X on the desktop.
For the people using their Macs to check email and surf the web, yes. For the people using Macs for serious graphics, sound and video work (do you think Adobe maintain Creative Suite, and Apple develop Final Cut and Aperture for a hobby?) not so much.
Except this was never the case. All apple fanboys argued that PPC was far superior to Intel back before the Switch.
The PPC architecture probably is better than Intel - on paper. The problem was, in practice, Freescale and IBM were making low-power PPCs for the embedded market and server/workstation class Power chips but nobody was making fast, cool PPC chips for high-performance desktops and high-end laptops. Intel was ploughing zillions into just that market - and although their architecture was fugly, the chips got the job done.
ARM-based systems-on-a-chip that can be assembled pick'n'mix are great for appliances like the iPad, but nothing is going to keep up with the PC-fueled development of Intel chips.
IBM who told Apple to sod off, IBM had secured contracts to build the CPU's for the Nintendo Wii,
Underpowered
Xbox 360 and
Famous for overheating and/or requiring noisy fan.
Sony Playstation 3.
Cell processor - may include a PPC core, but gives mediocre performance unless code is rewritten to make use of the multiple SPEs. As much work as switching to Intel.
IBM didn't need Apple and their constant interference into Power PC development was costing IBM.
Translation: IBM weren't interested in making PPC processors optimised for desktops and high-end laptops because Apple were their only customer for such chips, whereas they had huge mass-market customers for Cell and the space-heater PPC for the Xbox. Intel-based machines were starting to kick sand in Macs' faces.
Apple would be in the same position with a desktop-strength ARM - they'd be the only market for such a chip and couldn't compete with the brute-force investment and economy of scale going into Intel.