Apple Intern Spent 12 Weeks Porting Mac OS X To ARM 368
An anonymous reader writes "Apple hasn't released a Mac OS X device running on ARM yet, but a recently discovered thesis from a former Apple intern going by the name of Tristan Schapp details a 12-week project carried out in 2010 to port the OS to the ARMv5 architecture. The port got as far as booting to a multi-user prompt, but then hit hurdles to do with drivers and cache. The good news is that same intern now works for Apple as part of the CoreOS team. With rumors last year that a MacBook Air running on ARM could appear by 2013, could he be part of a team making that happen? If he is, I bet it will use the new ARMv8 architecture announced late last year."
NVIDIA (Score:5, Informative)
NVIDIA is also working on high-end desktop/workstation ARM CPUs, under "Project Denver".
If something compelling emerges, perhaps ARM could be a player for sheer compute power.
Fat binaries might be useful again... ;-)
Re:NVIDIA (Score:5, Interesting)
Given Nvidia's (comparatively mature) GPU compute ambitions, and their displeasure at the fact that Intel has been shoving them out of all but the fat-'n-bulky laptop designs and discrete GPU desktop/workstation designs, it seems very likely indeed that Nvidia wants two things from ARM:
1. An ARM fast enough to, when combined with an Nvidia GPU, produce a tablet/laptop that people won't laugh at in comparison to a ULV i3/5/7 + Intel GMA.
2. An ARM fast enough(and with enough PCIe lanes and memory controller ability) to do boot, housekeeping, and care and feeding, for a big stack of 'Tesla' compute silicon.
Neither really requires(nor would it be obviously sensible) ARM to go up against high-wattage and relatively low thread-count x86 parts(in which struggle Intel is a very, very, dangerous adversary, and AMD a dogged and inexpensive one); but they likely would want something that can provide an adequate user experience compared to the intel power-constrained stuff, and something that can allow them to sell all-Nvidia Tesla compute stacks.
Re: (Score:3)
Fat binaries are irrelevent (Score:3)
Re:NVIDIA (Score:5, Insightful)
What you describe is how application resources are bundled. But fat binaries are a different thing. They are a single executable file that contains code for multiple instruction sets. Same for both command line tools and Applications.
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Mac OS X programs mostly are 'fat binaries'. If you right-click and 'view contents' of an application you'll see that it's really just a directory filled with files. You'll often see that there are x86, x64, and PPC binaries in the same package, sharing the same 'resource' files (which are now actually files instead of HFS magic).
Actually, as BasilBrush noted [slashdot.org], there are app bundles of the sort you describe, but fat binaries involve packing multiple chunks of executable code in the same file; that allows fat versions of code that isn't distributed as application or framework or plugin bundles, such as the UN*X-layer libraries, commands, and daemons.
It would be trivial to add more architectures to Mac OS X. Basically all you need is a compiler (which already exists) and for developers to actually target it.
...and a binary-to-binary translator, along the lines of Rosetta, to deal with all the apps that haven't yet been recompiled (and had any assembler-language or otherwise platform-specific
Likely be faster... (Score:3)
It's always disconcerting to be on the wrong end of the power/performance curve when it means your computer will have less raw CPU in search of lower power requirements.
However, a change of platform generally means new compilers and fresh code.
I'm not convinced there will be any real-world performance difference when this is factored in.
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So what does this mean for all the people who were saying that the iPhone runs a stripped down version of OS X? I've always chalked it down to the fanboys wanting to believe OS X was on every Mac product. But this news is living proof that no flavor of OS X was ever part of iOS, right? iOS and OS X are completely distinct operating systems. The only thing they have in common is they both were invented in Cupertino, CA.
What it means is that everybody should read this person's comment [slashdot.org] (which was posted anonymously, so it may take a while before it gets moderated up enough for enough people to notice it) before going further.
What he ported was Darwin, not Mac OS X in its entirety; Darwin also underlies iOS. iOS and Mac OS X have some common stuff atop Darwin (for example, Core Foundation and Foundation) and some different stuff atop that and atop Darwin (for example, AppKit vs. UIKit).
Oh, and what he ported it to was a p
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Other way around. iOS uses some of the user space GUI components of Mac OS X, but the kernel is entirely different. Android is the other way around in that they use the Linux kernel but completely re-implemented user space.
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from that article: "iOS is derived from Mac OS X, with which it shares the Darwin foundation, and is therefore a Unix-like operating system."
Unless I see something otherwise, I would believe that iOS is Darwin based as opposed to the multi-touch tiny screen and GUI is based on the desktop OS X GUI. I've heard that they have moved features from iOS GUI to the desktop so iOS apps could run on the desktop but not the other way arou
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Pour, beleaguered Microsoft. Sun should buy them.
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Apple history (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not like Apple hasn't changed CPU architectures before. 68K->ppc->intel and if you want to count the Apple II, you can also include 6502->68k
Re:Apple history (Score:5, Interesting)
And not only that, this is in NeXTStep's DNA. That OS was made for portability, and ran on at least (if this link is accurate) four different [wikipedia.org] processor families. Apple also had a concurrent build of OS X on Intel while they sold PowerPC machines. Fat Binaries also would allow Apple, if they felt like it, to make the CPU all but invisible to the user for properly recompiled programs, letting them have multiple processors in their lineup (this does, however, leave anything older or not recompiled out in the cold; that doesn't seem to matter much to Apple, however).
This is just smart business; something goes wrong with Intel, they're ready. A new, decent competitor pops up? port it, and if it proves to be better, run with it. To not to have these projects going would seem to be a mistake.
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I think it does matter to them - on every architecture/major OS change they went to great lengths to provide legacy support, with the 68k emulator, the Classic Environment, keeping Carbon around for 10 years, Rosetta etc.
Big changes like that are always a bit bumpy, but it's not like they simply said "tough luck everyone on PPC".
They got serious flak from developers for finally pulling Carbon in Lion, which has been deprecated officially since the launch of OS X 10.1 or earlier, and apparently a decade is s
Re:Apple history (Score:5, Interesting)
Mr. Otellini. Thank you for meeting with us to discuss the Intel hardware performance-per-watt roadmap. It certainly looks like you have top engineers working very hard on this issue.
We have to head back to Cupertino in just a few moments, but before we conclude, I want to introduce you to young Tristan Schapp. He's an intern with us this semester and we've really enjoyed having him around the office. Now Tristan, can you show these nice gentlemen what it was you were able to cobble together in your cubicle over the summer?
More like 6+, depending on what you count... (Score:4, Informative)
If you're willing to include software that was developed, but not released, there are:
m68k (original NeXT hardware)
i386 (NEXTSTEP for Intel processors)
SPARC (NEXTSTEP for SPARC)
HPPA (NEXTSTEP for PA-RISC)
Motorola m88k (NeXT RISC Workstation - never released, but a working copy was at Apple when I worked there)
PowerPC (Mac OS X Server 1.0, later developed into Mac OS X)
Significant bits of NeXT software were also ported to Intel i860 and DEC Alpha, but not enough of the OS to actually qualify as a "NEXTSTEP port"
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I believe it uses the Mach microkernel, and therfore can be ported quite quickly
At this point, XNU probably isn't significantly easier to port to another architecture than, say, the Linux kernel or one of the *BSD kernels or the SunOS 5.x kernel. (And, in any case, XNU's already been ported to ARM, as have the other userland bits of Darwin; that's what iOS is built atop. What he did was port the ARM version of Darwin to a new piece of hardware - one that had an ARMv5 processor, which required, among other things, cleaning up some bitrot in the ARMv5 support. Read The Fine Thesis [tudelft.nl].)
Re:Apple history (Score:5, Insightful)
And considering an intern could port a complete OS port in a mere 12 weeks, shows how portable it is. This person presumably had never touched the OS-X source before, yet manages to pull it off. And indeed I recall rumours that OS-X was running on Intel from before the time the rumours came that Apple was planning to switch to Intel. I suppose portability is simply part of the demands by management. I don't think Microsoft will have such an easy time if they were ever to switch to another architecture.
And those driver issues: no surprise. That's by nature fairly low-level stuff talking directly to hardware so will need more work. Not counting third-party drivers of course.
Sounds more like open source Darwin than Mac OS X (Score:3)
And considering an intern could port a complete OS port in a mere 12 weeks, shows how portable it is. This person presumably had never touched the OS-X source before, yet manages to pull it off ...
It sounds more like Darwin that Mac OS X in a form the average user would recognize. From the summary: "The port got as far as booting to a multi-user prompt, but then hit hurdles to do with drivers and cache." If so he probably was familiar with it since Darwin is open source, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Darwin-1-0-Open-Source.html [apple.com].
That said, the intern did great work, I'm happy he got hired by the CoreOS team.
... I suppose portability is simply part of the demands by management ...
I would not be surprised to find that this is just an internal e
Re:Apple history (Score:4, Informative)
Windows history (Score:3)
Windows NT was actually developed originally on MIPS - and ironically, on DECstation 3000s - a DEC MIPS based workstation that was sold w/ only Ultrix - not VMS, and not NT. It was later ported to Intel and Alpha, and when released, it was released for x86, MIPS and Alphas. Silicon Graphics was one of the first companies w/ an NT box based on the MIPS R4000 called Magnum, while DEC released an EISA based PC based on the 21064. Since then, a number of companies tried building NT boxes based on either MIPS
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Dissertation PDF (Score:5, Informative)
Par for the course. (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like standard intern hazing.
"Hey, Tim, take this source code (*drops huge book of source on desk*) and port it to... uh... ARM."
**12 weeks later.**
"Holy crap, he made it work."
At least it wasn't SPARC.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Poor Apple... with their outdated OS X, useless iPad and simply useless iPhone... They have been surpassed by Fedora and Windows.
Yeah, poor Apple..... Where will they find the money to fund improvements to their OS? It is just hopeless, completely hopeless.....
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Fanboys? Overpriced RAM? Pick two.
Droping X86 may be suide for apple (Score:3, Interesting)
As how meany big apps will want to change architecture on apple yet again?
This may brake Photoshop plugins as well
Dropping X86 will take away windows dual boot as well.
Steam games and other games may also die on the mac
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i doubt they will stop selling Intel based MBP's. this will probably be for a lower end laptop for the $500 laptop market.
as it is now a $500 laptop about $200 goes to Intel/MS for the hardware and OS. add in the screen and other hardware. the margins on them are razor thin. it take 8 cheap HP laptops to equal the profit of one MBP.
If apple can make a $500 laptop that does the basic tasks for most people it's all over for Intel/MS in the lower end laptop market. Internet, email, basic games, basic apps. the
Re:Droping X86 may be suide for apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple is certainly big enough at this point to support two architectures. You may or may not be aware that, with Xcode, generating a fat binary supporting multiple CPU architectures involves nothing more than a setting. Of course testing may not be quite that smooth, especially at first.
At any rate, I'm quite sure Apple won't drop x86 support for the foreseeable future. However, there may be some real advantages to supporting both, including price competition for Intel.
Don't forget that Microsoft has already promised Windows for ARM (NVIDIA's "Project Denver"), so it may also be in Apple's best interest to be a player there as well - especially if the NVIDIA CPUs have some real advantages.
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Sure, Apple is, but how about Adobe? As I recall they were dragged kicking and screaming into native x86 Mac code after years of procrastinating.
Re:Droping X86 may be suide for apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Adobe deserves to die imho. They were indeed dragged kicking and screaming. Same for MS Office. You either adapt or die, if your code is so shitty you can't port it between slightly different architectures without breaking it, you have a really bad development team.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They didn't learn from history either - Adobe InDesign (then Pagemaker) was an also-ran to Quark Xpress' stallion, but then Quark got complacent after the release of OS X and thought "nah, no need to do any work to release an OS X native version - everyone uses us, no one will is going anywhere" and then InDesign came along and said "thanks for the user base!".
Sad that Adobe forgot that with the move to x86 on the Mac. Still, I guess they just didn't care about the Mac platform all that much.
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Windows 8 is supposed to have ARM support, so may still be able to dual boot.
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Windows 8 is ported to ARM as well (also Office). About Steam... If it was actually working on OS X with their shitty and outdated fixed-pipeline-driver architecture that is slower than a snail...
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This is just Apple keeping its options open. If Intel fails to deliver its promised low power CPUs Apple needs to know what effort would be needed to switch processor families. If it was a real strategy to move to ARM then it would have been more than a 12 week Intern project. What would be suicide for Apple would be to stuck in the PPC debacle again, ensuring OS portability is a good way to avoid that.
The apps will go where the market is. If there is a big enough market they would eat the porting costs, es
apple tv? (Score:5, Interesting)
Assumption is its for the new mac book.
Would be funny if it turns out to be the much rumored apple tv.
One of Many Reasons for Intel UltraBook Program (Score:5, Interesting)
It's no secret that one of the reasons Intel is subsidizing manufacturers over $100M for the Ultrabook project is to keep ARM at bay. This is compounded by Microsoft offering a ARM version of Windows. Apple putting out a really nice A8 MacBook Air could really shake things up.
However, the real issue Apple is going to have is MacOS or iOS. There's a lot of compelling reasons to move to iOS for Apple, but ultimately the closed nature of iOS would likely alienate the large programmer base they have built up.
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However, the real issue Apple is going to have is MacOS or iOS. There's a lot of compelling reasons to move to iOS for Apple, but ultimately the closed nature of iOS would likely alienate the large programmer base they have built up.
I don't think Apple is doing away with MacOS X. Remember that something like 80-90% of the code is shared between MacOS X and iOS. Apple has plenty of money for developers to maintain the two.
Re:One of Many Reasons for Intel UltraBook Program (Score:4, Interesting)
Just goes to show you that there is not an open market in the PC sector and who has been controlling it for so very long. IMO
LoB
OS X's darwin kernel already runs on ARM (Score:2, Insightful)
Since the various ARM SoC devices are radically different in how they boot and ennumerate devices a 12 week port time is pretty impressive but Darwin aready runs on arm v5 (and v7). iOS uses the darwin kernel. Since this was a marvell and not a samsung/apple A device a lot of work would have to be done to get the kernel to boot but the basic build system already fully supports ARM.
It's not a secret Apple keeps their options open arch-wise. After the switch the Intel it came out apple had an x86 build of
OS News has a followup on this article (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.osnews.com/story/25588/No_Mac_OS_X_wasn_t_ported_to_ARM_by_an_intern
What an awesome job (Score:2)
Some people get all the cool gigs.
Mountain out of a molehill (Score:3)
Darwin != OS X (Score:5, Informative)
TFA says he ported Darwin - the open-source version of the OS X kernel - and got as far as a multi-user login prompt (he'd need some of the BSD toolchain to get that far, but you could run BSD on the ARM-based Acorn Archimedes in the early 90s). Not to be sneezed at as an intern project - but a long, long way from porting "OS X".
Its the difference between porting "Linux" (in the correct sense of the name - i.e. the kernel) and porting Linux + GNU tools + X.Org + KDE/Gnome + ... in order to make something resembling modern Linux distro.
Not that its remotely unfeasible to port OS X to ARM (nobody outside of Apple knows how much of iOS code is directly ported from OS X but economic common sense says "as much as possible") and I'd be unsurprised if Apple had an ARM-based Mac lashed up behind a closed door at Infinite Loop. Apple know a thing or two about supporting multiple processor architectures and It might just make sense as a stop-gap between the iPad and the Air if it offered size/weight/power savings over Intel. Feasible, but probably not likely.
Re: (Score:3)
TFA says he ported Darwin - the open-source version of the OS X kernel
Kernel and core bits of userland, actually.
What's more, what he ported was the (not-completely-open-source) ARM version of Darwin (little if any of ARM support is open-source), which already exists - it lives, for example, in every one of those mobile phones with the apple-with-a-bite-out-of-it logo on the back, for example - and what he ported it to was an ARMv5 platform, and a lot of difficulties were due to bitrot in the ARMv5 support, as stated in The Fine Intern Thesis [tudelft.nl]
So, as you say, this says little
How many hours in a week? (Score:3)
Twelve weeks is a specious number. Interns (i.e., no life) given an interesting project (and they're more likely to be interesting to interns) or trying to impress will often put in 80+ hours a week, so 12 weeks can easily mean 24 or 36 weeks. Granted there'll be some time wasted due to lack of knowledge, but that'll be more than compensated for in poor quality; Not necessarily in terms of errors, but quality in terms of usability by whoever takes over after the internship term ends. (Maybe Apple had to hire the intern.) As someone else posted, "Free lunch!" Indeed!
IOW, the real news has very little to do with the inaccurate, misleading title.
Name, job. (Score:3)
His name must be Tristan Schaap. Not Schapp.
He used to work for me, but Apple made him an offer he couldn't refuse. When he left, he said he was going to work in security. Apparently they found something else for him to do :-).
As far as I know he went to apple for an internship, and after that they asked him: finish your studies and come work for us after that.
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to recognize Apple's freedom to run their business however they want.
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to stop using rhetorical hyperbole posted on websites as a basis for decisions.
Collude to take away freedom (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yeah, people sure were writing their own programs to run on their Coleco Telstar systems.
Re:Collude to take away freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
If you really like freedom a little bit, you need to be on your guard lest all manufacturers of computing devices priced for home users collude to design their products to take away the computing freedom of home users. This already happened decades ago in the video game industry.
Due to a wonderful concept called "free markets" this will almost certainly not happen. That is, unless perhaps the government decides that "free computing" is dangerous, and mandates that all PCs are locked down. The government, in particular the current US idiocracy, is the main enemy of free markets. In fact, the PS3 tried to make one if its distinguishing characteristics that it was a general-purpose device, but apparently rethought that for various reasons. Since video consoles are essentially fixed-function devices I guess it made sense to Sony, besides Sony's approach was always half-hearted.
Until then, someone will always offer "unlocked" computers due to market demand. Macs are in this category, along with virtually all desktops/laptops in the world. One of the more interesting developments in the area of "cheap, general purpose computing" lately is the sub $50 Raspberry Pi. Now there's a hacker platform if I've ever seen one! =:-D
I disagree that it's a free market (Score:4, Insightful)
Due to a wonderful concept called "free markets" this will almost certainly not happen.
An oligopoly isn't especially a free market. Microsoft has announced that it will require OEMs of devices running Windows 8 for ARM to configure UEFI such that it won't boot anything but Windows 8.
That is, unless perhaps the government decides that "free computing" is dangerous, and mandates that all PCs are locked down.
This almost happened with the SSSCA/CBDTPA proposal [wikipedia.org]. It's also starting to happen with a patent land grab on the part of companies opposed to free computing, namely Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft in particular rakes in royalties for Android equal to those for Windows Phone 7.
Until then, someone will always offer "unlocked" computers due to market demand.
Take this scenario for example: A locked computer costs $200, and an unlocked computer costs $2,000, and you have to be an established business with a secure office to qualify to buy an unlocked computer (source: warioworld.com among others). To what extent will the market demand unlocked computers under such conditions?
One of the more interesting developments in the area of "cheap, general purpose computing" lately is the sub $50 Raspberry Pi. Now there's a hacker platform if I've ever seen one!
But will it stay sub $50, or will the price shoot up as they run out of stock and people start reselling them for a 300% premium or more on eBay, like a recently launched game console?
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But will it stay sub $50, or will the price shoot up as they run out of stock and people start reselling them for a 300% premium or more on eBay, like a recently launched game console?
I'm sorry, but with this statement, you just lost any and all credibility your argument had.
Re:Collude to take away freedom (Score:5, Informative)
I'm curious, how has Apple designed their consumer computers to take away computing freedom?
Apart from switching to x86, and including tools in OS X to make dual booting other OSes easier, and putting socketed CPUs and removable GPU boards based on MXM in the iMac, or adding extra choice for software purchases with a new distribution method (that has no effect on prior methods of obtaining software...)
I mean, sure they modified the firmware on hard drives used in the iMac to use the LED activity output to monitor the temperature, thus causing the HD fan to spin up to full if you fit a non-Apple HD in that bay, but there is a simple method to tell the iMac that a non-custom-iMac drive is installed, since it has a factory option for an SSD where this different pinout is set back to standard SATA. Some people seem to believe this engineering choice is "proof" that Apple want to make it harder for you repair your own machine... in the same generation of hardware where they switched from soldered-on CPUs to socketed ones that are replaceable with standard Intel chips from newegg. Curious!
So, how are they taking away computing freedom from home users? I mean, sure they have iOS, but are you forced to choose to use it? What was the state of "freer" handsets before and after the iPhone? Someone on here tried to argue that Apple's entry into smartphones has been bad for "open" mobile computing because before there was Symbian and Win Mobile 6 (thus, a value of 2) and afterwards there's only Android (value of 1) and 2 is bigger than 1. Despite trying to convince him that Android is in better shape than ever and offering much more as a whole than the numerically greater but technically and figuratively worse older offerings just wasn't cutting it.
It's never been better for computing choice and freedom, not only despite, but in many cases *because* of Apple - especially with the success of the iPhone (which you are free not to use, and is certainly not the "freest" handset, but has sure done a lot to push Android on).
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So because they used a similar pricing structure to Microsoft for their iOS dev program and because MS requires locked bootloaders for Win 8 on ARM, this is somehow "Apple colluding to take away computing freedom"...
I'm not following.
You're suggesting that because they had similar pricing for the dev programs, now that MS has announced that Win 8 on ARM will require locked bootloaders that Apple will also require a locked bootloader on a rumoured product in the future?
I guess that's conclusive proof!
How "decades ago" and how "everything Apple"? (Score:4, Informative)
[Industry-wide lockdown] already happened decades ago in the video game industry.
Happened decades ago with everything Apple too.
I agree with you that it happened long ago with iPod and iPhone, but how "decades ago" and how "everything Apple"? A copy of Xcode is bundled with every Mac (or at least was bundled with a Mac mini in the third quarter of 2009), and the computer's user can use it to develop Mac apps on a Mac without paying any separate annual fee.
Re:How "decades ago" and how "everything Apple"? (Score:4, Informative)
If it's not still bundled, it's a free download from the App Center.
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I have some hope that Apple will open up some more under Cook.
Regardless, Apple is certainly not any worse than Microsoft, the maker of the only other viable desktop/laptop OS, in the "do no evil" department.
Apple also produces some of the nicest products, and what's widely regarded as the best user experience - and has the highest customer satisfaction for its products of any of the big players.
Apple innovation has also outshined the rest of the industry in a big way over the last few years.
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I have some hope that Apple will open up some more under Cook.
It would actually be interesting to hear more about what Tim Cook is, umm, cooking. After Jobs passed away, I don't remember seeing any Cook news in Slashdot, for example.
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I have some hope that Apple will open up some more under Cook.
It would actually be interesting to hear more about what Tim Cook is, umm, cooking. After Jobs passed away, I don't remember seeing any Cook news in Slashdot, for example.
That's because people don't hate Cook ... yet. I'm sure as soon as he does one thing that Apple haters don't like they will wish upon him the same fate as Jobs.
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Nicest product is based on your personnal preference. It appears that there are quite a lot of other devices that appeal to a lot of people. The best user experience is certainly not the case. Being locked in quite destroy the user experience for a lot of people. Having to delete the content of the ipad when syncing someone else new app to try it out is certainly not a good user experience. Hell, even Woz says that there are things better done on his Android.
Finally, most of the products of apple aren't inn
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.tensionnot.com/jokes/operating_systems_and_airlines
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:4, Interesting)
iOS developer program copied from Xbox 360 (Score:2)
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Obarthelemy explicitly mentions the "30% cut of whatever they do allow you to sell on their platform". How you go from there to the $99/year entrance fee is quite mind-boggling.
Re:iOS developer program copied from Xbox 360 (Score:5, Insightful)
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How you go from there to the $99/year entrance fee is quite mind-boggling.
It was the mention of "the closed Console ecosystem", and I was giving an example of a well-known video game console whose developer program's price structure was identical to that of iOS down to the cent. If the developer program didn't have an annual fee, one could circumvent the 30% cut by distributing an application outside the App Store and requiring users to register as developers.
and yet big apps are not in the store (Score:2)
Office mac top's out at $280 does it really cost $84 per unit to run a store?
CS 5.5 costs $1,299 - $2,599 apple store max's out at $1000 and does it really cost $390 - $780 per unit to run a store?
For big apps apple will need to have a lower cut and a much better way for site licenses and multi unit pricing systems / let app makes set a lower price per unit for say packs of 25, 50, 100 and so on.
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For big apps apple will need to have a lower cut and a much better way for site licenses and multi unit pricing systems / let app makes set a lower price per unit for say packs of 25, 50, 100 and so on.
For all we know they do! The 30% app store cut is just what we see publicly. This doesn't prohibit Apple and software manufacturers from cutting private deals that use a different percentage. It also doesn't prohibit Apple from selling codes in bulk to companies for certain apps.
I'm not saying that this is currently being done, just that there's nothing preventing this sort of thing and it could be happening right now without public knowledge of it.
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Why don't you set up a store and find out? You pay for the bandwidth to download CS5.5 for 20,000+ people. And program the interface. And support all the credit card transactions. etc. etc. etc.
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Do you really think it costs that much to run a software repository? Come on.
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really think it costs that much to run a software repository?
Do you really think that the app store is a simple software repository? Apple writes and maintains the software to interface with the apps, runs the billing system and pays the credit card fees, vets apps and handles legal issues, buys bandwidth and server space, performs advertising, etc.
This is all done on a much larger and more involved scale than the usual "set it and forget it" software repository. Obviously Apple does make some profit from the app store but there's no doubt that they have significant expenditures in running the thing. Is 30% too much? Not when you compare it to how much other distribution channels take off the top. I'm sure if there is more competition then you'll see that 30% get shaved but right now 30% is pretty darn nice for what you get.
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Apple seeks an outcome where they cryptographically control all the devices and you can buy back the ability to do certain things with them.
These outcomes are known as 'a distorted market economy' and 'feudalism' respectively.
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that 30% cut for handling all the credit card processing, hosting, bandwidth, servers, storefront etc... Such a travesty.
Seriously, the 30% cut just for managing the payment stuff *alone* is a bargain, as anyone who has ever had to handle a merchant account and payment processing will tell you, especially for small transactions. It is very expensive and time consuming to deal with.
Apple's official financial statements have confirmed year over year that they do not make much at all on the store - the 30% really just covers the cost of running the thing. That's not the point of the exercise for them, though - the store exists to drive hardware sales, and the third party developers are a major part of that.
If you're stuck thinking that the 30% cut is some sort of daylight robbery or "quite bad" then you really have no idea what the costs (in time, resources and hassle) it is to handle distribution yourself.
Also, "responsible for translating the closed console ecosystem to phones"? How short is your memory?! Phones were anything *but* open before Apple entered the market. If anything Apple has made it more open, by driving the success of its main competition - Android.
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Sorry for the disturbance, folks. The fellow had a little too much schnapps and was starting to bother people.
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Does it actually matter what CPU your platform is running when the OS is totally locked down?
Yes, I still haven't gotten rid of my last ppc mac, darn thing just won't die, all the intels are upgraded to the most recent OS and software but the old ppc is the odd man out. Runs itunes just fine, and not worth the money to upgrade it (Not going to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to merely do what it already does just fine). Now we'll have equally incompatible ARMs floating around too. Great.
Re:Does it actualy matter? (Score:5, Informative)
OS X is nowhere near "totally locked down".
But to answer your question, it matters to anyone who wants to be able to run apps written and compiled for a different CPU.
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>> anyone who wants to be able to run apps written and compiled for a different CPU.
The "I want to run my old ARM app" argument is bogus here. There's a lot more to binary compatibility that it just being compiled for the same CPU. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to run another ARM platform's apps on your ARM-based Apple.
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Who said anything about running "old ARM apps"? (I'm not an idiot; I don't think that you can run old Newton apps on an iPad just because they both have ARM processors.) I was answering your question about why anyone would care whether OS X was running on ARM or Intel: because apps compiled for Intel processors wouldn't run on an ARM CPU (at least not without some performance-sucking battery-draining deal-killing emulation layer).
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Re:Does it actualy matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying America is socialist because of the welfare state or is laissez-faire because we have a robust capitalist system. Neither is true and it is a matter of degrees.
Not being open source doesn't make something "completely locked down." If that's what you want, more power to you, download Linux or FreeBSD.
Core of Mac OS X is open source (Score:3)
Lets start with being able to get source code for the OS ...
Core OS, filesystem, etc ... sure:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Darwin-1-0-Open-Source.html [apple.com]
http://www.apple.com/opensource/ [apple.com]
... or any of the apps ...
Mac OS X runs the same console and X11 apps as Linux. The X11 display server is well integrated into Mac OS X.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.7/en/mchlp2276.html [apple.com]
... Then we'll continue by discussing the DRM.
What is there to discuss? The record industry initially required audio files from the iTunes Store to include DRM but Apple eventually got them to abandon DRM. Mac OS X does n
Re:Not this again (Score:4, Informative)
Um... the A4 and A5 are ARM chips. That's what they're talking about this hypothetical MacBook Air running on.
"A more likely scenario is a MacBook Air based upon iOS with a built-in touchscreen."
An iPad with a keyboard? Not likely. But what kind of processor would make most sense to put in such a device? How about one that iOS already runs on: ARM.
iPad Transformer (Score:3)
Like the volunteer efforts to get Ubuntu running on the Asus Transformer series, perhaps there's a niche for a device that can run iOS and Mac OS - AT THE SAME TIME! The next-gen ARM chips support hardware virtualization.
Dock a keyboard and your iPad becomes a mobile OS X workstation for those who need to 'get real work done'. Not all of us need 'legacy' amd64 apps like Photoshop. :-) All the iApps would seamlessly share settings from a common home directory - surprising? not really, same code underneath, j
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ARM is quickly getting more and more powerful. Modern Intel chips are total overkill for by now 99% of common tasks - it makes sense to me that laptop makers would look into less power hungry chips that are powerful enough to build a next-generation laptop.
It won't be a speed monster, but it should be good enough for normal business work: e-mail, documents, web surfing - and many businessmen already do this on their iPads. Having an actual laptop (with the advantage of a real keyboard and the clamshell desi
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Microsoft is actively developing Windows 8 for ARM.
Also, the current MacBook Airs (with SSD boot devices) are already darn close to your description of an instant-on laptop.
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"Apple learned their lesson last time with the G3/G4/G5 chips"
Which lesson is that? Keep your code portable? The G3, G4 and G5 were all PowerPC processors. They switched away from them to Intel, and supported both architectures (as well as PPC and Intel 64 bit architectures) at the same time.
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Yep. I know some interns are unpaid--maybe a majority for all I know--but I was paid well when I did an internship in the mid 2000s.
Maybe that has changed with the economy, but I kind of doubt it. There has always been two camps and probably always will be: Those who use internships as free labor, and those who use internships to look for potential hires. The latter are extremely likely to do what they can to make the job appear desirable, including actually paying their interns.
Re:Free lunch!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
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If they don't have ass, where's all this crap coming from?
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So, first they uesed the cheapest factory and labor from China, and now they are actually paying ZERO dollars (as it is the normal salary for any intern) to get their OS ported to ARM!!! What the...... Honestly, i think these guys don't even have ass, or even if they have, i could not imagine putting anything inside, that's how tight they are.
Yeah. Interns should just make coffee and run errands. How dare they give them the experience of porting an OS from one platform to another. Its outrageous!
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