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Apple Keynote today


chadbag

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Anybody besides me watch the Apple Keynote today from their virtual online WWDC?

 

Biggest announcement was the "Apple Silicon" for new Macs.  Should be exciting.   FIrst consumer ones to ship by the end of the year -- developer development machines shipping starting this week.  This is the "ARM Mac" rumor you've no-doubtedly been hearing about.

 

I've been slowly designing some DCC control stuff -- so far just in my mind and on paper -- targeting the Apple "ecosystem".  These new announcements are just getting me more excited to start actual work on the project...

 

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Martijn Meerts

I've actually been moving away from Apple devices recently, the prices on them were just getting beyond ridiculous. I'm expecting them to go up even more with their own silicon. The transition is also likely not going to be as smooth as they want you to believe, PowerPC to Intel was a pain as well (depending on which programs you needed)

 

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Hello,

 

We moved away from Apple starting 3 or 4 years ago.  Replaced our last two iPhones with Galaxy S10's last year.  I agree with MM.  Prices for Apple gear are now far beyond reasonable.

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I look at the big picture of the total ROI. I’ve earned a huge ROI utilizing Apple products in personal and professional life for 35 years now. I’ve had to walk on both sides for many years and I made way more money on the Apple side due to much easier development and application ease. I don’t know how many project is was able to beat the pants off the other side in development time and costs. In personal life having PC, phone and pad all pretty seamless is nice. The amount of time I use my iPad makes it priceless for its abilities and form in my life now. Phone yes I go cheap as I’m not a huge smart phone guy, so a simple one is not too expensive and is worth a bit more as it syncs well with all the other electronic forms in my life.

 

not seen a better option out there yet, so I’ll continue to look at ROI vs price tag and take the benefits in the long run.

 

jeff

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Flagship Android phones are in the same price range as similar iPhones.  Not much of a price savings, if any. 

 

I'm long past "platform" wars.  I want people to use what they feel most comfortable with (whether it be the user experience, the price, ROI, or whatever other metric they want to personally use to judge their "best" platform.)

 

For me, the Apple platform performs better, lasts longer, and is more fun to use.  YMMV.  Having said that, this years WWDC brought lots of new and interesting developments -- many of which were rumor bait for a while.  Like the switch away from the stagnating Intel platform as the basis for the Apple "PC" (aka Macintosh).  This is very exciting and I will be greatly excited to see what happens in the next 5 years with the "Apple Silicon".

 

Even with today's more iPad oriented chips, the performance seems to be very good at the macOS level (for normal work, not speciality high end work station stuff, yet).  Besides the normal "CPU" and "GPU", the Apple SoC have all sorts of special "neural engine" and AI and other specialty processing on them which will be opened up on the desktop/laptop now as well.  Things for which, at the moment, there are not normal standardized ways in the Wintel world.  (I am sure that AMD/Intel etc are working on these technologies to add to their base architectures but it will be a while before they are full standardized).  Once they start showing specialty version of the chips specifically designed for desktop/laptop type work, we'll really see the advances in performance and capability.  Exciting times ahead.

 

And for those on "other" platforms, this will push those platforms to adopt similar technologies and capabilities, so everyone will win in the end.

 

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I was in the market for a successor for my trusty 2011 Macbook pro last year, and was not at all excited by the price of the current equivalents (or the increasing lack of USB ports or that funny mini-keyboard-screen etc.) so ended up with a Thinkpad which provides much better bang for the yen and runs Linux just fine, including voice/video stuff which was one of the reasons I had the Mac.  Which has proven excellent value and is now in semi-retirement as a domestic-only laptop.

 

Phone is a cheap-ish Motorola which is holding up pretty well and does what I ask of it.

 

All the more money for trains, which tend not to morph into obsolete unsupported/unrepairable junk after a couple of years 😄

 

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Apple basically said that anybody buying a MacBook now will be abandoned in 2 years with an unsupported device.
 

in the end PowerPC also only had 2 years more of life in them after the Intel migration was announced.
 

I have owned many Mac computers since the Intel migration, and have been an iPhone and iPad owner since day one.

 

But Apple has not been caring about Macs since since the retina MacBook in my opinion. So why should I? And their computers are built so terribly that I am wondering what is going on there? Obviously they care more about the iPad, iPhone and AirPods since those products are such huge cash cows. 

 

they don’t care if your device has costed you an arm and a leg. Same as what they did with the trash can Mac Pro of 2012, dropped support, even though it was super expensive and still is a fast machine. 

 

I was so offended by the trashy keyboard and thermal issues of the previous MacBooks that I decided I would ditch the MacOS platform completely. The new announcements are no real improvement if Apple continues to produce trashy hardware.
 

as for iPads, still very happy with the last iPad Pro with touch sensor. Not a big fan of iPhones with Face ID, I prefer a touch sensor. I hope Apple will bring back the touch sensor and dump Face ID. Face ID doesn’t make much sense in the new corona era anyway. The new updates for iOS and iPadOS are great but should have been announced a few years earlier. Better late than never. 
 

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Martijn Meerts

I have 2 iMacs, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook pro, MacBook air, 2 iPads, several iPods, Apple watch, and iPhone 3gs, 4s, 5s and 6s.

 

My latest pc is a custom built one running windows 10. I was planning on dual booting Linux, but windows WSL does all I need for development purposes. It's far more powerful than any iMac at about half the price. My current phone is a Galaxy s20, paid 700 euro for it, while a comparable iPhone 11 pro is around 1400 euro here.

 

I still use Macs, and at the office I have a MacBook Pro with the touch bar (pretty useless for me), and I'm definitely not against them, but for me they're just not worth it anymore for personal use, for the moment at least. I still enjoy MacOS, but windows has made up some major ground since Apple's change of focus to iOS and services.

 

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1 hour ago, Yavianice said:

Apple basically said that anybody buying a MacBook now will be abandoned in 2 years with an unsupported device.

 

No.  They will continue to introduce new and sell new machines with Intel for another 2 years.  After that, you will get a couple years of support for Intel machines with new version(s) of the OS.  The PPC-Intel transition completed in 2006 and the first OS version that did not also support PPC based machines was in 2009 (10.6).  I would expect something similar here.

 

 

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PowerPC to Intel was announced in 2005. Mac OSX 10.5 was the final OS that supported PowerPC. Mac OSX 10.5 got, according to Wikipedia, the final update in August 2009. Apple usually places products in the "vintage" (i.e. unsupported) in 5 years. 

 

So if you buy a Mac computer now, taking the PowerPC as an example, you will not get updates from 2024 onwards. That is a shockingly short amount of time if you would purchase the latest Mac Pro for 6K for example.

 

And this isn't unheard of, like I mentioned, taking the Mac Pro Trashcan as an example.

 

Sure they SAY they will "continue to release" intel macs, but I'm not so sure they will. It's probably cheaper to build the chipsets themselves rather than buying unreliable Intel ones.

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That’s the roi issue as apple products are used way longer than pc comparable sales, thus you get the money back almost always with the lifespan alone. They tend to support older systems way longer than other manufactures do. I nursed an old tower thru the power pc and I think it was about 5 years before it hit the wall and I think it was a year or two old when the switch happened. Great roi still as at that point it was glacial compared to new machines and time to upgrade it anyway.
 

ive programmed and run productions for 30+ years even taught high school multimedia for a year and mac always new the corresponding PCs away on roi. I know as I had to manage all the budgets for everything from support to purchasing to the production budgets done on the systems. It use to be the running joke in the high school as my multimedia lab had about 90 macs from very old desktops to video editing stations (late 90s) and range of laptops to checkout and I had maybe 3 computers down at any time usually due to waiting for a hardware part to come in (purchasing in schools is a glacial process even when you have the funding). The brand new business pc lab down the hall had 40 brand new identical dels with custom cd setups to reload and reinstall everything perfect and a full time well traded ms tech who just maintained and did no real teaching or much student interaction usually had half a dozen down at any one point! Principal even finally walked in one day and said damn we should have got the macs for the business and not the dells as she had seen our budgets for the year and realized how different the roi was in a year...
 

jeff

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