Thread: Cheap Apple
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Old November 13th 17, 10:48 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
Alan Browne
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Default Cheap Apple

On 2017-11-13 16:39, nospam wrote:
In article , Alan Browne
wrote:

Lots of folks are curious in what step Apple will take next with Mac
hard and software. If you are interested in the current family of
systems it might be a good idea to take a step back and see where they
are heading. Will there be separate mac- and i- OSs or will they merge?
Will the hardware merge so that we will see ARM processors on Macs? That
will be sorted out then the new Mac Pro system arrives. Until then the
serious hobbyist with other obligations and limited resources could be
wise to wait and see if Apples new offerings due in a year or so just
see if is that is that they want. They do charge for the gear, you know!


Good advice


No. It's crappy advice. Apple will not merge iOS and MacOS despite
greater and greater integration and interoperability between them
(across apps via iCloud and local comms services such as handover).


it depends what you call merge.

under the hood, they're already merged, since both are os x, but with a
different user interface layer and minor other differences.


It's not OS X. It has a lot of OS X components but its behaviour, most
notably in the user relationship to the file system is completely
different. Likewise wrt to the gammut of i/o for MacOS v the thin world
of iOS.

What they will do (and almost certainly have running in the back room)
is move Macs from intel to ARM processors. But this will be very
transparent to users and more so than during the past quite smooth
transition from PowerPC to intel.


and even smoother transition from 68k to powerpc.

Those developers who completely adopted XCode/Cocoa will be able to
distribute their code to the new ARM world with nary a change to their
code - so no impact on late intel adopters, contrary to the nonsense
above. This will be even smoother than the Rosetta supported PPC/intel
transition.


more accurately, apps submitted to the app store can be recompiled to
arm code on the fly.

The main difference is that iOS is mainly a "consumption and capture"
device whereas a Mac is a mainly "workstation and creation" device.
There is overlap (when isn't there?). But they will remain very
separate for many years to come.


that's a myth.

both platforms serve both purposes, depending on the user and tasks.


Wow - what contradiction in one phrase.


That said, the higher end iPads are becoming desktop class devices in
computing and graphics power.


they already are and have been for a while.

the a11 chip benchmarks faster than recent macbook pros.

But they are hampered to a degree where
storage and peripherals are concerned.


not really.


Really. Don't see many Thunderbolt class peripherals running at full
tilt in an iOS environment. Try printing a 4 colour separation from iOS
.... etc. Indeed using iOS where a lot of files are in use is pretty
lame all around. It's just not oriented to that.

iOS / iDevices are thinly interfaced. Which is fine for what they do.

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