Apple's Shifting Differentiation

> it is possible that Apple’s chip team is so far ahead of the competition, not just in 2020, but particularly as it develops even more powerful versions of Apple Silicon, that the commoditization of software inherent in web apps will work to Apple’s favor, just as the its move to Intel commoditized hardware, highlighting Apple’s then-software advantage in the 00s.

I think Ben is missing something here: that the speed and specialist hardware (e.g. neural engine) on the new SoCs again give developers of native apps the ability to differentiate themselves (and the Mac) by offering apps that the competition (both web apps and PCs) can't. It's not just about running web apps more quickly.

Apple is also working against itself in that department. As far as I know a webapp does not need to be approved by Apple to go live.

I think you're confusing the Mac with iOS. Native Mac apps don't have to be approved by Apple unless they are on the Mac App Store.

Yes, but there have been instances of Apple (and in general, ARM as well, though not as much) adding special instructions to the A series chips to make JS execution faster. They can make web apps run better than other platforms. And then they can make native apps run even faster. Both are a advantage which the competing ecosystem doesn't have.

I side with you. It is not about a faster chip nor hardware over software. What Apple understood is, that specialized chips or hardware allow for even better software and therefore services.

For sure, but in a world where you have near-infinite CPU power, ram, and performance per watt, the difference would not be noticeable between the two. I really think that the gains made in performance have enabled people to be far more okay with Electron. 6-10 years ago VSCode would have been seen as a non-option, now it's just 'bloated' compared to editors like Nova.

Apple has made publishing apps without their approval significantly harder during last couple of years. With pretty much mandatory notarization there were several app developers who just stopped developing macOS software due to increasing amount of restrictions and process involved.

Very fair comment. I guess that most developers don't see it as a huge issue though (I've not seen any issues with Apps that I use on Catalina). Direction of travel is towards more onerous Apple involvement.

It looks like Apple is pushing towards having a single app store, see the news about the new macs being able to run iOS apps. I can definitely see them eventually moving to only allowing apps from the iOS store installed on macs, the same as how ipads and iphone are now.

The special CPU instruction for JS thing is a bit silly. Javascript defines it's floating point rounding behaviour as what Intel CPUs do. ARM behaves differently by default, so they implemented an instruction to emulate the Intel behaviour specially to avoid Javascript running too slowly implementing the excepted behaviour in code.

This doesn't give ARM chips an advantage over Intel CPUs at executing Javascript for obvious reasons, once you know why they added it.

How long 'til there's a WebML spec that abstracts of neural engine, tpu, etc.? Similar to WebGPU and WebAssembly SIMD.

The assumption that Apple wants to approve all apps is wrong.

Apple sees App Store apps, and web apps as having different advantages, and it is in their interest to have the best platform for both.

It’s not just me saying this, they keep saying it too, and proving it by investing in making web apps run better.

I wonder if the next step after that will be Apple dictating what new apps are desirable in the app store and then a bit further Apple making apps themselves and only outsourcing the support or signing franchise deals. Once the hardware could only be repaired by Apple, they could move completely into a subscription model where you could subscribe to e.g. Office or Streamer package that would include a laptop for two years and a predefined set of applications.

And it effectively just sets the FPU flags, runs the instruction, then resets the FPU flags. It just avoids the JS VM from having change FPU flags repeatedly.

> Apple sees App Store apps, and web apps as having different advantages, and it is in their interest to have the best platform for both. It’s not just me saying this, they keep saying it too, and proving it by investing in making web apps run better.

The method to pin a webapp to the home screen is substantially worse than it used to be.

There was a period where javascript running in Safari ran significantly faster than javascript running in a webapp opened from the home screen, or in any other app opening a web view. Is that still the case, or did they decide to share that function?

And yet they've completely nerfed PWAs on iOS. So they can say what they like; I don't believe it.

To the contrary, most apps I have to install from outside the App Store now aren’t signed and need the workaround (right click, Open, OK the scary dialog, open again) to run.

It hasn't been the case for years.

Are you really ‘scared’ by the dialog?

Why would anyone subscribe to that?

Agreed but I think it's stretching it a bit call it a 'workaround' when it essentially tells you what to do :)

Too Long

Do you not think we're moving towards a future where both platforms converge into just iOS?

Think we can't ignore that the iOS install base has been larger than the MacOS install base. Start looking at it that way and the iOS way of doing things is the norm in the eyes of Apple and MacOS is the odd one out.

> This doesn't give ARM chips an advantage over Intel CPUs at executing Javascript for obvious reasons, once you know why they added it.

I believe the point is that it's one example (of hundreds, maybe thousands?) of performance paper-cuts addressed by Apple hardware that result in significant performance-per-watt advantages over devices not using Intel CPUs.

You will find that many people would pay for having their worry about choosing the right laptop and software completely removed. They also won't have to worry about repairs etc. as long as any damage would be accidental or from a manufacturing fault.

It's a nice idea in theory, but I don't see Apple putting in the effort to make this fruitful.

For example, we just saw an article rise to the top of HN in the last couple days about the pathetic state of Apple's developer documentation. Their focus seems to be less providing integrations into their hardware, and more providing integrations into their services. Meanwhile, developers increasingly distrust Apple because of bad policies and press around App Store review. It's a mess.

I agree that Apple could and should help app developers use this cool new hardware. I'm sure there are good people at Apple who're trying. But the company as a whole seems to be chasing other squirrels.

There may always be a small group of dedicated Mac development enthusiasts, but the last decade has shown that companies will trade performance and frame rates for maximum usefulness and time to market.

Apple's performance boosts will reward those companies who never valued performance. Why would they change their approach now?

That’s already why people buy apple and AppleCare.

What you are describing is taking this even further in the direction of an information appliance.

I am unconvinced that there is any benefit that your model provides that Apple does not already.

You can already just buy a Mac with AppleCare and install MS office from the App Store.

People may want their choices to be simplified, but they are also going to need to be able to use whatever important new thing comes along. E.g. Zoom or Slack.

You make this sound like a new problem. You have had to do that for unsigned apps for years and at least in my experience the majority of apps that come from outside the App Store are unsigned. This has been a thing for so long that I almost instinctively right click, Open the first time I run an app I downloaded from the internet

Very largely agree (and the chasing squirrels analogy made me laugh!) but of course the speed comes without any extra effort from Apple - so if your native app becomes attractive because its now that much quicker - say some form of video editing - then you're good to go.

Not everything they do will fit your view of how they should support the web.

Believe whatever you like.

But this means you are also choosing to ignore absolutely enormous investments at every level of the stack that they have made to increase web performance, adopt standards and improve web user experience.

> Do you not think we're moving towards a future where both platforms converge into just iOS?

Could be, but as far as the new cross platform frameworks are shaping up right now it looks like their strategy is slightly different. Apple is seemingly creating a developer ecosystem to loosley describe interfaces and share them between platforms while they ultimately decide how your UI is rendered. Maybe you're right and one day that means flicking a switch and everything is unified. I also look at something like iPadOS for instance which started as extremely similar to iOS and has now diverged and become it's own thing, different to both the Mac and iPhone.

Not quite. If your native app becomes attractive, Apple might replace you with a built-in clone and then use that as the reason to kick you out of the app store.

If I remember correctly, that's what happened with flux.

f.lux was never allowed in the iOS App Store, because it needs private APIs to change the screen color temperature.

Was it on macOS App Store at one point and then kicked off?

There are some areas where Apple is prioritizing getting developers on board with their hardware, and the neural engine seems like one of them.

Over the past couple of years, coremltools [1], which is used to convert models from Tensorflow and other frameworks to run on Apple hardware (including the neural engine when available), has gone from a total joke to being quite good.

I had to get a Keras model running on iOS a few months ago, and I was expecting to spend days tracking down obscure errors and writing lots of custom code to get the conversion to work -- but instead it was literally 3 lines of code, and it worked on the first try.

[1] https://github.com/apple/coremltools

Safari is known among many web developers as the worst browser to develop for.

It's hard to square the claim that they've made enormous investments when you compare feature support against budget. Apple's operating budget is 200x Mozilla's ($85B vs $0.45B), and yet Safari lags significantly behind Firefox in features (and for some the use cases, in performance as well).

Disclosure: I work at Google on JS libraries, and at one point was in the Chrome org, but my opinions are my own.

If think more people would buy a subscription instead of forking out few grand at once. It will be like a finance instead you won't own the laptop. I also understand this is quite stupid, but I feel that this is the direction Apple is going to go to extract even more money from their target audience.

Being worked on now as the Web Neural Network API:

https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webnn/blob/master/expl...

You're earning money with a model deployed on an iOS device? Now that's an achievement. It's even rare to actually get productive models in the first place but then doubling down on less powerful hardware then you could get with aws is just mind-blowing to me in an production context

The term GP is referencing is Sherlocked[1]. As someone familiar with the iOS jailbreaking ecosystem circa 2010, you could definitely loan the term to apps that are from outside their walled garden.

That said, it would be silly of them not to in some of these most obvious cases: a flux/redshift comparable feature is now built into most OS’s as we’ve become attached to our devices, and Sherlock was argued by critics of the term to be a natural progression of iterating in their file indexing capabilities.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...

It's reasonably clear that Apple's main focus for Safari is on memory, power use and performance rather than features so that doesn't in any way disprove that they are investing heavily in it.

You'll probably know better than me but Apple's work on Webkit was presumably worthwhile enough for Google to fork it into Blink (no problem with that but maybe worth acknowledging that fact).

It's the age old thin client vs. fat client debate repeating itself again. It seems like as the chips & tools get more mature we'll see more and more model deployments on customer hardware. Transmitting gigabytes of sensor/input data to a nearby data center for real time result just isn't feasible for most applications.

There's probably lots of novel applications of AI/ML that remain to be built because of this limitation. Probably also good fodder for backing your way into a startup idea as a technologist.

I think it highlights a distinction between Apple's past work and their recent work.

Google forked Blink because for whatever reason they were unsatisfied with the state of Webkit -- nominally because they wanted to take a different approach to multi-process, but there may have been other technological and project direction/pace disagreements. Since then, a number of browsers have switched from Webkit to Blink/Chromium as their engine, and arguably Safari is falling behind on new features and overall quality (weird quirks that require web devs to work around).

I am not aware of a sherlocked being kicked out of the App Store for duplicating features of Apple’s version, though. That was quite a bold claim, asserted without any example.

Could you point to one of those (Apple only instruction added for the only purpose of accelerating JS)?

One clear example of this is audio related apps. iOS has a rich ecosystem of DAWs and VSTs because their platform seems to be much better with low latency for audio. You don’t find the same on Android.

That’s a result of Apple putting effort into hardware + software to make that happen.

Don't disagree on features and some aspects of quality but I think it's a mistake not to recognise that the overall user experience also depends on other factors.

If Apple's focus is on getting better power consumption and memory use (esp on mobile) then that's still investing and arguably that does as much if not more for users and the web than adding more features.

PS Let's not forget that Apple are still standing behind WebKit when Microsoft have given up on their own rendering engine so let's give them some credit for helping to avoid a Chrome only web.

It's not properly built in. OLEDs support full conversion to red-only light, allowing you to preserve your night vision. No other app or built in implementation except f.lux and cf.lumen allow for turning all colors off except red. This is the main reason that I jailbreak my android phone (a oneplus). Not ad blocking, not side loading apps, but because I want to not get my eyes destroyed every night when I try to go to the bathroom and use my phone as an impromptu flashlight...

What the fuck guys? Do you just not care about astronomers? Why is it that no one has properly implemented all of f.luxs features?

On iOS have you tried Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text size > turning on Color Filters and sliding intensity and hue to the far right? Maybe set the triple click shortcut to Color Filters?

They showed in the keynote Davinci Resolve running on a Macbook Air with impressive performance. They could have easily stuck to demos using Final Cut like they often do, so this seems like a pretty good sign that from day 1 they do care about 3rd party software running well. They've also been showing more and more games which are obviously also performance sensitive. I fully expect Tensorflow models and other major libraries will be able to take native advantage of the Neural Engine in the near future as well.

Leasing the hardware makes sense - basically like the iPhone upgrade program but extended to macs.

I know people who upgrade their Mac every time there is a speed bump and just sell the old one. They would presumably be candidates for this.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this.

I just don’t see any reason Apple would tie the leased hardware to a limited software bundle.

Google has a strategy to destroy other platforms and replace them with Chrome.

It’s hardly obvious that this is best for users in the long run.

I point this out not to say it’s wrong for them to attempt this, but because it makes no sense to use Google’s strategic decisions as evidence of Apple’s intentions or investment.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

There should be limits on this. It's sad to be the baby outside the window, drenched in bathwater.

I think the bathwater is the least of the defenestrated baby's problems. :)

ah. also jazelle.

>that the speed and specialist hardware (e.g. neural engine.....

Yes. For one, there seems to be no Unified API for GPU Computing in the PC Market. And Microsoft doesn't seems to be interested in doing a Direct X version of it.

And for NPU, which is increasingly important for things such as Speech Recognition, ( For many parts of the word where Languages aren't easily typed into, they are the default way of input on their Phone ), Photo Face Recognition without using the Cloud. Increasing use in Graphics, Video, Audio productivity apps. There aren't even any specific Hardware on PC market. ( That is why Intel is desperate to move the XE as a co-processor ). And it will be years if not a whole decade before a PC parts comes up and reach a large enough market volume.

And it sort of makes you wonder 3-4 years down the road when the M1 ( excluding Memory ) becomes a $20 SoC, will we see a variant of Mac cheap enough that will hit back at the 1.5B Windows PC Market. Where Apple current has roughly 110M Mac.

Suppose you want to do object detection on a phone’s live camera stream. Running your model on aws is probably infeasible, because you’re killing the users data plan while streaming frames into your remote model, and network latency kills the user experience.

On-device detection (“edge ai”) is gaining steam. Apple recently purchased a company called xnor.ai which specialized in optimizing models for low power conditions.

Good points but I suspect Apple is more interested in the $1000 business PC market - so say a videoconferencing app that was much, much better as result of using Apple's API's might be a handy way of selling more Macs to business.

Of course set against that they've lost the ability to run x86 Windows in a VM for legacy business apps (but not sure many were doing that anyway!).

> specialized chips or hardware allow for even better software and therefore services

Based on the front page of HN, "better" is not a word I'd choose

I would agree if us poor souls didn't have to still support ie11.