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Apple's Shifting Differentiation

(stratechery.com)
292 points kaboro | 3 comments | 11 Nov 20 13:21 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Shivetya ◴[11 Nov 20 14:29 UTC] No.25058661[source]▶
Software is the key for me. I am by no means a power user but I really am loathe to give up even more of my software library to swap to Apple Silicon after Catalina cratered my gaming library in Steam and some older apps from companies long gone.

I don't expect I am alone in this observation but the number of software companies they highlighted during the M1 debut was very slim and to be honest I have not heard of half of them until then and don't remember them now.

So to me it matters not how much faster AS is, what matters is if I can run want I want to run. I am not going to own two separate machines to do what I want to do. If AS machines cannot do all I need I will keep my current Mac till support runs out and look again

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freeone3000 ◴[11 Nov 20 14:41 UTC] No.25058768[source]▶
Rosetta 2 allows you to run your x86 mac apps on Apple silicon. It's like the PPC->Intel switch again; your software keeps working regardless of the hardware underneath.
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1. naravara ◴[11 Nov 20 14:53 UTC] No.25058847[source]▶
It’s not without some overhead though, so there will be performance issues.

Fortunately those performance issues will probably only affect games released in a fairly narrow band of time, new enough that they’re still resource intensive but predating the transition. It would maybe be a 5 or 6 year span I guess depending on how performant the ARM system in question is?

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2. breakfastduck ◴[11 Nov 20 15:26 UTC] No.25059100[source]▶
They've stated that some rosetta apps actually perform better on apple silicon due to the previous intel model being so slow (e.g. on the macbook air)
3. kergonath ◴[11 Nov 20 23:26 UTC] No.25064260[source]▶
Metal will be optimised. They said in the presentation that a game running on Rosetta would benefit from these optimisations, offsetting some of the slowdown resulting from the translation. So games that spend much of their time in Metal calls should be fine. Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, which will start next week.