So this setup is for people who use a Mac, but not a Mac laptop (or who keep the laptop closed and use it exclusively with an external monitor), and who also don't want to buy Apple's keyboard with Touch ID, or an Apple Watch. I gotta say, I don't think that's a huge group of people.
Having a mac laptop doesn't help either if you use it primarily as a secondary monitor, relatively far away from your reach. This is a pretty standard setup in enterprise IMHO.
Then not wanting to wear a watch and wishing for a better keyboard than the Apple one don't sound outlandish either.
I hit a similar issue on my MacBook Pro. Whenever I watched YouTube or streamed Spotify while playing a game, the audio broke into little "clipping chirps" and static.
For me the culprit was Game Mode. I still don't really know what it does, but disabling it fixed everything. None of my games come close to stressing the CPU, yet Game Mode was throttling anything that wasn't the game. It was also on by default, which felt like a design miss.
For MacOS, a better approach would be to check what's happening on the second monitor or at least avoid throttling apps that aren't being displayed. Assuming the game deserves all system resources and that the user doesn't want to watch or listen to anything else is a bad bet.
Anyway, the good news is the fix on a Mac is simple once you know where to look. (=
I don't get why they bother changing the aspect ratio in the first place. What audience is saying, "I want a weird one-off version of the show in HD, please"?
Most of these shows were shot for 4:3. Directors framed for 4:3, lit for 4:3, blocked scenes for 4:3, and even built their special effects around 4:3. Stretching that work into widescreen feels a bit like deciding to colorize Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It solves a problem no one actually has.
Viewers are already used to black bars, and we watch lower-resolution content constantly. Vertical phone clips shot by amateurs on TikTok, grainy GIFs, and IMAX footage down-scaled to fit our phone (and connection). Content that wasn't designed to fill the entire screen isn't the issue.
From what I've seen, most of these old shows end up on free or bargain streaming services packed with ads. I watched an episode of Highway to Heaven with my dad where they sped up the dialogue and trimmed pauses, squeezed the credits into a tiny picture-in-picture box, and still lopped off another minute so the episode ended mid-sentence. All of that was just to make room for extra commercial slots the original show was never designed to accommodate. Disgusting, really... though I suppose you get what you pay for.
Sticking with the original 4:3 and simply adding pillarbox bars is cleaner, simpler, and far more respectful -- and ultimately more enjoyable for the audience.
why would it? they're only intereated in Intel's fab, not their actualy CPU technology. they're looking at diversifying they their fab stuff so it's not only TSMC.
Partnerships could mean more than just fab capacity -- maybe even incentives to build an instruction translation layer so software built for Intel chips could run natively on Apple Silicon. Something like Rosetta, but at the hardware level.
Getting a lot of down-votes for this... why are people so down on the idea? Was Boot Camp really that unpopular? I always enjoyed it -- especially for gaming. Sure, laptops weren't ideal, but even then the same games ran noticeably better on Windows than on macOS.
It's both technically and economically unviable for Apple.
For one, Intel's x86 IP is covered by lots of patents and licensing agreements (including with AMD) and Apple wouldn't want to encumber themselves with that. Hence making their own GPUs and modems.
For two, the M-series CPUs already have extensions which improve x86 emulation performance in Rosetta.
For three, Rosetta is already slated for removal in a macOS version or two. Apple don't look backwards, they expect users and devs to move on with them after the transition period - like 32-bit code, PowerPC Rosetta, Classic environment.
Even if Rosetta wasn't being removed, everyone should still want native ARM software because these are fast, efficient CPUs and any form of emulation will harm that. And dedicated SIP blocks would only confuse the market.
For four, Boot Camp was a selling point when the Mac and OS X were still far behind Windows in terms of software support, so dual booting and virtualization was a selling point. Now many apps are cross-platform or web-based and Microsoft's strangehold on computing is reduced. A Mac running Windows was better for Apple than a Dell running Windows, but a Mac running macOS is what Apple wants - that's how they can keep in their ecosystem, charge you (and devs) for apps, and make you evangelical for their battery life.
Five, Apple have never cared much about games. Yeah there are some classics (Marathon...) and the porting toolkit for Metal now, but with the Steam Deck and game streaming being so accessible, I see no reason why Apple would accept the previous 4 cons just to appeal slightly more to a gaming market that Apple don't target and that doesn't really target Apple.
So people are probably downvoting (not me, I don't have enough karma and it wasn't a bad-faith comment!) because it's a far-fetched fantasy which goes directly against Apple's business style and would benefit almost no Mac users.
> Even if Rosetta wasn't being removed, everyone should still want native ARM software
I think this is seriously flawed logic, and part of why I don't daily a Mac anymore. As a user, I have zero leverage in porting 90% of the stuff I own to the New Hotness. Yes, that includes video games. But it also includes BBEdit and Sublime and Git Tower and dozens of other Mac apps I paid for and can't easily use anymore. That is insulting - I should be allowed to use these apps if the hardware supports it. No software nanny should have the right to tell me playtime is over.
There's no point paying for premium software that my laptop OEM uses as leverage against their own developers. I'm not going to be complicit in it even if emulation "harms" the performance. It's not unviable for Apple to implement UEFI, take Rosetta seriously or hell, even support Windows. They are a trillion dollar company, Apple could launch a satellite into fucking orbit if you gave them enough time. They simply don't want to.
> But it also includes BBEdit and Sublime and Git Tower and dozens of other Mac apps I paid for and can't easily use anymore.
Those apps all run on current Macs today--but you do need to upgrade to a current version.
Nobody should expect BBEdit 6.5 that shipped on PPC Macs in the early 2000s to run on a M4 MacBook Air.
> It's not unviable for Apple to implement UEFI, take Rosetta seriously, or, hell, even support Windows.
Apple stated it during the PPC to Intel transition and again with the Intel to ARM transition: Rosetta is a bridge technology for developers until they ship native versions of their applications. It's not a long-term solution.
Microsoft could make a deal to run ARM-based Windows on Apple Silicon hardware if they wanted to.
> They are a trillion-dollar company; Apple could launch a satellite into fucking orbit if you gave them enough time. They simply don't want to.
You're arguing against yourself: obviously, Apple's market cap is $4.16 trillion and has shipped over 400 million Macs since its introduction; it's hard to argue their strategy is "wrong" and hasn't been wildly successful.
No successful modern company has been declared dead or beleaguered more times than Apple has.
I'm confused by the first half of your first point - I understand frustration at Apple's constant "throw it out and move on" attitude, but if that did not exist I would still want software to be compiled for the CPU I'm using where possible. It's why I download amd64 instead of x86 binaries on Windows, and run CachyOS built for x86-64 v3 on my Zen 3 PC.
The second half I agree with. Apple has "their vision" of what computing should be, and you need to be ride or die with that vision. Including application deprecation, unrepairable hardware, and artificial locks to make sure you're not misbehaving. That doesn't work for a lot of people, and was something I had to accept when I bought a Macbook after a decade away from the ecosystem (it helps that I now have an army of ThinkPads, a homelab, and a gaming PC.) But if you don't want to pay lots of money to visit Apple Disneyland on their terms, no one can reasonably blame you.
Sadly, Microsoft has enshittified Windows to the point that I jumped off - that 30 year backwards compatibility isn't worth the spying and advertising (LTSC helps, but not enough) and the Linux/BSD world expect binaries to be recompiled to the point that people joke that Win32 via WINE is the Linux stable ABI.
Everything has trade offs or things that benefit the business much more than the users.
I just liked that I could re-boot my MacBook Pro into "Game Mode" back when there was an Intel chip. I liked that about Bootcamp.
I played Marathon back in the day. Ha. It was a great game, and actually had a really good plot... most video games at the time didn't (especially not other FPSs).
Escape Velocity was another great Mac game from the past. And while Maelstrom wasn't really original, it was well-executed. I don't think there was any sort of PC version of either of those.
Spectre (the first FPS I remember playing), Bolo (the first multi-player network game I remember playing), Lemmings, Myst, Dark Castle, Load Runner... all amazing classic games that were Mac-first if not Mac-only. (=
Edit: Bolo may not have been Mac-first... but that's where I played it. Ha.
> Partnerships could mean more than just fab capacity -- maybe even incentives to build an instruction translation layer so software built for Intel chips could run natively on Apple Silicon. Something like Rosetta, but at the hardware level.
Rosetta is pretty damn fine as-is, and yet Apple is removing it, because they don't care for supporting anything older than 7 years.
Which is pretty hypocritical of them, touting gaming on Macs is good now, yet throwing 90% of the remaining game library (after killing off i386).
> Getting a lot of down-votes for this... why are people so down on the idea?
People mistake "downvote" for "disagree". You should only downvote a comment when it doesn't contribute anything to the discussion. If you disagree - you can argue, or just move on.
macOS, but mostly for the hardware. The operating system matters less to me than having a good screen and a machine that isn’t made of crappy plastic. After nearly 20 years years on a MacBook Pro, it’s hard to go back to anything that feels cheap. =P
I get that he just wants to build something alone in his basement -- without product managers, sales guys, or customers with SLAs breathing down his neck. But he's doing an enormous amount of work specifically to avoid charging money for something that's already providing real value. That's the part that feels odd to me.
If you've got "200 users" who rely on your tool so deeply that a migration glitch would seriously hurt their business, you're past the point where this is a casual side project. That's the point where you should at least have some path for people to pay you.
In my head there are three phases of an open-source project:
* Toy – "I scratched my own itch and threw it on GitHub."
* Product – "People actually rely on this. Now I owe them migrations, docs, and not breaking stuff."
* Infrastructure – "If this dies, someone's company explodes and I'm on the front page of Hacker News for the wrong reason."
This post is basically the story of moving from (1) to (2).
What I rarely see is a maintainer explicitly saying which phase they're in. Users see "kanban board, nice site, good docs" and instantly a user is going to map this to, "Jira replacement!" And the author is thrilled to be compared to a polished SaaS!
But then both will be "shocked" to realize that one person can't match an entire product team, support team, design team, etc.
I think there's a lack of honesty in a lot of open source projects. I'd love to see more READMEs say things like:
* "Hobby project. I reserve the right to disappear for a month."
* "No guarantees, no SLAs. Use at your own risk!" (or even more blunt, "If you use this in production, or for mission-critical business practices, you're a fucking moron.")
* "If you're a company depending on this, you should be sponsoring it."
Anyway, seen this countless times... And the real tension starts when the author's excitement about having users surpasses the amount of work generated by those users. As long as the author wants to avoid working on a team, with business rules, and other stakeholders... it'll never actually scale.
Worse, the difference between users and customers is that there's no barrier to entry. Users expectations drift upward -- whether they are paying or not. Users don't just want fixes -- they want roadmaps, guarantees, backwards compatibility, and custom migration help. The code is open-source, but the longer the project goes on, the more the expectations drift towards enterprise-grade.
Boundaries matter. "No, that's out of scope." "No, I won't support your forked schema." "No, I can't chase down your custom patches." Those aren't signs of being unhelpful -- they're what keep the project from collapsing under its own weight. And when you have to start saying things like this, you've past the point of needing a bigger team... which means you're also past the point of where you should have started charging money for your product.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
This is hilarious considering the way Google treats their customers, business partners and FOSS maintainers of software they use.
Why should random people take on more responsibility for clearly 0 gain? If you want people to bear the cost for their externalities due to their shit software it has to be regulation.
I think something like this has to happen eventually, we can't keep using the same unix programs forever.
Since this is an official US government website, are we now officially using metric?