Tag: Apple

M1 MacBooks Pro

I love beepy music made from Apple system noises. This is not the first!

I could not care any less about HomePod (I have cheap but acceptable stereo BT speakers in every room) or AirPods (BT lag into my ears makes me dizzy). So do with these as you will. I'll be using cheap wired earbuds or expensive wired cans forever.

M1 names combine the ugly internal product number with marketing "Pro". "Max" implies you can't get better. Who'd need more than 64GB RAM? Should be one or the other, like "Apple Chip Pro", or "M1P-10-16-32" (cores-gpus-ram).

MacBook stats are given in mm & lb. PICK ONE SYSTEM!

"The physical keys replace the Touch Bar." Almost like it was a gigantic mistake everyone hated. And MagSafe is back! Multiple ports and SD card reader! It's 2013 again!

What would you do if you had a million bucks? LCD, 3 XDRs, & a 4K monitor at once! (actual cost of the shown system is ~$25K).

How's the notch gonna work with fullscreen programs like Notch's game Minecraft? Just a blank spot. Might obscure the compass in Elder Scrolls games, too. Maybe it just blacks out the entire upper area in fullscreen, wasting real estate but not being stupid. I dislike the notch thing in every device, desktop more than others.

Battery life & GPU performance are awesome, no kidding. Faster than anything Apple shipped in a desktop even, my iMac 5K has a low-end AMD Radeon.

The 16" with M1 Max, 64GB RAM, 4TB SSD, is $4899, still less than a single XDR monitor. 14" with M1 Pro, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD (get a cheap thunderbolt drive for storage) is $2899, almost reasonable.

I'm not, I think, actually getting this; the iPad Air satisfies my portable needs at present. I want the M1 Max in a Mini format, so I can wire up any monitor (not a $6000 XDR).

But if I took a new dayjob, I'd do it in a minute.

The Death of iTunes

So, I was listening to my last playlist, and realized I don't own one of the albums, so I figure I'll grab it off iTunes…

No iTunes app. No "show in iTune Store" action on the album page (Share has since shown back up, because Apple Music is non-deterministic). There's an iTunes Store on my phone, but I want to download it here on my desktop. Fine, where's the store page. It's… missing. After some duck searches, turns out you have to open Apple Music Preferences, check "iTunes Store" in a little grid. I didn't deselect this, it came deselected, meaning NOBODY is going to see it.

Once that's done, Store is back in the sidebar, and clicking it shows the good old storefront, account links, etc. But how do you search? Search box just shows Apple Music (streaming). WAAAAAY up in the top-right corner is a selector for Songs or Store. Now I'm on the album. And it's $8.99. Yeah, there's no DRM, but you know, I can get this elsewhere.

So I went over to 'zon and bought a used CD (a little cheaper), because I can rip that lossless. At least they want my money.

And like that, with no announcement, Apple killed their store.

What Are You Doing, iCloud?

I often use Pythonista for automation or just code goofing off on the iPad. And unfortunately, the only ways Apple has allowed to get files into it are:

  1. Download with some other app (Dropbox or Readdle Documents, mostly) and share, one-way into it and no way out like a roach motel, or
  2. Put the file in iCloud, and it "should" sync automatically.

This is 100% an Apple policy problem, #1 demonstrates other apps can use networking just fine.

So on Mac I open iCloud (only in Finder, it's a stupid long path in shell), Pythonista3, try dragging the now-annoying disappearing proxy icon… can't drag it. So up a folder and I can drag THAT into shell.

Now in my CodePy folder, ln -s LONGICLOUDPATH icloud and voila, convenient access. Move my working project in there.

Make changes to a file, look in Pythonista, and it's all good. Make a new file, wait… it never shows up. Finally I open Files app on iPad, see if it's there, and NOW it syncs.

Maybe Pythonista is getting old and missed a notification, I notice the keyboard row isn't coming up, but Apple's incompetent garbage service iCloud/MobileMe/iTools has been failing to sync files for 15 FUCKING YEARS NOW, and I'm goddamned sick and tired of it.

This is why I give Dropbox money every month, because their syncing always works.

4/20 Apple Event

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

  • Timmy Apple dressing exactly like me (his watch strap is different) is not cool. He's a fucking MBA from Duke & IBM, should only be in a suit or a track suit.
  • Moneymoneycard.
  • Purple iPhone.
  • Find My needs a noun. I suggest Find My Shit.
  • Geotracking every object you own is totally not creepy (even with privacy features).
  • Sofa cave is fucking awesome, I want a videogame of that.
  • TV+: BUY CONSUME THIS IS YOUR GOD
  • Using Queen songs to advertise fucking sportsball comedy: Lame.
  • TV 4K: Eh. Maybe fixes my mediocre TV. New remote is slightly better, but I want a 500-button universal remote for it.
  • Mac M1 is faster than everyone else, yes. I already have 16GB RAM in my six-year old iMac, and it's barely adequate under Tacos Bug Sir macOS Big Sur. It needs to be 32, 64, or more GB for any serious machine now, but M1 is still limited to 16GB. So that's a hard pass this year.
  • iMac color: Not just silver! But you can't see the back on most desks, so there's just the little bezel. I don't want vibrant, bright, I want dark, black so black it eats light; not just because I'm Hotblack Desiato, I need neutral colors for pixel-fucking art; colors distort my vision! I don't like wafer-thin, I want fat chunky computers with wind-tunnel fans for cooling. Losing 3" from my iMac 27" would be lame. Guess not.
  • iMac Keyboard: Actually looks like a really good improvement. I wonder if the big numpad boy with touch ID will even work on my old iMac? It'd be nice.
  • iPad Pro M1: Sweet, here an M1 with shitty 16GB RAM is excellent, because iOS doesn't eat 8GB just to exist. I'm putting the 11" & Pencil 2G on my shopping list; notebook, not giant wall of video. I don't like any of the keyboard cases because they have no ESC key. I'd rather use a soft keyboard or carry around this silly Magic Keyboard. Of course, needing it depends on me ever leaving the house again.

Update:

iPad Pro models with 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage will come with 8GB RAM, while iPad Pro models with 1TB or 2TB of storage will feature 16GB RAM.
— Juli Clover

Portable Computing Devices

"Dr Ed Morbius"[sic] posts The Case Against Tablets and one of the most unusable tables I've ever seen (too much data with no affordances, and Diaspora's design crops anything complex). But the premise is interesting, especially as I'm considering my next wave of new hardware. He's just going about it the wrong way (no, really, Samsung of the exploding batteries is bad? Tell me more news.), and then frustrated he can't succeed by going the wrong way.

So, luggables have been around since (counting only devices usable by the general public) Osborne I (1983, 10.7kg), tablets since Kyocera Kyotronic 85 aka TRS-80 Model 100 (1983, 1.4kg), laptops since Toshiba T1100 (1985, 4.1kg). It's been possible to have handheld computing since at least the Apple Newton MessagePad (1993, 640g), and Palm Pilot 1000 (1996, 160g). I've used but didn't own most of those, mind, just a Sharp PC-3, Psion, slightly later Toshiba and IBM laptops I hated, a bunch of Palm devices. I read many ebooks (Baen's early CDs of ebooks were great! Pity they mostly ship right-wing milsf these days), and 160x160 2-bit grayscale is not ideal. I have, as they say, seen some shit.

These days, the choices of hardware are a little better, thousands of suppliers, almost all of which fit into a few categories:

_ iPhone iPad Apple M1
Laptop		 Android
phone		 Android
tablet		 Microsoft
Surface		 Cheap
Windows
Laptop		 Pricy
Windows
Laptop
Price mid-y mid-y hi-r low-g low-g hi-r mid-y hi-r
Weight/Bulk low-g mid-y hi-r low-g low-g to mid-y mid-y hi-r hi-r
Battery hi-g hi-g hi-g mid-y low-r mid-y mid-y low-r
Performance hi-g hi-g hi-g mid-y low-r to mid-y mid-y mid-y hi-g
Security hi-g hi-g hi-g low-r low-r mid-y mid-y mid-y
Books low-r hi-g mid-y low-r hi-g hi-g low-r low-r
Video mid-y hi-g hi-g mid-y hi-g hi-g hi-g hi-g
RSS/news sites mid-y hi-g hi-g mid-y hi-g hi-g hi-g hi-g
Social media hi-g mid-y low-r hi-g mid-y mid-y low-r low-r
Online shopping low-r mid-y hi-g low-r mid-y mid-y mid-y hi-g
Reference hi-g mid-y low-r hi-g mid-y mid-y low-r low-r
Videogames mid-y mid-y hi-g mid-y mid-y mid-y low-r hi-g
Writing low-r mid-y to hi-g hi-g low-r mid-y mid-y to hi-g hi-g hi-g
Programming mid-y mid-y hi-g low-r low-r mid-y mid-y hi-g

Figure out the things you care about, and pick whatever has the most green, maybe yellow, avoiding red cells. Now you know what to buy.

What do you actually care about?

  • Price: You do largely get what you pay for in this category. Apple's devices aren't really much more expensive than equal hardware, but they never ship anything in the bottom price category. They do gouge on the top memory prices, which is unpleasant. But any Apple device will last for years longer than Android or a cheap PC, and have good resale value. The incredibly low prices on Android stuff is tempting, but it's a trap ("get an axe").
  • Weight/Bulk: These days almost everything's under 2kg like a good sword, but holding up an iPad over your head in bed is very liable to fall and break your nose; this is one place where a phone or phablet is superior. Obviously holding a heavy laptop up is incredibly dumb, and they're completely useless while moving, standing, etc., can't be propped up anywhere, are just always in the way.
  • Battery life: It's easy for manufacturers to lie about this, but if you run a real workload, you quickly see how wasteful any x86 PC is. Everyone else, it comes down to power management.
  • Performance: Only matters for Videogames and maybe programming. But Apple's been putting absurdly powerful CPUs and GPUs in their mobile devices, A12 is essentially the same as the M1 in the new Macs. Only the fastest AMDs or Intel are even competitive, and those burn too much power to be good mobile devices. Benchmarks are hard to compare exactly, but: anandtech on A12Z puts it pretty high against laptops. 2 years later, that's the SOC that's now in the lower-end iPhone and iPad.
  • Security: I'm not trying to be biased here, but if you are concerned with security at all, you really only need to look at those first three columns. There's just no alternative at present.

    Only a fool would trust anything running Android, they often ship with malware, everything in the stores is contaminated and has ridiculous lists of permissions, and they stop updating at "EOL" which may come as soon as it ships, rarely more than 6-12 months later. Do not put anything of value or interest to others in your Android device.

    Microsoft wants to be good at security, but is functionally terrible at it. They live in an open sewer of constant attacks, and have cardboard walls of bad software. Your mobile device may be pwned and all your files crypto-ransomed the second you connect it to the Internet. MS monthly updates sometimes wipe drives or lock you out, those are just from the last year, I'm sure they'll fuck up new ways this year.

    One can, one supposes, install BSD or Linux on a laptop, but that just makes it unusable for most of the tasks below.

    You know who actually seems able to keep secure borders? The walled Apple garden. Other than nation-states getting physical access to an older device, and if you're not stupid enough to turn on iCloud backups for things you need to stay private (iMessage!), you are almost entirely safe on iOS or Mac OS.

The tasks you might reasonably do with a portable computing device are:

  • Books: Cannot be read comfortably on a small screen, or landscape laptop. Needs a good document management program. On iOS, there's Readdle Documents, which is a great storage/reading hub for almost everything. On the Mac, I use Murasaki to read epub, except those in Apple Books. On Android, I've found ReadEra and Simple File Manager do that well, are pleasantly minimalist, and are not apparently run by criminals out to rob you, unlike 99% of Android software. I guess on Windows you can just keep things in folders and click on them? As noted every time I have to use Windows, I don't know how people use that.
  • Video: Not ideal on small screens, but I've found almost everyone has caught up now. Everyone has players for all the major streaming services, can play web video fine. Android file management of videos is awful. Windows seems OK at this. The real losers, tho, are BSD and Linux laptops; they can't do any DRM video without jumping thru excessive hurdles. I've been fighting this off and on for a decade with my side terminals, and mostly end up playing video on the Mac desktop instead.
  • RSS/news sites: Relies on having a big screen for 2-pane or 3-pane view, and good RSS reader. I use Reeder on mobile, and Feedbin on desktop; there's inferior but functional apps on other platforms.
  • Social media: Doomscrolling is best done at arm's reach, where you can instantly push home or just throw it away to get away from it. You need a camera attached, so I don't consider laptops suitable at all. Can you imagine someone holding their laptop over their lunch or up for a selfie?
  • Online shopping: Requires multiple tabs, note-taking, preferably a spreadsheet. On the latest iPads, you can split-screen a notepad or Numbers and a browser, which definitely helps, but a laptop or desktop works best here. I don't know how you would even do this on Android, where programs rarely keep their contents when hitting Back a bunch of times.
  • Reference: Here I mean on-the-spot "what's the answer to X?". Mostly checking wikipedia or Memory Alpha. So just a tiny bit of typing in search, maybe poke at a couple followup links, not extensive reading. 12 years ago I started doing this with my Treo, and it was addictive. This is an ideal use of a smartphone, every second that passes until you can Kirk someone with your online knowledge, it becomes less interesting.
  • Videogames: All mobile devices suffer from shitty controls. Cheap computers suffer from shitty GPUs; these days mobile GPUs are better. Macs don't have as many games as Windows, the official hybrid Excel/Call of Duty OS, but it's fine. The whole category shouldn't exist, we should just play games on the Switch or consoles, but it persists. Go play catch with your dog, it's more fun than poking at a tiny screen.
  • Writing: Long-form writing depends on screen, keyboard, and editor. There's plenty of BT keyboards for every mobile device. The original iPad had a keyboard dock stand which I bought with mine, and used until I got a better one; I now mostly use a Zagg keyboard with it, or just type on-screen. The current low-travel keyboard cases for Surface, iPad, etc. are kind of awful to type on, but they're very portable. Laptops will always win here, you can sit upright at any table and type ergonomically, and still have functioning hands in a decade. Even with an external keyboard, I find phones too small to compose much text on.

    The editor situation is more complex. I love Editorial (by the author of Pythonista), and it's great for writing text in Markdown, and is scriptable. Pages is fine for short, pretty documents, but it's incredibly slow as your document gets long, and very fiddly when you adjust layouts. There's dozens more on iOS, of varying quality. MS Word runs on iOS, Android, and something called "weeendows"; it's mildly awful but standard. I've found no native Android writing programs that weren't hate crimes, but I'm not super motivated to try every one.
  • Programming: As noted in Programming on your Phone, there's only a few good environments for iOS, but Pythonista is so good it makes up for a category. I've now seen a few Android programming environments, and they're comically, hatefully bad. Surface would be fine, except it's Windows; the only way to dev on that crap is a giant IDE that really needs a high-end desktop computer. Again you might put BSD or Linux on a laptop, but now it's useless for anything else.

I don't rank Drawing, even though that's a very important task for some people, because I'm not qualified to evaluate it; I can draw stick figures and collage art/"memes", but is the Apple Pencil super great? Maybe. What do the others have? No idea. Apparently MS reinstated MS Paint to their program store?

In hardware, I ignored e-ink readers because I find them unusable; a 2-4 second lag when flipping pages or trying to type anything is just unacceptable. We have cheap, low-power, high-refresh-rate LCD screens now, there's absolutely no benefit to e-ink. If you can stand it, fine, but I have no idea how to evaluate a thing I can't even look at.

(my table's not ideal because WordPress fights me; writing this in BBEdit/multimarkdown, I had the column labels rotated 90° with CSS, but for some reason WP positioned them wrong! I could render the HTML and paste that in, I guess, but then it's not easily editable later. And the margin of my site theme is a pain; I keep threatening to rewrite the style sheet entirely. Also, I'm aware there's colorblindness, but safe colors for them look awful to everyone else; so read the -r -y -g labels.)

Elder Scrolls is Offline on the Apple Silicon Mac

You'd think that with unlimited Microsoft money, ZOS could hire one Mac developer and buy a couple Macs mini M1 to build & test on.

Or as posted, they could just carry on as they have been: They haven't had any Mac developers in years, certainly never test on Mac, and never fix Mac bugs except by accident.

Just a couple:

  • When you log in after a new patch, 50/50 odds you'll spin uncontrollably until you open Mac Security preferences and toggle control off and back on. For a couple years now!
  • They made a new character select background, which crashed the Mac if you dawdled there for 1-2 minutes, and didn't fix that for months.

Which is why I quit buying crowns, just ESO+ subscription. Now I guess I can cut that out, too.

So, after 6 years, well over $1000+ customer, I'll be in ESO only as a freebie until the next set of ARM Macs are out (I need slightly more than the M1 provides).

Not everyone is so short-sighted and incompetent:

While I'm often annoyed by/actively loathe Activision/Blizzard the company (as noted late last year), at least they support their customers and aren't too cheap to pay for a Mac developer or two. Guess I'm back to World of Warcraft.

Apple Silicon

  • Apple event: ♫ "The chime is back!"
    • Reasonably good summary of the new chips, and how Big Sur works with your old Intel applications.
    • Device coverage is very superficial, "it runs X specific app in Y time!" Well, if I haven't used Logic, is that good?
    • I know Apple will never show real benchmarks where they might not be best in everything, but I want to see real benchmarks.
    • I know Apple will never show real device teardowns, only silly 3D animations of flying parts, but I want to see real device teardowns.
    • ONE MORE THING! (Why is only John Hodgman back, but Justin Long was too good to be a Mac again?)
  • AnandTech review of A14, estimates of M1 covers some of what I want to see.

In short, the A14 in the latest iThings is just barely short in power of the best AMD CPUs, and beats all the Intel CPUs, at half the power consumption. M1 ("Apple Silicon") is apparently much faster, Apple claims the fastest CPU in the world, which may be true enough.

Intel is, to be really technical here, fucked. They're facing Apple and AMD on the high end, and ARM below (you couldn't make an Intel RasPi 400!) There's no space for Intel now except corporate garbage Windows desktops, and many of those can be replaced at a fraction of the cost with ARM computers. What happens when every IT department decides to halve their parts and power costs, and high end users already buy Apple?

So my thoughts on Apple's new M1 lineup. Obviously, I don't have one yet, haven't seen real benchmarks, forward-looking statements require use of the Spice Mélange, expands consciousness, etc. etc.:

  • MacBook air: With 8-core, 16GB RAM (maximum), 1TB SSD, price is $1649. But uses passive cooling, do not buy this. I love the MBA form, I love hard function keys, and probably this is perfectly fine for casual use. But the second you try to do demanding tasks, it's going to be heat-constrained.
  • Mac mini: With 8-core, 16BB RAM (maximum), 1TB SSD, price is $1299. This has active cooling. Of course it has no keyboard, mouse, or monitor.
  • MacBook pro 13": With 8-core, 16BB RAM (maximum), 1TB SSD, price is $1899. Active cooling. Only has 2 Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, it really needs at least 3: Power, external drive, external monitor, but you can buy a hub to dongle-book all your drives & monitors, and power in on the other. It does have a good old fashioned 3.5mm audio jack; I'm surprised they haven't put a lightning port there.

All have "integrated graphics", which in the Intel days meant crappy video performance, but Apple's on-board GPUs aren't bad (not new AMD or Nvidia level, but tolerable). However, they are "unified memory", which means the GPU is going to take 2-4GB of system RAM away from you.

The problem here is that 16GB RAM limit, which is really 12-14GB. I regularly run up against my old iMac's 16GB limit in development with a virtual machine (and that has 2GB dedicated video RAM). 3D modelling or high-end games, video editing, and many other problems are going to be crippled. Apple needs to make 16GB the minimum casual level, and 32-128 GB for serious users.

So, I'm probably waiting for the next batch of Macs; I may get the MBP 13" with an eye to selling it & replacing it with a better machine ASAP. If you're casual, that's probably a perfectly nice machine, it's only $250 more than the MBA.

Epic Rap Battles of History: Apple vs Everyone

Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field certainly made the Mac/NeXT/iMac/iPhone/iPad much cooler than just "it's a knockoff Star/UNIX, in a fishtank/as a black magnesium box/in fruit-colored plastic/in your pants/as a book".

But their hardware & software mostly works, unlike everyone else. I haven't liked Mac design since Tiger (and Big Sur is their ugliest desktop yet), or iOS since iOS 6, but it's still the best, most reliable UNIX workstation money can buy. The more I look into setting up a FreeBSD workstation, the less happy I am with how much effort I'd be spending to get back to here (albeit with a much lighter load).

Non-Mac people with their giant junkpile of non-working or sometimes exploding hardware & software with shitty licenses, grifters like "Epic" stealing your kids data & money for virtual hats while running their own exclusive game store, constant whining about the existential threat that someone else may be cooler, is really getting tiresome.

Spend your time making your own junkpile less awful. Stop whining about Apple stealing your precious bodily fluids.

(see also epic rap battles )

WWDC 2020 Liveblogging

As posted on appdot.net:

Apparently I'm watching all of WWDC on my phone, because it's the only current OS version device in my house, and of course a course table and video player only works with the absolute latest updates! F'shaw, like last year's OS could handle a scrolling table?! Or video streams?!

Brings up George Floyd… but not . Some kind of fund for black developers is a good idea, but no details yet.

COVID, but nothing about the contact tracer or anything productive.

So now Craig.

"App Library" is like my page of folders auto-filled. With Apple Quality AI®, I'm sure. Probably not.

Widgets, OTOH, is a "finally!", move usable widgets from the dashboard to pages.

PiP, great. Had that on my TV 40 years ago. Everyone except me hated me using it to channel-surf while waiting for ads to end.

Siri: 25 billion requests per month. 3B of those are me "set a timer for 3 minutes".

Universal translator! That's actually pretty cool. I was gonna snark, but if it's even 75% accurate it'll make phrasebooks obsolete.

Oh god Memoji. The hideous ingrown noses are super goddamned offensive to those of us with a real beak.

Ha ha maps and travel. As if. Just cancel this section until next year, guys. And by then, the Eugenics Wars or Terminator Uprising will have started. Won't be no Paris to visit.

Car stuff, I don't care. I replace a car every decade if that, I'm still using a tape adapter to play from my phone. And if I was getting a new car, I'm not a big enough asshole to get a Beemer.

OK, App Clips is like the Watch app-lets, but virally distributed by NFC or QR code. Not web tech or anything convenient.

Apple Pencil, remaking the Palm Pilot or Newton UI from the '90s… today!

AirPods are not "magic". They are bluetooth devices which can make me nauseous and vomit when the audio delay gets high or out of sync. I loathe this whole idea of wireless audio.

I've worn an Watch since launch, and it's a great watch… All the stuff past time, calendar, timer, talking to Siri, kind of irrelevant to me.

Sleep tracking's maybe a little judgy for me, I know I have erratic sleep and a machine's not going to make it better.

"self-report" privacy report. So it'll all be complete lies. You can't trust marketing scum.

Home. Yeah, no, never letting a machine control my house. I barely trust light switches or the garage door remote.

What is this "Foundation" show? There's a woman in it. There's no women in Asimov's Foundation! (OK, there's 2 or 3 in the later books)

Why is it all dark and grim, cyan/orange tinted? It's a book of conference room meetings.

Oh, fuck. "Entirely new design". Big Sur? Seriously? I still think Weed was the best California name they should've used. Maybe Barstow if they wanted to go more Fear & Loathing.

"Buttons appear when you need them" = invisible mystery meat icons. Just what I never wanted.

They did the translucent menu bar back in Leopard? It was unusable.

And yeah, great, more shit moving into my menu bar, or a fake-Dashboard in Notifications. I liked the old Dashboard, one F-key or hot corner. 10+ years ago!

If I thought it'd be as reliable as Leopard, I'd be less wary.

Advanced new controls in Catalyst like checkboxes: Just like 2005!

Safari: Hey, the one mostly good product Apple ships. Let's not fuck it up too much, guys! Kick Chrome for being a slow fat-ass while it's down, that's smart. I like that.

I just want my adblockers to block all the ads, guys. I don't need fucking Yahoo! home page in Safari, I need the NY Times paywall to go fuck itself.

Recipe filter? What. Be serious.

Do I love tabs?
% safariCountTabs.applescript
Window #95 = 31 tabs - Window #99 = 5 tabs - Window #98 = 23 tabs - Window #97 = 26 tabs - Window #102 = 15 tabs - Window #103 = 14 tabs -

How's your update gonna work with this madness? And I cleaned up last week! It was twice as much!

All right. The thing that matters.

"Transitioning to our own custom silicon".

I guess "Fat Binary" is politically incorrect for fat-shaming, all-dancing, exercising Apple. So it's "Universal Binary 2".

And yes, of course they used the new hardware for the demos, that's a good old Apple stunt.

Seems like it's working full-speed. Which if it's compiled for the device, it should be.

I'm more concerned with what happens to non-native apps? OK, "Rosetta 2".

All right, what devices, how much, and how soon, Craigy?

Yes, yes, I played this shitty Tomb Raider reboot on the PS3. I care about code, not Lara's pixelated ass. Nor about running iOS apps, I have a phone.

Hm. Dev kit? I'm still very negative on Swift, but maybe I'll live (or find practical ways around that). If they're gonna make good new hardware, and I do like many of the things in Big Sur. They just went from "no plan, last year's tech, no future" to having a future.

Might be time to revise my plan, move my current iMac to Windows for games, use an ARM Mac for work and get back to shipping Mac/iOS stuff?

SteamVR Drops Mac Support

Now, that's just their VR headset, which is an extremely low-volume, 1% of the market gadget; VR's kind of awful in practice, but it keeps being "useful next year" for the last 40 years, and someday it'll be right. Steam as it is, >50% of the games I look at have a Mac version; it's not dead yet, but it definitely smells bad.

I blame Apple and their terrible support for gaming, in fact overtly hostile attitude. They like the PR opps at WWDC, and they like taking 30% gross profit of gachapon/IAP ripoff games made by Chinese clone factories, but never do anything after that, never provide game dev support on the platform, or put gamer GPUs in common hardware. They do not hire gamers or game developers, and they fired all the engineers in upper management, so it's just sales weasels left. And then killing 32-bit app support in Catalina just put a knife in any classic gaming.

The Mac used to be fun, a great desktop UNIX workstation which could also run a fair amount of games. Now, nothing works.

Elder Scrolls Online on the Mac is a pain in the ass these days, about half the updates make your camera spin out of control because ZOS doesn't have a Mac developer or any testing, either, they just rely on a cross-compiled build and push it out.

The suggestion to use Windows Boot Camp is just a giant middle finger, but what else are you gonna do?

Well. Given my plan to switch my workstation to FreeBSD when Mojave is EOL, I may accelerate that to this year, and have a partition for Windows just to play games. Which is stupid, but there you go, this is the dumbest, worst decade already just 4 months in, so why wouldn't computing be as bad as everything else?

Certainly anyone who uses Windows to try to do anything productive is… well, more masochistic than I am. It's just unbelievably awful and un-designed. I have a VirtualBox of it that I use for some testing, and it's like a 10-year-old read about CP/M, windowing systems, and bad middle management systems like stack ranking, coded it in BASIC and C, and then billions of dollars of business software and games were run on it. No part of that is a good idea.

Linux is so unbelievably awful; it's a half-assed server or embedded system, but not engineered for safety and reliability like a real UNIX workstation, the desktop is even more amateurish, and "business software" for it is comically bad. I'm not going to do that for a few half-working games.

But here we are. If I want to play games other than Animal Crossing, I suck it up and run a garbage OS as a partition.