Month: June 2020

macOS 11

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macos11

So macOS 11 Big Sur was announced earlier today at WWDC.

First things first, WOW I did not see that interface change coming. 

There were no prior rumors about an interface change, so Apple really kept it tightly under wrap during the whole development. The last interface change came during Yosemite, during the Jony Ive de-Skeuomorphism era, when OS X was given a fresh coat of paint from the skeuomorphic graphical changes that started in OS X Leopard.

Apple paints this interface change as the biggest one since the one from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, and while I won’t go so far as to say that this new interface is like the second coming of Aqua, it looks really good, even if some longtime Mac people on the internets were complaining about it. The current macOS has elements from the early days of Aqua, mixed in with more recent graphical changes that were bolted on as the “design era” changes, so a complete interface facelift is definitely welcomed, even if that means an interface that is extremely similar to that of iPadOS 14. Well, in the first place iPadOS took a lot of design elements from macOS, so the influence isn’t exactly one-way.

Under the hood though, macOS 11 definitely does not have the kind of complete overhaul like it did when it went from Mac OS 9 to the Unix-based, originally OpenStep Mac OS X. It really is macOS 10.16, like what was indicated in the Xcode and macOS betas that were released after the WWDC keynote earlier today. “macOS 11” is basically a very recent Marketing decision, one recent enough that they did not have time to make changes to the betas to reflect the difference. 

The big news, of course, was the announcement that Macs will be transitioning to “Apple Silicon” and that the first Apple Silicon Macs will be out later this year. (Apple was never going to use the term “ARM”, come on. Previously I coined the term “Apple Processors”, but “Silicon” definitely sounds cooler.)

The transition was almost exactly like the one in 2005, right down to having Rosetta 2 as a translator for legacy apps that are abandoned (or for the folks who refused to pay full price or a expensive subscription just to use the new Safari extension that comes with 1Password 7). 

And while Tim Cook mentioned that there are still Intel Macs coming down the pipeline soon, and that Apple will continue to support them for years to come, based on experience by end 2006 (one and a half years after they announced the transition) nobody gave a damn about PowerPC Macs anymore (except for the collectors).

Speaking about collectors and collecting, I know for a fact that I will really love to have a Mac Mini G4 or even a G4 Cube today, so this might be a good time to actually buy one of the last Intel Macs and keep it for years to come, either as a compatibility machine or even as a piece of Apple history. Maybe a Mac Mini is in order, for I have wanted one of those for decades already. 

And did I mention previously that I can’t wait for the 12” MacBook to come back in Apple Silicon form? 

2021 can’t come soon enough. For many many reasons. 

PS Both purchases are pipe dreams, COVID-19 has not been kind to my financial health.

On the switch to Apple Processors during WWDC2020

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I bought my first Mac in 2004.

It is a 12” iBook, the last model to be assembled in Taiwan, just before production is moved to Mainland China. As most will know eventually, the PowerPC Mac laptops were somewhat slow, stuck at G4 processors because IBM can’t make power efficient G5 processors that won’t burn the skin off anyone’s legs if a G5 processor was ever used in a Mac laptop. 

The Intel switch was announced in 2005, with the first MacBook Pro released around Jan 2006, and the first MacBooks around April 2006 if I remembered correctly. I was quite involved in the educational sales of Macs in some of the major tertiary institutions in Singapore, and to an extent, the aftersales support in one of these institutions for a few years.

A major thing during the first year was the old Mac people commenting on how stupid the term “MacBook” sounded, after years of PowerBooks and iBooks. Seriously today MacBooks are how the common non-Mac users define a Mac laptop, and in hindsight it was a great name, just like many of Steve Jobs’ other ideas. “We are done with Power”, he said during the MacBook Pro reveal.

Today I doubt we will see a change of product names though, when the Macs with the Apple processors are eventually unveiled next year.

One big issue the early MacBooks had were that the first Core Duo/Solo CPUs ran really hot, and with Apple’s legendary cheapskate-ness of putting enough ram in their laptops a lot of these early MacBooks were slower, hot, and did not seemed to be that much faster than the G4s they replaced. More RAM (we did a institution-wide program for upgrading RAM) and the Core 2 Duos eventually solved the problems.

Will next year’s A14 MacBooks be as problematic as the first MacBooks? I wonder. Apple has a track record of having problematic first generation machines (first intel logic boarded unibody MacBooks, first Retina MBP, first TB3 MacBook Pros, amongst others) though the first 2nd-gen MacBook Air, and the first Retina iMacs were absolutely perfect. 

A huge factor in the problematic first MacBooks were that the Core processors from Intel were relatively new, coming from the Pentium M design that a small team in Israel made, and Apple probably had at most a year of work with the Core processors before implementing them in the MacBooks, like every other Intel customer.

Apple has more than 10 years of experience working with the Apple A-series processors, and more than 10 years of experience putting them in machines that are way way way smaller than even the smallest Mac — the 12” MacBook. Heat, stability and performance won’t be an issue in the upcoming early Macs for sure – and with the rumored first machine being my favuorite 12” MacBook design, I will sure be saving up for one.

Monday can’t come soon enough.