My first and foremost wish is – that Geocart will continue to run on the upcoming ARM-powered Macs!
My current Mac was bought merely a year ago so I hope to work with it for another few years – but some day…
daan, do you already have an idea if the transition to the new architecture will be easy or not?
(Apple says it’s going to be easy, but well… what else would they say?)
My first and foremost wish!
Re: My first and foremost wish!
Hello Tobias.
Apple’s ARM announcement makes me tired. Yes, of course, Geocart will be released for ARM. That said, there’s very little chance it will be “easy” and no chance it will be soon. Given that they will start with low-powered Macs least likely to be used for Geocart, hopefully that’s not a problem.
<rant>
In the broader picture, the demands Apple places on developers is far into the territory of unreasonable. That truth doesn’t encourage me to rush out and do anything. This will be the fourth machine architecture for Macintosh, and Geocart will have been there for all of them. None of those transitions have been “fun”, and it is especially enraging how this practice ends up leaving behind so much software that is useful even if it hasn’t been updated. And when software gets left behind, data formats that depend on the software get left behind. Data formats that get left behind means data that gets lost. I have gigabytes of documents and data from the early 2000s and before that Apple has kindly made inaccessible to me, and now this will happen again in a few years to the measure of hundreds of gigabytes.
This processor change is mostly about Apple and little about customers. That makes me particularly annoyed. The earlier transitions, well, they might be justified by a widening performance gap, but this time, it’s the reverse. ARM may be good for FLOPS/watt, but it can’t compare to Intel FLOPS, and I have no engineering reason to suppose that it ever will. That’s bad for Geocart and for pretty much anyone who’s not carrying their computer around with them.
</rant>
— daan
Apple’s ARM announcement makes me tired. Yes, of course, Geocart will be released for ARM. That said, there’s very little chance it will be “easy” and no chance it will be soon. Given that they will start with low-powered Macs least likely to be used for Geocart, hopefully that’s not a problem.
<rant>
In the broader picture, the demands Apple places on developers is far into the territory of unreasonable. That truth doesn’t encourage me to rush out and do anything. This will be the fourth machine architecture for Macintosh, and Geocart will have been there for all of them. None of those transitions have been “fun”, and it is especially enraging how this practice ends up leaving behind so much software that is useful even if it hasn’t been updated. And when software gets left behind, data formats that depend on the software get left behind. Data formats that get left behind means data that gets lost. I have gigabytes of documents and data from the early 2000s and before that Apple has kindly made inaccessible to me, and now this will happen again in a few years to the measure of hundreds of gigabytes.
This processor change is mostly about Apple and little about customers. That makes me particularly annoyed. The earlier transitions, well, they might be justified by a widening performance gap, but this time, it’s the reverse. ARM may be good for FLOPS/watt, but it can’t compare to Intel FLOPS, and I have no engineering reason to suppose that it ever will. That’s bad for Geocart and for pretty much anyone who’s not carrying their computer around with them.
</rant>
— daan
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Atarimaster
- Posts: 446
- Joined: Fri Nov 07, 2014 2:43 am
Re: My first and foremost wish!
Thank you – for the reply and the rant!
And I agree that the story is annoying.
At the moment, I don’t know if I even want an ARM-powered Mac. With any luck it’ll be a few years until I have to decide that…
Kind regards,
Tobias
I don’t think it’ll be a problem, for the reason you mentioned.daan wrote:and no chance it will be soon (…) hopefully that’s not a problem.
And I agree that the story is annoying.
At the moment, I don’t know if I even want an ARM-powered Mac. With any luck it’ll be a few years until I have to decide that…
Kind regards,
Tobias
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Joe LeMonnier
- Posts: 20
- Joined: Mon Nov 19, 2018 10:18 am
Re: My first and foremost wish!
I for one would not mind paying something for the 'upgrade'