• Re: Today, 50 years ago

    From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Tue Mar 31 20:59:17 2026
    On 31 Mar 2026 19:58:11 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

    On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company was founded
    (incorporated January 3, 1977).

    Back in those early years, the company was more about technological
    innovation than trendiness.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.13
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Sun Apr 5 20:37:13 2026
    Someone has put together a montage <https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWm2oTZCOcZ/> of various startup
    sounds of Apple gear (desktop/laptop/server).

    What?s missing, though? I don?t see any representatives of the
    first-generation Power Macs (with the PowerPC 601 processor). These
    had a ?guitar strum? sound, which was generally considered to be
    underwhelming. Which is why later models replaced it.

    Also, there were the AV Macs (with the on-board DSP chip) from the
    latter part of 1993. I think they had a similar sound to other
    68K-based models from around the same time.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.13
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Jason H@3:633/10 to All on Tue Apr 14 22:55:36 2026
    On 31/03/2026 21:59, Lawrence DOliveiro wrote:
    On 31 Mar 2026 19:58:11 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

    On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company was founded
    (incorporated January 3, 1977).

    Back in those early years, the company was more about technological >innovation than trendiness.

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple Silicon
    was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest of the market.
    Unified memory ftw.

    --
    --
    A PICKER OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 05:47:36 2026
    On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:55:36 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple
    Silicon was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest
    of the market.

    The ?rest of the market? is Linux now. Even Apple realizes that ?Unix?
    isn?t enough, which is why it is now embracing Linux.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From oldernow@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 11:38:17 2026
    On 2026-04-15, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
    On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:55:36 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX
    and, much later, Apple Silicon was ultimately
    pretty innovative when compared to the rest of
    the market.

    The ?rest of the market? is Linux now. Even
    Apple realizes that ?Unix? isn?t enough,
    which is why it is now embracing Linux.

    All I know is that in 40+ years of computer
    ownership, my Macbook Pro is the only computer
    I ever owned that bricked.

    First and last Apple product....

    --
    v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v
    | this line was supposed to be clever | ^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Dan Cross@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 13:11:43 2026
    In article <10rmgl8$gjuj$1@dont-email.me>,
    Jason H <jason_hindle@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 31/03/2026 21:59, Lawrence DOliveiro wrote:
    On 31 Mar 2026 19:58:11 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

    On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company was founded
    (incorporated January 3, 1977).

    Back in those early years, the company was more about technological >>innovation than trendiness.

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple Silicon
    was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest of the market. >Unified memory ftw.


    Eh.... I dunno.

    Apple Silicon is pretty nice, though I don't know about ARM.
    The obvious alternative is RISC-V, but it was not mature enough
    for use in a high-end product at the time they moved away from
    Intel.

    Unix as the basis for an OS wasn't super innovative,
    particularly when you consider that they were building on NeXT's
    technology, which was already Mach+4.3BSD, and predated macOS by
    a few decades.

    - Dan C.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Dan Cross@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 13:13:24 2026
    In article <slrn10tuu59.e2b.oldernow@oldernow.jethrick.com>,
    oldernow <oldernow@dev.null> wrote:
    On 2026-04-15, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
    On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:55:36 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX
    and, much later, Apple Silicon was ultimately
    pretty innovative when compared to the rest of
    the market.

    The ?rest of the market? is Linux now. Even
    Apple realizes that ?Unix? isn?t enough,
    which is why it is now embracing Linux.

    (More bullshit from the village idiot.)

    All I know is that in 40+ years of computer
    ownership, my Macbook Pro is the only computer
    I ever owned that bricked.

    First and last Apple product....

    The way that they boot is probably the issue here; the OS kernel
    is loaded from flash, so if the flash part goes bad, you're
    going to have a bad time.

    - Dan C.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Nuno Silva@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 14:31:21 2026
    On 2026-04-15, Dan Cross wrote:

    In article <10rmgl8$gjuj$1@dont-email.me>,
    Jason H <jason_hindle@yahoo.com> wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple Silicon >>was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest of the market. >>Unified memory ftw.


    Eh.... I dunno.

    Apple Silicon is pretty nice, though I don't know about ARM.
    The obvious alternative is RISC-V, but it was not mature enough
    for use in a high-end product at the time they moved away from
    Intel.

    Unix as the basis for an OS wasn't super innovative,
    particularly when you consider that they were building on NeXT's
    technology, which was already Mach+4.3BSD, and predated macOS by
    a few decades.

    On that field, I guess there's also SGI Irix? (Better known by its stage
    name, "It's a UNIX system, I know this!")

    --
    Nuno Silva

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From oldernow@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 13:57:49 2026
    On 2026-04-15, Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
    In article <slrn10tuu59.e2b.oldernow@oldernow.jethrick.com>,
    oldernow <oldernow@dev.null> wrote:
    On 2026-04-15, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
    On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:55:36 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX
    and, much later, Apple Silicon was ultimately
    pretty innovative when compared to the rest of
    the market.

    The ?rest of the market? is Linux now. Even
    Apple realizes that ?Unix? isn?t enough,
    which is why it is now embracing Linux.

    (More bullshit from the village idiot.)

    All I know is that in 40+ years of computer
    ownership, my Macbook Pro is the only computer
    I ever owned that bricked.

    First and last Apple product....

    The way that they boot is probably the issue
    here; the OS kernel is loaded from flash, so if
    the flash part goes bad, you're going to have
    a bad time.

    Right.

    What made the bricking all the worse was that
    Macbook costing me roughly an order of magnitude
    more than a computer that would have met my
    needs. It seemed like such a classic case of
    appearances over genuine value (see also: the
    pretty/hot dolt).

    Oh... and now I'm remembering the location
    of keys important to me being sufficiently
    nonstandard to cause frustration that arguably
    negated other benefits on a regular basis.

    The overall effect was becoming personally
    familiar with the truth of a sucker being
    born every minute....

    --
    v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v
    | this line was supposed to be clever | ^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Dan Cross@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 14:04:29 2026
    In article <10ro3v9$v6he$1@dont-email.me>,
    Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
    On 2026-04-15, Dan Cross wrote:

    In article <10rmgl8$gjuj$1@dont-email.me>,
    Jason H <jason_hindle@yahoo.com> wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple Silicon >>>was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest of the market. >>>Unified memory ftw.


    Eh.... I dunno.

    Apple Silicon is pretty nice, though I don't know about ARM.
    The obvious alternative is RISC-V, but it was not mature enough
    for use in a high-end product at the time they moved away from
    Intel.

    Unix as the basis for an OS wasn't super innovative,
    particularly when you consider that they were building on NeXT's
    technology, which was already Mach+4.3BSD, and predated macOS by
    a few decades.

    On that field, I guess there's also SGI Irix? (Better known by its stage >name, "It's a UNIX system, I know this!")

    Irix was basically SVR4 with a bunch of SGI's cool graphics
    stuff layered on top of it, but in terms of the actual OS, it
    wasn't all _that_ different from other, similar commercial
    Unixes out there at the time. I remember thinking that SunOS,
    OSF/1, and even Solaris, were more pleasant to work with.

    The weird one was IBM's AIX (which did run on an Apple-branded
    PowerPC server machine at one point). HP's HP-UX was somewhere
    in the middle.

    Apple had made foray's into Unix before; A/UX was based on SVR3,
    if I am not mistaken, and seemed pretty cool. They had built a
    graphical application called "Commando" that could be used to
    interactively constuct the invocation for a Unix command, which
    was very forward-looking for the time.

    - Dan C.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Peter Flass@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 07:35:39 2026
    On 4/14/26 22:47, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
    On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:55:36 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple
    Silicon was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest
    of the market.

    The ?rest of the market? is Linux now. Even Apple realizes that ?Unix?
    isn?t enough, which is why it is now embracing Linux.

    Operating systems reached the point a while ago where there just weren't
    many "gee whiz" features that could be added to differentiate one from another. Except for some mainframe systems, everything is "unix" now. It doesn't make a lot of sense to have something that's "unix-like" that
    requires a lot of effort to keep up, when you could use Linux and just
    make a few tweaks.

    I wonder how long until Microsoft realizes this and just makes Windows a
    shell on to of Linux (or bsd, like Apple has done).

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Peter Flass@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 07:44:50 2026
    On 4/15/26 06:11, Dan Cross wrote:

    Apple Silicon is pretty nice, though I don't know about ARM.
    The obvious alternative is RISC-V, but it was not mature enough
    for use in a high-end product at the time they moved away from
    Intel.


    From what I read, RISC-V still isn't quite there yet. I think the
    performance is still below other chip families, but, of course, a lot of engineering went into squeezing more performance out of, for example.
    Intel. I expect RISC-V will soon be on par.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Scott Lurndal@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 14:48:57 2026
    cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) writes:
    In article <10rmgl8$gjuj$1@dont-email.me>,
    Jason H <jason_hindle@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 31/03/2026 21:59, Lawrence DOliveiro wrote:
    On 31 Mar 2026 19:58:11 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

    On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company was founded
    (incorporated January 3, 1977).

    Back in those early years, the company was more about technological >>>innovation than trendiness.

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple Silicon >>was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest of the market. >>Unified memory ftw.


    Eh.... I dunno.

    Apple Silicon is pretty nice, though I don't know about ARM.
    The obvious alternative is RISC-V, but it was not mature enough
    for use in a high-end product at the time they moved away from
    Intel.

    RISC-V didn't exist when Apple started working on the ARMv8-based
    silicon (circa 2012-2013). Apple was part of the TAB[*] (as was my
    employer) and helped guide the development of 64-bit ARMv8.

    [*] ARM's Technical Advisory Board

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Scott Lurndal@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 14:55:11 2026
    Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> writes:
    On 2026-04-15, Dan Cross wrote:

    In article <10rmgl8$gjuj$1@dont-email.me>,
    Jason H <jason_hindle@yahoo.com> wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple Silicon >>>was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest of the market. >>>Unified memory ftw.


    Eh.... I dunno.

    Apple Silicon is pretty nice, though I don't know about ARM.
    The obvious alternative is RISC-V, but it was not mature enough
    for use in a high-end product at the time they moved away from
    Intel.

    Unix as the basis for an OS wasn't super innovative,
    particularly when you consider that they were building on NeXT's
    technology, which was already Mach+4.3BSD, and predated macOS by
    a few decades.

    On that field, I guess there's also SGI Irix? (Better known by its stage >name, "It's a UNIX system, I know this!")

    Irix was a flavor of unix, yes. When I was at SGI, I was hired to work on
    a distributed version of Irix (called Teak). I had just left Unisys
    after spending almost a decade working on a distributed version of SVR4
    for the Unisys OPUS MPP machines.

    There were some nice things in Irix, but it was also hobbled by
    some of the warts in the MIPS architecture (particularly
    the software-based TLB handling).

    The Teak project ended up being cancelled as we moved to linux
    development and worked on an early hypervisor (called Crucible)
    to run Windows and Linux simultaneously on a single dual
    processor Kayak (1998/1999).

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Dan Cross@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 16:13:07 2026
    In article <10ro892$10a46$3@dont-email.me>,
    Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:
    On 4/15/26 06:11, Dan Cross wrote:

    Apple Silicon is pretty nice, though I don't know about ARM.
    The obvious alternative is RISC-V, but it was not mature enough
    for use in a high-end product at the time they moved away from
    Intel.

    From what I read, RISC-V still isn't quite there yet. I think the
    performance is still below other chip families, but, of course, a lot of >engineering went into squeezing more performance out of, for example.
    Intel. I expect RISC-V will soon be on par.

    Yeah, this is true. Some new chips are on the horizon that look
    promising, but the ecosystem hasn't had nearly enough time to
    mature as, say, ARM has had.

    - Dan C.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Dan Cross@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 16:14:09 2026
    In article <tzNDR.276692$4wI6.186533@fx24.iad>,
    Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:
    cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) writes:
    In article <10rmgl8$gjuj$1@dont-email.me>,
    Jason H <jason_hindle@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 31/03/2026 21:59, Lawrence DOliveiro wrote:
    On 31 Mar 2026 19:58:11 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

    On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company was founded
    (incorporated January 3, 1977).

    Back in those early years, the company was more about technological >>>>innovation than trendiness.

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple Silicon >>>was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest of the market. >>>Unified memory ftw.


    Eh.... I dunno.

    Apple Silicon is pretty nice, though I don't know about ARM.
    The obvious alternative is RISC-V, but it was not mature enough
    for use in a high-end product at the time they moved away from
    Intel.

    RISC-V didn't exist when Apple started working on the ARMv8-based
    silicon (circa 2012-2013). Apple was part of the TAB[*] (as was my >employer) and helped guide the development of 64-bit ARMv8.

    [*] ARM's Technical Advisory Board

    Adopting ARM on the desktop does make some sense from Apple's
    perspective, I imagine. They already have a robust ecosystem
    for using it on handheld-devices; standardizing on one ISA
    across their product lines is a no-brainer.

    - Dan C.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From John Levine@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 17:19:02 2026
    According to Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net>:
    Adopting ARM on the desktop does make some sense from Apple's
    perspective, I imagine. They already have a robust ecosystem
    for using it on handheld-devices; standardizing on one ISA
    across their product lines is a no-brainer.

    More than that, they already had extensive experience designing chips using ARM components. I gather the M series of chips in the macbooks are quite similar to
    the A series in the phones and tablets.

    The new Macbook Neo has an A18 Pro chip, with five GPU cores rather
    than the 6 in the version they put in the phone. It was apparently a
    way to use slightly defective chips with one broken GPU core they
    could disable, thereby letting them sell chips they would otherwise
    have thrown away.

    The Neo has been so popular that they've run out of 5 core chips. Oops.
    They could ask TSMC to do another run of A16 but those would be way
    more expensive than the rejects they've been using.

    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From moi@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 19:18:37 2026
    On 15/04/2026 14:13, Dan Cross wrote:
    In article <slrn10tuu59.e2b.oldernow@oldernow.jethrick.com>,
    oldernow <oldernow@dev.null> wrote:
    On 2026-04-15, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
    On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:55:36 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX
    and, much later, Apple Silicon was ultimately
    pretty innovative when compared to the rest of
    the market.

    The ?rest of the market? is Linux now. Even
    Apple realizes that ?Unix? isn?t enough,
    which is why it is now embracing Linux.

    (More bullshit from the village idiot.)

    Is there any chance that the village idiot
    is actually a "hallucinating" LLM?

    --
    Bill F.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From John Ames@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 11:21:01 2026
    On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:04:29 -0000 (UTC)
    cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:

    Irix was basically SVR4 with a bunch of SGI's cool graphics
    stuff layered on top of it, but in terms of the actual OS, it
    wasn't all _that_ different from other, similar commercial
    Unixes out there at the time. I remember thinking that SunOS,
    OSF/1, and even Solaris, were more pleasant to work with.

    Irix's "Interactive Desktop" was much nicer and more polished than the
    GUIs offered by other commercial Unices at the time. Had a decent GUI
    package manager, as well.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Dan Cross@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 18:28:41 2026
    In article <n4a33tFnmftU1@mid.individual.net>,
    moi <findlaybill@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
    On 15/04/2026 14:13, Dan Cross wrote:
    In article <slrn10tuu59.e2b.oldernow@oldernow.jethrick.com>,
    oldernow <oldernow@dev.null> wrote:
    On 2026-04-15, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
    On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:55:36 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX
    and, much later, Apple Silicon was ultimately
    pretty innovative when compared to the rest of
    the market.

    The ?rest of the market? is Linux now. Even
    Apple realizes that ?Unix? isn?t enough,
    which is why it is now embracing Linux.

    (More bullshit from the village idiot.)

    Is there any chance that the village idiot
    is actually a "hallucinating" LLM?

    It's an interesting idea, but I actually don't think so. He
    seems to have a web page that predates the widespread
    introduction of LLMs, and it's got a bunch of dumb shit on it,
    too.

    - Dan C.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Dan Cross@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 18:41:40 2026
    In article <20260415112101.00002c08@gmail.com>,
    John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote:
    On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:04:29 -0000 (UTC)
    cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:

    Irix was basically SVR4 with a bunch of SGI's cool graphics
    stuff layered on top of it, but in terms of the actual OS, it
    wasn't all _that_ different from other, similar commercial
    Unixes out there at the time. I remember thinking that SunOS,
    OSF/1, and even Solaris, were more pleasant to work with.

    Irix's "Interactive Desktop" was much nicer and more polished than the
    GUIs offered by other commercial Unices at the time. Had a decent GUI
    package manager, as well.

    Yeah, those are great examples of the cool graphics stuff I was
    thinking about: the desktop environment was very clean.

    A sysadmin I knew referred to SGIs as, "Grown up Macintoshes."
    That wasn't a bad description, honestly.

    For a long time, Irix was terribly insecure out of the box; I
    remember they had a lot of default demo accounts and so on, some
    of which were configured with UID 0, and no password.

    - Dan C.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Dan Cross@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 18:43:52 2026
    In article <10roha6$uuh$3@gal.iecc.com>, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote: >According to Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net>:
    Adopting ARM on the desktop does make some sense from Apple's
    perspective, I imagine. They already have a robust ecosystem
    for using it on handheld-devices; standardizing on one ISA
    across their product lines is a no-brainer.

    More than that, they already had extensive experience designing chips using ARM
    components. I gather the M series of chips in the macbooks are quite similar to
    the A series in the phones and tablets.

    Exactly. Given that the operating system distributions they use
    for their various hardware products share significant amounts of
    code, they had probably done most of the hard parts of porting
    it to aarch64 already, anyway.

    The new Macbook Neo has an A18 Pro chip, with five GPU cores rather
    than the 6 in the version they put in the phone. It was apparently a
    way to use slightly defective chips with one broken GPU core they
    could disable, thereby letting them sell chips they would otherwise
    have thrown away.

    The Neo has been so popular that they've run out of 5 core chips. Oops.
    They could ask TSMC to do another run of A16 but those would be way
    more expensive than the rejects they've been using.

    Hah, that's awesome.

    - Dan C.


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 19:55:26 2026
    On 2026-04-15, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

    The new Macbook Neo has an A18 Pro chip, with five GPU cores rather
    than the 6 in the version they put in the phone. It was apparently a
    way to use slightly defective chips with one broken GPU core they
    could disable, thereby letting them sell chips they would otherwise
    have thrown away.

    The Neo has been so popular that they've run out of 5 core chips. Oops.
    They could ask TSMC to do another run of A16 but those would be way
    more expensive than the rejects they've been using.

    That reminds me of the one about the company that placed an order
    for parts with a Japanese supplier, specifying a 1% defect rate.
    When the shipment arrived, they found several parts in a plastic
    bag lying on top of the remainder of the parts. They queried
    the supplier, who replied, "You specified a 1% defect rate.
    For your convenience we packaged them separately."

    --
    /~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
    \ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
    X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
    / \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Scott Lurndal@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 20:08:15 2026
    John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:
    According to Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net>:
    Adopting ARM on the desktop does make some sense from Apple's
    perspective, I imagine. They already have a robust ecosystem
    for using it on handheld-devices; standardizing on one ISA
    across their product lines is a no-brainer.

    More than that, they already had extensive experience designing chips using ARM
    components. I gather the M series of chips in the macbooks are quite similar to
    the A series in the phones and tablets.

    The new Macbook Neo has an A18 Pro chip, with five GPU cores rather
    than the 6 in the version they put in the phone. It was apparently a
    way to use slightly defective chips with one broken GPU core they
    could disable, thereby letting them sell chips they would otherwise
    have thrown away.

    The Neo has been so popular that they've run out of 5 core chips. Oops.
    They could ask TSMC to do another run of A16 but those would be way
    more expensive than the rejects they've been using.

    They can also use the 6-core version and fuse out one of the cores
    with a small revenue hit.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From John Levine@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 21:26:38 2026
    According to Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net>:
    The Neo has been so popular that they've run out of 5 core chips. Oops. >>They could ask TSMC to do another run of A16 but those would be way
    more expensive than the rejects they've been using.

    They can also use the 6-core version and fuse out one of the cores
    with a small revenue hit.

    They're up to the A19 now. The A16 was their 2022 chip that went
    into the iPhone 14 and 15 series, which were discontinued in 2024.

    I would be surprised if they had any of the 6 core chips left.



    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 22:03:33 2026
    On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:21:01 -0700, John Ames wrote:

    Irix's "Interactive Desktop" was much nicer and more polished than
    the GUIs offered by other commercial Unices at the time. Had a
    decent GUI package manager, as well.

    Also remember, like any *nix, the GUI was a separate, replaceable,
    modular layer, not baked into the OS kernel.

    Not sure this was true of NeXT. Any sign of modularity certainly
    disappeared by the time Apple took over.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 22:05:14 2026
    On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:35:39 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

    On 4/14/26 22:47, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

    On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:55:36 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

    To be fair to them, the whole move to UNIX and, much later, Apple
    Silicon was ultimately pretty innovative when compared to the rest
    of the market.

    The ?rest of the market? is Linux now. Even Apple realizes that
    ?Unix? isn?t enough, which is why it is now embracing Linux.

    Operating systems reached the point a while ago where there just
    weren't many "gee whiz" features that could be added to
    differentiate one from another. Except for some mainframe systems,
    everything is "unix" now.

    Even mainframes (what?s left of them) run ?Linux? now.

    Lots of new features keep going into the Linux kernel. This is why
    Microsoft and Apple are now being forced into adding it to their
    product offerings.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Wed Apr 15 22:08:24 2026
    On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:38:17 -0000 (UTC), oldernow wrote:

    All I know is that in 40+ years of computer ownership, my Macbook
    Pro is the only computer I ever owned that bricked.

    First and last Apple product....

    Apple was a cutting-edge company back in the 1980s, though this
    started to fade in the 1990s.

    Comparing the Macintosh and the Amiga, for example, the Macintosh
    had QuickDraw for its hardware-independent graphics rendering layer,
    while the Amiga had clever hardware, with not much software on top.

    So as hardware development progressed, the Mac software world found it
    easier to move to bigger screens, while the Amiga world had to
    maintain compatibility with the original lower resolutions, because
    that?s what the software was directly developed for.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Leonard Blaisdell@3:633/10 to All on Thu Apr 16 00:01:43 2026
    On 2026-04-15, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

    Lots of new features keep going into the Linux kernel. This is why
    Microsoft and Apple are now being forced into adding it to their
    product offerings.


    Linux is unixy. Apple went full unixy nineteen years ago with OSX
    Leopard.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Thu Apr 16 00:44:46 2026
    On 16 Apr 2026 00:01:43 GMT, Leonard Blaisdell wrote:

    Linux is unixy. Apple went full unixy nineteen years ago with OSX
    Leopard.

    Wonder why Apple needs to add actual Linux into its OS, then?
    What?s missing in Apple?s ?unixy??

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Nuno Silva@3:633/10 to All on Thu Apr 16 09:23:15 2026
    On 2026-04-16, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

    On 16 Apr 2026 00:01:43 GMT, Leonard Blaisdell wrote:

    Linux is unixy. Apple went full unixy nineteen years ago with OSX
    Leopard.

    Wonder why Apple needs to add actual Linux into its OS, then?
    What?s missing in Apple?s ?unixy??

    (I wonder why are you bringing this up here after bringing it up in comp.os.linux.misc, but at least this time you didn't crosspost the mac advocacy group, which really brought the other thread downhill...)

    I'd say: because that's the UNIX way.

    --
    Nuno Silva

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.14
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)