We can make it look like McAfee is saying even more ridiculous things than he actually says! All we have to do is MITM a reporter's computer while they're at a coffee shop, send them a link to that site, and have them believe they're reading the real site while we make it seem like it has offensive content! Totally worth it!
> ...one last gap remains in the middle of this stack of system exclusivity: Apple licenses the instruction set architecture for its mobile devices from ARM.
But Apple already not only designs the own SoCs independently already, they regularly add their own opcodes to the ARM instruction sets they license, as they see fit.
The alternative to not licensing from ARM, even if they "invented their own ISA", would be to pay an exorbitant sum in royalties to ARM and every other patent-holder whose technology they might dare use in their chip. So paying ARM for their technology in one go just makes the most economical/legal sense.
Aside: Apple's 68k-on-PowerPC emulator was an amazing piece of work. It didn't run 68k code in a separate environment; it allowed 68k code to run alongside PowerPC code, to nearly the same level of transparency. Applications could mix ISAs in libraries and code resources, and system extensions could patch PowerPC system functions using 68k code or vice versa. It was surprisingly efficient, too: the first PowerPC systems used system software consisting mostly of 68k code, and still ran faster than the native 68k systems they replaced.
I've never seen anything quite like it since. About the closest I've seen is the way that Thumb code can be integrated with native ARM code, and that's explicitly just a different instruction encoding, rather than a separate ISA.
A big part of the success with the 68k switch over was that the 68k line was getting long at the tooth. Clock for clock 601 would trounce 68040 (even the 486 was faster per clock). Plus the base 601 was at 60Mhz, while the fastest 040 based mac was 40Mhz (the quadra 840av, of which I picked up one a few years later for $40, and still have it).
So apple was working with something north of 3x the raw performance, its no wonder that most people with older macs that weren't anywhere near the performance of the 840AV thought the powermac was incredible.
The problem with that, at least in the case of Rosetta, is that the QuickTransit technology underlying it got bought by IBM and disappeared from the open market, so doing that trick again would be...a moderate time+cost sink.
Wiki for QuickTransit seems to think that a number of prominent people from Transitive hopped to ARM and Apple (which might be telling, given the claims of the original post), but has no citations.
Eh, JITs aren't the most complicated things on the planet. There's plenty of people who can do it outside of QuickTransit. Like, look inside most emulators.
> There are LLVM targets with corresponding ABIs that are nonspecific to architectures like PNaCL but Apple is not using them
They do indeed support LLVM IR target(s) that are, in fact, much more architecturally-nonspecific than PNaCl, namely the
spir[64]-unknown-unknown
target. See https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIR and /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenCL.framework/Versions/A/Libraries/openclc (on a Mac, since 10.7).
I don't know if bitcode with this target triple is necessarily suitable for the Apple Watch, however.
Although the text of the article doesn't say it explicitly, the title of this article effectively screams "Apple isn't well diversified! Its making too much money on one thing!" I really don't see the sky falling here by any means. Barring a seismic shift in the smartphone market, Apple will continue to dominate the smartphone market, making obscene amounts of money; they will probably also continue to innovate. And Kleenex will continue to dominate the facial tissue market.
> Apple will continue to dominate the smartphone market, making obscene amounts of money; they will probably also continue to innovate
Apple is certainly going to continue making a lot of money from the iPhone but they haven't innovated a single thing since the iPad. Actually, they've been playing catch up on pretty much every single front and they are still way behind on quite a few (e.g. wireless charging, NFC, ...).
Suggesting Apple is will always be on top with no possible contenders to their crown is strikingly similar to the way people talked about Microsoft in the late-90s. And Nokia before them. And IBM before that. And countless other businesses that dominated their respective industries.
It is highly unlikely the current #1 will not be #1 forever.
Not a useful comparison. The facial tissue market isn't subject to ongoing massive disruption by rapidly changing technologies. The smartphone market is.
Imagine that its 1984 and you've just used the same argument, substituting 'IBM' for 'Kleenex'...
Ongoing? Maybe not. But, rather than talk IBM in 1984 (which is probably a bad example vis-a-vis Apple products and their breakthrough impact), I'll refer you to the facial tissue breakthrough product of 1980: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLa0IGW1k8g
Sorry for raining on your parade and interrupting your chest-thumping session but The smartphone market is near saturation point and soon the sales figures would reflect that and Apple better be ready for this eventuality should it wishes to survive the ship.
