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So this is it. The end of an era. Intel has seemingly confirmed that they will lose Apple as a customer in the next couple of years, possibly from 2020 onwards. This is a very exciting time for the Mac. Just like the switch from PowerPC to Intel, this is a major change which will herald a massive change in the world of personal computers, and could possibly redefine the very definition of a personal computer.

Let's unpack this. But first, a bit of history.

In 2005, Apple announced that they would be switching over from using IBM built PowerPC processors to Intel's x86 processors. Although PowerPC processors were very fast, they were quite power hungry and ran quite hot–undesirable qualities for use in a laptop. There were also issues with IBM being able to manufacture the chips on time. Steve Jobs decided enough was enough and announced the decision to switch over to Intel chips. This was easier said than done, as this wasn't a case of simply switching out the processors and hitting the restart button.

To run Mac OS X on the Intel chips would require a complete rewrite of the operating system, as it would compile differently than on PowerPC chips. And as if changing the operating system wasn't itself a mountain to climb, every single application or piece of software written for the Mac would also need to re-created to be able to run on the new Intel processors. However, with some clever software writing to help developers, Apple managed to completely switch over to Intel chips within 2 years. A piece of software called Rosetta, allowed developers to run their PowerPC compatible software on Intel chips. Although this wasn't an ideal solution and some applications such as the Adobe Suite used by a large majority of Apple customers, needed to be completely rewritten in order to function on the new processors.

As tumultuous and inconvenient those 2 years may have been, it was definitely worth it. Apple was back on top, making some of the most powerful machines their customers could buy. Intel kept on making bigger advances year on year, and the customers lined up to get their hands on a Mac. All was well. Apple used AMD or Nvidia graphics cards in their higher end specifications, and it's pro users were very happy. Fast forward to 2012, and the first noises of discontent could be heard. The Mac Pro wasn't as fast as it should have been, and Intel's turn of speed in both processor speed and manufacturing capability started to slow down. The next generation Retina display MacBook Pro lineup was announced in late 2012, and thereafter things started to go wrong. Apple was unable to update the 2012 model's adequately, and it took them until 2016 to launch the next generation model. Now ordinarily 4 years isn't that long a time, but with Intel's ever smaller rate of improvement, combined with Apple's obsession with creating thin and light computers was starting to affect the upgrade schedules of their pro users.

Around this point of time, applications were starting to rely on parallel compute hardware, which dramatically accelerated their speed and efficiency in various tasks. Graphics processing units or GPU's were now becoming more and more popular as productivity software for creatives started to rely on them more heavily than ever. This is an important factor, as you shall see later on.

Imagine this scenario. It's early 2016. You're a pro user, with the latest 15-inch MacBook Pro. You've got an Intel quad-core processor, which is a generation older than the competition, and an ageing Nvidia GPU, which barely gets the job done with the demands of newer pro software. It's been a few years, and you've held off buying a new laptop as you know Apple is launching the next generation MacBook Pro soon. The leaks promise a super thin and light laptop which is expected to pack the latest and greatest internal hardware. You're not happy as your work is getting affected, but no matter. The new Mac will be here soon, and all will be well. It's now October 27th, and Apple has finally revealed the new MacBook Pro, and now you're very angry indeed. The new laptops look fantastic, and come in Space Grey! But they are woefully inadequate at launch, barely faster than your current machine, and have absolutely no ports at all! Crucially they also don't have a pro-level GPU. What now?

Apple had been concentrating on their mobile devices, namely the iPhone, and had clearly taken their eye off the ball, quite literally. There were reports of hardware and software teams being told to prioritise development for the iOS and iPhone. So say the rumours, but long story short, you were essentially getting screwed over by Apple. Betrayed even, one might say. To add to the misery, the laptops suffered battery issues, display issues, speaker blowouts, malfunctioning ports, and had chronically flawed keyboards which could turn a MacBook into a very expensive paperweight. Apple appeared to have not only shot themselves in the foot but had started painfully hacking away at every part of their legs with a machete. It was brutal to see this unfold.

In 2018, Apple updated the MacBook Pro's with significant upgrades, but still suffered from the chronic keyboard issues and now, significant thermal throttling. The GPU's were still a sore point, and in 2018, did not officially support Virtual Reality, which is borderline criminal. Was this tragic or funny? Both perhaps.

The current situation for a MacOS pro customer is not great at the moment. Short of spending a preposterous amount of money, the current lineup is average at best, and hopelessly underpowered in comparison to it's Windows rivals at it's worst. But, history often repeats itself, and I believe we are currently at the end of an era, and at the cusp of a new one. This change of guard is perhaps the most significant in the history of the Mac and looks set to propel the Mac back to where it belongs, right at the top.

I'll have to rewind again and show you frame by frame in slow motion, how this change will come to pass. It all starts with the inception of the iPhone, back in 2007. Apple wanted to make a small and powerful phone, and at the time was looking at Intel to design and manufacture the processor. But Intel didn't see the value of investing in the design and production of a low power chip, and wanted to focus on creating products for laptops and desktops. Apple then worked with ARM, a small British company for the design of the main CPU, which was manufactured by Samsung. Intel did not see the smartphones or mobile devices as the future, and ultimately it missed the boat. Long story short, ARM has a large lead on the design of mobile chips, and it's licensing model allows customers to choose their own manufacturers which is a critical factor as it allowed Apple to negotiate a better deal and save money on manufacturing costs, instead of being held ransom by single supplied, for example, Intel. In 2019, chances are that the device you're reading this on, or a device you own, is probably powered by an ARM-designed chip. Both Qualcomm and Apple use ARM's architecture in the design of their mobile chips.

These chips with ARM cores are excellent for use in mobile devices with their low power draw, and minimal thermal output. It's not only mobile devices which use them but now servers are also starting to use them for low power instances in a bid to cut electricity costs. ARM and Intel employ different instructions sets in their processors. ARM uses Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) and Intel's x86 processors use Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC). Although this largely doesn't matter as the electronic devices you might use, usually contain a mix of both sets of instructions. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages for certain tasks, hence they will be found being used together

Intel designs and manufactures their own chips, which gives them greater control over their design and production, hence their ability to not only innovate across the board and create better products but also the privilege to charge more and hence, lead to increased profits. ARM, however, has a different business model. Advanced RISC Machine, ARM for short, designs the chip architecture, which they then license to other companies (such as Qualcomm), who will manufacture them and sell them to other companies (such as Samsung, Apple), who will use them in their device. This is usually the CPU, GPU or both. Other integral parts of a computer, such as the memory, connectors, radios, amongst others are designed and manufactured by other companies. Although Intel designs and manufactures CPU's and GPU's, the final product in the consumer's hands are an amalgamation of parts from various manufacturers.

Mobile devices use a highly compressed form of this amalgamation called System on Chips. Abbreviated to SoC, this particular thumb-sized bit of silicon contains all the major parts of a computer, such as the CPU, GPU, memory, antennas, and so on. So Apple or Qualcomm will buy parts from various suppliers, or create their own, to eventually make an SoC. They will then sell these SoCs to other manufacturers, such as Samsung, or LG, or Google for them to use in their devices.

As the rapid decline of the Mac unfolded, Apple was making huge strides with their mobile devices. As of 2019, the iPhone and iPad are some of the most powerful mobile devices you can buy, with great battery life to boot. Their A-series chipsets which power their devices are class-leading, and competitors are struggling to keep with the year-on-year improvements achieved by Apple. This is not purely down to the physical hardware itself, as the software running on those chips have been exceptionally well optimised to ensure efficient use of resources. Since 2011, their chips have gotten up to 36 times faster in multi-core tasks and 17 times faster in single core tasks. In comparison to its competitors, Apple has been focussing on ensuring that the hardware they design is used efficiently by the software they write. Navigating through marketing and PR fluff is quite a difficult task for the average consumer, as certain metrics advertised by manufacturers have next to no impact on the quality of their experience of the device they are trying to sell. Case in point, Qualcomm advertised the higher number of cores their SoC's had in comparison to Apple, but this didn't matter as there wasn't much software written for Android devices (which used Qualcomm's products) to take advantage of those extra cores. Extra cores are usually attributed to better multi-tasking performance and better battery life and more.

Now diverging back to the Mac, we can now see a situation where Apple has the ability to create very powerful chips with ARM architecture, with exceptionally powerful GPU's, the likes of which can traditional gaming consoles. The caveat here is that the software has to be well optimised to ensure that these statements hold true. The potential for Apple to use ARM-based chips for the Mac is ripe, and we will probably see the first implementation in the model which will succeed the 12" MacBook. Subsequently, the entire product lineup will eventually switch over to the new ARM-based chips, with the 'Pro' lineup' last to make the change. Intel will keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible, and there is still time left to convince Apple to retain their chips for the more powerful 'Pro' hardware.

It is a little tricky to directly compare Apple's ARM-based A-series chips versus Intel's latest and greatest. Geekbench and SPEC2006 (synthetic benchmarking frameworks) results, amongst others, can be referenced, but the truth is altogether more complex. There isn't yet a benchmark which can conclusively prove if the A-series chips are faster or not. It's important to consider the fact that software optimisation is critical, hence inadequately optimised software can dilute the results.

But taking the results as an aggregate, and applying some healthy speculation, we can probably make an assumption that the A12X Bionic, Apple's most powerful chip is about 30-40% slower than Intel's desktop-class i7 processors[i7 8700K]. Taking into account the A12X Bionic's lack of active cooling (which is to say, it doesn't have fans or any cooling mechanism), and dramatically lower power consumption, the gap doesn't seem so large after all. It's fair to say that the A12X may not be able to sustain the same performance over extended periods of time, but with adequate cooling, this limitation can also be overcome. The A13X could help paint a better picture of what is to come next, and whether Apple can sustain the rapid year-on-year performance leaps which could enable them to confidently use ARM-based chips in the MacBook. Another potential upshot could be a dramatic increase in GPU performance. We could see performance equivalent to the GTX 1070 or more without the need for a discrete GPU. Perhaps we could see a combination at work here, with the integrated GPU working an AMD supplied discrete GPU. It is possible that Apple can solely rely on their own GPUs by 2025, depending on the performance increases they can make.

So how will the switch affect you? Well, the first thing you'd be worried about is the transition pains. Will your applications continue working? Apple’s XNU Kernel for macOS is compatible with x86 and ARM64, so it should be painless. There's also Marzipan for translating apps from iOS to MacOS, so it's likely that Apple will have a similar solution for native binaries to be converted to ARM - like back in the day when they had Rosetta. We might see one or two generations of MacOS which will still support older x86 apps, working through a translation layer or emulation, but eventually, Apple will kill support off, and become ARM only. Usually, it takes them two OS releases for this to happen, so 2020-22 with support for both x86 and ARM, and after 2022 probably ARM only.

There are quite a few articles on the internet, and in print giving reasons for Apple's meteoric rise to success. Those articles are very long, and the writers of those articles use big words because they think it makes them look sophisticated and highbrow. It gives me a headache, and big words only makes it seem as if you're trying too hard. Put simply, the only reason why Apple rocketed to success is because they had a radically different design direction to their rivals.

Design here isn't used in an aesthetic sense. Before Apple, or Steve Jobs, everyone assumed users of technology were just as smart as the people who made them. Steve Jobs assumed the users of his products were morons, and designed them in such a way so that even the most technologically challenged person could use them. Jobs called his design direction intuition.

AutoShot. I couldn't resist naming an elementary AppleScript script. It was too good a name to pass up.

Autoshot automatically takes screenshots of your Mac while you play your game, or work on your project, so you can document your work or play, without having to press the combination of keys to take a screenshot. There are full fledged apps out there that might do this, but this is a simple script that can do the same. You can decide the delay between each screenshot, and for how long should the script take the screenshots.

Here is the code incase you want to edit it anyway. I took bits of code from places, as I'm slightly rusty at this. To change the format of the image, simply edit the ".png" bit.

display dialog "AutoShot: Automatic Screen Capture Script 

Gap between each shot(in seconds)" default answer "" buttons {"OK", "Cancel"} default button 1 --Q&A for user, to determine factors of taking screenshots

set beta to text returned of result

display dialog "Period of time for the screenshots to be taken(in minutes)" default answer "" buttons {"OK"} default button 1

set zeta to text returned of result --period of time for shots to be taken

display dialog "Screenshots will be saved on folder named 'AutoShot' on Desktop" buttons {"OK"} default button 1

set dFolder to "~/Desktop/AutoShot/"

do shell script ("mkdir -p " & dFolder)

set zeta1 to zeta * 60 --converting input to seconds

set alpha to (zeta1 / beta) --calculating no. of times the screenshot code has to be repeated

repeat alpha times --Repeat Code

set tTime to do shell script "date +%H%M%S"

do shell script ("screencapture " & dFolder & tTime & ".png")

delay beta --Gap between each shot

end repeat

The download link for the app that doesn't need AppleScript editor. Its a standalone app, so it'll run the script on simply running the app.

MacBook Pro 13" i7

First off, the biggest flaw with this laptop is the name. The official name for this laptop is "MacBook Pro 13" Mid 2012 i7". This is because Apple launches a new MacBook every Tuesday or something. So it has to have a different name corresponding to the launch date to differentiate from it's predecessors. It's a bit like the Porsche 911. Just like the 911, the MacBook evolves generation by generation, never radically changing its design. And just like the 911, the MacBook has around billion variations. So it's a nightmare to pinpoint the version you actually want. Spell something wrong, or say some words in the wrong order, and you get a completely different laptop. However, Porsche figured it out. By giving codenames like '991', and '997', generations can be differentiated. And with names like Turbo, Carrera, and so on, models can be differentiated. The MacBook Pro 13" series has 3 models. 1 retina display equipped model, and 2 non retina ones. The one I will be reviewing is the non retina display one. The non retina display model has 2 variations. On standard configuration, one has 4GB RAM, Intel 2.5 GHz i5 processor, and other one has 8GB RAM, and Intel 2.9GHz i7 processor. Now to simplify the naming, Apple should have taken Prosche's lead and called the i5 model, "Standard", and the i7 model "TURBO V RACING ROCKET FAST TURBO!!!!!!". Because the i7 model is really fast. In a hypothetical laptop drag race, it will do quite well.

The Macintosh operating system is often thought to be extremely serious and po-faced, only dedicated to serving corporates and artists alike. But there is a fun, childish side to the Macintosh OS not many people know about, and even fewer know how to access it. Here's a guide to access those awesome features.

First open Terminal
[Applications>Utilities>Terminal] or use Spotlight

A few years ago, someone made a Garfield widget which displayed every comic since its inception. However due to circumstances only know to the wildly imaginative, the widget isn't available on the internet anymore. I took the basic algorithm of that widget and made another so that the interweb can still enjoy Garfield.

Download Link

I think the sunday strip doesn't appear for some reason. Don't ask why. I can't figure it out either.

A while back, I had a bit of a moment when I ranted on about how flawed the E7 was. However, with the new Symbian Belle update, it's a lot better now. Finally, it starts to make a lot more sense. However, rumors are abound that the next Symbian update, Carla might not make it to the E7, as it doesn't have enough firepower to handle it. Or more likely, a lite version of Carla will be available for the E7. And this is pretty monumentous news, as the Carla update is a big overhaul and it refreshes Symbian^3 altogether.

This is all a bit mysterious. Either Nokia's product management team screwed up, or the rate at which the smartphone market grew messed up Nokias' product strategy. The Nokia N8, and the E7, flagship devices of the Symbian range are too old and weak to support a Symbian^3 upgrade that even models much lower in the hierarchy such as the 701(which have better(4x)processing power) to support. The 701 can even support Windows Phone 7 or Android 4.0, if it comes to that.

Nokia E7 with Symbian Belle

However, Nokia has specifically listed the flagship devices as N8-00, and E7-00. So there might be future models based, if we are to believe the nomenclature followed by the other phones in the Nokia family. Hopefully the N8-01, or E7-01 might just bring Nokia up to speed in the smartphone war.

Windows Phone 7

I honestly do not consider the Windows Phone 7 OS to be any better than Symbian^3. The Windows interface is too cluttered and it is frustrating when scrolling through the menues. It is a great idea to have the 'tiles', but they haven't thought the idea through. It is counter-productive, and it is an eyesore with all those tiles and idiotic contrast, and the colour scheme is awful as well. God help you if want to navigate through the menues and pull up something. It's a bloody maze. Although, technically it is a better platform than Symbian, but Symbian with its user friendly interface and properly segmented menues and its well chosen colours makes it so much nice to use. Android is downright boring, but productive. And yes, iOS is still the best mobile OS out there. The iPhone 4 used a 680+(upper limit is supposedly 780Mhz or so) Mhz processor with average RAM. Similar specs to the E7. But there's a huge chasm in the user experiences of both the mobiles. The iPhone is a class apart, and the E7 lags behind. iOS, with its fantastically structured menues, and inherent intuitiveness of the OS and it's fantastic display feels so fluid(very efficient) and effortless compared to the halty, and jerky Symbian^3. iOS is extremely efficient, and I highly doubt Android which is nothing more than an open-source clone of it, will ever catch up. Windows 7 is just hopeless. Nokia needs to develop a new OS with ARM(instead if Intel) and get its best designers on the job. Something along the lines of MeeGo, and possibly even better. MeeGo was the only OS that got close to iOS.

Apple iPhone 4

Good luck and Godspeed Nokia.