burnedsap

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.

The game studio Flippfly is run by two brothers, Aaron and Forest. I first heard of them when I compiling a list of Kickstarter games for the Mac for macgamerhq. I took a closer look at Race the Sun and reviewed the game for the Mac when it was launched a couple of years ago. I continued to follow the game it was astonishing to see how big it grew. I've always been a big believer in simple games with focus on concept and gameplay over visual pizzaz, and Race the Sun is the game which I feel follows that direction.

Forest and Aaron

Tutsplus and I were to make an Applescript tutorial. Unfortunately for Mr. Winters, I'm not really going to help him out anymore. So here is a fun little tutorial to make an script that narrates whatever you type into it and gives you an option of saving it as an MP3 file.

Here's the script, with the vaguely useful comments explaining every line.

An awesome adventure game

Anodyne is brilliant indie game. It really is one of a kind. Challenging and fascinating, I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. A key part of Anodyne was the storyline and the music. Anodyne also had an unique launch method. Analgesic Productions put their game up for free on thepiratebay for a limited period of time, and asked gamers to pay what they felt like. It was a brilliant plan, and it really helped Anodyne get more attention. I asked Sean Hogan of Analgesic Productions a few questions to get to know him slightly better.

Jonathan Kittaka(right), creator of the artwork and Sean Hogan, brains behind programming and music at Taco Bell.

sap: How does it feel to have made Anodyne?
Sean: Satisfying? It's nice to finally have realized a large game idea, and have this finished game that I can show to others and have them play! 


sap: Do you think Anodyne's unique launch plan attracted more gamers than it usually would?

OpenEmu is a open source emulator that will play pretty any game you played 'back in the day'. My 'back in the day' games were the Pokemon games.

Now the only way to play Pokemon on a Mac is with GameBoy emulators. VisualBoy is a very good option, with the ability to fast forward time and use various cheats. But it is slightly unstable, and the cheats and the fast forwarding option does spoil the game because you will inevitably use them. It's like a cake on a table, in a room full of other people. You don't simply ignore the cake. You will eat every bit of it. Then you will become violently sick because the cake was poisoned. The cheats and the fast forwarding is the poisoned cake. It ruins the game and you can't help but use them.

Enter OpenEmu. Not only will this emulate any sort of Nintendo device, it is stable, and it doesn't have anything extra. Open app, play the game. Thats it. No fuss. The best part is that it looks like an official Apple app. It's like a mini iTunes for emulators and games. It is beautifully designed.

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.

Although there aren't as many games available for Mac as there are for Windows systems, there are still more than enough games to choose from. Here are some of the games I think are worth buying. I'm not listing it in any specific order. I'll try to update this list whenever I can.


TOCA Race Driver 3: One of the best all round driving games ever. Basically, its Gran Turismo for the Mac. So you can play this game for the rest of your life, and still not complete it.

F1 2012: The best and the most accurate Formula 1 game till date. Although F1 2013 is coming this year, F1 2012 is still a superb game, and the online experience is unparalleled.

The Movies Superstar: This is like Sims, but all about movies. You're basically controlling a movie studio, producing movies, and managing stars. Good fun

Lego Batman 2: Its Lego. And its Batman. Need I say more? Haven't had so much fun in a long time.

Colin McRae Rally Mac: Probably the most realistic rally game there ever was. It is quite a challenge.

Call of Duty 4: The most iconic FPS game of all time, and the one with most hacked servers ever. I think there's more than a million players online by the looks of it, and an infinite number of mods. It's better than Black Ops because of the game's hack-ability.

Call of Duty Black Ops: This another iconic FPS game, but it's a lot more realistic, and you have to work a lot harder while playing it.

Lego Star Wars Clone Wars: Once again, Lego, Star Wars, and lightsabers. Better than the original Star Wars games.

Dirt 2: The rally game next-gen. With the X-games, and rallycross, focus has shifted from proper rallying. Not as cool, but still it's a lot of fun.

Minecraft: It's blocks of pixels stacked on each other. With imagination, you can create anything.

Angry Birds Space: The best Angry Birds version. Much better than the original thing.

NBA Jam: Retro game refreshed and bought back to life. Best played with a friend. This has to be ported to the gaming consoles. So much more fun than the original NBA games.

Real Racing 2: Same as the now iconic iOS version. Not as polished, but still playable.

Anodyne: The product of indie developers, this game had a game-changing launch. The devs put it on pirate bay.org for free, and asked players to donate. And oh boy they did. Brilliant RPG.

Grand Theft Auto Series: Its grand theft auto. Burn everything.

The Incident: Another indie game, this is really very good. Hours of fun.

Video Tennis: This uses a novel method of playing ping pong. It tracks your hand using the webcam to play the game. It works very well.

Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy: Another iOS port. Multiplayer is epic. Needs a joystick though, to play the game properly.
Galaxy on Fire 2: A space exploration game with good space battles. Great graphics.

Flatout 2: The daddy of smash 'n' race games. Haven't seen speed and violence in a such a great cocktail before.

Tomb Raider: Underworld: It's Tomb Raider. Owe up. You only play the game to look at the girl. Everyone does. She looks great in this game. So it's a no-brainer.

Bus Driver: Great training if you lose your job. It's sort of a realistic bus driving game. I haven't driven a bus, so I have no idea how realistic it is.

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy: One of the better Star Wars games. Although it is quite old, it is still really good. Deserves a remake though.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The most iconic Star Wars game ever. With an option to build your character toward the dark side, or the light side, it is quite a easy decision to make. Join the dark side. Have fun.

With the Mac App Store expanding day by day, it is becoming increasingly hard to figure out which applications are actually needed. So here's a small list of apps that I use on a day to day basis.

Media

Perian: This is a Quicktime player addon that enables to it play many video formats

MPlayerX: The most dependable and versatile media player out there. Plays everything, and anything.

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.

This is my new home.

This is what happened when I got my copy of F1 2012.


Day 1: Finished downloading from Mac App Store by midnight. Took quite a lot of time. Spent all day long watching clips of the real season and ridiculing drivers. Of course I can drive better than them. It's a piece of cake. Pftt.

Day 2: (continued from Day 1 midnight) Fired up the game, and straight into Young Drivers Test. Turns out it's quite hard to drive a Formula 1 car with a keyboard. No wonder real drivers use a steering wheel. Did well in the Test, and got job with Force India. Got bored of career, and went online. Got pwned in every race. Then became extremely angry and smashed into race leader while getting lapped. That b****** recovered and finished the race in P1. I get DNF. Went to sleep with angry and disturbing thoughts of disappointment.

Apply opposite lock and accelerate.

Colin McRae Rally Mac is the equivalent of Colin McRae Rally 2005 by Codemasters and has been ported over to the Mac by Feral Interactive. Even though this game is now quite old, Feral Interactive knowingly, or mistakenly ported one of the best rally games of all time.

Paying homage to the Colin McRae, the game menu is subtle and stylish, and you can choose any one of the different game modes. Career, single rally events, or just rally stages, the choice is yours. Once you choose your car and stage, the player can make car setup changes, and you do have to be smart, as the setup can win you the rally, or trash your car.

There are many, many sites out there with the best racing games listed out there on the internet. I however, have played and bought every game on this list. So even though you might not find the most popular games here, there's a good reason why. Because most of them are terrible. Porting games to from Windows to a Mac doesn't always work out well.
The list of the best racing games for Mac(not in any specific order) are,

ToCA Race Driver 3

Feral Interactive ported F1 2012 to Mac about a month ago, which is great, just that the game is already pretty old by now and F1 2013 is coming in April 2013. Anyhow I downloaded my copy of F1 2012 a week ago, and I was immensely excited to finally play it on my Mac, and not having to boot up Windows 7 via Bootcamp to play it. And as I don't like booting to Windows, I barely played F1 2012 on it anyway. The game is superb, and my Mac easily runs it on max graphics setting, and the visuals are amazing. Surprisingly the Windows version cannot run the game on max graphics without frame skip or lag. I'm using OS X Mountain Lion just by the way.

However when I started playing F1 2012, immediately there was a problem. It's simply impossible to play the game with keyboard controls. You just cannot match the pace of the amateur level AI, let alone hardened veterans online who have a proper gaming setup. Now I did not have a wheel, or a console controller of any sort. But I do have my trusty million year old PSP. So I revived my PSP(which had F1 '09 on it surprisingly), and hooked it up to my Mac.

Next, I downloaded FusaGamePad for the PSP. Now, FusaGamePad only works for rooted PSP's, like mine was. To root your PSP, look for instructions online. It's easy and plenty of tutorials are available.

Here's the link: FusaGamePad

Now connect your PSP to the Mac, goto PSP>GAME and drag the folder named FusaGamePad from the PSP>GAME from the downloaded file.

Drag the folder to PSP>GAME

Don't disconnect your PSP from your Mac. Press the Eject button on the Mac, exit USB Mode on the PSP and open FusaGamePad on the PSP. Your PSP is now a controller, just like any other joystick.

Now, open F1 2012, and go to options and edit the controls and modify the controls to the buttons on the PSP, and you're set.

My settings with the PSP for F1 2012 are as follows:

Steering Saturation: 70%
Steering Deadzone: 70%
Steering Linearity: 100%

One of the best city simulation games of all time. Now for Mac via DOSBox. Simply unzip and play.


Download SimCity 2000

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.

Finished Vector!

This tutorial will show you how to use Sketch(Illustrator too) to make a simple stick figure man/woman.

Ok, this isn’t exactly a real Mac virus. But it’s a good way too prank your friends(or foes!). With the help of AppleScript you can instruct the Mac to perform several tasks. Although Applescript is generally used for boring stuff like sending bulk mails or doing something productive, it can also be extremely fun if you have a devious plan in mind!

Open AppleScript Editor.

Open AppleScript Editor