"Natural" birth-control app dogged by unwanted pregnancies gets FDA approval - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/natural-birth-control-app-dogged-by-unwanted-pregnancies-gets-fda-approval/ <comment><USER2> What is with scare quotes? It's a non-pharmaceutical method with only passive intervention (i.e., measurements and abstaining). The word "natural" seems at least as appropriate here as "organic" and "processed" foods; all of these are oversimplifications, but they communicate something that's not meaningless with reasonable fidelity to an unsophisticated user.

I understand most reporters are going to bring an existing set of political beliefs to the table, but I wish they felt a higher duty to present an objective account. (Like a judge.) This doesn't mean pretending there's no fact of the matter and all sides must be given equal time uncritically, but cooly assessing arguments is different than weaponizing the words on the page.

<comment><USER3> The quotes refer to other "natural" methods that were once pitched but are now bunk. "Natural" also has religious connotation in the US. Rhythm method was the church-approved means of family planning. It doesnt work, with a per-year failure rate of at least 10%. So anyone talking of natural birth control is eyed with sucpicion.

<comment><USER4> > It doesnt work, with a per-year failure rate of at least 10%.

That's on par with condoms, which per Planned Parenthood have an effective annual failure rate of 15%[0]. Oddly, folks don't eye talk of condoms with suspicion.

0: [https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth- control/condom...](https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth- control/condom/how-effective-are-condoms)

<comment><USER5> As your own link shows, the main problem with condoms is people failing to use them properly (the 98% figure given for proper usage is actually one of the lower values I've seen for effectiveness in that case). Part of it is not putting them on right. The other part is much closer to one of the problems this app has: people getting caught in the moment and making an impulsive decision to proceed at least partially against the app/without a condom, then pull out (and either stop/apply a condom).

<comment><USER6> So why single out the app and the natural birth control method if the same problem (people using it incorrectly) applies to condoms as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's unfortunate how there are not better birth control options available by now. Condoms are intrusive and make sex significantly less pleasurable for many people. The pill has a number of well documented side effects and many women anecdotally report a variety of other problems and reactions that make them unwilling to use it or other hormone based methods. IUDs are effective but also can have side effects for some women that in my experience are under reported / downplayed that make them not an option. All the other options I'm aware of have issues with effectiveness, side effects and practicality that make them not compelling options.

The temporary 'vasectomy' based on injecting a gel seems promising but needs more study and hasn't yet been approved in the US to my knowledge.

Given all this there's a reason natural methods like the rhythm method and withdrawal are still used despite lower than desirable effectiveness. People often talk like contraception is a solved problem when it's really not for many couples. Maybe this app is not as effective as would be desired but if it's improving on the unaided rhythm method it's still valuable.

<comment><USER8> Great points. I think it's also important to consider the statistics when you combine multiple approaches to contraception. It may not be a good idea to solely rely on natural methods, but natural methods can be combined with other contraceptives to yield a much, much greater effectiveness than most contraceptives can provide by themselves.

Since failure rates are typically stated as odds of getting pregnant within an entire year of usage, combining two methods that each have only 90% effectiveness can potentially yield an _extremely_ high level of effectiveness: it's already unlikely that both methods will fail in the same year, but when you consider that both have to fail _at the same time in the same year_ then the odds start to look pretty good, despite neither method being that great on its own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This relies on ovulation timing. Technically, if there is no egg to be released within the next few days, a woman will not be able to conceive. However, using temperature as a surrogate end-point for ovulation does not yield a perfect correlation, there will be statistical error and there will be individual differences obscuring the effectiveness of the method. Then there's the issue of people using the app imperfectly and having sex near ovulation anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> I saw this as a way to _help_ people get pregnant, since it'd work in either direction. In that case, how can you _not_ approve of it? It's simply a natural biological aide.

<comment><USER11> IIRC to get pregnant most efficiently one should do it as often as possible rather than wait for the fertility peak.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but many people have a dead bedroom yet still want children.

These apps are popular among certain religous groups as well where sex is viewed as some sort of necessary evil solely for procreation. Something to be minimized.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure what religious groups there are that actually have that view of sex. I usually hear that as an incorrect interpretation of Catholic views on human sexuality.

The usefulness of NFP depends on your perspective. If you require a 100% childless life, you're going to see it as useless. For faithful Catholics, using NFP with random failures can mean 3-5 kids instead of 8-12 kids. That's a huge difference.

<comment><USER12> I'm from the south and have people (christian, non-denominational) in my own family with that view.

I'm not talking about some misinterpretation of Catholic views, but a view that actual people hold. No need for the indirection of trying to pin this on a label. That's another convesation. But you are underestimating the level of sexual repression in the States.

<comment><USER14> >underestimating the level of sexual repression in the States.

Let alone the rest of the religious world, and even non-religious people can be puritanical about sex

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This app caters to a lot people within my social group. Old enough to be married but young enough to want a couple years more of freedom. This allows couples to have sex without protection. The worse consequence is pregnancy which isn't too determinatal since most of us are mature enough mentally and financially to support a kid.

</comment><comment><USER16> The website right now calls the app 99% effective when used as directed. Ars is typically high quality, so I'm going to assume this isn't a Pharma hit piece. That FDA approval must be based off better looking data than the 1990 study, right? I hope?

<comment><USER17> If the only inputs are daily oral temperature and menstruation dates, I have a hard time believing that they get to 99% without essentially fudging the number via a convenient definition. For example, total ratio of users who do/don't get pregnant over a given time period regardless of how frequently the user is having sex or what other contraceptive methods they might be using.

<comment><USER18> I think the fudge here is "as directed". As in if you put in all of the data accurately, take it accurately, and don't accidentally mess it up in one of the 700 simple ways to do so, it is 99% effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Netflix recently released a documentary called _Bleeding Edge_ which takes a sobering look at several medical devices approved by the FDA:

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8106576](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8106576)

</comment><comment><USER20> There is a word for people who use the rhythm method of contraception: "parents"

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm surprised that an app _needs_ any approval of this sort.

<comment><USER5> It makes claims of medical efficacy, so the FDA gets involved.

<comment><USER21> Being fertile or not isn't "medical", though, it is biological.

Should a vocabulary memorization app require FDA approval? Memory is biological.

<comment><USER22> Do you see doctors for memorizing vocab? No. Do you see them for pregnancy issues? Yes.

<comment><USER21> > _Do you see doctors for memorizing vocab?_

Quite plausibly so; if you have unusual trouble remembering even modest quantities of vocab, that could be a brain problem.

<comment><USER22> But then it's memory in general, not specifically for vocab.

<comment><USER21> A problem that shows up as infertility could be something more general too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is somebody keeping a list of all the mistakes the FDA keeps making?

</comment><comment><USER24> Why must everyone debate how other people should or should not have sex? What happens in the bedroom ought to stay in the bedroom. Unfortunately, many people who originally preached "freedom" have moved to a position of "those who do not are unenlightened and clinging to Bibles". As jessriedel articulated, it seems overtly political. I probably wouldn't use it, but if someone else wants to, so what? Besides, even 90% accuracy is better than nothing (which some people use).

<comment><USER25> If you market a medical product in the US you are subject to review by the FDA. As a general rule, we like the FDA to require efficacy.

This is in addition any normal claim of false advertising if they overstate their abilities.

<comment><USER26> This _is_ efficacious, though - it's just not as effective as other methods.

For about a decade, my wife and I were fine with the lower effectiveness of the rhythm method. We were smart about it and had no issues, but if she'd gotten pregnant during that time it wouldn't have been a huge problem. In our case we based it on the date of menstruation, and giving enough of a buffer to feel comfortable. It worked. We've had two children, both of which were planned, and both of which were conceived within a month of our decision to do so.

Like most things, it's a tradeoff. We didn't want to have a child at that particular moment, but weren't willing to completely abstain to ensure that. It didn't make sense for us to use condoms, oral contraception, or an IUD at the time either for various reasons. We were willing to accept the risk, so it wasn't a problem.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple is arbitrarily flagging newly created developer accounts - <AUTHOR> https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/112285 <comment><AUTHOR> Apple is arbitrarily flagging newly created developer accounts as fraudulent and threatening to remove them.

As a developer myself, I cannot help but feel outraged and disappointed to have my app flagged as fraudulent _before launch_ and have my license threatened to be revoked.

At no time the company reached out to me to answer any questions or provide any explanation as of the app's activities. So to have my app flagged as fraudulent out of the blue is really insensitive. I understand this may be an automated review, however Apple should be more careful before calling someone out like that.

My app is built in React Native and open source. It is easily verifiable that it does not contain any misleading behavior out fraudulent activity.</comment>


Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple ditching Intel - <AUTHOR> https://tedium.co/2020/06/16/apple-powerpc-intel-transition-history/ <comment><USER2> I think this article paints a rosy picture of the PowerPC. I was a Mac user and owned G3 and G4 Macs (and a PowerPC 603 Mac). It wasn't a happy time that suddenly came to an end with the G5 and a decaying relationship. IBM and Motorola had been struggling to keep up with Intel for a long time. Apple kept trying to spin it and the next-great-thing was always just around the corner...the problem is that Intel kept getting there faster and cheaper.

Apple would talk about the "MHz-myth" a lot. While it's true that MHz doesn't equal performance, Intel was doubling the PowerPC's performance most of the time. The G3 saw Apple do OK, but then Intel went back to dominating in short order. The PowerPC never matched Intel again.

It was really bad. People with Windows computers just had processors that were so much more powerful and so much cheaper.

You can say that Apple always charges a premium, but not too much today on their main lines. Apple simply doesn't sell low-end stuff. Yes, a MacBook Pro 2GHz costs $1,800 which is a lot. However, you can't compare it to laptops with crappy 250-nit, 1080p screens or laptops made of plastic, or laptops with 15W processors. A ThinkPad X1 Carbon starts at $1,553 and that's with a 1080p display rather than 1600p, 400-nits rather than 500-nits, 8GB of RAM rather than 16GB (both soldiered), and a 15-watt 1.6GHz processor rather than the 28-watt 2GHz part. Heck, for $1,299 you can get something very similar to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon from Apple (though with a 1.4GHz processor rather than 1.6GHz) - $250 cheaper!

The point of this isn't to say that you can't get good deals on Windows computers or that there's no Apple premium or even that there's any value in Apple's fit-and-finsh that you're paying for. This is to say that I remember things like the original iMac with CRT display, 233MHz G3 processor, 13" screen (when people wanted 15-17" screens), and an atrocious mouse going against Intel machines for half the price with nearly double the speed and better specs on everything other than aesthetics. Things were really bad trying to argue that someone should spend $1,300 for an iMac when they could get a Gateway, eMachine, Acer, etc. for $600 with a 400MHz processor rather than 233MHz. A year later, Apple's at 266MHz while Intel has released the Pentium III and is cranking it up from 400MHz to 600MHz that year.

Yea, you can point to $700 laptops today and say, "why buy an Apple for $1,300?" Sure, but at least I can say that the display is so much better (500 nits vs 250 nits and retina), it's lighter than those bargain laptops, fit- and-finish is so much better, etc. At least I'm not saying, "um, no...all those benchmarks showing the Windows machine twice as fast...um...and the mouse is so cool because it's translucent...you get used to it being terrible." It's very, very different from the dark days of 2000.

Plus, today, a price premium doesn't seem as bad. Back in 2000 when you thought you'd be upgrading ever 2-3 years, you'd be shelling out a lot more frequently. If performance doubled every 18 months, 3 years later you'd be stuck with a computer running at 1/4th the speed of something new. With the slowdown in processor upgrades, paying for premium hardware doesn't seem like throwing money away in the same way.

The article also paints the RISC architecture as superior. I'm not a chip expert, but most people seem to say that while RISC and CISC architectures have a different history, modern CPUs are hybrids of the approaches without huge advantages inherent in their ideology. Frankly, if Intel were able to get down to 7nm and 5nm, Apple might not be looking at ARM as strongly.

I think it also paints Apple as some sort of more demanding customer. In some ways, sure. Apple likes to move things forward. However, it's not like MacBooks are that different from PC notebooks. The difference is that Apple has options. They can move to another architecture. Windows manufacturers don't really have that. Sure, Windows on ARM has been a thing, but Microsoft isn't really committed to it. Plus, Windows devs aren't as compliant when it comes to moving architectures so a lot of programs would be running slowly under CPU emulation.

The big issue is that Intel has been stuck for so long. Yes, they've shipped some 10nm 15-watt parts and even made a bespoke 28-watt part for Apple. It's not enough. I'd argue that PC sales are slow because Intel hasn't compellingly upgraded their processors in a long time. It used to be that every 18 months, we'd see a processor that was a huge upgrade. Now it's 5 years to get that upgrade.

There's a trade-off between custom products and economies of scale. With the iPhone using so many processors and TSMC doing so well with its fab, Apple now kinda doesn't have to choose. Intel has been charging a huge premium for its processors because people were locked into the x86 and it takes a while for new competition to happen. Their fabs have fallen behind. It looked like they might be able to do 10nm and move forward from that, but that doesn't seem to be working out too well for them.

The transition from PowerPC to Intel was about IBM and Motorola not being able to deliver parts. They were falling behind on fabs, they weren't making the parts needed for Apple's product line, and it was leaving Apple in a position where they simply had inferior machines. The transition from Intel to ARM is about Intel not being able to deliver parts. It wasn't simply a short time when they couldn't deliver enhancements, but a decently long trend on both accounts. Apple knows it can deliver the parts it wants with its own processors at this point. The iPhone business is large enough to ensure that and they can make laptop parts that really fit what they're trying to market. Intel got Apple's business because they produced superior parts at a lower price. They're losing Apple's business for the same reason.

<comment><USER3> > I'd argue that PC sales are slow because Intel hasn't compellingly upgraded > their processors in a long time. It used to be that every 18 months, we'd > see a processor that was a huge upgrade. Now it's 5 years to get that > upgrade.

I think it's Moore's law approaching its limits and the direction of chip improvements isn't core speed but the number of them, power usage, etc which make a difference but for most folk it doesn't appear like an improvement like say doubling the frequency every 18 months. I have an old laptop and it keeps up quite nicely after 8 years...

<comment><USER4> This is me today. I'm typing this on an 8 year old macbook pro. First gen retina. 4-cores and 16GB of ram. I want to upgrade, I really really do. I have a 16" with 8-cores and 64GB of ram at work, but I can't bring myself to purchase one for myself since I've been telling myself I would wait for 10nm.

The first 14nm processors started shipping in the 15" in 2015 - 5 years ago.

My current 8 year old macbook has a 22nm processor. I would never have thought 8 years ago that Intel would only have managed a single node shrink since then.

<comment><USER5> _> I have a 16" with 8-cores and 64GB of ram at work_

I'm jealous and genuinely curious where do you guys work that your employers can afford to get everyone such expensive machines.

I've been a dev in the EU for 8 years now and at most places I've worked or interviewed(not FAANG) the machines you get are some cheapo HP/Lenovo/Dell with only the executives having Apple hardware.

I never understood why companies in the west cheap out on hardware so much since compared to the cost of office rent and employee salaries that's a drop in the ocean, they could buy everyone MacBooks or Ryzen towers and it wouldn't even dent their bottom line.

<comment><USER6> There are a few places that kind of go 'to the nines' for employees and give adequate and even overpowered workstations. I think the crowd that gets that treatment is slightly over-represented on HN.

But most businesses here are the same, you get lucky to get any nice feature over the 'same laptop that sales gets' which is barely more than a Chromebook. And getting an external monitor that's not the cheapest bulk-buy model was also pretty hard to do (I had a friend in marketing who helped me get a larger display with better colors at that place).

<comment><USER7> Or you go self employed and get your own fancy workstation since you know it's easily worth your money in the long run. Don't work for people that don't understand this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Internally Apple always had an x86 build of OS X running. Just like I'm sure they have an ARM build running today.

Intel chips ran cooler, had better power efficiency and were way faster at a lot of things than PowerPC.

Leadership was actually super reluctant to switch and it took a demo from an engineer showing the massive improvement to convince them.

If Apple is ready to switch to ARM they must have some impressive CPU. Apples not usually one to dabble here and there, so if they switch it's going to be a wholesale ordeal. What will this look like for the Mac Pro?

<comment><USER9> > If Apple is ready to switch to ARM they must have some impressive CPU. > Apples not usually one to dabble here and there, so if they switch it's > going to be a wholesale ordeal.

Apple has an ARM-based product on sale today that has a better screen, better battery life, and better performance, than the 2020 Macbook air for many workloads, including compiling and doing development work (it crushed the air in the benchmark sets that can be run there).

That product is the 2020 ipad pro, and that is why there are so many posts about people actually trying to turn them into development machines.

This product is one step away from being a real laptop: it is missing real MacOSX.

The performance of the Intel-based Macbook Air has increased by 1.8-1.9x from 2012 to 2020 (that's 8 years). Apple already has internal A13 prototypes, and A14 is probably going to the prototype phase right now.

I can't imagine the numbers working in favor of Intel. By 2021 Intel can probably deliver a 1.1-1.2x speed up tops for Macbook airs, while Apple can probably deliver a 2x speed up for 2021 with the A13 and another 2x one for 2023 with the A14. Being able to scale the same chip for iphones, ipads, and macbooks, reusing internal resources, and avoiding the "hassle" of having to deal with Intel.

The only thing that's IMO in the air is what is going to be the discrete graphics story for macbook pro's and Mac pros.

Its unclear whether it would make sense for AMD to deliver discrete gfx products that interface well with ARM, and the Apple-nvidia bridge burned long time ago. So I wonder whether Apple has openings for electrical engineers to work on discrete graphics verification & design, and driver developers. It would strongly hint that apple would design their own discrete gfx in house.

<comment><USER10> The A12 is clearly at parity now vs. Intel's existing mobile offerings, probably somewhat ahead given the long delays with 10nm.

The question upthread is whether or not switching architectures makes financial sense, not whether it's a (mild) technical win.

Switching to their own chips cuts Intel out of the loop, but as far as business risk that simply replaces one single source manufacturer with another (TSMC).

It probably saves money per-part, which is good. But then Apple is still drowning in cash and immediate term savings really aren't much of a motivator.

> By 2021 Intel can probably deliver a 1.1-1.2x speed up tops for Macbook > airs, while Apple can probably deliver a 2x speed up for 2021 with the A15 > and another one for 2023 with the A16.

That's going to need some citation. Moore's law is ending for everyone, not just Intel. TSMC has pulled ahead of Intel (and Samsung has caught up) for sure, but progress is slowing. That kind of scaling just isn't going to happen for anyone.

<comment><USER9> > That's going to need some citation.

So this is Geekbench 5 showing the difference between a 2012 macbook air i5 and a 2020 macbook air i5 - both base models and similar price: [https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2613713?baselin...](https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2613713?baseline=2613509)

And this is a thread in the rust subreddit about compilation speed on macbooks where some users report the performance increase for different generations of macbook pros and macbook airs, if you want a more "realistic benchmark" to calibrate geekbench results: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/gypajc/macbook_pro_20...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/gypajc/macbook_pro_2020_compile_performance/)

This is the ipad pro 2020 crushing the macbook air 2020: [https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2612714?baselin...](https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2612714?baseline=2613509)

And this is the improvement from the previous generation ipad A10 to the ipad pro's A12Z - 2x speed up in single a generation: [https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2613991?baselin...](https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2613991?baseline=2613301)

You are definetely right that Moore's law is hitting Intel hard. But AMD is still doing quite well, nvidia and "ati" are doing incredibly well, and Apple chips have been doing extremely well over the last couple generations.

Maybe you are right, and Apple won't be able to deliver 2x speed ups in the next 2 generations. I'd expect that, just like for Intel, things won't abruptly change from one gen to another, but for this to happen over a longer period of time. Right now, only apple knows what perf their next 2 gens of chips are expected to deliver.

The only thing we know is that Apple ARM chips are crushing their previous generation both for ipads and iphones year after year, and now they are betting on them for macbooks, and potentially mac pros, probably for at least the next 10-15 years.

<comment><USER10> > This is the ipad pro 2020 crushing the macbook air 2020

You keep coming back to that citation. It's more than a little spun. The parts have comparable semiconductor process (Intel 10nm vs. TSMC 7nm) and die size (146.1 vs. 127.3 mm2). But the the A12Z in the iPad is running as fast as Apple can make it (it's basically an overclocked/high-binned A12X), where the Intel part is a low power, low-binned variant running at about half the base clock of the high end CPUs, with half the CPUs and half the L3 cache fused off.

A more appropriate comparison would be with something like the Core i7 1065G7, which is exactly the same die and can run in the same 12W TDP range but with roughly double the silicon resources vs. Apple's turbocharged racehorse.

<comment><USER11> But the A12Z (based on the A12) is not using the latest TSMC process as used for the A13 (which is almost certainly in higher volume production than Intel 10nm).

Plus, if Apple can afford to put an overclocked / high-binned TSMC chip in the lower-cost iPad but has to put a low binned i5 in the Air doesn't that say something about the relative economics / yields.

For what it's worth I have a Core i7 1065G7 and it's decently fast but gets very hot and definitely needs a fan (which the iPad doesn't) and has good battery life (but not as good as the iPad's).

The advantage still seems to me be to be very strongly with the Apple parts.

<comment><USER10> > if Apple can afford to put an overclocked / high-binned TSMC chip in the > lower-cost iPad but has to put a low binned i5 in the Air doesn't that say > something about the relative economics / yields.

Potentially. It probably also says more about the relative product positioning of the iPad Pro (high end, max performance) vs. MacBook Air (slim, light, and by requirement slower than the MPB so that the products are correctly differentiated).

The point is you're reaching. The A12 is a great part. TSMC is a great fab. Neither are as far ahead of the competition as Apple's marketing has led you to believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The key element in the CPU market space is volumen. Volume lowers the cost of manufacturing and allows you to spend much more money on R&D as it is amortised over more devices. While all the big RISC manufacturers had in principle better architectures than Intel, in the 90ies Intel would kill them one by one due to the insane volumes of the PC market. Only on the server PowerPC and Sparc would survive. This is what forced the PowerPC to Intel transition, Apple had litte choices. I always keep wondering what the outcome would have been, if one of the large RISC platforms would have been made available in more consumer level products, e.g. offering an ATX motherboard for running Linux. Volumes would have been much larger.

Another big factor for Intel was, that, financed by their huge cash flow, they had the most advanced fabs, so competitors often were 1-2 generations behind in the available processes.

But now a few things have changed. First of all, Intel got stuck with their 10nm process, so they are no longer the manufacturing lead. But most importantly, TSMC would pull ahead of Intel and offer their services to everyone in the market. For the first time, AMD had a manufacturing advantage vs. Intel.

And the iPhone happened. Given Apple an almost endless supply of money and a huge volume. Over many years, Apple built up a leading chip-design team. This already paid off big with the iPhone, having by far the most powerful CPUs in the mobile space. This also gave Apple a clear insight into the advantages of really owning the whole platform. Designing software and the cpus together.

Offering desktop-class CPUs is of course a large additional investment - so it is not a trivial step. But if Apple is willing to do it, it should be very interesting and would give hope that they have ambitious plans with the Mac, as it only makes sense if they really push the platform.

<comment><USER13> The big problem with switching CPUs is the instruction set.

For most people, it doesn't matter. But if you are in some niche domains, it really has an impact. I don't expect a smooth transition of libraries such as BLAS or VMs such as the JVM. You can't simply recompile these. You typically need a human to rewrite SSE, AVX and other tricky low level code so that performance stays competitive.

<comment><USER14> Apple has the Accelerate.framework already, which is hand-tuned per chip-type, and is what most of the libraries call into. I'd imagine a lot of work will have been done to make that as seamless as possible on the new chips.

It's also kind of useful for a a framework team to be able to call up the guy designing the next cou and say that "this bit here is a bottleneck, what can you do for that?"...

<comment><USER15> Moreover, BLAS is part of the Accelerate framework ([https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate)), so if your code targets that, no porting is needed.

<comment><USER16> You still need to recompile and relink. And it's not that simple, Apple's implementation of LAPACK is well out of date for e.g. - it dates back to 2009.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The book "The Race For A New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox and the Playstation 3" by David Shippy has some commentary on Apple with their relationship with IBM and the Cell. It's an interesting book and gives some reasons for Apple to ditch PowerPC.

</comment><comment><USER18> There was less software running on PowerPC than x86 back then and still there's less software running on Arm than x86, especially the key ones like professional ones (above all, Adobe suite, AutoCAD, Blender, Ableton, etc.)

Arm chips might even be faster for Apple, but MacOS X unfortunately isn't as castrated as iOS and power users will refuse to give away that (small) liberty available in the desktop system than on mobile one.

An OS where there's only a way to install software (the AppStore) is a huge limitation and even Microsoft itself learned the mistake with Windows 10 S, offering customers to install the standard version.

<comment><USER19> macOS running on ARM doesn't mean the App Store would be the only way to install software.

<comment><USER18> Sure?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whilst most of the discussion has been on Intel vs ARM performance and power consumption as a rationale it's probably worth mentioning two others:

\- Complete control of the Silicon. Apple will be able to place its own silicon IP on the new ARM chips. Does this mean the integration of the T2 onto the main SoC? Adding Neural Engine hardware? None of this would be possible with Intel and this would seem to provide interesting opportunities for Apple to differentiate the Mac from the PC market.

\- Economics. It seems likely that the ARM chips will be materially cheaper for Apple to buy than comparable Intel chips, although Apple will have fixed design costs to meet that it wouldn't do if it stuck with Intel. Any advantage would grow if Mac volumes increase which would make it advantageous to try to grow market share. Is this the start of a push to grow Mac volumes significantly?

<comment><USER20> I think the lower heat density of ARM, and the increasing heat of AMD and Intel is another interesting point.

AMD and Intel are racing to smaller manufacturing processes that inevitably will increase heat density.

Today the most powerful laptops are those huge PC gaming bricks which of course are much more powerful than any MBP. This is only going to get worse as heat density increases, at least for demanding applications (gaming, 8k video editing, vfx, etc).

By moving to ARM, Apple will be able to offer much more performant laptops in a much smaller form factor which will only differentiate Macs even more from the PC world. At least in theory.

If this works I wouldn't be surprised if PC laptops moved to ARM too a couple of years later.

<comment><USER21> > If this works I wouldn't be surprised if PC laptops moved to ARM too a > couple of years later

Hasn't PC world ALREADY started the transition to ARM? Snapdragon based laptops already started shipping with SD835, Microsoft already has Windows S for such ARM laptops and many OEMs are already making experimental foldable ARM based devices that can take advantage of these small chips. Apple would be just retro-fitting their ARM chips in the shell of Macbooks 2 years too late.

<comment><USER20> > Hasn't PC world ALREADY started the transition to ARM?

Sure there are some ARM Windows devices but AFAIK this is not really a trend to moving away from Intel/AMD.

We'll see tomorrow, but it seems Apple intends to move all their laptops to ARM, not just the smaller/cheaper ones.

<comment><USER22> Surface Pro X is not a smaller/cheaper device, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >In the early days of the Apple/Intel partnership, their use represented something of a "pressure valve" on processor limitations that the Power Mac G5 created for Apple's processor line. It helped solve a plateau in Apple's laptops, which weren't able to take advantage of the 64-bit architecture that the PowerPC G5 had promised to consumers.

I doubt Apple will ever forgive Intel for missing the Merom release date...forcing Apple to support 32bit for an extra decade.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't think they're exactly comparable. Ditching PPC (and I was working at Apple at this time) was a bold move. The existing Apple loyal user base -- which Jobs wisely knew was irrelevant -- loved having a "different" "Supercomputer" CPU at the heart of their computer instead of the "slow-as-a- snail" Intel. Jobs knew it was better to appeal to the rest of the world than be true to the "true believers" \-- who would have been happy with OS9, too. But it was taking a risk:

To the True Believers it didn't matter that by this time ~2003, Intel was fast and much more power efficient. You'd be lucky to get 40 minutes of battery life from a PowerPC based Mac laptop at the time when Intel laptops could run for a few hours.

Today, Apple doesn't have a core group of users who are "proud" of their unique CPUs, and isn't fighting an uphill battle as they were in 2003-2005 or so. However, sometimes they choose a tech for "stubborn" reasons rather than technical ones and it's not clear if the ARM decision is made for the right reasons. For example: I think not choosing NVidia, especially for the Mac Pro, was a big mistake and costs them customers.

<comment><USER25> >I think not choosing NVidia, especially for the Mac Pro, was a big mistake and costs them customers.

Apple's reluctance to use Nvidia has been a total head scratcher. I owned a 2011 with Nvidia dedicated GPU, but this was the line with known manufacturing defects. I had the mainboard replaced twice because of this issue, but eventually replaced the laptop when the GPU failed again. It's like Apple is holding a grudge.

<comment><USER26> I owned an early 2011 15" MBP with a discrete AMD Radeon GPU which had very well known serious manufacturing defects.

I didn't realize Apple had any 2011 model year Macs that used nVidia GPUs.

<comment><USER25> I think the 2011 was the last year a discrete Nvidia option was available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article title "Power Outage" is a very cute description of Apple's migration away from PowerPC.

</comment><comment><USER28> Perhaps a naive question, but what will this mean for Bootcamp users?

<comment><USER29> Apparently Windows supports ARM, so in theory Apple will continue to support Bootcamp.

> (notably, one thing Apple does not need to give up is Windows support: > Windows has run on ARM for the last decade, and I expect Boot Camp to > continue, and for virtualization offerings to be available as well; whether > this will be as useful as Intel-based virtualization remains to be seen).

[https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-arm-and- intel/](https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-arm-and-intel/)

<comment><USER30> Windows may support ARM. Yet the reason most people want Windows is compatibility. And if Windows ARM doesn't run most of their software then it's a step backward for them.

<comment><USER31> It _might_ give a small boost to Windows-on-ARM that Microsoft has been trying for over a decade. Porting a typical windows app might be easier than porting to Mac/Linux because you still have DirectX and all the Windows libraries.

There's also x86 emulation on ARM. It's slow, but it might be enough to run that 20 year old business app.

<comment><USER26> Wasn't Intel saber-rattling about patent lawsuits when Microsoft announced that Windows for ARM would run some x86 apps via emulation? [1]

While I don't know what became of that, I can see Microsoft working out a deal with Intel because Windows is still huge on x86 and wasn't going anywhere.

On the other hand, if Apple is planning to completely drop Intel in favor of ARM and wants to implement x86 emulation, I can't see Intel letting OSX ARM emulate x86 without some form of resistance.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/06/16/intel...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/06/16/intel- threatens-microsoft-and-qualcomm-over-x86-emulation/#2ed6c54354f4) (sorry about the link being Forbes, it was the first search result for the keywords I used)

<comment><USER32> But what IP would be violated for x86 emulation? It's clear that Intel only threaten chipmaker who tried to add x86-emulation-acceleration ISA to the silicon. x86 ISA is complete 17 years ago, which mean a lot of patents has been expired today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> With all of the security issues surrounding Intel CPUs in the last couple of years, not having an Intel processor will be a real advantage for Apple. And competition is a good thing.

<comment><USER34> If your impression was that modern ARM CPUs weren't affected, I have some bad news for you:

[https://wiki.netbsd.org/security/meltdown_spectre/](https://wiki.netbsd.org/security/meltdown_spectre/)

<comment><USER35> That chart doesn't include Apple's implementations, but they were some of the relatively few non-Intel CPUs to be affected by Meltdown as well as Spectre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I ditched my Windows PC when Apple moved to Intel. I will ditch my MacBook when it uses ARM.

Not dogma, just practical. I'm a `nix SW Dev and require the 95% of code that works on AMD64 run on my machine. Odd to see MS now supporting more `nix. What we (many SW Devs) need is `nix + AMD64 for the foreseeable future.

Furthermore I do not trust Apple. The advent of the iPhone software lock-in echo-system shows where they want to take Macs and that is just a no starter for me.

Bye-bye Apple.

<comment><USER37> I don't think that's quite a given. I don't think Apple has changed as much as you're implying. When OSX was first released, even though it was Unix-based, most people were pretty confident it wouldn't ship with a Terminal. Apple has always been very opinionated and strongly biased towards a user-facing experience. "Techies" have always been a bit skeptical of what Apple may do and should continue to be.

Linux already has a very healthy ecosystem on ARM with Raspberry Pi and others. Heck, it had a healthy ecosystem back in the day on PPC with thins like Yellowdog Linux. I don't think an ARM transition will change this part as much as people think. You've always needed to recompile for macOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Never thought that I would see the day that Intel would lose its dominance. Every time they came out with a new processor back in the 90s was like a new iPhone.

</comment><comment> github-cat More about Apple's CPU architecture story can be found at [https://www.pixelstech.net/article/1592625055-Why-Apple- Mac-...](https://www.pixelstech.net/article/1592625055-Why-Apple-Mac-switches- its-CPU-The-war-between-Intel-and-ARM), An interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER39> P.A. Semi built a powerful and power-efficient Power ISA processor which solved all the problems Apple had with the Power architecture at the time.

What did Jobs do? He bought the company and closed it immediately so that nobody noticed that the switch to Intel was not only completely unnecessary but also a big mistake.

<comment><USER40> He didn't close it, he bought it and set them on ARM chips. Which have been very successful.

<comment><USER41> And who knows, maybe Jobs didn't set them on anything. Maybe he bought PA intending to use their existing bus technology but someone at PA pulled him aside and said "Hey, we don't think you should waste your time with this. How about we design [what is now their ARM line]?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think amd may be on the verge of fixing a lot of the problems that intel has run into in their inability to move forward quickly - the 10nm switch is potentially devestating intel (intel's slow pace of advancement is kind of what the article eventually gets to). If apple said they were going to focus on amd chips at this point, the market would be excited. Are those apple arms going to be able to really handle the cpu load and scale over time like large market intel and amd design teams are scaling investments over billions of devices? I'd just be afraid apple isn't quite big enough. It's very exciting when a change like this comes along in any case. Will they run x86 'legacy' mac programs at a reasonable speed?

</comment><comment><USER43> At the same time in the mid 80s Acorn was an even smaller company that wanted to make its own CPU, and managed it, and by 1992 had a SoC version with GPU and MMU built in (ARM250)

</comment><comment><USER44> >Gassée is certainly correct that Aquarius likely played a historical precursor to Apple's current processor ambitions, but it likely also played an indirect role in its first major processor shift—that from Motorola's 68000 series of processors used in the Apple Macintosh of the time, to the PowerPC, which eventually took off in a big way in the 1990s.

Hey, Apple's first major processor shift was from 6502 to 68000!

</comment><comment><USER45> No way to easily maintain an ARM ecosystem and an x86, but it sure would be nice if we got to choose our hardware more in our macs. They could solve a lot of peoples issues by letting people customize basics like their laptop ports, magsafe or not, keyboard / touchpad or not, and T2 chip or not.

They would have to open the OS up a lot to allow choice of CPU architecture, which they will never do.

</comment><comment><USER46> For the end user, the migration to the new platform will be simple, but confusing for the average Mac user. For developers, the migration will require much more work (testing and coding for both platforms) for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, the development tools will ease the pain somewhat.

</comment><comment><USER47> What does this mean for current x86 needs? Will Apple just "bridge" it for a while like their transition to Intel? Do they have a shim or some other way to handle it?

</comment><comment><USER48> IBM should have open-sourced POWER.

</comment><comment><USER49> Lack of backwards compatibility every time Apple changed their OS or processor pretty much ruined my life back when I was trying to write games on the Mac, because they coincided with downturns like the dot bomb and housing bubble popping (in that case just after iOS arrived). I was so beat down trying to survive at life that rewriting everything I had just written the last year for the new hotness became too much of a burden. I worked a bunch of dead end jobs instead and wasted whatever potential I might have had. Now midlife has hit and I've generally let all that go, but it still bothers me thinking about what might have been.

That said, Intel has sat on their hands for 15 (I would argue 20) years, and so it's unsurprising that Apple is ditching them. I remember seeing 3 GHz processors sometime around 2003-2004. Very little has changed since then. We have faster memory busses now but we've generally lost almost two decades of Moore's law. Before that, processors got twice as fast every 1.5 years, so 100 times faster every decade, which would be performance equivalent to a 30 THz processor today.

Note that where progress HAS happened is video cards (GPUs). So I'm somewhat optimistic that if Apple disrupts the CPU industry, we might see true general- purpose computation speed up rather quickly and break the 4 core, 1 memory bus barrier. I think low hanging fruit here would be 16 to 256 cores arranged in a grid, with the square root of that number of memory busses on an edge. With today's tech, we could have 1024 DEC Alpha cores with 32 memory busses for not much more than we're paying for an Intel i9 with 2 billion transistors (the Alpha had 2 million). Yes, I know it's not an exact comparison, but I have a computer engineering degree so this isn't the time to be pedantic.

General purpose computing could also disrupt the GPU and AI industries, because we could jump ship from the ever-narrowing niches of rasterization and neural nets, and move on to broader experiments in things like ray tracing and genetic algorithms. I had originally wanted to do that with FPGAs, but I've been burned out so long trying to keep up with the shortening attention span of tech that I had to let it go.

Hard to say if any of this will happen, but I just wanted to shed light on the kind of innovations we've missed out on under two lost decades in tech. This is the tip of the iceberg. An explanation for this is that customers want cheap eye candy, and prices have certainly fallen on track with Moore's law. But I've vote to finally see better performance again. Also I'd like to see the emergent effects of better processors, such as more use of parallelized higher-order functions and data driven/functional/declarative programming using something like the Actor model, piping data around with simple tools that do one thing well, borrowing techniques from UNIX and Clojure/Erlang/Go/MATLAB/etc.

<comment><USER50> >I remember seeing 3 GHz processors sometime around 2003-2004. Very little has changed since then

I think computers _are_ faster, but I'd like to see an in depth survey of how today's 2 GHz chip differs from a 2001 model.

Probably I should do it myself.

<comment><USER51> More cores, way more cache, way better IPC, less power draw/heat, way more instruction sets & capabilities, onboard graphics ...

Anandtech has lots of details on these things.

<comment><USER49> All of that stuff can be good, but has tradeoffs. Longer pipelines result in worse branching performance, caching interferes with write-heavy code that's mainly about moving data (like for games), and so on. I feel that putting extra transistors towards large numbers of cores with short 4 stage pipelines (like in early PowerPC) would have been better.

This is one of the more concise benchmark comparisons, in this case having a 3.6 GHz i9 and 1.4 GHz Pentium 3 (released starting in 1999):

[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+III+1...](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+III+1400S+%40+1400MHz&id=1146)

So this is 8 cores vs 1, at 2.57 times the clock speed. So per-core performance has increased:

(18892/299) * (1/8) * (1.4/3.6) = 3.07

A 3x fold increase in 20 years is admirable but 1/3000 what would have been predicted if performance had followed Moore's Law. To me, this indicates that per-core performance stopped really increasing sometime around 2005 at the latest. That's why fabs moved towards lower-cost mobile and embedded chips.

<comment><USER51> Per core performance has increased steadily for intel at approx 5-10% per generation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's a shame they didn't switch back to PowerPC, more momentum behind OpenPOWER would have being nice to see and allow more freedom to the end user.

<comment><USER53> Doesn't really make sense given their large existing investment in ARM and there being (afaik) no current work on POWER for mobile applications.

<comment><USER52> That's true and it'll likely prove to be a good business decision although not necessarily one that benefits the end user in the long run. I'm also not suggesting they use POWER for mobile applications neither did I suggest they use Intel x86 for that.

<comment><USER53> So POWER only for desktop systems, keep macbooks on something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Does Apple actually invests into laptop/desktop development? They are usually couple of years behind competition (DDR3, Sky Lake chips). While their ARM chips are heavily developed.

I think they decided long time ago that ARM is good enough, and are waiting for train to stop to change the engine. It is not about Intel quality, but about saving money and independence. AMD is not even considered as an alternative...

<comment><USER55> People seem to be buying them anyway. If we consider Form over function could also be playing a role here, Apple's obsession with making their notebooks thinner ditching intel will help a lot with that cause they can at least keep the same battery life with a smaller battery.

<comment><USER56> Apple's latest MacBook Pro is thicker than the previous model.

<comment><USER55> That could also be part of the reason they are switching platforms. Likely not the primary one.

<comment><USER56> Or it could be an indication that they don't have an _" obsession with making their notebooks thinner"_</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nine out of 10 premium-priced PCs sold at US retail is a Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Nine-out-of-10-premiumpriced-PCs-sold-at-US-retail-is-a-Mac/1265047893 <comment><USER2> That's so specific as to be meaningless. How many PCs are bought at retail as opposed to online? How many people that buy PCs at Best Buy are looking for a high-end machine?</comment>


New book from DHH: "It doesn't have to be crazy at work" - <AUTHOR> https://basecamp.com/books/calm <comment><USER2> Intersting. Seems kind of along the lines of Rework.</comment>


There is no bug. It is not the bug that bends, it is only yourself. - <AUTHOR> http://damonpoole.blogspot.com/2007/12/there-is-no-bug-it-is-not-bug-that.html <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the "Microsoft Code Has No Bugs" episode: <http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html></comment>


Show HN: Fluxguard – UI/UX change tracker to help automate QA - <AUTHOR> https://fluxguard.com?source=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks. We built this with about 40 Lambda functions on the backend. We use headless Chrome and puppeteer. It was a little tricky getting everything working on Lambda, including re-use of cookies/local storage.</comment>


A small router for Openresty - <AUTHOR> https://docs.apitools.com/2014/04/24/a-small-router-for-openresty.html

<comment><USER2> Check out the router prototype I wrote for openresty over at [https://gist.github.com/daurnimator/3721157](https://gist.github.com/daurnimator/3721157)

Can do all sorts of fun conditions :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for sharing.

Here are some comments about your module:

* Your solution is tied to nginx/openresty. We try to limit our dependencies on the ngx.* interfaces as much as we can. That way, if changes happen on the ngx.* api, we have less places to "hunt".

* Your module does more than just the routing. That is not a bad thing on itself, but the routing code is coupled with the rest (that is bad)

* As I mention in the article, using patterns for matching the urls ends up being messy quite quickly. In apitools we need to handle between 50 and 100 different routes. Handling those without some sort of structured strategy would be maddening. We ended up using routes. Getting the correct matching algorithm was tricky.

* Your sinatra module is stateful - the user has to "modify it" (with get and set) in order to use it. We did that before, too. It can cause trouble with nginx's workers and global state. We moved to a stateless solution (the library returns a "new router" and you put the changes there instead).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Unfortunately, due to some technical reasons, we had to discard [Lapis] and > roll our own solution on top raw Openresty.

Would appreciate if someone could point out what the problem was. Keen on trying Lapis myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main reason was that APItools is not a typical "web application" \- it has a web frontend, but its most important part is an "intelligent proxy" \- it does things like storing requests, changing them on-the-fly, and sending them to other places. We had to use some of nginx's more arcane tricks to get that part working.

Lapis had some abstractions on top of those parts, and we ended up "fighting" with Lapis more often than we wanted.

There's also the fact that we don't use postresql for persistence (we use redis), so we didn't get the advantage of using Lapis for the "Models" of our app.

Finally, and this is a minor thing, most of the existing doc is for using moonscript, not Lua, which was a bit of a bummer.

If you are planning to build a "conventional" web app on top of openresty, I think Lapis is the best tool out there at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would be nice to compare it to www.confreaks.com/videos/782-magrails2011-pattern-matching

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

The code referred to in that presentation is the rails router, journey - [https://github.com/rails/journey](https://github.com/rails/journey)

router.lua is much simpler than that. Journey can parse complex regular expressions like `/(app|application)/(:id)+/foo` while router.lua can only handle parameter interpolations (like `/app/:app_id/foo`). We found out that handling parameters was enough for us.

That said, the strategy we use is pretty similar: we parse the routes and transform them into a tree, which then allows us to match urls faster. It's just that our string parsing and tree construction are much, much simpler than Journey's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Putting routing logic in Nginx seems like a architecture smell to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

It's not nginx. It's Openresty. It's an nginx "distro". One of the main ideas behind it is adding logic on top of nginx (not only routing). This is also how Lapis works.</comment></comment>


Yes, but who said they'd actually BUY it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.building43.com/blogs/2010/12/08/yes-but-who-said-theyd-actually-buy-the-damn-thing/

<comment><USER2> This has been "guest posted" all across the web; here's the older discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587983></comment>