Singular "truth" would be something such as "2+2=4". When it comes to what you're claiming, a lot of it is subject to interpretation and not necessarily a universally agreed upon "truth" in the sense you claim it to be.
Everything is a science. There is no such realm in which truth does not exist or is open for interpretation. All you can do is get a more nuanced understanding of the singular truth. If something is true, other true things don't take away from it, but add color to the overall picture of everything.
Shifting advocacy just weakens your overall arguments, because it indicates you are more concerned with being perceived as "winning" an argument than you are defending your original ones.
As Germans we have compound words to describe absolutely everything. There is no need to ever indicate or hint at anything. I say exactly what I mean and you should too to not waste our time.
You keep trying to equate the Mac clone era to Microsoft, but until the Windows Phone and Surface devices, Microsoft was never in the hardware business.
I equated nothing. The Mac clone era was merely an example of "Classic" Mac OS running on and being compatible to non-Apple hardware. Which seems to be the direction you want todays Apple to develop towards. This wasn't back then and isn't now a viable business model for a company, who doesn't hold a firm OS monopoly. Both companies and their market circumstances are very different, what works for one doesn't necessary work for the other. There is no equation to make.
Microsoft could afford to not have their own hardware business, because there was and is no serious threat to their software monopoly. Windows still holds a healthy 75% global market share. Apple only survived and became profitable by integrating hardware and software in a way no OEM can integrate with Windows. It's not just too many companies who can't agree on anything. A single hardware company also couldn't attempt a path of innovation that requires a complete rewrite of a major part of Windows. And even if they tried to team up, they'll find different corporate cultures, no experience of software and hardware guys working together and legacy products which were designed independent of each other.
People who buy Macs, buy them for what is great about them, not for what is not so great about them. And what's great comes from what Apple does differently than the rest of the PC industry.
Think different.™ is not just a marketing slogan. When Apple thought it could license its OS out like Microsoft, it almost killed them. And whenever Microsoft thought, it could build a Zune or a Surface or a Windows Phone, they failed miserably.
Microsoft got their foothold in the industry by making DOS available across a wide variety of platforms, including x86, the Apple II, CP/M machines, the Laser 128, TRS-80, and the Altair. They then took to poorly copying System 1 for the Mac by creating the original Windows OS.
That's the facts, now shower me with your insights.
Microsoft tried to gain market share not by creating the best products, but by sheer volume and flooding the market with Microsoft-created software. Hell, Microsoft honestly could have cared less about clock speeds, RAM, or graphics performance at the time, which is what so many so-called "experts" in the tech reporting industry fixate on. Even now, Microsoft's Surface offerings often lag behind systems from companies such as HP, Lenovo, Dell, etc. when it comes to hardware specs.
More facts. But why did they win? Because they lifted hardware makers from the need and burden to write their own software. Even Apple initially was a hardware only company. When they released the first Macintosh it came with MacWrite and MacPaint to showcase its fonts and graphics, but there was no productivity software for which they relied on Microsoft (not yet called Office). Bill Gates threat to
"stop all software development for Mac" even helped Microsoft to get away with theft. And later Microsoft exploited their Windows monopoly to dictate which other software OEMs could sell preinstalled.
The Apple vs. Microsoft GUI Lawsuit
Apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Safari and even Apple Maps exist not only to increase user value and customer binding, they are an insurance against any future blackmail attempts. Apple's formative years for their corporate character were marked by extortion, exploitation and copying. They didn't became closed, secretive and mistrusting for nothing. The PC industry is like swimming in a shark tank.
The ISA is as close as you can get to raw silicon unless you're directly accessing the underlying opcodes.
As close as you can get with software, but hardware implementation efficiency gains exists too. CISC was an obstacle for better hardware solutions, hence RISC and ARM. Once you have a much simpler instruction set to operate with, your chip designers can start to build a whole different CPU logic. Remember back when tick-tock was an Intel release cycle for CPUs? The
tocks were the microarchitecture changes, always a little less exciting than the process node shrinks, the
ticks. The M1 was a boisterous
tock, reminding everyone that chip design is good for more than measly 5% gains. But to make this possible, you need to recompile the entire OS, add a new compile target to Xcode and build a Rosetta 2 abstraction layer for legacy software. And you need to communicate and "sell" the transition to developers and customers. It's a giant effort inside and outside of the realm of chip making itself, even if only one company is doing all the heavy lifting.
The OSI model (which is where the various layer definitions come from) has nothing to do with upgrading machines.
I'm not remotely interested in the network architecture use of the term. I'm using 'abstraction layer' literally to describe the function of an ISA in how it connects software with hardware. It used to be that machine code was written for one specific chip and wouldn't even run on its direct successor build by the same company. ppc64, x86_64 and arm64 describe families of chips, sometimes made by different companies, who all communicate via the same instruction set. So the instruction set functions as an abstraction layer. You don't need to know whether the Mac has an M1, M2 or M3 chip, as long as your software was compiled for Apple Silicon.
The ability to not only advance technology at either side of an abstraction layer, but to swap out the abstraction layer itself for a more modern one (which requires a joint effort of hardware and software development combined) is what differentiates Apple innovations from PC innovations. You can achieve so much more in performance and energy efficiency, when you're able to drop x86 itself. Yes, this breaks native support for all triple-A games written so far, but it also unleashes the frame rate for all triple-A games written in the future for arm64.
Hot-swap and plug-and-play capabilities were added to Windows because people wanted the convenience of not having to constantly restart their machines or manually set IRQ, interrupts, or have to flip tiny DIP switches to configure hardware.
You can call it convenience, an interface or an abstraction layer. What it comes down to is the ability to change the hardware configuration without crashing the software.
I can do a lot more with a Raspberry PI than the Apple Watch - emulation of multiple consoles, control and manage smart home devices, set up a media server for my house, run interactive displays for convention centers, use as a very small PC that can literally be attached to the back of a monitor, etc.
You can do nothing like that without a display. And once you add a display the size of an iPhone, your iPhone can do all of that in a much smaller package. I don't need to attach anything on the back of my iMac, it's a monitor and a quad-core computer in one.
You claim they're trash for hobbyists, yet there are a plethora of user groups centered around the Raspberry Pi around the world. Calling them "trash" is just your opinion, and not something backed up by facts or sales figures.
Sure it is. Compare the sales figures of iPhones and Raspberry PIs and tell me what the average "non-hobbyist"
user choses to control their smart home? iOS simplicity wins by many magnitudes, so much so that the Raspberry Pi can be ignored as a rounding error. The competition is between iOS and Android with no third horse in the race.
This is also why your claim that "I do not have opinions, only analyses to offer for debate." is laughable, because you then attempt to portray your opinions as irrefutable fact, and skirt debate by shifting your advocacy when cornered.
Please corner me! To describe a display-less, case-less circuit board as trash was benevolent of me. With sub <1% market share it's actually nonexistent.
You also have a tendency to twist the comments of others into something you can argue against when more often than not you're not even arguing against the substance of the comments as made, but your misguided interpretations of said comments.
Says the guy who brought up the OSI model, which nobody talked about.
Again the Apple Watch is irrelevant. Also, attempting to compare something like "The C64" to an iPad is a red herring and not pertinent, because your argument was that people can't make small computers.
First of all.
What's a computer? And who are you to decide about the relevance of Apple Watches and Raspberry PIs! And I didn't say PC guys can't make small computers, they can't make small yet powerful computers. For that you need energy efficiency and for that you need to be able to leave x86 behind in favor of ARM. Everyone can build a small Intel laptop with cores that throttle down when used. If it doesn't need to run an i9 can fit into a super small enclosure.
That was an example along with the Raspberry Pi which demonstrated your point was clearly wrong. Shifting the goalposts after the fact while ignoring your prior statements is disingenuous at best.
Maybe you didn't understand my prior statement, because you were distracted by something going on in your head and not mine?
At this point, it's clear you're more concerned with being perceived as "winning" arguments rather than discussing/debating things in good faith, so I'm done with this thread.
Perceived by whom? There's nobody else left in this forum but you and me. So maybe you want to win this argument at all costs!
