WWDC

[Cmaier]

I’m guessing invitations go out on Tuesday? Looking forward to it. I am sure this year will be remote again (we are only now beginning to toy with taking our masks off around here), but I expect we’ll see some cool stuff this year. Probably Mac Pro, maybe M2 (I still think Mac Pro has to have an M2 variation in it), maybe (33% chance?) a new monitor with miniLED and promotion, and lots of new OS stuff. Also, maybe, the first signs of some sort of VR/AR goggles.

We can use this thread to speculate until the day arrives

 

[MEJHarrison]

Probably Mac Pro...

Other than drooling over the power, and getting to finally see what the next big CPU is, I really don't care about a Mac Pro. It will be an interesting piece of technology that I can't put to good use or reasonably afford.

maybe M2 (I still think Mac Pro has to have an M2 variation in it)

I'd like a Mac mini/Mac Studio with an M1 Pro. But I'm also getting tired of waiting. I might just go with an M1 Max Studio and be done with it.

maybe (33% chance?) a new monitor with miniLED and promotion

I would have been excited if they hadn't just released an old LCD for $1,600. I'm sure it will be cool and all. But I'm also sure it won't be priced for me.

, and lots of new OS stuff.

While I'm not an iOS developer, I do love playing with their stuff. It would be fun trying out Xcode 14 Beta with a new Studio.

Also, maybe, the first signs of some sort of VR/AR goggles.

I'd LOVE to hear more about this. I doubt it will be something I'll be interested in. As much as I love VR, I'm 99.999% sure it's going to be an Apple device incapable of taking advantage of current VR software. Apple doesn't like hopping on other people's bandwagons. They want to forge their own path forward. Still, as a VR enthusiast, I'm still super excited to see what they'll bring to the table and how they might push the whole industry forward.

I'm mostly looking forward to what's new in SwiftUI. I work in .NET/NodeJS/AWS land. Still, I've learned quite a bit from SwiftUI that I've been able to apply to the work I do.

WWDC is always my favorite yearly Apple event!

 

[Yoused]

Probably Mac Pro, maybe M2

I am not so sure they will go with a "Pro" brand before November. Studio Ultra is right up against the edge of being a Pro right out of the box – if they get the performance to its limits, it is just about there already. I coulld see Apple dropping "Pro" altogether, or maybe making a card chaasis attachment option. iMac M2 maybe, still in 24" only.

 

[Cmaier]

I am not so sure they will go with a "Pro" brand before November. Studio Ultra is right up against the edge of being a Pro right out of the box – if they get the performance to its limits, it is just about there already. I coulld see Apple dropping "Pro" altogether, or maybe making a card chaasis attachment option. iMac M2 maybe, still in 24" only.

Well they said the pro is coming (very unusual of them to do that), so it will come at some point.

 

[mr_roboto]

Well they said the pro is coming (very unusual of them to do that), so it will come at some point.

I think it's connected to their big "whoops we screwed up" press thing a few years ago, where they admitted the 2013 Mac Pro was a mistake and acknowledged it didn't serve the needs of people who want a Mac with a ton of PCIe expansion slots.

They don't want that audience to think "oh no they're abandoning us yet again" for even a millisecond, which might be a natural thought if you saw the Mac Studio presentation with no hint at a bigger box yet to come.

 

[Cmaier]

I think it's connected to their big "whoops we screwed up" press thing a few years ago, where they admitted the 2013 Mac Pro was a mistake and acknowledged it didn't serve the needs of people who want a Mac with a ton of PCIe expansion slots.

They don't want that audience to think "oh no they're abandoning us yet again" for even a millisecond, which might be a natural thought if you saw the Mac Studio presentation with no hint at a bigger box yet to come.

Yep, that’s probably right. I also think they are just going to be a little tiny bit more transparent. I mean, they even said that ultra is the last member of the M1 family, which is a weird thing for them to offer up.

 

[Andropov]

I'm excited to see the news on the Metal & SwiftUI fronts too. SwiftUI is still very new, so great changed year after year are still expected, but it's hard to know what they'll try to cover first, there's still so much to do.

 

[Cmaier]

I'm excited to see the news on the Metal & SwiftUI fronts too. SwiftUI is still very new, so great changed year after year are still expected, but it's hard to know what they'll try to cover first, there's still so much to do.

I’ve created a few views for my big app using swiftui. I have to say I love how you create the gui (I did something very similar at AMD to allow you to place gates), but my brain has a hard time understanding how to get the data connected to the gui. I can make it work, but it hurts my head. I don’t think that way.

 

[DT]

I'd like a Mac mini/Mac Studio with an M1 Pro. But I'm also getting tired of waiting. I might just go with an M1 Max Studio and be done with it.

I like to think we'll see a Mini with an M1 Pro (or some M2 variant). I think there's a good slot for a something above the current M1 Mini, with 16GB (base) RAM, around $1299 (an M1 Mini with 16GB/512GB is $1099). Better CPU and GPU but without the extra power needed for more graphic intensive tasks that the Studio provides, a really stout general purpose machine that's a good choice for developers, easily handles moderate graphic chores, a machine that will drive three 4K/5K displays (again, between the M1 Mini and Studio capabilities).

 

[DT]

I’ve created a few views for my big app using swiftui. I have to say I love how you create the gui (I did something very similar at AMD to allow you to place gates), but my brain has a hard time understanding how to get the data connected to the gui. I can make it work, but it hurts my head. I don’t think that way.

Yeah, I haven't done any iOS development for a while, and that was all before SwiftUI, it would've been so much better (heck, a lot of it was pre-Swift, back when Obj-C was the only option ...)

 

[Cmaier]

Yeah, I haven't done any iOS development for a while, and that was all before SwiftUI, it would've been so much better (heck, a lot of it was pre-Swift, back when Obj-C was the only option ...)

My “big app” is still 20% Obj-C, particularly the database backend stuff. It’s also got some swift-based programmatic ui. And some javascript (used to figure out what page numbers you are citing when you select text from a court’s opinion and copy it to the clipboard). It’s a melange.

i was one of the first few hundred developers in the store (apple told me i was around number 370 if i recall correctly), so I’ve seen it all

I’ve slowly started being unable to keep up - SwiftUI seems to be better documented for things like Combine than for presenting locally stored, generated or calculated information.

and the newer versions of swift give me headaches. I am beginning to think like a swift programmer instead of a c programmer, but it is evolving very fast and it’s hard for me to keep up.

 

[MEJHarrison]

I’ve slowly started being unable to keep up - SwiftUI seems to be better documented for things like Combine than for presenting locally stored, generated or calculated information.

I've sadly not dug into Combine much at all. I find it confusing and uninteresting (it's that second one that kills me). I might try to dig a little deeper into that this year.

But I do know a Mac Studio/mini would certainly help. I tried to get a project going last night. It's just way too slow (on a base 2017 iMac, 16GB, Fusion drive). If you take away the time it just took to get something loaded after months of not using Xcode, and fighting with trying to use a free account (I'm not paying $100/year for the pleasure of tinkering), it was probably a good 10-15 minutes to get things loaded, indexed, built, etc. Then my machine is always too slow to get the SwiftUI views displaying locally. So there's usually a second build involved. Once I get everything up and running, it's reasonably slow (1-3 seconds to render a new SwiftUI page).

I'm honestly at the point where the hardware keeps me from fooling around with things as much as I'd like. When it starts becoming annoying to work with the code, I find some other hobby to interest me.

 

[DT]

Yeah, I started ages ago with Obj-C, but I also knocked around with SmallTalk, had some C++ experience, so it, er, kind of made sense I migrated to Swift as I could, same here, I had projects that retained Obj-C, while new builds added Swift, started with springs ~n~ struts, moved to some auto-layout, attempted some storyboards, but wound up with code based layouts.

I worked on a multi-platform solution, and wound up moving to React Native, which is it's own set of headaches. Then my main project/product I wound up migrating to a PWA because it was mostly driven by the backend services, the front work worked more than well enough as a web application, and the small amount of offline features were easily implemented using PWA+IndexedDB (and the existing web services), and I didn't have to worry about deploying/managing native code.

 

[MEJHarrison]

Yeah, I started ages ago with Obj-C, but I also knocked around with SmallTalk, had some C++ experience, so it, er, kind of made sense I migrated to Swift as I could, same here, I had projects that retained Obj-C, while new builds added Swift, started with springs ~n~ struts, moved to some auto-layout, attempted some storyboards, but wound up with code based layouts.

I taught myself C. Then later on, C++. Then really later on, C#. I never really got the hang of Obj-C. But I had nothing on the line. I wasn't trying to write an app, I was just curious. Then it wasn't long before Swift came around, and I taught myself that. Had I had a goal beyond "learn Objective-C", I might have picked up and retained it better. I must say I'm a fan of Swift and especially SwiftUI.

 

[Cmaier]

I taught myself C. Then later on, C++. Then really later on, C#. I never really got the hang of Obj-C. But I had nothing on the line. I wasn't trying to write an app, I was just curious. Then it wasn't long before Swift came around, and I taught myself that. Had I had a goal beyond "learn Objective-C", I might have picked up and retained it better. I must say I'm a fan of Swift and especially SwiftUI.

I tried to teach myself objective C in the 90’s, when my roommate in college had a NeXT. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Problem was I always thought like an assembly programmer, because I’m a hardware guy (CPU designer). It wasn’t until years later that I started to code in C and C++ very seriously, while I was designing CPUs, because I kept thinking “why should I manually figure out how to size the transistors in this circuit?” Or “why should I figure out where to put the pins on this block?” So I just started automating stuff. Then the CTO at AMD put me in charge of the design automation team while I was still designing chips, and I ended up writing a couple million lines of code that we used to design Athlon 64 and Opteron. By the time that was done, after having made every possible mistake, I understood how to code reasonably well. So when iPhoneOS came around and I revisited Objective C, it made a hell of a lot more sense to me. I didn’t even mind all the reference counting stuff, because I still thought like an assembly language guy too

When they took away the ++ operator in Swift I cried a little, then studied other people’s code carefully to finally get that the “swift way“ is very different than C/C++/Objective C. In a lot of ways it is much better, in fact. But it did drive me crazy that they kept changing how strings work, and I am not a big fan of the way optionals are dealt with - though it sounds like that will be much improved shortly.

As for SwiftUI, it has a lot of limitations still, and I often have to get around problems by assigning a swiftui block to a variable and returning it - for example to conditionally display a GUI one way or another - which tells me I still am not getting the gist of how you are supposed to do stuff, but, anyway…

 

[Runs For Fun]

I’m guessing invitations go out on Tuesday? Looking forward to it. I am sure this year will be remote again (we are only now beginning to toy with taking our masks off around here), but I expect we’ll see some cool stuff this year. Probably Mac Pro, maybe M2 (I still think Mac Pro has to have an M2 variation in it), maybe (33% chance?) a new monitor with miniLED and promotion, and lots of new OS stuff. Also, maybe, the first signs of some sort of VR/AR goggles.

We can use this thread to speculate until the day arrives

I’ve heard people speculate that they wouldn’t announce something like an M2 Extreme right off the bat, but I could see them doing that and then announcing the lower power M2s and spin it like “we took the M2 Extreme, shrunk it down and put it in a MacBook Air!”. From what I understand they can’t possibly put two M1 Ultras together. Even if they could the RAM limit would be a lot lower than the current Mac Pro.

 

[Cmaier]

I’ve heard people speculate that they wouldn’t announce something like an M2 Extreme right off the bat, but I could see them doing that and then announcing the lower power M2s and spin it like “we took the M2 Extreme, shrunk it down and put it in a MacBook Air!”. From what I understand they can’t possibly put two M1 Ultras together. Even if they could the RAM limit would be a lot lower than the current Mac Pro.

I can understand why people think they wouldn’t, and maybe they won’t. I don’t know. Maybe they announce the M2 MBA at the same time. Beats me. But the Mac Pro is still coming, and I’m pretty sure it will be based on M2.

 

[MEJHarrison]

I tried to teach myself objective C in the 90’s, when my roommate in college had a NeXT. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Problem was I always thought like an assembly programmer, because I’m a hardware guy (CPU designer). It wasn’t until years later that I started to code in C and C++ very seriously, while I was designing CPUs, because I kept thinking “why should I manually figure out how to size the transistors in this circuit?” Or “why should I figure out where to put the pins on this block?” So I just started automating stuff. Then the CTO at AMD put me in charge of the design automation team while I was still designing chips, and I ended up writing a couple million lines of code that we used to design Athlon 64 and Opteron. By the time that was done, after having made every possible mistake, I understood how to code reasonably well. So when iPhoneOS came around and I revisited Objective C, it made a hell of a lot more sense to me. I didn’t even mind all the reference counting stuff, because I still thought like an assembly language guy too

My favorite class in college was on a simulated CPU where we were writing microcode. That's where you write the code for the assembly instruction, right? I thought that was exactly what I wanted to do. Then my professor told me I'd probably want to get a PhD if I went down that route. So I didn't. I toyed with assembly on my Commodore 64, then a wee bit in college to optimize some code on a VAX. I still have that VAX handbook... right next to my desk! VAX Architecture Handbook 1986.

When they took away the ++ operator in Swift I cried a little, then studied other people’s code carefully to finally get that the “swift way“ is very different than C/C++/Objective C. In a lot of ways it is much better, in fact. But it did drive me crazy that they kept changing how strings work, and I am not a big fan of the way optionals are dealt with - though it sounds like that will be much improved shortly.

For the most part, I pretty much love every change Swift made. Getting rid of the ++ operator is odd, but I understand the driving force behind it. Don't give people 2 ways to do something or they'll find 4 ways to mess it up. I kind of like the simplicity. I also find myself using things like extensions all the time. But for some reason, I ignore similar functionality in C#. I find that really interesting. I'm a fan of the language for sure.

Agreed about early string handling. And I despise optionals. There's just too many ways to unwrap them and I have a hard time reading the code still. When I see an oddly placed ? or !, half the time I need to go look up what it means. But that's just from not doing it enough. I'd not heard about anything coming with Swift optionals, but now I'm really curious. If they could fix that, I think it would be a fantastic language.

As for SwiftUI, it has a lot of limitations still, and I often have to get around problems by assigning a swiftui block to a variable and returning it - for example to conditionally display a GUI one way or another - which tells me I still am not getting the gist of how you are supposed to do stuff, but, anyway…

Last year I watched some WWDC videos. But I was big into VR at the time (still am, but I was obsessed). So I skipped playing with all the new stuff last year. This year I'll have plenty of new stuff to play with.

 

[B01L]

I am of a mind that Apple will preview the ASi Mac Pro at WWDC, for release before the end of 2022...

Apple might also refresh all Macs with M2-series SoCs, and a few chassis redesigns as well; ASi transition complete within two years AND on Gen2 of Apple silicon...!

 

[Cmaier]

I am of a mind that Apple will preview the ASi Mac Pro at WWDC, for release before the end of 2022...

Apple might also refresh all Macs with M2-series SoCs, and a few chassis redesigns as well; ASi transition complete within two years AND on Gen2 of Apple silicon...!

That wouldn’t surprise me one bit.