Matisyahu's Blog

I’m all excited about WWDC 2023 as the keynote draws closer – 5am on 6 June New Zealand time. I’ve decided to do the smart thing year and go to sleep at 8pm on Monday night so then I get up at 4:30am on Tuesday then watch it either on the big screen in the lounge room or on my laptop – depending on how I feel. Lots of rumours are whirring around particularly about the announcement of a new product category, hardware refresh, new operating system for the new product category. What I am hoping is that the announcements regarding their platforms is more a focus not on new features but rather focusing on improving on what they already have to make the platforms more reliable.

There is a rumour about the Mac Pro being refresh however there is also rumours that the Mac Studio will be refreshed thus making it potentially the Mac Pro replacement. There was a patent application regarding having a two level memory model where you have an SoC with RAM on the packaging then having off SoC RAM that can be upgraded by the customer with the kernel I assume being smart enough to swap between the RAM on the SoC and the RAM that is user upgradeable so that the performance critical stuff is always in the fastest type of memory. It will be interesting to see whether it may even open the possibility for a nVidia video card to be added for CUDA hardware acceleration with support being provided through a user space driver rather than installing a kernel extension due to Apple phasing out kernel extension support.

Windows App SDK v1.4-experimental1 was released last week. Although I don’t use Windows I like to keep myself up to date on what is happening in the Windows world. It appears that the long term plan is gradually moving Windows components over to Windows App SDK which enables Microsoft to decouple the application API layer from the underlying operating system in much the same way that Google has decoupled the Android platform from the underlying kernel and user space which is allowing OEMs to stick with the same kernel and time tested drivers but upgrade what is sitting on top (Android platform). I could imagine some time in the future where there is a stable Windows base that that is super stable with the Windows App SDK on top being regularly upgraded along with the bundled applications in much the same way it occurs on Android through the Play Store.