> "Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?"
My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).
What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.
> "I think, realistically, the issues the author describes - particularly with the keyboard and trackpad - would drive me up the wall for any kind of serious use."
Me too. But the tray table compatibility resonates. I had hoped someone would build a modern netbook as a detachable focused on productivity and light gaming (say, Steamdeck class), maintainability and (modular) expandability; a modern road warrior that's also a nice hobbyist machine that stands some abuse. Framework was/is positioned to put something out, but they decided to release the F-12 instead.
MUTOS 1835 was a UNIX port which we did under contract for an AT-compatible
from Robotron. Since this machine was never produced, the whole thing
must be seen as a flop."
Yeah, just about 20 EC 1835s were built (the "C" is the Russian "S"; they're ESER (ES EVM) machines, after all). But then again, there's MUTOS 1700 (for A 7100 and A 7150) and MUTOS 1834 (for EC 1834)... along with CP/M, CP/M-86 and DOS, of course. The 32-bit (386) follow-up to the 1835 was planned for 1993/94. Well, history had other plans. I remember my first programming lessons in my school's computer lab in 1991... on Amstrad 386DX/20 machines.
> "It is a laptop that’s designed to be your laptop for at least two or three upgrade cycles, which, for Apple, implies a new laptop."
In all fairness, most Apple users are technically illiterate (hardware-wise). And running upgradeable machines to optimum efficiency necessitates running a redundant setup, e. g. the main bird and a compatible support unit, usually an older one, but capable enough to take over relatively seamlessly for a while, enable diagnostics, facilitate maintenance, and so on.
Most Apple users have only one computer, with their secondary machine the iPhone, itself a neutered simulacrum of a pocket computer, just good enough to do some basic outsourcing of troubleshooting, and to place an order for the next computer of course.
People who gravitate to Frameworks offerings, or similar machines, are just of a completely different mindset than the typical Apple customer. As evidenced by threads like this one. That's also one of the reasons why the F-12 was a misfire. You don't "half-ass" machines built for long-term support. And in this climate, an entry-level LTS machine that's supposed to become popular needed and needs a different approach. Which begins with the form factor.
I consider the Framework 12 a conceptually flawed machine (especially given the setup of its maker) but, as a general computing option, it would still be of much better value to me than anything Apple had or has on offer; every hardware feature I value in general purpose mobile computers is implemented better in the machines of other builders. And the less said about the OS and the backing platform and company, the better.
Sadly, without an accompanying FPGA-implementation of an FPU it's much less useful for productivity work/research, i.e. outside of 08/15 gaming and application fare. Same with Ao486, which only implements a 486SX.
I think there are two reasons we haven’t seen an FPGA FPU yet, especially for MiSTer.
First, FPUs are complex and FPGA support for floating point is limited. There's DSP blocks for integer additions and multiplications. But very little FP support.
Second, the CPU itself may not be fast enough for an FPU to matter much. Quake wants at least a 75 MHz Pentium, while ao486-MiSTer is closer to a 486-66. So we probably need both a faster CPU design and a faster FPGA. Maybe Altera's new Agilex 5 will be useful here.
Aye. Well, hopefully something comes to pass as a lot of industry-specific applications demand the (emulated) physical presence of an FPU. Keeping that in mind, it's obviously high-level bitching (as we say in Germany); I, as a fan of IBM PCs and compatibles, am very fascinated by your and others' awesome work in this domain.
> a lot of industry-specific applications demand the (emulated) physical presence of an FPU
Can you name some? I cant come up with any real world uses of FPU implemented PC for industrial use. Even MISTER is pushing it considering availability of emulation.
What I've personally seen that needed an FPU: a water analysis package for a "field laboratory" (its centerpiece being a luggable PC), several in-house applications of an insurance company (which my mentor, a mathematician, coded), as well as a bespoke, modular sasec (safety and security) suite for facility management. I'm slowly building a reference list of DOS- and UNIX-based industry software, as I have an interest in that stuff. Can't help with any names. Yet.
So much for needed. Packages that run without, but are only fully useful with an FPU, were relatively common.
My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).
What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.
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