iMac Pro Appears to Include A10 Fusion Chip for Always-On ‘Hey Siri’
macrumors.comPlease stop saying that Apple is secretly recording your conversations for nefarious purposes with Hey Siri. It’s been around for 2 years and there has been nothing world-ending found about the feature.
A reminder about how Hey Siri privacy works: https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/11/apple-addresses-privacy-qu...
> In no case is the device recording what the user says or sending that information to Apple before the feature is triggered,” says Apple.
> Instead, audio from the microphone is continuously compared against the model, or pattern, of your personal way of saying ‘Hey Siri’ that you recorded during setup of the feature. Hey Siri requires a match to both the ‘general’ Hey Siri model (how your iPhone thinks the words sound) and the ‘personalized’ model of how you say it. This is to prevent other people’s voices from triggering your phone’s Hey Siri feature by accident.
> Until that match happens, no audio is ever sent off of your iPhone. All of that listening and processing happens locally.
It won't be listening to you if they don't care to.
The idea of having a device that listens to everything around in your home is unnerving, for me atleast.
The problem with saying "they would never do something like this" or "I have nothing to hide so why do I care" is that your trusting people thousands of miles away from you who are heavily influenced by the government...
If your not comfortable having a policeman sit on your desk while you work on your computer then I might not be a good idea supporting products like these.
Personally, Siri can screw off. I am more than happy to check the weather myself. :)
If Apple wants to eavesdrop on you I don’t see how Siri changes the situation. You already have a networked device with a microphone, turning or not turning on an additional service hardly makes a difference.
And that's just it, isn't it. Siri is just a name. A cartoon.
The reality is that at a minimum, it's an organization of profit motivated people trying to listen to you. Maybe Apple is controlled by nice people today, but how many other companies will justify their own actions by pointing to Apple's practices.
And when those companies are bought and sold, or go out of business after a period of desperation, what happens in those moments?
Justify this with Apple, and ten more organizations follow in those footsteps.
That’s fine, I don’t like services like ‘hey Siri’ either so I turn them off. Or rather, in the case of ‘hey Siri’, I don’t turn it on.
There is no conspiracy. If you don’t want your phone or other device to listen continuously, do not turn on a service that requires it to do that.
As long as there is an always-on CPU with non-permanent firmware that has access to the microphone in my device, Fort Meade will find a way to hijack it and subvert this security model. I would rather not give them more attack surface.
Always-on CPU with non-permanent firmware with access to the microphone... sounds like every cell phone made in the past couple of decades.
And the power source is built-in with no way to detach it when you want. Brave new world
Yeah, the situation is pretty bad.
If they have come this far, why should they even bother about the “Allow Hey Siri” toggle?
Well I'm not an idiot. Things like Siri do not exist to help me or improve my life like the marketing and Apple fans proclaim.
It exists to sell me shit and make people money.
Not nefarious, I accept capitalism. But at least let me turn it off.
You can turn it off by going to Settings -> Siri & Search -> Listen for "Hey Siri".
It's not silently enabled by default. You choose on or off when setting up the device.
Yeah I'm sure it will be just as easy as it was on win10 ;)
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Neither "Hey Siri" nor Siri itself is enabled by default. It takes 3 seconds to disable if you ever change your mind. To imply otherwise is either ignorant or disingenuous.
We'll see how deeply embedded it is in the OS. Disabling Cortana didn't shut down Cortana.
I'm also looking forward to packet inspection.
> It exists to sell me shit and make people money.
How does Apple use Siri to sell you shit?
This is huge. While it starts with just powering things like boot security and Hey Siri, I guarantee you this is the first step toward Apple getting rid of Intel on the Mac.
How much longer before they release MB/MBPs with the same chip, doing the same thing? How much longer after that before we see SDKs released for writings apps that run on Mac, but are completely executed within the ARM processor? I think this is coming far sooner than many people think.
Here is what I think will occur : New Macbook Pro (not a refresh) will probably have this chip in but it will be probably only be used initially for iOS emulator for developers. The next release of macOS will probably have iOS apps that you can run on a mac. Then they will replace the Macbook Air line in to a Macbook Arm as a new product launch at the beginning of 2019.
> it will be probably only be used initially for iOS emulator for developers
This is quite a large technical undertaking, with a very small pay-off given the tiny percentage of users who develop on their Mac for iOS devices. I can't see this being something that happens until x86 CPUs have been removed entirely.
>with a very small pay-off given the tiny percentage of users who develop on their Mac for iOS devices.
If they go that way, the pay off obviously wont be "helping iOS developers have faster simulations", but as the parent already implied, beta testing and driving forward the eventual mix of iOS apps and macOS. So the "faster simulations" would just be a step in that process helping with perfecting it in a low stakes situation.
Plus, if it indeed happen, as the article also states, it would be used for another payoff, always on (at least when on mains power) Hey Siri, plus controlling the touch strip perhaps.
At the rate Apple is increasing its iPhone SKUs every year, it won't be long until all iOS app companies will need to purchase like 20 different-generation iPhones. I think they'll need the emulator eventually.
Not sure why is this being downvoted. Apple is currently selling 8 models across 4 lines (6s, 7, 8, X and SE), and the iPhone 6 line is still being sold by carriers. This is pretty much the first time when 8 primary models are available from Apple + at least 2 models are still being sold.
If the model trend continues to grow as it has been since the iPhone 6, there might be actually a need for device model emulation for development...
Have you seen how many Samsung Galaxy variants exist in comparison?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy#Phones
That's just one manufacturer.
> The next release of macOS will probably have iOS apps that you can run on a mac.
Why? iOS apps are designed for touch. Macs don't have touchscreens.
> New Macbook Pro (not a refresh) will probably have this chip
No need to speculate. Check out the TouchBar MacBooks.
I automatically dismiss comments that start with “This is huge”. I’m not the only one. Could you please edit that filler out of your comment, thanks.
I guarantee you this is the first step toward Apple getting rid of Intel on the Mac.
...and making Macs even more closed and proprietary, moving away from the (semi-open, but also quickly closing[1]) PC again. This is huge, and scary.
Apple never bothered with EFI secure boot, and even go out of their way to do BIOS emulation for other OSs.
Apple knows that on desktop computers, the genie is out of the bottle. They wouldn't block booting other OSs, just like they they still give options to disable Gatekeeper and SIP despite the FUD.
It is the return to the roots, just like Apple used to be before OS X happened.
They only became more open out of necessity.
Apple’s roots were extremely open. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#History:
”After building it for himself and showing it at the Club, he and Steve Jobs gave out schematics (technical designs) for the computer to interested club members and even helped some of them build and test out copies”
Also: the Apple 2 shipped with full schematics and an assembly listing of its ROMs.
The ‘phone book’ edition of Inside Macintosh didn’t document all hardware, but I wouldn’t call it ‘closed’. It explains how OS calls are implemented, details on the floppy disk interface, etc.
That was the very early days, hardly noticed in Europe.
What I remember are the LC and Quadra with NuBus, AppleTalk, QuickDraw, QuickDraw 3D, Sound Manager...
Hardly open in what regards using standards common to other platforms.
Having proper technical manuals was common to all companies during those days.
I don’t see how that makes them different from other companies in that period.
NuBus was an open standard, the ISA bus of PCs wasn’t. Neither were the Atari or Amiga buses.
As to AppleTalk: they could have chosen something else for networking, but I don’t see what they should have used instead of AppleTalk for networking. Ethernet existed, but used thick coax cable (twisted pair is from 1984, standardized in 1986. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair); token ring is of about the same time, but also proprietary, and wasn’t ready in time for the launch of the Macintosh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk#History). TCP/IP existed, but it wasn’t clear that it would win the race, and it was overkill for the intended uses of AppleTalk.
The various operating system APIs aren’t less or more proprietary than what OS/2, Windows, Atari’s TOS, AmigaOS, and the various Unixes offered at the time (OpenGL wasn’t available yet; X Windows would have crawled on Mac hardware of the time even more than QuickDraw did, and wasn’t stabilized in 1984)
I also don’t see that they should have done things different after they made the choices they made for the 1984 Mac. They could have opened the hardware somewhere in the 1980s, but it isn’t certain that that would have been beneficial for them.
I think the only real difference is the openness of the PC hardware architecture, and that was accidental/unintended.
That’s Jobs-Woz Apple, not Jobs Apple. The Apple you’re thinking of started disappearing when the Macintosh came out, and was no more when Jobs returned as CEO.
Not saying it’s a bad thing, mind.
Or you could just buy a Non Apple product if you don't like it.
Will be interesting to see if native iOS apps will be able to run for development or regular use. This is a good sign for the convergence of the Mac and "i" products.
For fun here's the "transitions" talk Steve Jobs gave announcing the switch from PowerPC to Intel processors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghdTqnYnFyg
Every iOS app already runs natively on Intel. Adding an ARM co-processor to the Mac doesn't change that situation.
It's possible to compile iOS apps for x86 if you have the source, but this x86 version is not included in what's shipped to the app store.
> Every iOS app already runs natively on Intel.
For simple apps this is more or less true.
More complicated cases might not behave same.
For example, ARMv8 and x86 have different memory models. So execution won't be equivalent. You can have concurrency bugs in your code that only manifest on ARMv8.
I'm sure there are a lot of other examples of differences as well.
Converging the Mac and the i products sounds like a terrible idea, as long as iOS insists on running non-windowed apps.
Serious workloads is very inefficient without a proper windowed desktop environment combined with a Finder and a Terminal that can access files across all apps.
Also, having an x86-compatible CPU at the core enables high enough performance for virtualbox/vmware, which is a huge enabler in that it allows running windows or linux VMs side by side (or even integrated) with the native desktop.
A converged ARM-based Macbook sounds very much like a toy computer; a facebook+youtube media consumption station with an option for perhaps doing limited creative work such as composing an iMovie or touching up some photos at the most.
>A converged ARM-based Macbook sounds very much like a toy computer; a facebook+youtube media consumption station with an option for perhaps doing limited creative work such as composing an iMovie or touching up some photos at the most.
What you describe as a "toy computer" is actually an indestructible and hella-great main business computer for a huge majority of people.
Most people aren't designers or videographers or programmers -- including most Mac users. What you dismiss as "Facebook" is actually the browser, which is how most business users do their business day in, day out (plus some office suite and so on).
So what you describe will be more like a Chromebook done right.
Nothing wrong with a device like that - put a keyboard and mouse on the iPad and go at it. But please don't take away the option of having a real computer Macbook for the rest of us.
Sure, I agree with that too. I'm all those things the main public is not (programmer as main trade, but make films and music on the side).
I hope we'll always have that general flexibility.
That said, I prefer something closed-but-works-98%-of-the-time like macOS's graphics engine (Quartz or whatever is called) than the infinitely flexible X-Windows (or whatever graphics engine/compositor rules Linux distros now) that seldom works properly and people write things in reviews like "it worked with my graphic card just fine on the first try" as if this is still allowed to be a good surprise in 2017.
A chromebook has windows and a file browser and a terminal. It doesn't fit that "toy computer" description at all.
A macOS-iOS hubrid doesn't exist yet, so we don't know about what it will have.
That said, iOs has a file browser itself now (and of course it had windows from the start, if by "windows" you mean the ability to show UI apps. If you mean "overlapping windows", it has side-tiled ones, that are even better than overlapping). As for terminal, there are several for iOS as well.
> That said, iOS has a file browser itself now
Oh right, they did just add a file browser. Does that make it easy to access files from multiple apps? ...actually, upon looking into it more, it only shows files saved in a very specific way from apps with explicit support. It's 90% an icloud app, not a local file system app. That's not good enough.
> (and of course it had windows from the start, if by "windows" you mean the ability to show UI apps. If you mean "overlapping windows", it has side-tiled ones, that are even better than overlapping).
I mean multiple apps on screen, which is probably good enough in iOS at the moment.
> As for terminal, there are several for iOS as well.
Local terminals? The issue is not ssh clients, it's getting a shell open. The best I can find is https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/284556/can-i-run-a... with an answer of "none exist". And there's definitely not one with access to your files.
Well I don't think Apple will be as senseless as they have been with the iPad Pro. I think they will converge them, but continue to support classic Mac interaction models (keyboard + mouse).
With all the competition from Microsoft's Surface lineup we'll probably see the iPad shift even more towards the Mac side of interaction as well.
To your second point about performance: have we really seen what a high wattage ARM CPU can do?
I'm sure we'll see ARM CPUs with native performance on par with x86 soon, but not for running x86 binaries at full speed (i.e. windows/linux VMs).
In terms of running iOS apps for regular use, it makes no sense to run apps designed for handheld touch screen devices on a non-touchscreen device where the display is fixed.
For development, what’s the advantage over the current system where your app is compiled for x86? It would still run in something like the simulator app and have similar drawbacks.
I’m more excited for possibilities like FaceID, not to mention other uses for the secure enclave.
Purely speculating from a position of ignorance, but I wonder if this might be able to take over for a variety of coprocessors.)
This is not a switch from Intel to ARM for Mac, but a ARM coprocessor in Mac similar to new MacBook Pro that handles the Touchbar and Secure Enclave for TouchID. Apple don't even like the idea of touch interface for Mac apps, so its unlikely they will open up running of iOS apps on the Mac.
Curious to see if new Mac from now onwards will still support TouchID as Apple has said that they are abandoning Touch ID on the iPhone. Makes no sense to support TouchID on just one platform, the minor one.
I don't think we really know what it could be yet. Looks to be a inroad to phasing in ARM chips in Mac products.
It could just be about doubling the battery life automatically for typical workloads.
The A10 could even be running OSX like the Apple TV allowing Apple to port their own apps to it making the experience pretty seemless.
Having an embedded iOS computer take over most "firmware" features would definitely simplify things for Apple. The strings found that hint at the A10 being in charge make it sound like this could possibly even solve the Intel ME issues, if the iOS part absorbs roles traditionally given to the Intel chipset.
Steven Sinofsky had an interesting tweetstorm throwing a bit of cold water on the notion that this was a sign that Macs were moving to ARM.
> 12/ Or do you allow cross-compilation? Then the access to underlying system undermines "iOS" walled approach. Only "certified apps" isn't so interesting to most people.
I don't get this point. How does ARM translate to "walled garden"? I see no reason to tie ARM and the walled garden-approach together, just because that's the way it is on mobile. Non-certified apps would work just fine on OSX if the developers build for ARM.
Assumption 1: Most interesting OSX apps are active ones, where the authors have the source code, and are thus able to cross-compile and publish ARM binaries.
Assumption 2: Due to volume (and using an indenpendent foundry) the A11 chip is at least 10x cheaper than an Intel CPU.
I'd love to see a Macbook with 10xA11s, for a total of 20 high-performance cores, even if it can only run non-legacy apps ("legacy" meaning apps that depend on x86 code somehow).
Does anyone know how much space the four inefficient cores on the A11 take up? Perhaps the A11 volume is just so large that Apple can spit them out at a cost so low that it doesn't matter if four of the cores remain unused? I don't think they'd be of much use in a Macbook -- at least not the 40 of them that would be available in a 10xA11 setup.
> Does anyone know how much space the four inefficient cores on the A11 take up?
Have a look at the die photo at [0]. Not much.
[0]: http://techinsights.com/about-techinsights/overview/blog/app...
I wonder if macOS will be able to run userspace code on this. Apple's ARM chips are pretty fast, so this could be extra 50% of computing power for the iMac.
From software side they've already done similar things in the past (fat binaries, Rosetta).
This new iMac pro, in its ‘low end’ configuration, has 8 cores (https://www.apple.com/lae/imac-pro/specs/), possibly of the new “Purley” kind (http://bgr.com/2017/07/12/imac-pro-2017-specs-intel-xeon-pur...)
A single A10 will not add 50% of computing power, even ignoring its GPU.
True, but the A10 is much cheaper than any Intel CPU, so Apple could develop a multi-socket ARM motherboard to increase the number of ARM cores, to make performance compatible with Intel's (perhaps at lower cost, since Apple can get cheap A11s using the high volume of iPhone 8/X).
Also, according to Geekbench, the single-thread performance of the 2.4 GHz A11 is 70%[1] of the 3.7 GHz i7-8700K. I'm guessing Apple could bring the A11 even closer to the i7 by increasing the clock frequency, which may not make sense for mobile devices (because of disproportionally higher power consumption).
So, again according to the Geekbench figures, four A11s (at mobile clock frequency) is 50% faster than a 6-core i7-8700K[1].
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/52 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2062
If the A10 really is half as fast as an Intel CPU, wouldn't it make more sense for Apple to put four of these chips in an iMac -- delivering double the performance -- and use the savings to fight Intel's x86 emulation patent in court?
One could hope that, due to the negative PR, Intel would give up trying to prevent Apple from delivering 2x the performance at a lower cost. In any case, I think this patent needs to be challenged thoroughly, as it seems to favor only Intel while punishing consumers.
I'm worried this is going to be some kind of TouchBar-and-Siri type useless gimmick instead of something that genuinely makes this a good useful machine.
The last thing I want is to talk to my turned off computer... Comedy sketches of the past are becoming reality, and will be propelled by "Apple can't do no wrong" crowd.
I wonder if it'll shut off if, like me, you turn off Siri.
I'm glad they're trying this first in Macs that're expected to always be plugged in, rather than laptops.
Could handle Face ID, etc. Possibly offload video encoding/transcoding? The A10 can handle 4K HEVC. Not sure what the point would be with dedicated graphics doing the same.
Article mentions secure enclave so FaceID is very likely. It doesn’t make much ergonomic sense to put fingerprint reader like you do on macbook.
External keyboard with touchbar and touchid might be interesting (but hard to make wireless, unless with some cool new wireless charging mechanism).
Right. With Face ID, you sit down in front of your computer and your desktop is already up and available.
Makes perfect sense for them to do this for Siri and Security. Otherwise they'd end up with two separate implementations.
Crazy how HN flips out over the Intel ME then turns around and applauds this.
Strange, I didn't see in the article any suggestions that this chip had full access to all data flowing throughout the computer. Almost as though it's not at all similar in any way to the Intel ME discussions.
This has interesting implications in many aspects of computing while Intel ME largely serves to attack and spy on the user.
I have more trust in Apple than I do Intel.
Lots of Apple fanboys on this forum.
Apple did it before and they will succeed again. Fat binaries.
Always-on Siri is a very creepy feature, and who even needs it in a "Pro" workstation?
>the chip will enable support for "Hey Siri" functionality, potentially even when the iMac Pro is turned off.
Intel ME wasn't bad enough... so Apple builds a second backdoor you can't remove, with the explicit purpose of bugging your room?
No thanks.
This is such a ridiculous statement...literally anything could be a backdoor why would it be one of the most expensive components ?
Mac development has lost some momentum, so maybe unique hardware help push things forward. On the other hand, the ever-controversial touchbar was unique hardware.