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Apple Expected to Announce Arm-Based Mac Plans at WWDC, Transition Away From Intel to Begin in 2021
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Buying a mac for games was never a good idea.
Depends on what you're trying to do.
eg. Avoid Apple's high prices (and you're probably heard my ranting and raving re: Apple's Mac pricing ad' nauseum...
Work dual platform.
Need Intel cpu compatibility for your audience.
Sure. Alot of people don't have 'two' computers.
But most people have an iPod, ATV, Mac...iPhone, iPad...
Having an intel (for work) and Mac at home has been a thing for years.
If you're budget is £2k, you could buy a Mac. Buy a PC. That is true now and that won't change much.
So, if APple pulls bootcamp, and I want to play an obscure game from 2004, I buy a decent tower for £1k that performs better than any £2k iMac in Bootcamp.
if the 24 inch iMac is 'affordable...' I can buy one of those too and enjoy the Mac, as passionately as I always have. That doens't have to change because of Mac ARM. It only makes it more so.
I never did quite recover from the PPC loss. It was my 1st Mac Tower in 1997.
And yes. I got burned £1k Adobe software on PPC as Mac went Intel. Ouch.
Azrael.
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The Core Wars have begun.
Azrael.
Likely, unless Microsoft starts selling Windows on ARM as a standalone product (right now it is licensed only to OEMs for shipping products, and I doubt Apple would license it). However, virtualization existed under PowerPC, and would likely continue under ARM.
Yes. AMD have only really caught up with Intel. And passed them in Core count, yes.
But single performance isn't anything special. Intel's latest is still ahead in gaming performance in single core.
Mult-core. Cinebench? Rendering? AMD. But that's largely because of chiplets and many more cores.
I'd take an outside bet that Apple can add many cores to Mac ARM.
Azrael.
No, I think this transition won’t be nearly as quick as the PowerPC to Intel transition.
Given that the MP is by definition modular, what’s to stop them from offering a board that lets it run ARM MacOS?
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Yes, not buying an ARM Mac is indeed a bad move.
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IBM was a “relatively smaller firm?”
The PPC market for Mac sales was. 'Relatively smaller.' Not enough to sustain G5 in a laptop.
Shame it wasn't.
Azrael.
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Yes. ANd it's going to do it way better.
Azrael.
Yes, I really would like them to bring back a 12” MacBook. A fanless Mac that actually runs fast would be good.
I just want to be sure ... the change to Apple's own ARM-based processors will mean no more Windows in Boot Camp, correct?
Most likely yes. Microsoft has an ARM version of Windows, but it's pretty terrible in terms of performance and compatibility. Contrary to what some here have claimed, there is no IA emulation layer for ARM with reasonable performance, and I doubt there ever will be.
By the time these ARM Macs could come out, Intel will likely have solved its process problems (or Apple could just switch to TSMC-manufactured AMD CPUs, which would be far less disruptive than a switch to ARM).
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This is my hope as well - a dual CPU machine, that switches based on workload, like they do with the accelerated graphics chips vs integrated. That would actually be pretty cool...but given their recent quality problems, man I wouldn't want to be an early adopter.
Thanks. I guess this will make me a Windows guy again. Crap.
I feel like the Bad Luck Brian meme.
- Gets first Mac ever.
- It’s a legacy product 2 weeks later.
- Gets first Mac ever.
- It’s a legacy product 2 weeks later.
Rosetta was a temporary band-aid until everything could be recompiled. In that case, developers were being asked to move to the industry standard, widely adopted platform from a one-off. This is the reverse.
If we go by GeekBench (which has its limitations), the A12X in my iPad Pro is slightly faster than the Ice Lake i5 in my MacBook Pro. That’s faster than the majority of notebook computers sold.
Sounds like you were always a windows guy if the reason you use a mac is to run windows.
Except they were still writing for macOS, which is NOT the industry standard. True, in 2005, switching to Intel gave Apple the ability to run Windows and promote the Mac to “switchers.” However, they haven’t emphasized that in their marketing for years. They are more likely looking to promote the Mac to iPhone and iPad users.
I spend most of my time in macOS. But, I like switching to Windows for some light flight/racing simulation (gaming). It's been nice having 1 machine that could do both.
My first Apple product, iPod Mini, died a pitifully early death and they wanted more than the value of the device to repair it, and they wouldn't ensure I kept the special engraving it came with as it was a prize won from playing Ragnarok Online back in the early 00s. My second Apple product, the last non-unibody Macbook Pro got sent in for repair about 8 times before they gave me the new unibody, which I promptly sold on Craigslist after it's defects became apparent. I had a few iPhones over the years, my first being the iPhone 4, which was a subpar device compared to what I could get from Android based devices, and then I tried with a 6S, which was awful, and then a 7, which was alright, and then the 8, which was the start of the dismal glass backed lineup we currently suffer through. I most recently tried an iPhone Pro Max 256 GB Space Grey, and I was extremely unimpressed with it to the point where I sold it and went with a Samsung Galaxy device.
Apple just isn't the company it pretends to be. There's always been a bit of mindfuggery going on with them, and that reality distortion field just isn't working for Cook like it did for Jobs.
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And it is most likely that those 98% of mac users could also get on well using a chromebook.
Raw specs don't tell the whole story. I don't know of any real world examples of Apple's ARM chips being used in heavy multitasking scenarios. People look to the iPad Pros as "proof" that the move to ARM is going to be amazing from a performance standpoint. But those iPPs generally perform only one heavy task at a time.
I see Apple's shift to ARM for their macOS devices as part of a move to further control that segment by increasing the use of proprietary components. There can be a benefit to that in that Apple could optimize the hardware without external constraints (though their recent track record hasn't been good).
Kind of like how they prioritize in patching the jailbreak in 13.5.1 instead of fixing the VPN bug since 13.3.1
That would be pointless for MS unless all apps for windows also are being released for ARM. I don't see a huge enough market for most developer to do that. Heck they many dropped Mac support when OpenGL died. Imagine to have extra cost to test and port to ARM and metal. The only potential upside is the iOS apps may be able to run on it, but if "MacOS" is going to be a locked garden like iOS is, it is properly not a machine most professionals want.
This. Yeah, I dropped a bunch of cash on mine assuming to spread the cost out over a 7+++ year lifespan. Like the last 2 Mac Pro's proceeding it, i assumed it would be a beast for many, many years. Would be frustrating if this wasn't the case.
Realistically, i'd guess that ARM chips that can replace the Xeon chips will be a long way off, and that music plugin developers will take a long while to transition as well. But perhaps this will all go faster than I expect.