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I think Apple has done well with their computers not needing to play the game of who has the fastest processor. Don't want to go back to that nonsense.

MacPros have always used ECC memory and G4/G5/Xeon.
They absolutely do play some of that at the MacPro desktop level.
 
Watching that SJ video, Apple has probably been running a version of macOS on ARM already for a few years "just in case". Project Catalyst runs iOS apps on macOS, so that was probably part of this whole transition all along.

I remember buying a Mac Mini a few months before the intel transition, luckily I sold it early, as the resale price on it dropped fast and it became forgotten rather quickly.

Now I'm wondering if a Mac Mini 2018 will be "end of life" in 2021 or 2022. Even though Apple still sells it like it came out yesterday for the same price.

I feel computers have been in dark times for awhile

  • Macs laptop/desktop computers mostly neglected and cheap hardware (macbooks bad keyboards, screens so thin they break just closing the screen with a small mouse wire underneath).
  • Windows telemetry with Windows 10 and auto updates
  • Linux environment so fragmented into 200 different distributions, versions and graphical manager and still no Adobe/Office products available
Dont get me wrong iOS is great, and so is macOS, but now, its going to go through a rough patch.

Their prices aren't going down. Expect the computers to be 1 big soldered sandwich. Mac Mini 2021/2 wont have anything upgradable and the iMac wont either (the laptops have already been like this), just disposable. Tim Cook doesnt like the 2nd or 3rd R "reduce" & "reuse", he thinks recycling and wasting resources to do that process is better.
 
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I don’t see Apple transitioning away from Intel in their higher end Pro models anytime soon. There’s a lot of value in being able to boot into Windows, and 12-core i9 processors are quite capable. This is more about thin and light laptops having both more power and more battery life.
 


Apple plans to announce its upcoming shift to Arm-based Macs at its virtual WWDC event later this month, giving developers several months to prepare for the transition, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

wwdc2020-1.jpg

The report claims that the first Arm-based Macs will be released in 2021, adding that Apple plans to eventually transition its entire lineup of Mac notebooks and desktops to the custom-designed processors. This lines up with a timeframe shared by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who said Apple plans to release several Arm-based Macs starting next year.

Arm-based Macs are expected to have several advantages over existing Intel-based Macs, including faster performance and reduced power consumption. Apple would also no longer be at the mercy of Intel's development schedule.

Gurman reiterates that Apple is developing at least three Mac processors, with the first based on the A14 chip in upcoming iPhone 12 models. TSMC is expected to manufacture the Mac processors based on its advanced 5nm process.

Apple's first Mac processor is expected to have 12 cores, including eight high-performance cores and at least four energy-efficient cores. Apple is said to be exploring Mac processors with more than 12 cores for further in the future, with the company apparently designing a second generation of Mac processors based on the A15 chip.

WWDC 2020 begins the week of June 22 as an online-only event. Apple has promised a virtual keynote, where it is expected to introduce iOS 14 and other new software, and seemingly its Arm-based Mac plans too.

Article Link: Apple Expected to Announce Arm-Based Mac Plans at WWDC, Transition Away From Intel to Begin in 2021
It seems like we just got rid of the power of things and apps
 
When you bought the 7.1 Mac Pro, you made a deal with the devil. It's processors were overly expensive and not top of the line. Their RAM offerings were decent but realistically overly expensive, and their anemic base dGPU offering was incredulous. They're giving "professionals" a Radeon 580? A card that was not top of the line even in 2017? Good God. It's not like the 5700XT wasn't out and about when they pumped out the Mac Pro to the market, so what gives? Apple totally crapped on the professional with it's distastefully expensive and underwhelming Mac Pro 7.1, and I urge you to rid yourself of it and buy or build a Windows/Linux workstation.

It fits my needs quite well.

-It's for music production

-Needs to run MacOS as my main software is logic.

-Hackintoshes or not as robust as native Macs. Some say they are, but I have alot of real world experience with colleagues running them and this is not the case on the ground. In the middle of a project I cant lose a day to fix a hackintosh. An example, The latest version of Logic requires Mojave or later. A colleague of my upgraded his Hackintosh to be compatible with me and broke it. About a week turn around to get it sorted out with the guy who built it for him.

-The Mac Pro is an incredibly robust machine. It multitasks incredibly well. It's outside my expertise on why, but all 4 generation's (Yes inc G5) have always been more solid and dependable than any "consumer" Mac I've owned. This isnt obvious using paper specs but become apparent after having one for a while.

-Older tech- being on the bleeding edge of tech is not where I want to be. I need hardware that is guaranteed to work well together.

-If the system dies, I can buy a new one, restore my workstation from a clone disk, send the broken one in for repair, get it back within a week, re-clone, and return the new one for a full refund.

-It's very quiet under load, which is a big deal in my studio.

-Video cards, agreed that PC's have that side of things down, but it doesnt matter as I dont work on graphics card intensive tasks.

-RAM, I never buy direct from Apple. Their prices are indeed a joke. Just as hilarious as the mice they design.

-Looks great for clients.

-Doesn't get as messed up when shipping it around as PC's I have built. It's put together more solidly.
-

I do feel it is crazily expensive overall, but I remember people running the numbers of a similarly specced Dell machine and it came pretty close price wise. Plus i saved $500 off sticker through BhPhoto and also saved the 9.25% tax by using their Payboo card. I also save 20 - 25% from the Tax deduction :)
 
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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.
Actually not a fact but ARM cores and processors that compete with Xeon and AMD machines are not like A12 processors.

But processors like that, although a lower TDP than Intel still suck lots of power.
128 Lanes of PCIe consumes lots of power when active.
You can build a Xeon class ARM processor, it's just not an A12.
 
I hope they only do this for low end macs. I use too many virtual machines for this ever to work for me professionally.

Yeah, if this is across the board it's just going to kill Apple for a number of sectors. Are they huge sectors? Probably not, but they are important sectors, and they are "foot in the door" sectors. Little of this effects me, personally, at this point. Starting with the Lion and iOS 7 degradation of the UIs I began to loose faith in Apple, and working so long in the education, SOHO, and creative markets I've quite simply seen the wholesale slaughter and destruction of nearly everything that once made the Apple ecosystem so compelling. There do remain some important and significant advantages to the Apple ecosystem, just not nearly as many as there used to be, and it's often a constant fight against Apple to actually make use of those advantages (for example, it's still common to see Apple computers last, and be perfectly usable, for an industry-unheard of 10 to 12 years, but in order to do so and stay current with security releases and keep your iWork apps up to date (because Apple now ties damn near every update to having the very latest OS) you have to figure out how to get the OS to run on perfectly capable hardware that Apple has needlessly decided to abandon in order to trick you into buying a new computer).

The school in which I work has a slew of state-mandated software that works only on Windows. They now run all of that in VMs, on Apple laptops. We are talking a dozen systems at this point, plus a couple Windows VMs that are run on the sysadmin side for other purposes. Guess what happens when ALL the staff in the school can no longer get their mission critical work accomplished on Macs? Do they have 2 laptops? Nope. They have no more Macs! Guess what happens when the staff can no longer open Pages documents from the iPads and student Macs? Does the staff use Pages on iCloud? Nope! The students move away from Apple products. Oops! Guess what happens to my friend's metal-working business, which uses lot's of CAD, and they can no longer run all the specialized software they need in Parallels at all, or as quickly as they need to? Do they get 2 laptops? Nope! They don't buy Apple next time. What happens to the Gamer who likes Macs but runs a eGPU via. Windows for gaming? Do they buy an Apple next time around, or do they do what I do and sit their old Mac in the corner, headless, and just remote into it to do anything they need to do "Mac" and then move to a Windows box for anything new? Yeah, that's probably what they do.

Hopefully none of this will happen. Hopefully Apple has a plan in mind to make everything work out just fine and those of us who work on the "POWER end of things" won't be left out in the cold. But I have little faith left in Apple, and I think a lot of power users will end up doing exactly what I do; the last Mac I bought new was a 2006 MacPro. I now have a 2009 with all the (extremely non-Apple-approved) upgrades and it absolutely flies, plus a laptop provided by a school. I'll almost certainly never buy any new Mac again - I get along just fine with remote access into my headless machine etc, and I'll be spending any "real money," unfortunately, elsewhere, and I think that's a road that Apple will continue to force more and more power-users down.
 
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I'm not gonna buy any new Macs until I buy one with an ARM inside. I can upgrade to the newest iMac this year but if the next years iMac is going to use ARM processors, I can wait a year easily. It's not about speed either, after the Intel transition, PowerPC macs lost their resale value quickly.
 
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I hope they only do this for low end macs. I use too many virtual machines for this ever to work for me professionally.

And I am sure that Apple have engineers who know what they are doing and I can promise that you are worrying about nothing. VMs will still work once Apple switch over to ARM.
These exact same types of arguments were used when Apple switched over from PowerpC to Intel and that did not turn out how the doom sayers said it would.
 
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But processors like that, although a lower TDP than Intel still suck lots of power.
128 Lanes of PCIe consumes lots of power when active.
You can build a Xeon class ARM processor, it's just not an A12.

Yes but it doesn't need to be an A12. You put fans into a MBP. It can be a lot more power hungry than an A12. It just needs to beat Intel at power consumption. And at desktop level, nobody cares about power consumption, it just needs to be fast and cheap.
 
Arm co-processors please. Intel chips are too good for so many tasks. I don’t want to have to drop macOS for Linux.

Except that these days Intel CPUs are so krap at pretty much everything. Just look at the many many many delays and problems that Intel keeps having. This is a major reason for Apple wanting to ditch Intel and about time too. I am sure that the ARM CPUs will work just fine.
 
I am hoping that Apple knows what it is doing but I have doubts after some of its recent decisions. But on the whole, I keep the faith because they are smart people, it has a great ecosystem and I really enjoy Apple products. Also, MacOS is my favorite operating system. If I have to go to Windows or Linux, I would be unhappy. However, I would need the new iPadOS for ARM computers to offer all the amenities and functionality of MacOS. It falls far short currently. I also would need my trading software to be fully functional to what is available on MacOS or Windows. It also falls far short currently. So, I remain hopeful but my inner voice still keeps saying" I hope this is not a New Coke moment" for the company.
 
I'm not intrinsically opposed to a switch to ARM chips but it just means that all of the software that you've been using probably won't work, or will only work for a limited time before they deprecate the backwards compatibility (like Rosetta).

I've already been screwed by them dropping 32-bit support on Mac. So many old games that are just unplayable now. And this change will get the rest.
 
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As a nerd, I'm excited by this. Judging by the pace of ARM progression, Apple seems to have excellent hardware teams, so for the first time they're designing (almost) the entire box, not being reliant on 3rd parties to keep up chip development.

As a user though, it worries me. Using virtualisation all the time at work; if Apple does go ARM-only the Macs in our office are gone.

You seem to think that 1) it is the only thing that matters in the world and 2) You forget that Apple are aware of this and will ensure that whatever solution they put in place enables you to still use VMs etc. Apple design the hardware and the software so that the user can enjoy a better and more seamless experience. So with Apple esemntiually making their own CPUs for Mac they will be better placed to ensure that the ARM CPUs work as they should do with the software and vice-versa. So in other words the software teams will make sure that the hardware teams develop the ARM CPUs in a way that enables virtualisation to work. You all act as though Apple are just going to take the ARM CPU from an Ipad/Iphone and plonk it straight into a Mac.
I am pretty sure that will not happen and they will tweak the design.
Stop worrying and wait to see what happens.
 
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Personally I have no regrets in purchasing my 10th gen 13" MBP - love this machine. I was aware of the ARM-transition rumors before making the decision to purchase. I have a high-level understanding of both the pros and cons to this transition, but I'm really, really interested to hear what Apple has to say about this transition, specifically their rationale and transition roadmap. How are they going to make this a minimal painful process not just for developers, but for the rest of the consumers/prosumers/business users that this transition will potentially impact.

My whole point in returning to Mac was to trim down on the number of devices needed. Although nice to have, iOS apps on Mac can continue to be standalone for me. The iPad Pro lends a different user experience that complements my MBP. I have an iPP for iOS apps, but having disruption in use of Windows software on the MBP isn't an option, not at this time. Not every software shop will be ready at day one, so if the ARM transition works for my workflow when I'm ready for my next Mac purchase, I'll stay with Apple. Otherwise, I have no problem returning to Windows.

It’s going to come down to Apple’s plans and timing.
 
My big concern - is that Apple locks this OS down too much. They need to either:
- make it much easier to use the app store (and make it easy to publish quickly)
- make it easy for 3rd party developers to deliver functionality outside the use of the app store. I need my homebrew/karabiner/etc to be effective on a mac.
 
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Hackintoshes or not as robust as native Macs. Some say they are, but I have alot of real world experience with colleagues running them and this is not the case on the ground. In the middle of a project I cant lose a day to fix a hackintosh. An example, The latest version of Logic requires Mojave or later. A colleague of my upgraded his Hackintosh to be compatible with me and broke it. About a week turn around to get it sorted out with the guy who built it for him.


Build them correctly and they are rocksolid and every bit as stable as native Macs, particularly of late with an OpenCore install.

(10 year hack builder and user)
 
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And I am sure that Apple have engineers who know what they are doing and I can promise that you are worrying about nothing. VMs will still work once Apple switch over to ARM.
These exact same types of arguments were used when Apple switched over from PowerpC to Intel and that did not turn out how the doom sayers said it would.
Except that move was toward the industry standard. A move to ARM would be the opposite direction. It was never possible to run x86 VMs with good performance on PowerPC Macs (there was only Microsoft's terrible Virtual PC), and it likely again won't be possible if they move to ARM.
 
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