Why would Apple care at all about dual boot? This is a tiny percentage of users. Supporting another OS on their devices has never been their priority.
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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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Why would Apple care at all about dual boot? This is a tiny percentage of users. Supporting another OS on their devices has never been their priority.
I also use virtual machines, but I don't see what the issue is. Apple's processors almost certainly will be a leap forward from Intel's, so they should run virtual machines just fine once ported to the new processor. That's not to say developers won't have a lot of work to do in the meantime.
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Given my 2018 iPad Pro spits out a 4K video 2x as fast as my top end 2018 i7 13" MBP, I'd assume video editing will not be an issue.
As long as arm Macs are as fast as they are now, and I believe the first one will be significant faster than the one it replaces (bragging rights), whether that is a Mac Mini/MPB or any other Mac, it will have no effect on me, the OS is the most important and ease of use.
No, you won't, as virtualisation only works on the same type of processor. You mean emulation, which comes with a hefty performance hit.
Can't wait for the Photoshop speed comparisons. 
I genuinely hope you are right.
Being faster (like with a benchmark/cut down apps) when you are not doing as much isn't much of a challenge.
Doing everything an Intel or AMD CPU can do, running the same software, AND be as good or hopefully faster is something I#d love to see
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I hope you are right.
I'm aware that Intel/AMD are able to do a lot more "grunt" with each beat of their hart.
Look forward to seeing what Apple has to demonstrate to be as good as or better than them.
Without using cheats (light OS / light apps) to make it happen.
I'm skeptical, but look forward to being proved wrong
Up to 20% doesn't sound all too great an advantage for a personal device IMO. Also probably not enough for convincing emulation speed. I'd rather take the existing software and the current overall compatibility over some throwback to the 90's where everyone was cooking their own thing.
Comparisons of RISC and CISC clockspeeds come to mind.
Can we even imagine the number of cross platform developers who won't bother any longer. It's already a struggle with some software.
Comparisons of RISC and CISC clockspeeds come to mind.
Can we even imagine the number of cross platform developers who won't bother any longer. It's already a struggle with some software.
Apple march to the beat of their own drum, not others. This is why they are where they are today....arguably one of the most innovative companies in tech. Apple take people to places they never thought they needed to go, until they were shown the way and have been solely responsible for the obsolescence of entire categories of tech.
Look at it like this....Apple already have a huge ARM user base and a transition to desktop devices is going to mean it is even more compelling for devs to code for ARM and high quality apps will likely increase. This is where the money is going to be as ARM will likely provide large energy cost savings to businesses. When your business has thousands or hundreds of thousands of machines, moving to ARM and saving 150W of electricity on each machine makes financial sense. As an example, going from 200W processor to a 50W processor (just an example) on 1,000 machines running 365 days per year for 16 hours a day is an energy saving of 876,000kWh per year. For 100,000 machines, that's 87,600,000kWh per year. Here in Australia, the average cost of electricity is 0.27c/ kWh (NSW) so for 1,000 machines a business will save $236,520 pa and $23.6m pa for 100,000 machines.
Following MS is hardly a good strategy and I'd hazard a guess that other hardware manufacturers will have to seriously think about also moving to ARM.
20% because of design, plus another 20% because Intel can't get their **** together and get past 14nm++++
Your workload does not need a Intel x86 CPU. Just think about how your work was done before Mac using Intel CPUs.
Technically no workload requires a x86 CPU as CPU is not related to any "workload".
Mac applications are dramatically different than those running on windows. Nobody code CPU assembly for those applications. And guess what, porting an application from Windows x64 to Mac x64 is much harder than porting it from Windows x64 to Windows ARM64.
Even today lot of applications refuse to have a Mac port because of that. It's not easy to port a software between operating systems. Running same CPU does not make it any easier.
OS hide all those CPU differences.
And BTW Office works on ARM long time ago when Microsoft release the Windows RT devices. It's the win32 legacy Office 2013 not the mobile version.
CPU does nothing to any user land applications. Only kernel drivers care about what CPU you are running.
My 16-inch MacBook Pro may be my last Mac. The hardware and software churn has burned me out. For every transition, people insist there are good reasons that will benefit the Mac, yet the Mac platform remains in bad shape. It's hard to believe now, but this platform used to be important enough that Valve once made exclusive earbud cosmetics for Mac users in Team Fortress 2.
Besides, MS also has Office for iPadOS. With Catalyst, they can port that to macOS.
Question is, with the AMD rumors earlier this year, would Apple drop Intel and move their continuing x86 Macs to Ryzen? Wouldn't be a huge change, but a great back up in case they run into some pains with macOS and ARM. However, I'm sure they've been testing macOS on ARM for years, even before 2018.
It's doubtful at this point they would want to do it, especially if their products have big gains over Intel and AMD. Still wouldn't be surprising if AMD is pushing for their CPU, GPU and/or APU products to be in some machines as Apple is getting their ARM processors adapted to PC life. Or in same tandem together with Apple's ARM processors. What do you guys think? Think AMD is lobbying hard to put more of their products in Apple?
Last thing, this is slightly amusing, ARM is RISC based... so is PowerPC. Google ARM and PowerPC together, you'll find lot of articles and posts with them mentioned together. Pretty interesting stuff. No, I don't believe PowerPC is EVER coming back. IBM is giving it away now as open source technology.
It's doubtful at this point they would want to do it, especially if their products have big gains over Intel and AMD. Still wouldn't be surprising if AMD is pushing for their CPU, GPU and/or APU products to be in some machines as Apple is getting their ARM processors adapted to PC life. Or in same tandem together with Apple's ARM processors. What do you guys think? Think AMD is lobbying hard to put more of their products in Apple?
Last thing, this is slightly amusing, ARM is RISC based... so is PowerPC. Google ARM and PowerPC together, you'll find lot of articles and posts with them mentioned together. Pretty interesting stuff. No, I don't believe PowerPC is EVER coming back. IBM is giving it away now as open source technology.
No...
They can invent what they want, but that doesn't mean the industry will follow.
PCIe is a standard high speed peripheral interconnect. There won't be a graphics manufacturer in the world that diverges and gives Apple some home brew support.
The SSD/Flash memory business is PCIe/NVME m.2
So yes, Apple will need to support that.
My thoughts:
1. No comparison to PPC to Intel transition. People won't lose the apps they are currently using because there is already a huge library of ios/ipados apps with a user base in the billions that will likely be able to run on ARM macs, and the average user these days is transitioning to web based apps that won't be affected anyway. Certainly there will be people with esoteric use cases that may be affected, but the majority won't. If you are in that smaller group I agree this isn't necessarily positive for you. And yes, on this site with a collection of tech enthusiasts and content creators there will be a disproportionate number of those individuals but we also have to then recognize this is an echo chamber and we don't represent the typical apple customer (not by a long shot).
2. VMs are still possible as linux and even windows ARM versions. May not solve issues with x86 specific software needs, but still solves some problems.
3. Why not AMD? AMD has an excellent lineup of CPUs and GPUs RIGHT NOW, but historically they have had more than their fair share of misses and periods of stagnation. That's why intel became so dominant in the first place, and ironically became complacent with "being king" as it were.
4. Tim Cook doesn't understand software and hardware like Jobs did? Steve Jobs was completely non technical. He didn't care about tech stuff other than to invoke his "reality distortion field" to get his tech guys to do things they insisted were not possible. I can see him arguing with some of you guys about why ARM based Macs are a bad idea. He had an uncanny ability to understand what the average consumer wanted and needed. If ARM based macs provide a better, more seamless experience with better battery life, better thermals, etc at the expense of affecting 2% (or less) of users, then he was going to do it.
1. No comparison to PPC to Intel transition. People won't lose the apps they are currently using because there is already a huge library of ios/ipados apps with a user base in the billions that will likely be able to run on ARM macs, and the average user these days is transitioning to web based apps that won't be affected anyway. Certainly there will be people with esoteric use cases that may be affected, but the majority won't. If you are in that smaller group I agree this isn't necessarily positive for you. And yes, on this site with a collection of tech enthusiasts and content creators there will be a disproportionate number of those individuals but we also have to then recognize this is an echo chamber and we don't represent the typical apple customer (not by a long shot).
2. VMs are still possible as linux and even windows ARM versions. May not solve issues with x86 specific software needs, but still solves some problems.
3. Why not AMD? AMD has an excellent lineup of CPUs and GPUs RIGHT NOW, but historically they have had more than their fair share of misses and periods of stagnation. That's why intel became so dominant in the first place, and ironically became complacent with "being king" as it were.
4. Tim Cook doesn't understand software and hardware like Jobs did? Steve Jobs was completely non technical. He didn't care about tech stuff other than to invoke his "reality distortion field" to get his tech guys to do things they insisted were not possible. I can see him arguing with some of you guys about why ARM based Macs are a bad idea. He had an uncanny ability to understand what the average consumer wanted and needed. If ARM based macs provide a better, more seamless experience with better battery life, better thermals, etc at the expense of affecting 2% (or less) of users, then he was going to do it.
My FAN NOISE iMac FAN NOISE computer FAN NOISE awaits his FAN NOISE new ARM FAN NOISE based FAN NOISE fanless overlords.
The other thing I find interesting about this, is that this is just a rehash from Bloomberg News about Apple moving to ARM.
This is essential the same story that Bloomberg has been running for years.
They even say, Apple might not say much at the WWDC.
So this is more crap from Bloomberg that has no basis in anything real and only rumor and speculation.
This is essential the same story that Bloomberg has been running for years.
They even say, Apple might not say much at the WWDC.
So this is more crap from Bloomberg that has no basis in anything real and only rumor and speculation.
"New" hardware is out of date within 3 months of it's announcement. Nobody wants those specs in a few years time anyway.
That's not useful as they can port their current Mac Office to ARM much easier. Since porting iOS app to Mac using Catalyst is still quite hard compare to just a recompile.
Same CPU does nothing for porting software. Same OS and frameworks makes a huge different.
Just like how Microsoft ported Mac PowerPC version of Office to Intel Mac and Intel win32 version to arm win32.
to the contrary, many people don’t realize how good they have it in this age. Tech is rock solid compared to a few decades ago
How do you get to say "AMD will get even higher clocks and more cores", which is basically speculation, without also being able to speculate that Apple could run much higher core count than they are now? To this point, we have only seen Apple ARM constrained in a mobile form factor. When configured for desktop use (ie, having good thermal management and not connected to battery), you HAVE ZERO idea of what is possible. It is entirely possible, that performance will be significantly higher than we are expecting with an energy footprint 1/10th of x86.