Of course. Why do you assume this isn’t the case at my workplace? You do realize that it’s not a personal attack against you that most production infrastructure is x86. It’s not like the world is doing this just to spite you personally, or to spite Apple. It’s just the nature of the world as we live in it. There is absolutely no reason for you to act so defensive here.
True but there is no promise that the future will stay x86.
As always, my position is very simple. The lowest risk path (and least expensive) will be for companies to continue to invest in development environments that are aligned with their production infrastructure, and not the other way around. The migration of macOS to Arm processors simply makes those devices inappropriate for developers at my company and our IT department will adjust the supported platforms as a result. We’re not just “holding it wrong.”
The problem with this mentality is the lowest risk path (and least expensive) tends to result in stagnation which can be deadly for a business.
"A manufacturer
who sticks to old equipment cannot compete, and must fail. To survive, he must persu"ade people to risk savings in his business.
He can then buy new equipment, increase production, and show a profit." - Yankee Dood It (1956)
My father worked for a company called Yaeger Typesetting Company which, when the original died, spit in two by his sons. One son continued the lowest risk path (and least expensive) hot metal Linotype side of the business while the other went with riskier option of computer soft metal.The Linotype side went out of business in the early 1980s (throwing my father out of work) while the computer side continued on but it couldn't easily adapt to the rapidly changing market of computer printing and as a result also went out of business in the late 1990s early 2000s.
"A lot of ATMs around the globe are still running
Windows XP embedded, long after Microsoft ceased support with security and stability patches." - (
2019 Dec 27)
Bank ATM migration to Windows 10 – Deadline Jan-2020
Yes that is indeed the least expensive part but tell us how in the name of sanity can this behavior also be considered the "
lowest risk path" rather then getting ATMs that run something that
did not stop being updated in 2014?!
It like that political cartoon several years back regarding the FDA getting involved with drug executions. "You want it to be safe
and effective?!"
Honestly, I think Apple have just stopped caring about the devops userbase. macOS has been a fantastic platform for us since the release of MacOS X, but Apple’s current world view seems to be hyper-focused on video and audio production, Xcode developers, and general office app users. For those markets, Apple Silicon machines will be a great solution. Apple have every right to focus on those users even if it comes at the expense of unix-focused developers like myself. I’ll miss macOS, but Apple probably won’t miss me.
Since the MacOS has had
Single UNIX Specificationversion 3 (SUSv3) via Darwin since 2007 and odds are they have converted the DarwinOS to the AS chip and there are other
UNIX ARM platforms I don't see the problem. Now per
Server market takes a pause in 2019 – still dominated by Windows and x86 if you were talking about
x86 Windows users then yea that is an issue.
The benefits of Arm do not outweigh the risk and expense. I’m disappointed, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Suggesting that our code is fragile or that I deserve to be fired for this is untethered from reality and offensively inflammatory.
Perhaps that is true for what you are doing but that doesn't mean that is true for the market in general. My father and the owner of the hot metal Linotype side of Yaeger Typesetting Company that that method and the equipment that supported it still had a future but anybody that looked at the
big picture could tell you it was a road to nowhere. Just because hot metal Linotype had become the industry standard c. 1900 didn't mean it would stay the standard.
My father and that one son of Yaeger didn't understand that - they want to take lowest risk and least expensive path and stay with hot metal Linotype.
If the Forrester total economic impact report incorrect ARM for data-centers has the benefits of
- 30% to 60% lower upfront infrastructure costs
- 15% to 35% lower ongoing infrastructure costs
- Cloud infrastructure cost savings of up to 80%
To rephrase Yankee Dood It: 'He who
sticks to old equipment and old methods cannot compete, and must fail.
