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When Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel 10.5.8 was the last Mac OS that would run on PowerPC. The Power Mac (PowerPC) was discontinued in August 2006 and 10.6 (Intel only) was introduced in August 2009. I'd say you'll get 3 years support at best. Maybe less.

The installed base base of Intel machines is orders of magnitude larger than PPC was at that time. And people would rightfully angry if Apple stopped supporting Intel hardware less than the time on an extended Applecare warranty. I'd say 5 tears would be more likely.
 
I think with this ARM route a dGPU will be a thing of the past for Apple computers. Especially with Apples current stance on Nvidia drivers
This will be a nightmare for devs, right now they are suffering having to develop soft for 2 companies, and lot of plugins for mac are GPU powered dropped because the lack of apple’s nvidia support
 
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This has one meaning , Apple is killing the macpro desktop . noway ARM can beat 64 cores chips running at 5ghz each after 2 years from AMD and intel.
Think again. I think Apple can release a 100 core Mac Pro with this transition and beat the 28 Core intel by miles. A12 is a 6 core chip. In a Mac Pro, it should be possible to stuff 15 of these.
 
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Lasta time was 3 years (snow leopard 2007, extra year for uodates, not counting 3rd party developers dropping sooner the support)
Yes, for a much smaller market and to a more compatible CPU. This is the opposite. Why would app makers drop support for a hug Intel installed base. The ARM installed base will take years to exceed the Intel installed base.
 
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I expect the first informative numbers will not come from Apple. They will provide a carefully crafted set accompanied by the usual "supercomputer" hype. The first independent reviews will be very interesting.

I did just go back and looked at the 2005 keynote (which I was at) and found something on anandtech. Apple did provide a chart on performance per watt. Was hoping they would provide something similar today.
 
This will be a nightmare for devs, right now they are suffering having to develop soft for 2 companies, and lot of plugins for mac are GPU powered dropped because the lack of apple’s nvidia support
It maybe a nightmare but surely having an Apple based CPU & GPU will make the whole process simpler. We won’t see Nvidia support on any future version and why would we see AMD support for future ARM versions if Apple can match the specs of a dGPU in its silicon? With what they have managed to do with an A12X chip, this is very much a possibility for a customer chip
 
Yeah. Apple...jeez. Giving us more performance and better power consumption. How dare them...

And sacrificing all backwards compatibility again. Making a ton of software obsolete again. Sacrificing boot camp. Sacrificing ALL Hypervisor comparability (virtual machines).

Lots of developers are for sure gonna dump their Macs going forward. The majority of developers using Macs are NOT iOS developers, after all. Most
Developers chose a Mac simply because it offered the unique ability to test in macOS, Windows (VM, BootCamp), etc.

While on Windows I can still run old DOS games if I want to. And thanks to WSL2 I have a native Linux kernel to test on. And I’ve stopped iOS development due to the hostile nature of the AppStore and the way Apple abuses iOS developers. No need for a Mac any more.

/Jailbreak
 
Think again. I think Apple can release a 100 core Mac Pro with this transition and beat the 28 Core intel by miles. A12 is a 6 core chip. In a Mac Pro, it should be possible to stuff 15 of these.

You obviously have zero technical engineering experience of cpu design. 100 core cpu my arse. Perhaps 25 years later and a whopping $100k min. buy-in price. Apple does not over engineer anything. They give you drops of water when you are parched unless you fork over the big bucks, you get that glass of water.
 
The installed base base of Intel machines is orders of magnitude larger than PPC was at that time. And people would rightfully angry if Apple stopped supporting Intel hardware less than the time on an extended Applecare warranty. I'd say 5 tears would be more likely.

True some people would be upset, but moving up the transition timeline as far as software goes could really help increase Mac sales and profits. Just because they no longer have updated software for them (other then some possible security patches) doesn't mean that Applecare still wouldn't cover the hardware. I'm guessing they will push this transition as fast as they can. We'll see.
 
Yes, for a much smaller market and to a more compatible CPU. This is the opposite. Why would app makers drop support for a hug Intel installed base. The ARM installed base will take years to exceed the Intel installed base.

What precisely is a "more compatible" CPU? I mean ARM CPUs are ARM compatible, and x86 CPUs are x86 compatible - none of them is "more comaptible". In fact i do think that A14x is fully ARMv8.6A compatible - they are possibly AArch64 only though.
 
I'm not getting sucked in to the Rosetta 2 ruse. Running old apps on the new architecture will actually be slower. It's only when the apps are re-written and native that they can take advantage of the new Apple Silicon architecture. Lot of frustration back when Apple switched to PowerPC, then again with Intel, with both Apple and developers bloviating about how great simulation mode works.

Indeed. The only reason Rosetta worked as well as it did, for the most part anyway, was that PPC had fallen so far behind Intel in 2005 that even the first Intel Macs left the last generation PPC Macs for dead, so could easily afford the overhead of emulating PPC code. I just don't see that big a gap between what can be done on ARM with what Intel can put out. You also have to judge against what AMD is doing. Right now, there is a lot buzz about AMD with its Threadripper line.
 
This has one meaning , Apple is killing the macpro desktop . noway ARM can beat 64 cores chips running at 5ghz each after 2 years from AMD and intel.

The interesting thing is that Apple could just keep using Intel chips for high end computers if they needed to. But - they’re so confident that they won’t need to, that they’re telling us right up front it will be a complete transition away from Intel over the course of about 2 years.

They know what they’ve got, and we don’t yet.
 
AMD is the King of chips at the moment.

AMD, INTEL, same s***, different toilet. Apple wants complete control of their hardware. The heart of the system is the cpu so they want to control that without having to deal with AMD or INTEL.

But yes, AMD is so much bang for your buck; but apple is apple they will only want to rape your wallet as hard as possible.
 
WOn't be buying another Mac. Won't run CentOS and my engineering tools.
I'll be building Xeon machines of my own.

It certainly will run CentOS. CentOS has been available for ARM for sometime.
All it will need is a few kernel driver additions if that.
 
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This is terrifying for those of us with loads of TB3 devices. How is this going to pan out? Intel could always say piss off to Apple in regards to Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt is royalty-free. Intel can't do a thing.
 
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Indeed. The only reason Rosetta worked as well as it did, for the most part anyway, was that PPC had fallen so far behind Intel in 2005 that even the first Intel Macs left the last generation PPC Macs for dead, so could easily afford the overhead of emulating PPC code. I just don't see that big a gap between what can be done on ARM with what Intel can put out. You also have to judge against what AMD is doing. Right now, there is a lot buzz about AMD with its Threadripper line.
You don’t see it, but it’s there.
 
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You obviously have zero technical engineering experience of cpu design. 100 core cpu my arse. Perhaps 25 years later and a whopping $100k min. buy-in price. Apple does not over engineer anything. They give you drops of water when you are parched unless you fork over the big bucks, you get that glass of water.
Why not? An A12 costs 40$ to Apple, give or take. Even 15 of them disregarding the design for the MB costs much less than a single 28 Core Intel CPU.
 
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