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They were demoing those apps on a maxed out Mac Pro. Of COURSE it's going to scroll smoothly. What about a lesser, more realistic machine?

No, the demo was on the ARM-MacMini connected to a Pro Display using the A12 CPU. I guess you missed the iPhone SE2 (2020) $399, which beats a $2500 MBP in single core performance. INTEL is so dead...
 
The Big Sur demoes were running on an A12Z, that means they don't have the A14's that will be used in the final Macs yet. Benchmarking an A12Z wouldn't have been really impressive at all (it's basically a 2018's A12X with better GPU), neither it was designed for a desktop but for tablets.

The fact a tablet SoC was able to run that Maya demo (even with the handicap of emulation) is quite remarkable though
Right, we'll have to wait for Mac specific CPUs. Desktops don't really need the efficiency cores. Imagine if the A12 had 8 high performance cores, that would already be something. Now extrapolate that to the new A14 and bring in 12 high performance cores. The thermal envelope and wattage would still be much better than anything Intel could be offering at the low end. Wait another year, at the end of 2021, and Apple will have better high end chips than Intel could be offering. Also, Apple could easily be pairing two or three chips for the high end and still be more energy efficient and more cost effective. Two 8 Core A14 based series anyone? I think the Intel emulation on Apple CPU will be quite fine once the real Macs come to market.

But didn't Intel sue Microsoft And Qualcomm Over x86 Emulation in the past?
 
I think Apple may dump MBA after this. Put an A14X into the MBP 14", get rid of the fans, make it even thinner than Air, and you have essentially a MBP which is faster than a 13" MBP but thinner/lighter than MBA.
 
You’d rather they keep it a secret? How does that benefit the consumer exactly?
No, I'd rather they didn't do it at all.

This has nothing to do with what's best for the consumer, it's entirely about what's best for Apple. From a consumer perspective, there is zero need to put Apple CPUs into Macs. A move which will cause enormous disruption and indeed setbacks for many customers.
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I dont know about that.
if Apple releases a new intel iMac, for example, yes it will be likely to be Osborned, but there will also be people, probably like me, that will wait and see what the first iMac with an A series chip is like, and if it isn’t awe inspiring, buy the last intel iMac at a discount instead.
Sure there will be all sorts of people who will buy whatever is available for all sorts of reasons.

However, most people do not like to buy "old" tech, or tech which is superseded the moment they buy it, especially if it's not available at a knock-down price.

Honestly, I see this whole move to different silicon as one spectacular waste of time and disruption as far as consumers are concerned. The Apple die-hard fans may be super excited (why, I have no idea) but for everyone else, it's a pain the ****.
 
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Yes their past performance and historic dominance is the reason they are still holding on. They are not the king of chips in mobile because they had no grip on that market.

If I was still an Intel investor, I'd be very worried right now.
Rightly so, the world will be moving to ARM, even Microsoft, and Intel will have made the wrong bet. They'd wish to have continued XScale development parallel to X86. Yes for a while, the trajectory of X86 was very good when Intel went Core architecture. But they haven't been able to deliver the performance per Watt that the move to full mobile solutions need (desktops have already been largely replaced with notebooks). The current Intel CPU thermal envelope is bad.
 
I specifically mentioned Eastern Europe as it was only 7 years out of the end of the Cold War and I assume Apple had very few vendor partners there versus Western Europe where they had both established partners (Apple France)and manufacturing (Cork). It’s not a sleight, it was a reality back then. iMac G3’s abounded back then.

History will not repeat itself and this one-sided prostrating to Intel as if they are God’s gift to computing is just astounding. Without money to buy off Microsoft and OEMs and threats of slow CPU shipments, they would be toast. Sooner or later there will be a reckoning.

You fail to remember that Apple now has the iPhone, the iPad, the Watch, the AirPods, the AppleTV and the HomePod as ambassadors and gateway drugs to the Mac, not just the iPod. Allowing Apple Silcon Macs to run iPhone and iPad apps is going to drive so much new business Apple’s way, it’s not even funny.

Too many people here are desperately clutching their Dell mid-towers and their copy of Shadow of the Tomb Raider and giving us opinions that are completely irrelevant in today’s computing world.

PS - Jobs has been dead for almost a decade. Apple is valued at between 1.0 and 1.5 TRILLION dollars. in who’s world is that failure? Do you think he would have done better? Let it go, let him Rest In Peace.

“History will not repeat itself and this one-sided prostrating to Intel as if they are God’s gift to computing is just astounding.”

Again with the tub-thumping playing to the crowd, setting up a straw man about “one-sided prostrating to Intel” like some cheap politician.

I’ve seen clueless fanboys deny reality again and again over the decades, some fancy themselves as a modern day Oscar Wilde. Stop doing it. It doesn’t make you right. In a few years it will be as embarrassing as those shell suit and mullet pictures that you swear you don’t have.
 
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Honestly, I see this whole move to different silicon as one spectacular waste of time and disruption as far as consumers are concerned. The Apple die-hard fans may be super excited (why, I have no idea) but for everyone else, it's a pain the ****.
Why? Because Intel has not been able to deliver the goods. Yes, in the beginning their Core architecture was great. Incredible performance at low wattage. But the world has moved on, and when a phone can get better performance per Watt than your Intel MacBook, people will start to scratch their head. We're at that point. The A14 will give greater performance to a stupid iPhone than your MacBook Pro, which will heat up to 85-99 degrees Celsius and run fans full blast! Imagine to have the same MacBook pro that runs as fast as Intel but stays cool and fans won't run much at all? You don't have to be a die-hard Apple fan to want that future to happen. Sure, I will miss X86 compatibility to run Windows, but how long do you think Microsoft will be staying with Intel? They too will be moving ARM. Now is the time for Apple to make the bet, because waiting another 5 years will be too late. Apple made the right bet developing their own A series CPU. Imagine if they stuck with standard ARM reference design? iPhones would not have had a competitive edge at all. Apple will make the same bet for the Mac.
 
Why? Because Intel has not been able to deliver the goods. Yes, in the beginning their Core architecture was great. Incredible performance at low wattage. But the world has moved on, and when a phone can get better performance per Watt than your Intel MacBook, people will start to scratch their head. We're at that point. The A14 will give greater performance to a stupid iPhone than your MacBook Pro, which will heat up to 85-99 degrees Celsius and run fans full blast! Imagine to have the same MacBook pro that runs as fast as Intel but stays cool and fans won't run much at all? You don't have to be a die-hard Apple fan to want that future to happen. Sure, I will miss X86 compatibility to run Windows, but how long do you think Microsoft will be staying with Intel? They too will be moving ARM. Now is the time for Apple to make the bet, because waiting another 5 years will be too late. Apple made the right bet developing their own A series CPU. Imagine if they stuck with standard ARM reference design? iPhones would not have had a competitive edge at all. Apple will make the same bet for the Mac.

I think you have a rather biased (and BTW flawed) perspective. Microsoft will be staying with Intel for as long as I am alive IMO. And Intel will continue to dominate personal computer CPU sales for the same period.
 
So, what PC laptops have the best trackpads?

Because I'm done. The last transition was a nightmare, but there were real benefits, lots of them.

This is only a negative. There are no good reasons to switch to a proprietary processor chip. I'm done with Apple.

If that is the way you're going, then either Dell XPS or Razor Blade would do you well.
 
By what measure? Seems to me by $$ apple wins.

It is hard to quantify in terms of $$, because Apple sells complete solutions not only including CPUs - in fact on Apple SoCs there is even licensed ARM IP inside, like Cortex-M.
In any case i am comparing by scope - full range from embedded M-cores over realtime R-cores to application processors aka A-cores plus lots of infrastructure and fabric components based on AXI, APB, AHB or whole coherent mesh interconnect solutions for instance for servers.
 
I think you have a rather biased (and BTW flawed) perspective. Microsoft will be staying with Intel for as long as I am alive IMO. And Intel will continue to dominate personal computer CPU sales for the same period.
They will dominate, but not necessarily on mobile (notebooks included) and that's where the future is at. Sure desktops and servers will be Intel's playground for years to come. But the bet is mobile, and Microsoft will be introducing form factors in which the bet will be ARM. So the future will be this dance between Intel and ARM based devices. Apple is simply betting on a future in which they can deliver their mobile solutions better with ARM than they ever could with Intel. For years Apple has waited for the promised mobile CPUs that Intel constantly failed to deliver on time, and is still failing to deliver.
 
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That's not the worry here, the point is if you can install it!

It will be fine. In the State of the Union presentation, Apple stated that have already started work on ensuring that multiple open source projects will work fine on the new Macs – with homebrew explicitly listed among these projects.

Even 3rd Party Kernel Extensions will be permitted on the new Macs – which surprised me – but with the limitation that these Kernel Extensions must be notorised to run on the new machines.
 
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.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that TB4 (which is integrated into the USB4 spec that has a target release of Q4 2020 for consumer devices - conveniently timed for an Apple Silicon Mac to include it at release) will be backwards compatible with TB3, so by the time the new AS Macs are released all of the TB3 preipherals will work.
 
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iPad is just a toy is yesterday's news. Today's news is iOS-ification of the Mac. /s

Yes, but also Mac-ification of the ipad.
:)

In the demo it was clear that they brought the ipad versions of mutual apps ( photos ) ... closer to the desktop version. So it goes two ways...

Makes me wonder if we will be able to install MacOs 11 on ipad?
Or that recompiled proapps could run on ipad.
Maybe not ... 😬
 
Windows also has a Binary Translation technology like Rosetta, it might work, I mean when the Industry and chips are ready Microsoft would do a good job. I agree the job they did on Surface X was not good but the ARM chips weren't ready either.
This is what I find perplexing with MS. That was/is their own 1st party hardware carrying their brand name on it. Why release the Surface X at all if they weren’t going to develop proper emulation tools, and didn’t even bother to have their signature software running natively on the platform???

Apple just made them look like chumps. All of their 1st party software, including their signature professional apps, running from day 1 natively, and an emulation tool for 3rd party software that is obviously miles beyond what MS produced. MS even has their own signature software running natively on Apple Silicon macOS before they even have a Windows ARM version.

Not to mention Adobe et al. If that doesn’t say volumes about how the developer community is going to support this transition, then nobody will ever be convinced.

I mean, the fact that you are going to be running iOS and iPadOS apps natively - that alone - is going to drive developer adoption. You have just given the mobile developers a slam dunk at earning more money without having to do anything at all - and even more by doing the macOS UI work. Think beyond the MacRumors forum here. The average consumer that has an iPhone as their main device pretty much - and I am talking the non-tech interested younger and older generations here mostly - tell them that this machine will run all of the apps/games they use on their phone out of the box. Then tell them that this Windows PC over here will never be able to do that.

I actually see Mac market share going up.
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Yes, but also Mac-ification of the ipad.
:)

In the demo it was clear that they brought the ipad versions of mutual apps ( photos ) ... closer to the desktop version. So it goes two ways...

Makes me wonder if we will be able to install MacOs 11 on ipad?
Or that recompiled proapps could run on ipad.
Maybe not ... 😬
This was my observation as well. iPadOS basically got macOS versions of all the core basic apps, i.e. Photos, Mail, etc. - at least from a UI standpoint.

They have now clearly shown that an iPad could easily handle a full on upgrade of iPadOS to be a touch first UX version of macOS in every meaningful way.
 
The end of user side compute, hence how Apple can shift to their own processors.
You will buy a pretty thin terminal to sit on your desk, and buy all your software as a service, with all the heavy lifting done in the cloud.
Welcome to $400 a month subscriptions replacing initial hardware outlay.
Have no idea how you get to that conclusion by anything other than wild speculation and paranoia based on what we saw yesterday...
 
Ok, but I'm comparing Apple's to Apple's.

Today Apple's dGPU offerings are 5500M, 5600M, Vega 48, Vega 56, Vega 64, Vega II, Vega II Duo and 5700XT.

Apart from 5500M, all these are 5 to 10 times as fast as 12Z.

So yes, I also expect Apple to come up with a solution. But we haven't seen anything remotely close to the speeds of the GPU's from Apple yet.

Vega II is a desktop class GPU used in the Mac Pro and the 5600M is a 2020 release for laptops. The former is always plugged in and the latter is designed for a laptop sized battery. Neither the A12X or A12Z was designed for either of those specific power use cases, so it's only a rough comparison to begin with. I'm just saying that a two year old GPU design that wasn't even meant for laptop use was still reasonably close to MBP GPUs from 2018, and would still qualify as mid-range for a laptop today. I think that bodes well for what Apple could roll out in 2020 that is specifically designed for a larger power source in laptops/desktops. Apple SoCs have had great performance per watt.
 
...you are locked into this new Bad Sur thing that behaves just like iOS (not only aesthetically, but in terms of user freedom as well)...
Where did they say they were locking down macOS?? I didn’t catch that part? What part of user freedom has been taken away that I missed???
 
Where did they say they were locking down macOS?? I didn’t catch that part? What part of user freedom has been taken away that I missed???
If you consider iOS doesn't take away any of your freedom, then of course you cannot understand what I said. Now you can have wishful thinking that this Bad Sur thing is only an aesthetic change that won't limit your freedom as iOS does... well... I wouldn't keep that hope, because in Apple, aesthetics follows function.
 
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They’ve only been using the instruction set from ARM for several years now (that’s my understanding). They haven’t touched a reference design from ARM since I think the A7?

Note that behaving as BIG.little isn’t the same thing as using an actual ARM design, it’s an organizational/performance scheme.

Apple has been doing completely native chip design for several years now.

Again, that’s my current understanding.
Yes, you’re right - Apple haven’t used the reference Cortex ARM cores designs since the A5 or A7, something around there, but my understanding is that it is the ISA Gruber is talking about. In order to use the ARM Instruction set, you have to keep the full compatibility with the full ARM instruction set. You can add new customized instructions to create an extended instruction set for your custom core design though, and I think this is what Apple is doing. So they are going to have instruction sets that won’t run on just a standard Cortex core reference design chip either because some of the custom instructions they use will be specific to the custom core designs and implementations they use in their Silicon.

This is probably why it is most accurate to say that Apple Silicon is ARM-based, rather than saying Apple’s ARM chips.
 
Oh.

Great.

THIS again.

Bye, Bootcamp (using one computer as two platforms - also bye bye Windows-based gaming on Macs)...

Bye, WINE (Windows API on non-Windows OSes, though this was already killed by Catalina’s ditching of 32-bit)...

Bye, any and all hardware older than one year which relies on custom drivers (not class-compliance), which wont be ported to Apple Silicon machines by the company that originally sold it (the audio production market is going to suffer a LOT here, just as it did with Catalina)...

Bye, literally hundreds of pieces of commercial & freeware software & plugins that also wont be maintained or ported because the companies no longer exist, don’t care to maintain their products beyond one year, or can’t afford yet more Apple hardware to do ports... Some of those companies might even simply abandon Mac support entirely.

Et cetera.

This is going to be a slaughter, for a not-insignificant portion of the Mac user world... but not significant enough for Apple and most Apple customers to care. The commentary here is typical: anyone voicing legit concerns is barked down by cultish Apple fans. Most of you could be served by pretty much any computer anyway, so I’m not sure why you get so upset when Apple users like myself take issue with Apple over stuff like this. It’s like people like me aren’t allowed to prefer Mac OS, too, just because I have non-mainstream needs for my computing. If your needs are so basic that you cannot empathize with those of us with specialist needs, why do you attach to Macs in the first place?
 
A few things,

  • Performance
    • Why would apple continue to be chained to intel's increasingly frustrating chip design?
    • Intels chips have been thermally limited for years now
    • Trade off between power/performance is getting worse with intel
  • Bootcamp support
    • This is probably the reason they are still going to release intel based macs, until they work out Bootcamp
    • Apple knows a lot of users use bootcamp and if they don't eventually support this they will lose customers
  • Your recently purchased MCP is not obsolete
    • How often do you upgrade your machine? This transition will take 5 years to fully complete
All in all this is a smart move for apple and they have probably had this in the works for a LONG time after seeing the gains they made with ARM on mobile, as long as they handle the transition well....
 
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Well im so glad i did not enter the mac system a few months ago. yes, big software will be supported. but not the specialized audio programs im using wont. at least not in time. most developers took until recent to adept to 64bit.... so no apple for me. staying on windows. this made my decision really easy.
 
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