Apple's Path to Arm-Based Macs Could Start With a New 12-Inch MacBook

[Macbookprodude]

I was planning to get a custom MacBook Pro 16 for $4,118.99 because my old computer died. I’d don’t know what to do now. I really need a new Mac and I don’t want to spend so much money on a product that will become obsolete in a year or so. I’m also taking programming classes, will I still be able to write programs in Java and Python on Intel based macbook? What about ARM?

if you need it get it, but because ARM is replacing intel, I would seriously wait.

 

[jackietreeh0rn]

The butterfly keyboard is dead. Long live the butterfly keyboard!

 

[fairuz]

If this is the case, I’ll skip Catalina entirely. Why bother finding replacements for my 32-bit apps when I’ll soon need to find replacements for my x86 apps?

If there's nothing crucial forcing you to update your OS, it's best not to. Apple always backports security updates to the previous two macOS versions, so there's no rush. I only update once every 2 or 3 releases.

 

[Detnator]

Nope. First one will be a new 16"-ish MBP. New architecture won't be adopted other than by early adopters (developers, etc.). Those people don't want a low-end 12" machine.

Here we go. Two comments in and it begins.

It amazes me how some people on this forum think, as if people like us (MR readers) are typical Apple users.

Not to pick on your comment really because you’re not using this to complain or Apple bash, which I appreciate, but I think your thinking there is off.

The average Mac user - especially at the low end where the 12” sits - don’t know or care anything about architecture. They care if it does what they need it to do - which in their cases will be basic consumption, web, email, word processing, music, etc. Apple will have all that seamlessly figured out just like they had with the two previous architecture switches.

Incidentally this is similar with people here complaining that an iPad isn’t a computer. No, it’s not, for the likes of us. But for a lot of people who would have otherwise bought a MacBook Air for those same tasks, it’s an awesome alternative.

Most normal people care as much about what’s inside their computer or tablet about as much as they care about the insides of their toaster. Apple understanding and delivering around this is a huge part of why Apple is so successful.

 

[cmaier]

Here we go. Two comments in and it begins.

It amazes me how some people on this forum think, as if people like us (MR readers) are typical Apple users.

Your thinking there is way off. The average Mac user - especially at the low end where the 12” sits - don’t know or care anything about architecture. They care if it does what they need it to do - which in their cases will be basic consumption, web, email, word processing, music, etc. Apple will have all that seamlessly figured out just like they had with the two previous architecture switches.

They actually care that it runs their software, and aren’t going to take a chance on a new architecture where that’s an open question. Unlike developers and early adopters. There’s a reason they are called “early adopters.” They adopt first. And they are willing to pay more.

In any case, my statement isn’t a guess. Nor is it a prediction. It’s simply stating a fact.

 

[Detnator]

I think a much better approach than just a switch is to have dual processors. An ARM and an Intel CPU over the next five years. That way, tasks that only run on Intel allow the Mac to use more power and turn on the Intel processor. In all other cases, it would use a much lower power state of a twelve-core A-Series ARM SoC. This, if implemented well, could allow Apple and developers a path to ensure customers get the best of both worlds. Apple can show its prowess and SoC capabilities without leaving out Intel/x86/Windows and etc.

This scenario has never been offered but it seems to me to allow the best of both worlds. Apple could run its own graphics which would probably destroy anything AMD has available. The SoC can do certain things much faster and better than Intel. But for those Intel-only apps that are power hungry not alienate them.
It’s truly the best of both worlds. It requires some advanced code and a rosette model to emulate all possible for running as much as possible on ARM CPUs. At the same time, when it just isn’t feasible like with Adobe Premiere Pro or other intensive apps, allow Intel to shine.
This strategy would allow a win-win for Apple, customers, developers and etc. as Customer will not be left out in the cold and developers will have time to implement a new instruction set.

anyone want to give their thoughts?

This is an awesome line of thinking and I for one would love it if this is the way they go, but I suspect it won’t be. There’s the cost issue of course (unless an Intel chip in your ARM Mac is a BTO option — “why have one chip when you can have TWO at twice the price!!). There’s also that this (unfortunately) just doesn’t ring with Apple’s minimalist/purist philosophy.

So yeah. It’d be a great option but I doubt they’ll do it. My guess is they’ll do seamless emulation just like with all three previous switches (PPC, OS X, Intel).

 

[Detnator]

They actually care that it runs their software, and aren’t going to take a chance on a new architecture where that’s an open question. Unlike developers and early adopters. There’s a reason they are called “early adopters.” They adopt first. And they are willing to pay more.

In any case, my statement isn’t a guess. Nor is it a prediction. It’s simply stating a fact.

And that’s my point - for the typical 12” user it WILL run their software. They don’t buy a 12” to run Premier or Photoshop. And even if they do, Apple won’t release ARM Macs before they have a solution that runs Intel apps on them pretty seamlessly just like with the Intel switch.

You stated that the first ARM Mac will be a 16” because early adopter type people are more likely to be using those. But for this kind of switch and the vast majority of Apple users, “early adopter” isn’t a thing. The customer in the store doesn’t know or care what ARM v Intel means. Theycare, as you say, that it will run their software. And it will.

For something like the OS X switch - that was a significant change in user experience. That’s where “early adopters” is a thing. But think back to the first Intel iMac. It looked, felt, and functioned EXACTLY the same as the G5 one except that it ran the OS and native Intel apps 2-3x as fast and the emulated PPC apps about the same or marginally slower. The only thing it didn’t do if I recall correctly was run OS 9 apps since they didn’t bring Rosetta to Intel, but by then OS 9 (and OS 9 apps) were pushing 6 years old.

This will be similar. I’ll wager that the ARM Macs won’t run 32-bit apps. But today’s Intel Macs won’t do that in Catalina anyway, and perhaps that’s exactly what Apple was waiting for. For native performance gains Intel apps will have to be recompiled, but Apple won’t release ARM Macs without them being capable of running today’s Intel apps as well, one way or another, even if with a small performance hit.

What percentage MacBook Air customers are asking the sales people in the stores about 32-bit apps? Less than 5% of them. And it’ll be the same with ARM v Intel when it comes. The rest of them don’t have the faintest clue what either means Nor do they care except that for the ones who are migrating from an older machine will simply be told that some older apps they’re running might need to be updated or replaced for their new machine - as with ANY new Mac purchase.

All of this - plus the fact that the greatest benefits of ARM at this point are in the lower end devices - is why the 12” will come first, not the 16”.

At least that’s my opinion. This certainly isn’t “you’re absolutely wrong and an idiot for thinking that way” or whatever, by any stretch. It’s not lost on me that the first Intel laptop was the 15” Pro not the 13” nor the MacBook (from the iBook). So who knows.

 

[Gerdi]

On a side note, does anyone here think its possible that Apple would include an atom-based x86 cpu (Celeron or Pentium Silver) to maintain computability, while also crippling performance, to help with and force the transition?

Why should they do this? Look at Surface Pro X, emulation is like 50% slower than native. Assuming Apple has a similarly good emulation technology, the A14 should easily match Celeron or Pentium Silvers per core performance.
On top of this, i suppose Macs will have more cores than these Celerons.

And then, when done right, you only emulate the application code and have something like a WoW (Windows on Windows) layer, which translates the ABIs for native kernel calls.

ps. Even when you put an x86 core into a Mac in addition to the ARMs, you will need to boot a different OS - as ARM OSX will not run on these. So you will need to decide at boot time, which OS to run.

 

[Detnator]

My first generation tesla model s disagrees with you.

As did my first gen Intel MBP. That thing was awesome in its day compared to the corresponding PowerBook.

 

[Detnator]

If this is the case, I’ll skip Catalina entirely. Why bother finding replacements for my 32-bit apps when I’ll soon need to find replacements for my x86 apps?

Apple is going to tell us that macOS and all Apple’s 64-bit apps have been living a secret double life for years and we just had to phase everyone to 64-bit only with Catalina. Plus most of the key third party devs have all their 64-bit apps working on ARM aLrwady, and for the rest it’s just a checkbox in XCode to recompile for Apple’s new ARM chips. Point being, the two switches are effectively the same and all the current up to date 64-bit apps that we all had find as replacements for our old 32-bit apps for Catalina already run on ARM so we don’t have to find more replacements.

At least it’d be nice if that’s how it goes. 😉. It’s probably wishful thinking.

 

[Detnator]

As someone who only jumped to Mac in 2011 after 15 years of using Windows/x86 exclusively i am really concerned about application compatibility with this ARM move.

When i first got a Mac running Lion 10.7 (2011 Air 13"), PowerPC compatibility using Rosetta had just been removed so i missed out on running some of my favourite Windows games with ease as there was PowerPC versions of those games . I did find work arounds using WINE or buying Parallels but i just wanted the native Mac version to work 🙁 .

Slowly since owning one i had noticed the amount of programs for Mac had become the strongest it had ever been, and even games were slowly but surely becoming available more on Mac. Then Apple kill 32bit in Catalina and half the games no longer run and other old apps have been killed, so now thats all the Power PC software and all the 32 Bit gone.

Now we move to ARM what happens to the apps? Will the 64 bit apps i run today still be allowed to be run in years to come on ARM using emulation or will Apple pull the equivalent of the Rosetta engine for x64 emulation out in 4 years time and even worse with their new OS every year make holding onto the older OS that can run them even harder.

It does not matter how amazing an OS is to use , and MacOS has had a crisp clean consistent UI for 20 years that is very reliable, but if there are no apps to actually run i'm going to have a big problem.

It won’t be “no apps to run” but I think a lot of what you’ve said there is why Apple has never wanted in seriously on the “gaming” market. Apple does some things extremely well and much better than Windows, but they’re never likely to compete in the gaming market where Windows is. Sure - a lot of great (and plenty utterly crappy) games on iOS and tvOS but most of the “serious” games are all only on Windows. Hardware control and the freedom to change architectures and leave old tech behind - a lot of what drives Apple - is just not compatible with the gaming market, and that’s what you’ve experienced.

But today’s Mac app landscape is still vastly superior to what it’s been in years and decades past, and that won’t change. If anything one of the big reasons for or benefits of this move to ARM will be how it lines up and overlaps iOS/iPadOS and macOS apps better than ever before. They started that already with this Catalyst thing and ARM is the next step. Meaning the app choices for both sets of devices (iPads and Macs) expands dramatically.

God forbid we might even get a hybrid device that runs both iPadOS and macOS on one device - switching between OS’s by switching between touch and desk/lap modes, while all the apps, documents, tabs, etc. switch seamlessly between modes as well.

That’d be pretty awesome, but probably wishful thinking.
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AMD’s x86 license becomes invalid if they are acquired. It’s non-transferable.

Some lawyer probably got paid a lot to nail that one down. Damn shame.

 

[Detnator]

The only good use case for boot camp is gaming, and you’d be better off just putting together a gaming box for that.

Agreed. For everything else Windows related, virtualization makes a lot more sense (so you’re running both OS’s side by side). That’s the one thing that’ll be a big problem for me. Devs need multiple OS’s at once for testing. A lot of enterprise apps only run on Windows and virtualization solves that without having to give up Mac altogether for those. Etc.

Losing what VMWare and Parallels do is going to really hurt a lot of Mac users. Not likely the 12” buyers but assuming they’re planning to being the whole line-up to ARM then I really hope they have a solution in their strategy for this.

 

[Jury]

Other than the ****** keyboard.

I just lucked out - literally two weeks ago, a week before apple care expired, we brought in our 12” to get the keyboard fixed (space bar completely stopped working, and several other keys intermittently double-press or miss strokes. Already replaced keyboard once a year ago). The lucky part was the Battery also failed their testing, so i got a whole new top case/keyboard and a new battery all for free.

Sadly, while that would mean many more years of use for any of apple’s scissor-keyboard designs, I’m sure that the 12” keyboard will fail again within the next year or so.

Apple understands that the butterfly mechanism is not coming back in any of its mac form factors to avoid reliability issue ⚠️

 

[firewood]

I think a much better approach than just a switch is to have dual processors.

You can do that now. Run your Raspberry Pi (or AWS ARM instance) on a Remote Desktop on your x86 MacBook. Or run an x86 Mac mini (or AWS instance) on a Remote Desktop on some hypothetical ARM MacBook or on your iPad. Putting them in one box is a hardware and OS design nightmare (even just the T2 touchbar thingy causes OS problems).
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You can do that now. Run your Raspberry Pi (or AWS ARM instance) on a Remote Desktop on your x86 MacBook. Or run an x86 Mac mini (or AWS instance) on a Remote Desktop on some hypothetical ARM MacBook or on your iPad. Putting them in one box is a hardware and OS design nightmare (even just the T2 touchbar thingy causes OS problems). And twice the heat for less performance.

 

[Project Alice]

i forgot about Cyrix, which i think is the license that VIA owns. at any rate i was taking the word of my colleague with whom i worked at AMD. i guess he was wrong 🙂

I’m pretty sure it did come from Cyrix yes (I’ve got an old cyrix 686 PC)
unfortunately VIA seems to only use their license for budget PCs in China at the moment.. it’d be nice for more competition.

 

[smulji]

The average Mac user - especially at the low end where the 12” sits - don’t know or care anything about architecture. They care if it does what they need it to do - which in their cases will be basic consumption, web, email, word processing, music, etc.

That's what the iPad Pro is for.

 

[cmaier]

I’m pretty sure it did come from Cyrix yes (I’ve got an old cyrix 686 PC)
unfortunately VIA seems to only use their license for budget PCs in China at the moment.. it’d be nice for more competition.

Problem was via was never any good at making competitive chips. Neither was cyrix for that matter.

 

[Bug-Creator]

I think a much better approach than just a switch is to have dual processors. An ARM and an Intel CPU over the next five years. That way,

.... you end up with a needless expensive product where no task will ever be able to utilize >50% of the power 😛

Even if we were to ignore the engineering problems and having 2 CPUs sucking at the battery, to what point?

People seem to forget that Apple has everything under control this time. They can design an ARM chip in a way that is optimal for AMD64 (cos thats what the apps running under Catalina actually are) emulation.
They had years making sure XCode won't put anything into binaries that would turn out problematic.

The idea kinda reminds me of the Phase5 PPC cards for the Amiga which also featured a 680x0. Insane engineering but performance of the PPC part was crippled due to the 680x0 being on the same memory bus. In the end putting that effort into developing a 68k EMU would have been the much better alternative (as proven by even the first version of MorphOS being released a few years later).

 

[Neodym]

I think a much better approach than just a switch is to have dual processors. An ARM and an Intel CPU over the next five years. [...]

anyone want to give their thoughts?

Not sure how far technology has advanced, but the Dual CPU (68k/PPC) cards in the old Amiga computers had significant issues with things like context switches / cache consistency, which created massive overhead and impaired performance.

Maybe that’s negligible with modern CPU’s and their vastly increased performance in general, but perhaps it’s even worse, with modern architecture using things like long pipelines and out-of-order instructions.

On top of that, you’d have to use important Pcb real estate and machine volume (thin!), provide additional cooling and probably take a hit on battery, as there’s another hungry mouth to feed.

So my gut feeling is that Apple wouldn’t go that way.

 

[Tozovac]

Dear god, no. It was a mistake. It's been fixed. Leave it in the dustbin of electronics history, where it belongs.

Agree with you. I think the problem with the 12” was that it was too similar to the other MacBooks and with too many limitations. Now, a 12” ARM based macbook dual-bootable to ipados/osx with removable iPad screen might be a compelling different story for some. Something meaningfully different.

 

[Azrael9]

That's what the iPad Pro is for.

That's also what the Macbook Air is for.

Azrael.

 

[hanske68]

Naw... the first ones will be a small test box like a Mac Mini and be sold to developers. Then a year later after developers had time to iron out bugs with the move, an updated Mac line will be released. Pretty much what Apple did in the switch to Intel.

Exactly what I was thinking. The mac mini is the perfect candidate.

Position it as the ideal development machine and provide developers with a capable machine.
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never merge iPadOS and macOS. would be extremely dumb.

Replacing macOS with iPadOS is even dumber...
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I predict that the MacOS and iOS will be replaced by an OS common to both when all the hardware is ARM based (i.e. one OS for everything)..

I fear so, but I certainly hope not (unless the focus will be on macOS)

 

[Nütztjanix]

Replacing macOS with iPadOS is even dumber...

Won't happen.

 

[Azrael9]

They probably had Mac ARM running on Mac OS for the last several years at least.

Great performing chips. And the last noteworthy one is two years old. The A12x is some beasty performer.

I'm looking forward to see what the A14x can do. How Apple announce Mac ARM and what the road map it. And if they give Mac Dev's a Mac ARM device to play with to move iPad apps and 'Mac' apps over to Mac ARM. It doubt it's any more difficult than last time. And M$ and Adobe are already on ARM, anyhow. Already on the App stores.

I'll enjoy pulling the trigger on the Intel iMac at the same time.

Azrael.

 

[Tekguy0]

Why should they do this? Look at Surface Pro X, emulation is like 50% slower than native. Assuming Apple has a similarly good emulation technology, the A14 should easily match Celeron or Pentium Silvers per core performance.
On top of this, i suppose Macs will have more cores than these Celerons.

And then, when done right, you only emulate the application code and have something like a WoW (Windows on Windows) layer, which translates the ABIs for native kernel calls.

ps. Even when you put an x86 core into a Mac in addition to the ARMs, you will need to boot a different OS - as ARM OSX will not run on these. So you will need to decide at boot time, which OS to run.

I suppose an "auxiliary" x86-64 chip would only run applications, and the main OS would run completely on the ARM chip. If emulation is good enough to offset simply installing another chip, then we will see that, though I would imagine on the higher end models (iMac /iMac Pro/MBP16/Mac Pro/MBP13 4ports) it would at least be an option to maintain compatibility and the highest performance possible for applications that have not migrated to ARM.