Will be a beautiful thing. Create futuristic designs, lock down the OS, and start to make macOS more like iOS/iPadOS and Apple will resurrect the platform. I am interested to see where they go.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Bloomberg: Apple's First Arm Mac to Launch by 2021 With 12-Core Processor
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I am not sure I follow your logic here. Should Apple stop developing new hardware? Doesn’t the prospect of new and better processors excite you as a user knowing that when your next Mac is due in a while you’ll have even more power at your disposal?
Rebuilding and going back in time is unusual for computer companies unless you mess up an important part like the keyboard and steer back to where you roughly were a few years ago.
If they want software developers to jump in on such a major change, Apple is going to have to provide plenty of swag: t-shirts, keychains, fidget spinners, worry balls, fake tattoos, whatever it takes. No expense should be spared.
You do remember Rosetta and the universal binaries from the PPC transition, right? That's not even a fluke as Apple had something similar back when they transitioned from Motorola 68k to PPC that also made the transition pretty smooth.
Maybe you had a different experience than me, buying into the MacOS ecosystem right smack in the middle of the x86 transition, but the software that still hadn't transitioned to Intel or universal binaries worked pretty much without issues and by the time they stopped supporting Rosetta I didn't use anything that relied on it. Admittedly plenty of users were peeved by Adobe never releasing PPC or universal binaries of Photoshop CS2 and forced users to stick to older versions of MacOS or have to buy another expensive Photoshop license when Apple dropped Rosetta with 10.7 in 2011.
Looks like my guess was right:
forums.macrumors.com
I likely won’t be buying, if and when I do upgrade, I will be going for another Intel based MacBook Pro. The A-Series on Mac will still need some time to mature. It will be certainly faster than it took for the Intel transition and even that was a smooth one.
Apple likely has been testing macOS on A series as far back as 2012 or 2013. When Phill Schiller described the A7 as having desktop class performance and the first 64 bit chip in an SoC. Part of the heritage of macOS too is its portability. Remember, NeXT had it running on Motorola processors, then Sparc after a deal with SUN, then brought it to Intel. It appeared to have been little effort to bring it up on Intel as proper OS X back in the 2000’s when it was called Marklar.
This is exciting though. I wonder if they are gonna use the opportunity to make any alterations to macOS desktop or to make the transition familiar and easy, maintain the traditional macOS Finder Desktop Experies: Dock, Global Menu Bar etc. Apple should use the iPad style dock in the new macOS on A series.
Leaker: Apple Planning iPad Air With Under-Screen Touch ID, ARM MacBook, Game Controller, and More
I knew they were going to use A series on low hanging fruit first. Interesting that they are bringing back the 12 inch MacBook. It’s less risky, especially since the MacBook Air has restored some sanity and affordability to Apple’s family of MacBooks. But I knew the recent iPad update was really...
forums.macrumors.com
I likely won’t be buying, if and when I do upgrade, I will be going for another Intel based MacBook Pro. The A-Series on Mac will still need some time to mature. It will be certainly faster than it took for the Intel transition and even that was a smooth one.
Apple likely has been testing macOS on A series as far back as 2012 or 2013. When Phill Schiller described the A7 as having desktop class performance and the first 64 bit chip in an SoC. Part of the heritage of macOS too is its portability. Remember, NeXT had it running on Motorola processors, then Sparc after a deal with SUN, then brought it to Intel. It appeared to have been little effort to bring it up on Intel as proper OS X back in the 2000’s when it was called Marklar.
This is exciting though. I wonder if they are gonna use the opportunity to make any alterations to macOS desktop or to make the transition familiar and easy, maintain the traditional macOS Finder Desktop Experies: Dock, Global Menu Bar etc. Apple should use the iPad style dock in the new macOS on A series.
Interesting idea, obviously that wouldn’t be 12” then anymore. Maybe they call it the Macbook SE.
I bought the 16" 2 weeks ago and I'm happy with it. I know ARM Mac are coming sooner or later, but I don't care. I plan to use this laptop for 4-5 years (unless they stop supporting Xcode), then I'll switch to ARM. By then, the ARM version of macOS will likely have more compatible apps so it will be a smoother transition.
Uh…I using Home.app which is Marzipan…but usability in desktop is horrible. They not optimized for desktop experience, basically just large iOS apps floating on window. No contextual menu, using large touch screen oriented UI with mouse cursor is very wrong….
No developer is writing apps in X86, you use tools. Apple controls the bigges one - XCode. All they need to do is a flip a switch in XCode to compile natively for ARM.
Tralsation layer is goign take care of the rest...
This is not 20 years ago, my friends. Even bootcamp will work (looking at my Surface pro X ARM based Windows device...).
Tralsation layer is goign take care of the rest...
This is not 20 years ago, my friends. Even bootcamp will work (looking at my Surface pro X ARM based Windows device...).
X86-64 instructions on ARM. So Apple is turning the MacBook into iToy?
Probably not. While there is a Windows ARM variant, that OS is not booted the same way. Nor is it sold "off the shelf". Windows on ARM is about tightly coupled 1-to-1 with systems as iOS is to iPhones. For there to be Windows on ARM pragmatically Apple would need to be involved with coupling it to system. I doubt Apple is interested in that at all.
I think Apple is going to be willing to "walk away" from those at the lower end who need to run x86 Windows in a native or hardware virtualized mode. Additionally, probably will punt to a third party a software x86 emulator as did before when back on PPC & 68K.
Pretty good chance though that in the top "half" of the Mac line up they won't be getting rid of x86 based systems all that quickly. Doubtful this is come kind of 12-14 month "Big Bang" transition for the entire product line. ( these rumors tend to be overly dimissive of what AMD is doing of late. Apple pushing out both Intel and AMD at the top half will be problematical for Apple. )
That would be doable if Citrix put in the work.
They wouldn’t do that again.. it will probably be in a 14” pro or the air to start off with
if we could only count all the times “Apple is doomed” has been predicted because of a change in processor architecture…
The ever-reoccurring “Apple is doomed” is part of the Macrumors spirit. It will never go away.
2021 is too early. Need to wait good few years. Early adopters almost always end up being the ultimate fools.
However, 2023 MacBook Air 15" with 16 core processor, that's where the real deal is at!
Citrix: for sure.
Boot camp: not regular windows. Windows for Arm is a possibility, but given the tiny user base unlikely that Apple would put in the effort.
[automerge]1587647034[/automerge]
I bought the original iPhone the day it came out. I was one of the first 400 developers to ship App Store software for iphoneos. I don’t feel very foolish.
Unless you use an external library compiled for x86 only. But I'd say the majority of apps will be ok. If you ported your app to iOS, your libraries are ARM compatible. It is funny because I've used external libraries in the past, and I needed them to be ARM and x86 in order to run on a device and on the simulator on my Mac.
Switching to arm let’s them completely change the form factor of the computer, if they want to. Lower cooling requirements, and the ability to move external chips into the SoC allow them great flexibility.
It might look very little like a traditional MacBook.
The one thing that I’d worry about is what will they do for a graphics chip, if anything.
[automerge]1587647269[/automerge]
Why wouldn’t they run Citrix? It’s just a vpn-like client.
For the hundredth time: "Marzipan"/Catalyst has absolutely nothing to do with porting Intel applications to ARM CPUs. It's a port of iOS's UIKit for macOS, nothing else, and produces only Intel compatible binaries.
They can kill off the desktop os and incorporate all their users into the walled garden of mobile os, take control of all software sales for the entire platform.
Imagine the revenue when all software sales must go through the app store...
