Thank you for your feedback, Apple SW dept. has completely missed that fact! Tim Cook will be forever in your debt.
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Bloomberg: Apple's First Arm Mac to Launch by 2021 With 12-Core Processor
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Thank you for your feedback, Apple SW dept. has completely missed that fact! Tim Cook will be forever in your debt.
I've made the decision to be cross platform after the Mac Pro debacle. The lack of options, value or timely updates.
I'm looking forward to a new iMac. But this latest news is interesting but not surprising.
Apple does their transitions. They'll have to make it very compelling.
Azrael.
Worth the read, I promise!
You don’t have to go very far back in history to conclude that Apple is well positioned to have a smooth transition from x86 to ARM processors. First, they did it with the switch from PowerPC to Intel in 2006. Back then those machines ran a PowerPC emulator called Rosetta to run PowerPC apps on Intel. They were a bit slower than native apps, but it was more than useable and allowed devs the time to transition their apps to run natively on Intel.
Secondly, they did it right under our noses with the public none the wiser when they transitioned millions of iOS devices from the aging HFS file system to the new APFS file system all the way back in 2017 (no small feat).
Thirdly, a transition of this magnitude is not done overnight. You better believe Apple has been cooking up this thing in the lab for years and when the move happens, they will have all their apps ready to go natively on ARM. I’d wager that their top devs have knowledge of this and are prepping for the transition behind the scenes as well. It’s not an accident that Adobe is dipping their toes in the ARM waters with Photoshop and the upcoming Illustrator for iPad.
Fourthly, by moving over to ARM Apple will be more in control of their products and their product rollout. They will save boatloads of money by designing their own processors because they don’t have to factor in Intel’s profits. This will free them up to either lower prices, or add value by inventing new innovative features that don’t exist today.
Lastly, you can’t compare what Micosoft is doing to what Apple is doing. Literally, Apples and Oranges. One can argue that Microsoft has far more duds than Apple and often rushes unfinished, unrefined product/platforms that have little developer buy-in like Windows Phone, Zune, Windows ME, MSN Watch, MSN PlaysforSure, Plug and Pray... I mean... Plug and Play.
BONUS: The transition to ARM is not a matter of if, but when. Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel because PowerPC processor updates became stagnant and unpredictable, they ran hot, and hit the ceiling in terms of performance when compared to Intel. Sound familiar? This is Intel today. ARM is the future, the processors are efficient yet powerful. The current iPad Pro A12X runs rings around Intel Core i7 single and multi-core benchmarks, it even beats the pants of Core i9s in some tests. All this in a super thin, fanless, design that doesn’t run hot enough to cook eggs. Can you imagine what an ARM MacBook would be able to do without the form factor constraints of an iPad? Brrrr... I shudder at the thought.
So... I wouldn’t bet against Apple pulling this off :]
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We all are.
there’s a certain task I’ve been doing regularly on my macs since 2014. Uses 100 percent of available cpu. Between 2014 and 2020 Intel cpus, it’s sped up from 1.5 hours to 1.35. I am unimpressed.
and what if they just use a different machine code layer with the os still performing the work? Wouldn’t matter what cpu was used. Don’t compare to Microsoft, they have a history of botching things like this up
Fair enough, for developers it absolutely makes sense to buy it ASAP.
General population as well as people who rely of pro software though might be better off waiting a while the software transition is properly underway
I have nothing against using an ARM based processor, but I will wait before I make the transition to see how things are going. Apple has been putting a lot of buggy software out lately (thinking of Catalina, and also iOS), so I have lost confidence in their ability to do major transitions.
I'm assuming the plan is that the machines would still run Intel based software, via some sort of shell as with the PowerPC to Intel transition?
I didn't buy a Mac until it had an Intel processor, specifically due to Intel software, so I have no experience with a processor transition.
I'm assuming the plan is that the machines would still run Intel based software, via some sort of shell as with the PowerPC to Intel transition?
I didn't buy a Mac until it had an Intel processor, specifically due to Intel software, so I have no experience with a processor transition.
Yah. Intel. They got greedy with the intel task, and now are struggling to catch back up
INtel are between a rock and a hard place of their own making.
If an iPad chip is rivalling Intel CPUs then a specific Mac part will likely stomp all over it. There's no point doing this.
Apple like to own their tech'. This has been coming for a long time.
Many fought tooth and nail re: PPC. It got dumped. Many have said ARM on Mac isn't happening. Tooth and nail.
Intel on Mac hasn't been great these late five years. It's been very sluggish.
They've been on borrowed time.
The Mac looks like the past. The iPad looks like the future.
I'm a Mac fan.
But it is what it is.
Azrael.
Apple didn't have one for PPC. What Apple labeled "Rosetta" was actually a solution that belonged to another company (it just happened to be available for licensing at the time). Apple itself hasn't done something like this in decades.
I wonder how it will perform relative to Intel 7 nm and AMD 5 nm chips that are coming?
Hopefully a transition to ARM doesn’t mean completely abandoning x86 altogether.
Hopefully a transition to ARM doesn’t mean completely abandoning x86 altogether.
No. The great majority of applications written today are not written for a specific processor architecture. They're written to support certain operating systems, frameworks, libraries, etc. For most applications, the transition will most likely be as simple as recompiling the software. For example, I work on a large-scale software project intended to run on x86 servers however our demo platform is a bunch of ARM boards running a different operating system than what most of us develop on; we did virtually 0 work to support this, for the most part we just recompiled.
Developers have been writing cross-platform compatible software, using cross-compilers, etc for decades. Some folks here are blowing this way out of proportion (or they just have no idea how software is written today). Yes, there will be a transition period, however, for the great majority of Mac users this will be no big deal.
Another thing that will help this is that Macs are quite popular as developer platforms, including for software that's not intended to run on Macs in production. Those developers, like me, want to use a Mac and we want software to work on it. I can see a lot of developers jumping on this and working to make sure stuff works.
Yes, there will be issues like "how do I run my x86 OS in a VM" and whatnot but those will be solved with time. Aside from those issues, I think most people here are not nearly as tied to x86 as they think they are.
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We'll see on the re-design. I won't be buying an 'old design' iMac. I'd rather go Hack'tosh.
So I'm hoping with you.
The ARM thing is it's own thing. It's just the next evolution or revolution of the Mac.
It's not the 1st time it's happened. Apple's Macs have been stale in tech, design and premium pricing for a while and due a shake up.
The iPhone and iPads look like the future. The Macs don't.
Azrael.
The funny you say that since I bought the first iPad when it came out and I don’t mind the Apple Watch, but didn’t get one until 2018 since I didn’t feel the need to get one. As for the AirPods, I don’t care about them.
But still, I am very skeptical about the ARM switch since it leaves really little benefits in power consumption and security (looking at you Spectre, Meltdown, etc) over breaking compatibility and causing a lot of software developers, especially pro apps abandoning support macOS for good. Yes, nobody codes in assembly and I develop apps for iOS and macOS and reusing some of the code (completely in Objective-C) with both x86-64 and ARM. The part that really conscerns me is that others like Microsoft with Windows 10 on ARM still haven’t managed to get x86 apps running seemlesslly (yes, without the big performance hit) let alone X86-64 support. That is why I think ARM transition is going to be a big failure, unless Apple has something up their sleeves that say otherwise.
Not to conerned about virtualization support since VMWare did have their hypervisor running on ARM.
But still, I am very skeptical about the ARM switch since it leaves really little benefits in power consumption and security (looking at you Spectre, Meltdown, etc) over breaking compatibility and causing a lot of software developers, especially pro apps abandoning support macOS for good. Yes, nobody codes in assembly and I develop apps for iOS and macOS and reusing some of the code (completely in Objective-C) with both x86-64 and ARM. The part that really conscerns me is that others like Microsoft with Windows 10 on ARM still haven’t managed to get x86 apps running seemlesslly (yes, without the big performance hit) let alone X86-64 support. That is why I think ARM transition is going to be a big failure, unless Apple has something up their sleeves that say otherwise.
Not to conerned about virtualization support since VMWare did have their hypervisor running on ARM.
I have always been a Mac guy, but my current Pro is probably the last one I will own. You just get so much more bang for your buck with PCs, and have so many more options. There is nothing specific that I do that I cannot accomplish with a PC.
I wonder about the resale value of current and shortly upcoming MacBooks though. Will anyone want to buy my 2020 MacBook Pro 14" with 10th gen Intel chip three years from now?
Microsoft has tried rolling out ARM based products, but so far they have not taken the world by storm. I'd say that Intel/AMD based computers have too many advantages over ARM based products.
The Mac market is not the Windows market.
If MacOS is better than Windows, then one of the key reasons is that Apple can have a clean sweep every decade or so without losing their ultra-conservative corporate customers. Even Apple's "pro" users mainly work in media creation and, by necessity, are vastly more open to change than the banks and insurance companies who keep Microsoft stuck with supporting 30 year-old software.
Windows users expect to be able to run binaries compiled in the 1990s (and they have to support a huge corporate market who rely on this) using an API that was x86-centric since it was cloned from CP/M (...Windows NT is newer and cross-platform, but the non-x86 versions all failed and/or were dropped, and even Windows 10 still supports old Win9x-era, if not before, binaries).
In that time, Apple have (a) completely switched processor architecture 3 times (68k to PPC, PPC to x86-32, x86-32 to x86-64) and (b) dumped Classic MacOS for a completely new NextStep-based OS that isn't even source-code compatible with "Classic" (and the "classic" emulation mode is long gone)... which, as a Unix implementation, is fundamentally platform-agnostic and founded on source-level compatibility anyway
Also, Apple control the hardware and the software, so they can force a transition by simply announcing an end-of-life for x86 Macs - anybody wanting to stay in the Mac software business will have to support ARM - whereas Microsoft can't (well, they could drop x86 Windows... and cease to exist) so currently you have 1 or 2 ARM Windows machines vs hundreds of Intel-based competitors with no particular incentive for developers to support it. Heck, Apple could afford to lose the Mac entirely.
Meanwhile, have spent years shepherding developers towards official MacOS frameworks for graphics, acceleration etc., depreciating OpenGL, CUDA etc. They just purged the Mac world of "abandonware" and legacy binaries by dropping 32 bit support in Catalina. For the vast majority of applications, written mainly in high-level languages, recompiling for ARM64 is going to be a trivial job compared to converting them from x86-32 to x86-64... and for the exceptions, well, if the developers don't think their worth supporting they're likely to die at the next major MacOS upgrade anyway (if they haven't already been killed by Catalina).
It's pretty ironic that the most serious loss from switching the Mac to ARM would be the ability to run Windows
...although, personally, that's a feature I'm finding less and less important - increasingly, there are Mac and cloud-based alternatives to Windows-only software, the demise of Internet Explorer and MS's switch to Chromium vastly reduces the need for testing websites/webapps on Windows while the lack of a touchscreen on the Mac probably means that I'm going to end up needing to buy a Windows laptop/convertible to properly test websites/apps.
Meanwhile, if I really need an x86 Linux VM (given that ARM64 Linux is already well-developed), I can spin one up in the cloud for a penny an hour (its not like you can do modern web development without an Internet connection).
That seems most likely - 6 months of a developer program should ensure a huge swathe of natively-compiled ARM apps. The big pro media apps will likely take a bit longer.
However, notwithstanding the comments above (and the revelation that an iPad Pro+ Magic Keyboard weighs more than an Air) I'm starting to wonder if the mythical ARM Mac will actually turn out to be an "iPad Laptop"... which would explain all the interest in "Pro" apps for iPad.
Spot on.
The iPad is blazingly fast. There is no 'death of Mac.' The iPad and iPhone are 'Macs.'
Put a custom Arm chip in the iMac and nobody would tell the difference. The last PPC/Intel transition was seamless. It's consigned to history. The Intel Mac was no less a 'Mac.'
Azrael.
I never owned a PC that lasted beyond 3 years that wasn't showing it's age and battery shot to death....here I am typing this to you on 2012 MBP that's still running with the latest OS.
Death of the Mac for how many technical folks use it. Macs will certainly go on, but Apple just seems determined to turn its back on segments of the consumer base that have been very loyal.
But as we all know, Apple is no longer a computer company. They are a phone/services company. So decisions like this make sense, in that light, no matter how some of us here despise such decisions.
It’s too bad, the 4000 series AMD mobile chips sure look nice. I’m sure Apple could have gotten them much cheaper than the Intel chips they are currently using in the laptops.