Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak Discuss Apple Silicon Transition, Lack of Boot Camp Support, and More

[MikeZTM]

My 5c of optimism: OK, imagine totally no Boot Camp support in ARM flavour from Apple. But then imagine user is still able to allow ARM Mac bootloader to load Windows 10 for ARM. Then I'm confident, sooner or later a new 'ARM Camp' will arise. What I mean: people can write the missing drivers... As for me, I would actively join such project, being drivers coder (some of my drv stuff is at http://forbootcamp.org/). Trust me, there are many more geeks who could join efforts and make this happen. If people had created Linux kernel mostly for fun, then definitely there are people who could as well write a set of Windows drivers for ARM architecture, also just for fun. Locked bootloader (if truly locked) is so far my biggest concern. Anyways, we can't wait to get an ARM Mac in order to start these evil experiments 🤓

You almost cannot write GPU drivers for that.
It's much easier to write a virtual GPU driver to bridge DirectX calls into Metal calls for VM -- Parallels already shipping one in their product now. So at the end of the day, VM will run much faster than the hacked Windows on bare metal.

That's won't stop people from trying but will limit the usefulness of a bare metal installation.

 

[GeoStructural]

Are they not good because there is not native software for what you do (forcing you to run them under Windows, either virtualized or under Bootcamp), or are they not good because they do not perform well enough?

If the former, there are two ways this might play out - cheaper better Macs might spur market share increases which may encourage other companies to port, or a widely accessible ARM platform might encourage Windows only software companies to do Windows ARM ports of their software.



As long as they support Metal, there will be very little effort to port for any application that has been developed using Apple’s tool chain (about 99% of applications these days). AutoCad, as an example has used Metal for several years.

For both reasons you mentioned: There is no native support, and where there is, it is wildly outperformed by cheaper Windows machines.

I feel you are suggesting Macs will become cheaper? I don't think so...

And what you say about Metal, yes, that was what I meant in my original post, developers will have to rewrite or port their codes, instructions, API, etc. in a market that may not be so attractive due to the raw number of users.

 

[DummyFool]

I will know when I got my dev kit.
And I will not tell you about it due to NDA.

Life is unfair.

 

[MikeZTM]

Until now I used to use Dragon Professional & Medical under Parallels - is there a real and working equivalent on OSX ?

Is it a 64bit Windows application? You can check that in Task Manager. It's hidden now by default in Details tab and you have to right click on the columns and "select columns" and check "Platform".

If it shows 32bit then you are in good shape. High chance it will run on a Windows 10 ARM and it is possible to run a Windows ARM VM on Mac with ARM chips.

If it shows 64bit then you have to wait Microsoft to support x64 emulation on Windows.

 

[smulji]

There have been dozens of news articles on it today. No bootcamp. They said “we are focused on virtualization.”

No matter how much it's been said people still don't want to accept or believe it.

 

[Squeak825]

No matter how much it's been said people still don't want to accept or believe it.

No, I just misunderstood the headline from the Macrumors article.

 

[DummyFool]

In Steve Jobs own words.

"If the market tells us we are making the wrong choices we listen to the market. We are just people running this company. We're trying to make great products for people. And so we have at least the courtage of our convictions to say we dont think this is part of what makes a great product and we're gonna leave it out. Some people are not gonna like that, and they're gonna call us names, and it's not going to be in certain companies vested interests to do that.


But we are gonna take the heat cause we wanna make the best product for customers...you know what, they are paying us to make those choices, thats what a lot of customers are paying us to do...And if we succeed they'll buy them, and if we don't they won't! And it will all work itself out!"

I feel the same way for politics, both of the candidates that i can vote for have to do what the peoples wants and what is good for the peoples because otherwise we will not vote for them.

 

[DracheMitch]

"We aren't merging the Mac with iOS, we are just moving all the iOS APIs to the Mac and deprecating Mac APIs."

Yes, that's not a merger, it's a full-out replacement.

 

[Cosmosent]

I feel you are suggesting Macs will become cheaper? I don't think so...

I disagree 100% !

By year's end, AAPL will very-likely announce two new lower-end (i.e., cheaper) Macs, one a MacBook Air (for ~$800 USD), & one a 13" MacBook Pro (for ~$1,100 USD).

Those two will Kick Off AAPL's Si transition.

And, if AAPL was smart, they would focus on the lower-end with their new custom Si efforts !

Does anybody remember ALL the times Jobs stated he did NOT want AAPL products to be ONLY for the rich ???

AAPL lost its way (wrt to that) under Cook.

This might bring them back into the fold.

 

[cmaier]

Well here I have to disagree. Floating Point is not more imprecise than long ints it just depends on the range of values you want to represent and what kind of precision you need. It is both 64 bit values so number of you can represent is nearly the same (except some reserved FP special values).

Especially if you go into the more analog world like rf design or more general mathematics floating points are very important. But also in circuit design if you look currents and voltages and start to solve equation systems you really want floating point arithmetics. No offence but you seem to be a more digital guy

But more on topic did any of the tools you use run natively on MacOS? Matlab seems to be the only tool in this domain, which is available as native Mac application. All EDA vendors seem to go the x86 Linux route and therefore won't run on ARM MacOs. I know some analog designers which used Vituoso in virtual machines on macs

Well of course it’s true that you can represent 2^64-1 numbers either way (NaN not withstanding), but in floating point representations those numbers are increasingly spread out. With a 64 bit integer I can represent any number between -9,223,372,036,854,775,807 and + 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (more or less, ignoring that you lose 1 because of the sign) or any number between 0 and 1.8x10^19 (ish). In almost any real engineering regime, that range is sufficiently large to enable you to represent any values you are working with. For example, in semiconductor circuit analysis, multiple all current/voltages by 10 billion, and you get plenty of precision.

The tools I wrote were generally written on Unix platforms, but designed to be easily portable (so we ran them on Solaris, Linux, bsd, etc.). I have versions re-written from scratch with new source code that do run on mac (of some of the tools I was most proud of).

Now, as for commercial EDA, yeah, they are all Unix/Linux. Some have dabbled in windows over the years. I’m assuming nobody other than Apple is using Apple EDA tools My prior solution was simply to use VNC which, to be frank, is often how people ran their stuff even when using a Linux desktop. (People always wanted to get onto one of the “fast” machines if they could, unless they were lucky enough to have such a machine - I felt like a king when I had one of the first dual-core opteron machines under my desk, before they were even on sale

 

[ApfelKuchen]

They demonstrated MacOS x86 games being run on the ARM based Mac.

Rosetta will not support any Windows based games.

Note: Some major games are ported over to the Mac but more then half the games are not (looking at the Steam store). Unless people are happy running simple Apple arcade games or the limited titles that get ported to MacOS, it's a net lose for gamers.

But the strategic goal here seems (to me) to make Apple a unified market - one app that runs on iOS/ipadOS and Mac. This makes Apple a more cost-effective target to produce code for. Chances are, we'll see more gaming on Mac, not less.

 

[cmaier]

I will know when I got my dev kit.
And I will not tell you about it due to NDA.

You will tell me about it, though, right?

 

[canadianreader]

Is it the death of Hackintosh as well ?

 

[otternonsense]

Goodbye to the partition dedicated to running Steam on windows

 

[prism]

Wow, after listening to this I feel way more confident that my recently purchased MBAir will truly have years of support ahead. Many ppl try to draw parallels with the PPC to Intel transition but you have to remember the total PPC user base was just a small fraction of the total intel user base today and it just does not make any business sense to accelerate the transition to ARM by prematurely dropping support on Intel.

 

[D.T.]

I'm guessing not, but can someone with the technical know-how confirm if VMWare would be unable to run my old virtual installation of High Sierra?

It's been answered (probably even more times by now, I had this sitting in my editor ), but for some additional [hopefully helpful] clarification: an ARM Mac will run apps (code) compiled to ARM, and ARM Mac will also run X86/Intel code by way of Rosetta 2 (either on the fly, or or transcoded during download).

So I see a lot of folks thinking, OK, well, if I can run an X86 app, that's a product like the current VMWare or Parallels, right? That is correct, you could (most likely) fire up (an Intel version) Parallels Desktop on an ARM mac, you'd be able to navigate through the UI, etc. However, when you configure a VM in Parallels, and attempt to start it, that OS will execute CPU instructions (isolated inside the VM software) for the specific architecture for which is was compiled, like Intel.

What Parallels would need to do, is create a software emulator for an X86, and use that (vs. direct hardware) for a VM that targets X86. The big downside is obviously the performance, though with enough horsepower from a next gen A series, you may be able to get pretty good performance, especially for non-graphic intensive apps. That all depends of a number of factors: Parallels or whoever actually doing it, the effective performance (there's a threshold where it would just be unacceptably slow and detrimental to productivity, etc.)

 

[Alan Wynn]

You are conflating two issues. Loss of 32-bit apps has nothing to do with Arm. You can’t buy a new *x86* mac today and run those apps either.

This! I have seen people complain about this issue, and I am curious as to their thoughts on how long the rest of us have to suffer to allow them to run no longer supported applications? It has been pointed out that one can still run ancient Windows games on current Windows systems. Unfortunately, for years this unbounded backward compatibility was a major source of Windows instability.

There are costs for supporting these applications. Most of us are more interested in supported applications and new features, while some here have the opposite views:

Heck I'm still on Mojave as I don't want to lose 32 bit applications and plugins for creative software.

That these plugins did not get updated over the several years of warnings, makes it clear that they have been abandoned. I understand that some of these tools are very important to some users, but I think that the benefit to the community of pushing things forward exceeds the loss. The best way to prevent this problems is to keep the platform popular with competitive specs and wide availability apps (something that you have pointed out will improve with native compatibility of iOS and iPadOS apps).

As for anything 64bit, apple says it should run fine, including games. Until you know otherwise, suggest calming down.

Having lived through NeXT Computer’s transition from 68030 to 68040 to SPARC/PA-RISC and Intel, I know how seamless these things can be. Any application built with Apple’s tool chain should be simple to recompile.

 

[jgbr]

Interviewer waffles a lot or likes his own voice. 😂

Beta products, they are going to be cautious about what they say.

It’s a historic change just as it was 15 or so years ago with X and intel. Remember the SJ era with pride and reverence.

 

[LavenderCaptain]

Is it the death of Hackintosh as well ?

Perhaps. But then again, maybe someone will make it work on a Raspberry Pi.

 

[cmaier]

This! I have seen people complain about this issue, and I am curious as to their thoughts on how long the rest of us have to suffer to allow them to run no longer supported applications? It has been pointed out that one can still run ancient Windows games on current Windows systems. Unfortunately, for years this unbounded backward compatibility was a major source of Windows instability.

There are costs for supporting these applications. Most of us are more interested in supported applications and new features, while some here have the opposite views:



That these plugins did not get updated over the several years of warnings, makes it clear that they have been abandoned. I understand that some of these tools are very important to some users, but I think that the benefit to the community of pushing things forward exceeds the loss. The best way to prevent this problems is to keep the platform popular with competitive specs and wide availability apps (something that you have pointed out will improve with native compatibility of iOS and iPadOS apps).



Having lived through NeXT Computer’s transition from 68030 to 68040 to SPARC/PA-RISC and Intel, I know how seamless these things can be. Any application built with Apple’s tool chain should be simple to recompile.

My roommate in college had a Next cube. I desperately wanted one. I bought a book on programming objective-c, and read it repeatedly and understood absolute not one whit of it. (I was a good c programmer, and a fair c++ programmer at the time). 10 or 15 years later it all came together when I started writing iPhoneOS software

I still want a cube though. Such a cool machine.

 

[CarlJ]

They didn’t say they support every way to build an app. There’s no lisp. APL is noticeably absent. Apple hasn’t provided bindings for perl.

Jeez, do they even ship Forth with the systems these days? What is this world coming to?

 

[dogslobber]

Question - are you a developer? and if you are a developer - what do you develop? because in no way does ARM cut off developers arms unless you are developing in some highly specific scenarios - aka native windows applications. I would bet well over 50% of all development done today is done on languages and systems that are compatible across x86 and ARM - so not sure what you mean here?

Lack of x86 virtualization is the kiss of death for the Mac for majority of developers. This is not those who are prisoners of the Apple iOS eco-system.

 

[rp2011]

It felt like that ad went on for 20 minutes.

He’s gotta eat. Got to pay the bills.

 

[CarlJ]

What Parallels would need to do, is create a software emulator for an X86, and use that (vs. direct hardware) for a VM that targets X86.

It’s possible (not necessarily likely, but possible), that Parallels et. al., could call a Rosetta2 API to have the code translated and/or run.

 

[Whathappened]

So we're losing Windows support AND a switch that will force us to lose or rebuy software?
How are we benefiting again?

Hopefully my lap won’t get burned anymore. That’s all I’m asking for.
Have fun in yesterday’s world.