Leaving Apple over ARM Based Macs discussion [merged]

[richinaus]

I wouldn't be so sure about that... in particular, unified memory, large caches, excellent CPU performance and TBDR GPUs and high-performance AA will most likely make it surprisingly capable for CAD.

You may be right Leman, but I think the issue is for people like myself that the developers of the app’s we use are unlikely to update them for AS quickly.
Most of the software already runs like a dog on a Mac, so my faith in Rosetta is limited to fix anything.

I have already bought my PC. It’s a tool that is really benefitting my work output and as such am now looking at a HP Z workstation laptop. The same apps in windows fly, and as this is all for my livelihood, I am not risking the business on maybe’s.

Will just see how all this pans out. Hardware is cheap really for business and my licences are cross platform so it’s not a big deal to be platform agnostic.

I much prefer the Mac to pc but in the end of the day the CAD apps in windows fly and they don’t currently on a Mac. Given the market share it is highly unlikely they will anytime soon.
I just have to face reality, a PC is better for my business.

 

[ChrisA]

Are you sure on that? Specifically video editing?

This guy showing editing 4K 10bit video on the iPhone 12. That's on a thermally constrained phone. Extrapolate that to a laptop form factor, or even a desktop form factor, well, I can't wait to see what's coming.

He has only one time line up. It is not even moving. He is just cutting and pasting a static timeline. Any computer can do that. It is not impressive at all. THis is what people do when they cull out the worst of their vacation videoa but you go nuts editing on one timeline if doing a real show.

I found another youtube of a more typical use of FCPx in a low-budget amateur use case. The "standard" example is shoot a two person dialog scene. Even a new interview does this. You need at least two camera and preferably 3. You also have each person having their own microphone on two different sound recorders. This is a cheap youtube setup. using just a few dSLRs on tripods

 

[leman]

I have already bought my PC. It’s a tool that is really benefitting my work output and as such am now looking at a HP Z workstation laptop. The same apps in windows fly, and as this is all for my livelihood, I am not risking the business on maybe’s.

It makes perfect sense to me. Tools are there to get the job done. If new Macs end up being good for this kind of tasks, software will certainly come. Dinosaurs like Adobe and Autodesk are not necessarily the most agile of the bunch anyway.

 

[bill-p]

The problem is that... it has taken ages for some companies to come out with tools that barely try to address "some" of what Photoshop offers, and there really is no alternative to Lightroom and many other Adobe tools. Same goes for Autodesk.

They may be dinosaurs, but these dinosaurs are hard to beat. The software industry actually goes very very very slowly, contrary to what younger startups would have you believe.

So software will come, but not as fast as you'd think. By the time alternatives to Autodesk suite come around, I wouldn't be surprised if we're on the A25Z or something like that. Heck, if Autodesk didn't bring AutoCAD and Fusion 360 to Mac, the Mac would actually still not have any decent CAD software at all even today. That's pretty sad.

P.S.: oh, and Fusion 360 currently does not work properly at all on Big Sur even without Rosetta in between.

 

[richinaus]

The problem is that... it has taken ages for some companies to come out with tools that barely try to address "some" of what Photoshop offers, and there really is no alternative to Lightroom and many other Adobe tools. Same goes for Autodesk.

They may be dinosaurs, but these dinosaurs are hard to beat. The software industry actually goes very very very slowly, contrary to what younger startups would have you believe.

So software will come, but not as fast as you'd think. By the time alternatives to Autodesk suite come around, I wouldn't be surprised if we're on the A25Z or something like that. Heck, if Autodesk didn't bring AutoCAD and Fusion 360 to Mac, the Mac would actually still not have any decent CAD software at all even today. That's pretty sad.

P.S.: oh, and Fusion 360 currently does not work properly at all on Big Sur even without Rosetta in between.

I couldn’t agree more.

I tried to go elsewhere than Adobe, but recently re-subscribed.
I cannot go elsewhere than Autodesk as they are dominant in the built environment and all my contractors use Autodesk software, so cant change that either.

Fusion 360 for me is the best new app around. I love it to bits and was an early adopter [on the mac].
I use it on my PC and also my 16" maxed MBP. The experience between the two is chalk and cheese, where the PC totally dominates it in terms of experience of use.

I can completely imagine Fusion on Big Sur is average, and also dont expect an Apple Silicon solution any time soon - they basically say as much on their forums. Rhino is exactly the same.

This is really disapointing, but is also the reason I was spurred onto buy a PC. My life was transformed for the better when I did this and it does make me sad to say that.

 

[ian87w]

He has only one time line up. It is not even moving. He is just cutting and pasting a static timeline. Any computer can do that. It is not impressive at all. THis is what people do when they cull out the worst of their vacation videoa but you go nuts editing on one timeline if doing a real show.

I found another youtube of a more typical use of FCPx in a low-budget amateur use case. The "standard" example is shoot a two person dialog scene. Even a new interview does this. You need at least two camera and preferably 3. You also have each person having their own microphone on two different sound recorders. This is a cheap youtube setup. using just a few dSLRs on tripods

Not impressive? This is on a phone, and it can scrub the 4K 10 bit video without slowdowns and encode in near real-time. Try doing that on a Regular desktop and you need at least a high end CPU and discrete GPU. Extrapolate the performance of the A14 from a thermally constrained iPhone into a laptop/desktop form factor, and I am excited.

 

[kepler20b]

the people that talk nonstop about a14 arm >>> x86 chip performance have no idea what they are saying.


You know, there are tons of professionals that do more than just video editing? Sure, if you strictly do 4 tasks and those apps are available to without any emulation the arm chip computers will be highly interesting to you.


But anyone that runs any type of software that is on x86, legacy software, stuff that no one wants run in emulation, what does having an arm chip do for you? Just more stupid hoops to jump through to lose performance and security.

In fact I applaud apple for moving to arm because I do believe its the future, but those that are going to jump ship right away are the sacrificial lambs. For this reason, there has NEVER been a better time to buy an intel Mac. You get the best compatibility and by the time you upgrade again you'll have the advantage of seeing how the ecosystem has adapted to arm

 

[gnasher729]

But them making an architecture switch gives them a massive opportunity to say "here's the new Xcode wherein you can produce native ARMacOS applications, but, by the way, you can only install them using the Mac App Store".

The processor architecture has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. Apple could easily build an iPad with an Intel processor requiring downloads from the AppStore only (although that would be a bad idea for many reasons, just no technical problem), and using ARM processors in Mac doesn't change anything about how apps are distributed.

 

[gnasher729]

Translation is 100% though. It doesn't work for something like jump tables (something you see in Machine Code, Assembler and C programming) or generated code (programs which generate native machine code on the fly). Those would have to be ported.

Rosetta 2 can translate x86 at runtime as well. Mostly useful for browsers which translate JavaScript into x86 machine code.

 

[gnasher729]

ARM does not blow away X86 out of the water. It is simply a reduced instruction set which allows it to have way less transistors than X86. That is how it is able to achieve such a low power for mobile devices. X86 has complex instructions which are not needed for simple tasks that mobile devices do, so that is why ARM is more suitable in an iPhone or iPad (as the most complex X86 instruction set will not be used and cause extra battery drain).

For devices were complex tasks are done, that is were ARM will start to struggle as it requires much more operations than a X86 processor. X86 also has much more compatibility and is able to optimize incoming instructions.

What Apple should do is switch to AMD instead of ARM for their pro devices and do ARM for devices that do simple tasks. An AMD EPYC has no problem keeping up with a 80-core ARM server cpu, so there is no need to go to ARM for a MAC pro for example right now (maybe in a few years when all software has been ported to ARM)

Oh please. An ARM core is superior to an Intel core in every way. Number of registers - 32 vs 16. Number of instruction decodes per cycle - 9 vs 7. Number of execution units - 11 vs. 8. Single cycle multiplication. 8 cycle division. An ARM processor doesn't care how "complex" tasks are - it just goes through them faster than an Intel processor. And heaven knows what you mean by "able to optimize incoming instructions".

 

[pshufd]

Rosetta 2 can translate x86 at runtime as well. Mostly useful for browsers which translate JavaScript into x86 machine code.

When I say translation, I mean translating an x64 binary to an ARM binary. Not on the fly.

 

[ght56]

In fact I applaud apple for moving to arm because I do believe its the future, but those that are going to jump ship right away are the sacrificial lambs. For this reason, there has NEVER been a better time to buy an intel Mac. You get the best compatibility and by the time you upgrade again you'll have the advantage of seeing how the ecosystem has adapted to arm

Now is definitely a good time to buy an Intel Mac. Super excited about ARM, but I'm not going to be an early adopter!!!

 

[CRoebuck]

It's going to be month before the new ARM Macs, so who says Windows and Apple won't have an agreement by then?

I was wondering that too.....then I tried Windows on ARM (Surface Pro X v2) and very quickly realised that Windows on ARM is not WIndows on X86 or even close. App compatibility is horrible, performance was no way near what I expected as X86 apps run under emulation on Windows for ARM. Imagine this emulated x86 app running on Windows for ARM in a virtualized environment on Mac OS. eeeesh

 

[gnasher729]

Or they will push out a disappointing midrange ARM chip that can't even match a Core i5.

Why would Apple "push out" something that is less powerful than the chip in an iPhone 12 or iPad Pro?

 

[gnasher729]

So seems all apps will be ported to ARM. Does that mean Intel Mac's will be running some kind of emulator to run ARM apps? That would be really horrible.

That would be really horrible and really stupid and isn't going to happen. When you build a MacOS or iOS application, you just choose which processors are supported, and then the compiler creates something that supports these processors. Like you turn on "ARM 64 bit" and "x86 64 bit". Some people with too much time have even managed to build an app that would run on ARM, x86 and PowerPC.

 

[gnasher729]

My question is about cross-platform transfer of binary data files, not apps. Can I build a binary-format data file on an Intel platform, copy it over to the new Apple ARM platform, and read it there without any bit/byte swapping or otherwise changing the word structure?

People have done that kind of thing 35 years ago. Well, I have It's harder to build a binary data file format that does _not_ work on ARM. Both Intel and ARM are little-endian.

 

[ian87w]

He has only one time line up. It is not even moving. He is just cutting and pasting a static timeline. Any computer can do that. It is not impressive at all. THis is what people do when they cull out the worst of their vacation videoa but you go nuts editing on one timeline if doing a real show.

I found another youtube of a more typical use of FCPx in a low-budget amateur use case. The "standard" example is shoot a two person dialog scene. Even a new interview does this. You need at least two camera and preferably 3. You also have each person having their own microphone on two different sound recorders. This is a cheap youtube setup. using just a few dSLRs on tripods

Here’s the new iPad Air doing three 4K 10 bit video tracks, without optimizing media/transcoding.

Let me know an Intel laptop that can do that without choking.

 

[ichibrosan]

I have an Early 2013 Retina MBP 16GB-ram 7 50GB-ssd that I paid almost $4000 for. It is on the hair edge of OS sunset and could be unsupported any time now. On the other hand I just build a $4000 Linux workstation Ryzen 9 3900X, 128GB-ram 6TB-ssd... I can't give Apple any more money because their planned obsolescence is making me crazy. I am moving all my professional work to Linux now. I was an Apple fanboi from 2000 to 2018, that was long enough.

 

[pshufd]

I have an Early 2013 Retina MBP 16GB-ram 7 50GB-ssd that I paid almost $4000 for. It is on the hair edge of OS sunset and could be unsupported any time now. On the other hand I just build a $4000 Linux workstation Ryzen 9 3900X, 128GB-ram 6TB-ssd... I can't give Apple any more money because their planned obsolescence is making me crazy. I am moving all my professional work to Linux now. I was an Apple fanboi from 2000 to 2018, that was long enough.

I just did similar. But with an i7-10700/64 GB/3 TB SSD/GTX 1050 Ti. I also considered a Mac Pro but I wanted to build something tuned for my workload that used minimal power with excellent thermals. I probably would have been better off with a Zen 3 but they came out after I had purchased my parts. What I have runs around 24-30 degrees on the CPU. I've moved my CPU-intensive workloads onto Windows. I still run iCloud Apps on my MacBook Pro which I access using VNC. So it's a hybrid approach (there's a thread on this here). My MacBook Pro is a 2015 15 2.5 Ghz/AMD so it has plenty of life left in it - I also bought it refurb for $1,100. But it does have thermal problems with my normal workload.

So let's see what Apple delivers. It is hard to believe that they will deliver extreme value like your Linux build; especially when there are rumors that the MacBook Pro 13 AS will be twice the price of the Intel version. I really do like iCloud Apps though so I will still use macOS but not for any heavy workloads.

 

[bill-p]

Why would Apple "push out" something that is less powerful than the chip in an iPhone 12 or iPad Pro?

And you base your assertion that Core i5 is less powerful than iPhone 12 or iPad Pro on what? Geekbench?

The Surface Pro X gets similar Geekbench score to a Core i5 10210U.

Try running Windows 10 on both chips and see for yourself which one is the faster overall chip.

 

[jjjoseph]

For those who do professional work, would anyone consider switching to Microsoft Surface Book for productivity if Apple decides to go full ARM with their professional lineup?

Work in Feature Film, TV, post and VFX. I would never use Microsoft for production. I have to use Sharepoint and OneDrive at times ans that is all I can handle.

I would just go to Linux, Microsoft finally made some good hardware, but the OS is still too messy for hardcore work, IMHO.

 

[ichibrosan]

I just did similar. But with an i7-10700/64 GB/3 TB SSD/GTX 1050 Ti. I also considered a Mac Pro but I wanted to build something tuned for my workload that used minimal power with excellent thermals. I probably would have been better off with a Zen 3 but they came out after I had purchased my parts. What I have runs around 24-30 degrees on the CPU. I've moved my CPU-intensive workloads onto Windows. I still run iCloud Apps on my MacBook Pro which I access using VNC. So it's a hybrid approach (there's a thread on this here). My MacBook Pro is a 2015 15 2.5 Ghz/AMD so it has plenty of life left in it - I also bought it refurb for $1,100. But it does have thermal problems with my normal workload.

So let's see what Apple delivers. It is hard to believe that they will deliver extreme value like your Linux build; especially when there are rumors that the MacBook Pro 13 AS will be twice the price of the Intel version. I really do like iCloud Apps though so I will still use macOS but not for any heavy workloads.

It has been five months since I build the new machine. I have to say I have no regrets. I got out the MacBook Pro to use the Logic Pro application for some personal music development recently. MacOS seems primitive to me now. I have gotten used to the Linux. As a general workstation, I am finding the Linux environment more flexible. In my day job, I am developing the control software for a large six legged walking robot, so my usage is mostly C++ IDE (CLion) and the usual GNU development tools I am using are available for Windows Linux and Mac, but I am sure I am the happiest on Linux, having been a Unix user since forever.

 

[Kung gu]

I can't give Apple any more money because their planned obsolescence is making me crazy.

What do mean, can you expand on this?

 

[Kung gu]

especially when there are rumors that the MacBook Pro 13 AS will be twice the price of the Intel version.

There two versions of the 13" MBP, the 2 port and 4 port. The 2 port now has the M1 and starts at $1299. The 4 port has intel and has not been updated yet. It starts at $1799.

 

[Kung gu]

The Mac has been neglected by Apple SO much. Butterfly keyboards, thermal problems and SLOW performance. Before 2020 I thought the Mac was done for. I want to see where this ARM Macs lead too.