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Mac With Apple-Designed Arm Processor Coming in First Half of 2021
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yeah there were also Linux distros compiled for PPC.
It’s not fun to use when you have to compile every piece of software yourself because arm package is outdated or doesn't exist.
You will be fixing stuff in source code to make it compatible with compiler and environment quite a lot.
Transition to ARM will lock down Macs inevitably.
If you get Apple apps plus, say, MS Office and Chrome, you have covered many home user's primary use cases with native apps.
A slight loss of performance in non-native apps would then probably not trouble such folks all that much, if at all.
If they do this, I think the MacBook Air is the one that will move to ARM. It has to be a switch on a mass market product because otherwise it risks never gaining market and developer traction. Plus the MBA overlaps with the MBP too much right now and uses a relatively anaemic CPU so could use something to differentiate it.
As much as I would love a new MacBook (ARM or otherwise) I think Apple took the decision its size overlaps too much with the iPad Pro and is not coming back.
A slight loss of performance in non-native apps would then probably not trouble such folks all that much, if at all.
If they do this, I think the MacBook Air is the one that will move to ARM. It has to be a switch on a mass market product because otherwise it risks never gaining market and developer traction. Plus the MBA overlaps with the MBP too much right now and uses a relatively anaemic CPU so could use something to differentiate it.
As much as I would love a new MacBook (ARM or otherwise) I think Apple took the decision its size overlaps too much with the iPad Pro and is not coming back.
There really isn't much of a point for Apple switching entirely to ARM from x86 which can be a huge mistake. Intel is still the performance crown in CPU designed for mobile device despite stuck on 14nm process.
What makes you think things are not destined to change? Again, if the world is moving towards ARM architecture, Windows and its ecosystem will follow.
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This depends on whether ARM will be the outlier with amd64 being the de-facto standard, or whether ARM manages to carve enough market share to become a first class architecture even in the PC space and consequently gain first class support.
Almost three years of "Windows on ARM" with an extremely lackluster adoption by the developers.
I'm the second type, but even if all of my software was from the MAS, (it's not and I go out of my way to get it elsewhere), I like to have options.
One trick ponies are great at that one trick but I'd rather pay for a two trick pony, (within limits), in case I want to experiment. and lets face it at the money they charge for these things they should be three trick ponies.
Windows tablets were extremely lacklustre until the arrival of the iPad. And Microsoft appears to have put less effort into Windows on ARM (they cannot even capitalise Arm correctly https://www.arm.com/company/policies/trademarks/guidelines-trademarks) than they did into their tablets. I'm sure Apple would put more work into doing it properly if they adopt Arm for Macs.
Lackluster as it might be, Windows on ARM exists and has been improved constantly in the last years: the signs are towards ARM becoming more and more relevant, not less. ARM becoming a real contender on the PC space would be a monumental change: these kinds of change needs a lot of stuff happening which build up momentum: that's exactly what has been happening in the last years.
I guess time will tell.
As an average consumer I am in a very similar position to you Kagio (apart from an urgency in my case to now transition from a 9-year old 64-bit Windows 7 OS).
Truthfully, I cannot answer your questions which I would also be very interested in the answers to other than to imagine the first ARM based Mac may well be in the form of a MacBook, and would have 1st Gen. issues like all devices normally do. For me, that would mean any purchase of such an ARM based system, should it exist, would not be wise until approximately 2022 if an ARM based MacBook Pro was available at that time, and most critical 1st. Gen. issues were addressed.
Alternatively, I would be very tempted to purchase a refreshed MacBook Pro with, hopefully, an intel chip supporting Wi-Fi 6 later this year.
Dieter Bohn from The Verge talking about ARM-based Macs in his Processor newsletter:
"The first rumor that has my attention is that Apple’s first ARM-based Macs may start showing up as early as next year. I am writing about this on an ARM-based Windows machine, the Surface Pro X. The software hassles I’ve dealt with are enough to keep me from recommending it to anybody, but it’s been useful for me to live with those hassles as part of my job.
I’m not suggesting Apple will face exactly parallel issues if it ever releases an ARM-based MacBook, but I’m guessing they will be in the same ballpark. And while I’d like to express confidence that Apple will navigate the issues of app compatibility, developer relations, emulation, and performance well, recent history with the Mac gives me pause.
Catalina, the latest version of the OS, is widely derided right now. Catalyst, the system for getting iPad apps on the Mac, has also not worked out especially well so far (to put it mildly). Apple’s recent software track record for the Mac makes it hard to give the company the benefit of the doubt that it can gracefully handle a processor transition.
I didn’t even lead with the easy criticism of the Touch Bar, the keyboards, or the recently-ended long dark night of the Mac Pro. Those things aren’t strictly relevant to an ARM transition, but they are examples of other hassles that have drained the reserves of goodwill that Mac users might otherwise feel towards a big shakeup.
I’m not saying Apple isn’t up to the task of switching Mac laptops over to new processors, but I am saying it is going to need to show its work early and often if it’s going to engender enough trust to bring users along for the ride."
"The first rumor that has my attention is that Apple’s first ARM-based Macs may start showing up as early as next year. I am writing about this on an ARM-based Windows machine, the Surface Pro X. The software hassles I’ve dealt with are enough to keep me from recommending it to anybody, but it’s been useful for me to live with those hassles as part of my job.
I’m not suggesting Apple will face exactly parallel issues if it ever releases an ARM-based MacBook, but I’m guessing they will be in the same ballpark. And while I’d like to express confidence that Apple will navigate the issues of app compatibility, developer relations, emulation, and performance well, recent history with the Mac gives me pause.
Catalina, the latest version of the OS, is widely derided right now. Catalyst, the system for getting iPad apps on the Mac, has also not worked out especially well so far (to put it mildly). Apple’s recent software track record for the Mac makes it hard to give the company the benefit of the doubt that it can gracefully handle a processor transition.
I didn’t even lead with the easy criticism of the Touch Bar, the keyboards, or the recently-ended long dark night of the Mac Pro. Those things aren’t strictly relevant to an ARM transition, but they are examples of other hassles that have drained the reserves of goodwill that Mac users might otherwise feel towards a big shakeup.
I’m not saying Apple isn’t up to the task of switching Mac laptops over to new processors, but I am saying it is going to need to show its work early and often if it’s going to engender enough trust to bring users along for the ride."
Legacy software is the problem.
Open source software is the least problem - it just needs one person, anywhere, with some development experience to grab the software and re-build it for ARM and submit any patches they make - in many cases is going to be just a case of re-compiling. On top of that, a lot of open-source software was written for Unix/Linux which has a long tradition of architecture-independence since Linux is already supported on ARM32, ARM64, PPC, x86 etc. Most of it already runs on Linux for ARM64 (go look at the current state of the main Linux distros for ARM, such as Raspbian) so the only problem cases are applications which have x86 dependencies in their Mac-specific code which should be fairly rare.
The only serious recent past attempts at a mass-market ARM PC (unless you go back to the 80s/90s and the original Acorn systems) have been Windows RT and the Raspberry Pi.
Windows has a huge issue with "legacy" software of the "our Fourtune 100 company relies on binaries last compiled in 1996 with an obsolete COBOL compiler" variety (yeah, 1990s code still runs under the 32 bit version of Windows 10) - beyond the worst nightmares of Mac.
Windows RT was a knobbled version of Windows restricted to "modern" software in Microsoft's App store - alongside which Apples Mac App Store (let alone the iOS/iPadOS store) is a veritable cornucopia. The latest attempt to do Windows on ARM is still early days...
Microsoft are hamstrung by their monopolistic past - as soon as they compromise backwards compatibility, they're competing on a level playing field with Mac, iOS, Android and Linux... and everybody hates Microsoft. Apple have far more flexibility without the corporate albatross around their neck which they've already used to switch architecture 2-3 times as well as switch from Classic MacOS to the completely different
The Raspberry Pi has been something of a success, and many of the usual Linux Apps have been "ported" (in many cases, minor tweaks then re-compile) with problems more likely down to the Pi's limited resources and flakey I/O rather than ARM.
If it was made for Linux then, chances are, it's already been ported to ARM (e.g. k3b is available on the Raspberry Pi - although the Pi is cursed with no SATA and a shonky USB implementation so you probably wouldn't want to burn DVDs on it, but that's not because ARM).
Apple could lock down MacOS on x86 tomorrow if they were so inclined, more so once they've replaced their last remaining pre-T2-chip system, the iMac. Moving to ARM would be an excuse for doing that, not a reason.
Most ChromeBooks are x86, and a lot of the code they run is processor-independent. Google have dumped the idea of "ChromeOS Apps" in favour of a 3-way split between (platform-independent) web apps, Android compatibility (mostly CPU-independent bytecode) and sandboxed Linux binaries (with many Linux Apps already buildable for ARM).
Intel benefits from a lot of optimisation effort which has been put into software built for their chips over the years. In raw performance terms, currently they're clinging on to the crown by their fingernails for U and H series class chips, but its already slipped from their grasp on desktops (AMD) and for fanless Y series chips (ARM).
Not to mention that what happens here is that AMD doesn’t bother attacking the extreme high end because even if it can beat Intel there, it can’t yet make money doing so. Hell, we used to down-bin a lot of our high binned parts because nobody would pay us to use them at those speeds anyway.
On top of that a significant performance boost on Intel comes from speculative execution, which has been shown as being vulnerable to security attacks. AFAIK mitigating those vulnerabilities for Intel has a much larger impact on performance compared to AMD, with a performance hit even 15-20% higher.
True. Though if one thinks about side-channel attacks at the design stage, one can do speculative execution without having to give up most of that performance hit. Not sure when Intel silicon will hit the market that has been designed from the ground up to avoid sign-channel vulnerabilities, though.
The thing for x86 emulation is Intel licensing for their proprietary instruction set architecture, which they decide to make Apple's life difficult, it will suck.
This is the only option. Millions of macs are sold for developers needing access to Windows, Docker, Linux, etc.
They only sell about a million and a half macs per month. A small percentage of these are sold to people running windows and Linux. Even if it’s a third (highly doubtful), apple will gladly lose all those customers in exchange for gaining millions of new customers who want to run their iOS apps on a computer.