Zdigital2015
macrumors 601
Then the possibility exists that you will be buying a Windows-based PC at some point...Bootcamp‘s future was never guaranteed.
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Mac With Apple-Designed Arm Processor Coming in First Half of 2021
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Then the possibility exists that you will be buying a Windows-based PC at some point...Bootcamp‘s future was never guaranteed.
I lived through PowerPC. it was absolutely terrible. Not because of the performance but because so many developers found it ****** to port their stuff. They can't possibly make this mistake twice. There must be some reason this time is different.
I'll be buying a current MBP just in case though.
I'll be buying a current MBP just in case though.
I'm not concerned about performance more so than I am how well it would handle current x86 apps
GFLPraxis
macrumors 604
I have such mixed feelings about this. I am really excited, but at the same time, apprehensive.
I see so many potential benefits and also pitfalls.
From a professional perspective, this is terrible for one simple reason; VMs. Many of our Mac users have VMs available for specialty enterprise apps. On the flip side, it has never been easier to work around this than today; more apps than ever are web based or cross platform, and delivery of apps or VMs through thin client software (Citrix, VMware) makes it possible for large enterprises to find workarounds for the edge cases easily. The worst hit would probably be smaller professional outlets that need specialty or legacy apps; they lose the ability to run VMWare or Parallels and run those apps in Windows.
From a personal perspective, I think 90% of users will see massive benefits. Thinner and faster machines. Most people don't run Boot Camp.
But...I do. I always buy the higher end MacBook Pro just got the GPU, and I dual boot and do my gaming on the other side.
This would basically end gaming on MacBook Pros completely. Though it might actually push developers to develop more for Macs since they can't tell users "just use Boot Camp"- it also might not. It's a lot more difficult to support Macs for cross platform these days; Apple's OpenGL support is further and further out of date, and most developers haven't gotten on board the Vulkan or Metal bandwagon, so the Mac version of games just use OpenGL and perform terribly. (Same story for many emulators, btw.)
Gamers that use Macs are a very small market, to be fair, so I don't think this will kill a huge user base for Apple. But this honestly makes me sad because we were just hitting a point where gaming on Mac becomes viable again - because of Thunderbolt docks. I was definitely planning for my next Mac purchase to be with a Thunderbolt 3 dock so I can continue upgrading an external GPU. If you can't dual boot a Mac to game, and games have such terrible performance in comparison, there's really no point of a TB3 dock except for specialty 3D work (like CAD).
This is a big rundown of the downsides, but I think ARM Macs will end up with considerably better performance and battery life and heat. It will give Apple a massive advantage for most use cases that aren't gaming or specialty/legacy corporate. I hope it will help Apple recapture the video editing crowd down the road.
Apple's already got the Universal Binary system, so I think it would be a really easy switchover. They can probably automatically recompile all App Store apps that submitted Bitcode anyway.
I see so many potential benefits and also pitfalls.
From a professional perspective, this is terrible for one simple reason; VMs. Many of our Mac users have VMs available for specialty enterprise apps. On the flip side, it has never been easier to work around this than today; more apps than ever are web based or cross platform, and delivery of apps or VMs through thin client software (Citrix, VMware) makes it possible for large enterprises to find workarounds for the edge cases easily. The worst hit would probably be smaller professional outlets that need specialty or legacy apps; they lose the ability to run VMWare or Parallels and run those apps in Windows.
From a personal perspective, I think 90% of users will see massive benefits. Thinner and faster machines. Most people don't run Boot Camp.
But...I do. I always buy the higher end MacBook Pro just got the GPU, and I dual boot and do my gaming on the other side.
This would basically end gaming on MacBook Pros completely. Though it might actually push developers to develop more for Macs since they can't tell users "just use Boot Camp"- it also might not. It's a lot more difficult to support Macs for cross platform these days; Apple's OpenGL support is further and further out of date, and most developers haven't gotten on board the Vulkan or Metal bandwagon, so the Mac version of games just use OpenGL and perform terribly. (Same story for many emulators, btw.)
Gamers that use Macs are a very small market, to be fair, so I don't think this will kill a huge user base for Apple. But this honestly makes me sad because we were just hitting a point where gaming on Mac becomes viable again - because of Thunderbolt docks. I was definitely planning for my next Mac purchase to be with a Thunderbolt 3 dock so I can continue upgrading an external GPU. If you can't dual boot a Mac to game, and games have such terrible performance in comparison, there's really no point of a TB3 dock except for specialty 3D work (like CAD).
This is a big rundown of the downsides, but I think ARM Macs will end up with considerably better performance and battery life and heat. It will give Apple a massive advantage for most use cases that aren't gaming or specialty/legacy corporate. I hope it will help Apple recapture the video editing crowd down the road.
Apple's already got the Universal Binary system, so I think it would be a really easy switchover. They can probably automatically recompile all App Store apps that submitted Bitcode anyway.
Zdigital2015
macrumors 601
No, it will be a Mac. What you really mean is that it won’t be an x86-based Mac...which it won’t. But it will be as much of a Mac as a 68xxx-based Mac, a PowerPC-based Mac or an x86-based Mac.
Would prefer them to be doing something with AMD rather than going all out with ARM products. You would imagine that with AMD they would have a lot of clout to get the best from them and use that to their advantage. Support the underdog, which Apple is.
cmaier
Suspended
Not great.
But we'll survive. Just like we survived 68k to PowerPC, and PowerPC to Intel.
rp2011
macrumors 68040
And if true, as a happy iPad Pro user, it will be my very first Mac.
I'm interested to see how they perform relative to x86-based Macs, in terms of raw compute performance, as well as battery life. One thing I wonder is, is x86-based support in macOS going to be deprecated, or will it continue indefinitely (2019 Intel x86 Mac Pro)? If support for x86 dies in macOS, long live Hackintosh x86.
cmaier
Suspended
I've become disillusioned with Apple and the Mac platform. For developers, the Mac platform feels unstable, insufficiently documented, and full of constant churn with little consideration for legacy software, especially games. Catalina was a particularly brutal release. Unfortunately, I suspect ARM Macs may lead me to transition to Windows, but I hope things turn out better than I expect.
GFLPraxis
macrumors 604
I too lived through PowerPC, but I don't think your assessment is correct.
PowerPC didn't make things much harder for developers. 99% of developers write in higher level languages that are, for the most part, agnostic to the underlying architecture. You can just recompile the app, if written in Objective-C with Cocoa.
I think a big part of it was Carbon. Carbon was an old legacy API ported from Mac OS 8/9 to Mac OS X. Mac OS X apps that had been around a while all used Carbon instead of Cocoa. Cocoa apps just had to have a box checked and most of them would just recompile as Intel with no effort. Carbon apps were messy and needed to be reworked to run on Intel.
Apple depreciated Carbon at the same time and also never made it 64-bit. So if you had a Carbon app, you could do a lot of work to make it run on Intel, and even then, it would only run as a 32-bit Intel app. Apple was really trying to press developers into simply re-writing their apps as Cocoa apps, and a lot of developers simply didn't put in the effort.
If Apple switches to ARM, it should be a lot simpler for developers as long as they don't do something similar (like, say, making it so that Objective-C code can't be compiled to Mac/ARM).
When Apple started the transition to Intel processors, it took them 1.5 years to transition the entire Mac line to Intel. It'll be interesting to see if they transition the entire Mac line to ARM just as fast.
rp2011
macrumors 68040
If true, then we will be getting plenty of information at this summers WWDC to get developers on board for the launch in 2021
oneMadRssn
macrumors 603
My worry is more about MacOS than the ARM transition itself, and the effect that will have on the availability of Mac apps. If Apple fully prohibits running apps downloaded from outside the official App Store, as has been rumored, there will be a severely diminished quantity and choice among Mac apps. They're clearly building up this in the last few MacOS releases.
Never been a better time to be an Apple developer
On the road to Swift 6
The Swift project has achieved a critical milestone of maturity of the core fundamentals, providing stability for users to invest in using Swift in earnest. On Apple's platforms such as macOS and iOS, the arrival of ABI and module stability has enabled the creation of stable binary frameworks...
True!
rp2011
macrumors 68040
im not sure about the Mac Pro, especially as code seems to suggest AMD might also be getting in the act.
GFLPraxis
macrumors 604
Maybe.
I'd even say most likely.
But not necessarily. It's actually a lot more feasible these days to do both. Apple's Universal Binary system from the PPC/Intel switch would've worked pretty well. And nowadays Apple has developers submit their apps using Bitcode, an intermediary binary format that Apple can finish the compile themselves into another instruction set if they wanted.
I could see it being pretty easy for Apple to make apps that work universally. Submit something in Bitcode to the App Store and Apple automatically makes x86/PPC versions and delivers the appropriate one to the user. Dev wants to distribute themselves? They can include both binaries in one .app.
It's a mess on Windows because Windows lacks the ability to support fat binaries (except through the Windows App Store), so you have to download an x86 or a PPC version. Macs don't have this problem.
I could absolutely envision a world where the "Pro" machines are Intel-based for people who need to run Windows in a VM or Boot Camp and need the highest performance and don't care about thickness, and the non-Pro are ARM based.
But I think as Windows on ARM becomes more popular Apple might just support Boot Camp on ARM.
lJoSquaredl
macrumors 6502a
I'm all for it cuz I mostly use Apple stuff these days, but I'm wondering how gaming would be since I play on MacOS or Bootcamp. May have to go back to having a MBP for work and a bulky ass desktop for gaming again:/
I also wonder if they'll have both an ARM series and an Intel one just for the people who still want a Mac but need that architecture. Would be interesting to see what happens if the MBPs with the ARM chips start eventually spanking the Intel setups.
I also wonder if they'll have both an ARM series and an Intel one just for the people who still want a Mac but need that architecture. Would be interesting to see what happens if the MBPs with the ARM chips start eventually spanking the Intel setups.
Zdigital2015
macrumors 601
So the 68xxx-based Mac and the PowerPC-based Macs weren’t proper desktops or laptops?
A ChromeBook is dependent on a constant connection to the internet and web apps. This is in no way equivalent to what Apple is doing, if they are moving to ARM-based CPUs. You are conflating the hardware with the software or confusing them, either out of ignorance or you’re just being disingenuous.
If a “proper” desktop/laptop is only one that contains an Intel or AMD x86-based CPU then your worldview is extremely narrow.
cmaier
Suspended
I'd agree with you, but in the long run the ARM chips will beat x86 in performance, and the customer base for slower, crappier machines will fade. The "I don't care about performance, just compatibility" market is small. Just ask Sun, SGI, etc.
theLedger
macrumors regular
For those that need to run VM's, yes, sticking with Intel based processors is a big advantage that won't go away soon. But in the ~15 years since Apple switched to Intel processors, we have also seen a lot of applications move away from being thick client based to web based. You can have a decent Microsoft Office experience in a browser without installing anything. And more enterprise apps are following suit. And if it can run iOS apps natively, then it makes it even more useful out of the gate.
It wouldn't be for everyone - especially those that need specialty applications - but it will be interesting to see how their vision for such a device takes place.
It wouldn't be for everyone - especially those that need specialty applications - but it will be interesting to see how their vision for such a device takes place.
newtonuk
macrumors member
"Over the years, Apple's product releases have been stymied by Intel chip delays, and with its own chips, Apple will not be tied to Intel chip release cycles."
Memories of PowerPC anyone?
Memories of PowerPC anyone?