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It will probably run the ARM Windows version, but problem is, software support on ARM Windows is terrible. So Windows on ARM is barely useless.

Software support on arm macs will be the same. Hate to break it to you. I can barely justify buying a Mac now. In the future there’s simply no way. Apple is aiming at the folks who think iPad apps are amazing or something. Think fisher price type apps. We saw this reimagining already with Big Sur. Dumbed down for the typical ignorant mainstream user.
 
Considering you can already run versions of Windows (though, the older the better :) ) on an iPad or iPhone with unsupported emulation software, I'm pretty sure more than one company will offer a supported commercial emulator for ARM Macs.
 
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In all fairness, MS compiled their ARM based Windows 10 for their SQ1 chip, which is basically a tweaked Snapdragon 8cx. Doubt it could handle any emulation without dragging.

No, the problem is not related to processor performance.
Mac OS X has ended support for all 32 bit code. All X86 code on the Mac is 64 bit. For that reason, Rosetta 2 MUST support 64 bit x86 code, but support for 32 bit X86 can be skipped easily.

Windows on the other hand still supports 32 bit code. Even many 64 bit applications rely on 32 bit compatibility. Sometimes just because the installer is still a 32 bit exe. In order to offer 64 bit support, Microsoft has to support both 32 and 64 bit compatiblity which makes the binary translator much more complex and bigger. It also means many libraries were necessary in both 32 and 64 bit. Probably quite a burden for a small (surface like) device.

It is one of the main reasons why you cannot run X86 VMs on that ARM Mac. For full compatibility with such applications Rosetta 2 wohld need to supprt 32 bit code. In fact it would even need support for 16 bit X86 code (including 8086 real mode and 80286 protected mode) and a quirky mode that was used to run 16 bit real mode applications on a 32 bit OS ('virtual 8086 mode'), because the guest OS might still require hese features (maybe even just for booting).
 
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Software support on arm macs will be the same. Hate to break it to you. I can barely justify buying a Mac now. In the future there’s simply no way. Apple is aiming at the folks who think iPad apps are amazing or something. Think fisher price type apps. We saw this reimagining already with Big Sur. Dumbed down for the typical ignorant mainstream user.

Lol "dumbed down" because they changed the UI a bit. It isn't as if it they killed APIs so that pro apps no longer work, or that it doesn't have Terminal.app. They even mentioned "UNIX" in their keynote.
This is sortof the typical response though "Apple made the desktop background prettier, the Mac is just an Iphone 3GS now! :rolleyes:"
 
Lol "dumbed down" because they changed the UI a bit. It isn't as if it they killed APIs so that pro apps no longer work, or that it doesn't have Terminal.app. They even mentioned "UNIX" in their keynote.
This is sortof the typical response though "Apple made the desktop background prettier, the Mac is just an Iphone 3GS now! :rolleyes:"

Big Sur reminds me of iOS 7, like, the early early betas of iOS 7. I actually really like the look.

It would have been funny if the desktop background was that animated, purple/blue floating bubbles iOS 7 wallpaper.
 
The power PC based G5 years back had an app called Virtual PC that emulated x86. It was dog slow but it did it!

i think a company like Parrallels could build something similar. And they could accelerate some pc apps by running them using Rosseta translations directly.

they could also make a windows x86 emulation faster by offloading GPU tasks from windows to macs GPU. Virtual PC back in the day had to emulate the GPU and everything which was hard.

I think it can be done but will probably run at half the speed of the present VM. Which might not be that bad really.Just takes a lot of work.


The technology already exists in the open source world, take a look at UTM an iOS app built with QEMU at it's core that allows you to run x86_64 Windows on a frickin iPad. For obvious reasons this isn't on the App Store but can be sideloaded through an app called AltStore
 
Blarg. One of the several things I like better about windows is backwards compatibility. That’s just vital for an actual PC, and Apple’s been terrible at it, and...now is even worse.

this just pushes macOS to be even closer to iOS and at this point, why not just merge macOS and iPadOS if you’re not serious about having a full pc?
 
But this won’t happen. Not with any full complete comparable version. For all the arm talk I’ve not seen any major software maker make an arm version that is remotely on par with the real thing. It’s mostly toy like apps.
You are confusing "iPad version" and "ARM version". It's no problem at all to create an ARM version that looks and works exactly like the Intel version, as long as it runs on a Mac and not an iPad.
 
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Lol "dumbed down" because they changed the UI a bit. It isn't as if it they killed APIs so that pro apps no longer work, or that it doesn't have Terminal.app. They even mentioned "UNIX" in their keynote.
This is sortof the typical response though "Apple made the desktop background prettier, the Mac is just an Iphone 3GS now! :rolleyes:"

Was looking at the catalyst apps. You know the ones replacing everything on macOS that look like garbage. This is their windows 8 moment.
 
The technology already exists in the open source world, take a look at UTM an iOS app built with QEMU at it's core that allows you to run x86_64 Windows on a frickin iPad. For obvious reasons this isn't on the App Store but can be sideloaded through an app called AltStore
Many users _think_ they run Windows, but they are actually running Windows software using Citrix. Which runs on an iPad just fine.
 
You are confusing "iPad version" and "ARM version". It's no problem at all to create an ARM version that looks and works exactly like the Intel version, as long as it runs on a Mac and not an iPad.

Show me an arm version of office or photoshop that is remotely comparable to the real thing.
 
Many users _think_ they run Windows, but they are actually running Windows software using Citrix. Which runs on an iPad just fine.
No, UTM is an emulator. It _IS_ running actual Windows.
Emulators have existed for decades, why is everyone so surprised?
 
What if a VM can still run, with the only restriction that it will be 'emulated'? If Apple Silicon is as fast as Apple claims, then the end user may not even notice a big difference. I'd wait to see how this whole migration turns out. It might not be as bad as some of us now expect it to become.
There's a bit of confusion there. You have a VM, and then you have software that runs inside the VM. Like you might have the Parallels VM, and running Windows or Linux inside it. VMs have to use special instructions so that the code inside them can't touch anything outside the VM or only in a controlled way. These special instructions are not supported by Rosetta (today, this might change in six months time). So you can't run an Intel VM at the moment.

But you can run an ARM VM. Which _normally_ would only be able to run ARM code _inside_ the VM. And that's where the maker of a VM can add additional work to use Rosetta so that the code running _inside_ the VM could by Intel code.
 
But this won’t happen. Not with any full complete comparable version. For all the arm talk I’ve not seen any major software maker make an arm version that is remotely on par with the real thing. It’s mostly toy like apps.

Umm, I guess you're talking about Windows devs not releasing a lot of ARM native titles? Mac developers will update (if necessary) and compile their existing Mac apps for ARM. They will be the same apps for essentially the same platform just running on a different CPU.

You're making it sound like a vendor will have to code an ARM version from scratch in pure assembly, then will give up when it's too much work and just make a toy version :D. Maybe sell it for the same price with a middle finger in the center of the app store screenshot?
 
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I can't see what good can come out of this. Except the case that are extremely faster than the Intel chips, the whole process does sound like counter-intuitive for everyone involved.
Wonder if Apple will pass on any cost savings, isn't that one reason they say for moving to Arm?
 
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Many users _think_ they run Windows, but they are actually running Citrix. Which runs on an iPad just fine.
QEMU is an emulation platform, it lets you emulate architectures that aren't native to your current system. For example you can run an operating system built on the PPC architechure on a host that has an x86_64 CPU, it uses very similar technology to Rosetta 2 in that it uses JIT compilers. I am not kidding when I say that UTM can run x86_64 Windows on your device because QEMU translates the x86 instructions to something that ARM understands on the fly. Try it out for yourself, its quite amazing.
 
Well, I suppose I’ll buy an XPS or a Thinkpad X1 Extreme when my MBP 16 comes out of service.

That sucks. But there’s just no way any of the apps I need are going to be rewritten for ARM, most of them don’t even exist for MacOS, but I get by with Bootcamp or VMWare Fusion.

I know a lot of other fellow engineers of various types will feel my pain here.
I feel your pain. Cisco engineer here no x86 kext support and no Windows for X86 app support is going to be tough. Only hope for Windows for ARM now emulating X86 for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows applications. Maybe I can still run all of my tools in Windows for ARM, but it means that macOS will be simply a shell now and most of my work will happen in Windows (for ARM) in the X86 emulation layer. This begs a question, Why even have a Mac at that point. Why not simply get a Windows laptop? Disruptive? You bet. Mac is dead in engineering now. Congrats Cookie.
 
I haven't read all 13 pages of comments - just skim read through - but I'll chuck my 2p's worth in anyway.

I'm a web and app developer. I use Windows for testing websites on Windows browsers and also to access SQL Server databases using SQL Server Management Studio. That's it for Windows. I use Parallels Desktop running Windows 10. It's a convenience to have both running on my iMac Pro and sharing the clipboard is handy, there's no doubt.

There's no way this will stop my next computer being an ARM based Mac, however it does leave me with a question mark over how best to organise my workflow going forward. Having another machine (even a cheap Windows laptop) would be no great problem. The issue to get over (for me) is making transferring things across from Windows to Mac quick and easy. Sure, I can save a file to my network - but the convenience of using the clipboard when I need to take something back or forth between the two operating systems is a huge time saver. I see no obvious way to resolve that.

Not a deal breaker by any means. The switch to Apple Silicon is a very positive move. It'll just throw up little gotchas that we need to find a workable solution for.
 
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umm Didn't the Demo show them running Parallels with a Linux virtual machine? Wouldn't this mean that Parallels is already working on a version for the Apple Silicon that can virtualize X86_64 systems?
The demo shows Parallels? Are you sure? I thought it was the virtualization app built into macOS.
 
But this won’t happen. Not with any full complete comparable version. For all the arm talk I’ve not seen any major software maker make an arm version that is remotely on par with the real thing. It’s mostly toy like apps.

Make no mistake the only reason Apple is doing this is an attempt to leverage iOS, nail down App Store as the only way to install arm apps, and desperately turn macOS into a more suitable cash cow like iOS. But the software has a LONG way to go before it’s even remotely on par. Years.
This will mean either the current intel Mac I have for work is my last work Mac, or we need to find a new CAD software that runs natively.

I wonder if anyone is going to match or exceed the power of Microstation / Powerdraft for 2D drafting and make it available on the Mac? I've been waiting for years and years for this but no one has come close (and please don't tell me to use Autocad which I loathe).
Ah, ****. I’m sorry that the ARM transition is going to screw with your workflow. Here’s to hoping they figure out something before your MBP 16 needs replaced (which hopefully won’t be for several years, at the very least. That’s a beast of a machine😎)

I think Apple realized that native Windows compatibility was a double-edged sword. Yes, it enabled the “switchers” back in 2006, but at the same time kept it less attractive to make native Mac apps even as iPhone and iPad transformed Apple and made their platforms more popular.

At the same time, the main. criticism of iPad is that while the hardware is fully capable, the OS is limited. With Macs with Apple Silicon that is no longer the case. Developers can write “real apps” for a “real OS” now. That has the potential not only to improve the quality of apps on the Mac, but potentially the iPad, as well, particularly if Apple eventually releases a “reverse Catalyst” or further merges the two platforms.
 
Running a VM with a Linux distribution compiled for Arm does work, so why wouldn‘t we be able to virtualize Windows for Arm?
Good question. Let me answer with another question. Why didn’t they mention Windows one time?
 
I haven't read all 13 pages of comments - just skim read through - but I'll chuck my 2p's worth in anyway.

I'm a web and app developer. I use Windows for testing websites on Windows browsers and also to access SQL Server databases using SQL Server Management Studio. That's it for Windows. I use Parallels Desktop running Windows 10. It's a convenience to have both running on my iMac Pro and sharing the clipboard is handy, there's no doubt.

There's no way this will stop my next computer being an ARM based Mac, however it does leave me with a question mark over how best to organise my workflow going forward. Having another machine (even a cheap Windows laptop) would be no great problem. The issue to get over (for me) is making transferring things across from Windows to Mac quick and easy. Sure, I can save a file to my network - but the convenience of using the clipboard when I need to take something back or forth between the two operating systems is a huge time saver. I see no obvious way to resolve that.

Not a deal breaker by any means. The switch to Apple Silicon is a very positive move. It'll just throw up little gotchas that we need to find a workable solution for.
Look into an app called Synergy, it is a paid app but allows for you to use the same keyboard and mouse across two or more computers, no extra dongle or anything needed and also supports shared clipboard and drag and drop of files between your devices. Free alternatives may be available but I haven't looked into it, maybe try the Alternative to website or search around on various forums to see what others suggest.
 
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