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Rosetta Won't Support x86 Virtualization Apps Running Windows
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Probably more realism. You have to understand how to grow and nurture an eco-system. If Macs are not used by developers in general then the platform quickly becomes forgotten. x86 Linux virtualization is the key and primary method that developers use Macs for but if you erode that then they will look elsewhere. Windows + WSL is now a go to developer platform as Apple with ARM Macs have castrated developers to creative ability. Without your upcoming developers then your platform does die. Look at history.
He’s a very charitable guy. Certainly his largesse should extend to the fine team in Redmond?
My $20,000 investment in Apple in 2011 is now worth $220,000. If that’s failure I’ll take more executives like Tim Cook.
Yep. x86 was the reason that Mac ecosystem grew. More developers means more apps means more growth. It will be an interesting transition, and hopefully we don’t go backwards
Which is why Craig was quick to point out that Linux still works on ARM. But any developer worth his or her salt won’t ignore iOS/iPadOS/MacOS.
80% of all computer users, PC and Mac, basically run a web browser, and Microsoft Office. Even popular desktop apps, including parts of Office, are pseudo-web browsers (Electron).
Microsoft is even moving software development to webapps (Azure DevOps/VS Code), and because of that they even support Mac and Android in the same environment they build Windows.
There's very little pure desktop app development going on anymore. That's something that has fundamentally changed in the last 10 years.
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Not sure you read the rest of my post. My argument is that dual-booting is the wrong way to go about this, virtualization is the right one. So knowing that 2% of the users install Boot Camp is unhelpful as it doesn't take into account most of the users who go about running Windows on their Macs the right way.
Software developers (unless they are an Apple-exclusive shop) need Windows or Linux on Intel. Engineers are another group of people for whom nearly all software runs on Windows (I know, I'm one). And then there's people who need to run in-house apps developed for Windows. I'm sure many more groups of people who rely on Windows will come out of the woods now.
For games, my experience back in the leopard/snow leopard days was that bootcamp ran a lot smoother than running in VMware. Maybe things are different now.
I use Windows for Sql Server Management Studio and all the tools around that. Azure Data Studio still can't shine a candle on SSMS functionality.
Fortunately I run Rider on my Mac, have Docker to run an engine and DBVisualizer and the aforementioned Azure Data Studio to handle lesser tasks. And Tableau also works on my Mac which helps as well.
But when it comes to checking my Sql code into git or administrating Sql Server, Windows on parallels is currently my tool of need.
Not saying I'm representative of other developers etc. But all the Mac users in IT at work use Parallels for similar reasons.
Remote desktop was never in question as it has nothing whatsoever to do with virtualization.
I understand. No dev, platform dies. It’s true.
But I don’t see why devs would desert the macOS platform. Yes, x86 Linux is mainly the target deploying platform today, but we will certainly find a way to run this in a virtual environment. I don’t see why neither macOS with a change of CPU could castrate creativity.
And let be crazy a moment.
An Xserve with a 80-100 core Apple Silicon for under 200W of power and plenty of I/O that surpasses every x86 cpu on the market... Why not ?
I can see where not running windows on Macs for a while might be bad. But, they said this transition was going to take years. When PPC was ending, there was virtual PC. When they switched to Intel, it took a while for the chips to be fast enough, the OS to be robust enough, and the developers to risk making even better visualization software for the Mac. I think once Arm chips have a few years on them, the developers catch up, and Apple sees where the wind is blowing, they will take steps to needed to make this work. Either they make Macs super affordable through low or no interest payment plans so that its trivial to own both a Mac and a PC, or they will make the OS and hardware catch up to the point where emulating a PC on it can work to a certain extent. Not booting, but certainly eventually emulating one. If its doable, someone will make it happen eventually.
Yeah some engineering apps are available only on Windows. Not software engineering but I think more about electrical engineering, embedded software engineering, things like that.
lol a normal thing should have a lot lot iteration before final go . As from old time surface arm to normal intel back to qualcom sq1. What most all of us worried is stability. i had my issue upon itanium before compare with xeon, and its in linux and messy. real 64 bit vs amd64 intel
The development world is pretty much x86 Linux for the majority of the universe. iOS is a drop in the bucket compared to that developer count. When those non-iOS developers can't run x86 VMs on a Mac then they'll bin the Mac.
Latest statement from Parallels:
www.parallels.com
Application and Desktop Delivery | Parallels RAS
Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) is a complete application delivery and VDI solution empowering the creation of digital workspaces! Read more.
www.parallels.com
The good ol' generic developer. It's true there's a lot of the industry that shifted to Macs as it was a great place for a POSIX-compliant system to develop any sort of scripted language, or Java, or Go these days. But that's not the Mac's developer bread-and-butter, it's iOS/iPad OS development. The architecture shift makes no difference at all to them. And now that the frameworks for mobile and Mac are basically synonymous, as long as they have them, they have macOS app developers. The platform will be just fine.
I really don't see why anyone would think Apple wants or needs to keep non-Apple platform developers around on their platform, but it's largely irrelevant. The only thing we're quibbling about is a processor architecture that is largely obfuscated for most people, even developers! That "just recompile your app" vibe being thrown around the keynote isn't just lip service. For 95% of the apps out there, it doesn't matter what the compiler does with your high-level Swift/Obj C code. That's also the whole point behind the multitude of Apple's heavy lifting frameworks like Metal or CoreML. They'll do the dirty work of processor integration, you just use those high-level APIs. They're going above and beyond to ensure the developers that actually do further their platform have a smooth transition.
As for the rest of the developers out there, what's the argument? You can't write your node.js code the same way on an ARM-based PC? If you're a hardcore C user, you can't cross-compile using Clang? If you're a Docker user, you can't simply point your Docker client to a cloud VM to get your x86 build? (Or even cross-compile locally the same way a C user would?)
It has happened before, we survived. In a decade, I can guarantee you, we'll barely remember these days.
Latest statement from Parallels:
Application and Desktop Delivery | Parallels RAS
Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) is a complete application delivery and VDI solution empowering the creation of digital workspaces! Read more.
Notice they are being very cagey and not answering very direct questions of "will I be able to run virtual Windows"
That right there is the one thing Microsoft needs to figure out. They need a rosetta-like layer for Windows so that existing apps, including many which will never be ported, continue working. Apple has done this now three times, and still Microsoft can't figure it out. The likely culprit is the complexity of supporting legacy code, needed to support ancient Windows binaries, much of which didn't even make the jump to Windows for ARM. But, that just shows you the underlying problem of the Windows architecture, and why Intel and Microsoft are both in a very precarious situation now. Time will tell.