I'd say it's a fair bet that MS will develop a version of Windows for ARM-based Macs. But that would also open the door to other forms of virtualization on it's own. Not necessarily desktop-within-a-desktop.
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Should I Buy an Intel Mac Today or Wait to Buy an Arm-Based Mac?
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MS does not have to develop a version, they have Windows version running on essentially all ARMv8 hardware. This version does not only run on the official Qualcomm based SoCs but on very generic ARM systems both either directly booted or under virtualization.
The only thing technically missing are the Apple silicon related device drivers. So the ball is clearly in Apples court.
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Apple provide virtualization support but not for drivers under other OS.
That's VM software companies' job.
Currently Parallels have a DirectX 11 on Metal driver for years.
Thats true for Virtualization but not for Boot-camp, which requires native device drivers. But yes, if Parallels provides DirectX 12 on Metal drivers along with the UEFI for ARM64 all is fine as far as Virtualization is concerned.
At the moment it is for instance possible to run Windows ARM in a virtual machine under Linux.
Does not have to be UEFI directly in the ROM/Flash. I guess you can just load EFI from iBoot and go on from there - similar as on the Raspberry PI, where you just load an EFI and then boot Windows from there.
If (and that's a big if) Apple makes an emulation layer to load an EFI environment, sure. Maybe they make one for BIOS. Or OpenFirmware (which wouldn't be useful for Windows). But most likely none of those.
Jup thats my point. In order to boot Windows you need EFI, because Windows uses EFI to discover interfaces to basic IO devices like keyboard, HDD or frame buffer. From here on Windows ARM should be happily booting.
Now of course i do not know what plans Apple has with respect to Windows - but technically thats peanuts effort wise for a company like Apple.
As a said the ball is in the court of Apple - there is nothing at the moment what Microsoft needs to adapt on the Windows side. I am saying this because some people seem to think, that Microsoft needs to do additional modifications. As it stands Windows on ARM is a pretty generic OS for ARMv8 platforms.
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... if the Apple II is any indication of how Apple handles "Forever" ..
"Forever" meant about 5 years. _5_ years of kicking, screaming and begrudgingly 'supporting' it...
At least "Long into the future.." indicates an end-time.. So figure something a bit less than 5 years. ;-)
"Forever" meant about 5 years. _5_ years of kicking, screaming and begrudgingly 'supporting' it...
At least "Long into the future.." indicates an end-time.. So figure something a bit less than 5 years. ;-)
That's misleading. Virtualization has only been written for hardware that is in fact natively supported where drivers actually exist. It's just time slicing cycles. If Apple has their own tweaks to the opcodes used, it would not necessarily be as simple and may not be worth the risk involved.
Adobe dropped support right around the time of snow leopard, as did a lot of others. Third parties aren't going to maintain support when Apple isn't covering them in a big OS update.
ARM has made at least some inroads in high performance applications.
Fujitsu-backed supercomputer with Arm chips ranks as world's most powerful
A Japanese supercomputer built with technology from Arm Ltd, whose chip designs power most of the world's smartphones, has taken the top spot among the world's most powerful systems, displacing one powered by International Business Machines Corp chips.
The second part is pretty neat. Conjugate gradient solvers tend to be bound by bandwidth rather than instruction latency. That's why they refer to them as close to real world computing tasks. ARM's assembly is also a bit simpler. They haven't introduced a bunch of different vector sizes or shoved instructions that take memory operands everywhere. ARM's approach of exposing more names is a bit more like llvm internals in that data movement is an explicit step and not optionally folded.
I can't wait to see how great ARM macs will be.
However I think pretty much every single person here can agree on one very true point which has repeated itself with Apple products over many many years even going back to well into Steve Jobs time.
Expect any new Apple product, to get VASTLY better by the time the 2nd and 3rd models come out.
1st model (generally always issues)
2nd model fixes most of these problems, as they HAD to ship the 1st one and could not fix everything before launch so the 2nd one has all the things they really wanted to do with the 1st one.
3rd model, they'd had time to have a rethink and look at the good and bad points, and give it the love and polish to really make is a good well rounded product.
On the one hand, this is completely correct. Those first-gen models have often been kind of rough drafts. The first MacBook Air was a perfect example of this. It was slow, hot, expensive, and the base model ran off a miniaturized spinning hard drive of the sort that you'd usually see in an iPod. By the time a few years had gone by, the MBA had been iterated into one of Apple's all-time best Macs.
On the other hand, I have learned absolutely nothing and I will probably cave almost immediately and throw my credit card down once a paper thin, super fast ARM MacBook hits the shelves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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So I'm running a 2015 Macbook with the shockingly bad butterfly keyboard. I had it replaced a third time this week, and apparently the battery is on the verge of failing, so I'm in the market for a new Mac. I'm also having slowness issues when connected to my external display.
What I'm looking for is a device that's as thin as this machine, preferably with a bigger screen, better battery life and most importantly more power, but I would prefer a hybrid like device that I can use as both a tablet and laptop.
The iPad Pro comes close to being this device, but there's no dual monitor support, and being an iPad it won't work with things like my scanner, plus the myriad of other limitations. I don't really need a Mac for everyday use, but there's still so much I can't do with iOS that requires one.
What I want is a hybrid Mac running MacOS that works similar to an iPad Pro. I know Apple have said they will never release a touchscreen Mac, but it's as good time as any to do something radical like this with this transition, and would be a great way to bring MacOS into the future. What are the chances of this happening? It would seem a waste to me for Apple not to release something like this, it doesn't have to replace the MacBook Pros, it could be it's own product line.
Alternatively, maybe I'll get next years iPad Pro and an Apple Silicone iMac, but this doesn't serve my needs either as my partner uses my external display a lot and I don't think it's possible to connect other machines to the iMac to use as an external display.
Am I alone in wanting this kind of setup? I do not see the point in buying both an iPad and a MacBook, as managing multiple mobile devices is a hassle to me and it seems unnecessary.
What I'm looking for is a device that's as thin as this machine, preferably with a bigger screen, better battery life and most importantly more power, but I would prefer a hybrid like device that I can use as both a tablet and laptop.
The iPad Pro comes close to being this device, but there's no dual monitor support, and being an iPad it won't work with things like my scanner, plus the myriad of other limitations. I don't really need a Mac for everyday use, but there's still so much I can't do with iOS that requires one.
What I want is a hybrid Mac running MacOS that works similar to an iPad Pro. I know Apple have said they will never release a touchscreen Mac, but it's as good time as any to do something radical like this with this transition, and would be a great way to bring MacOS into the future. What are the chances of this happening? It would seem a waste to me for Apple not to release something like this, it doesn't have to replace the MacBook Pros, it could be it's own product line.
Alternatively, maybe I'll get next years iPad Pro and an Apple Silicone iMac, but this doesn't serve my needs either as my partner uses my external display a lot and I don't think it's possible to connect other machines to the iMac to use as an external display.
Am I alone in wanting this kind of setup? I do not see the point in buying both an iPad and a MacBook, as managing multiple mobile devices is a hassle to me and it seems unnecessary.
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I can't wait to see how great ARM macs will be.
However I think pretty much every single person here can agree on one very true point which has repeated itself with Apple products over many many years even going back to well into Steve Jobs time.
Expect any new Apple product, to get VASTLY better by the time the 2nd and 3rd models come out.
1st model (generally always issues)
2nd model fixes most of these problems, as they HAD to ship the 1st one and could not fix everything before launch so the 2nd one has all the things they really wanted to do with the 1st one.
3rd model, they'd had time to have a rethink and look at the good and bad points, and give it the love and polish to really make is a good well rounded product.
So true - especially with the iPad the second iPad was awesome. The first one was more of a Beta product. Except the 3rd generation was a disaster, and the 4th generation they fixed all of the issues.
You could use a wireless printer/scanner like this with the iPad. Scans to cloud.
Brother Wireless All-in-One Inkjet Printer, MFC-J690DW, Multi-function Color Printer, Duplex Printing, Mobile Printing, Amazon Dash Replenishment Enabled
Delivers affordable printing plus the features and functions to meet your home, home office or small office print, copy, scan, and fax needs. This wireless color inkjet all-in-one reliably delivers high-quality output and enables wireless mobile device printing from your desktop, laptop, smartpho...
www.amazon.com
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I ditched my 2016 MacBook Pro a few months ago and got a 12.9 iPad Pro with the new magic keyboard. Don't miss the MacBook one bit. For larger projects, I can just use the Mac Pro at home and doing large projects isn't really feasible on the go anyways. The only thing that is kind of a pain is the 6 step process of trying to find a file whereas on a MacBook, I can just go on my desktop and click on the file that I need.
I have an AirPrint printer, but I also use a duplex scanner for scanning lots of documents quickly. I’m pretty sure you can’t use any type of scanner with an iPad directlyYou could use a wireless printer/scanner like this with the iPad. Scans to cloud.
Brother Wireless All-in-One Inkjet Printer, MFC-J690DW, Multi-function Color Printer, Duplex Printing, Mobile Printing, Amazon Dash Replenishment Enabled
Delivers affordable printing plus the features and functions to meet your home, home office or small office print, copy, scan, and fax needs. This wireless color inkjet all-in-one reliably delivers high-quality output and enables wireless mobile device printing from your desktop, laptop, smartpho...www.amazon.com
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
You put the docs in the scanner, scan to the cloud, access scanned docs from the iPad.
Plus if I was gonna do that I'd want it to go into iCloud, therefore accessing from the files app on iOS. Having to use an extra app just for that seems silly. I would have to then transfer said file into the files app anyway as I like all my stuff in one place. Also, my scanner has no network connectivity so no good anyway.
Last I checked even with a PC or Mac you still have to walk the documents to the scanner like some sort of primitive. The only thing different here is you simply initiate the scan from the scanner instead of the Mac or PC. Then open DropBox or whatever and open the document in whatever app you intend to do something to it with.
There's a big difference between transferring data over a local network (which AirPrint does) and first uploading it to a corporation's server on the Internet, then downloading it from there. It requires Internet access, it comes with privacy caveats, etc.
I can scan from my Canon G4600 using the Canon Print App on my iPad. Can save as PDF or jpeg. No cloud involved.
