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Top Stories: iPad Keyboard With Trackpad in 2020, Arm-Based Mac in 2021?, MacRumors Turns 20
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I look at that old MR front page and it’s a bit sad for us old dinosaur computer types. Back then things were both perceived to be on the way up, and in retrospect were indeed on the way up. I was pumped when I decided that OS X was for real and I bought my first iMac running Tiger. I looked forward to OS X upgrades and new/improved hardware offerings. Now if it weren’t for the recent new Mac Pro I’d say Apple’s computer days are long gone. I’m still not optimistic, but the Pro does show that there is some creative spark left, it’s just not let out to play very often these days. Apple should start using BB King’s “The Thrill is Gone” as the lead-in music for all their big reveals.
It wouldn't be bad at all. In fact, it's very likely that we'd get increased battery life, if not also better performance (Apple has impressed greatly with their iDevice CPUs. I'd be willing to believe they could compete with Intel at this point). People are concerned about not being able to run their existing programs, but that won't be an issue either. Apple has in the past provided compatibility layers to make transitions such as this go smoothly, and you can bet they'll do the same thing this time.
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You won't be able to boot the normal Windows which runs on Intel-based PCs, but there is a version of Windows on ARM which can run many of the same programs. It's very possible that Microsoft will at some point offer a way to install that on a Mac.
With that said, Boot Camp is a very rarely used feature, so it's possible Apple will just not worry about it.
Happy Birthday MacRumors! I remember finding this site in 2005 when I was searching for rumors about the iPhone. This is the only site I still regularly read from that era, so you must be doing something right. Here’s to another 20 years!
By then I will actually be an old man. Will I still care? What will a computer be in 20 years? I think they will be much more proactive. They will anticipate everything because they will be constantly fed data from every imaginable source. I think we will use them less in the sense of sitting in front of them, even though they will govern every aspect of our lives. Using a computer will become much more abstract, like a fabric of computing that constantly surrounds us and takes care of all the things we don’t care about.
By then I will actually be an old man. Will I still care? What will a computer be in 20 years? I think they will be much more proactive. They will anticipate everything because they will be constantly fed data from every imaginable source. I think we will use them less in the sense of sitting in front of them, even though they will govern every aspect of our lives. Using a computer will become much more abstract, like a fabric of computing that constantly surrounds us and takes care of all the things we don’t care about.
There’s nothing in it for Apple to design a machine to run windows. This isn’t 1995 anymore. Apple sells only four million or so Macs a month. Most of them never use boot camp.
it’s far more important that Apple provides support for Mac users to use the same software they run on iOS. Even iPad far outsells Mac, and iPhone does so by tremendous margins.
if apple loses every boot camp customer for ever, they’ll never even notice it.
Yes, amazingly short sighted people who believed the lies about a G5 powerbook that was NEVER going to materialize because Motorola couldn't improve upon the CPU design. You know, fanboi types.
4 million or so a quarter - and you’re right, iPad outsells macs 2-3 times that. If anything, iPad, tablets and chromebooks in general prove that most people aren’t reliant on (or put much value in) a desktop OS.
I think the harsh reaction is due to legacy software support and the fear that the performance would be worse than intel+amd/nvidia. But what if an ARM MacBook winds up surpassing it?
MacRumors is an important achievement & resource for all of those involved over the years, you should be congratulated and thanked. Other rumor sites have come and gone, but MacRumors has been producing great quality news, reviews and the forums are full of intelligent, mostly kind people. Thank you for all your hard work! I raise my drink to every last blurry elevator photo.
I am generally not this nice. So don't get use to it.
I am generally not this nice. So don't get use to it.
Oh my god ... Time flies....Happy birthday MacRumors. You are the best !Already 20 years? Oh, my...
Congratulations.
Those were die-hard intel haters, though, there were valid reasons – end-user advantages to switch from PPC to intel and it had nothing to do with the platform itself, and everything with the incapability, or better unwillingness of IBM to develop decent CPUs for desktops or laptops – their sole interest was big iron, and so the only option for fast laptop CPUs back then were intel CPUs. That, plus the advantage of being able to run Windows natively at a time when this was a huge selling point won a lot of new users to the platform.
The switch to ARM now, however doesn't seem to provide enough advantages to the end user. Don't get me wrong. I think ARM is a great platform and I love it. I wish Apple would've switched from 68k to ARM directly as a RISC platform instead of the detour to intel and now back to RISC…
But when we switched from 68k to PPC, the new machines were vastly faster, so that even running your stuff in emulation was as fast if not faster than on the old machines. ARM isn't that much better in performance than x86, so an ARM macOS will be slower for the time being, because it'll run most of the software in emulation for quite some time to come. Then why would anyone buy one? Battery life could be considerably improved, great, but if you want a machine that has longer battery life for the cost of running your apps slower, then you might as well use a less powerful CPU of the same architecture.
Better GPUs? Nah. Anything Apple has done regarding GPUs is no comparison to anything serious from AMD or Nvidia. So what's the merit? Apple can get a higher price margin if their Macs use ARM chips? That won't trickle down to the end user either. Not under Tim Crook. All I have seen since he took over, is shameless price inflation, while taking away features, and bungling hardware designs.
I've been on the Mac since mostly System 7 in 1991, but Tim's Apple reminds me too much of the screwed up Apple of the late 90s. Back then DOS/Windows was a much worse of a mess so Apple had some appeal, nowadays? Not so much. And there's no Messiah company founder around to come in and clean up the mess anymore. I am starting to consider other options for the mid/long-term future now. This makes me angry and mad. I stuck with Apple through the dire years, and now they seem to screw up the product line and pricing so bad that people are getting sick of it.
Says you.
There is a huge wealth of apps that won't work anymore without emulation. And emulation isn't the answer, either. Transmeta, anyone?
Apple can (and should) do other things to make Mac great again.
- Allow the user to upgrade memory and storage AFTER purchase.
- Allow the user to CHOOSE their graphic solution.
- Allow the user to choose who repairs their Apple products.
- You can upgrade memory after purchase on iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Pro.
- You can choose your graphic solution. Apple even sells different GPUs and eGPUs in their store.
- If you want repairs under warranty (incl. warranty on replacement parts) then choose from the many Apple Stores or authorised stores. If this doesn't matter to you, you're free to send your device to any repair shop you like.
Bringing transmeta into it is weird. That was in-hardware emulation, and it failed because it was a ****** processor. I interviewed there, and walked out when some dude tried to convince me that in bipolar logic you should do level shifting at the transistor base instead of at the emitter. Ridiculous. Plus Linus was not a nice person.
P.S.: I, for one, don't give a **** about any of the things you have bulleted. I want none of those things.
Says you.
Despite 2 past CPU switches and one switch to a completely different OS - and the further back in time you go, the more likely it was for Apps to have CPU-specific code rather than pure C/C++/ObjC/Swift.
Emulation/code translation was only ever s stop-gap on Mac (and a lot of software spends most of its time calling native OS routines, anyway, which reduces the slowdown). Transmeta was a red herring - the idea there was to use code translation for everything - including the OS - permanently.
The one real loss is going to be Bootcamp/VM for Windows - although there will probably be equivalents for dual-booting or virtualising ARM-based OSs, and ARM Linux is already well-established, Windows is still shackled by the users' demand to run code written in the 1990s (...when Macs had PPCs running MacOS 8/9) so I wouldn't bet the farm on many people wanting Windows for ARM on their Mac.
No, emulation is a temporary crutch that Apple always uses, while simultaneously convincing and incentivizing people to port their apps to the native architecture, the way Apple always does it.
Recompiling apps for ARM should not be too difficult, in almost all cases. Some devs might need to wait for the libraries and frameworks they use to be ported, but that shouldn't take too long either.
I work in IT, and I'm a software developer. I do actually know a thing or two about this.
Transmeta’s dopey theory was that they could make a garbage processor, but add in hardware hooks so that it could, on-the-fly, reorder/recompile/optimize code by learning from past behavior. The idea was that over time code would run faster and faster, making up for the fact that the processor, itself, wasn’t very good.
They also thought “gee, this means we could also run code meant for ANY other processor on it just as well as x86!” But what it really meant was “we could run code meant for ANY other processor on it just as BADLY as we run x86!”
A lot of people use Windows to run a variety of still-updated apps, such as Quickbooks or the PC version of Excel (which has many advanced features the Mac version probably will never have). Now, Intuit is the type of company I'd expect to drag their heels excruciatingly when it comes to supporting ARM, especially if the primary user base is Mac users, but the point is that the potential's there for at least some kind of Windows support, even on ARM.
Not great, but not all doom and gloom either. The real question is whether or not Microsoft will get on board with such a thing. That's the big unknown here.
The one thing you can be fairly certain of is that Microsoft will get on board. Subscription business models are good motivators. And they quickly adopt new mainstream platforms (they were critical in x86-64 even becoming a thing. If not for that, we’d all be running Itaniums)
I'd believe it. Microsoft already has a fully-functional ARM platform, and you'd have to believe that porting it to whatever Apple comes out with shouldn't be too much of a task, compared how much work it must have been to do the initial port to a non-Intel architecture. I'd definitely buy it and run it if it came out. Here's hoping.
Microsoft had always ports of Windows NT for different platforms (x86, DEC/Digital/Compaq/HP Alpha, MIPS, heck even a PowerPC version). Just for the case, one of these platform goes bye-bye.
So I think, that at Microsoft they have always a plan B in their pocket if something goes wrong.
So I think, that at Microsoft they have always a plan B in their pocket if something goes wrong.