Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlacks | Hacker News Reader

I can imagine Apple saw this coming a while back and decided to go all in on iOS while maintaining MacOS on the back burner.

It must be difficult to be in a management position where you obviously see the industry is moving towards ARM, but you need to orchestrate a plan in motion to correctly time when the customer/ developer is ready to make the switch.

View on HN

> It must be difficult to be in a management position where you obviously see the industry is moving towards ARM, but you need to orchestrate a plan in motion to correctly time when the customer/ developer is ready to make the switch.

Apple is in a unique position to make this happen though. And they have done it before with the PowerPC->x86 switchover.

Their solution has previously been to have fat binaries with both versions compiled alongside. They control the toolchain and the app store so this is not that difficult to enforce.

And the 68000 to PowerPC before that.

Not to be pedantic, but you could argue it goes all the way to 6502, so they have gone though all these transitions: 6502 -> m68k -> PowerPC -> x86. Added a x86 -> Arm64 transition would hardly be shocking.

EDIT: In case it wasn't clear; there are Apple II emulators for the Macintosh.

Instead of switching macOS to arm, they could promote iPadOS to laptops. They already added a file manager and advanced windowing to it.

The ironic thing is, that the question isn't so much one of hardware, but software. With the iPad Pro, Apple has an almost perfect piece of hardware, that could be used as an ultralight laptop alternative. The problem is, Apple does not allow the use of an iPad as a computer. File handling - though a little bit improved on iPadOS - is still extremely limited and even more so is the software. There are no real development environments on the iPad because of the app store limitations, there is no Termux for the iPad. Even if fully sandboxed, that could increase the productivity as a computer a lot.

So the simplest way for Apple to get a ARM-based computer would be allowing the iPad to be more of a computer. Alternatively, they do it the hard way and launch ARM-based Macbooks. That would be nice too. But putting iPadOS onto a Macbook would rather go in the wrong direction. MacOS should run well on ARMs anyway.

Have you tried iSH? It’s kind of like Termux

I have heard about it, but not tried it. It is sad how many heroics iSH has to go through, if Apple could just provide a sandboxed Termux.

iSH is a x86 emulator running on an ARM phone. It’s crazy.

A nice proof of concept, but I don’t think it’s the right path for a serious tool.

True, most stuff doesn’t work and it’s very slow. But it runs youtube-dl well enough which is something.

No re-encoding I hope :)

Not reencoding but it can remux separated streams quickly using ffmpeg

I expect within the next five years you’re going to see some sort of convergence between Apple’s phone/tablet and traditional computer lines.

At least on the level of the 13 inch devices, this would absolutely make sense. The Macbook competitors nowadays offer touch and some even pen input, which the Macbook lacks, the iPad has those and plenty of cpu power and is ultralight, has no fan and is more energy efficient. The iPad Pro could replace a laptop for most usages, if were not limited by iOS/iPadOS.

Personally, I would refresh my iPad much more often, without the limitations. And it is not very realistic from Apple to expect people to carry both a laptop and a tablet. So forcing the customers to choose between those device types is not very customer friendly.

Actually, I am currently considering to get the Samsung Galaxy Book S, which seems to be a very interesting, ARM-powered laptop. Of course I would prefer a new iPad Pro, if not for its limitations.

And Apple won’t maintain a whole separate hardware/software design stream. The pro-oriented users will have to accept the confines of a consumer-optimized set of designs or switch to another platform. This is already true to a degree of course but I expect we’ll see a real crossroads.

Box86 exists though. They don’t need fat binaries, they only need x86 emulation. Many x86 patents have also expired or will expire soon, so the set of instructions that need to be emulated is reduced.

Emulation works as a transition layer, and they've done it before (see Rosetta from ppc->x86 and the 68k emulator from when they switched to ppc), but native binaries will be significantly faster and more energy efficient.

Native binaries using the latest stable libraries with the latest compiler optimizations will always be faster and more energy efficient.

Even the Xbox had backwards compatibility across ISAs.

Somehow I doubt people will care that much about efficiency.

They will care on a laptop with a battery.

Apple is removing Python etc for more than one reason.

Curious if Apple does an ARM Mac Mini first as a canary.

The current Mac mini is an awesome machine and in top spec has some impressive performance. Given that a key strength of ARM is its power efficiency, it would seem more logical to start with something that has a battery. That way any performance hits can be seen as a trade off for longer battery life.

I say this knowing full well than in any battery life versus thinness tradeoff, Apple has picked thinner just about every time.

If Apple does any Mac with a ARM processor, I think it will absolutely be the Macbook Air (or the recently discontinued Macbook). Those ARM processors will be so power-efficient that they will be able to market their laptops as "lasting for several days", which a lot of consumers will absolutely crave.

They can’t even get their phone batteries to last a full day because they’ll continue to prioritize form over function.

I had several smartphones I didn’t need to charge more than every other day or even every three days if I wasn’t using them nonstop. Apple could do that today.

> They can’t even get their phone batteries to last a full day because they’ll continue to prioritize form over function.

Well, to be fair, smartphones have much, much smaller bodies to carry around a battery. If Apple makes a notebook with the same A13 processor I’m pretty sure it will last more than two or three days.

BTW, one of smartphone’s function is that it’s portable. You really can’t blame it being form over function when talking about battery life; there are many, many people who want light phones. If you need longer battery life by sacrificing weight, you can get yourself a backup battery (or a battery case)

> I had several smartphones I didn’t need to charge more than every other day or even every three days if I wasn’t using them nonstop. Apple could do that today.

My experience is that my iPhone XS survives a day and a half without any charging. YMMV, of course, but for me that’s enough.

The new iPhone 11 is slightly larger and thicker with a much bigger battery and an ugly camera array. Function seems to have been prioritised.

CPython works on ARM, doesn't it?

Yes there's even iOS app like Pythonista which provide Python and n IDE.

I wonder, why Apple has nothing like Samsung DEX. But also I wonder why Samsung and Google don't push this feature not more. I almost bought one of the last Windows phone, the HP Z3, because it could be use as base for a small notebook (they had just a "dumb" notebook for it, just the screen and a keyboard, all the processing was over air or cable from the phone). Even the new Linux phone (Librem 5) comes with a feature to connect the phone to a monitor and keyboard etc. Apple has never showed any of this concepts even a tiny bit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com