ARM Macs are coming, three years after Apple’s attitude change
macworld.com
macworld.com
This is nothing like the transition to Intel, which offered a huge benefit to the 95% of users who were trapped in the Windows ecosystem.
In the last 8 years or so, Apple's big ideas for the Mac have been complete duds (the trashcan Mac Pro, their entire laptop lineup from 2015 to 2020...)
Mac OS X recently dropped support for 32-bit software, and this should have freed up their OS engineers. Instead, the most recent release of Mac OS (10.15, Catalina) is widely viewed as one of the worst releases in recent memory.
I don't want an ARM Mac. I want Apple to refocus on the basics of Mac hardware and software.
Seems like a very Apple move.
This is an extraordinary claim. Don’t get me wrong, I love ECC, but it has a very real cost associated with it. Why would any alternative to Intel change the pricing dynamic?
Nonsense. There's a lot of valid reasons to be critical of Intel (largely stemming from general malicious business practices and greed), but suggesting they haven't been pushing computing forward and being market leaders and innovators is just plain untrue.
They were making 8c/16t Xeons back in 2010, and core counts there have continued to improve on the high end, and increment and propogate across their stack. It's taken till recently for most consumer software or usecases to really leverage more than 8 threads as well, so the demand on the consumer side wasn't really there. If it were, the AMD Phenom's likely would have been more successful given their multithreading performance advantage over their consumer intel contemporaries. Instead they delivered gains in performance per watt, lithography, IPC, idle performance, and instruction set/acceleration gains (AES-NI, AVX, QuickSync, etc), to say nothing of pushing the market forward in Memory and Storage as well. Clock speed gains were realized as well but pushing much passed 4Ghz starts pushing into limits of physics/thermodynamics given current fabrication tech/science.
ECC gives no benefit to most consumer applications, and actually would more likely be a detriment in most implementations, as it increases costs and limits performance while it's two primary benefits would largely go unnoticed if not entirely unused (error correction and improved total capacity). That's like suggesting you should make the entire frame of a car out of Titanium. Sure, it's technically better, but it's gains aren't worth it's costs and largely lost on most consumer buyers anyway, so why bother.
> That doesn't even touch on all the security issues.
No argument from there. Worth pointing out that exploits will often target the dominant marketshare holder of any given industry/segment (eg, Windows for OS, Android for mobile OS, Intel for x86 CPU's), but that doesn't discount the flaws that intel had implemented and their handling of said flaws/exploits. But that's not holding computing back so much as a matter of corruption/morality.
You made a strawman regarding titanium. For as much as the recent Apple computers cost, a MacBook Pro should have ECC memory and plenty of ports, while a MacBook should not.
There is a possibility if this tweet is anything to go by, https://twitter.com/_rogame/status/1225381275617415168 and apparently it seems this is being talked about since Nov'19 when the codenames appeared first time in Mac betas.
Admittedly, this only works for applications that use the API. For anything in plain text you should probably be using a git repo though.
One of the tools that I require to do my job, a development environment for an ERP system, is a Windows application. It's a closed-source commercial application. The likelihood of it getting ported to MacOS is zero, so it's always going to require me to run Windows in some capacity in order to use it.
There are three ways I see this tool working on an ARM-based Mac:
* MacOS emulates enough of the Intel instruction set that VMware still runs. And doesn't kill it in the next version like they did the PowerPC emulation after the Intel switch.
* VMware runs but gives me a virtual ARM CPU which runs an ARM version of Windows which emulates an Intel CPU. I'm not sure what the ARM virtualization story is, so this may not even be a thing,
* I keep an Intel machine under my desk and use RDP. This is somewhat cheating and it's unlikely that work would be willing to pay for two machines.
On the flip side, Windows 10 seems to be getting really good, so switching actually wouldn't be that bad. WSL will basically give me all of the command-line tools that I need, Hyper-V can meet my virtualization needs (though I won't require it like I do on the Mac), and all of my other tools are available on Windows.
AMD, which also is x86 compatible, had a division a while back to produce ARM/x86 processors in one chip... maybe this could be a solution to running both systems at once?
I was helping a friend with her 2014 MacBook Air, which can still run macOS 10.15 Catalina, which was released a few months ago. Keep it mind it shipped with macOS 10.9.2—that’s six major releases ago.
Macs tend to last a long time; I think it’ll be quite a few years before the lack of serviceable Intel Macs will be a problem for users who need to run something that’s Intel-only.
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powermac_6...
With USB-C and these external GPU chassis, why not have a CPU chassis for your i3?
As far as I know, qemu can do this today.
If anything network performance is more important than CPU performance - the IDE is very chatty when it talks to the server.
MS is branding themselves as "low end" junk by doing that kind of thing.
I’m excited to see what Apple’s processor team could pull off with the higher budget, better heat dissipation, and much larger battery capacity that comes with a MacBook Pro housing.
I could even see being able to choose the number of processors when you buy the machine. Trying to save money? Get the single processor option. Need to compile Rust code daily? Get the 6 processor model. Or get a low end Mac Pro today and upgrade it tomorrow with processor cards. There are a lot of options when you control the complete system; Hardware, Firmware, and Software.
Jobs did not want iOS devices to create content, only to consume it, and with Apple’s focus shifting to services, I worry that they will continue this push for ever more consumption, to the detriment of all else. We see it in their overtaking of and reported indifference to independent developers. We see it their push to create an all-encompassing media empire, like Disney, but with a watch and handhelds. We see it in their push to develop ever.more expensive hardware that doesn’t have commensurate increases in functionality.
I still use Apple and love it, but the hardware and software hasn’t yet moved away very far from what it started out as after the switch to OS X. But I can also see the end of that in my lifetime, perhaps in the next 15-20 years. By that that time, I can see development limited to a few approved vendors with deep pockets for expensive licensing, but the bulk of it coming from Apple.
You do realize Mac OS X 10.0 was released in March 2001. Here are the specs of the early 2001 iMac: It featured a 500 MHz processor, 64 MB of RAM, a 20 GB hard drive and a 56 kbps modem,was available in Indigo, Blue Dalmatian or Flower Power, and was priced at $1199 U.S.
So yeah, we've come a long way.
I can see development limited to a few approved vendors with deep pockets for expensive licensing, but the bulk of it coming from Apple.
I doubt this will happen; there's no point. The recent release of Swift Playgrounds [1] for the Mac has the potential to create a new generation of Mac developers.
Apple wouldn't have created Catalyst to increase the number of apps for the Mac by giving a path to iOS developers to bring their apps to macOS.
Darwin isn't going anywhere; you'll still be able to run all of the Unix stuff, with the vast majority just needing to be compiled for ARM.
Not to be pedantic, but sandboxed apps on macOS goes back to the 10.5 days. I just checked on my Catalina machine; most GUI apps are sandboxed, but none of the Unix apps are. By definition, sandboxing has to work differently on the Mac than it does on iOS.
There's no doubt that Apple has to do better; the 10.15 Catalina release was way more buggy than we're used to seeing. Apple seems to have a lot of balls in the air, with macOS 10.16 coming in a few months at WWDC, plus new iOS, watchOS, tvOS and who knows what else.
If the transition to ARM is going to happen about a year from now, that means there are alpha versions of macOS running on prototype ARM Macs right now.
Hopefully, the Catalina release was a wakeup call for them to get their act together; guess we’ll know soon enough.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swift-playgrounds/id1496833156
If AMD had died and Intel's top of the line enthusiast CPU was a 10 core; I wouldn't blame Apple. They would be leaving a lot of performance on the table that they could get from TSMC.
AMD has made the x86 space much more competitive and likely saved x86 in the long run in the server space. Same with gaming enthusiasts. Some of them dual boot to use Windows software/games while keeping the mac in that creative space. It would just be much easier to source AMD parts. Especially since both of them use TSMC.
It is a lot of software effort at a time when the quality control of Catalina is buggy mess. A lot of software work to emulate and optimize a new CPU. I am seeing, at least youtubers, consider other platforms. Snazzy labs recently moved to Linux because they couldn't afford a Mac Pro, risk a Hackintosh, or use Windows 10 because their 10 gig networking didn't work well on Win10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2dACq3F_W4
If Apple does switch over they better have the CPU horsepower to justify it. Their brand new Mac Pro is only 18 cores and AMD's 3000 16 core can match it on Windows. AMD is very strong right now and Intel has had fire lit under them for the past year that may cause them to respond soon.
Not hugely.
It really would be quite a drag.
On second thought, most web dev tasks aren't very CPU intensive and would work under emulation pretty much fine. And we all expect code to run faster in prod than on dev anyways!
The last Power Mac G5 with its 9 fans plus water cooling just to get two dual-core PowerPC G5 processors to run reliably was the last straw: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/specs/powerma...
An Ipad / laptop cross, I'd guess you could call it a "Surface Pro x" clone. The IPad pro comes close if the OS was a bit more powerful.
I'd still need a real x86 machine for work. I deploy on x86 so need to develop/test locally on x86.
Does anyone with better computer arch knowledge know if something like that would be reasonable from a price and performance perspective?
I'd buy one of these, but it'd probably be priced in line with the current Macbook lineup
I remember my first intel Mac having support for PowerPC apps was really important to me.
It's good to see ARM spreading as a cheap alternative to traditional CPU for personal computers.
(Emphasis mine.) Most Homebrew programs are not installed from source; and they'll require recompilation for the new architecture by the Homebrew team and a reinstall of all packages (to fetch the new packages) to work.