Apple's shift to ARM Mac from Intel at WWDC will define a decade of computing | Hacker News Reader

Apple's shift to ARM Mac from Intel at WWDC will define a decade of computing

appleinsider.com

Microsoft will be spending money reimplementing office and I wonder if they'll stop at the minimal electron wrap around o365?

Adobe Photoshop, Ableton, AutoCAD

I imagine Photoshop will be relatively quickly made available, and maybe even Ableton, but based on how most engineering software progresses and develops and how much slower engineers themselves are to use modern tools, I can't imagine any cad software will be ported for ARM within the decade.

And bugs, bugs everywhere

I'm hoping apples investment in llvm pays back here.

I wonder if the sw Devs are hoping for funds to cleanly reimplement in.. (name newer language but probably rust here)

If Apple is indeed moving to ARM I think it’s fair to assume Adobe is already working on it.

The mac is as good as its ecosystem.

I wonder if they'll stop at the minimal electron wrap around o365

They will be relying on Electron getting ported first, which will be reliant on Chromium and Node and goodness knows how many packages on NPM. I suspect it will be easier to toggle whatever switch Apple provides in XCode.

Apple being able to migrate across CPU types is notable.

They've done it how many times now?

Just musing on that fact, and the impact it has on their thinking.

Three times (MC680x0 to PowerPC to x86), so far, or more if you also count the 24-bit to 32-bit and 32-bit to 64-bit transitions.

I didn't realize there was a 24 bit to 32 bit. Was that the 68K to PPC transition?

https://lowendmac.com/2015/32-bit-addressing-on-older-macs/

Thanks! Yeah, I passed this part of Mac history right by.

Bad memories there. Programmers would stuff crap in the high 8 bits of the pointers. Not so good once running on 32 bits!

Ouch!

That seems both tempting, because the buts are right there, unused.

...and a bad idea, because at that time people had to know the address space was going to expand.

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