Osborning the Mac, or not
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I'm a bit more skeptical.
Back then, their desktop/laptop business line was much more important to them. They needed it to go well. They were also a niche player and couldn't afford to lose more market share to PCs/Windows.
But now, they barely care about their desktop/laptop revenue (being only 10% of their revenue) and they don't seem to care much about their marketshare either because they don't seem to be doing much to expand it. They care a lot more about their iDevices now.
Also, if the transition from 32 to 64 bit is any indication, they don't care nearly as much about backwards compatibility as they used to. When they did the hardware transitions, they had a compatibility layer (Rosetta) that was supported for 5 years after the transition. But with the 32 bit change, the announced that it would no longer be supported in 2017, and dropped support in 2019, just 2 years later.
I can no longer use a lot of my favorite apps because they were games written years ago with no current support, so they were not updated. Or they're things like the old Microsoft Office, which works perfectly well for me, but I can no longer run. And Apple provided no emulation environment or official way to do so.
So now my choice is to keep an old computer around just to run old apps (which could be a security issue if it's on the network), or buy something like Parallels, which is a ton of overhead for a single app at a time.
It would have been nice if they had provided a Rosetta for the 32/64 conversion. The fact that they didn't does not bode will for this transition.
The amd64 architecture, by contrast, innately supports i386 code—that's a key feature of the platform! Removing support from macOS does not benefit users; it only benefits Apple by lowering Apple's maintenance burden.
Given that Apple is one of the richest companies in the world, and they sell Mac hardware at a large markup, I'm not particularly sympathetic to their plight.
Of course they care more about iDevices than the Mac. It brings in roughly 5x as much money as the Mac. But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time.
There are a lot of costs associated with backwards compatibility with very little payoff if it doesn't mean a lot to the bottom line.
Companies of all sizes (even FAAMNG) will act to protect that kind of existing revenue.
And my point was that you can do all of the things you listed for less than $500M; probably for less than $250M. Developers are more expensive than they used to be but $100M+ still goes a pretty long way.
Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well.
Why do you think Apple still builds Pro apps like Logic and FCP ? They are almost certainly losing money given their ridiculously low price point, but they help with brand image and keeping the Mac the go-to platform for creatives. There’s indirect value in that.
Apple killed Shake, which was an industry standard at one point. They killed Aperture, which lots of photographers loved. They replaced Final Cut Pro 7 with a much more limited Final Cut X, and seeded lots of ground to Adobe in the process.
There's also OS X Server, although there's a strong argument to be made it wouldn't have survived in the modern world anyway, and Apple just saw the writing on the wall.
Logic does seem to have done consistently fine, at least, so that's something.
Sure, and this might be skewed by hindsight because they did make new releases for a handful of years, but it was an acquahire to develop Aperture and other color tools for Final Cut Pro. Small shops use After Effects on Windows, medium shops used Shake on Windows, and large shops used Shake in Linux. Because of hardware costs you'll be very hard-pressed to get medium or large shops to use macOS.
I also don't see Apple investing/competing with the big transitions that happened in CG over the next 5 years; 64bit, 4k/8k, and stereo. Apple had special deals where they offered Shake's source code when it was discontinued and a few studios clung on and tried valiantly to accommodate [1]
[1] https://www.studiodaily.com/2008/07/delivering-8k-vfx-shots-...
For iOS Developers, I am not so sure. If Apple came out with Xcode for Windows at WWDC, I'm pretty sure a lot of iOS developers would be overjoyed. Now, a build farm is much easier among other advantages.
I would also imagine they would remove anything having to do with the Macintosh except perhaps the Catalyst compiles which should decrease some of the neglect problems causing bugs.
How many, though, and would they really switch to Windows or Linux, or retire from the industry?
Apple has always — or at least since 1984 — had an incredibly loyal fanbase. I think that the sort of slights which would make me leave a platform just roll of their collective back.
Windows is also making a very compelling argument with WSL2
As far as I can see the Mac market share hasn't shifted in the last few years. I wouldn't take too much notice of a handful of people whinging on HN.
You can’t extrapolate from that. No less when it’s not even correct for general trends most of the time.
Apple still killed it.
Apple is the best (large org) at marshaling resources, focus, priorities, pushing the envelope. It's been fantastic.
But every decision has consequences. They abandon beloved products. They deprioritorize code quality.
I wish they'd find a better balance, or clever new org strategies. Spinoff abandoned products. A separate cleanup crew to address technical debt, fix bugs. (I'm sure there's plenty of other devs, like me, who revel in house cleaning.)
I don't know, look how long it took for Apple to finally replace the damn keyboards.
No. Look at MS and the difference in quality. They are both samey in the $$$ department, but MS much larger focus and enormous dev base makes it not such a nice thing for products. Apple reduced scope is what lets them have quality thing. They do not have much manpower (I mean, they are one of the few trillion dollar company, their human resources don't look like that), spreading focus would harm quality. Their iDevices makes 5x as much money, that's where their eyes are, that focus can't be made smaller for an "infirior product" money-wise.
Apple jettisoned all of that diversity to refine a few precious use cases to earn that "quality" aura.
I think this move to ARM is signaling a couple more use cases being tossed to the curb, like beefy workstations and PC gaming.
- Microsoft is a non starter in mobile
- trying to run Windows on low end Surfaces is painful
- Windows is horrible as a touch first interface.
- even with Azure there are more Linux VMs than Windows.
-it takes literally years and multiple failures every time that MS tries to release a new version of Windows.
- They finally through in the towel when it came to IE and was forced to use a competitors engine.
MS is not exactly the shining example of how to successfully pivot as technology changes.
On the other hand, they entered the game-console game very late but still had a pretty good run. They entered the cloud game similarly late but they're now killing it. They won the Browser War I and would have likely done it again in BWII, were they not forced to behave by authorities.
So it's not like they cannot execute, or like they are fundamentally impeded by their fundamental structure. They can smash it with the best of them, when the lead is focused.
> They won the Browser War I and would have likely done it again in BWII, were they not forced to behave by authorities.
Rephrased: Microsoft won Browser War I by using illegal tactics, and lost Browser War II because authorities made them stop using illegal tactics. IE/Edge was always a bad product, and its success was due to external factors.
That said, Microsoft has lots of resources and I don't doubt they could have made a good browser. By extension, I don't see Chromium Edge as a loss for Microsoft so much as an informed decision to throw in the towel. How does Microsoft benefit from spending millions of dollars on a custom rendering engine, when Google gives Chromium away for free? Microsoft can fully rebrand it, and put in their own ads, tracking, and default search engines. From my vantage point, Microsoft just saved an enormous amount of money and lost very little.
They also lost billions of dollars on the console market. Is it even as profitable as the AirPods now?
As far as getting in mobile too early. Failing at the Newton didn’t exactly hurt Apple getting back into mobile. You do remember that Apple was almost bankrupt in the 90s?
Apple was able to port OS X to the iPhone partially because it didn’t have all of the bloat of Windows.
I developed on WinCE devices using both .Net CF and C++/MFC. I am very much aware of the limitations.
Between that and the EU ruling that forced them to implement the somewhat-silly browser-choice system, it was a "hostile environment" where the political message was fairly clear. Combined with a situation where IE was effectively dominant, it sapped any appetite to take it forward or take risks with it.
> Is [the console market] even as profitable as the AirPods now?
That is not the point, the point is that they pivoted just fine when they wanted to. They even had something genuinely novel with the gesture-tracking system. And how could they not? Windows and Office are a license to print money, even today.
> Failing at the Newton didn’t exactly hurt Apple
That was 1 device. Microsoft and their partners tried tons of different iterations of formats, some that didn't even exist at the time (kindles, book-like, palm-like - I had an HP that, without a stylus, looks now like a thick iPhone, but was produced in 2003)... but screen tech and cellular bandwidth simply were not good enough at the time.
I'm not talking of exhaustion because of financial losses (Microsoft was printing money, they could have done the same 10 times over), but of a shared weariness for the effort. At one point they basically gave up. I believe the famous Ballmer snark on the iPhone announcement was sincere, in the typically-disdainous way of his: Ballmer thought he had seen it all and this was just one more, nothing to write home about. They had failed so many times in the space that they had lost faith in the possibility of success.
There was no browser choice in the US and I believe it lost its lead here first.
If that was true they wouldn't have released the Mac Pro.
Apple sells roughly 18-20M Mac per year. According to their own words more than 50% of these are completely new to the Mac platform. ( And most of them are form China ) You would have expected 9-10M new Active Users every year if no one was leaving the platform. Instead from 2014 to 2018, during that 5 years they managed to add 20M. ( Genuine Question, Did anyone notice there are less Mac users in US? ) There are also 20M registered developers, which adds to the bottom-line of Mac. What used to be annual Active User number reporting stopped in 2019. And even stopped mentioning satisfactory rate of Mac. Mac Pro was done not because they cared, but because a few closely connected real professional customers threaten to leave the platform before they took action. ( And many left before they notice )
It is like in a marriage when your partner keeps telling others in public how he/she loves you. But did not show any care or action during that time. For years He/She dont even talk to you or notice you. You try talking to him/her about having problems but he/she completely ignore you. One day you publicly file for divorce and He/She rushed out and tell others how much he/she cares and are working on it. That is not caring, it is called saving faces.
You are comparing the time a technology was supported with the time it was announced a technology would no longer be supported. 32-bit apps were supported in 64-bit Mac OS systems for at least 7 years.
Almost immediately after 64-bit support was added in 2005, it was the recommended path, not only for new apps but for existing ones to migrate to. For example, an document called "64-bit Transition Guide for Cocoa" [1] was first published in 2007. A few years later, another document [2] was more explicit:
> Should You Recompile Your Software as a 64-Bit Executable?
> As a general rule, in OS X v10.7 and later, the answer is probably yes.
OS X 10.7 was released in 2011.
Certainly, many – most – app makers did update their old apps. For example, Apple's refusal to support Carbon on 64-bit famously forced Adobe to scramble to update their apps to run on Cocoa, because they considered 64-bit support to be essential. Admittedly, one of the chief benefits of 64-bit was the ability to address more than 4GB of memory, and pro apps needed that more than your average app. But your average app was also easier to recompile, so in practice, pro apps were if anything the slowest to migrate. Even then, most of them did, long before the official deprecation.
By the time the deprecation was announced, let alone by the time Catalina was released, most apps that were still 32-bit were the ones that had ceased to receive updates altogether. From that perspective, the exact timing of the deprecation doesn't matter that much: most unmaintained apps aren't going to become maintained again because of an announcement by Apple. It was going to hurt no matter what.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
Not to mention, for better or worse, games in particular were 32bit through 2018 at least. I imagine this must have had something to do with cross platform compatibility, although I can't imagine what.
Well, here are the Steam Hardware Survey results from some random date in 2014:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140318083854/https://store.stea...
If you click on "Windows Version", you can see that a substantial percentage (~20%) were running 32-bit versions of Windows, which can't run 64-bit applications. Most of those were likely on 64-bit processors, but had 32-bit Windows installed anyway for whatever reason; IIRC that might include driver support and not needing as much RAM. So game developers were forced to ship 32-bit binaries if they wanted to target those users. (They could ship both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, but that's relatively difficult on Windows; there's no equivalent of Mac "fat binaries". And there wasn't much point.)
That's Windows, not macOS. But then as now, game developers targeting PC primarily cared about Windows, with macOS as an afterthought at best. If the Windows version was built as 32-bit, the macOS version likely would be too for simplicity's sake.
There's also game consoles to consider. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to 64-bit in 2013, so most games released from then on would have to at least have 64-bit-clean codebases (even if they weren't tested specifically on 64-bit PCs). But earlier games might well not be 64-bit clean; the kind of low-level hacks that make porting to 64-bit difficult are probably more common in game codebases than your average app.
Were there? On iOS, I lost access to a lot of games due to the 32 to 64 transition. On Mac OS, nothing I used was impacted. If your app wasn't 64 bit, it was abandonware. Even the abandonware that I actually use, like Gitbox, was already 64 bit.
Yes, lots! I won't go through all the individual 32 bit apps I use because it's idiosyncratic, but this has been a major complaint about Catalina, aside from the OS's general buggyness.
If you want to switch to 64-bit, you don't introduce machines that cannot do that, that need their 32-bit ABI and have to be supported for years to follow.
1. Either their engineering org is so bad they can't afford to spend some of their massive resources on backwards compatibility.
2. They just don't give a shit.
Either way, not a great look.
1. Wait a few months, Core 2 Duo was on it's way. Previous Nehalem generation did support 64-bit, so obviously, the next Core Duo SKUs with 64-bit support were on the way. This way, they could skip x86 ABI entirely.
It's not like Apple doesn't have long periods without updates of specific models.
2. If they really had to release a model that introduces 32-bit ABI, they could support it properly.
So by doing it the way they did it, I have to agree with Jasper_. The only difference with his conclusion is, that in my opinion they just took the option 2.
But they did take that option and now refuse to pay the price. They are forcing paying the price on their users now.
They got additional benefit at the time, if I remember correctly: Adobe suite was 32-bit + Carbon; so having 32-bit x86 ABI allowed to them and to Adobe to have the suite running natively on the new CPUs, buying Adobe time to port to 64-bit and Cocoa, and axe Carbon without waiting to axe Intel entirely.
Given the benefits they got, they should be called for not wanting to pay the price.
Perhaps you need to be more charitable and try to find the reasons why devs and businesses chose to only support 32-bit.
Apple hasn’t sold at 32 bit only Mac since 2007. To Adobe’s chagrin they didn’t port Carbon to 64 bit with the rest of MacOS in 2007 and they deprecated it in 2012. Were developers really caught off guard that they shouldn’t be writing 32 bit software in 2017?
Probably not, but end users shouldn't have to suffer because they bought software from bad developers. One reason why IE still ships with Windows is because a lot of companies are still using old enterprise software that never got updated for the modern web.
IE and the collapse of MS's browser market share is not exactly a shining example of how to successfully handle a product.
No one cares about PCs as a business anymore.
Is that true? While I get that this isn't scientific proof, there seem to be a lot of Youtubers out there making a decent living off videos of building and reviewing PCs and Macs.
Linus Tech Tips has >11M subscribers, Dave2D has 2.7M subscribers, etc.
Making money off of YT videos is peanuts in the grand scheme of things.
You said "No one cares about PCs as a business anymore."
The popularity of YT videos on new laptops, pcs, etc. seems to suggest that at a non-zero number of people (i.e., greater than "No one") still care about PCs.
Both are not even remotely true.
Almost all of Apple’s former competitors are either dead or worth nothing. From a business standpoint, Apple’s strategy seemed to have been the right one. Apple probably makes more on computer sells than any one else and they only make up 10% of Apple’s revenue.
So HN posters can complain about Apple’s strategy until the cows come home, but the market has decided it was the right one.
What do you define as a low end Surface line on x86? I have a Surface Pro 1 that I still use to this day. I also have a GPD Win handheld that's running an Atom processor that is surprisingly good for what it is. I also have some older Atom based stick PCs that are pretty bad (only 2GB RAM), but those are designed for signage and kiosks, for which they are... adequate.
The iPads can actually run well with 2GB of RAM. Microsoft Office is a much better experience on an iPad without a keyboard than any hardware that Apple sells.
While x86 Surface (not-pro) might have been "meant" to compete on price with iPads, I don't think that's how it worked out. I tend to think most of the people who will buy a low end x86 Surface want/need Windows in the first place. It's not a substitute for an iPad.
I don't think anyone in their right mind considers a Surface as an alternative to an iPad. Just because they have similar form factors doesn't mean they're substitutes for one another.
The things I run on my atom based handheld are only available on Windows.
Microsoft’s own products run better on the low end iPad than the low end Surface. On top of that, the interface is better for touch.
And Microsoft sells less Surfaces than Apple sells Macs, let alone iPads. This isn’t really saying much about the Windows being backwards compatible for ever (what started this thread) was a great strategy.
https://investorplace.com/2018/10/surface-sales-propel-micro...
Their last transition is specifically what brought me to the Mac after having been away for a decade.
I switched to Mac exactly because they were going x86, because I knew I'd be able to virtualize Windows (although it took a year to happen), which was a win-win for me. I'm guessing a lot of people who used Windows at work plus developers on Linux wanting a nice GUI (remember, we're talking mid to late 2000s) were responsible for a lot of Mac growth back then.
I have to wonder how many people will switch back if x86 were to get totally abandoned.
Back then Mac software support wasn't nearly as good as it is now - I think Apple is in a much better position to drop x86 support.
It might be a chicken and egg thing though. With the influx of people who wanted Macs on x86 and the halo effect of them spreading the word, the app support got much better.
Also, because the machines were x86 compatible, I'm sure a lot of enterprise buyers like IBM started to allow their users to get Macs instead of Windows laptops.
I obviously have no idea what will happen, but as someone who switched back to Windows a few years ago, I am definitely curious to see how it plays out.
I had my logic board replaced under AppleCare and it had the same issues within a few months.
I managed to keep my bricked MBP long enough for the recall, but the board (which I guess had the same defect) still eventually died (same for a friend of mine with the same model).
That laptop wasn't cheap, and is the only laptop I've ever had that died. I've had a lot of Mac and Windows laptops since the mid-90s (first was a Powerbook with a trackball).
So needless to say, while Apple has the rep of having the best customer service, there are exceptions, and I was unlucky enough to fall under one of those exceptions, and I will probably never go back again.
Having said that, when I switched back to Windows, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had remembered it, and has gotten better since. I only miss a couple of things from Mac, and the biggest one is iMovie.
The last few years have really felt like enduring Apple more than enjoying it. It's a shame, because OSX remains great, but there is only so much it can compensate for.
The selling point of iDevices is that so much content/code works perfectly on them, and that is because it is created on the OSX platform originally. If Apple think they can maintain that experience for customers while developers flock to WSL or Linux they are kidding themselves.
Until 32 bit support was dropped, the system supported running 32 bit apps and drivers. What kind of ‘Rosetta’ are you looking for?
ARM macs make sense long-term, but the experience is likely to pretty rough at first while software support catches up.
Transitioning to x86 brought additional customers who prefer Mac but also need to run Windows or Linux or who do x86 development. Transitioning away from it may lose them.
That's exactly what the 68K-to-PowerPC transition was: Going from a widely used architecture (Mac, Amiga, ST, and others) to a brand new one.
Also, I don't recall stories of Macs being able to dual boot AmigaOS, and there was nothing like virtualization in those days. There were emulators, I guess. All of those other platforms were less common than Windows is today.
And there was never any threat that they would enforce sandboxing and code signing like a lot of people speculate for ARM Macs.
It really does sound like the ARM Macs are going to be less capable. It would be nice if that turns out incorrect but it's sure the way it looks.
They weren't. Amiga 68K systems had significantly different system architecture from Apple 68K systems, most notably in terms of their graphics and audio hardware.
> and there was nothing like virtualization in those days.
Weeelll... there were some special-purpose tools, but they were much more special-purpose than anything we call "virtualization" today. The Amiga version of Basilisk II [1] ran 68K code directly on the host processor, for instance. Later on, there were tools like Mac-On-Linux [2] which would run PowerPC MacOS on a PowerPC Linux system.
Ergo, it was dead end for Apple products.
Not sure how unique this architecture will be, but by device count, ARM architectures dwarf all others significantly. Calling it 'less-popular' is wrong.
And Apple nearly went bankrupt.
(Not saying Apple is in any danger of going bankrupt, but it's not a successful transition story.)
Going to PowerPC was the only real option at the time.
ARM Macs will do just fine. Backwards compatibility will be close to 100%. x86-64 apps may run a bit slow, but native software will benefit from running on the most powerful laptop money can buy, period.
I do believe ARM Macs will do fine, eventually.
Heck, these models went for years without any updates.
Even if all major developers (Autodesk, BlackMagic, Ableton, Steinberg, etc) are able to switch to ARM there is a myriad of plugin developers out there who might not be able to do it.
Catalina and the 32bit EOL hit the audio world very hard.
Seems like it's about encouraging the development of way more ambitious ARM-based stuff that will tend to eclipse the x86 and 'desktop' things, on the basis that Apple is far bigger in the mobile space than they are in desktops. Maybe there's the prospect of super-powerful computers in a sort of cluster form… a dense block of iPhones, rather than a massively multi-core PC? That's sheerly hypothetical, but given the characteristics of ARM stuff it seems reasonable.
sorry what :-) I know people who still keep a PPC mac around because some critical software they use in e.g. art contexts has never been ported.
I've never used it, I've just seen people gush wistfully on the internet. :)
Exactly. You don't want anything to do with first and second gen Apple changes.
When you take this into account it's easy to see why dumping Intel is attractive to them.
No built-in emulation or other support for x64 binaries.
In the past transitions they had to have a strong compatibility story. But I think that's not nearly as important anymore.
For software that is being actively developed, releasing fat ARM/x64 (or maybe fat bitcode/x64) binaries can be worked into a release over the upcoming months.
Software that is not being actively released... was pretty much mostly kicked to the side of the road due to the completion of the transition to x64 (if not sooner -- death by a thousand small transition cuts).
There will certainly be casualties to this approach, but I'm guessing Apple will prefer to reap the benefits of a much simpler and straight-forward transition. They may also see it as no great loss. E.g., software that is no longer being recompiled is also no longer receiving security updates.
If this happens, the big kicker will be dependencies. Your hyper-maintained, always-updated app will probably contain at least a few dependencies that stopped moving a long time ago, and you'll be forced to find alternatives.
Also: x64 emulation (slow though it will be) will happen in any case. But from third parties. VMWare Fusion, etc. I think there will probably be a market for some kind of x64 container that "shrink-wraps" an x64 app or library with an emulation core as an alternative when recompiling can't happen (there's a lot of existing tech to build this on top of, so I think it will come pretty quick -- actually, in different forms for different migration scenarios. Because of the performance/resource penalty, you'll want to wrap as little as possible)
edit: I meant to add: It will be funny to come back to this after Apple's ARM announcements and see how bad (or good?) my speculations are...
I used Macs during Classic to OSX and PPC to Intel transitions but I'd argue it's actually way more important this time.
Back during previous transitions fully native apps were really the only option but now...
Almost all modern actively developed software on Macs is just electron wrappers Only a few exceptions of actively developed cocoa apps come to mind, Sketch, Omni Group, etc.
The other half of the Mac ecosystem is exist outside of electron apps or cocoa good citizens and that's old but essential power user applications the Adobe suite, 3d software, science software and audio software which all have extensive custom Intel code and all the plugin infrastructure runs on Intel.
To bring After Effects, for example to ARM is going to be an insane amount of work and a lot of it is going to sit outside of Adobe's control because so much of the application relies on plugins which all have to be recompiled too.
I feel Apple might have lost the plot here a bit and has convinced themselves that this functionality vacuum is going to be filled with catalyst iPad ports, reality is if the computer can't run these apps people require for their jobs then they'll just buy windows machines.
Which is exactly what Apple doesn't want to see prospering on its platform.
If they want this platform to remain the world class computing experience they actually have to invest in it fully not just hope that some work can be skimmed off the top of their iPad investment.
Where is the example of a best in class 2020 Mac desktop app? Because it certainly isn't News.app.
How so? All the old legacy apps that nobody wants to (or can) recompile were just jettisoned in the 64 bit transition, as TFA duly noted.
"In retrospect, the move to 64-bit software may have been made not just for its own sake, but in contemplation of the ARM transition."
Plenty of 64 bit software exists that isn't being updated often or at all anymore.
There is no reason that they can’t do a dual processor strategy. Heck they shipped Apple // computers and Macs simultaneously for eight years.
For non-store software, I don't see a big deal in distributing x86 vs ARM builds separately, but that might be the developer in me speaking.
Well, I got that wrong. Rosetta 2 and some kind of virtualization support (no idea yet what that means)
The choice will also say something about how Apple views these ARM Macs: Are they iPhone-esque devices made exclusively for Apple software, or are they (relatively) open-ended computing platforms capable of booting alternate operating systems?
There is no way Apple would create a Windows driver for that custom silicon- it has always relied on AMD or Nvidia for those drivers in the past, it has no in house code base or expertise to write the requisite code in Windows and none of the silicon has been optimized for it.
(I do agree that they're more likely to just drop Bootcamp support.)
But since its 99% likely that all the other Mac's will be SoC with no Windows driver support for any of the underlying silicon, I'd find it very surprising if Apple went to the trouble just for the high end.
That said, I thing Intel Mac Pros will be a thing for a long while, even is a 256 core ARM variation came out, just to keep the pros happy until they can comfortably transition to the new stack. Apple has spent too much human capital recently on the pro team to make me think otherwise.
1. They’re going to have some kind of breakthrough with x86 emulation where the Apple ARM CPU has a translator, or an accelerator, or a co-processor, or something that will make x86 run at decent speeds.
2. Apple will move to a long term two-CPU strategy with ARM on economy and low power SKUs, and Intel chips for the “Pro” SKUs.
3. As an alternative to 1 and 2, the direction might just be a killer next-gen iPad Pro and new iPadOS which substantially raises the bar for multitasking, trackpad, etc on that platform. I wouldn’t even dismiss the possibility of an “iPadBook” for want of a better name.
How is this going to work for developers or Apple? For how many years will everyone need to test and ship universal binaries?
Testing is a legitimate concern but I don’t think it’s as consequential as you imply. (For most developers.)
If you ship a Catalyst app that runs on iPad and Mac you are shipping and testing on x86 and ARM.
Apple already splits binaries in the app store and only downloads what is needed for your device (including resources for different device resolutions), so the end user would likely not see an increase in app size.
That makes sense to me: a two-CPU strategy (ARM for laptops and x86 for desktops where power usage is less important) would lessen the Osborne Effect. Mac developers would have a strong motivation to support both laptops and desktops (and thus ARM and x86 macOS) so consumers would not have to fear buying a soon-to-be-obsoleted computer.
Shipping bitcode instead of ARM/x86 universal binaries would also mean that eventually Apple could drop x86 and those bitcode applications would be forward compatible with ARM desktops.
It would actually be quite tidy if “Pro” Mac meant Intel, non-pro meant Apple ARM.
Recall that at one point Apple shipped laptops with two GPUs; one for low power work that was more power-efficient, and a more powerful one that was turned on as needed.
An alternative possibility to my earlier musings is that the T2 chip gets expanded to take over more system functionality—perhaps to the point where the Intel chip looks more like an accelerator add-on card than the primary CPU.
Given how they handled it in the past my guess is that Apple will release a very usable X64 emulator for the ARM and really brag about it at WWDC.
Knowing today's Apple, though, they'll make it super thin and it will still run hot.
After the new machines are released, all Mac app store apps will just magically work because they were recompiled behind the scenes by Apple to run on ARM. Only independent releases (stuff not in the app store) will have to deal with the shit show, which will also push more developers to the Apple tax.
For regular Mac users (who are already using the app store for everything), there will be no difference, and nobody will care what's actually under the hood. All of their software will work just fine whether it's x64 or ARM. There's nothing to wait for because these ARM machines aren't going to be so much better that people delay their purchase. It would be like holding off on the 2.2L engine variant of a car because the new model with the 2.4L engine with 5% better acceleration is around the corner.
Of course the reality will be that some apps will break, but the majority will just work, and Apple will be working behind the scenes with the biggest fish to make sure their stuff transitions smoothly.
Lol.
Definitely not.
80% of mac users are like my mother-in-law: The Mac is a machine that does their taxes, emails, word processing, small business stuff, browsing, movie watching, and sometimes video chat if they're not doing that on their phone.
And if a company that depends on the creative industry is selling its software outside of Apple channels, I'm sure they'll have the foresight and budget to make sure their software works on the new machines.
That would be really magical; this is essentially impossible.
https://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/06/17/apples-biggest-devel...
https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translatin... (other direction but clearly demonstrative of what apple can do here)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_representation
Bitcode is not a magic solution, though. You can’t take a 32-bit app, for example, and run it on a 64-bit device. That kind of portability isn’t something that Bitcode can give you, notably because that is something that’s visible in C. As you’re writing C code, you can write #ifdef pointer size equals 32, and that’s something that Bitcode can’t abstract over. It’s useful for very specific, low-level kinds of enhancements, but it isn’t a panacea that makes everything magically portable.
That will be hard to do, as apple doesn't have the source code. They could transcode them from one machine code to another, but this is unlikely. It will be the app developers themselves that will need to recompile. But I'm sure it will be a (relatively) easy process.
Developers. They want to run the same code on their machines as on their servers. Or in some cases a library might not be available (or behave differently) on one CPU family vs another.
In theory this could accelerate adoption of ARM servers.
MS might decide that "the web is good enough" and just drop native Mac apps for the time being.
They've already been optimizing the existing code base for ARM, maybe with a heads up from Apple that this would be a good preparation for changes coming down the pipe on Mac...
If Osborne had said "The next versions will be even better, and only cost $5000 more!" people would have kept buying the Osborne 1.
Consumers rarely complain about lower prices than they expect.
Hell, tons of companies offer their products at an MSRP that drops massively within weeks.
I was an early adopter of PPC and OSX, I’m not gonna sit there trying to get work done via the old-cpu emulation again.
On a desktop machine, there’s no benefit in lower power dissipation and slimmer bodies
If you’re in a hot climate then every little bit helps. Lower your power bill due both to lower consumption on the part of your computer and due to the AC coming on that much less. Run the computers fan less. Maybe even have a Mini that does a surprising amount of what you’d buy a Pro for. Make the iMac that much more of a flat screen.
The obvious win for me is shipping multiple times as many cores in the same TDP. If Apple used a chiplet strategy and good interconnect to make scaling easy - imagine a 16-core Mac Mini, 64-core iMac Pro, and something obscene (256 cores?) in a Mac Pro.
Jesus, yes.
I live in Mexico and when it's hot anything other than idle or small bursts of CPU brings my iMac to 60-70ºC and I hate fan noise.
Intel desktop CPUs are where they have problems and you would assume that this is where Apple has the most frustration with Intel. That's where I'd start.
Also, by keeping ARM and Intel around simultaneously for a few years (both as first-class citizens) forces developers to maintain portable code. If you are using Swift in the manner that they want you to use it, this is already the case. If you're using some other language/approach then you have to either think about adopting Swift or putting in more work.
There isn't an Intel processor that is near the performance/watt in the iPad Pro, especially factoring in graphics performance.
The lowest spec of the very first PowerPC Macs (the 6100) was faster than any 68K Mac, including emulated software.
The first Intel Mac Mini was faster than the G5 Mac Pro.
EDIT: Sorry, I misremembered; 68K emulation did impose a performance penalty versus contemporary 68K Macs. PowerPC-native performance was definitely faster than any 68K Mac, and developers were very good about releasing fat binaries.
I had been using SoftPC to run compilers for school. I bought the DOS Compatibility Card for my 6100 and that was a dream machine.
Any other good examples for Osborne Effect? Wikipedia does list SEGA's transition from Mega Drive/Genesis to 32X and Saturn and I can see how this confused potential customers but I guess there must be more (better?) examples.
Symbian was the cash cow, successful in a number of markets. But not up to par with where Android and iOS were leading the industry. The prevailing wisdom seemed to be it needed some modernization or replacement.
Maemo/Meego was their previous replacement candidate, based on Linux and Qt. Personally I liked this one. They never really allowed it to be on a path to cannibalize Symbian. It was always like an experimental project.
Switching to Windows Phone killed both of those.
Less talked about is s40, the low end feature phone-ish platform that continued to sell well in emerging markets long into the Windows Phone era.
Meego—and the Nokia N9 it ran on—was so damn good. I can still remember the feeling of using it; it felt so good!
I am still pissed off that they killed it. For Windows Phone, of all things!
There was, however, an anecdote banded about the Helsinki R&D Nokia offices: "We have, easily, the most expensive clock application ever made, it's been rewritten so many times". So maybe the inefficiency was always going to kill it.
That said, Nokia was betting on Meego replacing Symbian, symbian was so crazy optimised for low end hardware though.
Symbian was transitioning to better Java support, moving aways from Symbian C++ via Qt and PIPS (POSIX support for Symbian), 3rd Reboot of Symbian IDE (2nd Eclipse based attempt), having Python and Web based widgets as well.
Then comes the Windows phones announcement telling Symbian developers that all the tooling improvements from the last couple of years would be thrown out the Window.
That was the last drop to just abandon Nokia phones as platform for many of those developers, that decided to focus on Android/iOS instead.
Also as former employee that deal was quite a surprise to us, Nokia used to have a strong anti-MS culture on the engineering units.
2. There's no reason dedicated ASIC modules for specialized tasks (like video rendering) can't be connected by Thunderbolt 3 just as external video/compute modules are now.
3. There's no reason a dedicated x86-64 dongle can't be sold for ARM-powered Macs that need to run software that hasn't been ported yet. It would be a spectacular coup if those x86-64 dongles had chips made by AMD but I digress...
I think the last thing the MacBooks need are more dongles.
Dongles for legacy functions in the process of deprecation that some users may not want/need seems sensible.
Fun suggestion, so I'll bite :-) would a USB-C dongle actually be a speed improvement compared to host dynamic binary translation? Especially since all RAM operations would need to be funneled over I/O...
2-3. TB3 is a single PCIe x4 link, which is not even enough for a single state-of-the-art SSD. It's certainly not fast enough to connect an entire other computer to, except for certain embarrassing workloads.
I don't see anyone building an external compute/accelerator platform around an ARM Mac ecosystem. It's a niche market as is and the direction has always been to integrate functions like this onto the chip / package directly. I think the latter is certainly an opportunity apple will choose as they will be able to claim their new processors have a special sauce that intel does not have and charge an apple premium for it.
Are you suggesting plugging in a dongle that has a CPU on it? I'm very confused if true. As the bandwidth between RAM and CPU is ~50GB/s, any external dongle would not be able to communicate with the system RAM without a huge slowdown, so the dongle would need it's own RAM too, how this would communicate with a GPU is questionable again and this is already a weird crazy expensive dongle.
I think this is the part that will make 3rd party developers give on on the Mac. Mac ports are given the least love as is, mostly because apple will break your application on such a regular basis it's not worth the cost to port/support, but this change adds so much more burden to the developer, I think most will wait a few years before making a commitment unless apple throws money as them.
Maybe they just transition to AMD CPUs and nearly nothing changes at all :)
For a time, many developers couldn't find fault with OS X and Mac hardware. I wonder how much more correction we'll see from Apple, now that they've gone back on keyboards to a degree. I'm not counting on too much, I know a lot of people aren't as happy as they could be.
That seems really unlikely to me. Catalyst is primarily a tool for porting iOS applications to macOS. Apple already has plenty of ARM-based devices that run iOS applications; there's no reason for them to muddy the waters by introducing another one and calling it a macOS system.
Stock apps set the example for how third party apps should use your platform. IMO, Apple is setting a pretty clear example.
Mind, I'm not sure that's any better: Apple is still setting a pretty clear example for future Mac apps. Mac-specific UIs are out, iOS-esque paradigms are in.
Totally.
I bought my first Mac in 2007 and from that moment until 2013 I only had small complaints about the Mac platform.
Then my MBP 2011 suddenly died and by the time Apple started a repair program it had been collecting dust for almost 2 years. Then Yosemite came and it was the absolute worst version of macOS I've ever used.
These days I'm happy with my iMac 5K but I'm still using High Sierra. I will probably upgrade to Mojave at some point but that's it. I will _not_ upgrade to Catalina. Thank god I don't need Xcode.
Speaking to friends suggests that I'm far from the only one.
Apple hardware has always had bugs, flaws, and failures. I had a Mac Pro G5 that leaked (it was liquid cooled). I had the first Intel Mac Pro, and the GPU died several times (and was like $700?). Luckily it was covered under warranty.
Laptop batteries bulged, screens delaminated, cases displayed wear because wrists get sweaty. iTunes on Windows sucked. And obviously keyboards butterflied.
Software has been up and down, sometimes secure, sometimes not. Sometimes fast, sometimes buggy.
But the reason the Mac came back was because despite these perennial flaws and issues, it was WORLDs better than the alternative.
But that's just one piece of anecdata. I prefer my MacOS to remain roughly how it is now.
1. The power savings just isn't there. I find this hard to believe.
2. The performance of the chips just isn't there. This is very possible.
3. Not enough software is compatible yet. What are the crucial pieces?
4. Xcode isn't up to snuff running on ARM yet.
It's like the PowerPC->Intel story all over again. Intel was not at PowerPC levels that long before 2005 (PowerPC had substantial advantages from 1994 to 2002), and IBM was not showing evidence of improving the situation beyond 2005.
I think before 2018 it was unclear whether an ARM Mac would be superior in terms of performance/heat/power, but I think given Intel's lull and Apple's continued improvements I think the best decision is clear [if you think it is worth the transition, which is the most debatable item].
- They have only just finished deprecating 32-bit x86 instruction set support in Catalina. Now there is space to support another instruction set, as supporting 3 at the same time would be more expensive
- The patents on AVX are due to expire, making x86_64 emulation a possibility, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14523587
Wait... what?
The Mac was only 38% of Apple's revenue in 2006?
In fact I actually checked their Q4 2005 results and the iPod generated 1,212 M and the Mac 1,611M.
I knew the iPod was popular at the time (I had one) but never expected it to be that much.
The risk is that there will be enough difference between the ARM machines and the previous ones that consumers will be reluctant to buy the new machines. I know that the keyboard problems on recent laptop models caused me to buy some windows laptops for the rest of my family.
There is a way for Apple to facilitate this move to ARM. Make the ARM machines noticeably less expensive than Apple's previous Macs. I've been disappointed during the last few years by the cost of Apple's Macs, the mini, the iMac Pro, the Mac Pro, and high end configurations of the laptops seem overpriced now. Perhaps this is is a longer term strategy for Apple. Maybe they have priced the recent machines higher so that adoption of ARM based machines can, in comparison to previous models, look more attractive. Apple could also lower the margins on the new ARM machines, at least until there is enough buy-in by consumers to raise the margins back to be comparable with Apples pre-ARM products. My prediction is that the new ARM machines will be priced very competitively when they are announced. In a few years, their prices will rise.
a) Will this change be smooth and offer native enough app support (or emulation) at launch?
b) Will the performance and price be acceptable?
c) What will the ripple effect be throughout the existing Apple dev community?
d) Is this move going to do well for Apple, or the opposite.
I'm finding it tough to speculate on this one, but I've seen a lot of Apple misfires since 2013 when it comes to price, functionality and quality (should I dare say, "the butterfly effect"?).
In short, Apple's direction hasn't been great recently. Given this, I think it more likely that the negatives will outweigh the positives.
I get that after nearly a decade of disappointment that‘s not enough to rebuild trust completely and there is still more than enough to be critical of, however the most recent positive moves to make me cautiously optimistic.
Plus: Apple has managed these transitions extremely well in the past. That‘s something they are (or at least were) good at.
Here they could also be helped by the fact that these transition times usually put any other extreme experiments on pause. I don’t expect Apple to switch out the CPU and also offer up a radical redesign (where they can make many wrong decisions), at least not across the product line.
They also didn’t do that for the Intel transition.
Meaning, today I write. Because what I say is necessary. Can’t just be silent.
When is he gonna give up the ghost? He’s not at Apple for a reason. Yet he’s obsessed with them.
No one at Apple sought him out before going in any direction. He’s been a non-entity there for two decades. Yet he can’t stop trying to tell us all how to think about everything they do.
Gruber is at least a little more attached to Apple.
But the two of them sound like two old cranks: one consistently fawning over all Apple decisions, the other fretting.
I don’t know what it’s like to devote one’s life to discussing a single corporation, even one as wildly successful and entertaining as Apple.
I always wonder if these guys ever wake up and think, “Maybe today I’ll just delete my blog, stop reading press releases and tech news about Apple, and go build that cabin or walk a trail”.
Maybe they’re terrified no one would miss them? Or maybe they’ll find that life is better and that they wasted the last few decades of their very precious and limited life?
I don’t know. Maybe they are so enmeshed it just never occurs to them. It just always makes me sad to see their posts. Maybe that says more about me in some sad way than it does about them. Don’t know.