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Comment by jmpman | Hacker News Reader

I buy iMacs for my personal use, as they spend the majority of the time running Windows 10 for gaming. Sure I could build/buy a dedicated gaming machine, but I like the hardware (Great monitor, quiet, sleek, mostly trouble-free) and my iMac can play any game at 1080p. Without bootcamp support, I’m going to abandon the Mac hardware for personal, and then for business use. There’s no way an ARM processor is going to be able to emulate x86 to run windows and my steam library at anything close to usable performance.

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My prediction of Apple’s moves here are far less dire. These are just predictions mind you, but the point is Apple could do this without ruining the platform for enthusiasts.

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.

> 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.

How is this going to work for developers or Apple? For how many years will everyone need to test and ship universal binaries?

I see no issue with developers shipping universal binaries indefinitely. I don’t see what the issue would be with that, for most devs it’s just part of the Xcode build process. I suppose it would double the compile time for release builds.

Testing is a legitimate concern but I don’t think it’s as consequential as you imply. (For most developers.)

Every iOS app is currently tested in x86 on the Mac simulator and then ARM on the device.

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.

> 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.

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.

In my imaginary universe, it’s be ARM for MacBook Air and a “Mac nano” shortly followed by an economy spec iMac. If the performance is there, it could eventually extend to the entire iMac line, with a broadened iMac Pro line staying Intel.

It would actually be quite tidy if “Pro” Mac meant Intel, non-pro meant Apple ARM.

While they might like to go that way, I would say the subpar UX of iPadOS with keyboards/pointing devices suggests that they will need to pour a lot of money into the effort.

I look at two things Apple did recently: giving iOS on iPad its own name, and releasing the Magic Keyboard. To me, both these things look like moves in preparation for Apple seriously scaling up iPad as a computing platform.

OSX on iPad would be a nice device. I’d buy it, and prefer it over iOS.

What would keep Apple from shipping machines with both ARM and Intel CPUs in them? The ARM CPU would run the OS and decide when to ship jobs over to the Intel CPU. I can’t imagine that the home-grown ARM CPU would add much to the total price of the computer.

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.

They already ship ARM co-processors in Macs: the T2 chip.

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.

I lived through both major Mac CPU transitions (68K-PPC and PPC->X86) and in both cases the assumption was that it was impossible for Apple to ship a usable emulator. In both cases Apple proved everyone wrong and in fact the emulator was a major contributing factor to a smooth transition. It simply takes a lot of time for all 3rd party software to be released for the new architecture.

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.

A theoretical possibility: Apple could make Bootcamp support Windows on ARM. I don't know that they'll do it, but they could and it would be interesting.

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?

Windows itself struggled to support ARM. Bootcamp alone is not going to cut it, at least for some time.

I don't think there is a standard BIOS for ARM like there is for x86, so multi-boot would probably require Microsoft to support Macs explicitly in Windows on ARM.

Just observing the pain of getting Linux to run on new Macs, the answer should be obvious. Not that I think this is a bad thing, there definitely is space for an operator like Apple and exactly what many people need.

The problem is that Apple has moved to a home-grown stack for it graphics and deprecated OpenGL and moved wholly to Metal.

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.

This is an interesting point—but, are you expecting Apple to move entirely to in-house GPUs? On the laptops that currently have integrated graphics, sure, but I'd expect the higher-end Macbook Pros and iMacs to still have AMD cards inside. Perhaps that just becomes a prerequisite for Bootcamp—there's probably a lot of overlap between the types of people who want Bootcamp and the types of people who buy Macs with dedicated GPUs.

(I do agree that they're more likely to just drop Bootcamp support.)

Potentially keeping AMD as a partner is graphics on the high end is a good point- i.e. iMac Pro/Mac Pro.

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.

Yeah, this has got me debating whether I need to bite the bullet and buy a high-spec 2019 model, despite their lingering, myriad problems. I have too much stuff to worry about in my day-to-day usage to gamble on whether Apple is going to stick the landing with this transition.

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