It just feels wrong to buy anything new from Apple with "Intel Inside" - when they're clearly going to dump it soon, in favor of ARM (excuse me for not using the cringey term Apple Silicon).
a question i ask myself
video rendering throttles to 30% at steady state
the top end CPU perf only lasts a minute or so before it throttles
/s
If you have a retina macbook pro from 2014~ it definitely makes sense to upgrade to a macbook pro 16" today. The thing will see you through another 5-6y easy.
However, I am assuming since the Macbooks are rumored to get ARM as early as late this year, it is likely iMac would follow next year too. The Developer Transition Kit has a Mac Mini with ARM already.
For most apps it’ll be fine, emulation and cross compiling will be enough. There will be some apps where this isn’t enough though. When the App Store switched to 64-bit, how many apps just disappeared, never to be seen again?
I fully support the transition and I think it’s a logical step for Apple, but it’s going to be one more thing that indie or smaller devs have to worry about. Which means it’s one more thing everyone on this forum has to worry about.
It's not much harder than supporting Linux on x86 and ARM.
It’s trivially easy to compile your iOS app for 64-bit as well, but like I mentioned... that transition left a lot of dead apps in its wake.
Apple is going to change the landscape with a mainstream ARM platform that can compete in specs with Intel desktops and laptops. Let's see what happens then.
The dynamics of proprietary software are somewhat different from open source - unless you make a steady revenue from an app you launched some time ago, there is little incentive to dedicate resources to port it to a new platform (even if it's from 32 to 64 bits) unless you expect it to drive new sales. There is no penalty apart from lost potential revenue and a huge incentive to focus on the next product.
Most of those "dead" apps were not under active development and had no income flow. Making a "trivial" change to an inactive project means rebuilding software which you have shelved for some time.
If you are actively developing software, adding Intel support to a build is pretty much just clicking the option to build a Universal binary. Adding a flag to an existing build a lot easier than dusting off an old app and making a bunch of tweaks and a new build with near zero chance of return on that time invested.
And what user that is ok with a 6 year old computer is interested in spending several thousand on a new macbook that they're going to have to throw out in 3 years? The only user I can imagine that would be ok with the 16" macbook are the users that upgrade every 2-3 years... they can risk it and likely won't lose out on anything except maybe the resale value.
Not really. Pre-2015 Retina MBP are just as efficient and far more flexible than later models.
Wait for ARM.
No touchbar instead classic function keys, HDMI output, 2 displayports + 2 usb3 ports, magsafe!, and most importantly a MicroSD drive i have put a Nifty 512GB card into, so i have 768GB of space of which 256 is from the SSD, - works perfectly.
Having a small SD drive is so incredibly useful when you can buy half a terabyte of extra space for $100, granted not that fast but still useful as storage.
The newer models are so incredibly expensive they make no sense to me when they remove features.
... so waiting for the ARM version.
I'd be very surprised if Apple Silicon is going to be competitive against the Xeons in their highest end machines any time soon, so they'll be bound to supporting Intel at the OS level for the foreseeable future. They've basically said as much. I suspect you should be able to get about 5 years, at least, before they start phasing things out.
I'll take that action :) I think it's going to be pretty dramatic. Or they wouldn't have bothered.
That makes less sense, though. Apple isn't using Arm's cpu architecture, just the ISC.
Apple is switching from Intel chips with x86 to Apple chips with ARM. You should, when comparing, use one pair or the other.
From x86 to arm
Or
From Intel to Apple
The whole industry of music software is kind of weird… their products tend to be somewhat “closer to the metal” than typical software, even a bit more than video, graphics, CAD and 3D… improvements and bug fixes are few and far between.
Also, like most artists (in my experience), musicians tend to learn one way of doing things very very well and getting them to try anything new is next to impossible.