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Comment by seunosewa | Hacker News Reader

Many apps optimized for the x64 platform won't run as well as the benchmarks.

I think this is an important one to keep in mind. I'm sure most native Mac apps will be compiled to ARM, but a lot of existing apps won't.

Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps.

I for one really wouldn't mind if Apple would build a native app to replace Electron apps, e.g. a chat app that works as a good client for (what I have open right now in Rambox) Discord, FB Messenger, Whatsapp and multiple Slack channels. Or their own Spotify client. Or a big update to XCode so it can use language servers for VS Code and it's viable to use for (what I do right now) Typescript, PHP and Go development.

They have more than enough money to invest in dozens of development teams or startups to push out new native apps.

One day I'll switch away from Chrome in favor of Safari as well. Maybe.

(I am taking recommendations for native alternatives to apps)

Electron seems to have support in recent beta releases.

You still have to rebuild your software and explicitly support a bunch of different architectures.

I can't understand why you think Apple should be building apps for their competitors. It's very strange.

Use Apple Music, Messages, Safari, Swift if you want first-class support.

Or one of the better options now might be to use the iOS apps for Slack, Spotify etc.

whatsapp support in native apps is not something that isnt happening because there is no will in teams or companies to do that. its just not possible, there are no APIs. everything you see is a workaround or mashup of the whatsapp web feature

Not just the lack of will - hostile action and threats from whatsapp against even just community projects trying to build a client for a platform not supported by the official ones. This might no longer be the case but a couple years ago they still used to do that, so no wonder so little native clients exist.

Most of the electron apps out there already have native iOS versions which will run natively on AS macs too, that should go a long way to smooth the transition (and will be interesting to see how much extra RAM you gain from not needing slack/spotify/notion etc to run on Electron).

I guess there will still be issues for people who need to run VMs or media apps like Adobe CC etc, and also it will take a while for some dev environments to be fully supported (https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857 for example shows it will take some time to get to feature parity).

Overall though a lot of the hard work has already been done, and I'm sure in 2 years time or whenever the transition is 'complete', mac owners will be getting much more value for money with few drawbacks (the main one being higher walls around the garden)

> Most of the electron apps out there already have native iOS versions which will run natively on AS macs too, that should go a long way to smooth the transition (and will be interesting to see how much extra RAM you gain from not needing slack/spotify/notion etc to run on Electron).

They don't have desktop UIs, and will be a big step down for most users. You can't seriously argue the UI doesn't matter on a Mac.

Apple Silicon has integrated floating point hardware specifically designed to run JavaScript super fast, so Electron will be fine.

> Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps.

Won't this be handled by just porting V8 to the M1?

They did mention in a presentation some applications ran even quicker in Rosetta 2 than native. Though Wine isn't an emulator, I've seen the same in Wine numerous times. How many, which, etc, who knows? Interesting to figure out regardless.

That happened regularly in the transition from 680x0 to PowerPC.

This is often because it's translating syscalls rather than emulating them, so for applications that are only asking the OS to do the real work, in those cases it's running native code. And then it's running it on a current day CPU instead of one from two years ago.

Unfortunately, although applications like that exist, they're not the common case.

One of the most common operations done in MacOS is retain/release of objects. Rosetta2 translated code is TWICE as fast on the M1 as the original code on x86.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262387851813...

Microbenchmarks are meaningless. Where are the benchmarks of real-world applications?

The M1 running native code can retain/release objects five times faster than x86 processors running native code.

X86 code translated by Rosetta2 on the M1 retains/releases objects TWICE as fast as native x86 processors.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262387851813...

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