About that A18 Pro MacBook rumor | Hacker News Reader

About that A18 Pro MacBook rumor

sixcolors.com

24 pointstosh19 comments

Wouldn't they save on materials if they ditched the M1 Air design? The newer Airs are smaller, using less Aluminium.

Interesting from a cost perspective but I hope it doesn’t introduce any oddities in software compatibility.

There’s already things the M chip series iPads can do that the A chip series can’t.

The new multitasking features (movable windows, pseudo-desktop environment) of iPadOS might be telegraphing an “iBook” line-up.

Meanwhile, the MacBook stays with the M chips.

OSX could run just fine on the iPad today. There's no technical limitation, there's nothing to develop (nothing non-trivial anyway.)

OSX does not run on the iPad because it would give iPad users an escape from profitable "value add."

Also, it doesn‘t run on iPads because it would be very difficult to use all these mouse and keyboard centric UIs with only your finger.

Nah. I used a phone for two years running Linux with FVWM and mostly VTE apps. If anything keyboard driven UIs are nicer on touch screens since the controls don't slide over each other all the time.

Most people think they would be bad because they haven't tried them.

But macOS is not primarily a keyboard driven UI?

Imagine if iPad gains a Windows Continuum-like morphing desktop functionality when docked with peripherals and a monitor. They could name the feature . . . Continuation?

What differences in capabilities would there be? The cores are identical, it’s largely the topology that’s different.

I/O seems to be the big one. The M1 has Thunderbolt support, the A18 Pro does not. This would majorly limit the resolution of external displays this MacBook could drive, for example. And the base-model M1 was already pretty limited in that capacity already.

Apple has a history of gating external displays behind higher price points. Seems reasonable they’d do it again.

Sure but that doesn’t affect software compatibility which was what the person I responded to was talking about.

There’ll be hardware compromises of course, but software should run fairly uniformly.

There’s definitely some underlying differences seemingly I/O focused that impacts what apps can do beyond simple lack of thunderbolt.

For example Elektron a company that makes synths has some software that runs on Macs and are porting it to iPad. They have it running in beta at conferences. It does audio/data/midi of sorts of USB. They have explicitly stated it will only work on M chips for some reason related to underlying OS limitations.

It’s also my understanding that apps in the App Store need to be explicitly enabled by developers for A & M series compatibility. So there’s something different enough to allow devs to disable / enable.

You can’t gate support on the App Store to specific hardware configurations, only platforms.

At most you can make apps available to iOS or iPadOS separately but you can’t restrict the store listing to any category of iPhone or iPad device.

You can list capabilities your device needs but what falls under those capabilities is at Apple’s discretion.

My understanding from Elektron is they are gated by this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/audiodriverkit

"Note AudioDriverKit is available on macOS for Intel and Apple Silicon devices, and on iPadOS for devices with an M-series processor."

Maybe they are idiots, maybe the docs are out of date, maybe theres alternate methods.. but it does seem at some point there was/is an A/M series software ability differences in iPad OS.

Like I said, you can gate by capabilities but not by hardware.

I was referring to your last paragraph about the supposed explicit compatibility settings in the App Store per hardware. That is not a thing. Your example is specifically a capability, and one that requires PCIe, therefore needs thunderbolt.

Apple themselves may gate those capabilities behind different product classes, but as a developer you cannot. That in turn makes it very difficult to know specifically why something isn’t supported.

For example you can connect DACs and controllers to non-M iPads https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360012532199...

There are also capabilities that diverge in other axes like newer A series chips support things where an M series doesn’t. Hardware raytracing was an example of that for a while. Or still is because there are different gens of M series chips for sale.

Don’t quote me on this but I think the A series also lacks support for virtualization.

People want a macOS on an iPad. Apple is developing a MacBook with an iPhone CPU instead...

what do you mean 'developing'. Prototype mac minis apple sent out for developers to adapt their apps to the new arm world (later named M1) was using iPhone A chips.

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