Support? The OS will translate any x86 apps made by lazy developers who can't be bothered to make an ARM version.
Apple to replace Intel and move to ARM - *** Confirmed as "Apple Silicon" ***
- Thread starter UberTiger
- Start date
More worried about not being able to run newer versions of software that are designed for ARM. Are they going to make it backwards compatible aswell as forward, besides rosetta is only going to have a temporary lifespan.
The majority of the mac active user base will be Intel for at least 5 years. Intel will continue to get all the new software.
Soldato
Does anyone have any information or come across anything regarding (Intel) Thunderbolt under Apple Silicon other than to wait-and-see?
This got brought up in a few client meetings this week but the only information i can see is that Apple might move to USB 4 and whilst Thunderbolt is part of the specs, it's an optional feature and, from what i know, still requires Intel certification and/or an Intel controller which could be a sticky point for Apple if they're trying to cut ties.
That's only on the ARM/Apple Silicon variant; MacOS "some big hill" will be compiled for both architectures over the transition period with the Intel version moving to minor/security only updates there after for a year or so.
Inevitably there will be a cutoff but if it goes anything like the previous transition (PowerPC to Intel) then the majority of the big suites continued to produce/compile for both platforms for a few years after the (initially) stated transition period.
As others have said, you should be good for the next handful of years (certainly two to three), just be wary of the resale value when you do come to upgrading to the new platform.
This got brought up in a few client meetings this week but the only information i can see is that Apple might move to USB 4 and whilst Thunderbolt is part of the specs, it's an optional feature and, from what i know, still requires Intel certification and/or an Intel controller which could be a sticky point for Apple if they're trying to cut ties.
That's only on the ARM/Apple Silicon variant; MacOS "some big hill" will be compiled for both architectures over the transition period with the Intel version moving to minor/security only updates there after for a year or so.
Inevitably there will be a cutoff but if it goes anything like the previous transition (PowerPC to Intel) then the majority of the big suites continued to produce/compile for both platforms for a few years after the (initially) stated transition period.
As others have said, you should be good for the next handful of years (certainly two to three), just be wary of the resale value when you do come to upgrading to the new platform.
PowerPC macs stopped receiving major OS updates 4 years after the transition was complete. Intel Macs will likely get new major updates at least until then, likely more so given that Apple has a much larger Intel user base now compared to PowerPC users back then, and they have a lot more resources now.
To say they'll just get it for a year and then it's just security updates is pure conjecture.
Soldato
I'm surprised they want to venture into this (stupid) territory again. Their marriage with PowerPC and proprietary rubbish nearly killed them at the end of the last century after intel shot forward in technology and left them light years behind. Only Steve Jobs' business acumen saved them on time.
It's a stupid move. Insane even. We've been through all that - the "unsinkable" hardware giants and their capricious proprietary cack - it's very 20 years ago and very boring - the DEC/Compaq, Cray/SGI, Atari/Commodore - they have their fifteen minutes and then x86 architecture goes next level and leaves them in dust. Whatever temporary advantage Apple think they may have at this moment in CPU architecture is only part of the story. Speed is also in buses, chipsets, I/O protocols, proprietary interfaces. How is Apple going to marry their mobile phone chips to another generation of Intel's thunderbolt or CXL or PCI-Express and other what-have-yous for our laptops and workstations?
Coding for multiple architectures will mean rise in costs for third party software providers, probably to the levels of the previous version of universal binary. For many software makers it will also mean complete overhaul from scratch to adopt new acceleration methods across the board - I honestly can't imagine the amount of work it would take to port all the DAWs, music software, video editing suites and plugins currently on the market to work on both Intel and ARM and let's face it - you won't be running stuff that currently needs low latency and maximum power of your CPU and GPU through a flipping Rosetta 2.
But that's Apple for you - always against their partners, supporters and customers - you want workstation with more space for your drives and cards, they give you "iBin" Mac Pro with exact opposite and turn your entire hardware inventory into scrap in process, you want a laptop with few usable ports and HDMI out, they give you one with the weirdest bunch of proprietary mini-this and micro-that ports that require new dongles for years, you finally want a powerful laptop with more expansion options, and they release a new one with two year old CPU, chromebook graphics and a single usable USB-C port and so it goes for every year. I've spent an equivalent of a three bedroom house in video editing equipment with them over several decades and I haven't been happy with anything I got from them since 2008. I'm tired of it now and I don't need them any more. Sure as hell not moving to ARM.
It's a stupid move. Insane even. We've been through all that - the "unsinkable" hardware giants and their capricious proprietary cack - it's very 20 years ago and very boring - the DEC/Compaq, Cray/SGI, Atari/Commodore - they have their fifteen minutes and then x86 architecture goes next level and leaves them in dust. Whatever temporary advantage Apple think they may have at this moment in CPU architecture is only part of the story. Speed is also in buses, chipsets, I/O protocols, proprietary interfaces. How is Apple going to marry their mobile phone chips to another generation of Intel's thunderbolt or CXL or PCI-Express and other what-have-yous for our laptops and workstations?
Coding for multiple architectures will mean rise in costs for third party software providers, probably to the levels of the previous version of universal binary. For many software makers it will also mean complete overhaul from scratch to adopt new acceleration methods across the board - I honestly can't imagine the amount of work it would take to port all the DAWs, music software, video editing suites and plugins currently on the market to work on both Intel and ARM and let's face it - you won't be running stuff that currently needs low latency and maximum power of your CPU and GPU through a flipping Rosetta 2.
But that's Apple for you - always against their partners, supporters and customers - you want workstation with more space for your drives and cards, they give you "iBin" Mac Pro with exact opposite and turn your entire hardware inventory into scrap in process, you want a laptop with few usable ports and HDMI out, they give you one with the weirdest bunch of proprietary mini-this and micro-that ports that require new dongles for years, you finally want a powerful laptop with more expansion options, and they release a new one with two year old CPU, chromebook graphics and a single usable USB-C port and so it goes for every year. I've spent an equivalent of a three bedroom house in video editing equipment with them over several decades and I haven't been happy with anything I got from them since 2008. I'm tired of it now and I don't need them any more. Sure as hell not moving to ARM.
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Caporegime
I have confidence that Apple will deliver on this. Their chips look like they will be better than the competition, so why wouldn't they want to create faster, cooler and more efficient computers?
Adobe and Office 365 will work natively on ARM so I'm covered for pretty much all my use cases. There will always be some apps that need to run under emulation, but if the performance hit isn't big then it's not like those users cannot use their tools.
Thunderbolt confirmed to work with ARM - https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/08/apple-arm-based-macs-thunderbolt-support/
Adobe and Office 365 will work natively on ARM so I'm covered for pretty much all my use cases. There will always be some apps that need to run under emulation, but if the performance hit isn't big then it's not like those users cannot use their tools.
Thunderbolt confirmed to work with ARM - https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/08/apple-arm-based-macs-thunderbolt-support/
Caporegime
Have you seen the terrible cooling system on the latest Macbook Air? Doesn't give you much faith in Apple's engineering. Unless it's intentional to make x86 look bad.
PCIe already exists on ARM, it's not an x86 thing. It's an open standard. They already confirmed they continue supporting Thunderbolt, CXL is datacentre technology. None of the major I/O protocols are x86 only, in fact they're open standards. NVMe is not x86, Apple already has NVMe in iPhones.
For someone who seems very angry at proprietary technology, you seem to ignore the most proprietary of them all in your wrath: x86.
That probably was the worst Macbook Apple has ever released.
Yeah putting the only fan in a different post code to the CPU is ridiculous.
Soldato
Among its once core audience - music and video industry - Apple is surviving thanks to one thing and one thing only - the fact we can adapt, flash or hackintosh various PC devices to their boxes. x86 compatibility is the only thing that keeps this market alive. ARM means end of compatibility with PC stuff, end of driver support from third parties for existing cards, expansions and hardware, major overhaul of all the software suites again, end of VM, end of bootcamp where needed. And for what? A bizarre notion that Apple can win CPU race with Intel and AMD?
Phhuullleeeeeeze bro... no, they can't. Look, I love those Apple idiots. And for decades I pick them over Microsoft even though they rip me off and cause me massive grief all the time and to be honest - by now there is very little reason to stick with them. But you'd have to blindly fanboy to think they have any chance in a war with Intel and AMD. It's not going to happen. I'm not investing in another Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics or Apple PowerPC shlong waving festival with x86. Been there, done that, still have a shelf full of shrunk T-shirts and a bucket of SCSI drives that run out of viable OS for data shredding in the loft. Not a single company in history, and I mean absolute behemoths of the markets, managed to maintain upper hand with proprietary CPU over x86 architecture for more than a few years and every time Intel geared down in generation the race would end in a complete demise of yet another industry giant.
Soldato
But how does an example of open source mobile phone OS apply in any way, shape and form to a discussion about desktops, laptops and workstations?
Caporegime
That's the kind of thinking that kills innovation and progress. If Apple just resigned to using Intel then we will never know what is possible. They understand the risks and challenges very well, they also have a good idea of how well it will stack up against the competition.
Caporegime
Until one day, a company does. You think we have reached the peak and nothing can ever surpass x86? C'mon man.
What’s funny is that it isn’t actually Apple going up against intel, it’s ARM and ARM have been killing intel in this space for years. Intel has tried and failed several times to get their power requirements down and they can’t do it.
They ultimately just rely on just sticking a bigger cooler on it that what the competition needs (e.g. AMD 8 core laptop chips).
Some of the fastest super computers in the world also use ARM.
What’s even more funny is that the 2018 iPad Pro which doesn’t have a fan at all is faster than a 2020 MacBook Air. Before you yell again that the MacBook Air is gimped, you completely ignore that the iPad doesn’t have any cooling at all. Better cooling also doesn’t substantially increase the performance of the Air. To get it to go substantially faster it’s power limits need to be removed, at which point it’s no longer a 10w chip for a very thin and light laptop.
There is a reason Microsoft are pouring millions, if not billions into getting windows running properly on ARM and it’s not because they thing intel will reign king forever.
Have you every thought there is space in the market for both of them?
They ultimately just rely on just sticking a bigger cooler on it that what the competition needs (e.g. AMD 8 core laptop chips).
Some of the fastest super computers in the world also use ARM.
What’s even more funny is that the 2018 iPad Pro which doesn’t have a fan at all is faster than a 2020 MacBook Air. Before you yell again that the MacBook Air is gimped, you completely ignore that the iPad doesn’t have any cooling at all. Better cooling also doesn’t substantially increase the performance of the Air. To get it to go substantially faster it’s power limits need to be removed, at which point it’s no longer a 10w chip for a very thin and light laptop.
There is a reason Microsoft are pouring millions, if not billions into getting windows running properly on ARM and it’s not because they thing intel will reign king forever.
Have you every thought there is space in the market for both of them?
Soldato
Yes. That's what I keep repeating. We've been through this already as a market, as a consumer, we've already "voted". We've done all kinds of RISC, PowerPC alternatives before and it was painful and tedious and many, many companies collapsed in the process. And we emerged into 2010's in a better world, where everyone understood "proprietary" was not wanted. Where your Mac Pro was finally compatible with almost everything. It would accept off the shelf SATA HDDs and off the shelf SSDs. And it could double boot to Windows, natively. And it could run linuxes in VM. And you wouldn't have to pay thousands of pounds for some excrement poor graphics card, because ATI or nvidia you had from your gaming PC could run in macos and have cuda and opencl acceleration. And when your CPUs became slow, you could upgrade them beyond normal spec. And when your SATA 3 SSD became too slow, you could get a PCI-E card with M2 SSD and improve the speed further. And we would get ported games. And ported software. And even something like a free ffmpeg would encode Apple ProRes at ten times the speed of the flipping Compressor. And it was done. It was sorted. We've ticked that box. The run up that hill took many decades but we arrived - and it was worth it and the view was fantastic. And we *** NO *** loved it. And we bought more and more Apples.
And then Apple comes out and says "you know what we miss? some proprietary **** - those fond 5 years when you all had to suffer Rosetta emulations, universal binary tradeoffs, massive incompatibilities and buying all the software again. Yeah, we fancy some of that." Well - I don't. If at least they had something viable on the horizon - "a new Mac Pro with 10 physical CPUs 10 core each clocking at 5ghz, fully accelerated for h266, guys - it's going to be totally worth it ". But no. That's not what's on the table. Encoding on iPad chip is. *** NO *** that.
Don
Because you know for a fact that all of the above won't work on ARM?
Is there a need after all this time? Surely the ultimate goal of buying a Mac is to use native Mac software?
How many typical Mac users actually did that though?
How do you know it isn't?
Soldato
That's pretty much what Gokhan Avkarogullari said though, wasn't it - Apple Silicon means moving to Apple own graphics and in terms of compatibility layer for other PC devices it's a given, if they won't use off the shelf stuff on motherboard level then native drivers won't be there, the hackintosh era of wide compatibilities will pretty much be over.
Hands up creative people, how many of you don't give monkeys about loosing bootcamp?
I'd estimate 80% of Mac pro 4.1 and 5.1 owners, but then again I'm not reliable statistical resource, all the Mac pro forums and all the Mac pro users I know do that, but I do accept this is a bit of an echo chamber situation in my case.
Because on the table is 12 core single threaded CPU with 8 cores at full speed and 4 "efficient" cores. With Thuderbolt 4 (open license) but apparently no USB 4 support.