ARM Macs will be the end of the line for many "prosumer" customers of Apple.
It will probably sell quite well though. And it will bring back fanless designs.
It will probably sell quite well though. And it will bring back fanless designs.
Why do you think that? Do you just think ARM can't match Intel performance? Or do you think the prosumers need Intel-specific functionality like counters?
What I'm worried about is implementing top-quality ARM backends for software like the JVM. We need someone doing this rapidly as I think an ARM MacBook Pro will just turn up one day, unannounced.
So, software changes alone require quite some upkeep on your existing tooling otherwise you run into problems.
Now imagine a whole new CPU architecture which means none of your tools work unless they are a) recompiled or b) virtualised.
I expect the pain of virtualisation and the problems with that to make the whole experience miserable.
And many tools will either never be recompiled or take so much time you are forever stuck in pleistocene times.
I remember, ahem, fondly when Apple dropped Java and we had to wait forever to be able to work with modern versions on OS X. At some point Landon Fuller stepped in and hand-made a Java 6 build.
Catalina is also quite famous in my circles as something to avoid.
And the notarization requirements for macOS tools that are not on the macOS AppStore is also something that has been wasting some of my time (and the $99 for Apple, of course).
So, all in all, I don't see how ARM Macs combines with the Catalina successor and even more stringent Apple rules are going to make a good developer workstation.
They don’t work in notarized apps, and only notarized apps are allowed through Gatekeeper. But if you’re a developer who needs advanced debugging capabilities, you can let the non-notarized app through Gatekeeper and continue on your way.
But maybe you're a hardware developer and need to debug the kernel, or replace the kernel entirely with a self-compiled version of Darwin. Macs let you do all of that too, just turn off SIP and the system is yours to command.
What Apple has done with macOS is lock down the experience by default so your average technophobe doesn’t ruin their system. If you’re a programmer or power user who wants or needs a less restricted environment, macOS can still be that platform.
I think it's a healthy balance.
Please don't do this. Use a perfectly adequate and more correct term "layperson". My grandsons are equally capable of ruining their system with trojans and misapplied hacks
They did it twice for mac os - m68k->PPC->X86 and came out alright. Also transitioned two generations of ARM (current CPUs no longer support 32bit).
So, I need to distribute a notarized build that also provides a JDK for users. My users would naturally want to debug their own code using the provided JDK.
So either we just forget about notarization on developer tools and we just tell people to disable everything or Apple has to figure out some better way. I already see they apply the notarization rules differently so perhaps if you get your tool on the "internal Apple tools whitelist" it's easier.
I programmed on Macs since the G4 days but I will not be upgrading the current software or hardware given the current trend. Just switch to a nice Thinkpad running Linux (or a BSD if I feel adventurous).
What would be a better way?
A computer either is or is not allowed to execute non-Apple approved code. If you want your computer to execute non-approved code, then let it do that by disabling Gatekeeper.
So, if my JVM forks another JVM that will debug just fine?
Or even that won't work as in I won't be able to add a breakpoint inside some standard Java class?
I mean a lawyer is a professional and they can probably do fine with a 2014 Air.
A lawyer with a camera is a "professional" "photographer" but not necessarily a "professional photographer"
I believe there are 'many' Java developers that use Macs but in the grand scheme of things I imagine it's a tiny sliver of the overall professional user base.
So, yeah, I don't believe Apple is committing suicide with any market move they make. They have the data, they have the marketing, they will do well.
But Macs don't seem like a good future developer workstation to me. Not anymore.
Perhaps we should replace "professional" by the more clear term "power users" to avoid this nitpicking.
Clearly, a lawyer is a professional in the sense of the job he is doing, but is also clearly not a power user in the sense of computer usage.
Nope. Never gonna happen. There are too many moving parts in a processor transition (and Apple has done two so far: 68xxxx to PowerPC to Intel, not counting the 64 bit transition). There's always more than a simple recompile (if that's even possible as some of the big players may be using their own proprietary toolchains for building, although I imagine this is less common now than it was during the last two processor transitions).
It has new optimisations like partial escape analysis that C2 doesn't have. In production this saves Twitter 13% on compute resources in their data centre. That's MASSIVE. I presume it's tens of thousands of dollars a month.
People also use Graal to compile Java applications to standalone native executables, which isn't something C2 can do.
And finally Graal is a system that you can use to run languages other than Java. For example JavaScript on Graal, which runs on a JVM but is about as fast as V8.
You can probably add a zero, if not several more, assuming the 13% number is accurate.
Qt is a graphical user interface library - Java is a programming language and runtime. They aren't really the same thing at all and it doesn't really make sense to compare them.
> Performance cross platform software would more likely be using Qt, and server Java runs on Linux.
Guess where most people develop that Java server software? They're on macOS!
Android development.
Can it match single core performance? Audio production plugins are often running on single cores. The A13 maxes at 2.65ghz, and the 80-core Altra maxes at 3.0 (turbo boosted). Both of those are too low for me to use in audio production. I intentionally went with less cores and a higher clock speed on my last computer because of this.
You're also looking at a CPU designed for a phone, and a CPU designed for a server farm. If Apple were to design a CPU for professional multimedia workstations, it would not have the same parameters as either of these.
What do you consider the minimum to be usable in audio production?
Fanless? Wishful thinking. Check out the Raspberry Pi 4's overheating problems.
If they make an ARM Mac, it won't be fanless.
ARM and x86 are both capable of very high performance. ARM isn't magically capable of putting out 10x the FLOPS in the same power envelope. Modern x86 parts are very close to ARM in terms of work completed per unit energy consumed.
The difference is that it's rare to see an ARM part with a heatsink/fan and it's rare to see an x86 part without one. RPi and MacBook 12 are notable exceptions to this.
All of this presumes that CPU utilization is what's eating the power. It's not. For an idle machine (e.g. ARM iPad vs. x86 MacBook) most of the energy goes into the display backlight. The SoCs idle down to near zero energy consumption.
It's even difficult to assert that CPU usage is a big power culprit on these machines. My MacBook 12 can max out CPU forever and hold 1.8GHz with no fan. The 4 core post-Haswell MacBooks can max out their CPUs and have the fan running very slowly. But run the GPU hard on either of those machines? You'll max out the fans and power consumption immediately and things will start throttling.
TL;DR: CPU arch makes no difference. ARM Macs will have similar cooling solutions to the current ones.