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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

Notably missing: Any hints about hardware for developers.

My conspiracy theory is that the sketchily rumored “gaming laptop”[1] is actually a hot rod ARM MacBook focused on developers to get the transition off with a bang.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/12/30/sketchy-rumor-gaming-ma...

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Imagine a cheap Apple ARM low power high performance Mac Mini for devs... Apple would never do it, unless as some sort of educational campaign to get a low cost education and coding platform into the hands of billions of kids

That article describes a high-end gaming machine, with a potential pricetag of 5000$. Given that the Intel-based developer transition kit was only 999$, I can't see their developer model being that expensive.

For the developer model, perhaps they'll revive the Macbook 2015 form factor with an ARM chip instead, to distinguish it from the Intel-based Airs and Pros.

The Apple of 2020 is in a very different market position than that of 2006.

I also expect that you won’t need this box to do ARM development: Why should ARM macOS development on an existing x64 Mac be any different from ARM iPadOS development there?

I mean, ideally it shouldn't. The vast majority of apps should just recompile. But I don't think you can compare them quite like that, remember that the iPad/iPhone emulators on Xcode run x64 code, not ARM. If you're doing anything that depends on architectural features or drops into inline assembly, you're going to need either an ARM emulator on your x64 box (which apple doesn't do right now for iPad/iPhone dev), or an ARM box to test on. Right now for iPad/iPhone development, if you wish to use some assembly you can test it on device.

It may help that clang/llvm is a cross-compiler by default.

$999 buys a low-spec MacBook Air and could buy a slightly higher spec ARM-based machine for the same margins. I still think they'd be very constrained. That original PowerMac chassis with a PC inside also won't happen again unless they have a ton of surplus MacPro chassis they need to offload.

$999 can buy the MacPro monitor stand...

I'm not saying it will be 999$, but it will probably be at lost less than 5000$ of that article. I'd say in the 1500-2000$ range. Something similarly priced to an iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard + Pencil combo.

Apple is on a very different track today than it was back then and buying hardware for developing for the platform is much less risky than the $999 price tag implied.

My conspiracy theory is that there will be a dual-boot iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard combo for a few $K…

Mightn't even have to dual boot if Hypervisor.framework were ported to ARM.

I don't know about dual boot but I wouldn't be surprised to see a clamshell iPad.

If Apple wanted, they could just offer a developer version of macOS for ARM that runs on an iPad Pro. This would completely solve the question of hardware availability for developers. Especially as lots if not most developers already have one of these.

Apple has never been good at gaming.

I guess it depends on the development tool chain, but when I tried compiling some C++ stuff on the AWS ARM instances, I found it was like 50% slower.

I suspect it was from some combination of branch prediction and OOO execution being weaker.

Were you using a1 instances (Graviton) or m6g, and c6g, r6g (Graviton2) instances?

a1, this was before Graviton2 was released.

I'm wondering if this is an unpopular opinion, but I wouldn't want to use anything other than a desktop for development.

Well, the rumor also mentions a “gaming iMac” which is just as preposterous, so maybe they roll out one of each.

Could the new iPad Pro works as a development machine?

Yes, but that’s so awkward technically and from a marketing / product segmentation perspective that I’d be shocked if Apple went that way.

They want to sell this transition as letting them build the best Macs ever. A kitbash iPad, despite its virtues, is definitely not that.

I don't mean as a product to sell to the masses but something that could be used to develop / test ARM apps before the new shiny laptop arrives sometime in 2021. Not the most ergonomic way to develop apps but maybe possible?

It already does,

Pythonista, Continuous, Codea, Shaderific, Playgrounds

Are enough to keep me busy.

Try out code-server[1]. It let's you run VSCode in a web browser. I have a 10$ a month vultr server set up for personal git hosting and running this, and it works great on my iPadPro (as well as my PinebookPro).

https://github.com/cdr/code-server

Thanks, but there is already the Azure version of it, where VSCode actually started.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/cloudshelleditor/

How well does this run on an iPad Pro? I assume that this is a web app. Does it run OK on iOS Safari? Thanks in advance.

I never used it, just the apps mentioned above, just wanted to note that there is where VSCode came from.

I usually only use tablets when flying, not the ideal place to access Internet (very few Airlines offer that on European flights).

I've said it before but I really love code-server. Recent releases have been a bit messy (change of deployment model didn't really work) but it's amazing. I got it running on a $5 VPS to access my dev environment from any machine without the need to sync anything (no more forgetting to commit code before I leave for a trip).

As long as I'm <10ms from the VPS I can't tell any difference between code-server and native VSCode. I really hope their business model is successful.

Absolutely, but iOS and its "security" is holding it back.

I meant iPad running a version of macOS

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