Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevsim | Hacker News Reader

Possibly stupid question - does Apple switching to ARM mean the death of Bootcamp?

Possible so, unless Apple makes the ARM chip run Intel code. Windows is overrated now and only Windows 10 matters at this point in time.

For $150 you can buy a cheap Intel based PC laptop with Windows 10 on it.

I think Bootcamp might work for ARM based Linux and the ARM version of Windows 10. At least Raspberry PIs that are ARM based can run those.

Many games still aren't available on Mac, and things like Wine are not nearly as clean of an experience as just installing games in native Windows. I'd guess switching to ARM will set back the progress made in Mac gaming as well.

They sent the message they wanted everybody to hear about gaming when they turned the lever on 32bit support

Would Intel be able to use patents to prevent them from doing x86 emulation?

They did so to block NVIDIA so quite likely.

>For $150 you can buy a cheap Intel based PC laptop with Windows 10 on it.

Is there any point in a $150 computer, especially if it's $150 including Windows?

Of course. You can get great deals from used/refurbished business laptops for that price.

I think the more interesting possibility is that one may have to jailbreak a Macbook Pro to run your own apps and/or OS.

Basically already a thing with SIP.

SIP is a simple toggle (for what it's worth, this is the same thing on Windows to be able to run arbitrary UWP applications). Jailbreaking is very much not, as it requires an actual exploit.

Almost definitely - yes.

Given that an ARM version of Windows 10 exists, why do you say "almost definitively"?

People mostly dual-boot so they can access software they need that isn't on macOS, but it isn't available on ARM Windows either so why would Apple care to foster a nascent competing platform?

Additionally, the importance of this use-case (from Apple's perspective) has decreased significantly since they originally developed Boot Camp. While I'm sure that many people do run Windows on Mac hardware, the percentage of Mac owners who do this is likely dropping significantly (if I remember correctly, there was a statistic about this in a comment on another thread about ARM Macs).

Windows 10 ARM is so useless that there's really no reason to Boot Camp it.

But what if someone wants to Boot Camp ARM Linux?

Boot Camp does not work with Linux on Intel Macs, so the question in this case would be whether the low-level bootloader would allow unsigned/third-party code or whether it would be locked-down like on iOS devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com