Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs | Hacker News Reader

Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

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Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers.

Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip.

Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; Intel’s thrashing has cost them at least two significant update cycles on the macbook line in the last six years. Search this fine site for complaints about how new mac laptops don’t have real performance benefits over old ones —- those complaints are 100% down to being saddled with Intel.

Apple has a functional corporate culture that ships; adding complete control of the hardware stack in is going to make for better products, full stop.

Apple has to pay Intel and AMD profit margins for their mac systems. They are going to be able to put this margin back into a combination of profit and tech budget as they choose. Early days they are likely to plow all this back into performance, a win for consumers.

So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k performance. You’re not going to want an Intel mac even as of January of 2021, unless you have a very unusual set of requirements.

I think they may also start making a real push on the ML side in the next year, which will be very interesting; it’s exciting to imagine what Apple’s fully vertically integrated company could do controlling hardware, OS and ML stack.

One interesting question I think is outstanding - from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized, vs AMD64. I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen — I wonder if systems developers will get on board, deal with slower / higher battery draw intel virtualization, or move on from Apple.

Languages like Go with supremely simple cross architecture support might get a boost here. Rust seems behind on ARM, for instance; I bet that will change in the next year or two. I don’t imagine that developing Intel server binaries on an ARM laptop with Rust will be pleasant.

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster.

I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference.

Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gains [1]. Not one thing that they demoed requires any meaningful CPU power.

Similarly, while ARM parts are more efficient than x86 per compute cycle, it's not a dramatic change.

The big changes, I think, are more mundane:

- Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped

- Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators. They will probably put that stuff in T2 for Intel Macs. If they're already shipping T2 on every machine, with a bunch of CPU cores, why not just make those CPU cores big enough for the main workload?

Doubling CPU perf is meaningless if you can ship the right accelerators that'll do 100x energy/perf for video compression, crypto and graphics.

[1] for a regular web browsing type user; obviously if you're compiling stuff this may not apply; if that is true you're almost certainly better off just getting a Linux desktop for the heavy lifting

Here's an analogy to help explain the skepticism: ants have amazing efficiency - they can lift multiples of their own body weight. So why can't an ant lift my car? Well, because it's too small. So let's just take the same ant design and scale it up? Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. A creature capable of lifting my car wouldn't be much like an ant.

There is no guarantee that a phone-scale CPU can just become 4x faster by 4x'ing the power/TDP/die area. If it were that easy, Intel would already have done it (and no, the x86 architecture isn't so terribly inefficient that they are leaving triple-digit percentage improvements on the table).

What I expect we'll see are ARM chips that are power and performance competitive with x86 chips only for specific curated use cases. Apple will extract an advantage by putting custom hardware acceleration into them, to cater for those specific tasks. They will not be able to achieve general purpose performance improvements wildly beyond what Intel can already do.

This is how the current iDevices achieve their excellent performance and battery life. Not through raw general-purpose CPU horsepower, but by a finely tuned synergy between hardware and software. Apple are taking their desktop down the same route. This will be the ultimate competitive advantage for their own software - they will be able to move key software components into hardware, and make it look like magic. But as a developer, you won't be able to participate in this unless you target Apple-blessed hardware instructions/APIs. Your Python script isn't going to start running 4x faster unless you can convince Apple to implement its inner loop in custom silicon.

I have no doubt that Apple will be leaning hard into ASIC territory as they build out their new CPUs. The endgame? Every software function you need, baked into perfectly optimised silicon by the monovendor.

> Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer.

Eh? This is a flimsy claim. AMD's performance/watt is extremely impressive right now. Apple is ahead of Intel for sure, but Intel isn't the only other player here.

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k performance.

A slightly more efficient CPU doesn't get you this. You need significant efficiency improvements across a variety of aspects, including those Apple has already been optimizing for years like the display.

Agreed on all points.

I saw speculation elsewhere that this change, along with AWS's addition of Graviton-based (their own ARM processors) instances at much more competitive price points relative to x86, are bound to spearhead the change to "ARM by default."

If your devs are already using ARM, and ARM's notably cheaper in the cloud, that's a compelling case. If you're already using Kubernetes / Docker heavily, you're probably already 80% of the way there. Linuxes that aren't supporting ARM as a "first class citizen" will soon, and undoubtedly that will be a speed bump at worst.

I'm interested to see the specs relative to the x86 Macs, but the only open question to me was whether or not we'd see the x86 emulation layer. Well, we did, and it may not be perfect but it certainly looks like they put a lot of effort into it. If it works as well as it looks, I think this transition is borderline inevitable. I think I've bought my last x86 hardware.

Apple chips are fast mostly because they have a lot of cache to spare.

Take for example the A12Z. It has 8MB of L2 (not L3, it's L2!) cache. An Intel Core i7-1068NG7 present in the latest Macbook Pros (that performs akin to the A12Z according to Geekbench) has only 2MB of L2 cache.

No other ARM CPU has this level of L2 cache. Apple chips are not "magical", Apple just can afford packing up lots and lots of cache because they are not in the silicon "race to the bottom" like Qualcomm and Intel are, for example. L2 cache is very expensive and Apple is just hacking its way up by packing as much L2 cache as they can.

Don't take me wrong, it's not that Apple is "right" or "wrong" by doing it. They just can and did it. However, it's needless to say that their CPUs are not so different from other ARM ones, they just happen to have a budget and a business model that let's them ignore the price/performance ratio when designing chips in order to achieve the maximum performance.

I'll bite.

  > Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is
  > roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from 
  > any other manufacturer.

We haven't been able to compare them. Micro-benchmarks do not count because mobile versions of Apple chips haven't been designed for desktop requirements. People love comparing CPU cores with micro-benchmarks, but the hardest thing for a modern desktop/server chip is to feed data to many cores while maintaining cache coherence.

  > So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an 
  > extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster.

Before agreeing with your estimates, I want to play with a true 8-core Apple CPU with a large multi-level cache first. Building the Linux kernel with -J16 will be a fun exercise. Look, AMD is not stupid, and they're on the same node Apple will be using, and they're not 30% faster than even a 5y.o. Skylake.

  > Apple has to pay Intel and AMD profit margins for 
  > their mac systems. They are going to be able to put 
  > this margin back into a combination of profit and 
  > tech budget as they choose.

I wonder how their conversations with TSMC go. With Intel, at least they had AMD to use as a bargaining chip. With TSMC there's no alternative.

  > One interesting question I think is outstanding - 
  > from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me 
  > that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized
  > vs AMD64.

That's the big one. The world's software is built for and runs in data centers, not laptops. Our machines are increasingly becoming nothing but thin clients, remote displays that happen to run Javascript. CPUs do not matter. And I suspect that's the real reason they're switching.

But from the developers perspective, it's incredibly convenient to use the same platform (OS + instruction set) as the machine they're targeting, even for interpreted languages. Linus Torvalds wrote a well-articulated email about this a while ago, IIRC he was commenting on POWER, but I think his points are valid. At my company, devs keep struggling with Docker on a Mac. Add to that the ARM pain, and I wonder how many will finally get a Thinkpad. Developers will switch to ARM when majority of AWS instance types goes ARM.

P.S. I love how "old-tech" HN is, but for the love of god, give us a decent way to "reply with quote".

I think it will work out fine.

Apple has an absolutely top-shelf team, designing chips.

By hand (Qualifier: Not sure if they still do, but they did, while everyone else was using automation).

They also have a great deal of experience in repaving the highway while traffic is running at capacity. They mentioned it in their keynote. They've done it three times. I have been there, for each of those times.

I was also there for the one time they completely pooched it (Can anyone say "Copeland"? Drop and give me twenty!).

It will be moderately painful. Not too bad. Quite manageable, and it will take at least a couple of years to transition.

I am in no hurry for one of those dev kits, though. They will be quite rough, and I have no compelling reason to use them.

I am looking forward to an entirely new Xcode. The current one is getting crashier every day. I'd also like to have one that can run on my iPad.

Why do feel that Rust is behind on ARM? I can't comment on the performance, but everything that I used that was purely written in Rust compiled and ran perfectly on my PineBook Pro. (with the exception of alacritty, but that's because PBP doesn't support OpenGL 3.x)

Go does have the (platform) advantage (?) of preferring the "rewrite everything in Go" approach, so those just transition when the tooling supports a new architecture. Rust is intentionally going with a interop design, rather than telling people the only answer to to rewrite all their favorite libraries.

> I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen

IMO ARM linux is great, the real thing lacking is good hardware to run it.

> I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen

In terms of distros maybe yes. Most distros are targeted at laptops, desktops or servers, and few of those have ARM processors.

In terms of architectural support by the kernel and low-level infra, I see no reason for that to be true at all. Open source kernels and (at least lower-level) userspace have for decades paid more attention to compatibility with various hardware architectures than proprietary operating systems.

Of course you'll have fewer drivers for hardware associated with a particular architecture if there's less interest for the hardware, or if the hardware is less available in form factors that most developers are interested in. But that applies at least equally to non-open source platforms. If MS or Apple don't have a commercial interest in maintaining support for a particular platform (and they usually have only one or two in mind), nobody's going to do it.

I am predicting the opposite. Apple isn't about the extend its Mac for Performance or Battery sake.

They are going about expanding its marketshare.

There are close to 1 Billion iPhone users, most of them have never used a Mac. We will need a 2nd Devices for some of those task. And that will either be a iPad or Mac. Out of the 1.5B total PC Market, Apple has 100M Mac users. I will say it is not too far fetched to say Apple wants to double the number of Mac users to 200M.

For every $100 dollar going to Intel, Apple could knock $200 off its Retail price while getting the same margin.

A $799 MacBook ( the same starting price of iPad Pro ) will be disruptive, the premium is now small enough over the ~$500 PC Notebook price.

In the longer term I think Apple is trying to reach 2 Billion Active Devices. And it certainly cant do this with iPhone alone. There are plenty of Market Space for the Mac to disrupt.

I haven't felt particularly constrained from CPU in a long time. My main issues have been with RAM (thankfully the new MacBooks finally started supporting 32GB of RAM), and GPU, which ever since Apple has been in a fight with NVIDIA has been miserable. It's not just that Apple doesn't use NVIDIA, it's that they won't allow them to ship their own drivers for it.

I just want to plug in an eGPU to an RTX 2080 card. Instead, you have this incredibly limited set of officially supported cards the are also hyper expensive. Black Magic stopped making their eGPU Pro, so even if money is no object you can't get a great laptop GPU extension that supports their XDR displays.

Now, you might be saying, if you want a great GPU why are buying a laptop? Well, 1) even if I were to get the one model of Mac that allows me to do something interesting with GPUs (Mac Pro), I still can't install the NVIDIA cards I want. And 2) laptop + great eGPU is a great setup that is supported in the non-Mac space, so it is not a bizarre request.

All of this to say: the ARM stuff is fine, but it won't really move the needle for me, and doesn't address any of my performance issues, and I would argue a lot of the performance issues a lot of people actually have (especially graphics artists).

Rust isn't behind on ARM, except for SIMD intrinsics on stable, which are not things most languages (e.g. Java, Go) have at all for any architecture.

Apple doesn’t control their machine learning stack. The models they ship are likely created and trained on PCs running Linux and NVIDIA GPUs. It’s entirely possible they’ll extend the Neural Engine to be useful for training but they’d still need to contribute or convince others to contribute to the existing tooling.

> those complaints are 100% down to being saddled with Intel.

And yet the new Macbook pro base models feature an 8th Gen Core i5. That is 2 generations behind the bleeding edge. I think some people might be experiencing the speed problems you described because their machine has an old gen processor in a shiny new box

> One interesting question I think is outstanding - from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized, vs AMD64. I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen — I wonder if systems developers will get on board, deal with slower / higher battery draw intel virtualization, or move on from Apple.

It's in fairly good shape, and has an active community. With the current proliferation of IoT devices, both the kernel and userland are well-maintained, and plenty of distros are available. The kernel also benefits from much of the work done for Android and Chromebooks as well.

All of the usual FOSS software is ported and runs well. As of this moment, you could easily take your pick from any of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, Slack, or Alpine just for starters, plus a whole mess of specialty distros. Many of those offer both 32- and 64-bit ARM versions.

Also bear in mind that recent ARM CPUs do support hardware-assisted virtualization as well. KVM and Xen are both available for ARM today, and I'd be shocked if Apple's Hypervisor.framework doesn't roll out with ARM support in the new macOS version as well.

(I'm writing this from Firefox in Manjaro ARM on a PineBook Pro, that I use as my daily driver)

it’s exciting to imagine what Apple’s fully vertically integrated company could do controlling hardware, OS and ML stack

So true! But from a market dominance perspective, it's also a bit terrifying.

I agree with you but I think we are going to see at least one A12Z consumer product (other than the iPad) probably going to be a rereleased MacBook with a better keyboard.

Somewhat ironically, I think it's mostly the languages trying to be safer alternatives to C that are most behind on supporting ARM.

I've done a little bit of Lisp development on my Raspberry Pi (with SBCL and Emacs/Slime), and in most cases I don't have to change anything moving between my AMD64/Linux desktop, Intel/OSX MBP, and ARM64/Linux Raspberry Pi. And that's even when using CFFI bindings to C libraries.

I'm not sure SBCL's ARM backend is at the same level as the x86 backends, but it works well, and there's on going work on it.

I'm not sure I agree with you on most of this, but I think more competition in the cpu biz is always a good thing.

I'm excited. My #1 wish is a 16" MacBook Pro that ways 3 lbs or less. Take an iPad Pro, make it 16" instead of 12, add a keyboard, run MacOS. LG already makes 15.6" intel notebooks that weigh 3 lbs. Apple can do it too!

> One interesting question I think is outstanding - from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized, vs AMD64.

Hahaha, look for a user-agent at 1:44:26 :) They use old Intel Mac for a virtualization demo.

The main thing Apple has done to improve their A-series chips has been massive L2 caches.

I still major advantages of putting a A-series chip into a MacBook Pro.

1) There will be a much larger thermal and power draw envelope available to new A-series chip. I suspect we will see insane “boosting” clock speeds.

2) Incredible “at idle” performance well beyond what X86 can provide with on did GPU cores, which means a bit better battery life for that screen.

3) More opportunity for tightly integrated acceleration chips On die for codec, ML, and other hardware acceleration methods for Apple only software libraries.

4) Easy porting between iOS and macOS, and tvOS.

#3 will be the most significant.

> Rust seems behind on ARM, for instance; I bet that will change in the next year or two. I don’t imagine that developing Intel server binaries on an ARM laptop with Rust will be pleasant.

Umm what? Rust supports ARM as a first class citizen as does LLVM. They only list ARM as second class because it's not a desktop platform generally. https://forge.rust-lang.org/release/platform-support.html

Agree with you on some points, I’m really excited to see what’s next. I’m also betting on a new, and faster, MacBook maybe with a discounted price to incentive the migration?

About the virtualization, they will probably make it more efficient, resource wise? Some cloud providers are also offering ARM so...

Anxious to check the GPU performance too!

To add: Control Center on macOS and some other UI improvements hints for Mac w/ touchscreen?

Could we finally see a true BYOD, like Dex or using the improvements in Handoff?

I'm not sure virtualising ARM on Intel platforms will ever be performant enough to be usable. They will probably have to ship an emulator, and even then there will be issues as it'll be very difficult to emulate the strictness of ARM CPUs on non-ARM architectures, for things like unaligned memory accesses and replicating the memory model.

> Languages like Go with supremely simple cross architecture support might get a boost here.

Go's crypto libraries are heavily optimized on x86, not so on arm (see Phoronix Graviton2 benches).

We will have to wait and see how much of Apple's halo effect will contribute positively to optimized arm code.

Wont this move result in more software compatibility issues from developer side though? Like why would you buy the update if the developers don't want to move to the new platform or determine it's too big of a change now?

You've missed off possibly the biggest advantage of ditching Intel. A perfectly usable machine without jet engine fans and a scolded lap. I don't use Mac's, but I see this as good for the industry.

I think MacBooks can run heavy ML processes, but why not run those on separate devices with specific hardware for that? I'm thinking any kind of job you'd want to run on the GPU.

> Apple has a functional corporate culture that ships; adding complete control of the hardware stack in is going to make for better products, full stop.

One word, Catalina.

it's easy to resign iphone models every year. it's not as easy to increase chip performance every year. there's a lot of R&D involved, i think in the long run it'll be better but Apple will have to devote more resources into it. you can't just wish for specs. the manufacturers actually get the hard job of trying to make it.

Not a fan of Apple, but x86 is a mess and I'd love to see companies pushing for its replacement.

> Apple has a functional corporate culture that ships;

Well we've already seen things gets delayed and even canceled (AirPower).

Cook's Apple is more about supply chain (where he excels), so if indeed the silicon design works, they would be able to 'ship'.

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+f

I predict they'll have the same battery life. Any savings will be used to reduce the battery size.

Paid for by Apple?

“Apple’s own pro apps will be updated to support the company’s new silicon in macOS Big Sur, and the company is hoping developers will update their apps. “The vast majority of developers can get their apps up and running in a matter of days,” claims Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. []...

Microsoft is working on Office updates for the new Mac silicon, and Word and Excel are already running natively on the new Mac processors, with PowerPoint even using Apple’s Metal tech for rendering. Apple has also been working with Adobe to get these pro apps up and running on these new chips.“

So the bottom line is: “your previous tools won’t work, will have to be rewritten, the burden is on the developers so we can rake in more cash”

Great, customer focused, and completely altruistic move back in the days when they killed Nvidia cards on high-performance rendering and simulation machines (and everywhere else).

So, Apple has performance libraries that are better than what Intel has to offer? So, cross-platform applications are now again “passe”?

I don’t use my iPhone for working. Why would I want iOS Apps on my computer? So I can install Apple Mail instead of Outlook

Apple ported many Pro Apps to ARM , especially their Logic Pro, Photoshop and they were showcasing Maya on ARM. That is about as Pro as it gets for Mac.

That reads to me Apple isn't going to have Intel for some high end Pro machine. They intended to go all in with ARM. i.e There will be a Mac Pro with High TDP ARM Chip. I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel.

Question is,

1. They are going to design their own CPU for the whole range of Mac? up to 10W for MacBook, up to 45W for MacBook Pro. ~150W for iMac, ~ 250W for Mac Pro ? How is that financially feasible considering the volume of Mac Pro sold. Or do they intend to use those high TDP chip in their server farm / iCloud?

2. What happens to GPU? Having their own GPU for iMac and Mac Pro as well? Dual GPU options where Apple GPU for power efficiency? This feels like additional complexity.

3. Would it be like the PowerPC era where you will get a new iMac once you finish with the development kit?

Finally while I am excited for ARM Mac, at the same time I am also feeling a little sad. Good bye x86.

> What happens to GPU? Having their own GPU for iMac and Mac Pro as well? Dual GPU options where Apple GPU for power efficiency? This feels like additional complexity.

I think GPU scaling will be much harder than CPU, so whereas Apple can surpass Intel CPUs for all but the highest segments, putting together a standalone GPU will be hard and very interesting to see. For an entry-level GPU? No issues. But what about a midrange (AMD RX 5700XT or Nvidia 2070S)? And not to mention the top-tier Nvidia 2080ti.

The other unspoken risk is that while Apple may be vertically integrating its SOC, it still relies on a fab like TSMC. Intel's recent problem is rooted in their inability to move off legacy 14nm fabrication process. TSMC may have done great in 7nm and now to 5nm transition, but what happens if/when they stumble? Would Apple also want to acquire them or build its own fabs to mitigate this risk?

It seems (wasn't really that clear?) that Maya was running emulation? (as in, x64 binary). I don't think Maya's viewport on MacOS actually runs with Metal (it's still OpenGL), so I doubt it's a native port.

Did it do any CPU-intensive stuff (skinning, deformation), or was it just GPU-intensive viewing?

High-end VFX will be interesting for this with Apple (Maya, Houdini, Nuke) - already there was quite a lot of anger at OpenGL being deprecated and Vulcan not being officially supported. Another instruction set into the mix for highly-optimised apps (lots of SIMD code) is going to be quite annoying, especially for the CPU renderers (Arnold, Renderman, etc)...

> Logic Pro

Logic isn't worth much without plugins, and I expect many smaller developers not to port to ARM, and there's nobody to fill the gap in the first years. If that is indeed the case, Apple will begin losing market share where it currently reigns. When there's no pro software, the mac will be just an iPad with a keyboard. It's quite a gamble.

But I've been too pessimistic before.

>I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel.

Not much. If you bought that machine you didn't care about it much as you bought older hardware at a premium price-point. You bought it to use it right now without fussing and have accepted it's obsolescence in 2-4 years, as is quite normal for studios.

If you bought it as an IT enthousiast, well..why would you even do that?

I don't see Apple coming out with an ARM Mac Pro within 3 years anyway. Why would they do that? No upside for them, that market has to be won back first. Slowly start with laptops and iMac, focusing on consumers, get the OS in shape and third-party vendors accustomed to the platform first.

iPad-like performance is already fast enough for almost all consumers, and I'm sure Apple doesn't want to break with Intel on everything right away.

AFAIK, they're going to make their own GPU. A recruiter from Apple reached out to me a few weeks ago trying to poach me from my job at a large GPU manufacturer.

Re. the PPC era and whether it will be like that in the future, this is from a lowly web backend developers perspective, so I might be naive, but hopefully we've learned to build generic solutions without sacrificing performance, when it comes to things like this, and it doesn't devolve into a code that only runs on X-hardware type thing.

I think it's a more common problem to see things like the T2 security chip not being present on older hardware or hackintosh(unsupported) hardware, so if you're not running the right hardware you can't take advantage of a feature (AR in certain iPhones) or you won't have the performance advantage (Filevault encryption with T2 chips vs encrypted by CPU).

1. They explicitly said yes, there would be a whole range of CPUs that they're making. This isn't just "throw the phone CPU on a desktop," they'll have laptop class and desktop class CPUs that are different.

2. They're saying integrated. Whether they also throw Radeons on high-end desktops is probably not yet determined. (They have a two year roadmap for this rollout, and I think it's pretty obvious they'll start with the portables/iMacs where the benefits of ARM are more likely to outweigh the pain of change for more people.)

Inferring from the video announce plus guessing:

Will they have a wide TDP range of designs? Yes. On feasibility, there are two major components to the cost - first is the engineering cost for design. You can bet that these costs are not massive; Apple has roughly $200 billion cash on hand right now. Most of the work will be scaled up as part of their overall design process.

The second cost component is the Non-recurring engineering to get a mask-set made for the chips. A 7nm start right now costs maybe in the range of $20mm? If the Mac Pro is required to stand on its own feet financially, perhaps that will push out timing / push up cost. On the other hand, if one considers the cost of the top end chip to be a marketing cost, it’s literally a rounding error.

GPU - Apple is going to have their own GPUs, and no longer worry about AMD and Nvidia. They’ll have complete control of the hardware and software stack and control their own destiny. I would be very surprised to see dual GPU options.

They said "we expect the transition to take two years [...] we've still got some Intel Macs to show you soon [sic] [roughly what they said]" during the keynote.

This isn't just going to replace low-end machines; its every machine they sell, within two years. Probably starting with low-end, but moving up.

I'd assume that they'll still have AMD/NVidia GPUs as options if they truly plan to bring these CPUs to the Mac Pro market. There's no way that e.g. Animation studios will accept anything less than absolutely top-end performance. And upgradability too. I think Apple must know this.

Apple go down the Samsung route and license RDNA tech for their ARM GPUs - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-rdna-exynos-samsung-so...

> Apple ported many Pro Apps to ARM , especially their Logic Pro, Photoshop and they were showcasing Maya on ARM. That is about as Pro as it gets for Mac. > That reads to me Apple isn't going to have Intel for some high end Pro machine.

That conclusion seems a bit too far fetched from my point of view. There are many users that use Logic on a MBP and with Photoshop it's even more common to use it on a Laptop.

Sooner or later a ARM MacPro is comming but if i'd had to guess i'd say that will take a while. There were 6 years between trashcan and the current cheese grater. So maybe 2025 then ;)

> 2. What happens to GPU? Having their own GPU for iMac and Mac Pro as well? Dual GPU options where Apple GPU for power efficiency? This feels like additional complexity.

Nintendo Switch uses a nvidia gpu with a very slow and outdated arm processor. Yet, this allows it to run Rocket League, Witcher 3 etc.

Apple, might go with discrete GPU from nvidia/amd to pair it with their arm processors.

Re 1: I believe iCloud is hosted on Google Cloud, isn't it?

Maybe they’ll eventually use some Arm server chip on high end.

Maya was running using Rosetta 2 translation rather than being ported.

I gotta say: really slick presentation.

1) Before the demo even starts: all Apple apps, pro or casual? Already running. Microsoft Office? Already running. Adobe Creative Cloud? Already running. That's the vast majority of the Mac userbase right there.

2) No apparent hard cuts on the legacy. I was expecting them to not support x86 backwards compatibility if they could get away with it, but apparently they're committed. Even naming the technologies "Universal Binaries 2" "Rosetta 2" is a confident been-there-done-that-will-do-it-again presentation. Unlike last time around, there also doesn't seem to be a major removal of macOS APIs?

3) Acknowledging what kind of x86 stuff machines are used for by showing VMs right away, and (trying to?) show Docker right away. Is that the first Linux demo in an Apple keynote presentation? It was a Linux desktop environment, even.

Now it seems this ARM announcement was a bit rushed by design, flashing by the features without allowing a substantial look. So it's likely we're going to be dissappointed by x86 performance and having to say good bye to APIs (this for sure is the end of OpenGL right? edit: no [1]), but they do leave an impression of having their priorities of broad software support straight and a pretty seamless transition as far as you can get one.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/porting_your...

>Acknowledging what kind of x86 stuff machines are used for by showing VMs right away

I do believe they showed a Linux ARM VM. And not a x86 VM.

x86 VM's are probably going to take a massive QEMU performance tax. The positive news it the boost for the Linux ARM space, which will see a massive boost.

Games on Mac? Games on Mac with Windows Bootcamp? Yeah... Maybe buy a console or a second PC...

I am frankly surprised they did not ditch opengl and carbon.

I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers. Either raw power or at least power efficiency and projected battery life improvements. Seeing as this is a major reason for the transition (according to them), it feels very weird.

They're shipping a 'Development Transition Kit' Mac mini with an A12Z this week, so it's not like the numbers are going to stay private for a long time. Even if there's an NDA, someone's bound to break it.

There's no indication that the A12Z will be the chip that ships to consumers at the end of the year. So honestly it'd be a bit out of character to boast about the specific performance numbers of a pre-release dev kit chip - especially when that chip has already had Geekbench run on it for a while: https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-pro-12-9-inch...

It was pretty much the same with PowerPC to Intel...

Steve Jobs demoed OSX first. Then surprised everybody by saying, OSX had lived a double life in a secret building for many years (with photo), and that he had been running on an Intel Pentium 4 during the demo all morning. Nothing about performance.

There was also a developer system back then; an Intel Pentium 4 in a PowerMac case.

In a lot of ways, this is far more ambitious, and could mean a lot more for Apple long term, but...

... The one thing that hit me the most was, how impressed I was with Apple back then, and how excited I was that a company could do this. Steve Jobs presented it really well, but this time it felt quite flat.

... I really, wish they worked a bit on their showman-ship. They rushed through so many small things, and the presentation felt unnatural. Like they have all over-rehearsed it, but are still reading while presenting (you could even see eye-movements). It is just too smooth, too generic, and a bit too polished.

Please slow down, focus on only the most interesting bits, and give us time to digest it...

It wasn't just lack of performance numbers, there were no actual products announced. They would have had to tip their hand on a lot of info that is not helpful to customers or their ability to keep selling Intel stuff.

One big question though will be how this devkit benchmarks against the current maxed Intel mac mini. I'm curious if GPU performance beats the current BlackMagic eGPU. (rx 580)

I don't think they even used the term "ARM" at any point. They're calling it "Apple's silicon," and they acknowledged it's the same as what iPhone and iPad use. But I thought it was interesting how they seemed to avoid the term. It's probably just a matter of avoiding getting too "techy" and marketing.

The A12Z is already faster than every tablet and phone in existence. Depending on the benchmark, it smokes about 80% of off the shelf PC hardware.

They really don't need to do that much.

> I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers.

It makes sense that they wouldn't:

1. Its dev hardware, not final production hardware. They'll want to compare the A13 or A14 (or whatever SoC they finally use) for benchmarks.

2. Until the apps are optimized, it doesn't make sense for Apple to put itself in the position of bad press with premature figures.

The A12Z is already shipping in the latest iPad Pro, so it's not like its performance is some unknown quantity: benchmarks are aplenty... Although I guess this dev kit could run at a different frequency, and have more/less memory bandwidth. Performance should still roughly be that of the iPad Pro.

The A12Z is itself only a small update on the A12X from 2018, so it's basically two years behind whatever will ship in actual ARM Macs this fall...

Apple will almost assuredly have a dedicated event later this year where they will announce new hardware.

Apple has development kits running in modified Apple TV's. This is a chip that has essentially been out for a few years in iPad Pros. Why would Apple announce numbers based on this? It also assumes Apple will ship future laptops without fans or ports, which is how the development kit is coming out.

Apple will most likely have an A14X out later this year in at least one laptop. That's going to be significantly newer and more advanced than the A12Z in development kits.

From what I understood the transition is of strategic nature. Less dependency on third party suppliers for vital components.

The performance and/or battery gains is almost incidental.

I found in the Press release the cost of the Transition Kit: $500. Not bad at all.

> I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers.

It's the CPU in the iPad Pro, performance numbers are out there in the wild. The only big change is the RAM. This isn't a retail product, it's a developer kit. When they release retail Macs I'm sure there will be some performance numbers.

They said the first ARM macs are coming at the end of this year, so even if there's an NDA it won't be long until we'll see the real numbers.

I wonder if they're holding them for the actual hardware release in Fall? They could still be deciding the tradeoff between battery life and raw power.

It's not a product release - it's an announcement of direction for the Mac product line and the Mac OS platform. Once they have hardware with ARM processors for purchase they'll be speaking to the processor specs and how much better they are at power management.

They had to announce this early to allow developers to get ready. If they could have gotten away with not announcing early they would have. Obviously (if all apps would automatically run natively on ARM without any developer involvement) they would have first announced this with an actual new Mac.

That, however, was not an option. So they have to tread carefully in what they say and they also have to be a bit careful about showing off too much.

They only had to tout the benefits of ARM insofar as to placate the fears of consumers (their Rosetta story plus virtualization story helped there) and to provide some reasonable justification to actually make devs at least a bit excited, even though they have to do additional work.

Plus: No ARM Mac (except the transition kit) currently exists. It’s not even clear if the first Mac they will announce is even finished yet, if only internally. And even if it is finished: Do you think going on stage now and talking about a new MacBook Air that has twice the performance and 50% more battery life as the current MacBook Air – oh, and you can get one in December – would be a good idea?

This is Apple’s tightrope walk to avoid too much of an Osborne effect. I think they are ok with some Osborne effect (if only because they know that even if no one buys an Intel Mac ever again during the next two years transition time they will not go bankrupt, so far from it) but you don’t have to provoke one, right?

I expect plenty of numbers and comparisons when they introduce the actual first ARM Mac.

It doesn't seem weird at all, and the fact that they're sending out devices on the A12Z seems to be intentional sandbagging: they know that people are going to benchmark and the results will likely be simply comparable to current hardware (from a performance perspective...energy efficiency will clearly be much better). When they release the actual devices, where their power and thermal profile is dramatically higher than an iPad Pro, it will actually wow.

Those numbers would be meaningless without knowing what the actual geometry of the internals will be, because cooling is a major limiting factor for laptop processor performance.

Don’t expect performance. The Intel DTK was Prescott based (while AMD had great dual cores and Intel were lagging). Then they’ve released their Core series that started from mobile and had great performance.

I guess they did some homework before ditching Intel. The big question Is if they have enough headroom for manufacturing reliable chips with sustained high power.

Have they ever given performance numbers that weren't like "up to 400% faster" in selected tasks?

A12Z isn't a consumer chip for macOS. That's why you aren't going to get benchmarks from Apple.

They are also being very very coy with what they have under their sleeves because of small of an upgrade A13 was over A12.

Same thing happened during the intel transition. The first consumer chips were dual cores, but the DTK was Pentium 4s

If A12Z is based on the A12 they will never make consumer products with it but instead take a new A14

> I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers

That's not this presentation - when they actually ship hardware (transition kit not included) - then they'll talk performance.

How do I get into the DTK program? We produce a compiler for macOS and obviously will need access to this.

I looked all over developer.apple.com and didn't find anything.

They are probably still working on ARM specific optimizations and benchmarks, and they prefer to wait to show their results, to maximize the impact.

We pretty much know it'll perform fine in native programs, the only real question is how well the x86 translation layer performs.

Why show performance numbers on a machine that will not be going to production?

maybe it's about profits not performance?

The major reason for the transition is higher margins, plain and simple.

For customers, both average users and developers it will be a pain with little to be gained.

> I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers.

The fact that all the demoes were on their top-of-line most-expensive machines fell very weird to me. "Look at this amazing performance" would be great if the demo was on a Macbook Air.

I really wonder what this says about the x86 platform going forward.

Mobile completely passed it by.

I’ve been seeing more hype about ARM servers for a while with AWS Graviton instances, the new #1 supercomputer in the TOP500, etc.

And of course today we see that Apple plans to transition their Macs to their own ARM chips. Even Microsoft made an ARM-based Windows/Surface product but it didn’t seem to amount to much. I wonder if they’ll want to make another stab at it seeing Apple’s direction with strong vertical integration.

While I don’t think x86 as a platform is going away anytime soon, I feel like its market share and by extension its relevance will slowly dwindle over the next decade or two. Interesting times.

I too don't see x86 disappearing soon but it feels like the world has changed and that change is not positive for Intel.

We've been used to x86 dominance on the desktop and servers for so long that I think a future where there are two architectures with critical mass and one of the architectures can be licensed by a number of firms is hard to imagine.

There will be some short term effort and pain but it must surely be a better competitive environment than we have now.

The historic / current Intel and AMD duopoly has surely not been healthy.

Intel has either squandered the tech and we will see drastic improvements soon or possibly they’ll fall closer toward the dustbin of history. I suspect the later since they’ve been stuck at various points of specifications for a decade plus. Or they do something novel for once. I wouldn’t count them out of a breakthrough into new architectures/fab processes entirely.

It was about time. The architecture has so much technical baggage. I don't even think it was intended to last that long.

x86 is only dead because CISC is dead. Now we just have to wait for Intel to go "full IBM" and try to ban people from writing emulators...

I'd suggest avoiding either hyping or dismissing the new processors. We don't have performance numbers for a real model, and until we do, we know very little.

The thing we can talk about is Apple's strategic direction. The good version has Apple releasing a notably superior general purpose computer, maybe even gaining more marketshare in the process. The bad version has the Mac turning into an iOS development station. The fact they showed a game of all things does give some encouragement.

Key questions:

1. How open the new OS/Models will be, and how much developer support we get. The more open, the more likely is will be a powerful general purpose computer.

2. Whether Apple can keep riding the tiger regarding processors. I'm sure they did their due diligence, and the new processors will be powerful enough. But x86 isn't dead yet, AMD is capable and even Intel isn't dead - they still have a hand to play.

If Apple can keep at this, developers will flock in and we'll see nice stuff. If x86 (re)gains its momentum, Apple will be left behind, but they will be unlikely to switch back (unifying processors with the iPhone has a lot of advantages for Apple), and we end up with the bad future.

Apple took a chance today, we'll see whether it pays.

Wasn't Linus who said that the reason ARM hasn't taken over the server market is because there are no ARM chips in developer machines?

I'm curious if Apple's move is going to finally help ARM succeed on the server side.

Docker and Linux virtualization. Fat binaries to make it easy to update Mac apps. iPhone and iPad apps. Rosetta to run Intel apps that aren’t updated.

Apple is gonna knock this out if the park.

There's gonna be a weird moment soon where developing docker images for Armbian hardware (Pi and friends) is going to be more straightforward on a Mac than developing docker images for Intel servers.

I wonder what this will do to Electron. If the iOS apps are really 1:1 on macOS, then the need to maintain an electron app will probably diminish. As long as they both support the same OS APIs I can see devs that can learn a new language (Swift) ditch Electron.

It already has. I'll Def try to get my hands on the A12Z Mac Mini. The GPU performance should be vastly better than existing Mac Mini options.

Hopefully MacOS support for x86 won't just be 3-5 years from whenever the new ARM models come out.

I have invested quite a bit into the Mac/Apple ecosystem. A big part of that reason was the longevity of the hardware, along with good resale values.

I hope they do right by their existing Mac customers. As of right now I don't have a strong reason to switch away.

I also hope that Apple does not blow this transition from a quality perspective. Their design choices and attention to detail have left a quite a few things to be desired in the past few generations of hardware.

My suspicion is that new macOS releases will continue to support Intel-based Macs for at least three years after the last Intel-based Mac ships. New OS X releases only supported PowerPC for about two years after the last PowerPC Mac shipped, which is shorter than I'd expected, but Apple under Tim Cook has been a little less aggressive about ending support for old hardware, despite what people often seem to think. MacOS Big Sur supports hardware going back to 2013, and iOS 14 supports hardware back to 2015's iPhone 6s. (And iOS versions keep getting updates for a year after their replacements ship, while macOS versions tend to be updated for two.)

As for the quality, reply hazy, ask again later? The whole butterfly keyboard of laptops turned out to be a fiasco, and Apple's long-held tendency to push their industrial design right to the edge of thermal and material tolerances got kind of crazy-making in the last few years. Yet so far, I'm really liking my MacBook Air 2020, and the only thing I'd absolutely change about it if I were given a magic wand would be to add a third USB-C port on the right-hand side. I appreciated much of Jony Ive's design work, but I'm hopeful that with him gone, the drive to prioritize minimalism over functionality will be at least toned down.

> I have invested quite a bit into the Mac/Apple ecosystem. A big part of that reason was the longevity of the hardware, along with good resale values.

Well, given that demand for x86 probably won't go away in 3-5 years and that Apple generally makes it impossible to downgrade OSX on new machines, dropping x86 support might actually increase the resale value of existing hardware.

Hopefully, but PowerPC Support was just 4 years.

I searched this thread for Thunderbolt and USB and nothing.

The only way this can work if they implement USB 4. That's earlier than expected but not by much. USB 4 came out last September and everyone was guesstimating 18 months before the first systems ship with it. AMD shipping it with the Ryzen 4xxx laptop chips would've been a really big win but apparently it was too early. And now, as with Thunderbolt, it seems Apple will be the first.

As far as I understand these things, you can connect a TB3 device to a full featured USB 4 port (which Intel plans to market as TB4 just to increase confusion as if there isn't of that around USB C). Not necessarily the other way around: the USB 4 bus while compatible with the TB3 bus, can contain USB packets, TB3 only carried PCIe and DP packets.

Areca has an amazing SAN-in-a-box product: it's a 24 bay 4U RAID box which allows as many as nine TB3 hosts to connect to it at the same time and it's immensely popular with various movie / TV show production. It's less than 10K USD which is an absolute bargain for the capabilities. Consider the 2K price of just one 40gbps Ethernet to TB3 adapter which you'd need for a traditional SAN.

Devices like these make TB3 compatibility an absolute must for Macbooks.

You'll notice all the demos of macOS Big Sur were shown using a Pro XDR Display, connected to hardware that was later revealed to be the MacMini+A12Z/Developer Transition Hardware. And during the Maya demo, it was a Pro XDR Display explicitly connected to the Developer hardware.

Which is interesting, because the Pro XDR Display can only be driven TB3 [1].

So Apple figured out the licensing for a TB3 controller chip to work in this design (which funny enough would be licensing that IP from Intel), or they are using USB4/TB4, or something else I'm not smart enough to think of.

1- https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/specs/

You can have thunderbolt controllers without an Intel processor, there’s nothing that precludes it from working.

I have to wonder if Apple even needs to worry about TB on the Apple Silicon computers moving forward.

Now that they're going down the path towards controlling everything in their computer hardware, I can see Apple creating a new proprietary high performance interface to replace TB and use USB for everything else that requires interoperability.

Apple is already running USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 with it's IPAD, so that's not a stretch.

The DTK has two USB-C ports (10 Gbps) and two USB-A Ports (5 Gbps) - so, they definitely have a USB story.

Rosetta 2 - the interesting bit was that it was going to pre-translate binaries instead of at runtime. The implications for actual VM emulation is that Rosetta won't work for run time environments like OS emulation. They touched on it briefly with the emulation technologies bit, but it looks like it will be separate from, and likely much less performant than Rosetta.

They explicitly said that it can perform both static and dynamic translation for JITs. I wouldn't be surprised if there is substantial hardware support too.

The emulation thing seemed to me to be Hypervisor.framework for ARM, as they showed Linux and Docker running (which both run on ARM), but not Windows (which an average user may be more interested in).

> Rosetta won't work for run time environments like OS emulation

They literally showed a demo of Parallels with Ubuntu for Intel running inside it.

The same slide also mentioned supporting JIT translation (for x86 web browsers and Java), so Rosetta doesn't run only at installation time.

It's doing both AOT and also hooks JIT compilers. They mentioned JS engines as an example for the latter.

Tim Cook just said they have new intel macs in the pipeline. Those will go over like a lead balloon.

I wouldn't be so sure, there are a fair number of people who want a machine that will run x86 for various reasons. Windows support/ Linux support. Even considering how impressive x86 VMs looked in the demo, lots of people will prefer using intel silicon for guaranteed compatibility.

If the PowerPC to Intel transition was any indication, they'll do just fine. Most consumers won't care, or will want to wait until Apple works out the kinks.

To put it a different way: the initial sales of the ARM-based chips won't be as strong as you think they might be, or as wide spread.

Having both Intel and ARM based systems in the market will even out the sales.

History is repeating itself, it's worth reviewing the previous transitions before making assumptions.

- https://everymac.com/mac-answers/macintel-faq/why-did-apple-...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_...

- https://tedium.co/2020/06/16/apple-powerpc-intel-transition-...

- https://mashable.com/2016/06/29/intel-macs-at-10/

I was waiting for Craig to say that every Mac with a T-series chip could be used as a dev platform, since they're pretty strong on their own. Oh well. Maybe to smooth things over they'll ship an A-series co-processor with those Macs.

Apple released a bunch of PPC Macs after they announced the switch to Intel, so this isn't unprecedented.

I'm in the market for a new laptop, and if I knew how long the Intel macs would be supported, I could see myself picking one up. Unfortunately, nothing was said about that so I guess I'm holding off.

On the contrary, I'm tempted to buy the latest Intel Macbook Pro so I can stick with Intel for a few more years. Whether or not I'll end up doing so depends a lot on how good the new ARM-based laptops are in terms of performance (esp. wrt virtualizing x86/x64 VMs). But the current lineup, however imperfect, is mature and a known quantity, in contrast to the unknowns surrounding the first generation of machines with the new architecture.

They said the same with the Intel transition, and also projected a two year timeline. The transition was over much sooner than that and there weren't any new PPC products to speak of, as far as I remember. And of course, PPC Macs only got one more version of OS X before support for them was dropped.

They're just trying not to Osbourne themselves too badly. They want you to keep buying Intel Macs, but who's to say how long they'll keep support.

Apple announced the Mac in 1984 and sold Apple // based computers until 1993.

Apple announced the PPC in 1994 and sold new 68K Macs for 3 years at least.

Personally I'd rather grab one of those as my daily driver, and wait a few years for all the issues to get worked out during the transition.

Those are the rumored "iPad Pro" aesthetic Macs which were initially rumored to be released today.

And I reckon those of us who just bought a shiny new Intel Mac in the past few months might be questioning our decision. Should have held on to that 2010 MBP one more year?

Maybe it depends on the pricing for the x86 vs. ARM macs. If the ARM machines are significantly cheaper the x86 sales will probably suffer quite a bit. As someone else in this thread said, most people have no idea what processor is in their computer. They just care that it's cheaper and runs all of their stuff (browsers, photos, messages, etc.)

The Mac Pro (and possibly the iMac Pro) will still be Intel for a while. I expect the portable lineups to get the ARM treatment first (as they are the most similar with the iPhone/iPad in terms of power requirements), and then scale it up for actual high-power desktop CPUs.

I wonder if these intel based ones are going to be on the high end of the Macbook Pro lineup or iMac.

Apple could continue to ship arm/x86 machines in parallel for years if the fat binaries+emulation work well. If say the desktop mac pro maintains an edge somehow, or Intel comes back from their current slump in 5 years this could go on indefinitely.

(that probably totally depends on whether Intel actually designs a desktop chip for the first time in nearly two decades, rather than continuing with their current sell server chips as poorly designed desktops path)

Do you think most people know who makes the CPU inside their Apple machine? Go into an Apple store and take a survey. I almost guarantee no one will know.

Apple has a strong story for x64, going forward, which I think will ease fears.

They aren’t rushing x64 out the door.

Apple released new mac minis and powermacs when they announced the intel transition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Apple should just go with AMD 7nm cpu.

It was a backup plan if the Apple Silicon was delayed. Might as well still execute on it.

That is so people don’t stop buying Macs into end of year

The last Macs that will support Boot Camp will be the best selling Macs for years.

Much like the 2015 Macbook Pro I expect you'll be able sell it for more than you paid for it years later.

What is really sad is that I don't think the majority of Apple consumers really understand what this means for the Intel macs in the long run. I fear a number of people will buy them not realizing they have a very limited lifespan.

They will lock down their PCs like the iPhone. Good luck booting anything other than macos or getting you Mac fixed anywhere other than Apple.

No thanks, switching back to Linux. I'm done with this crap.

The Mac is the Mac. Apple Silicon doesn’t change that. You can set boot args, disable security, and other things the Mac has historically supported. In fact these things are required to develop 3rd-party kernel extensions which are still supported on Apple Silicon.

Uhhhh when have you been able to pop out a CPU in a laptop and replace it yourself? A decade, at least?

> They will lock down their PCs like the iPhone.

Maybe, maybe not. Where did you hear that?

They are going to get the Apple ecosystem even more closed and make desktop consumer platform like iPhone. Steve Jobs' dream coming true. I have never seen Linux running great on a ARM consumer device (like android tablets, smartphones) except ChromeOS devices. The big issues being unavailable graphics and other drivers and lack of ACPI (devicetree has to be provided separately). Some attempts were able to get Linux on framebuffer with some X patches but system upgrades required special care and having just framebuffer is slow and useless. And that is what will be achievable at most. ARM means freedom for manufacturers, not for consumers/end users! I suspect Apple will also put there multiple proprietary accelerators and specialized chips to make things faster by offloading some work which won't be accessible from Linux, of course.

> They will lock down their PCs like the iPhone.

I have heard this claim for 10 years now. Still hasn't come true.

The question is will I be able to install Debian on it? Is the bootloader going to be locked like iPhones? Is the ISA going to be different from Aarch64 on commodity ARM boards? Will the only supported compiler be Apple LLVM?

This is a demo so take with huge grain of salt, but the x86 performance looks solid... better than I expected considering it's based on an iPad CPU.

So, if I install numpy via conda on a Mac now, it's backed by Intel MKL and is thus amazingly fast. What will it be replaced with? Has anyone at Apple thought about use cases like this?..

First mac with Apple chip by the end of the year.

Also Apple is committing to a long term pipeline of Intel chips. This makes sense since so many apps will take years to transition. At the same time, they're willing to put their own chips side by side with Intel and they believe people will voluntarily switch. I'm looking forward to the benchmarks.

I was interested by the GPU that was mentioned in the slide, does this mean that Apple is thinking that they have the expertise to take on Nvidia and AMD in that space?

When I was a young engineer, I thought management didn't matter. Man, has the Apple/AMD/Intel saga over the last 10 years proven me wrong. 10 years ago Intel had a decisive lead in talent/architecture/process. Now it hasn't been able to ship a whole new architecture or process since 2015 and is behind both Apple and AMD. Wow.

Is this the end of Linux as the host OS on Mac hardware? It's been really difficult for many years anyway, so for essentially hasn't been practical for a long time. I know there are plenty of working ARM builds of Linux so if the new Mac chips are ARM compliant then the ARM linux builds should work. I would think Apple has their own proprietary extensions or something tho, otherwise why make their own? Just very high manufacturing standards?

Using ARM will break Intel's optimized libraries.

Intel has been giving developers free libraries for many years which use code specifically optimized for Intel processors. It seems likely that any app that uses one of these libraries will break. Even if Apple's emulator or compiler can work around these optimizations, Intel might release new versions of the libraries that will not work on an ARM processor.

Also, even ordinary changes to MacOS tend to break music apps and plugins. I would expect a change to a new CPU architecture to cause havoc there.

Any app that uses assembly code optimizations that use unique Intel instructions seems likely to break as well. Maybe Apple has perfectly emulated all Intel CPU instructions, but that seems very complex and how often does new complex software work perfectly? Having to buy/upgrade apps to run on ARM may be necessary. And will drivers for USB and thunderbolt peripherals all just work on ARM?

I'm personally much more worried about the power Apple will gain from switching their hardware to ARM. This gives them such immense power, allowing them to create an even stronger walled garden environment. For all we know they could force the system to only run Mac OS?

Is this goodbye to choosing your own operating system now? Are the only people Apple cares about web and app developers? Are kernel engineers forgotten about? What about low-level hackers who like to tinker with their hardware or poke around in UEFI?

I'm more worried than excited about this.

MacMini with an A12 chip. Available now as a part of a developer kit. Will be fun to see what that can do.

The terms of receiving a transition device are now available [0]. As expected, receivers of the device essentially sign away all rights to show/benchmark the device.

> Section 2.2 No Other Permitted Uses

> ... You agree that neither You nor Your Authorized Developers will:

> ...

> (d) display, demonstrate, video, photograph, make any drawings or renderings of, or take any images or measurements of or run any benchmark tests on the Developer Transition Kit (or allow anyone else to do any of the foregoing), unless separately authorized in writing by Apple;

> (e) discuss, publicly write about, or post any reactions to or about the Developer Transition Kit (or Your use of the Developer Transition Kit), whether online, in print, in person, or on social media, unless separately authorized in writing by Apple;

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/terms/universal-app-quick-start-...

Apple has a chance here to go all in and make Apple ARM platform what Intel is today and standard ARM wasn't.

If they came out and said here's an open Mac platform with the ability to run macOS, Windows or Linux , open hardware specs, open source drivers and the ability to install whatever you want wherever you want it, I think most people will back it even though initially it'll be painful from a performance and transition standpoint.

But knowing Apple of the recent past or just be more and more closed, limited and Apple or nothing deal.

The aarch64 ISA has left cruft and legacy than x64, with all unoptimal support for the complete history of SIMD evolution over several decades...

On one side, I think this switch is a good thing for the industry, as I always believed that ARM was a better choice and that we should get rid of the legacy at some point.

On the other hand, Apple is again tempted to play in their own garden, with a complete disregard of standards and interoperability. They're doing that with Metal, they will certainly do the same with their custom silicon.

Beware this is an explicitly long migration. They mentioned it's supposed to take two years but when Apple switched to Intel back in 2005 I remember buying my very first MacBook one year later and still many apps were not available, conversion was everywhere etc (I believe this is why they announced Office right away). I am really excited, but I wouldn't buy a new full-apple-soc hardware until the end of next year for the sake of compatibility, and most importantly, rock solid stability.

I hope it works out for them, at least they are pushing envelope a bit more for a change.

The best fit is for Macbooks I think - low power and being able to run iOS software is pretty nice.

For real heavy lifting (6k or 8k editing in Resolve, with raw video codecs, or heavy duty 3D tasks) I don't think I'll be changing from a desktop with AMD Ryzen and top end Nvidia in the next 2 years. Apple high end GPUs in particular are a question mark.

But Apple will probably get there eventually with their own chips - would not put it past them.

Reminds me of a recent LTT video where Linus suspected that the reason Apple was severely under utilising Intel CPUs on their Macs by having poor thermals could be because they wanted to release their own silicon for future Macs and have them compare favourably against previous Intel based Macs.

Looks like the devkits are $500 and need to be sent back at the end of the year. Also curious that the name ARM wasn't mentioned even once. I wonder if that's just marketing or whether they're plotting to do their own ISA at some point in the future also.

It's interesting that their official virtualization support (in the demo) is Parallels.

I was seriously considering upgrading my 2012 MacBook to the new 16" model soon, but now I wonder what kind of longevity or support I can expect from that hardware...

Will BootCamp continue to be supported for the next ten years on my June 2019 MacBook Pro so I can install an operating system that continues to develop new features with the assumption I'm running on x86-64?

Assuming they build the new Macs around the SoC - does this effectively kill any hope of dual boot support for Linux/Windows etc. It's not just the ARM processor in there, those SoCs have a bunch of Apple proprietary stuff (inc. GPU) that I very much doubt will have open source drivers.

I know the 2016-2020 macs are pretty much terrible for Linux anyway due to hardware issues (audio, keyboard, wifi....) so it's no surprise there - but I fear this shift to "Apple Silicon" effectively kills it.

Interesting to see Big Sur + iOS merging. It's the opposite of what MS attempted in some ways. MS had a completely different look and feel on the phone and tried to shoe-horn it into Windows 8 in one release, whereas Apple have gradually moved things between the desktop and phone in both directions (dock, curved icons, notifications), and gradually aligned the two.

Maybe one more release until they're merged completely.

> Apple will release the first Mac with Apple silicon end of this year, and it expects the transition to take two years.

That's more than twice as long as the transition from PPC. Sounds like they've not yet figured out how to do high-end. Hopefully, they won't be as quick to drop support on the $6k 2019 Mac Pro as they were on the 2005 Power Mac G5 quad (<4 years from release to unsupported by OS X).

The real story here, I think, is that Apple is making moves to end the bifurcation of their product line. Having the same ISA in both lines means eventually we'll see the lines between them blur.

Whether that's good for consumers remains to be seen -- I fear it may lead to Macs whose architecture is locked down in a manner similar to iOS devices. That would be a worrying trend.

It's amazing that in their history of making computers Apple has used the 6502/65816, the 68k series, the PowerPC, and now ARM. And along the way there were backwards compatibility options for all of them (although not many people bought and used the Apple II compatibility cards for the Mac, they were really two separate user bases).

It is kind of satisfying in a way to see the ARM architecture come full circle and back to the 'home computer' segment it started in. I look forward to seeing someone port RISC-OS to a Mac, I'm sure it will happen. :-)

I was surprised to hear that the transition would take two years. I was expecting it to take a shorter duration considering Apple’s experience with transitions and the performance levels of Apple Silicon (AFAIK, at least single core performance has been leagues ahead of other ARM processors on smartphones and tablets).

I don’t know what other people consider as the lifetime of a Mac (meaning the number of years they’d use a still-working Mac before deciding to buy a new one), but I do wonder just how long Apple’s promise of “supporting Intel Macs for years to come” will turn out to be. Things are surely a lot different now than they were in 2005, especially with much better hardware (and the full transition to 64 bit everywhere).

The demo of Rosetta 2, however convoluted or staged it may have seemed to some, was quite impressive to me.

I really want to know what will happen to x86 virtualization.

For me, running Windows in a VM was the killer Mac app. There's always one or two Windows applications that don't have good Mac equivalents. I spent a good portion of my career as a Windows developer working on Mac with a Windows VM.

Here is a bit of history of the migration to Intel based CPUs.

"Apple's initial press release indicated the transition would begin by June 2006, and finish by the end of 2007, but it actually proceeded much more quickly. The first generation Intel-based Macintoshes were released in January 2006 with Mac OS X 10.4.4 Tiger, and Steve Jobs announced the last models to switch in August 2006, with the Mac Pro available immediately and with the Intel Xserve available by October 2006.[2] The Xserve servers were available in December 2006.[3]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_...

Curious how this will effect "the developer experience" considering that cloud instances are also transforming to ARM based processors.

what makes me sad is that while Apple has done very well with these major transitions, it leaves behind instances where (for me) a completely unique application gets left in behind. I currently maintain an only system 7 computer for software that is incompatible with system 8 or 9. A MDD G4 running System 9 for software that won't run on OSX, and a Mac Pro running 10.6.8 to run PPC OSX application (through Rosetta.) I haven't upgraded to Catalina because I have some applications that will never make the transition to 64bit, and now I'll have to maintain something to keep intel compatibility on the table (assuming Apple EOLs Rosetta 2 like they did Rosetta.)

This maybe a naïve question, so feel free to educate me.

If more software developers now need to target ARM architecture, does that mean that it will be easier to port software to other hardware, such as the Raspberry Pi, or is it not that simple?

The transition plan (dev tools, universal binaries, Rosetta 2, performance under Rosetta) looked really solid if I'm being honest. We'll see how they execute it but I'm optimistic that this will be smooth.

I think this is RIP to the Mac Pro for anyone that cares about extensibility. I can't see Apple making a board with a socketed CPU of their own silicon. I'd even say something like RAM would be a stretch.

I was about to go get myself new MacBook Pro 16" w/ few upgrades (~4k) and now I'm not even sure anymore... does it make sense to have latest Intel powered computer or wait for ARM based version?

goodbye hackintosh.. They were fun.

It will be interesting if one very big company can keep the whole stack going.. Even ps4/xbox went to the common architecture of x86. It could pay off big in price/performance but its risky..

after waiting for years for anyone to replace x86, with a better design, nobody could (Not even intel).

Is it just me or is this just the beginning of the ultimate walled garden?

For me as a developer by far the biggest concern is definitely technical alignment with production infrastructure. It has been such a boon in the last few years to be able to fire up docker and run to such a large extent the exact stack that ships to production. It's very unclear to me how close an alignment it will now be possible to have on future MacBook Pro's in this way. Between that and lack of nVidia support, it's definitely going to give me a significant push towards a non-Apple laptop for my next purchase.

Commenters here seem to be focused on performance while doing what x86 chips do. They're missing the point. That performance is good enough.

Top left on the arch slide: audio engine. Other on-chip blocks: camera compute, neural engine, machine learning accelerator.

This is about advancing the state of the art in personal digital assistants. The Mac change is in service of the iPhone.

I'm excited. Digital assisstants have stagnated for a long time, because of internet latency and lack of dedicated silicon (and perhaps privacy concerns). This is the way forward.

I'm too old for this. That's great. But what's more important to me is:

- Apple being hostile to developers: app approvals (Hey)

- Apple hardware being hard or impossible to upgrade

- MacOS turning into iOS (don't want)

They talked about virtualization but they only showed Parallels Desktop. Is just a virtualization layer for x86 on ARM or are they going to provide something like Hyper V on Windows?

PowerPC = best at the time because IBM was a researchy CPU engineering powerhouse, but then got outclassed by Intel. AMD forced Intel to release its 1 GHz CPU a year ahead of schedule and generally pushed x86 ahead of PPC.

Apple/ARM = best now, because Apple's vast capital from iPhone success has allowed it to build a world-class CPU engineering team from scratch. Building the end products at the same company gives them integration that can't be matched by other companies.

For those of us long around enough to remember, the switch to intel was really smooth with a good balance of quick adoption and solid emulation for legacy apps. I am not team Mac anymore but IMHO they did it as smoothly as auch a major change could be conducted. I have no idea where this will take the ecosystem. But apart from pissing off power users (developers mostly) and deprecating intel based hardware in the resale market I would not worry too much.

Now Apple has reached the integration that Commodore had: they made all the processors (CPU, graphics chip, sound chip, interface adapters) for their Commodore 64 and other 8-bit machines, and for the AMIGA.

I’m worried it will bring even more close control by them of what we run and how we run it on those computers, but having lots of custom chips (many of them in one package) for all kinds of things with a unified memory architecture is amazing, a modern AMIGA.

Annoying that there probably won't be any more Hackintoshes, unless we get ARM desktops.

Now will Qualcomm feel a little more competition or not? There chips are slow in mobiles and they are slow in PCs, compared to Apple's processors.

I almost didn't want to upvote this because it was at 486 points.

I'm sure anything close to the same performance as the Intel chips will have better battery life, especially since they can put in as fine-grained support for throttling and idling as they want. These should cost them loads less per unit than what Intel's selling them, too. They could cut prices a bit and still have higher margins.

I reckon this move will drive an arrow straight through the entire desktop market.

Why would I say that? Because the assumption desktop developers have made for decades is that Wintel/Lintel is the norm, everything else is a side dish. And Macs since their Intel shift have conformed to this, if not in terms of API, then certainly in the core architecture decisions. And that means that you design the software "for x86". If you try to run Linux software on a Chromebook you'll often have a nasty experience with these assumptions making things break. And nobody is paying much attention to Win10 on ARM chips.

But now you have a top-down mandate from Apple, which is in a strong position to direct the desktop platform again, possibly the strongest it's ever had. Everyone who follows Apple knows that they tend to obsolete things quickly; they have played this game before. The move they've made is to usher all the developers, not just the mobile ones, to ARM. And that means throwing out a substantial part of old codebases optimized for many generations of Intel chips. It pressures the Linux junkies to be more cross-platform, which in turn topples over some assumptions around Linux desktops themselves. The major distributions will scramble to support Apple hardware.

And a consequence of the assumptions in Linux changing is that you can start doing some ground-up rethinking too. "We're redoing this part of the codebase, let's change the design." And with Apple support may also come Surface support, Chromebook support - giving all the ARM platforms equal treatment. So it's likely that multiple operating systems will see a generational shift, not just Apple's. A big chain of events that will explode some projects and leave others untouched.

And then at the end of that, we might have RISC-V hardware coming over the horizon.

I really wonder if this will result in the Mac-ification of iPad. Would love to finally run a MacOS environment on a tablet.

I wonder what impact this will have for developers using non-Apple development tools. For example, I'm a C# .NET Core developer using Visual Studio. I'm hoping that the architecture shift won't be too disruptive to people who choose to use development environments other than Apple's Xcode.

Apple wants to put its users in chains and keep them locked to the platform for life. It is important to keep the system closed to third parties like independent repairers and other operating systems. Once they have their own CPU they can kill off virtualization and hackintosh even though they have no impact on their revenue and make it impossible to run other operating systems on their hardware. Push all software into an app store.

I thought the Mac was amazing back in the mid-80s. I was very impressed with the ipod touch and ipad. I owned an early unibody macbook pro. I can understand the benefits of the closed platform with everything micro-managed by Apple. But it is suffocating. I am more than willing to give up trivial advantages for relatively open hardware platforms and software.

Besides native apps from Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe (Universal 2), the demo included Maya and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Rosetta 2), and Parallels Desktop (unspecified virtualization improvements). I couldn't tell if the guest O/S was Debian for x84-64 or Aarch64.

Well, that new MBP I bought 4 weeks ago and planned to keep for 5 years just got a muuuuch shorter life span if I can run iOS apps on an Arm Mac, my wife is going to be livid.

I guess this also means Catalyst’s life span is pretty short and SwiftUI will becomes the focus?

> macOS will support native iOS apps and macOS apps side-by-side on these new machines in the future.

I wonder what that means. There's more to the chip -- what about the core APIs for UI? Does that mean CocoaTouch and UIKit will run natively on macOS?

My guess, and I hope I am wrong, is that it might be a world of pain for backend/cloud developers.

Virtualization gives us Linux ARM docker images, which is nice, but not the same as running the same Linux docker images that run on the cloud. (while ARM in the cloud can be an option, it is a whole different topic)

The developers will have to find and develop with the ARM equivalent docker image of their production x86 ones, which will make the local dev and production environment unnecessarily more distant.

The good news is that the Docker ecosystem has a relatively broad ARM architecture support, but still, this will be a significant difference with prod environments.

I think gains in I/O will be more noticeable than gains in their CPUs. SSDs are being choked and held back by PCIe 3.0 interfaces at this point. I'm not sure that PCIe 4.0 is any better on latency. It would be interesting if Apple took a big leap forward with a low latency interface like OpenCAPI, or maybe some iteration of RapidIO. Something like Optane over OpenCAPI would be a huge leap in speed. Optane is wasted right now with PCIe.

The PS5 apparently has incredible disk I/O, possible due to RAD's compression technology. A super fast compression codec could make a difference too.

I am fine as long as Linux will run on those machines when they get old :)

Okay, so Rosetta will be great for the beginning, but in the long run? How hard will it be for large Multi-OS code bases (think Photoshop/Maya/CAD etc...) to adopt and to maintain?

I don't understand why folks are doubting the possible performance gains here. The latest iPads are already faster than the vast majority of PC laptops, including almost all MacBooks in single-core performance. And that's with the thermal constraints of an iPad. Can you imagine what that exact same chip can do with better cooling?

I guess we won't have to imagine long, though, since that's exactly what we'll see with the developer kit. Can't wait to see benchmarks of those.

The Verge article is a little unclear when the "two-year" transition timeline started. Apple's own announcement says:

"Developers can start building apps today and first system ships by year’s end, beginning a two-year transition"

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-t...

I think that one of the main long term goals for Apple from this switch is to increase its marketshare to increase its revenues from services. The marketshare can grow through three drivers : - More affordable computers, - More vertically integrated hardware/software - A larger ecosystem

Think about the iPhone SE and how it is supposed to strengthen Apple bottom line on the long run, its more about the recurrent revenue from services than the one shot from hardware.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned that is extremely interesting with regards to performance is if all those demos were done on a developer test kit machine, which is itself based on the Mac mini form factor... then the fact that these systems were all driving that Pro XDR 6k display is notable.

For references in no configuration of the current Mac mini can you drive an XDR without the use of an eGPU thanks to the extremely limited integrated intel graphics.

Native virtualization and the ability to run iPhone and iPad apps directly on the Mac. This could unlock a whole new level of focus and optimizations for Apple.

Anyone know what happened to Intel over the past 5+ years? They used to be unstoppable, relentless, the best. Have they had trouble recruiting the best engineers? How have TSMC and Apple been been able to pull ahead in terms of being at the lead of CPU development?

I thought maybe Intel was losing ground to TSMC for cultural reasons – being the best while being based in the US is getting harder and harder. But I'm not sure.

So what is stopping people to buy the cheaper IOS / IpadOS versions of software / games and running them on their Desktops / Laptops?

since it's running so well on A12z, why can't they just let iPad Pro users choose whether they want to run MacOS or iPadOS on their iPad?

A lot of devs use Macs and run Linux x86 virtual machines in them. I guess this spells the end of Apple's business in that sector?

Not even considering it until I see Logic Pro X benchmarks.

PS All those sleeping bugs from C code that was never tested on weaker memory models...

Everybody seems to debating the hardware but to me the question is software. With this mean Apple's desktop software would become incompatible with the new architecture? Also would this mean less control for for the end user on the laptop / desktop form factor? I'm picturing only app store from iOS on those form factors...yuck

I'm curious if (1) that first Mac to ship with "Apple Silicon" will be pack an A14 -- A14X? -- chip and (2) if we'll get new branding to distinguish CPUs for phones, iPads, and macOS devices.

UPDATE: I don't mean the developer transition kit that has a Mac mini with an A12Z, I mean the first consumer macOS device/macBook

> The biggest addition this move to ARM-powered chips brings is the ability for iOS and iPad apps to run natively in macOS in the future. “Most apps will just work,” says Apple, meaning you’ll be able to run native macOS apps alongside native iOS apps side-by-side for the first time.

Pretty great for development long term.

Good time for anyone who was using macOS for gaming or anything else for that matter to switch to Linux. OpenGL bit rot, refusal to support Vulkan, dropping of 32-bit, dropping of x86_64 architecture - all that should have been a hint. Backwards compatibility is not even an option there (besides for emulation).

I think in the next 5 years this will be in Apple's favor. The issue is more of a 10 years down the road question. Intel always seems to lag for a while and then starts leap frogging. I don't know if that cycle continues, but it might...which is a risk to Apple.

I guess an Apple TV-sized "Mac nano" seems plausible as a potential product now (I hope)

People in here are so excited but I think that Apple will take this as an opportunity to make installing of custom programs even harder. The App Store might eventually be the only way to reliably install software and Homebrew could become a thing of the past.

Not quite related, but I Just wrote this comment on an Apple Pencil on iPadOS 14. Pretty sweet!

This kills Hackintosh, Raspberrytosh anyone? (Probably unlikely due to all the custom silicon)

iPhone 11 Pro Max's Geekbench multi-core score is ~3300. An 8-core MacBook Pro's Geekbench multi-core score is ~6700.

Now imagine the iPhone's CPU with double the cores and a giant heatsink + fan. I bet it would double maybe even triple a maxed out MacBook's score.

On the other hand, most software does not utilize ARM's NEON instructions (counterpart to x86 AVX). In my tests [1], H.265 software encoding was 3.5 slower on ARM than on x86 in terms of frames encoded per watt of energy consumed.

[1] https://quanticdev.com/articles/h265-encoding-on-arm-cpus

I guess this is the end of bootcamp?

It’ll require some kind of emulation now to run x86/AMD64 instructions on this architecture if I correctly understand the changes happening.

I’m saddened about that. I liked being able to boot my MacBook pro into Windows for games.

Is this CPU any different from the CPU in a Raspberry Pi? Will it be binary compatible?

I'd imagine Photoshop and other media apps are highly optimized for x86, so do have they have Adobe and other developers on board to port code over to ARM? Will they provide Rosetta-like instruction set translation?

Will I still be able to use my favourite scripting language, say Ruby, on macOS?

Any hints on whether the os is getting substantially more locked down like iOS?

This looks fantastic but I'll probably wait until second gen to update my 2014 MBP which I'm using as my secondary machine.

My main machine is a 5K iMac which should last me for a couple more years for web dev.

Too bad the hardware is going to run macOS, well, and Mac software, both of which just keep infuriating me at every turn. I wish they'd put as much effort into their software as they do hardware.

It kind of feels like Apple makes the MacBook Pro only so there is a platform for people to make apps for thier main market - phones (and iPads?). So why not make the hardware almost the same I guess

Was planning on getting a new Mac laptop this year to replace my old 2013 Macbook Pro. Would it be better to get one of the last Intel Macs or wait a bit and get in early on the upcoming ARM Macs?

I wonder what they can do to keep a reasonable experience for locally run dev containers intended to eventually run on x64/Linux in prod. Isn't the experience already a little subpar?

Now that it’s literally all the same can we please get an iPad Pro that runs Mac OS when docked into a nice keyboard/trackpad base??

I would get rid of my non-work 13inch mbp if this was the case.

Post with official announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23604457

Wow, after a couple of decades of pointing and laughing, I might finally have to buy a Mac. Assuming, of course, they don't stick their own Management Engine-alike in there.

As someone who's not fond of apple ecosystem I'm both excited and afraid. Processing space can definitely use more competition, though I'd be more interested in actual GPU efforts as CPUs are pretty boring unless you're running a server or in a tiny CPU intensive niche.

What scares me though is expanding of walled gardens of apple. Mac used to give back to libre culture at least a little bit and push some valuable standards but with native iPhone apps and this closed architecture I'm afraid it will take away from libre and desktop culture. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing we'll have to see but I'm staying optimistic.

If nothing else, I guess this will stop me complaining about how Macs are just generic X86 hardware with a different OS than other PCs.

Will be interesting to see how it plays out in practice.

Does anybody know if it will still be possible to run Windows via BootCamp with the new apple processors? I use a 16" MBP and am a heavy BootCamp user (Windows 10).

Here's a more detailed review: https://link.medium.com/blEemwhex7

So now can we get an official arm version of the dropbox client? It's all that's prevented me from running a useful linux environment on my phone.

The biggest question is will Apple/developers support x86 macs longer than Apple/developers supported PowerPC macs when that transition happened?

I don’t think this will convince expert users, the OS has been regressing in many years and without a good OS the hardware doesn’t matter

I only wish that someone will figure out how to hack-install macOS on the iPad pro, given that the dev box uses same CPU...

What's odd is that they announce Microsoft office for Arm but Microsoft did not have that when launching the Surface X

Rip apple. They're going to either have to copy Intel/amd Instruction sets or be surpassed by the power of SIMD.

The mention of virtualization in the official press-release is awkward [1]

> Virtualization technology allows users to run Linux.

How does it relate to the switch to ARM?

Did they get finally worried about success of WSL on Windows and aim to compete in that area?

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-t...

I wonder if Big Sur on Apple Silicon is still Unix based, i.e. with all the Unix underpinnings and terminal access?

My comment from a week ago:

"What would keep Apple from shipping machines with both ARM and Intel CPUs in them? The ARM CPU would run the OS and decide when to ship jobs over to the Intel CPU. I can’t imagine that the home-grown ARM CPU would add much to the total price of the computer."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23530084

If the FCC documentation is any indication (and it may not be), the developer kits may not shop until December. The reports made available today show a testing setup with what appears to be the DTK device, with internal and external photos not available until December 8, which follows the somewhat typical pattern of order devices of making such pictures confidential until shortly before the ship date.

What about Windows and Linux support? Will it be locked down like iDevices, able to run only Apple's OS?

This probably leaves even less control to the user, kind of like iPhone where you can only dream of having root access to a recent device. Needless to say this also gives up the compatibility celebration which using x86 hardware was (running Windows apps with Wine and CrossOver, dual-booting Linux and Windows alongside MacOS). Is it going to be any better than an iPad+keyboard at all?

I think there will be a evaluation period for HPC or apple is going to withdraw from HPC completely.

How hard would it be for apple to also fabricate its own chips one day?

Would it ever make sense for apple to do that?

I was most excited to hear about the virtualization support. Any links to more details on that?

If I just purchased a new Macbook Pro 13 10th gen Intel, should I return it and wait for this?

How does this complicate things wrt code portability (ARM). Surely the answer isn't VMs.

Haha this meme really fits:

Apple: Here we demonstrate desktop Photoshop running on ARM.

The Verge: Write it down.. write it down!!

OK, so should I sell all my macOS hardware (except Hackintoshes) now? Is this exclusive or half-baked like MS Surface ARM, i.e. some running on Intel, some on ARM? If it is half-baked, what's the point of fragmenting macOS and apps it can run?

What's the best non-Apple notebook these days?

Seems like they’ve just Osborned half the machines for the next 2 years.

Does anyone know if Apple's processors have any anti-features resembling Intel's management engine coprocessor? If there isn't any, this may be a good route to a less backdoored PC for many users--not just Apple's existing customer base :)

I really hope Android emulator(simulator?) can run faster on the Mac.

And just like that, I've already bought my last Apple product.

I wonder:

- Can the apps downloaded from a website run.

- Can x64/x86 apps both work

- Can I run Excel 2013/Old windows games on Windows XP on Parallels

Apple has deliberately added 'notarization' to try and control the platform as a bout of a landgrap using the ARM transition as an opportunity.

WWDC30: “We are switching to the RISCV on all our platforms!”

Surprised INTC isn't crashing. It's up a bit.

I wonder if you can’t just install the beta on an iPad.

I wonder what it will mean for Hackintoshs and Wine.

Ok. I’ll wait till then before buying my new Laptop.

This is a day one purchase for me. I am so stoked.

This also starts the eventual death of Hackintosh.

this is a exciting news. i hope Apple/AMD can force Intel to step up its game.

Intel is losing to AMD's Zen and TSMC process nodes.

The cost of the transition kit will be $500.

edit: why the downvotes? legit curious

I'm curious about the future, especially games, if they want to take on consoles.

PS4 and XboxOne are 7 years old and while the next gen looks really good Apple can refresh the productline much quicker (on the other hand it's a good question if people really would want to buy a new console say every year because Apple sure will be aggressive pushing out new models much more frequently)

As they are a relatively new player, I wonder: how many patents of Intel/AMD/Nvidia will they infringe on?

My burning question...

Made in China or the USA?

Return of the Acorn PC. Has ARM been used in other desktop tower PCs at all between the Acorn days and now?

Wait, no Apple Glass?

History being made!

Thus all your Apple Macs are relegated to legacy.

DEC reborn.

So is this the death of Mac gaming?

Will adobe products still work?

a12z, funded by a16z

am I stupid? how are they running a x86 vm on ARM...

There goes Hackintoshes after 5 years and backwards compatibility. Throw everything useful away (hardware with special kexts, niche expensive software) and start from scratch. No thanks.

Here is a though how about making Rosetta run those 32 bit applications you dropped on the floor with Catalina.

Do you think they rewrote Mac OS for ARM, or altered iOS to look like Mac OS? Or have they secretly been in sync for the past 10 years? It's been 9 years since they rewrote Final Cut, and 7 years for Logic Pro, both rewritten for this day

It amazes me how much abuse loyal Apple customers are willing to take. How much money are you willing to spend. It's almost like this is some large-scale ritual hazing which serves to make you, the hazee, come out even more loyal on the other side.

“We've been down this road before”

Yes, and then you ‘upgraded’ the OS and gratuitously stopped running older software. My final Mac Pro — yes, I was a buyer of Mac Pro grade hardware — still runs 10.6.8 for that reason.

https://youtu.be/UDfAdHBtK_Q

I think this is exactly the wrong direction. First no more geforce for you. Then the ram is not upgradeable anymore. Oh here goes all ports except a usb3 and you need to carry a full case of dongles. Then the escape key.(It must have escaped the non sense!!!) Then the SSD is soldered. Then this fancy useless color bar and T2. Now you can't run linux with VB or parallels or dual boot to Windoze. They are trying their earnest to drive away the ppl that build their brand by innovating. Where have the days when apple's hardware edge was used to do great features such as target display mode gone? The smartest move apple did was to move to Intel. A MBP was the best windows experience ever, circa 2008. Why can't a 5000$ device have the best processor available that can be used for other oses, plus some ARM silicone? I don't get the part about removing x64; we certainly havent run out of address space.

I supported Apple so much when they chose to adopt the Bell Labs system interface. I loved Apple even more when they made it possible to run the C and Assembly code that PC users have always known and loved, using a platform known for its product excellence.

However Apple comes across as cruel when they make decisions like these, which break software distributability of things like native machine learning code. For example one build system that enables that use case is: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

At best these new POWER or ARM architecture Apple PCs are going to be like a C-class Mercedes. So I'm honestly not that concerned. Having distributable open source executables support them shouldn't be that difficult, it's just that it'd add bloat and require trading away important parts of Von Neumman architecture, such as self-modifying code, in order to be done easily.

If Apple wasn't being goofballs, they would have taken into consideration that the x86_64 patents should expire around this year, so Apple could have just as easily adapted the POWER design of which IBM divested themselves, to support x86, by simply bolting on a code morphing layer like Xed. Since it'd be pretty great to be able to buy an Apple PC that doesn't have MINIX lurking inside the chip, without making tradeoffs that could be most accurately described as breaking open source software to save money.

Is it just me or did apple just bungle this entire announcement by not announcing a consumer facing ARM MacOS device, only a hot-rodded Mac Mini with an iPad Pro chip inside.

How many devs actually have the setup in place to use a non mobile device?

I also wonder if the current+last gen iPad Pro that has the new keyboard + trackpad case will gain the ability to run Xcode and native macOS apps in the near future.

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