
Apple Plans to Announce Move to Its Own Mac Chips at WWDC - sleepyshift
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple-plans-to-announce-move-to-its-own-mac-chips-at-wwdc
======
Shank
Don't get me wrong. I love the potential native performance gains from this
transition, but I can't help but just be a tiny bit scared for the future of
my day to day work.

For better or for worse, my company uses Docker for Mac for the vast majority
of the stack that I don't work on but need to actively develop. I'm already
paying a huge VM cost and it's pretty terrible. I don't see Apple working on
any kind of native containerization solution. Does that mean that I'm going to
be eating the current VM cost + x86_64 virtualization cost in the future?

I really want to keep using macOS as a platform. I know I can just stay on the
hardware I have, but it's not really practical to be on an end of life
architecture. It seems just a tad shortsighted to ditch x86_64 when a lot of
people depend on it specifically because it's a shared architecture with other
platforms.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
I've given up on the dream of working in a place where I can still run "all
the things" on my laptop, at least in a place that has embraced cloud
services, Kubernetes, micro services, etc.

~~~
m0xte
Yep. We're hanging ourselves with all this crap. There has to be a better way.

~~~
benologist
VSCode has an SSH extension that lets you seamlessly work on a remote server,
this has been invaluable with my old dual-core Macbook first offloading docker
and my work to a vultr.com virtual machine and then a 6-core Intel NUC on my
local network, which just feels like using the same computer.

The only drawback I've found is I use "puppeteer" a lot which is an API for
programmatically using Chrome and Firefox, sometimes I want to see what's
going on.

~~~
m0xte
Yes that’s the IDE I use as well with WSL2 on windows 10. Weird that windows
turned out to be the best Linux distribution I have used.

Ive got an 8 core Ryzen 3700x desktop with 32G of RAM and I can bring that to
its knees easily. It’s ridiculous.

~~~
Recurecur
You're a bit RAM starved at only 32 GB.

My preferred environment is yours, inverted. Native Linux (likely Ubuntu 20)
with Windows in a VM as necessary. That is making much better use of hardware
IMO. It also gives you native Docker, and a ton of easily obtainable software.
Much new software development is beginning in Linux or Linux-like
environments, including most language development.

Perhaps more importantly, Linux is the deployment target for most cloud based
software. The company I work with (Fortune 100) uses Linux as the preferred
deployment platform simply due to cost, along with sufficient quality. It's
nice to develop, test and deploy all on the same infrastructure.

Software turns out to be very interesting in terms of real lifecycle. Here in
2020, COBOL skills are in (relatively) high demand! While I'm interested to
see the "Son of Unix", based on something like Rust and completely cleaned up,
rationalized, and secured, Linux and Linux skills will be valuable for decades
longer. Windows, I'm not so sure about...

My next development system will likely be a 16/32 core/thread AMD chip. I'd
hate to hobble it with the Windows kernel, it's really not aimed at that class
system. Linux is.

------
hylaride
Moving to it’s own chips may be fine and all, but I’d much prefer Apple to
deal with the rotting quality of its OSes first.

~~~
MatthiasP
There is a good chance that macOS is being neglected precisely because Apple
is moving away from x86.

~~~
_ph_
It is quite plausible, that the quality problems of Catalina and iOS13 at the
launch were a consequence of shifting the development team around to also
support the development of MacOS on ARM.

~~~
andrekandre
its possible, but im not convinced

1\. mac os has been buggy for quite a few releases already

2\. outside of drivers and apps, ios and macos are basically the same kernel
and userspace/libraries, so there isnt much to port

~~~
_ph_
On the surface, there isn't so much new in Catalina oder iOS 13, that you
would think that things break so badly, but they did. Starting a new branch of
the development always is a disruption. Developers would be reassigned to new
groups, probably the best ones even, new developers would join the existing
groups. This process probably has started like 2-3 years ago and intensified
like 1-2 years ago, especially after they had the first silicon to play with -
and I assume the CPU will be sufficiently different from an iPhone so that you
want to at least optimize your code for it, there might also be entirely new
features to support.

------
neximo64
Hopefully the new macs are faster. Here's something you can try yourself:

My 10 year old Macbook pro running lion, if I go to the Safari menu in the
corner click it and move the mouse up and down really quickly over the menu
items, the responsiveness is instant & there is no flickering.

Doing the same with the * * max spec * * 16" Macbook Pro has flickering.
Easily reproducible in this very Safari window if you're reading this on a
Mac.

Everything has been downhill this decade with the quality. If the focus was on
ARM then hopefully if it was a resource diversion the quality is good after.

Well i hope at least..

~~~
wodenokoto
The annoying thing is this is what mac was famous for, for a long time.

Often, the price would give you considerable lower specs than a PC, but the
mac would be faster to desktop, faster to start working in an application,
smoother IU, longer battery life, etc.

Focus on macs used to be "faster to work with, not faster to calculate with"

It was those things that warranted the higher price tag.

~~~
zozbot234
> Often, the price would give you considerable lower specs than a PC, but the
> mac would be faster to desktop, faster to start working in an application,
> smoother IU, longer battery life, etc. Focus on macs used to be "faster to
> work with, not faster to calculate with"

Linux is the new Mac, then. It's really fast even on otherwise low-end
hardware, and the price tag is pretty hard to beat.

~~~
tomxor
> Linux is the new Mac

As a Linux desktop convert I find it hard to disagree. I used and owned macs
from the 68k through PPC and one intel (C2D), they were all fast (to use),
that last intel one from 2009 still felt slick... but that's where it stopped
for me, everything got super bloated and slow afterwards.

I may not be 100% correct here but it seems like most of the problems are with
their OS and software, which is a shame because they are the only remaining
computer company that has retained control over all of their hardware and
software - something that should have always given them an edge in fine
tuning, but they seem to be throwing it all away.

~~~
eitland
FWIW I wrote this on my blog the other day which supports your observations
from another angle:

> _I have seen developers starting to use Linux machines for a few years
> already. It kind of reminds me of how it felt like when devs started to
> adopt Macs around 2005 /2006 or so when Ruby on Rails became popular. And
> just like when Macs became popular, mainstream adoption seems to follow:
> I've already seen a sales guy running Ubuntu Linux (by his own choice) over
> a year ago._

Note: the driving forces aren't exactly the same, but the feeling is
reasonably similar in my opinion.

Also I should note that the adoption of Linux among sales and other non-devs
has surprised me.

~~~
tomxor
> Also I should note that the adoption of Linux among sales and other non-devs
> has surprised me.

That is interesting, I've seen colleagues go both ways - well three ways -

Web devs going from windows/mac to linux, then a couple going back to both
windows and mac due to needing to use adobe products (used to dual boot and
now use WSL).

Most people pick up on and appreciate the difference in speed/responsiveness
and ease of doing dev (i.e it has an actual proper built in package manager
that is fast, no brew crap). Whether they stay seems to be more to do with
dependence - people who really like it even start to re-evaluate if they are
truly dependent on software they liked, vs their new found utility.

Media seems to be a big problem, (adobe et al), but sales perhaps not, i mean
office is all going cloud these days anyway.

------
rado
My 3yo iPad Pro is ridiculously faster than my 3yo iMac at some tasks like
photo editing. It's night and day. Also quiet, cool and thin. Very excited
about the Arm transition, warts and all.

~~~
nojito
My favorite workflow comparison between desktops and iPads is
rendering/exporting 4K video.

~~~
realityking
This is actually a trick comparison. A lot of desktop software doesn't make
use of hardware encoding facilities, even if available, since a good software
encoder will provide better quality.

~~~
chrisseaton
> a good software encoder will provide better quality

Why is hardware lower quality? Isn't the encoding algorithm deterministic and
so the same wether you do it in hardware and software?

~~~
galad87
The decoder is deterministic. The encoder is free to decide where to allocate
more bit of which block type is better in a specific place or other things. A
software encoder can be improved without replacing the entire cpu/gpu.

~~~
chrisseaton
Ah so I guess hardware is generally a bit behind due to longer release cycles
and more conservative in design due to cost of experimentation and mistakes.

------
bgorman
If Apple doesn't provide some form of acceleration or support for x86
hypervisors I can see this leading to mass exodus of the Mac platform for web
developers. It will be interesting to see what Apple does.

Given the technological steps Apple has made, it seems like it is only a
matter of if, not when Apple will switch over some computers.

I personally would predict the Macbook Air (potentially a new Macbook), Mac
Mini, iMac and potentially the iMac Pro will switch over to Arm first. It
seems like a poor risk/return ratio to switch the Macbook Pro and Mac Pro
lines to Arm at this point in time. Who knows what the manufacturing yield
will be on the initial 5nm chips.

~~~
danpalmer
> I can see this leading to mass exodus of the Mac platform for web
> developers.

Why _web_ developers?

I'd have thought that web developers would be some of the last developers to
abandon Macs due to a change in architecture given that lots of web
development is done in scripting languages which would need minimal support to
move architecture, and the fact that Apple's ARM chips tend to perform well in
JS benchmarks.

I'd expect that it would be system software engineers working in languages
like C/C++ who would abandon the platform given that the majority of their
tools and libraries may need extensive porting work.

~~~
bgorman
Web developers frequently use Docker for Mac which is a way to run Linux
containers (which are most frequently built for x86-64), which requires a way
to run a x86-64 hypervisor.

Docker for Mac runs a Linux VM that in turn runs the containers running on
developers laptops.

~~~
stingraycharles
Doesn’t this answer your own question though, the Docker vm is just
virtualized to x86 and that’s it?

~~~
panpanna
It's virtualized for the same architecture, which is not very costly on
today's CPUs. ARM emulating x86 is a whole different beast.

On the other hand, why not run arm-docker on a virtual arm-linux?? Why does it
have to be x86?

~~~
jitl
Last time Apple did this (PPC -> x86), the new Intel CPUs were so much faster
& more efficient than the equivalent PPC chip that programs ran at the same
speed under emulation, and the system & native programs ran much faster, so it
was still a worthy upgrade.

~~~
btown
For power efficiency this may be true this time as well... but for sheer
performance and latency under spiky web-style workflows, I'm not hopeful.

------
chrisseaton
I'm really worried - there's software that I rely on such as parts of the JVM
ecosystem that haven't had as much much work put into them for ARM as they
have for Intel. How long do we have to bring things up to speed? Just a year?
Obviously everyone has known this is coming but I haven't seen much action
yet.

If we get the worst case scenario and Apple ships _only_ ARM hardware from
January 2021, then I feel like there's going to be some serious problems.

~~~
rjsw
From the OpenJDK commit logs aarch64 seems to have been getting a fair bit of
attention over the last year.

I do run OpenJDK on aarch64 and it seems fine but I don't run anything
particularly serious.

If Apple ship an AArch64 machine with plenty of RAM then it would make a big
difference to what applications people try to use.

~~~
dehrmann
I think the complaint was more about libraries using JNI than the JDK, itself.
There's a popular sqlite library that ships with native libraries, otherwise
falling back to transpiled code. I'm not sure if they've done much work for
ARM.

Java's actually the easy case. ARM means a lot of docker containers won't
work, your development architecture is different than your protection
architecture, cython libraries, etc.

This is probably the right move if you want to build a laptop with good
battery life, but sort of like removing the escape key, it's problematic for a
large segment of Mac buyers.

~~~
chrisseaton
> I think the complaint was more about libraries using JNI than the JDK,
> itself.

No it's the compilers in the JDK, at least in my case.

------
theblackcat1002
On the other side, AMD APU code name was found in latest macOS release which
should hint the other side of the story.

[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-may-start-selling-
ma...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-may-start-selling-macs-with-
amd-cpus)

~~~
ksec
I much prefer them to switch over to AMD if cost was a concern. Rather than
outright dumping x86 codebase.

~~~
dehrmann
I doubt that cost is the concern. Both Apple and Intel are big players, they
can find a fair price between them, and Apple always had the threat of
switching to ARM to get better prices.

I'm pretty sure this move is for power consumption and maybe so all Apple
products are on the same architecture.

~~~
ksec
A13X cost $30, compared to cheapest Intel used in MacBook Air cost $200+. I
think it is quite a difference. That means consumer are paying $300+ for x86
compatibility.

~~~
ogre_codes
> A13X cost $30, compared to cheapest Intel used in MacBook Air cost $200+.

You aren't comparing costs fairly here. A13X costs $30 each + $XXX million to
develop. With Intel the development costs are part of the SKU. If Apple
launches a series of desktop CPUs, the cost to develop those chips is going to
be substantial. Some of that cost will be in common with the iPad/ iPhone, but
a good chunk will be unique to their new CPUs. Since Apple ships far fewer
Macs than iPhones, the development cost/ unit will be significantly higher.

~~~
philwelch
iPad Pro is already beating some MacBooks in CPU benchmarks. Apple might just
reuse the same CPU’s.

~~~
ogre_codes
> iPad Pro is already beating some MacBooks in CPU benchmarks. Apple might
> just reuse the same CPU’s.

Maybe some. Just considering the size of the devices, I'd expect the 16"
MacBook Pro would have beefier CPU options than the iPad Pro.

~~~
philwelch
Sure, but I don't think the design cost is going to be that high--maybe even
less than the design cost of having separate iPad and iPhone CPU's.

~~~
ogre_codes
Maybe. But they will likely have at least 3-4 different CPUs for the various
Macs and different clock speeds for those different designs (though clock
speeds and core count will likely be handled primarily through binning).
Development cost for each additional CPU will be spread over fewer and fewer
units.

\- MacBook Air

\- High performance MacBook

\- iMac / Mac Mini

\- iMac Pro/ Mac Pro

If next gen Macs are going to support some kind of x86 emulation/
compatibility layer, performance isn't going to have to be comparable with
Intel, it's going to have to be 2-3 times faster so I'm expecting something
quite a bit beefier than what the iPad Pro ships with.

~~~
ksec
Yes that is why I also wrote in another reply [1] it doesn't make much sense
financially. And I dont quite see how it make any sense technically either.
Even if Apple refuse to use AMD CPU for whatever reason Intel's investor
roadmap ( Which tends to be more accurate then what they shared to consumers )
shows they are finally back on track. ( It will still take a year or two to
catch up though )

Software is expensive, writing, testing , QA.

On the hand, they are spending billions on stupid Apple TV Dramas, I guess
they might as well make their own CPU for high end Mac.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465728](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465728)

~~~
ogre_codes
> it doesn't make much sense financially.

This I disagree with. The Intel premium here is likely somewhere in the
ballpark of $100-200 per CPU. Spread across 16-20 million Macs sold per year,
we're looking at conservatively $2 billion/ year they can invest in CPU
design.

More important, Apple will control what features get added to their CPUs and
can integrate other functionality into the CPU the way they have with the
A-series chips.

~~~
ksec
Yes if you look at it from all of Mac perspective and selling it at the same
price ( Which I hope they dont ) But per unit, it would be MacBook funding
development of higher TDP CPU from 50W to 250W. Those are low volume, require
new Node tuned for Higher Power, and possibly some design changes. If they
follow the same Chiplet design as AMD, that could be $500M budget. If they are
making the same monolithic die that could go up to $1B+.

And this is a recurring long term investment.

------
rbanffy
Funny... A move to AMD would be less disruptive to the macOS ecosystem and
would solve the roadmap issues. It seems AMD will have the lead for a good
couple years right now.

Intel must be creating a lot of problems for Apple to warrant this move. Or
maybe AMD is not willing to give Apple the same sweet deal Intel gave Apple to
get the transition.

~~~
hodder
...Or more likely, they don't want to ever be relying on a third party ever
again for chips since whoever they go with holds great power over their
progress and timelines.

~~~
dehrmann
> progress and timelines

There haven't been many interesting CPU changes in a long time, and they're
still using TSMC for fabrication. Arguably, you're better off with two
vendors. I'm not sure if Apple has genuine roadmap concerns or is falling in
the not invented here trap.

~~~
rbanffy
Wouldn't be a first for Apple, but this is no longer Jobs' company.

------
Nursie
Well, there goes the Hackintosh!

Well, eventually, I imagine that Apple will continue to support their x86 Macs
for some time, especially as we've recently had the launch of the revamped Mac
Pro which is not a cheap machine. But maybe ten years down the line they'll
stop updating it and that will be that.

~~~
abrowne
I imagine you're right, but G5 owners might predict differently. They only got
one more major release (10.5) once Apple switched to Intel, although there was
a longer release cadence than there is now.

~~~
joshstrange
Ahh yes, before we had yearly iOS compatibility updates for the mac... I'm
still salty that Apple broke my reminders in Mojave just because I upgraded my
phone. They will have to use a much larger carrot or stick before I consider
moving to Catalina.

------
api
This recent event has converted me to a full blown supporter:

[https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310](https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310)

I lost days of time to what very much appears to be yet another hardware bug
in Intel's latest core. If you don't believe me that it's a hardware bug, read
the whole thing. It's probably a zero day security vulnerability too.

The only catch is: if Apple also takes the opportunity to iOS-ify Mac and lock
it down to the point that it is no longer useful for professional work, I will
have to drop the platform entirely. I've seen some decent AMD Ryzen laptops
showing up on the market and I could use Linux with a Windows VM for the
occasional Zoom call or similar thing.

Honestly though... I think if Apple pulls this off well without alienating
their user base, it probably spells the end of the X64 architecture outside
cloud and servers. Given that people prefer to deploy to the same architecture
they develop on, it probably means X64 will eventually die in those areas too.
AArch64 could end up being the core architecture of almost everything by the
2030s.

~~~
rezonant
Yep, when a computer manufacturer with 10% desktop market share switches
processor architectures, surely that will dictate whether the architecture
will die. <\-- This is sarcasm, to be clear.

~~~
michaelhoffman
Strangely enough, Apple's architectural hardware choices have a history of
having effects on the broader market disproportionately to their market share.

------
meesterdude
Apple ditching intel could lead to some great improvements in hardware, but I
would be _much_ happier if they made no changes to the hardware and actually
started investing in OSX again. Catalina is a disaster. I've been using macs
since OS 7 and I cannot believe how bad Catalina is.

~~~
nicbou
What is bad about it? I'm still on Mojave

~~~
kup0
In my personal experience, I would say it's the buggiest and least snappy
version of macOS I've used in quite a long time

~~~
mark_l_watson
I think that the lack of snappiness is mostly caused by the new sandboxing and
security features. I have mixed feeling about this. Things can run slower
especially at startup, but extra security is a good thing.

------
mromanuk
My wild prediction: Apple will remain using x86, but based on AMD chips and
integrating stuff like ML, security, etc. Both of them use TSMC as foundry.

~~~
adamfeldman
Came to say something similar. I’d love to see some kind of hybrid x86-ARM
system that is able to retain the value of Apple’s x86 investments while also
leveraging Apple’s deep ARM investments in the PC product lines.

~~~
adamfeldman
Hyperscaler servers (eg AWS Nitro) have dedicated hypervisor processors, and
then customer workloads run on another processor. Imagine this architecture in
a PC: macOS as “hypervisor” and applications as the user workload.

------
jurmous
Could it be that Apple brings an X86 emulator on the machine like they did
with Rosetta in the PowerPC to Intel transition? Most calls to native
libraries like Metal and UI would be handled natively so we probably don't
notice slowness in most apps. Even Chrome and nowadays Adobe Photoshop are
compiled to ARM versions. If so this will be a smooth transition.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_%28software%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_%28software%29)

~~~
Mindwipe
> If so this will be a smooth transition.

That is extremely unlikely.

Anything involving gaming is unlikely to run at even 50% of it's performance.

It is going to be an extremely, extremely rough transition.

~~~
tgv
Anything that uses a lot of CPU or pushes much data around.

I use Logic to make music. Many of te plugins run on one core, and can take up
100% of it. If performance via emulation is around 50%, that means a lot of
drop-outs in the sound, and basically an unworkable situation. Been there,
seen it, don't want to go throug it again.

The bigger plugin makers will probably port their products, but it's going to
cost the user; the smaller ones may simply give up macOS completely.

~~~
jurmous
You assume it is a lot of work to port the plugins. Most likely it only needs
a compile for a new architecture. And they will probably have months to check
that checkbox in Xcode. It is not like they have to switch to a new
programming language.

~~~
cageface
Audio plugins are one of the few software domains where you'll still often
find handcoded assembly in performance critical sections. I wouldn't be
surprised if a lot of third party vendors don't make the transition.

On the other hand DAWs are more complete in the box now than ever so this is
probably less of an obstacle to switching from the users' point of view than
it would have been 5 years ago.

~~~
waterhouse
Video too. I paid attention to the commits to x265 for a while, and quite a
lot of them were like this:

    
    
      asm: AVX2 version of saoCuStatsE3, (136881c -> 45126c)
    

Just counting lines, there's more assembly than C++:

    
    
      ~/x265> find source -name '*.cpp' | xargs cat | wc -l
         95358
      ~/x265> find source -name '*.asm' | xargs cat | wc -l
        168690
    

That said, x265 does compile for ARM, and has ARM assembly as well, though
much less of it, as of when I last updated my copy (March 2017):

    
    
      ~/x265> find source/common/arm -name '*.S' | xargs cat | wc -l
         11014
    

Looks like, in today's codebase, the line counts for .cpp, .asm, .S are
111188, 203423, 12217 respectively—so proportionally much the same.

------
seanalltogether
My only concern here is that the Mac line still only represents 10% of Apples
revenue, and they might not give these desktop processors the attention that a
supplier like intel or amd would to their own processors. I hope I'm wrong but
I feel like Apple has been making serious missteps in the mac line for the
past 10 years because its no longer their core product.

~~~
bredren
The Mac (a PC-style computer) is a strategic investment, due to its role in
software creation. The brand is also part of the core image of the company.

Apple still commands only a fraction of the overall PC market, and while that
is not growing as whole, their portion could by a great deal.

You’re right that there have been major missteps. But there have also been
major corrective steps as well, which are just as important in gauging how the
company will behave in the future.

------
dblooman
Having tried Windows on ARM with the surface, I was surprised that many apps I
use every day were not available. Perhaps Apple will be better at onboarding
developers to the transition, but will also be interesting to see how long
developers continue to support Intel. Can anyone speak as to the difficulty of
working with ARM and Windows?

~~~
akmarinov
They announced the move to Intel in 2005 and dropped PowerPC support in 2009,
so I'm guessing about the same period for the ARM transition.

~~~
shoo_pl
Unless they pull a rabbit out of hat, they will not have a x86-64 emulator
this time (for the same reasons why intel is struggling with speed/power
efficiency ratio for years now) so it won't be that easy. It will be either
ARM of Intel hardware and people will have to choose.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Unless they pull a rabbit out of hat, they will not have a x86-64 emulator
> this time (for the same reasons why intel is struggling with speed/power
> efficiency ratio for years now)

I don't understand what you mean - you absolutely can emulate AArch64 in
AMD64. You can emulate any instruction set in any other instruction set.

~~~
scintill76
They're saying it won't be fast or power-efficient.

------
whywhywhywhy
>Apple’s chip-development group, led by Johny Srouji, decided to make the
switch after Intel’s annual chip performance gains slowed

I'm just not really buying this as the justification, Mac has almost never
been about competing on raw performance and moving to ARM could even mean a
large performance hit for most software where performance counts for years to
come.

Although I guess we also keep getting lectured on how amazingly powerful iPad
Pros are yet we never really see them do anything beyond a paint program,
GarageBand level music production, basic video editing and keynote.

~~~
scarface74
Apple has successfully done this twice before. Each time, major developers
ported within the first two years and in the meantime, Apple sold computers
with the old processor and new processor.

------
pickle-wizard
I think this would work well for me. Most of my day is spent with SSH or RDP
sessions to systems that do the heavy lifting. So I'll welcome the power and
heat savings.

Though I don't think I'll be buying one soon. When I travel I have a 2018
MacBook Air and when I'm at home I have a 2013 Mac Pro. Both machines still
work great for my needs, and I plan to keep the Mac Pro until Apple stops OS
updates for it. When it comes time to replace it, I'll replace it with a Mac
Mini, and I don't need a machine that powerful anymore.

~~~
Frost1x
I guess I'm one of the smaller minority who prefers a hybrid with a
significant amount of local compute power and remote compute power. Going all-
in with thin client architecture is something I've never been a fan of, namely
because it puts a fundamental resource I need to do my work in someone else's
control/hands.

Much of the time, this is advantageous (and I prefer someone else managing
things for me when it works) but I run into far too many snags where its nice
to know I can get something done with local resources that I have control over
when needed.

------
_ph_
I am quite excited about this rumor. If only to finally find out what Apples
plans with respect to ARM based Macs are :). Also, just in general it would be
exciting to have a real contender for intel-compatible chips on the deskop. I
still can remember the times when there were several competing architectures.
And obviously, Apple has the potential to create really game-changing chips,
considering what they are doing with the iPhone hardware.

One thing I still find peculiar is, Apple could have had nice ARM-based
computers for quite a while. They are actually selling them in the form of the
iPad, especially the Pro. But what keeps people to the Mac vs. the iPad is
less the hardware, but mostly the software. The decisive difference in
practical terms between macOS and iPadOS are the mostly artificial software
limitations of iPadOS. While Apple loudly advertices the ability to copy files
from an USB stick to "Files", the fun usually stops there. App support for
file exchange is still very limited, you cannot even copy music to Files or
your iCloud drive and add this to Apple Music or the TV app. So I find it a
bit odd that they have to create ARM based MacBooks just as a solution to a
basic problem of their software.

~~~
nradov
I expect that Apple will gradually phase out MacOS, and add more features to
iPadOS that will make it suitable for content creators. It never really made
sense for Apple to maintain two overlapping but incompatible product lines. I
predict in a few years they'll launch a laptop running iPadOS.

~~~
_ph_
The problem is, and that is what I tried to point out with my comment, that
the only thing preventing the iPad to be useful for more people is, how
artificially limited iPadOS is. It is a great device, but not a replacement
for a computer.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
If you look at the direction of recent releases then you can see those
features being added. The latest version has trackpad support for instance.

I don’t imagine much is going to change right now but I wonder what they might
be planning for the next decade.

~~~
_ph_
Yes, since they separated the OS from iOS, development of the iPad has
somewhat gone into the right direction. But it took them a decade to add
mouse/trackpad support, this is moving at a far to slow speed. And the fact,
that you cannot add music to your iPad on your own, shows, how happy Apple is
with its limited usage szenarios, there is no good reason for this behavior.
They could have made the iPad a real MacBook competitor, the hardware is up to
it. Apple has decided to keep the software limited and even prohibit third
parties of closing many of the gaps.

------
bob1029
I read this article very carefully, and I still have not yet seen any
confirmation here or prior that rules out a semi-custom solution involving the
other x86 vendor.

Perhaps this is just a game of semantics?

"Its own mac chips" vs "x86+ARM chips co-designed by AMD & Apple, fabricated
by TSMC, and slapped with an Apple logo".

From AMD's semi-custom page:

"We are not bound by convention and don’t subscribe to “one-size-fits-all”
thinking. We develop customized SOCs leveraging AMD technology including
industry-leading x86 and ARM® multi-core CPUs, world-class AMD Radeon®
graphics, and multimedia accelerators. We offer the option to further
customize each solution to include third-party and/or open market IP or
customer designed IP. Discover how you can differentiate with AMD Semi-Custom
solutions."

[https://www.amd.com/en/products/semi-custom-
solutions](https://www.amd.com/en/products/semi-custom-solutions)

I still cannot see a hard switch to ARM without any HW x86 capability in the
mix. The impact to user experience would be very dramatic and the PR would be
a nightmare to deal with. The way I see this playing out is that the next gen
of Apple hardware provides both an x86 and an ARM stack, with subsequent
generations potentially being ARM only (i.e. w/ x86 emulation). There is just
too much software investment in the x86 ecosystem at this point. You have to
give people a path to migrate peacefully or they will never return. This isn't
like prior architecture switches. The impact with PPC->x86 was not even
1/100th what the impact would be today if Apple forced a hard x86->ARM switch.

All of that said, I can understand why they would want to keep something like
this under wraps until T-minus 0.

~~~
thomascgalvin
What you said makes sense, particularly:

> There is just too much software investment in the x86 ecosystem at this
> point.

But I don't have any confidence in Apple's leadership anymore. There was a lot
of software investment in 32 bit apps, too, and they merrily launched a nuke
at that entire library.

Do I _think_ they're going to drop X86? No. But is it a possibility?
Absolutely.

~~~
scarface74
Have you been following Apple for the last two decades? They have always
dropped legacy support - 68K, Classic MacOS, PPC, 32 bit software.

Keeping compatibility forever has its own drawbacks - maintenance,
performance, increased vulnerability surface, regression testing etc.

~~~
timw4mail
68K support on the hardware side happened in OS 8.6. On the software side, it
wasn't dropped until the Classic environment was.

Legacy support has deteriorated more rapidly recently, it seems.

~~~
scarface74
The last 32 bit Mac was shipped in 2006. They announced they weren’t going to
port Carbon to 64 bit about a decade ago. Was there really any great surprise
that you shouldn’t be writing 32 bit software in 2015 let alone 2019?

~~~
timw4mail
I think the bigger surprise is that the first Intel Macs were 32bit and/or had
32bit EFI.

My gripe is more with how long they supported PowerPC on the Intel side.

------
ksec
It is easy to reason for switching to their own CPU on MacBooks or MacBook
Pros, roughly at 16M Unit per year. But what about Mac and Mac Pro? Combined
to less than 2M Unit.

Are we going to have Split in platform where developers is expected to debug
on both Arch? This isn't the same as moving from PowerPC to x86, where
majority of Pro Apps are already on WinTel. ARM is still relatively new on
many Pro Apps. Adobe may be slightly better equipped, but not AutoDesk.

If not, would Apple spend additional hundreds of millions on 100W+ CPU design
that are sold in tiny quantities?

It is also worth pointing out Mark Gurman has been saying this since before he
joined Bloomberg when he was at 9to5Mac. And since 2016 when he joined
Bloomberg the rumours were taken more seriously.

And the first rumours to suggest Apple is working on ARM Mac goes back as far
as 2010.

~~~
nojito
They don’t want to be dragged along by Intel failing to meet deadlines.

~~~
benologist
Or they just want to fold the hundreds of dollars per machine going to Intel
into their own profit margins.

~~~
nojito
Intel forced Apple to support 32bit computing for almost 10 years because they
couldn’t meet deadlines.

Apple has been dreaming about this day for years.

~~~
benologist
It's hard to imagine this is really Intel's fault and not just Tim Cook
looking at a multi-billion dollar per year expense as an opportunity - they
buy like 20 million processors a year it's a ton of money even by Apple's
standards.

Even Intel's lacklustre results in recent years seem like an unlikely catalyst
- Apple couldn't have foreseen 14nm++++++++++++ back in 2015. In 2008 though,
Apple acquired PA Semi to design chips. This project has probably been
percolating since shortly after that.

------
drcongo
Given who wrote this, and for which publication, this article definitely needs
the Daring Fireball disclaimer.

~~~
whitehouse3
Here's the disclaimer that appears below any post on Daring Fireball that
links to Bloomberg.

> Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in
> October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple,
> Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s
> intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all,
> was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a
> single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been
> largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances
> “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction
> or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we
> do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is
> severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with
> skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was
> true.

[0]:
[https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/bloomberg_publishes_click...](https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/bloomberg_publishes_clickbait_in_break_from_rivals)

------
dehrmann
It's interesting how Apple takes the opposite approach of PCs. PCs have been
on x86 variants forever, to the point that MS-DOS will run on a new PC without
much fuss.

For Apple, this makes, what, the fourth architecture for Macs?

~~~
akmarinov
Imagine the cruft and patches that have accumulated in the past 42 years since
x86 came up...

~~~
ksk
On the flip side, how many generations before a new CPU architecture becomes
robust and mature to be relied on for critical work? We're still using crufty
Wintel at work (vaccine r&d), its simply the best platform that keeps our
investment in existing software.

~~~
akmarinov
Luckily ARM isn't anything new. Even Aarch64 is almost 10 years old.

------
derefr
By including even the Mac Pro in the eventual transition, Apple seems to be
expecting to have their own chips beating out Intel/AMD compute performance
for workstation-class tasks within the next 5-10 years. You'd assume they'd
keep the "halo products" running whatever chips are best-of-class, rather than
whichever are most cost-effective to put in; so if they're switching for even
those product lines, they're seemingly expecting their own chips to become
best-of-class.

That's an interesting bet, given how long the two giants have been at this.

~~~
idiot900
Is it? How much faster are CPU cores going to get? Also, Apple has many
billions of dollars to throw at this.

~~~
derefr
> How much faster are CPU cores going to get?

Whenever we hit a Moore's Law bottleneck, we see a transition to new CPUs
being increasingly optimized for power-efficiency instead. Whether or not
FLOPS remain a moving target, FLOPS-per-watt will very likely continue to grow
for a few more decades.

> Also, Apple has many billions of dollars to throw at this.

Unless they're planning on selling these chips on the open market, I don't see
how "throwing billions of dollars at this" project can be justified to their
shareholders, even if it's something they can technically afford to do. As it
is, it's a pure cost-center optimization (i.e. removing the need to pay Intel,
at the expense of now needing to make the chips themselves.) This presumably
balances out _slightly_ positive on their books, not mind-bogglingly positive
like a new product line would be. "So"—the prototypal shareholder asks—"why
are you putting $bns/yr worth of silicon engineers to work on _this_ , rather
than putting them to work on feature cores to create+differentiate a new
product line?"

In my mind, it only works out for Apple if it's actually _not all that
expensive_ for them to reach parity with Intel/AMD; i.e., if it's something
they can do while still having silicon-engineering talent left over to keep
doing feature engineering for new hardware. Which is what I find interesting:
how did Apple reach this point, where they can leapfrog Intel/AMD without it
even being a "drop everything" moonshot project for them?

~~~
my123
AMD's whole revenues are very small compared to Apple, and the Mac and iPhone
will share the same big CPU core uArch.

------
skellington
Whelp....that's the end of Apple for most/many professional developers. Apple
is working really hard to give up their PC market share again like in the
PowerPC days.

Great OS (although worse than usual recently), doesn't run any (hyperbole but
rooted in truth) software.

If they would just focus on running MORE software, especially games, they
could probably grab so much more market share, but they are happy at 10% it
seems.

~~~
kenward
I agree it's pretty frustrating from a developer standpoint.

However, the majority of people aren't developers and just want a computer
that works. I could see this as a way to _increase_ market share and reduce
the barrier to entry to expensive Apple products.

------
jagger27
I'm curious to see if they'll open up access to the T-series chips in our
existing Macs to at least experiment with or use as a co-processor. The T2 is
no slouch—it's based on the A10.

It also makes me wonder if they'll ship a lower wattage Intel part alongside
their Arm chips in a transition period. I think that would be kinda cool, and
would ease a lot of backwards compatibility woes. Or they could keep things
more or less the same and just beef up the T2 with more cores and interconnect
bandwidth.

It might not make much sense to ship a dual CPU Macbook Air, but it would
certainly be cool to see Arm PCIe addon cards for the Mac Pro, where power and
heat concerns are not as significant.

------
ziml77
I've seen this headline for a decade. Is there anything that makes it more
believable now?

~~~
Hamuko
The ARM Mac rumours have been quite hot lately if that's any indication of
their accuracy.

------
mberning
I would like to see a return of the Macbook. I loved the form factor on mine,
but after a couple OS updates the anemic processor became a painful
bottleneck. On the flipside my several years old iPad pro still feels
blazingly fast.

~~~
jrsj
Really the new MacBook Air is essentially a slightly larger continuation of
that design that also has a fan, specifically because the processors in the
12" Macbook weren't that great. I could definitely see a future ARM based Air
returning to a fanless design though.

------
amanzi
I don't use a Mac any more but from what I see and hear, most Mac users aren't
clamouring for more speed or for even thinner laptops, but for a more stable,
less annoying operating system.

~~~
beamatronic
I want a thicker, heavier Mac with lots of ports.

------
ilikehurdles
Truthfully, and to go against the grain a bit, whatever makes the platform
faster sounds good to me. If my IDE, browser, and terminal tools continue to
run just fine I'm not going to be up in arms about this change. We've been
married to x86 derivates for too long, even more so to Intel's critically
broken implementations of them.

Shitty keyboards and useless touch bar aside, Apple has had a long history of
pushing the envelope in radical and beneficial ways.

------
PedroBatista
That means they have to keep up with CPU performance for the next decades. It
might be easy now but let’s see if they don’t hit a pothole and have to go
back..

------
rukittenme
This is great news for software engineers, IMO. More battery life (hopefully),
comparable performance (hopefully), and lower cost (hopefully). Contrary to
popular belief, I think Apple has embraced those three principles in recent
releases more so than they were 5 years ago.

Everyone who writes software on macOS is probably virtualized already. Really
shouldn't be any downside to this for the vast majority of programmers.

------
twoodfin
Notably missing: Any hints about hardware for developers.

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

[1] [https://www.macrumors.com/2019/12/30/sketchy-rumor-gaming-
ma...](https://www.macrumors.com/2019/12/30/sketchy-rumor-gaming-mac-
wwdc-2020/)

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

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

------
robert_foss
The article mentions higher GPU, NPU performance and higher efficiency. All of
this I would expect since the SOC is likely incorporating much of their mobile
experience/IP.

However, it doesn't mention CPU performance or IPC, both of which will be
extra important due to the binary level compatibility for x86 I would expect
them to ship.

------
wyldfire
There have been a few models of Windows-ARM snapdragon-based computers for a
little while now. Somehow, mindblowingly, they didn't bother to ship the first
ones with a native Chrome port (only Edge). Now that they have native Chrome,
and Apple is moving macbooks, I wonder if the tide will shift towards ARM for
all laptops?

------
wil421
How many times have I heard about an ARM MBP, an Apple TV (a real TV with
screen), an Apple Electric car, or Apple Glasses?

------
toron123
I read somewhere that emulation of x86 on arm is much wrose compared to
emulation of arm on x86. Can someone confirm this?

~~~
NathanWilliams
I don't know the answer to that, but keep in mind that Apple is control of the
entire CPU design. They could for example put an x86 decoder in front of the
ARM cores.

After all, modern Intel processors decode x86 to a simpler instruction set
used internally anyway.

~~~
pixelrevision
Doing something like this would be the smart move. If the do this they’re
going to need to give developers lead time to get their software up to date.

------
miguelmota
I see in the comments that a lot of web developers are frustrated.. what
programs do web developers use that only work on macOS? or is it also because
of the retina screen? I've been developing on Linux for years without issues
so trying to understand why devs choose macOS.

------
atlgator
Haven't we been here before?

~~~
dhosek
This would be the third major CPU change for the mac architecture: 68xxx to
PowerPC, PowerPC to Intel and now Intel to ARM.

~~~
jerrysievert
I'd say technically fourth, since x86 -> x64 was also a hard cutoff eventually
with Catalina.

~~~
cpeterso
And iOS's ARM -> ARM64 cutoff was another architecture transition Apple (and
developers) had to weather.

~~~
jerrysievert
ah yes. I don't tend to do iOS development, so completely forgot about that
one other than having a lot of the apps I loved stop working. still grumpy
about pirates and civ rev being gone forever.

------
hs86
iOS apps on the desktop and the switch from x86 to ARM have uncomfortable many
parallels with Windows 8 / RT.

How is Apple's approach going to be different from Microsoft's? Will they keep
backward compatibility? Will the CPU architecture really be a day and night
difference or are our expectations too high due to the ubiquity of inflated
Geekbench numbers?

This will either make or break the Mac as a platform and I feel like
currently, any further investment would be a gamble.

~~~
pixelrevision
One thing that would be very different from a windows transition is that Apple
is much more aggressive about pulling support for backwards compatibility. MS
spends a lot of energy to support really old software for businesses whereas
Apple typically gives a 3 year window then pulls the plug.

------
nsajko
I wonder if there was consideration within Apple of switching back to PowerPC
(power9/power10) now that it is open (for whatever that means, I am not sure)?
They would appreciate the control that would give them.

Does somebody have an idea how much approximately would it cost Apple to
switch the Apple A14 from ARM to POWER? Usually it is said that the
instruction decoder is a small part of a CPU core, and the ISAs are not hugely
different (compared to AMD64/Intel, at least).

------
neonate
[https://archive.vn/ogP3y](https://archive.vn/ogP3y)

------
NoPicklez
I wonder why they're deciding to go back, after all they used to develop their
own chips back in the day.

~~~
mathw
Apple have never used their own CPUs for desktop computers, only for phones
and tablets.

~~~
philjohn
Unless you count the AIM alliance -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance)

------
Koshkin
"Project Kalamata"

------
velebak
The great unification continues between iOS and Mac!

------
watersb
A lot of discussion here about Windows/WSL2 or Linux on laptops, how it's
gotten good enough for the HN crowd.

The overloading of the Control key as the system menu shortcut
("accelerator"?) key when it's also the default Emacs bindngs for readline in
Bash -- drives me utterly insane.

If it were consistent, great, but on Windows there are many different text
widgets, from PC console, Win32, and other layers. I simply can't develop the
muscle memory.

I have a very cheap HP laptop, the trackpad driver is nearly unusable. I
installed the Synaptics Control Panel, and use it to "reset" the trackpad each
time it wakes from sleep so that I have a chance at scrolling without randomly
selecting the entire document's text and deleting it or dragging it to random
places. It's horrible.

On the Lenovo x230, the tiny trackpad is a bit better, but tiny, and the
physical trackpad buttons give me the chance at dragging etc in the face of
such madness. It's all very nerve-wracking.

The trackpad on the MacBooks have never been a problem for me.

Then there's text encoding. The Win-1252 Code Page. Turning UTF-8 into
unreadable line noise in unpredictable situations. The CRLF madness that grows
back no matter what.

I use WSL2, Terminal, and VS Code, but it's unbelievably exhausting. Digging
out of config issues with Code Signing certificate policy required a re-pave
and 12 hours of re-installing etc to get back to sanity. Something needed an
old VC Runtime DLL, which installed fine, but also seemed to overwrite a
Microsoft root CA cert. Differential analysis with a working Windows we
couldn't find the broken cert. Various msc tools and System Policy analysis
and Troubleshooters and so on couldn't find it. The CERT: filesystem
"provider" stopped working. It was a dead machine.

Linux and macOS configs, I generally know where config files are, and can
restore from backup.

Want to restore from a Windows Image Backup? Or a copy of the file system from
another Windows installation? Go ahead. Try it.

I got heavy into PowerShell, there are some nice bits there, but it still has
to fall back to text processing in pipes if some other tool doesn't output the
correct data. Usually JSON, but is that schema documented? Certainly have yet
to invest the time in Bash tools that might interact with PowerShell.

It just doesn't stop. It just doesn't. I must accept that people are actually
getting work done by adding WSL to the mix, but I guess I just break things.

I don't seem to break things as badly on Solaris or Arch or even Gentoo or any
of the BSDs.

I have not given up on macOS. On the contrary, I will get another Mac laptop.

It's a lot of work.

------
danaris
Thus far, the only source for this is Bloomberg, which published the story
"The Big Hack", which was shown to be complete bullshit. They have still not
issued a retraction, an apology, or any kind of acknowledgement that their
reporting was so completely wrong.

Their credibility on issues of tech—particularly Apple—is very suspect. (See
also: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect)

------
toyg
That’s me going bye bye then. It was fun while it lasted. After the keyboard
fiasco and “Vistalina”, this would be the last straw.

~~~
jbsmsk
The keyboard "fiasco" was fake news. Overblown by the loud minority and with
later iterations probably not an issue at all. But it's a stain that couldn't
be washed away (they tried with the replacement program, but likely wasn't
effective enough).

At worst the keyboard "issue" is just a preference.

~~~
Hamuko
> _At worst the keyboard "issue" is just a preference._

Yeah, I prefer to have my B key registering 100% of the time instead of 80% of
the time.

------
Fiahil
Next in line: macos on ipad.

~~~
FreakyT
iPadOS on Macs seems more likely given Apple's trajectory, I'd say.

------
inapis
This transition would be fun to watch. Mac has a huge legacy, enormous amounts
of apps and sometimes it is embedded deeply in a lot of workflows that it
would be very challenging to displace. Unlike the PowerPC -> Intel transition,
this time round, Apple has the iOS ecosystem to tap into.

We'll probably still have 4-5 years before the Intel Macs are completely
abandoned but then this is Apple we are talking about. For all intents and
purposes, they might cut the umbilical cord in 6 months.

Adobe is probably the only company which can delay the complete transition for
some time.

Edit - removed the line about electron. As others have pointed out, electron
already runs on ARM.

~~~
tinus_hn
Apple threw away a lot of that legacy by not supporting 32 bit apps anymore
and the world did not stop turning.

~~~
tgv
OTOH, the world continues using 10.14 Mojave. At least, I do.

~~~
whynotminot
Yeah, I've transitioned my main Mac laptop to Catalina, but I keep my Mini on
Mojave because it does happen every once in a while that I need to run a 32
bit app. I can't afford to be all in on Catalina at this time.

