
ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer - twsted
https://mondaynote.com/arm-ed-mac-we-have-an-answer-545a20419a46
======
Sephr
Can we get the title fixed to match the OP?

"ARM-Ed" sounds like a special ARM architecture, while ARM-ed and ARMed elicit
the author's intended meaning to me. It's pretty clear as to why the author
didn't capitalize "ed" in their own title.

~~~
OJFord
I Believe This is HN's Auto-Capitalisation of Titles.

It really annoys me when submitting; it does it only if there's a certain
number of capitals in the submission, so 'ARM' probbaly triggered it. (It's
now 'Arm' anyway, so it needn't have.) It does accept a more sensible case on
re-submission if the submitter edits it quickly enough.

------
bnj
Settles on a proposition that the iPad will consume and replace the Mac.

I don't agree with that position; I think the form factor of the Mac and the
capabilities of MacOS are going to continue to be relevant, even in a world
where a fully featured Xcode can be run from an iPad Pro.

It seems more realistic to me that apples' efforts to get catalyst to a point
of usability is about enabling software to make a seamless transition to the
arm architecture.

~~~
skohan
Honestly it's hard to imagine. Laptops are an incredibly important form
factor.

I actually suspect the move to/inclusion of ARM in the macOS lines of product
is part of the motivation behind dumping support for 32-bit apps in Catalina.
By preemtively removing support for a large amount of legacy software, which
will likely never be recompiled for ARM, they avoid the situation where their
new machines appear much less capable than the old ones.

~~~
pjmlp
In the PC world, 2-1 like the Surface are taking over classical laptops.

~~~
wooger
Are they? Certainly not in sales.

There was a push to make all laptops have a touchscreen a few years back, but
this seems to have fizzled out, and I've seldom seen anyone use them
(deliberately anyway).

~~~
pjmlp
Here in Germany if you go to a local consumer shop, there aren't many
classical laptops left to chose from.

------
burlesona
What I see as more likely is that Apple is hedging it’s bets. On the iPhone /
iPad side, they continue to develop better and better processors. One day they
_may_ be sufficiently better than Intel that Apple could pull a “Rosetta” a
second time on the Mac, translating apps from x86 to ARM at the software
level.

But that’s still a tall ask at the high end, and splitting the Mac lineup into
models that can’t all run the same software isn’t appealing.

So in the meantime, it makes sense to push the iPad toward being a stronger
and stronger computing platform with things like the recently added trackpad,
better multi tasking, etc. They’ve got a way to go, but given a few more years
of iteration, who knows how many more of the “real computer” niches the iPad
can fill.

If the processor advantage never reaches the point that it can emulate x86 at
full speed, then the Mac line probably won’t transition, and Apple will
probably shift it farther upmarket as the iPad cannibalizes every use case
that doesn’t need x86. And if the processors do get that much better, then ARM
comes to the Mac.

Either way, Apple is in a good place to leverage the iPad as their vision of
what the next generation of the personal computer looks like.

~~~
wolfgke
> One day they _may_ be sufficiently better than Intel that Apple could pull a
> “Rosetta” a second time on the Mac, translating apps from x86 to ARM at the
> software level.

Emulating x86 on ARM is very hard because x86 has a strong memory model while
ARM has a weak one. This either makes emulation _very_ slow or will break lots
of multithreaded applications.

The other emulation direction (ARM on x86) works much better.

~~~
jlokier
That's true for now. But due to RISC-V's openness, ARM has recently started
allowing licensees to add extra features to the architecture.

If emulation were taken seriously, Apple could add extra features to their
ARM-ISA processors in support of x86 emulation, including x86 compatible
implicit memory barriers.

~~~
doyouevensunbro
Don’t they still have to deal with the fact that Intel has been vocal about
suing anyone doing x86 emulation?

~~~
jlokier
QEMU exists and so do others, and has for many years, so I think x86
_software_ emulation might turn out to be fair game.

In fact, out of Intel and ARM, ARM is the only one I know that tried to shut
down software emulation...

(ARM blocked parts of QEMU from being published for a while, citing "you must
have read the manual to implement this therefore you are bound by the terms of
the manual". They also had an open source design removed from OpenCores.)

It would not be completely silly to modify QEMU with x86 guest and modified-
ARM target (for implicit-barrier mode), and then just use QEMU for the
emulation.

As long as implicit-barrier mode was generic enough I think Intel would have
an interesting time claiming it infringed some patent of theirs. Making it
efficient would remain Apple's problem but they are good at that. (Or were
until the CPU designers left to start Nuvia.)

If Intel won that, implicit-barrier would have to be explicit-barrier which is
just normal ARM, but there is no fundamental reason why that cannot be fast,
if the processor is designed to expect a lot of barriers and optimised
accordingly. Especially if a dense instruction encoding is created for it.

(Everything I just said applies to RISC-V as well as ARM, should Apple decide
to change course again.)

~~~
doyouevensunbro
Ok I’m not completely crazy, found the article:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/06/16/intel...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/06/16/intel-
threatens-microsoft-and-qualcomm-over-x86-emulation/)

Thanks for clearing that up. Wonder what the difference is that this article
mentions.

------
ken
His (roundabout) answer is to point to the new iPad Pro and cursor support,
i.e., Apple is moving everybody to the iPad so it doesn't matter what the Mac
does.

Of course, as always, whether this is "an answer" or not depends on whether
you happen to believe in this particular branch of Apple Kremlinology.

~~~
chongli
_Apple Kremlinology_ [1]

I love this term. What a fantastic way to look at this story and take a step
back so that we recognize what we're doing here. Maybe Apple, like the Soviet
Union, doesn't have it all figured out? Maybe they're just trying stuff to see
what sticks?

I think, deep down, there are a bunch of people at Apple that know they'd have
to pry the Terminal, vim/emacs, and command line tools out of macOS
developers' cold, dead hands before they'd ever switch to iOS full-time.

[1] [https://www.itworld.com/article/2782495/apple-
kremlinology.h...](https://www.itworld.com/article/2782495/apple-
kremlinology.html)

~~~
tambourine_man
Maybe they don't need to. A terminal app with a busybox-like set of tools
within the sandbox would make iOS/iPadOS a lot nicer to us nerds. We already
have Files.app. A terminal can't be that far.

~~~
smcnally
Terminus is available now and works well enough. It’s not a shell into local
iOS, but that’s fine for me. and standard external USB keyboards work fine
with a $10 Lightning adapter.

[https://termius.com/ios](https://termius.com/ios)

~~~
tambourine_man
Yeah, but that's just an SSH access point. I want a full shell.

------
_ph_
With the recent changes, Apple seems indeed to try to strengthen the iPad as a
platform. Hardware-wise, the new iPad Pro 12.9" with the new keyboard stand
seems to pretty much equal, if not superior to the also refreshed MacBook air.
It even has two USB-C ports, though with less versatility. Ironically the main
hardware missing in comparison is the headphone jack. The ARM chip in the iPad
should compare well with the MacBook, only the limited ram could be a cons.

But where iPadOS lacks significantly behind MacOS is the software. And this is
based on the AppStore rules. Applications are limited in their capabilities
which would be natural on a "computer". With "Files", applications can finally
exchange data, but that still has complexities for the user and is less
natural than it works on the Mac.

The biggest elephant in the room is the missing ability to do any real
software development on the iPad. One might say that the software developers
are the minority of the users and that is correct, but the software developers
are the critical group for a platform which creates the software which all the
other users can use. While the AppStore on the Mac has grown over time, just
look how large the software universe outside the AppStore is, to get an idea,
how important this is for the Mac platform. Not even counting the number of
users, which wouldn't qualify as software developers, but are running a few
scripts here and there for special task, either written by themselves or
grabbed from the internet and modified to their needs. And yes, sometimes you
really need a shell.

It will be interesting to watch what gets shown for iPadOS 14. If the iPad
should go further into the Mac space, some significant changes need to be
announced. The trackpad addition goes in the right direction, but does not
address the points I mentioned above.

------
philwelch
I find the notion of ARM-based Macs dubious and I think JLG is on the mark in
seeing iPad being positioned to replace low-end PC’s.

What did Apple gain from switching from PPC to Intel in the first place? They
gained faster processors (their market share was insufficient to keep
performance parity) and the ability to virtualize or even dual-boot Windows on
Mac hardware. I don’t see these factors changing; iPhones and iPads don’t have
the performance properties of laptops and desktops, meaning even Apple’s
internally-developed ARM architecture is going to treat Macs as as much of an
afterthought as Motorola and IBM did back in the day. Meanwhile, even if
Windows compatibility is less relevant, the ability to virtualize Linux
distros on Macs has become more relevant.

If I’m a software developer and I want to run my code on a x86-based Linux
server somewhere, I’ll often want my development environment to be capable of
reproducing that same environment, and tools like Vagrant and Docker
accomplish this on Macs using virtualization. Without a shared CPU
architecture, these tools will either stop working entirely or rely upon
emulation, which would hinder performance and potentially introduce
inconsistent behavior compared to the real hardware. Now, it’s true that iOS
development relies on the Mac performing ARM emulation. But there’s already a
working solution for this, and you can still use actual iOS hardware for
testing. If I had to connect my Mac to an x86-based Linux box for testing and
development, why wouldn’t I just use the Linux box? And the Linux box is a
server that I can either Remote Desktop or SSH into, why would I need a Mac to
be able to do that? Maybe I’m biased because I already think Macs aren’t a
very good development environment, but I don’t really see switching CPU
architectures as a move that makes them any better. All bets are off if ARM
servers actually take off, though.

~~~
Reelin
Just FYI, there are ARM versions of both Linux and Windows these days. There
are also high end ARM server CPUs, [1] and Amazon even offers EC2 instances
backed by a custom ARM CPU. [2] (While we're at it Linux also supports POWER9.
[3])

[1]
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-a...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-
altra-80core&num=1)

[2]
[https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/)

[3] [https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/](https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/)

~~~
philwelch
I’m aware that Linux supports ARM (it also supports PowerPC) but if I’m not
running my services on an ARM server, that doesn’t help me. Hence the last
sentence of my post.

------
jrockway
Nobody really knows what Apple is up to. Their processor design/manufacturing
seems top tier. Until you can develop an iPad Pro app on an iPad Pro, it seems
like a toy. (And I say this as someone who uses an iPad Pro as their primary
mobile device. I don't own a laptop.)

To me it seems like another case of big-company-itis. Someone on the processor
design team wants a promotion. Someone on the Macbook Air team wants a
promotion. Working together is not the easiest path to that promotion, so the
products remain separate. That is the reality of big companies and why
startups get so much done. Nobody on the MacOS team is going to say "we should
delete this thing and start working on XCode for the iPad instead", and so...
as end-users we wonder wtf they're up to.

~~~
kalleboo
> _Working together is not the easiest path to that promotion, so the products
> remain separate_

OTOH, another case of big-company-itis is over-segmenting your products and
not allowing them to grow organically our of fear of cannibalizing your higher
profit margin products.

Apple never letting the iPad get full keyboard and cursor support and saying
"that's a Mac thing" leaves them open for disruption from Microsoft instead.

Xcode is likely planned for iPad, but it's a massive ecosystem (not just one
app, don't forget there's Instruments, the Simulator, compiler build step
scripts, etc etc) and will take a LONG time to port

~~~
scarface74
_Apple never letting the iPad get full keyboard and cursor support and saying
"that's a Mac thing" leaves them open for disruption from Microsoft instead_

Full keyboard and mouse support is in iOS 13.4.

The Surface is just another Windows computer with all the baggage that entails
- x86 processors with horrible battery efficiency, an operating system that
requires more RAM and storage, an operating system that still has parts that
aren’t touch friendly and plenty of apps that still have a UI that doesn’t
work well with touch.

~~~
kalleboo
> _Full keyboard and mouse support is in iOS 13.4._

Sorry, that was the point I was trying to make. Apple isn't afraid to
cannibalize their own product lines by improving their "lesser" product.
Rather than being a sign of "big-company-itis", it's a sign of being agile.

> _The Surface is just another Windows computer with all the baggage that
> entails_

Microsoft has a history of evolving their products until they are a success, I
wouldn't count anything out on it's current iteration.

There's not just the Surface either, the Chromebook could have a future as
software moves more and more onto the web and people don't really leave their
browsers.

~~~
scarface74
Microsoft has been trying to make a good touch screen/desktop OS hybrid since
Windows 8. The Surface line has been around since 2012.

The entire idea of the Surface is fundamentally flawed because of three
factors - it’s dependence on backwards compatibility with Windows and using
x86 processors.

The Chromebook is already a success in education, but it has the opposite
problem than the Surface. Google has no clue in how to create an ecosystem.
Android on tablets have been a non starter and Chromebooks are still nowhere
as capable as iPads.

Android succeeded because Apple refuses to compete on price and everyone needs
an phone. A tablet is a luxury product and Apple competes pretty well on
price. The $329 iPad is a very good device with a better ecosystem.

------
thelibrarian
The preferred programming environment on an ARM-ed Mac would of course be
Armed Bear Common Lisp.

~~~
pjmlp
C++ARM could also be an option. :)

------
geofft
Surprised to see no mention of emulation. Apple has pulled off emulation-based
transitions twice before - from 680x0 to PowerPC and from PowerPC to x86 - and
nobody else has tried. Why wouldn't we expect Apple to try again?

~~~
discordance
Do you mean that macOS apps would run on iPad?

Seems like a lot of work would need to go into moving existing macOS apps to
touch friendly interfaces if that were the case. I’m using a Bluetooth mouse
and the cursor is finger sized.

~~~
simonh
I think the idea is that ideally apps should be recompiled for ARM, but for
those apps that aren’t you will still want to have a way to run those x86 apps
on an ARM Mac.

------
jccalhoun
I have had student try to use ipads in class for simple things like note
taking and things. It doesn't seem like a great experience. They don't seem to
know how to switch between apps very well. Certain things like working on a
collaborative google doc requires (or at least really encourages) them to
download the app which means they have to wait for it to download and install
while group members are already working on it.

~~~
wlesieutre
FWIW since iPadOS 13 you’re probably better off using Google Docs in a
browser, even if Google suggests that you download the app.

~~~
_anastasia
On mobile, some sites refuse to show anything other than their "Go ahead,
download our app!" page. In many cases, switching to desktop view doesn't
work.

~~~
wlesieutre
iPadOS reports the same useragent as a Mac and has a reasonable screen size
for a real computer, so I haven't run into that situation anymore.

Phones are another matter, of course.

------
Loic
My take which is probably not what Apple want to hear is that they simply want
to go the Microsoft Surface way.

I am personally a Linux/Thinkpad person, but all the persons I am working with
who happen to have a Surface just love it.

Well executed, the concept is beautiful and practical. Apple is coming from
the tablet side and Microsoft from the laptop side, they will converge at some
point.

ARM is an implementation detail.

------
lddhtx
Call me crazy but my bet is that Apple will eventually do an iPadOS to macOS
transition, kind of like they did with iOS to iPadOS in 2019. The existing
macOS would be scrapped for the iPadOS fork of macOS. This would simplify
their operating systems into one “Apple OS” where individual features/layouts
can be configured based on the host device. MacOS would still look like Mac UI
and iPadOS would still look like iPad UI. This would make easy for developers
to make a single app for all of Apple platforms and would allow Apple to
release more uniform OS updates. As for the x86 to ARM transition, I’ll bet
they make developers rewrite their apps for this new platform, kind of how
they dumped support for 32-bit apps in Catalina. If it’s a Catalyst app, then
it will automatically run on ARM and x86. Others will be left in the dust.

~~~
philwelch
iOS was already forked from Mac OS X though.

~~~
lddhtx
Yes it sure is. Stripped down version of it. Also this is just my guess which
is probably wrong. Guess we’ll have to see right ;)

------
Audiophilip
If anything, in the future I see iOS (or iPadOS) getting more and more 'MacOS-
ified' and not the other way round. As the HW inside iPads get more and more
powerful, I could imagine Apple eventually porting MacOS to iPads (and
therefore to ARM); not to replace the Intel-based Macs with ARM-powered ones,
but to empower iPad users with a much more productive OS. Sure, iPad users
wouldn't be able to run x86 binaries, but with Apple incentivizing developers
to build x86+ARM fat binaries, the software library available for 'MacOS iPad'
users would keep growing over time.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> I could imagine Apple eventually porting MacOS to iPads (and therefore to
> ARM)

There's not much to port. The underlying Darwin operating system is shared by
all Apple products (AFAIK, excepting Airports for some weird reason). They
would have to do a recompile and maybe make sure that nobody accidentally put
architecture specific bugs into the finder or something stupid, but the grand
difference between Apple's different operating systems is which graphical
interface they put on and some amount of user space tooling. And honestly, I
would be absolutely shocked if Apple doesn't have internal builds of the
desktop-oriented "Mac OS" for ARM, probably as part of the usual CI pipeline.

~~~
saagarjha
> AFAIK, excepting Airports for some weird reason

Non-touch iPods as well.

~~~
comex
Those haven't been sold since 2017 :)

------
orionblastar
If they move to ARM:
[https://github.com/ErisBlastar/qemuosxguest](https://github.com/ErisBlastar/qemuosxguest)

QEMU can run Intel MacOSX code and they can use it to emulate the old Intel
Macs. This version of QEMU was designed to run older OSX Intel versions under
new Intel versions to run legacy software.

CommodoreOS is based on Linux and in order to run old Amiga apps they use UAE
for 68K and PowerPC Amigas. This seems to be that virtual machines and
emulation can run the legacy software needed on the new ARM Macs.

------
thomasfl
The author, Jean-Louis Gassée, has some good points. It seems less risky to
let the iPad pro evolve gradually into a fully fledged Mac replacement, than
switching from intel to ARM based processors. Many years ago, the same Jean-
Louis Gassée, wrote that all operating systems eventually gets cancer and
dies. Maybe it is time for OSX to slowly die and be replaced by the much more
light weight iOS?

------
cable2600
Like the girl in the taco shell commercial said "Why not both?" Use both an
AMD and Intel chips in new Macs. Use the ARM chip as a co-processor to run iOS
apps on the Mac. This would make it easier to develop iOS apps on a Mac. Also
it would foil the Hackintosh crowd because PC Clones don't have ARM chips in
them.

~~~
sneak
The T2 boot security chip (which is ARM and has all of the standard iOS
(renamed BridgeOS) security features) which is presently shipping in most/all
Macs will be able to foil Hackintoshes just as soon as the installed base is
sufficient that a new macOS release can demand an attestation from it to boot.

The Air and mini just got an update that brings the T2. I’m not sure if they
are still shipping any non-T2 Macs, I don’t think they are.

~~~
mastercheif
The iMac is still shipping without the T2. I was last updated in 2019, so it's
not a zombie by any stretch.

~~~
sneak
Ahh yes; I have an iMac Pro (IIRC the first one to get it) and forgot they
hadn’t T2’d the silver ones yet.

------
gigatexal
I think the author misses the obvious advantage of having ARM macs: it gives
Apple even more vertical integration by moving the chip design in-house. They
could in theory iterate faster on core design changes quicker than Intel could
and would no longer have to pay what little markup they already to pay for
Intel chips.

------
DeathArrow
For Apple using its own CPUs might mean less money spent for hardware, more
control and greater user lock in.

But I don't see what's in for the users and software developers? Transition to
another architecture might mean more money spent for end-users and more money
and time spent for software developers.

Why is everybody so excited?

~~~
jurip
Because people assume ARM would give us better performance and/or battery
life. Hard to know if that would actually pan out in the laptop form factor
(and if it would hold true forever), but at least right now iPads get better
Geekbench scores than MacBook Air.

As for more money and time… I dunno, I make my living writing mostly iOS and
Mac software and I can't recall the last time I did anything that was
architecture specific. I'd imagine that applies to the vast majority of people
working on ordinary application software on these platforms.

------
totorovirus
I don't think changing the microarchitecture would only require developers to
swap compiler toolchains from x86 to ARM. The community is largely dependent
on x86 architecture. Not a case for high level application developers, but
some developers do serious optimization based on instruction set.

------
shuringai
so basically instead of porting desktop apps to ARM they convince me that my
mobile device is actually a desktop... yep.... sound basic Apple to me

------
jbverschoor
I dunno.. why is jlg blogging about Apple so much... he ran Beos, but that
stalled and then went belly up. Is he looking for a position at Apple? I hope
not.

As for the cpu side.. Apple switched before. Also, the tooling is way more up
to date and code is more high level these days than before.

Intel as a company isn’t performing, so it’s been AMD and their own CPUs..
they pulled it off before, and I think it will depend on tooling, and app
compatibility/performance when emulating. Although I’m not sure if that would
require a license

~~~
oddity
It's not rare to leave a company but still be interested in that company's
projects. And when you're a tech blogger, it's hard to not write about a
trillion USD tech company. I don't think speculating about his motives is
necessary.

~~~
jbverschoor
But he’s not a tech blogger.. He was silent for over 15 years about any tech
news. Apple was also interesting when Steve was still alive. I dunno.. I get
salty when I see these sorts of posts. Especially when there’s absolutely no
new insights in them.

~~~
scarface74
He has been blogging about Apple at Mondaynote since 2008.

[https://mondaynote.com/archive/2008](https://mondaynote.com/archive/2008)

