
Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs - djrogers
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21295475/apple-mac-processors-arm-silicon-chips-wwdc-2020
======
vessenes
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.

~~~
ianhowson
> 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

~~~
Teknoman117
I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their
shareholders, not the consumers.

~~~
ianhowson
Bingo. Estimates vary wildly, but I've seen figures saying that Axx CPUs cost
Apple about $50 each. Even if it's more like $100, that's still an insane
amount of additional profit per unit to be extracted. They don't need to deal
with single-supplier hassles and they get much more control over what cores go
into their SoC.

This is sort-of-OK for consumers but _amazing_ for Apple and its shareholers.

~~~
m463
But customers are going towards an entirely _entirely_ closed everything. ios
is apple languages, apple signature required to run code, apple processors.
Desktop machines are the last bit of freedom in the apple ecosystem.

This isn't "sort-of-ok", it's "bad-for-customers" and "bad-for-developers".

~~~
nisten
This is just my opinion but I think it's great for consumers and a good
restriction for developers.

As a consumer you shouldn't be running unsigned software because you're
putting not only your data at risk but any data you have access to.

And as a developer on mac you can still run anything reasonably well in a VM.
If you're using node, you should be running that in a virtualized environment
in the first place, albeit I'm too lazy myself to always set that all up.

Actually it's pretty amazing that now we'll be able to run an entire x86 OS
environment on an ARM chip and get very usable performance too.

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
As someone on linux I've never run signed software ever in my life. Guess I've
lost all my data and haven't even noticed!

~~~
m463
Linux signs its software.

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
I mean signed by Apple or any big corporation.

------
ksec
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.

~~~
paulpan
> 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?

~~~
notSupplied
And what happens if China marches into Taiwan? This is a plausible
consideration that must be one of Apple's worst nightmares.

~~~
mercutio2
China can bomb TSMC, no doubt.

But landing troops (they can't march, it's an island, and the difference
between amphibious and land based operations matters a lot) would be extremely
difficult, and not obviously in the PLA's favor. See, for example:

[https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-
wi...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-with-china/)

~~~
kspacewalk2
China's sheer scale means there aren't too many military shortcomings it can't
address on a roughly 10-year timeframe.

~~~
dmix
The larger point is that it'd be way too messy for them to even try. Basically
on the scale of US/SK invading NK.

Besides that significant causalities and economic damage to both sides, which
of course they'd eventually win, but it'd be a geopolitical disaster that
won't end with the quelling of the armed forces.

China has far more to gain not going this route.

~~~
elcritch
I’d imagine China would more likely begin blockading Taiwan, at least until
the US and the west responded. Given the strength of US naval power it’ll be a
while before China consider even that.

------
DCKing
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...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/porting_your_macos_apps_to_apple_silicon)

~~~
apexalpha
>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...

~~~
DCKing
Your comment made me rewatch that section of the Keynote [1], and I believe
you're right. Docker and Parallels were shown in a 'virtualization'
subsection, and not the Rosetta subsection. So that must have been ARM64
Debian we saw there indeed. Did I say that their presentation was too fast :)
?

That's going to be interesting in the end. Being able to build/smoke test x86
containers on macOS will be important, at least for a while. So it's up in the
air whether that will be addressed, although it's worth noting that Docker
already supports cross building images [2].

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEZhD3J89ZE&t=5918](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEZhD3J89ZE&t=5918)

[2]: [https://docs.docker.com/buildx/working-with-
buildx/](https://docs.docker.com/buildx/working-with-buildx/)

Another interesting note is that the user agent in their Apache logs still
says "Intel Mac OS X". Wonder if they'll keep that.

~~~
chrizel
In the “Platforms State of the Union” video, which gets a little bit more
technical, 30 minutes in, they are explicitly mentioning the ARM version of
Debian Linux and show it off. So yes, we are talking about virtualization of
an ARM system here.

~~~
modmans2nd
That’s cool I’m and of itself though

------
Cu3PO42
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.

~~~
bredren
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)

~~~
Cu3PO42
Not divulging their hand may be a thing. But they could at least have said
something (rehashed) about the A12Z: "it performs better than the CPUs
currently shipping in the Mac mini by X% in Y benchmark".

I'm not intrisically excited for a new Apple product, but if they could have
told me, we can deliver 50% extra battery life in your new MacBook at
comparable performance, that would build up some hype and maybe mindshare.

> not helpful to [...] their ability to keep selling Intel stuff.

I hope that that's it. If we're going through the pains of a platform
transition, I'd like to get something out of it.

~~~
ebg13
> _Not divulging their hand may be a thing. But they could at least have_

Let's say that the new numbers are mindblowingly good. So then what? Nobody
buys anything from them until next year because they're all waiting? Yikes.
This way fewer people will be mortified of the idea of buying something right
now instead of waiting.

~~~
smacktoward
AKA the Osborne effect:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)

------
QuixoticQuibit
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.

~~~
ianai
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.

~~~
abvdasker
It's astonishing to me how far Intel has fallen in so short a time. I feel
like it was only a couple years ago that Intel was understood universally to
be the "heavyweight champion of the world" so to speak.

They completely missed the boat on mobile and AMD has leapfrogged them very
recently on desktop. On top of that there were the Spectre vulnerabilities
which shook confidence even further. This announcement is another huge blow
given the extent to which the entire consumer electronics industry tends to
follow Apple. I would be interested to hear an insider's perspective on such a
rapid decline.

~~~
Leherenn
Not an insider, but as far as I know, it's mostly their fab that failed.
They're still on 14+++nm when AMD is on 7nm, with 5nm coming soon.

You can have the best architecture in the world (no idea if they have) and the
best engineers, it's hard to compete when you're so far behind in transistor
size.

~~~
ccmcarey
Do you have any good resources on why their fab process failed so hard? I've
seen it mentioned frequently, but not the reason why.

~~~
celeritascelery
They tried to jump too far with intel 10nm. The process node names no longer
represent actual transistor size, they just indicate a new generation. With
intel 10nm they took a risk and tried to shirk the die more then would
normally happen in generation jump. If it worked it would put them a whole
generation ahead of TSMC and secure process leadership. But physics bit them
in the ass. It turned out that shirking that small was much harder then they
thought, and the cells they were using were not robust enough to handle it.

Instead of putting them way ahead it cost them years of recovery and let AMD
sneak up from behind.

------
yyyk
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.

~~~
copperx
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.

~~~
diroussel
Yes I'm interested in the impact of an ARM laptop, ARM VMs/Docker, and AWS
Graviton2. Quite an interesting toolset.

------
valuearb
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.

~~~
originalvichy
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.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Isn't this already the case?

iOS apps can be built, for Intel, using Catalyst, with very trivial changes in
code, but we still see Electron hanging around today like a bad smell.

I can't imagine this will change anything.

~~~
pettazz
But have you actually used a Catalyst app on mac? They're terrible ports as it
is right now.

~~~
spideymans
Eh, Catalyst apps are as good or bad as the developer wants them to be. Voice
Memos and "Find My" on the Mac are two fantastic Catalyst apps, and certainly
better than Electron.

Anyways Catalyst won't even be relevant in the long term, once iPhone apps are
written in SwiftUI

------
deeblering4
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.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
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.

~~~
nicoburns
> 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

I agree with this. There's a big difference between Intel -> ARM and PPC ->
Intel too: With PPC -> Intel, they were moving from their own special
architecture towards the mainstream architecture that everybody else was
using. In this case they're leaving an architecture that is likely to remain
highly relevant outside of the Apple bubble for a long time to come.

------
chx
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.

~~~
billyhoffman
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/](https://www.apple.com/pro-
display-xdr/specs/)

~~~
tomaskafka
Or they are bullshitting - even if the Dev kit wasn't ready to connect to XDR,
they wouldn’t dare to show it. Which monitor would they even show it on? 10
year old Cinema? Glossy plastic Acer? :)

------
mrkstu
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.

~~~
LeoPanthera
> 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.

~~~
ryukafalz
Did they show the architecture at any point? I didn't see the architecture
shown in the VM at all, but could have missed it.

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

~~~
kemiller2002
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.

~~~
inapis
If those devices will have 4-5 years worth of use, then I think most people
would be fine with the purchase. 4-5 years already does require upgrading for
either performance or quality of life features.

~~~
adwww
Your comment made me look how old my current laptop is. "Mid-2014".

It's still as powerful as any of the current Apple laptops - progress has been
slow these last 6 years.

~~~
unsignedchar
Part of the motivation for the transition is the hope that the progress will
be much faster over the next 6. If that happens, those intel macs may age out
sooner.

------
sschueller
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.

~~~
criddell
> They will lock down their PCs like the iPhone.

Did they say that in the keynote?

~~~
benologist
At 1:34:04 of the presentation Fedherighi is opening up Xcode on the ARM Mac,
and says, "we're using Xcode, like all our developers will" which might be
construed as app store only.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Given that virtually everyone developing Swift or Objective-C applications for
the Mac is using Xcode whether or not they're publishing to the App Store,
that just seems to be a real leap to take, though.

~~~
benologist
It certainly might be nothing, but it's hard to imagine they would say "all of
their developers" are using Xcode to describe the current and diverse IDE
landscape. A _lot_ of developers are currently using multi-platform game
engines, open technologies like HTML, multi-platform frameworks etc.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
It really isn't, though. There's a lot of IDEs and text editors out there,
sure (I seem to collect them, myself). But if you're _specifically_ writing
Mac apps in Objective-C or Swift, the entire development chain is tied to
Xcode, and all the developers writing apps for Mac or iOS that I know of --
not "developers writing apps _on_ the Mac," but the specific subset of people
writing apps _for_ the Mac or iOS devices -- are using Xcode. The only other
IDE I know of that's remotely competitive on this front is JetBrain's AppCode,
but it has a tiny market share in comparison, and people developing native Mac
apps in other languages are an even smaller group.

(Also, it's not _really_ like Apple to acknowledge competition in this space,
especially anyone using non-native toolkits. They're not going to mention
people writing Electron apps in the WWDC keynote, right?)

------
zelly
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?

~~~
1_player
Running Linux is already not very straight forward on modern x86 Apple
hardware, it would be extremely surprised to see the ARM Apple running Linux
anytime soon.

It'll happen, eventually, when the open source community will reverse engineer
them and find how to "jailbreak" them.

~~~
nona
Then we still have to deal with drivers; I don't see mesa supporting the A12
GPU anytime soon, for instance. I think this is the end of the line for Linux
on Macs.

------
ogre_codes
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.

~~~
monocasa
IDK, "look how good our CPU support is by running a several year old GPU
limited game" fell a bit flat for me.

~~~
Mindwipe
Not even running it very well. All the graphics settings were turned down, the
framerate looked choppy and it was only running in 1080p.

~~~
freehunter
It’s not a demo of their new gaming-class GPU though.

~~~
snuxoll
No - but they weren't exactly showing us performance graphs to see where the
game was getting caught on bottlenecks either, however.

------
aldanor
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?..

~~~
mantap
PCs are for gaming. PCs are for work. Macs are for... students and middle
managers apparently.

~~~
chpmrc
Right, apparently _only_ a quarter of all developers uses them
([https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-
_-developers-primary-operating-systems)).

~~~
mantap
Including me. Will those same developers buy a machine that is completely
locked down? I will not.

~~~
chpmrc
Sorry, I don't understand what you're referring to. Locked down in what way?

------
nouveaux
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.

~~~
quantummkv
If the performance in the demo is accurate, and considering that the actual
Mac chips will have a lot bigger power headroom, silicon die size and more
thermal headrooms than the A12Z, Intel will be swatted out.

------
jdhn
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?

~~~
nouveaux
Whether or not they think that or they can, they have been developing GPUs for
iOS devices. It'll be interesting to see what they do for their desktops.

~~~
jdhn
I agree. I know they're currently using AMD GPUs, but how much longer will
they keep using AMD if they believe that their own in house chips can do a
better job? Also, I'm curious as to whether they would try to sell their GPUs
(iGPU?) to gamers who traditionally don't stay within the Mac ecosystem at
all. Having a 3rd major player in the GPU space would be wild.

~~~
bredren
It helps explain why they haven’t added nvidia support. Apple is going the
opposite direction and getting rid of both.

------
rayiner
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.

------
freedomben
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?

~~~
messe
> so if the new Mac chips are ARM compliant then the ARM linux builds should
> work

That's not how it works. ARM is just the processor architecture. While Linux
may very well support the processor, it's unlikely to support the rest of the
hardware well, if at all.

~~~
freedomben
yeah, but driver support has been a challenge for years on mac hardware (as I
implied poorly) but there are ways to run if you tolerate some absurdities as
a result of poor hardware support (like the fans running 100% all the time,
battery draining from 100% to 0% in 60 mins, no wifi, etc). There are also
workaround for some things like Broadcom where you can pull the firmware out
of the windows driver. So you don't necessarily need the Linux kernel to work
perfectly with all the hardware.

But my question/point was, is there likely to a total show stopper now that
you can't just tolerate?

------
rapjr9
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?

------
jason0597
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.

~~~
95014_refugee
Nothing here prevents you from doing this in a VM.

The problem with being able to tinker at will with a consumer system is that
you have no way of choosing _who_ is tinkering with your system.

If as a vendor you take the security and privacy of your customers'
information seriously, you cannot deliver an "open" and "tinkerable" system.
The two are fundamentally at odds.

This has been sufficiently obvious for long enough now that anyone still
complaining about how they can't run their own kernel on their desktop is
almost certainly a surveillance-state troll.

~~~
quickthrower2
Or a “hacker” as in the “hacker news” usage of the word.

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

~~~
udev
I wonder what the cost of the transition mini is.

~~~
Analemma_
The last time Apple transitioned to a new architecture, the dev kits were
loaners you had to give back.

~~~
donarb
And you most likely will have to be an established developer, meaning you’ll
have to have an app in the App Store. Apple’s not gonna give these to people
that just want to play around with a new machine.

~~~
donarb
Yep, confirmed.

[https://developer.apple.com/programs/universal/](https://developer.apple.com/programs/universal/)

"Submit a brief application for an opportunity to join the program. Selected
developers will receive a link to order the Universal App Quick Start Program
from the online Apple Store. Priority will be given to applicants with an
existing macOS application, as availability is limited."

------
kevindong
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-...](https://developer.apple.com/terms/universal-app-quick-start-
program/Developer-Universal-App-Quick-Start-Program.pdf)

~~~
abhorrence
This is unsurprising. Both because it's Apple, but also because the kits are
meant to enable testing on real hardware, not to be actual hardware.

------
blinkingled
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.

~~~
ianmassey
intel's market cap is ~250B. Apple's is ~1.55T. I don't think they want to be
what intel is today.

~~~
blinkingled
Apple ARM would like to be where Intel ISA as a de-facto platform is today -
but not sure what in my comment implied I meant Apple want to be financially
where Intel is today.

Also that would not preclude them from being financially where they want to be
- more Macs sold at Apple premium - even if they are to run Windows and Linux
- still means more Apple hardware sales and more money.

~~~
ianmassey
but the two things are inextricably tied - intel's open platform resulted in
their financial performance to a hugely meaningful degree, and the same with
apple's strategy vs. their performance. obviously it's not apples to apples in
any number of ways, but apple's strategic decision to operate as a closed
platform empowers many of the things they see as key to their performance. i
understand what you meant, but i don't think apple views that as a goal they
should pursue.

~~~
blinkingled
Mac is not currently a closed platform however and making it closed would be a
gamble on Apple's part - far from certain they will succeed like they did with
iOS. Your logic implies they are closing it down and that will lead to more
monetization. That's not a given. We don't know that they will take that
gamble yet - assuming they won't, the only way to make more money on the Macs
is selling more of them - sales have been fairly stagnant on the Mac side btw.

------
stephc_int13
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.

------
caiobegotti
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.

------
dharma1
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.

------
anoncow
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.

~~~
andrewksl
The same video where he gains ~13% performance by turning the bottom of the
laptop into into a heatsink, rendering it a surface too hot to be placed on a
lap. Also where chilled-water cooling had no performance gains over the un-
lappable laptop.

If anything, he debunked his own theory with that experiment.

~~~
anoncow
Yes, that one.

------
KenoFischer
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.

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

~~~
cmer
Curious that they said nothing about virtualizing Windows. That can’t be a
mistake or oversight. Odd.

~~~
Slartie
I noticed that too. Might have trademark or legal reasons though. Technically,
if they're able to dynamically translate x86 to ARM as they've explicitly
stated (with JIT of JS and the JVM as the example) they should be able to
dynamically translate x86 VMs regardless of what OS they contain, which would
allow x86 Windows to be virtualized with better-than-interpreted performance.

Or at least that's what I hope ;-) I'm relying on running x86 Windows and
Linux within Parallels in addition to native MacOS Apps to do my daily work,
which involves compiling and testing x86 binaries for these platforms, so
whether this virtualization thing actually runs x86 OSes transparently is an
absolute make-or-break feature for me to continue my usage of the MacOS
platform for work.

~~~
shaabanban
I don’t think that would perform very well without some hardware support for
it as well. Not an expert on this by any stretch but as I understand it modern
virtualization is almost always hardware accelerated which I can’t imagine is
a viable option if you’re translating the binaries with Rosetta.

------
cm0000cm
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...

~~~
thought_alarm
Given Apple's track record of supporting older Mac hardware, I would expect
Intel Mac hardware to be supported for many years and many OS versions after
the last Intel Mac has been produced.

Also given Apple's recent MacBook track record, the first version of ARM Macs
may not be as much of a slam dunk as people hope.

~~~
seanalltogether
Which track record are you talking about? Apple discontinued OS support for
PPC only 3 years after intel was announced. That means no more support for
xcode and new commandline tools after 3.5 years.

------
mikece
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?

~~~
Gaelan
I mean, there's nothing too magical about boot camp—even if apple removed all
support for it from macOS, you can probably install windows on a partition the
normal way without too much trouble. I think the only thing that might break
is if Windows stopped being compatible with the Mac hardware drivers, and
Apple didn't update them.

------
djhworld
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.

~~~
arexxbifs
Meanwhile, Intel can't seem to fix the issue with i915 causing GPU hangs. I
guess Linux desktop users, while not exactly a massive market share, will move
to AMD.

------
DrBazza
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.

------
greendave
> 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).

~~~
nojito
What? PPC transition took 4+ years until Snow Leopard was released.

You're gonna see macs across the line being moved over to Apple chips Q4 and
Q1

~~~
banaana
The actual hardware transition was only a year, OS support is separate.

------
cmrdporcupine
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. :-)

------
AnonC
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.

~~~
Analemma_
They may be sandbagging to give themselves some wiggle room. IIRC Jobs also
said the Intel transition would take two years and it only ended up taking
one.

------
gwbas1c
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.

------
nouveaux
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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_processors)

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

------
abruzzi
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.)

~~~
systemvoltage
It will be possible to virtualize old apps. For example, running OSX tiger in
a VM.

------
MarcScott
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?

~~~
djxfade
Not really. Native apps for macOS are targeting Apple specific APIs. It might
help for cross platform applications that do low lever asm optimizations
though.

------
_bxg1
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.

------
pathartl
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.

~~~
Corrado
Yea, I wonder what the Mac Pro is going to look like in a couple of years.
Then again, they could stuff it with 100 A19z processors and have a 1024
thread machine (or something equally outrageous).

~~~
slantyyz
I have to think it's going to be tiny, cool (as in temperature) and use a
fraction of the electricity that the latest Mac Pro does.

As for the pro software that currently requires a physical dongle for DRM, I'm
guessing those vendors will be forced into the Mac App Store with Apple
managing access to the software for them.

------
a1exus
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?

~~~
valuearb
Unless you want to build and test ARM MacOS apps next year you should be fine.
Your MBP should still work fine and in two years you should replace it
anyways.

------
acomjean
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).

------
zmmmmm
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.

~~~
knolan
They did show this in the keynote.

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

~~~
harmonicgf2
I like apple for its innovation but I'm starting to get scared at the same
time.

------
tuatoru
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.

------
msie
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)

~~~
valuearb
Apple isn’t being hostile to Hey! They are being hostile to Apple. Imagine
building a large new Paid App that you expect Apple to host and distribute for
free worldwide by gaming their payment system.

~~~
damnyou
Why do you think that is not a completely reasonable expectation?

~~~
valuearb
It’s entirely reasonable for a free service. Apple hosts and distributes
terabytes of free apps.

But Hey! isn’t free, they just charge you using a different platform. Maybe
30% is too much for Apple to charge them, but zero percent is definitely too
low.

~~~
damnyou
Apple is welcome to charge 2.9% the way other payment processors do. That is
reasonable. 30% is a protection racket.

~~~
valuearb
If you actually believe running the App Store is the same as payment
processing alone there is no discussion to be had with you.

~~~
damnyou
Well, clearly, "value arb", given that Apple has no competition among iOS app
stores.

~~~
valuearb
Visa/MC don’t host and distribute petabytes of data for card holders. They
don’t provide hundreds of store fronts with localized content and marketing.
They don’t provide extensive developer kits and support anywhere on par with
what Apple does.

The payment processor argument means you really don’t have any clue to what
Apple App Store services are or do.

~~~
damnyou
If Apple is so confident then it can allow alternative app stores and drop its
monopoly enforced through technology.

~~~
valuearb
No one isn’t saying they don’t make high margins on their App Store revenues,
just that comparing the App Store to a mere payment processor is ridiculous
and indicative of not even understanding what it does.

------
seek3r00
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?

~~~
ccmcarey
Parallels Desktop is virtualization. How do you mean?

~~~
seek3r00
I meant that we’ve already got Parallels Desktop. I didn’t understand whether
they want to introduce something like Hyper-V/WSL on macOS.

~~~
ArgyleSound
They have their own hypervisor.framework that they expect virtualisation
software to be built on top of.

------
starpilot
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.

------
halotrope
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.

------
AlbertoGP
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.

~~~
starsinspace
Nitpick: for the Amigas they used Motorola 68000 series CPUs.

~~~
AlbertoGP
Yes, you are absolutely correct.

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

------
infinityplus1
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.

~~~
jandrese
Nobody gives a crap about the Qualcomm powered notebooks. They're a joke
market segment. As long as Apple doesn't start selling A* chips to Samsung or
other Android OEMs Qualcomm isn't going to worry.

~~~
kasabali
> As long as Apple doesn't start selling A* chips to Samsung or other Android
> OEMs Qualcomm isn't going to worry

Even if Apple did sell their chips to other parties, Qualcomm will be still
collecting its sweet patent royalty _from both parties_ , so it couldn't care
less.

~~~
jandrese
The patent royalties are fairly small compared to selling a full chip. They
would still be feeling the pinch.

Of course even if Apple did start selling those chips (which they won't) they
would charge an arm and a leg for them, because they could. They would only be
used in the top of the line flagship phones. Apple has shown zero interest in
competing with the bargain basement hardware producers.

~~~
kasabali
> The patent royalties are fairly small compared to selling a full chip

Generally, yes. But we're talking about Qualcomm [1] here.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-
sho...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-
the-cell-phone-industry-for-almost-20-years/)

------
cestith
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.

~~~
StillBored
This is likely a larger reason for the move than the perf/efficiency. Apple
likes to ship "premium" products, which forces them into the premium/high
margin price tiers with intel/etc.

So they will gain a bit with a product laser focused on its market, but
alongside that, they won't be paying the kings ransom intel wants for a couple
additional cores, or a couple Mhz boost. So they can simplify the binning into
best in class, and good yields for the volume product, and pocket the margins
on the best in class product segment rather than giving it all to intel.

------
megameter
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.

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

~~~
AlexandrB
It seems to be going the other way actually. MacOS Big Sur looks like iPadOS
with a menu bar tacked on.

~~~
snuxoll
What they did to Finder is just...unacceptable.

~~~
AlexandrB
Hoping there's a way to switch to a more compact view, but as shown in the
keynote it looks terrible. What is with the insistence on wasting space in
modern operating systems? Were people getting _too_ productive with new, large
displays?

------
garrypettet
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.

~~~
jmkni
I'm wondering the same thing about the Jetbrains tools (Idea, Rider, PyCharm,
etc)

------
shirro
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.

------
SloopJon
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.

~~~
balls187
I was curious about the hardware they used for the demo.

~~~
eyesee
It was stated the demo hardware is the DTK (available this week), which
includes an A12Z processor from the latest iPad Pro coupled with 16 GB RAM.

~~~
balls187
Wow, that's awesome.

I was having intermittent xfiniti issues during the stream.

------
jeremychone
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.

------
simonbarker87
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?

~~~
nouveaux
I'd be surprised if the iOS apps did not work on Intel based macOS. Project
Catalyst already works on Intel macs and my guess is many iOS apps have been
migrated already.

~~~
jandrese
I'm sure there will be emulators. But I'm also fairly confident that they'll
be relatively slow. Emulating across architectures is rarely performant, and
if Apple had solved the problem they would be talking a lot about it right
now. In the past they've gotten away with this because the architecture
they're moving to was so much faster than the previous architecture that even
with a 50% or 75% performance penalty the apps would run faster than they did
on the old hardware. With this new hardware it is likely only going to be
marginally faster than the old Intel chips since the focus is more on power
efficiency, so emulated apps are probably going to feel sluggish.

------
hellofunk
> 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?

------
Solar19
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.

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

------
runxel
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?

------
nardi
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.

------
cpeterso
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...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-
transition-to-apple-silicon/)

------
mounram
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.

------
iramiller
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.

------
jaredtn
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.

------
Solar19
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.

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

------
dharma1
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?

------
dheera
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?

------
bnastic
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...

------
FloatArtifact
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

------
mikece
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

~~~
AnotherGoodName
It's the A12Z and they are shipping A12Z mac minis to developers who buy one
on the store starting today.

------
drawkbox
> _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.

------
shmerl
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).

~~~
mozey
I started using MacBooks when they switched to Intel around 2008. Maybe this
is a sign to move on. Currently using a mid 2014 model, I like the slim form
factor, but I don't like the absence of an ethernet port. I don't care much
for the retina display, my 2008 matte model was better. Been looking at the
Lenovo T470. I need something that would be easy to replace quickly anywhere
in the world. What should I get?

~~~
shmerl
Lenovo Thinkpad laptops are pretty good, and in my experience run Linux very
well. Get something with AMD APU (there should be new models coming out soon
with Zen 2 + Vega).

The only annoyance is their refusal to refund Windows tax. But now Lenovo
partnered with RedHat/IBM and started selling some laptops with Linux pre-
installed (Fedora), so you can avoid Windows tax there, even if you don't plan
to use Fedora. I hope that will eventually extend to all their models.

------
partiallypro
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.

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

------
foepys
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.

~~~
notriddle
Maybe, but I honestly kind of doubt it. The Mac specifically serves as the
development platform for iOS, so you obviously need to be able to install a
compiler toolchain at least for that.

But developing for iOS also requires a bunch more than just developing for
iOS. Mobile apps often require servers, and Apple doesn't have a server
product any more, so it's in Apple's best interest to allow stuff like Docker
(which, you'll remember, they specifically demoed).

------
gjsman-1000
Not quite related, but I Just wrote this comment on an Apple Pencil on iPadOS
14. Pretty sweet!

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

~~~
Wowfunhappy
It's dead. Intel Macs gave birth to Hackintosh, and ARM Macs will be their
death. It was a nice ride.

------
soygul
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](https://quanticdev.com/articles/h265-encoding-on-arm-cpus)

------
godzillabrennus
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.

------
fortran77
Is this CPU any different from the CPU in a Raspberry Pi? Will it be binary
compatible?

------
tannhaeuser
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?

~~~
yannikyeo
The keynote shows Microsoft Word, Excel and Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop
running on ARM Mac.

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

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

~~~
john_alan
I don't think it's possible without making development a nightmare. Apple have
committed publicly to keeping macOS Unix like and iOS touch based.

------
pier25
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.

------
redleggedfrog
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.

------
thesquib
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

------
jinonoel
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?

------
tyingq
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?

------
mcot2
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.

~~~
mstibbard
The redesign for Big Sur leads me to believe this is the direction they are
heading. It has a "made for touch" look.

------
lawrenceyan
Post with official announcement:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23604457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23604457)

------
kabacha
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.

------
boring_twenties
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.

~~~
walterbell
It's already there (T2 chip) but without (?) remote access.

------
josteink
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.

------
santiagoIT
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).

~~~
1_player
Probably not, no mention at all of Bootcamp and this is a unique opportunity
for Apple to lock everything down. Virtualisation will be the only option I
bet.

------
vardhanagwal
Here's a more detailed review:
[https://link.medium.com/blEemwhex7](https://link.medium.com/blEemwhex7)

------
cabaalis
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.

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

------
cjohansson
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

------
bruwozniak
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...

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

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

~~~
lasagnaphil
You need to understand ARM also has its own SIMD instruction set called NEON,
and from what I've heard it offers more flexibility than Intel's.

~~~
devwastaken
Neon isn't the chosen one for SIMD performance in most use cases. The very
basic use case of cpu encoding AV1 or h265 video requires AVX2, a much newer
simd instruction set. Afaik arm is nowhere near this.

------
vletal
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...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-
transition-to-apple-silicon/)

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

~~~
macintux
Yes, it will be. Even the iPhone/iPad are Unix at their core, although
terminal access isn't supported.

~~~
john_alan
good point, I wonder will they eventually open up a dev/pro mode on iPadOS and
give terminal access (as it is with macOS) but protect system folders...

------
snowwrestler
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23530084)

~~~
valuearb
Dual CPUs never made any sense. That’s why they are doing emulation and binary
conversion.

Maybe Apple adds the i86 instruction set as a module in their SOCs, but they
aren’t paying intel CPU prices on their ARM Macs.

~~~
snowwrestler
Did I misinterpret today? Didn't Apple just release a machine with ARM and
Intel?

~~~
monocasa
It's an ARM only Developer Kit.

~~~
snowwrestler
Ah. I saw references to "dual architecture" online but looks like that means
Apple will be releasing new Intel machines even as they are encouraging
everyone to port their apps to ARM. The "dual" part just means two different
lines of machines that will be sold contemporaneously for a little while, not
two architectures inside one machine.

Oh well, I got excited for a minute there.

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

------
plorg
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.

~~~
snazz
I think I heard them mention that kits would start shipping later this week.

~~~
plorg
That sounds reasonable. I didn't watch the presentation, and to be honest, I'm
not super familiar with the FCC device database.

------
qwerty456127
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?

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

------
sida
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?

~~~
jidiculous
I doubt it, the cost of building an assembly line for chip fab is apparently
one of the most expensive among all kinds of manufacturing. This link was
posted on HN last week that alluded to this:
[https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-arm-and-
intel/](https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-arm-and-intel/)

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

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

~~~
macintux
I bought mine a month ago, and I'm happy to keep it. It'll be supported for
(guessing) 4-5 years, at least, and the new ARM-based ones won't be available
until the end of the year (and you probably don't want to be an early
adopter).

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

------
codeisawesome
Haha this meme really fits:

Apple: Here we demonstrate desktop Photoshop running on ARM.

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

:)

------
bitL
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?

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

That's pretty subjective depending on operating system and use case. If you
want Linux, Dell makes some really good options (XPS Developer Edition),
System76 and Purism make some nice hardware for libre software purists.

For Windows laptops there are tons of options and it all boils down to thermal
performance and power versus weight and expense. No notebook will defy the
laws of physics so there are trade-offs, especially when you start wanting to
play games, which I have generally found just isn't worth the trouble on a
laptop. Dell's XPS and Lenovo's Thinkpad lines are solid in terms of providing
options that fit a lot of different use cases.

I've found that the new Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 environment is great for
a lot of the command line Linuxy stuff I took for granted in MacOS. Apple's
hardware used to be my default option for computing on the go while I would
use native Linux on my desktop, because so much of my development stuff
requires some flavor of Linux compatibility. Now, with WSL2, Windows works
perfectly for what I need. Microsoft's Linux support is so good that I would
not buy another Apple laptop if I were in the market now (it feels really
weird typing that) - there is just nothing justifying Apple's premium price
anymore, for the type of work I do (YMMV).

The thing that's different about buying non-Apple computing hardware is that
you have many more options. Apple takes kind of a dictatorial role in giving
you one option at any given screen size or price point. Want a GPU? Buy a 16"
Macbook Pro. Want a desktop class CPU? Buy an iMac (or spend $10k+ on a
reasonably spec'ed Mac Pro). People put up with this in large part because of
Apple's marketing. MacOS Catalina was a disaster but at this point a lot of
people have low grade Stockholm syndrome. The relationship is totally
different on the PC side where you can practically find anything to match
whatever particular use case you have; there are a lot more options, and you
have a more active role in figuring that out and purchasing what works for
you.

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

~~~
tpmx
That's exactly right.

[https://twitter.com/StevenLevy/status/1275138212516765697](https://twitter.com/StevenLevy/status/1275138212516765697)

------
jaykru
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 :)

~~~
monocasa
Pretty much every SoC has cores equivalent to the management engine. Currently
they have a handful of ARM cores on the southbridge that fulfill the same
purpose. I imagine that won't change. "BridgeOS" is the term to search for if
you want to learn more.

The thought experiment is probably moot anyway though, as Apple probably won't
allow any kernels that haven't been signed by them to be booted like on their
iOS devices.

~~~
jaykru
I ended up doing a bunch of research into and asking around about the T2 chip
(which seems to be the closest thing to an IME Apple advertises) today and got
a variety of responses.

The general picture I've gotten is that the T2 is probably significantly less
capable of surveillance than, say, the IME. This talk [1] for example suggests
(but doesn't rule out explicitly as far as I can tell) that the T2 is not
connected to the PCIe interfaces for network cards, which significantly
reduces the extent to which the T2 could autonomously phone home what it could
learn through its direct storage access and connection to the CPU.

And yikes! No unsigned kernels would be pretty bad. I certainly wouldn't be
buying if that's the case :(

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnyasv1qbU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnyasv1qbU)

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

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

------
neximo64
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.

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

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

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

------
gjvnq
I wonder what it will mean for Hackintoshs and Wine.

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

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

------
Ayesh
This also starts the eventual death of Hackintosh.

------
MangoCoffee
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.

------
gjsman-1000
The cost of the transition kit will be $500.

------
bdz
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)

~~~
coldpie
macOS's gaming story has always been pretty abysmal. They nuked a ton of games
when they dropped 32-bit support, and they refuse to implement the graphics
API that the gaming industry is standardizing around. I don't foresee any
improvements in Mac gaming from this announcement.

~~~
bdz
But now games like Fortnite, Minecraft, PUBG etc. that already exist on iOS
can natively run on the Mac. So I think that's a pretty big thing

~~~
Mindwipe
> But now games like Fortnite, Minecraft, PUBG etc. that already exist on iOS
> can natively run on the Mac. So I think that's a pretty big thing

With touch controls on non-touchscreen devices.

It isn't big.

I think the fact they chose to show off a fairly poorly running version of
Tomb Raider as their demo goes to show that they still fundamentally do not
understand the gaming market.

~~~
djmobley
They chose Tomb Raider to demo Rosetta 2 precisely because it’s an old game
built for x86

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

~~~
tuatoru
Apple could just buy them all.

~~~
amelius
You can't always buy patents. If other players don't want Apple in the CPU
market, they could just block Apple. Patents offer a monopoly on a technology
after all. A different scenario would be if Apple built a war chest of CPU-
related patents, which they could use for trading.

~~~
valuearb
Apple isn’t using any instructions from their CPUs

~~~
monocasa
There's all sorts of CPU related patents that aren't related to an individual
ISA.

~~~
valuearb
Then how has Apple not gotten sued over the Ax series of processors? Or the
iPhone, the iPad, the PPC Macs, etc?

~~~
monocasa
Because they have their own warchest of patents from acquiring about every
decent processor startup over the past 15 years that would allow them to
counter sue, and microarchitectual details are under incredibly strict NDAs to
where it's an uphill battle to even prove that Apple is using any of those
patented techniques to begin with.

Also, the PowerPC macs weren't their chips, those were IBM and Motorola for
the most part (Apple did have some input into Altivec, but didn't do anything
from the RTL down AFAIK).

~~~
valuearb
You are contradicting yourself. Apple hasn’t been sued because of their patent
portfolio, but they still have that. Little changes with this transition, they
are still building computing devices around the ARM instruction set.

~~~
monocasa
I'm not contradicting myself; all I've said is that patents matter across ISA
boundaries, but Apple has a lot of patents.

If another company were to try this without a warchest the size of Apple's,
they'd be sued into oblivion.

------
PatrolX
My burning question...

Made in China or the USA?

~~~
umanwizard
Apple chips are manufactured by TSMC, so presumably Taiwan.

(Taiwan’s constitution technically defines it as part of China, but it
operates as a separate country for all practical purposes).

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

------
numpad0
Wait, no Apple Glass?

------
sergiomattei
History being made!

------
andrewstuart
Thus all your Apple Macs are relegated to legacy.

------
dboreham
DEC reborn.

------
Causality1
So is this the death of Mac gaming?

------
arrty88
Will adobe products still work?

~~~
pram
It's literally in the presentation.

~~~
arrty88
Sorry guy. I didn’t have time to watch during work and dont feeling like
reading through a verge article

~~~
ulfw
But you feel like posting. Cool.

------
jbverschoor
a12z, funded by a16z

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

~~~
donarb
Rosetta. Apple knows processors, ARM is just a licensed instruction set.

~~~
donarb
To be clear, it's not a virtual machine. Rosetta translates x86 instructions
to ARM instructions on the fly.

~~~
foobiekr
I wonder if this is actually even related to the original Rosetta (which was
actually an external vendor - QuickTransit by Transitive), acquired by IBM.
Most of the Transitive team left IBM to go to Arm and Apple.

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

~~~
valuearb
An app the vender thought not worth updating to 64 bit isn’t worth saving.

------
mavhc
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

~~~
perryizgr8
They probably just recompiled for arm and optimized any pain points.

~~~
mavhc
Wonder how much code is shared between Mac OS and iOS, they can't be putting
that much effort into Mac OS when it sells 10x less devices than iOS unless
it's mostly shared.

~~~
monocasa
It is mostly shared.

------
zelly
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.

~~~
nojito
Macs are cheaper than PCs and have longer support.

~~~
danlugo92
They're also the best laptops around

------
kps
“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](https://youtu.be/UDfAdHBtK_Q)

------
francoisp
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.

~~~
rimliu
If you want a Windows machine, get a Windows machine.

~~~
francoisp
Hello, thanks for the comment, I might. Do you have any suggestion HW wise? If
I switch again, it will be for linux as my daily driver thought. I've been
happy with the MBP line, and my 2015 MBPs are still the best hardware I've
owned. I like Apple's services, I use iCloud, and the calendar and contact
sync with my iphones and ipads just works. I like macosx because it's real
unix, integrates well with the rest just mentionned. I run ubuntu for GPUs for
DL on a dedicated ws; I wish I could do some small models on the go better
than CPU speed, instead of remoting. I have several VMs in VirtualBox (that
can just now as of VB6 do nesting!! that's great! (real containers AND kvm on
macosx thru proxmox) but that wont work with ARM... ). I still need some win7
or win10 for legacy stuff or for clients, Vbox does the trick for most of it,
and if I need the metal performance of the gfx in windows I have a small
bootcamp partition. I use extensively Targed Display Mode with old imac27s,
and I LOVE that feature; a 27 inch monitor with a server to do backend tasks
on my desk, hard to beat.

All this to say, to repro my setup with Linux and another brand of intel
powered machine, I'll waste an amazing amount of time. Intel is not going
anywhere. They might have missed a beat or two, but they will pump out the
best CPUs again in a short time. AMD got the upper hand for while back when
the transition to x64 happened with the first real dual cores. Intel is not
looking great right now I'll give you that, but chances are they will come
back. Maybe. But in any case, this is a "if it works dont fix it". This CPU
change will force a bunch of ppl to fix something that worked.

------
jart
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](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.

------
fortytw2
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.

~~~
terramex
They are repeating PowerPC -> Intel transition timeline:
[https://www.macstories.net/stories/this-is-not-a-product-
the...](https://www.macstories.net/stories/this-is-not-a-product-the-apple-
developer-transition-kit/)

