
Apple already has several ARM powered laptops drifting around internally - sperglord
https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10191963&cid=53786433
======
kstrauser
Fascinating, but take it with a grain of salt. One anonymous poster didn't
just violate, but shredded and used as hamster mulch, their NDA to report
iPad-with-a-keyboard? It's plausible, but I think most of us here could have
written that comment as a speculative exercise.

~~~
Analemma_
That AC could be both right and wrong. He could be totally right about the
existence of those prototypes, and I bet it's true (it'd be more surprising if
Apple _didn 't_ have prototype ARM laptops floating around). But it doesn't
mean he knows anything about actual plans to get these out the door. There are
HUGE barriers to that happening at the moment, the cost/benefit ratio is
extremely high. It sounds to me like this AC is correctly reporting the facts
but incorrectly extrapolating his own story out of it.

~~~
ColanR
> From what I was told, there's a huge push to get this stuff out the door as
> soon as they think the market will accept it.

Looks like a) he's not extrapolating anything, and b) the AC knew those
huuuuge barriers existed when he wrote his post.

------
bsharitt
Makes sense. Allegedly they had pretty much every version OS X after Rhapsody
continuing to run on x86 in some capacity until the x86 version of OS X
finally came out. Keeping an ARM version around seems like a no brainer.

I suspect this isn't being held in case the Mac market falls apart, but in
case the iPad market starts losing to Surface and friends.

~~~
xoa
Exactly, in fact there's even more to it then that. Particularly at Apple's
scale, maintaining a codebase across multiple architectures internally, even
if there is absolutely zero foreseeable intention to use them, offers
significant value. Strategically of course it creates some hedge against over
dependence on any single supplier, it's not just "the Mac market falling
apart" so much as Intel/AMD dropping the ball or becoming unable to go in a
direction Apple wanted (as happened with PowerPC). By the same token it helps
maintain some level of economic negotiating position, even if Apple faces what
is effectively right now a single key supplier situation. The mere fact that
they _could_ switch if absolutely forced to is of use.

Non-strategic value though is probably just as important as any of this stuff:
as probably most of HN knows well, keeping a codebase portable can be quite
helpful in terms of plain and simple quality. Obscure bugs or bad patterns
that are hard to find on one architecture can be a lot easier to identify on
another. It can help promote discipline and good practices. Portability I
think is really a constant process rather then a goal or single thing, it's a
lot easier to have worked on it all along for years before you need it then
try to "port" something later because without the constant pressure of staying
portable it's all too easy to start falling into dependence on features (or
worse, quirks) of a single arch and build up more and more technical debt.
Then when the "bill" (not necessarily just in terms of money but sheer
developer hours) finally comes due it's effectively unpayable.

~~~
walterbell
Should this apply to cloud provider portability?

~~~
derefr
The problem with portability between "clouds" (IaaS/PaaS providers) is that
many of them have features (e.g. object storage; Dynamo-based distributed
tables; reliable message-queueing; health checks connected to load-balancing
and hypervisor lifecycle control),

• which are "obvious" and perhaps even _necessary_ for productive coding of
distributed systems software; and

• which have _huge_ economies of scale (one shared cluster for all customers
beats the pants off the performance+availability of your company's puny little
three-node private cluster), and yet...

• which other major clouds _don 't support at all_.

Effectively, all the "clouds" currently only offer between 30% and 90% of what
you'd _want_ in something that called itself "a cloud." Nobody has a "whole
cloud" (AWS is closest, but still not there.)

Designing for portability between these clouds would be like writing assembly
intended to be portable between processor architectures, when only one
architecture had an ALU, only one had registers, and only one could
conditionally branch. It would be madness.

\---

Personally, I feel like, to be able to sensibly design for portability between
cloud providers, they'd need a lot more features in common than they have now.

Maybe we could invent a minimum common standard to hold the cloud providers'
stacks to—maybe a small one at first, with a growing list of expectations over
time; or maybe a "core" spec, and then a number of "levels" of support atop
it. Then you could say you've targeted "IaaS Level 3", and clouds could claim
to support that, and cloud-abstraction libraries like Fog could actually do
something useful.

------
mcphage
They better have ARM laptops done or nearly so. If they didn't, I would
conclude that they have no idea what the fuck they're doing anymore.

Although if the software is through the Mac App Store only, then... well, it
won't be a very useful device. I hope that they're looking to replace the
Macbook with an ARM device, not create a new Chromebook.

------
breatheoften
I'm sure they will still have a compiler on the system -- it has to be
possible to compile code for this machine from source and run it ...

As I think about it -- wouldn't app store (if well run, then it provides the
best possible security for distribution of binaries without source code and
the most consumer friendly commercial licensing model) + open source eco-
system (self-compiled -- source only distribution) pretty much the best
possible world for users? There is (kind of) an open-source argument for
making binary distribution without source onerous or impossible...

Perhaps they'll bundle or distribute an official version of something like
homebrew to make installing open-source software as easy as possible and maybe
even provide a way for binaries generated from these packages to become signed
and distributed as binaries as an optimization?

I don't think I would mind app-store being the only way to get pre-compiled
binaries if augmented with a well-supported open-source ecosystem for
utilities that need to venture beyond the capabilities of the app-store
sandbox. There is a technical argument for making any software that needs to
operate beyond the sandbox subject to source code auditing simply because of
the potential attack surface ... I wouldn't necessarily mind if subscription
pricing was the only business model for such sandbox-spanning utilities --
continuance maintenance (and ongoing revenue) for software that works beyond
the sandbox is needed from a security perspective ...

------
0x0
If the future is supposedly going to be this locked down, I wonder what will
happen to the internet when there is no hardware left where you can develop
stuff like apache-httpd and php and mysqld.

~~~
api
Mac is dead for developers and pro users if this is the case. My current Mac
will be my last, and I'll be happy to give my money to Dell instead and anyone
else selling more open hardware.

One of our devs just got a new XPS 15. It's a gorgeous machine. Amazing. First
time I've envied a non-Apple machine since the early 2000s. I still marginally
prefer the Mac track pad but the rest is on par or better.

~~~
mi100hael
Can confirm. I sold my MBP and bought myself one of the new Dell 15" developer
editions. Trackpad is about on par with the prior physically-clicking mac
trackpads. I run Fedora and the only thing that doesn't work is hot-plugging
the Ethernet adapter. Otherwise all the usual Linux pitfalls like sleep/wake,
wifi, hidpi, touch screen, etc. work fine out of the box. No plans to switch
away.

~~~
sofaofthedamned
I did exactly the same with an xps 13. Gave my Macbook Retina to my
girlfriend, as the new models were not compelling at all. Fedora 25 is lovely
on it and I can run docker and KVM on it natively. I will buy another Mac if
they give me a proper value proposition.

------
esturk
You have to live in the future to invent for the future. These are probably
being used by product manager to see the deficiencies for the next feature
upgrades to make it perfect.

------
digikata
An interesting product line split might be putting the Macbook line onto ARM
for portability & battery life, and keeping the pro or air & pro line on
Intel.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
If we assume for a moment that this is true (which is a huge assumption), it
doesn't mean they'll necessarily release a product quite like it.

------
dplgk
I don't know how CPUs and instructions work but wouldn't this mean that every
app has to be recompiled for ARM or run in an emulator?

~~~
detaro
Yes, it would mean that.

~~~
ams6110
In the NeXT days, a program could be compiled as a "fat" binary that would run
on multiple supported CPU architectures.

It made things easier for developers because they only had to ship one set of
installation media regardless of the CPU the user had.

~~~
Turing_Machine
This capability still exists, and is in fact often used for libraries. The
lipo command-line tool lets you bundle code compiled for multiple
architectures into the same physical file (or extract the code for a specific
architecture, etc.).

------
mahyarm
If this is true, I sure hope to god developers will have some performant build
machine edition. It would make CI even more painful for iOS dev.

------
b1gtuna
I'd love to see a worthy competition to Intel.

~~~
allengeorge
The AC points out that the chips were made by Intel.

