who didn't see this coming?
Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
721–730 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
#722I think for a site full of developers, the almost exclusively welcome reactions to such a change are intriguing. Don't you worry you will have to cross-compile to run your programs on the amd64 server? Or how you are going to debug locally bugs that may arise from a different architecture? Or that homebrew could be in an inconsistent state for some years until all software catches up with the new architecture?
Recompiling software isn’t as scarey as some people seem to think as long as you have a decent toolchain. And, in my experience toolchains have improved a lot in the last few decades. Automated build processes are de rigueur these days.
Actual hardware to test on is essential for debugging, but it’s not like ARM based Unix/Linux isn’t already a thing.
Assuming Apple doesn’t lock down the OS, I’d say that open source ports like Homebrew will be available almost immediately. It’s the closed source vendors with outdated development processes that might drag their heels.
Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
#723Does anyone remember Intel's random rant about how "emulation of x86 violates our intellectual property" from last year? https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-sti... Intel didn't name names, and everyone at the time assumed it was related to Microsoft and their efforts to ship windows 10 on ARM with a 32 bit only x86 emulator. But I wonder if that rant was actually aimed at Apple. Microsoft's emula…
That would put Intel in the crosshairs of anti-trust. The have a defacto monopoly on personal computer processors, and this sounds like an abuse of their market position to stifle innovation.
How would Apple vs Microsoft change anything in those circumstances, though?
Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
#724I wonder if this means that virtualization will be impossible without some sort of emulation layer. If so, that seriously blows.
Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
#725Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you remember back to the mid 2000's when Apple switched from PowerPC to (Intel) x86, the higher end machines still ran with PowerPC chips in them while the mid-low end products had x86 chips. All of the old applications that weren't yet ported to x86 had to use "Rosetta." It wasn't until a little while later, presumably once most of the professional software companies had good working x86 versions of their softwar…
I remember all the way back to the early 90s and the original x86 emulator running on ARM. Admittedly that was before optimizations like JIT, and a lot of research has gone into binary translation since then, but it was a painful experience at the time. I wonder how much performance would be lost these days.
If they’re making their own CPUs, they can presumably add whatever additional functionality and/or instructions are necessary to make emulation or JIT translation work effectively.
But even if flat-out performance isn’t as good, what about if it proves cheap and easy to scale to more cores? Like, what if you get twice as many cores as the Intel equivalent has threads, albeit at 2/3 the speed (maybe worse or better for some workloads) but no hyperthreading-style contention? This wouldn’t be useless.
And GPU-accelerated functionality will be mostly unaffected.
Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
#726That would be the end of the Hackintosh, which would be kind of a shame. Even having never built one myself, it remained a last resort of some kind in the back of my mind.
For someone not still in high school that struck me as way more effort than it was worth.
Hah, now that you mention it does seem like a huge chunk of the community is in high school. When I went to college I just got a real Mac and it is 100x better than the MSI Wind I used to use (though that was a great device too!).
Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
#727This might just be a bargaining move on Apple’s part, but I don’t think so. I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see them make their own display screens. As an Apple customer, I like this idea also. For 20 years, I used to be a desktop Linux fanatic and later became a fan of Android. In the last few years, I have switched to using all…
How's this different than going back to PowerPC architecture? When they switched to Intel, I recall there being a lot of talk of benefits to running on the same chips as everyone else. From what I've been hearing lately about Apple, the impression I keep getting is that Apple doesn't think of Mac as a product with a specific target market, but more as a sort of just-a-really-really-big-ipad. The closed garden approac…
From what I've been hearing lately about Apple, the impression I keep getting is that Apple doesn't think of Mac as a product with a specific target market, but more as a sort of just-a-really-really-big-ipad.
As a long-time Mac user who's still basically happy with the product, this is what worries me the most long-term. YMMV, different strokes, go in peace with Ubuntu, but for me personally, macOS has been my favorite desktop Unix, hands-down, for about fifteen years. There's nothing that I want to do on even a semi-regular basis that I can't do, and a lot that would require, well, heavy adjusting if I moved to Linux. (Yes, I've used Linux within the last couple of years.)
I also love iOS and the iPad, but it's not a general computing platform; it's a computing appliance. It's very good at what it does, but by design it's difficult-to-impossible to do things on it that Apple doesn't want you to in ways that aren't true for macOS. (I'm sorry to those of you who had to disable SIP to recompile your own version of Apache, or who are infuriated you can't replace Finder with ratpoison, but you know that's not what I'm talking about here, right?) If "Project Marzipan" is about creating a new UIKit/AppKit hybrid that allows developers to create codebases that run on both iOS and macOS, that's already a little worrisome; if it's about "letting iOS apps run on macOS," as some of Gurman's reporting has it, that's a lot worrisome. I have a lot of apps that exist for both macOS and iOS, and in every single case, the macOS version is more capable. And iOS's "sandbox everything" model--and, I suspect, attitudes it engenders--make every app feel like an island not just in terms of data but in terms of functionality: there's much less of the "learn the basics of one app, learn them all" feeling that makes macOS, well, macOS.
If the Mac line moves to Apple's A-series chips, that's...not necessarily bad, but if it's being done in conjunction with sweeping software changes, it makes me extremely uneasy about the line's future in a way that even the Touch Bar doesn't (and trust me, I do not take the Touch Bar as a good sign). I'm not planning to switch platforms any time soon, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should buy an inexpensive Linux-compatible laptop so I can, you know, practice. Just in case.
Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and it's not going to work if I'm copying and pasting kernel code from Stack Overflow to get my trackpad to scroll the correct direction When was the last time you used a linux desktop, 2005? On any linux desktop I can think of (MATE, Gnome, KDE) this is a matter of going to Settings | Mouse & Touchpad | check or un-check the natural scrolling box as desired
Exactly. Sure if you're trying to revive some old notebook with a Linux distro you're going to face issues (no different to if you try to install the latest MacOS on their earlier machines). With a modern machine, Linux is a very reliable and comfortable OS that doesn't restrict you in terms of hardware. The only minor criticism I have is that it lacks a high quality spreadsheet application like Excel (but with cloud…
Does Libre's open source spreadsheet not provide the functionality you need? I took a small HP stream, replaced Windows with POP! OS (from System 76) and the spreadsheet comes as part of the package. As far as I know, it's also easily available with vanilla Ubuntu.
Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
#729So Apple laptops will become glorified underpowered netbooks. macOS users totally won't start abandoning the platform even more than now.
Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does Linux give you that macOS doesn’t? I use both a Mac and an Arch Linux running i3/awesomewm, and to me macOS is like any Linux distro with a user-friendly desktop environment. I guess it doesn’t have an « official » package manager, but homebrew has most packages anyway?
> What does Linux give you that macOS doesn’t? perf, case sensitive file systems, non stupid alt-tab behaviour, strace, pstack, gdb (these don't seem to work without sacrificing animals), gnome-shell (better than finder by a long way, imo). I've got a mac. I don't install programs except for things through brew. It's basically shitty linux with outlook.
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