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Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

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Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#31

Post by pathartl »

Alex3917 wrote: post #15
sdepablos wrote: post #6

After the last few years of hardware problems with Macs let's see who's the brave one to buy a v1 of any Apple new product (meanwhile there's probably people already making a queue to buy one)

If you look at the problems with the 2016 - 2019 MBP, and also the problems with the first generation intel MBPs, the biggest issue in both cases was heat. (Although there were clearly other issues as well.) The new Apple chips are going to be much more power efficient, so I think there is actually hope here. I still wouldn't buy a v1 because I think they'll have problems, but I think whatever problems they'll have w…

One of the biggest problems with absolute data loss for current Apple machines is the T2 chip dying.

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#32

Post by efficax »

ccmcarey wrote: post #10

Interesting. I imagine they'll have to provide some sort of x86/amd64 compat layer as otherwise this kills every application available for macos right now. I hope they don't also continue to lock down macos (though I imagine they intend to) by restricting applications to only being available from the app store. That would set a terrible precedent for personal computing.

Likely you'll just be able to ship fat applications that have binaries for x86 and ARM code with one click in Xcode

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#34

Post by coliveira »

niahmiah wrote: post #7

what does this mean for running docker containers on macos?

I don't think they will switch the whole product line to ARM. My guess is that they will have a line of Intel computers for a long time for professional who need them.

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#36

Post by underdeserver »

pathartl wrote: post #24

It's fine that Apple is moving to ARM. It's not okay that this is going to be a proprietary, locked down CPU. T2 has shown that Apple customers no longer own their hardware.

Apple customers haven't owned their hardware in quite a while.

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#37

Post by rsanders »

niahmiah wrote: post #7

what does this mean for running docker containers on macos?

The support for multi-arch docker images is getting there, but there's not much of an ecosystem. Between Raspberry Pi, ARM instances on AWS, and ARM-based Macs, it ought to get to critical mass before too long.

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#38

Post by _bxg1 »

pathartl wrote: post #24

It's fine that Apple is moving to ARM. It's not okay that this is going to be a proprietary, locked down CPU. T2 has shown that Apple customers no longer own their hardware.

> proprietary, locked down CPU

Is it somehow more proprietary and locked-down than the Intel ones?

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#39

Post by ed25519FUUU »

I think this is a good news. The vast amount of people use their laptop for little more than running a web browser, and AArch64 chips will make those laptops cheaper to produce (intel charges Apple upwards of $400+ for high end chips[1])

Then there's everyone doing local development in interpreted languages, most of which have stable support for AArch64. Java, python, ruby, go on AArch64? No problem.

The biggest hit things will be mac-specific programs and software built specifically to work with BSD syscalls. We'll see about that stuff.

1. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/24/how-much-d...

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#40

Post by the_duke »

This is just a rehash of Bloomberg reporting.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple-pla...

older: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/apple-aim...

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Personally, I gave up on the Apple ecosystem years ago and moved to Linux. But I feel ambivalent about this.

On one hand, the iPhone/Pad chips have impressive performance and power consumption, at least for the mobile use case. Some competition in this space can't hurt, and it will be interesting how well they fare against Intel and AMD in a different environment.

On the other hand: this seems like a golden opportunity for Apple continue the path of merging iOS and Mac OS, turning the desktop platform into an equally walled and locked down garden.

This will also be a rocky road for very performance sensitive applications which Macs are used for a lot. Like video editing, Photoshop etc.

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