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Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

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Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#181

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?

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.

The difference is that the entire (64bit?) iOS App Store back catalogue would likely be available to run as unmodified binaries without developers having to lift a finger.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#182
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.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#183
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?

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#184
post #76
post #26

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

And a two year transition period. That sounds ambitious as the bigger Apple desktop machines are quite powerful. But suppose you could just fit them with multiple chips.

If they keep the desktop thermal budget I have no doubt they could scale up the A series to be just as powerful as any intel chip.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#185

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…

Have they ever given performance numbers that weren't like "up to 400% faster" in selected tasks?

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#186

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…

maybe it's about profits not performance?

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#187
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I reckon those of us who just bought a shiny new Intel Mac in the past few months might be questioning our decision. Should have held on to that 2010 MBP one more year?

Nah, I'd have to wait until early next year to buy an ARM Mac, and mine will be fine for a long time to come. I am pleased I didn't splurge for the 32GB of RAM, however. I'll do that with my next one.

I was waiting to upgrade my 2013 16gb/512. I really see no point

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#188

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.

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.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#189
post #8

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

Already Apple is making it a headache to run non-signed apps on the Mac. I don't think they're going to slow down the "convergence" of iOS and MacOS at this point.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#190

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.

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

I would have been more impressed with them accessing an game service like Steam and launching random games from there.

Plus they insinuated they were running on the A12 but later demos including the game did not state exactly the hardware being used.

If they are limited to games support Metal then that is jettisoning a large number of games. Granted Catalina already did a of that work for them.

Are they going to support non Apple video cards? The skipped right over that but I suspect they don't think they need to

*edit on that last note it would be a good reason they never brought nvidia chips back as they would know they would not need them

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