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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

#991

Post by mantap »

imtringued wrote: post #969
mantap wrote: post #947

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac Pro was seen as an an assurance that Apple was going to support their Pro customers for the foreseeable future. It's not just the Mac Pro itself. It's the software and supporting hardware. Also crucially, due to Apple's spat with NVIDIA, the Mac Pro doesn't support CUDA. This means software has to be modified to use Metal Compute to support the Mac Pro. If you make pro software Apple just let off a huge signa…

How did they get played hard? They got the latest model that is still supported by lots of software. The only way you get shafted is by buying the ARM Mac Pro which is something the owners of a x86 Mac Pro luckily avoided.

It is only supported by software because Apple convinced big software developers to port everything to Metal. Apple no doubt made assurances to these developers that this was Apple's big re-entry into the Pro market and that they were in it for the long term.

Now, it turns out that Apple wants to complete a transition in 2 years... they are not keeping x86 around for the Mac Pro longer than that. It's not credible that Apple can just scale up their CPU into a workstation part. So if you are making pro software then you have to come to the inescapable conclusion that Apple is, in fact, not serious about the Pro market, and it's probably best to avoid expending further development resources on the Mac.

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

#992

Post by thejynxed »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #800
ianhowson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gain…

This doesn't match my experience. Web browsing kills my battery life, and my assumption is that it's driven by JS.

JS/ads and the wifi chipset seems to be the big culprit across laptops in general in this scenario. Even Netflix doesn't drain my battery as fast as hitting an ad heavy site with lots of JS and analytics and I can watch the power usage for my wifi chipset crank up accordingly. This happens across every laptop, iPad, Chromebook etc that I own.

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

#993

Post by eric-hu »

jedieaston wrote: post #714
originalvichy wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple had a list at the State of the Union of open source technology projects they had built pull requests for to add ARM support. Electron was up there, as was Python 3, OpenJDK and Go, notably.

Would love a link to that if you still have it on hand.

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

#994

Post by AlbertoGP »

starsinspace wrote: post #635
AlbertoGP wrote: post #473

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…

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

Yes, you are absolutely correct.

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

#995

Post by Eric_WVGG »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #651
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct that AMD’s offerings are impressive, but that‘s vs an uncooled A12 chip. Add active cooling and a few more watts there's no reason why they couldn't blow the doors off.

> You're > AMD’s > that‘s What is your method of input where you use three different characters for apostrophes?

wow, that was amazing. I was on my iPad at the time. No idea how that came out.

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

#996

Post by 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.

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

#997

Post by acjohnson55 »

thejynxed wrote: post #992
acjohnson55 wrote: post #800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't match my experience. Web browsing kills my battery life, and my assumption is that it's driven by JS.

JS/ads and the wifi chipset seems to be the big culprit across laptops in general in this scenario. Even Netflix doesn't drain my battery as fast as hitting an ad heavy site with lots of JS and analytics and I can watch the power usage for my wifi chipset crank up accordingly. This happens across every laptop, iPad, Chromebook etc that I own.

I think it's largely just the JS. I adblock pretty aggressively.

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

#998

Post by swebs »

geerlingguy wrote: post #513
swebs wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I tried out a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop replacement and pretty much everything is supported except for proprietary stuff like games.

Eh... that was not my experience: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook... (Unless you're speaking almost entirely of webapps, which mostly run fine even on the measly 1.5 GHz 4-core Pi ARM processor.)

I meant everything that runs on x86 Linux. Of course iMovie and Adobe stuff doesn't work, lol.

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

#999

Post by 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.

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

#1000

Post by tdsamardzhiev »

imtringued wrote: post #962
skohan wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with x86? Genuinely asking

It's compatible with all the software I own. Using proton is already a hassle. Adding emulation will just make it worse.

Software compatibility will obviously be the main problem to resolve, but I'm an optimist.
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