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macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

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Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#91

Post by icedchai »

tsunamifury wrote: post #49
troad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a stretch to call Apple's ARM transition "planned obsolescence". The M-series chips are very clear improvements on what came before and there is a clear rationale for that transition. We're talking here about an OS that hasn't even come out yet, that will get years of security support, for computers that Apple hasn't been selling for several years now. Seems pretty reasonable.

I have a MacBook from 2017 and and m3 air today. For day to day tasks there is no difference.

For developers, the difference is like night and day.

My 2019 MacBook Pro used to sound like a jet plane taking off whenever I did any sort of build. On a bad day, I could've baked some cookies on it. Admittedly, the corporate spyware that was constantly scanning every single file didn't help matters.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#92

Post by angerman »

thegagne wrote: post #76
angerman wrote: post #72

Time to share my little side project... https://hyper-linux.app which I hope will continue to be able to rely on the remnants of rosetta.

This looks great, and possibly useful, but I'm curious, what was the main problem you were trying to solve, or what does this enable for you?

docker is too heavy handed for me. And I’m a long term fan of wine. The primary usecase is Darwin -> Linux cross compilation.

It does supposed xeyes and similar via XQuartz; I gave up trying to make xmms work though. That would have been some fun.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#93

Post by BrandonSmith »

alin23 wrote: post #14

Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on? I get it that macOS has to evolve, but that doesn't mean all apps have to drop Intel support at the same time. On hardware-level apps like my Lunar app I have plenty #if arch(arm64) because some features like reading the brightness nits or reading ambient light is different or completely missing based on the architecture. I need to tes…

Continue to upgrade to the latest macOS on your host system, use something that leverages Apple's Virtualized.framework to run any version of macOS you want.

For instance, consider https://tart.run/

All the Android / iOS devs on my team use Tart locally when we need to test mixed environments.

Then we use Tart's sister Cirrus CLI to run our builds on our server.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#94

Post by FireBeyond »

GeekyBear wrote: post #52
alin23 wrote: post #14

Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on? I get it that macOS has to evolve, but that doesn't mean all apps have to drop Intel support at the same time. On hardware-level apps like my Lunar app I have plenty #if arch(arm64) because some features like reading the brightness nits or reading ambient light is different or completely missing based on the architecture. I need to tes…

> Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on? In a older version of the OS running in a virtual machine?

That's not going to solve the issue.

You are trying to emulate x86 to test those builds.

Rosetta doesn't emulate x86 hardware, but translates x86 instructions into ARM. The only thing your solution would get you is verification that the Intel build can work on Apple Silicon with Rosetta.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#95

Post by ryandrake »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #67
ryukoposting wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on? You don't. You could stay on an old MacOS. Apple would prefer that you tell your customers to stop being poor and buy a new computer. They will make your situation increasingly unbearable until you do. The overwhelming majority of people haven't needed a new computer since 2016. The current economic situation makes a new computer a w…

> Apple would prefer that you tell your customers to stop being poor and buy a new computer. This is certainly an interesting way to characterize dropping support for old hardware. What is a reasonable way to go about hardware deprecation in your view?

This isn't even just an Apple attitude. The whole macOS and iOS software ecosystem has this "nothing before the prior two OS releases exists anymore" attitude, and it is absolutely infuriating. It is absolutely possible and not a huge lift to support prior operating systems, but Mac developers just don't tend to care or do it.

The reasonable way to go about hardware deprecation is to not do it until that hardware is Truly Gone™, buy some actual definition of Gone that isn't an arbitrary number of years or versions.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#96

Post by jimrandomh »

This sort of thing makes the lack of a downgrade process a real problem. If you rely on something that uses Rosetta, you aren't likely to find out until after you've upgraded, at which point it's too late, you're stuck with it and lose that app. Which means that if you _don't know_ whether you're relying on Rosetta (which most people won't), upgrading is a risky proposition, which people will want to avoid.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#97

Post by ryandrake »

ieie3366 wrote: post #10

I bet it must feel good for the macOS engineers to remove the intel support. Probably much easier to do development for the OS as well

The developer's feelings should not play a role in whether or not to drop support for devices that actual customers bought and use.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#98

Post by hagbard_c »

EPWN3D wrote: post #77
tsunamifury wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The average user cares about their fans going full-blast when running some garbage electron app and their battery life being shit. You're just being dense.

Back when these machines were released they were hallowed as being the ultimate in mobile computing. What happened here what did not happen to other Intel-based machines from that era?

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#99

Post by ralphc »

kalleboo wrote: post #4

I hope they keep around the underpinnings for Rosetta 2 (without the macOS parts) just to keep supporting Intel virtualization for things like Docker. Heck then anyone who really needs to run some old Intel app can run a virtualized older version of macOS. But I wonder if they're eager to drop support for the Intel TSO memory model from their CPUs.

If Intel virtualization works for Docker, why doesn't it work for things like VMWare or VirtualBox for Intel VM's?

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#100

Post by lxgr »

jeroenhd wrote: post #90
lxgr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, do you know if performance is roughly comparable with Rosetta 2, i.e., are we talking about a few percent of overhead or something more dramatic? (For CPU-bound code; I understand that the overall effect will be smaller due to GPU code probably being executed host-side in native code etc.)

FEX isn't done yet, but Valve's people seem to suggest an overhead between 10-20%. Not great for getting the most out of a CPU, but small enough to compensate say the difference between an M1 and an M5 chip.

That's really promising, I expected much worse. Thanks for highlighting!
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