I may be in the minority, but I was really hoping that Apple's pro line stayed intel, and the consumer line migrated to ARM processors.
Absent something really amazing happening, I will need to shift my small firm back to Lenovo laptops in a couple of years. We currently use MacBook Pros with parallels and windows to run legacy windows software, etc., where the developer has not yet made a MacOS version, and is certainly not going to make a MacOs version for ARM processors. So I (and my business) am one of the small percentage of Mac users who relied on the Intel processors and is going to get burned by this.
That said, I am warming to the idea of Apple Silicon for my personal laptop, etc. I will miss the option of using Bootcamp to game on my MacBook Pro with its discrete graphics card, but streamed gaming services like Nvidia Now are slowly obviating the need to game on your local machine at all.
Well, another way to look at it is that Boot Camp and Parallels, et al. enabled these developers to be lazy and point users to this kind of solution, rather than doing what they should have and providing native support. With that option going away, at least some of them may need to rethink that strategy.
I may be in the minority, but I was really hoping that Apple's pro line stayed intel, and the consumer line migrated to ARM processors.
Absent something really amazing happening, I will need to shift my small firm back to Lenovo laptops in a couple of years. We currently use MacBook Pros with parallels and windows to run legacy windows software, etc., where the developer has not yet made a MacOS version, and is certainly not going to make a MacOs version for ARM processors. So I (and my business) am one of the small percentage of Mac users who relied on the Intel processors and is going to get burned by this.
That said, I am warming to the idea of Apple Silicon for my personal laptop, etc. I will miss the option of using Bootcamp to game on my MacBook Pro with its discrete graphics card, but streamed gaming services like Nvidia Now are slowly obviating the need to game on your local machine at all.
Well, another way to look at it is that Boot Camp and Parallels, et al. enabled these developers to be lazy and point users to this kind of solution, rather than doing what they should have and providing native support. With that option going away, at least some of them may need to rethink that strategy.
I wouldn't bank on that. If they haven't done it after all these years, the chances of doing it now with Apple Silicon Macs is equally low.
I may be in the minority, but I was really hoping that Apple's pro line stayed intel, and the consumer line migrated to ARM processors.
Absent something really amazing happening, I will need to shift my small firm back to Lenovo laptops in a couple of years. We currently use MacBook Pros with parallels and windows to run legacy windows software, etc., where the developer has not yet made a MacOS version, and is certainly not going to make a MacOs version for ARM processors. So I (and my business) am one of the small percentage of Mac users who relied on the Intel processors and is going to get burned by this.
That said, I am warming to the idea of Apple Silicon for my personal laptop, etc. I will miss the option of using Bootcamp to game on my MacBook Pro with its discrete graphics card, but streamed gaming services like Nvidia Now are slowly obviating the need to game on your local machine at all.
Well, another way to look at it is that Boot Camp and Parallels, et al. enabled these developers to be lazy and point users to this kind of solution, rather than doing what they should have and providing native support. With that option going away, at least some of them may need to rethink that strategy.
I agree with you there. But for what I do (I am a tax lawyer who specializes in a nuance-within-a-nuance of the tax code), the software I use MIGHT be licensed to 150-200 other firms in the entire country. And it's not hugely expensive software. So the company that makes it already has virtually zero incentive to make a MacOS version. Now that I (presumably) won't have parallels x86 support, it will just be simpler to switch back to PCs. And that isn't really a bad thing, necessarily. But the fact is that there are "pro" users out there who are not in the creative/graphics/video production fields who may have to migrate away from Apple hardware because of this. Again, though, Apple knows this. It's not the end of the world.
Jobs once asked a CEO: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?". Tim Cook is thrilled with selling sugar water like animojis, widgets, and UI skins. He is not moving us forward on how we work or gather/structure/validate our knowledge.
Despite this being a ridiculously flawed analogy, It's intellectually dishonest to reduce this entire historic WWDC Keynote and everything that we saw down to widgets and Animoji. You completely invalidate your points by doing this.
Eh... this thread is about 1 thing - the impact of moving the Mac to Apple Silicon. Apple hasn't cared about timely upgrading the Mac to new silicon in a decade it seems odd that silicon is now going to save the mac. As you correctly stated... they could go touch without. Is Apple Silicon really going to solve the problems with Apple not caring for 5 years about keyboards and for 10 years about Mac Pro/Mini?
And the animoji/skins/sugar water is only related to the Mac. Apple is doing amazing stuff with Watch - giving up on fashion and going for health is super smart. iOS is stronger than ever and the use of AI to organize stuff is great. The Home features are starting to make sense. All fine - for another thread.
Instead of pushing the Mac forward with tools that transform how we find, gather, structure, validate, and share knowledge, they will switch to new silicon - not that they even cared upgrading on the old one. That is simply not the answer to the question of the relevance of the Mac.
You apparently don't know how threads work. I was responding to the comment about touch-based Macs.
Keyboards, Pro, and mini are all solved problems, so this has nothing to do with any of that.
"iOS is stronger than ever and the use of AI to organize stuff is great." — you realize you just answered your own question about how Apple Silicon will benefit the Mac, right? Not sure how you can possibly miss that.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it.
No, instead it sounds like a realistic estimate, rather than useless marketing-speak.
But it is hardly an insurmountable development effort; even for a one-person shop.
So what was your point, again?
Yeah I’m sure the Parallels team won’t mind rebuilding their programme to work with ARM as despite what I thought I saw, support for X86 based virtualisation software is officially dropped from Apple silicone machines. This will be the start I think of programmes that will lose support, that’s my point in case you didn’t get it the first time:
Maybe that team will rebuild it for a market share in single digits, but I know that Parallels is on Windows so guess it’s an X86 platform, and by the looks of it will need to be rewritten for Apples hardware right? I do believe a lot of folks use virtualisation software to run Windows for work purposes on their Macs, and as stated above currently that support is no longer offered in Apples processor based machines.
They literally demoed an Apple Silicon build of Parallels running a VM on Monday. Maybe go back and rewatch the videos?
I may be in the minority, but I was really hoping that Apple's pro line stayed intel, and the consumer line migrated to ARM processors.
Absent something really amazing happening, I will need to shift my small firm back to Lenovo laptops in a couple of years. We currently use MacBook Pros with parallels and windows to run legacy windows software, etc., where the developer has not yet made a MacOS version, and is certainly not going to make a MacOs version for ARM processors. So I (and my business) am one of the small percentage of Mac users who relied on the Intel processors and is going to get burned by this.
That said, I am warming to the idea of Apple Silicon for my personal laptop, etc. I will miss the option of using Bootcamp to game on my MacBook Pro with its discrete graphics card, but streamed gaming services like Nvidia Now are slowly obviating the need to game on your local machine at all.
If you can stream games why not stream your Windows apps?
If the road this ends up going down means the same apps on a Mac are the same apps on an iPad, then surely Apples PC market share is going to shrink even further, everyone will just buy a much cheaper iPad.
I’m not questioning Apples silicone prowess here, I’m questioning if developers will follow them down the path.
Ummm, there’s over a hundred million Mac users. Developers will follow - it’s not a “hire a new team and rewrite all your code” obstacle. It’s a click-a-button and recompile inconvenience for 99% of developers.
Marketshare is not a metric you use to decide if you’re going to take time and develop software for a particular platform - what’s more important is user base and which versions of the OS is being used the most.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it. And the user base is minuscule hence my comment:
I have to say that I don’t think that market share equates to hundreds of millions of Mac users. I’ve already read comments from music professional stating a lot of their old legacy plugins etc will no longer work. And the developers are either not in business anymore or too small to worry about Apple and spending money if an Apple silicone dev kit.
For most it is a click. And legacy plugins can run in Rosetta.
So you stating the Parallels team can convert X86 bases paralleled into ARM based Parallels with a single click.. really? And no if you read the article I linked to you will see Rosetta won’t support X86 based VM, that’s the point of the support being dropped:
“Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn't translate the following executables:
To me that doesn’t sound like something that can be fixed with ‘a single click’.
And reading the posts in the forums there, it would mean a VM machine will have to ‘emulate’ my Windows and it’s apps to work not Virtualise them, I don’t enough about it to know if that’s true but it makes sense, virtualising X86 programmes on X86 platforms. And emulation doesn’t tend to work as well or perform as well.
You keep moving the goal-post. No one was talking about virtualization in a single click. They were talking about the vast majority of Mac applications can be updated with a click. That requires that the software has been designed correctly for portability but for most, that portability came from using a high-level language. There are a few things that are roadblocks, for example Rosetta 2 can't help if you designed your software to use Intel AVX and didn't check to see if it was available on the CPU beforehand. But most developers, even if they use AVX would have checked and will have a compatible fall-back that will work fine in Rosetta 2.
For plug-ins, Apple's presentation on porting to Apple Silicon made it very clear that there are two types of plug-ins. One type is plug-ins loaded into the applications process. This type of plug-in will not work with Apple Silicon native code and where the plug-in is x86_64. Any thing in-process will have to be either Rosetta 2 or native. You can force a universal binary to run under Rosetta 2 by selecting a checkbox under Get Info. The other type of plug-in runs in its own process. Those plug-ins will work under Rosetta 2 even if the application is Apple Silicon native code.
As for Virtual Machines, there are several solutions that use Apple's hypervisor framework, including apparently Parallels. Others are the open source VirtualBox and XHyve. Someone will be able to take the open source VMs and add x86_64 emulation or transpiling and support Windows 10 on x86. And maybe Microsoft will decide to allow Windows on ARM to run under a VM. A lot of this stuff is still up in the air. The announcement was only a couple of days ago. It will take a while to find out what various companies strategies will be.
PS. One thing that hinders taking your arguments seriously is that you keep using the word Silicone for Silicon. These are distinct materials. Silicone is a rubber like polymer that is used as a sealant. Silicon is an atomic element that is used as a semiconductor to make integrated circuit chips. It is Apple Silicon not Silicone.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it.
No, instead it sounds like a realistic estimate, rather than useless marketing-speak.
But it is hardly an insurmountable development effort; even for a one-person shop.
So what was your point, again?
Yeah I’m sure the Parallels team won’t mind rebuilding their programme to work with ARM as despite what I thought I saw, support for X86 based virtualisation software is officially dropped from Apple silicone machines. This will be the start I think of programmes that will lose support, that’s my point in case you didn’t get it the first time:
Maybe that team will rebuild it for a market share in single digits, but I know that Parallels is on Windows so guess it’s an X86 platform, and by the looks of it will need to be rewritten for Apples hardware right? I do believe a lot of folks use virtualisation software to run Windows for work purposes on their Macs, and as stated above currently that support is no longer offered in Apples processor based machines.
They literally demoed an Apple Silicon build of Parallels running a VM on Monday. Maybe go back and rewatch the videos?
That was Linux that the machine was running, read the article don’t shoot the messenger... It’s what Apple have stated.
If the road this ends up going down means the same apps on a Mac are the same apps on an iPad, then surely Apples PC market share is going to shrink even further, everyone will just buy a much cheaper iPad.
I’m not questioning Apples silicone prowess here, I’m questioning if developers will follow them down the path.
Ummm, there’s over a hundred million Mac users. Developers will follow - it’s not a “hire a new team and rewrite all your code” obstacle. It’s a click-a-button and recompile inconvenience for 99% of developers.
Marketshare is not a metric you use to decide if you’re going to take time and develop software for a particular platform - what’s more important is user base and which versions of the OS is being used the most.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it. And the user base is minuscule hence my comment:
I have to say that I don’t think that market share equates to hundreds of millions of Mac users. I’ve already read comments from music professional stating a lot of their old legacy plugins etc will no longer work. And the developers are either not in business anymore or too small to worry about Apple and spending money if an Apple silicone dev kit.
For most it is a click. And legacy plugins can run in Rosetta.
So you stating the Parallels team can convert X86 bases paralleled into ARM based Parallels with a single click.. really? And no if you read the article I linked to you will see Rosetta won’t support X86 based VM, that’s the point of the support being dropped:
“Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn't translate the following executables:
To me that doesn’t sound like something that can be fixed with ‘a single click’.
And reading the posts in the forums there, it would mean a VM machine will have to ‘emulate’ my Windows and it’s apps to work not Virtualise them, I don’t enough about it to know if that’s true but it makes sense, virtualising X86 programmes on X86 platforms. And emulation doesn’t tend to work as well or perform as well.
You keep moving the goal-post. No one was talking about virtualization in a single click. They were talking about the vast majority of Mac applications can be updated with a click. That requires that the software has been designed correctly for portability but for most, that portability came from using a high-level language. There are a few things that are roadblocks, for example Rosetta 2 can't help if you designed your software to use Intel AVX and didn't check to see if it was available on the CPU beforehand. But most developers, even if they use AVX would have checked and will have a compatible fall-back that will work fine in Rosetta 2.
For plug-ins, Apple's presentation on porting to Apple Silicon made it very clear that there are two types of plug-ins. One type is plug-ins loaded into the applications process. This type of plug-in will not work with Apple Silicon native code and where the plug-in is x86_64. Any thing in-process will have to be either Rosetta 2 or native. You can force a universal binary to run under Rosetta 2 by selecting a checkbox under Get Info. The other type of plug-in runs in its own process. Those plug-ins will work under Rosetta 2 even if the application is Apple Silicon native code.
As for Virtual Machines, there are several solutions that use Apple's hypervisor framework, including apparently Parallels. Others are the open source VirtualBox and XHyve. Someone will be able to take the open source VMs and add x86_64 emulation or transpiling and support Windows 10 on x86. And maybe Microsoft will decide to allow Windows on ARM to run under a VM. A lot of this stuff is still up in the air. The announcement was only a couple of days ago. It will take a while to find out what various companies strategies will be.
PS. One thing that hinders taking your arguments seriously is that you keep using the word Silicone for Silicon. These are distinct materials. Silicone is a rubber like polymer that is used as a sealant. Silicon is an atomic element that is used as a semiconductor to make integrated circuit chips. It is Apple Silicon not Silicone.
Firstly someone did state it would be a simple click, you’d do well to see the comments I’m replying to. Secondly did you read article and statement? According to some, I can’t validate this, emulation is not as good performance wise as virtualisation, and considering most people use virtualisation to Windows to run Windows programmes, those programmes will also be X86 based, but the performance (might) suffer and not be as good IF any kind of VM emulator is built.
And thirdly the fact you’ve got make a spellcheck Police comment undermines the seriousness of your comment. People usually do that when they have no argument to make.
If the road this ends up going down means the same apps on a Mac are the same apps on an iPad, then surely Apples PC market share is going to shrink even further, everyone will just buy a much cheaper iPad.
I’m not questioning Apples silicone prowess here, I’m questioning if developers will follow them down the path.
Ummm, there’s over a hundred million Mac users. Developers will follow - it’s not a “hire a new team and rewrite all your code” obstacle. It’s a click-a-button and recompile inconvenience for 99% of developers.
Marketshare is not a metric you use to decide if you’re going to take time and develop software for a particular platform - what’s more important is user base and which versions of the OS is being used the most.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it. And the user base is minuscule hence my comment:
I have to say that I don’t think that market share equates to hundreds of millions of Mac users. I’ve already read comments from music professional stating a lot of their old legacy plugins etc will no longer work. And the developers are either not in business anymore or too small to worry about Apple and spending money if an Apple silicone dev kit.
For most it is a click. And legacy plugins can run in Rosetta.
So you stating the Parallels team can convert X86 bases paralleled into ARM based Parallels with a single click.. really? And no if you read the article I linked to you will see Rosetta won’t support X86 based VM, that’s the point of the support being dropped:
“Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn't translate the following executables:
To me that doesn’t sound like something that can be fixed with ‘a single click’.
And reading the posts in the forums there, it would mean a VM machine will have to ‘emulate’ my Windows and it’s apps to work not Virtualise them, I don’t enough about it to know if that’s true but it makes sense, virtualising X86 programmes on X86 platforms. And emulation doesn’t tend to work as well or perform as well.
You keep moving the goal-post. No one was talking about virtualization in a single click. They were talking about the vast majority of Mac applications can be updated with a click. That requires that the software has been designed correctly for portability but for most, that portability came from using a high-level language. There are a few things that are roadblocks, for example Rosetta 2 can't help if you designed your software to use Intel AVX and didn't check to see if it was available on the CPU beforehand. But most developers, even if they use AVX would have checked and will have a compatible fall-back that will work fine in Rosetta 2.
For plug-ins, Apple's presentation on porting to Apple Silicon made it very clear that there are two types of plug-ins. One type is plug-ins loaded into the applications process. This type of plug-in will not work with Apple Silicon native code and where the plug-in is x86_64. Any thing in-process will have to be either Rosetta 2 or native. You can force a universal binary to run under Rosetta 2 by selecting a checkbox under Get Info. The other type of plug-in runs in its own process. Those plug-ins will work under Rosetta 2 even if the application is Apple Silicon native code.
As for Virtual Machines, there are several solutions that use Apple's hypervisor framework, including apparently Parallels. Others are the open source VirtualBox and XHyve. Someone will be able to take the open source VMs and add x86_64 emulation or transpiling and support Windows 10 on x86. And maybe Microsoft will decide to allow Windows on ARM to run under a VM. A lot of this stuff is still up in the air. The announcement was only a couple of days ago. It will take a while to find out what various companies strategies will be.
PS. One thing that hinders taking your arguments seriously is that you keep using the word Silicone for Silicon. These are distinct materials. Silicone is a rubber like polymer that is used as a sealant. Silicon is an atomic element that is used as a semiconductor to make integrated circuit chips. It is Apple Silicon not Silicone.
Firstly someone did state it would be a simple click, you’d do well to see the comments I’m replying to. Secondly did you read article and statement? According to some, I can’t validate this, emulation is not as good performance wise as virtualisation, and considering most people use virtualisation to Windows to run Windows programmes, those programmes will also be X86 based, but the performance (might) suffer and not be as good IF any kind of VM emulator is built.
And thirdly the fact you’ve got make a spellcheck Police comment undermines the seriousness of your comment. People usually do that when they have no argument to make.
It's not as good because it's a completely different architecture that has to be translated. To put it simply, when there was Windows EMULATION on PPC Macs the SW had to translate the PPC processing so that the Windows OS being installed on the PPC Mac running inside another app could think it's being run on an Intel processor. To put even more simply, it takes a considerable amount of overhead to achieve this feat.
When Apple moved to Intel Macs this limitation was removed. Windows runs on an Intel Mac much more directly without any overhead that the app EMULATING x86 instruction set. Most the chips Apple used from Intel included VIRTUALIZATION built in. This doesn't mean that it's not possible to VIRTUALIZE on Intel chips that don't have this feature—it most certainly is—but it increases the performance so the overhead is less effected when using VIRTUALIZATION.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it.
No, instead it sounds like a realistic estimate, rather than useless marketing-speak.
But it is hardly an insurmountable development effort; even for a one-person shop.
So what was your point, again?
Yeah I’m sure the Parallels team won’t mind rebuilding their programme to work with ARM as despite what I thought I saw, support for X86 based virtualisation software is officially dropped from Apple silicone machines. This will be the start I think of programmes that will lose support, that’s my point in case you didn’t get it the first time:
Maybe that team will rebuild it for a market share in single digits, but I know that Parallels is on Windows so guess it’s an X86 platform, and by the looks of it will need to be rewritten for Apples hardware right? I do believe a lot of folks use virtualisation software to run Windows for work purposes on their Macs, and as stated above currently that support is no longer offered in Apples processor based machines.
They literally demoed an Apple Silicon build of Parallels running a VM on Monday. Maybe go back and rewatch the videos?
That was Linux that the machine was running, read the article don’t shoot the messenger... It’s what Apple have stated.
You literally said "I’m sure the Parallels team won’t mind rebuilding their programme to work with ARM" when it's clearly been demonstrated that this is exactly what's already happened.
Sad! grab an Intel Mac Pro while you can. ARM Macs will be inferior in performance.
Source?
A (potential) A-Series out performing an Intel MacPro ?
Look at the first slide of this article. It shows that most of the benefit of going to an A-Series processor is the performance to power consumption ratio -- and showing desktops outstripping on both counts: more performance and more power consumption - with the ratio weighted towards a big increase in power consumption versus a smaller increase in performance. But then, somebody running a MacPro at full performance probably isn't concerned about power consumption.
It remains to be seen if today's A-Series chips can run with a full blown Xeon processor -- or even an I9 fully configured for performance. Maybe eventually, but I very much doubt it today. I suspect the MacPro will be the last to be converted to "Apple Silicon".
Intel is getting into dedicated GPUs and the following suggests they will have multi-chip packages (12, 20, 36TFLOPs around 80GFLOPs/Watt):
That could be a route for Apple to go. Stacking chips is another option. The highest-end CPUs and GPUs are typically around 3-4x the performance of the mainstream equivalents. The important metric is performance-per-watt. Not all tasks can split across hardware easily but pretty much all the high-end stuff can like video encoding, CPU/GPU rendering.
They can fit tiles like that in an iMac with the performance of a Mac Pro at the price of a standard iMac. Consider an iPad Pro chip that is running at 7W today. Double the clock speeds and run it at 15W in standard actively-cooled Mac hardware. Lets say this is equivalent to an 8-core MBP Intel CPU. Use 4 stacks and it's equivalent to a 32-core CPU. The GPU would need more to match the highest-end quad Radeon option at 56TFLOPs but 8 stacks of a 4 TFLOP GPU is 32 TFLOPs and fits in an iMac's power profile. Stacking/tiling means they don't have to design significantly different chips across different Mac models.
I could see them making an iMac with those chips and leaving the Mac Pro on Intel. There would be no reason for them to make a PCIe GPU with custom chips. When people see the price/performance advantage of the iMac, they'll migrate to it. Apple can sell their own higher-end chips at a premium but none of the sale will be getting passed onto Intel.
I may be in the minority, but I was really hoping that Apple's pro line stayed intel, and the consumer line migrated to ARM processors.
Absent something really amazing happening, I will need to shift my small firm back to Lenovo laptops in a couple of years. We currently use MacBook Pros with parallels and windows to run legacy windows software, etc., where the developer has not yet made a MacOS version, and is certainly not going to make a MacOs version for ARM processors. So I (and my business) am one of the small percentage of Mac users who relied on the Intel processors and is going to get burned by this.
That said, I am warming to the idea of Apple Silicon for my personal laptop, etc. I will miss the option of using Bootcamp to game on my MacBook Pro with its discrete graphics card, but streamed gaming services like Nvidia Now are slowly obviating the need to game on your local machine at all.
Well, another way to look at it is that Boot Camp and Parallels, et al. enabled these developers to be lazy and point users to this kind of solution, rather than doing what they should have and providing native support. With that option going away, at least some of them may need to rethink that strategy.
I agree with you there. But for what I do (I am a tax lawyer who specializes in a nuance-within-a-nuance of the tax code), the software I use MIGHT be licensed to 150-200 other firms in the entire country. And it's not hugely expensive software. So the company that makes it already has virtually zero incentive to make a MacOS version. Now that I (presumably) won't have parallels x86 support, it will just be simpler to switch back to PCs. And that isn't really a bad thing, necessarily. But the fact is that there are "pro" users out there who are not in the creative/graphics/video production fields who may have to migrate away from Apple hardware because of this. Again, though, Apple knows this. It's not the end of the world.
It’s always more complex. How many seats does that software have in these firms? It could be 1,000, and depending on the size of the firms, it could be 50,000. You say it’s not that expensive. What pricing do you consider to be not that expensive? $50 a seat, $75, $100, more? Is this subscription software? And finally, what other software that’s Mac exclusive, if any, do you use?
If the road this ends up going down means the same apps on a Mac are the same apps on an iPad, then surely Apples PC market share is going to shrink even further, everyone will just buy a much cheaper iPad.
I’m not questioning Apples silicone prowess here, I’m questioning if developers will follow them down the path.
Ummm, there’s over a hundred million Mac users. Developers will follow - it’s not a “hire a new team and rewrite all your code” obstacle. It’s a click-a-button and recompile inconvenience for 99% of developers.
Marketshare is not a metric you use to decide if you’re going to take time and develop software for a particular platform - what’s more important is user base and which versions of the OS is being used the most.
I do believe Craig said in cases it will take a ‘few days’, hardly clicking a button is it. And the user base is minuscule hence my comment:
I have to say that I don’t think that market share equates to hundreds of millions of Mac users. I’ve already read comments from music professional stating a lot of their old legacy plugins etc will no longer work. And the developers are either not in business anymore or too small to worry about Apple and spending money if an Apple silicone dev kit.
For most it is a click. And legacy plugins can run in Rosetta.
So you stating the Parallels team can convert X86 bases paralleled into ARM based Parallels with a single click.. really? And no if you read the article I linked to you will see Rosetta won’t support X86 based VM, that’s the point of the support being dropped:
“Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn't translate the following executables:
To me that doesn’t sound like something that can be fixed with ‘a single click’.
And reading the posts in the forums there, it would mean a VM machine will have to ‘emulate’ my Windows and it’s apps to work not Virtualise them, I don’t enough about it to know if that’s true but it makes sense, virtualising X86 programmes on X86 platforms. And emulation doesn’t tend to work as well or perform as well.
I said for most it is a single click. How many apps do you think use Kernel Extensions ( which are being discontinued anyway) and are virtual machine apps? The latter is only parallels. And they have an opportunity here to do x86_64 emulation (rather than virtualisation ) if they can, I think they used to Which will keep windows apps running.
in any case you mistook two things, what works in rosetta and what can be done in Xcode.
Here is a fairly quick explanation of what has to be done, and for most apps its just a recompile and if you use other libraries, getting them to recompile first. Plugins take a small amount of extra work.
I may be in the minority, but I was really hoping that Apple's pro line stayed intel, and the consumer line migrated to ARM processors.
Absent something really amazing happening, I will need to shift my small firm back to Lenovo laptops in a couple of years. We currently use MacBook Pros with parallels and windows to run legacy windows software, etc., where the developer has not yet made a MacOS version, and is certainly not going to make a MacOs version for ARM processors. So I (and my business) am one of the small percentage of Mac users who relied on the Intel processors and is going to get burned by this.
That said, I am warming to the idea of Apple Silicon for my personal laptop, etc. I will miss the option of using Bootcamp to game on my MacBook Pro with its discrete graphics card, but streamed gaming services like Nvidia Now are slowly obviating the need to game on your local machine at all.
Well, another way to look at it is that Boot Camp and Parallels, et al. enabled these developers to be lazy and point users to this kind of solution, rather than doing what they should have and providing native support. With that option going away, at least some of them may need to rethink that strategy.
I agree with you there. But for what I do (I am a tax lawyer who specializes in a nuance-within-a-nuance of the tax code), the software I use MIGHT be licensed to 150-200 other firms in the entire country. And it's not hugely expensive software. So the company that makes it already has virtually zero incentive to make a MacOS version. Now that I (presumably) won't have parallels x86 support, it will just be simpler to switch back to PCs. And that isn't really a bad thing, necessarily. But the fact is that there are "pro" users out there who are not in the creative/graphics/video production fields who may have to migrate away from Apple hardware because of this. Again, though, Apple knows this. It's not the end of the world.
It’s always more complex. How many seats does that software have in these firms? It could be 1,000, and depending on the size of the firms, it could be 50,000. You say it’s not that expensive. What pricing do you consider to be not that expensive? $50 a seat, $75, $100, more? Is this subscription software? And finally, what other software that’s Mac exclusive, if any, do you use?
Without getting too specific, I deal with transfer taxes (estate, gift, and GST taxes) for ultra high net worth individuals. Given that the unified estate and gift tax credit is now over $25M for a married couple, the entire universe of people in the US subject to these taxes is extremely small. As a result, most practitioners like me have very small firms, and the software is licensed on a per-user basis, at a cost of about $4,000 per user, per year. But, as stated, there are probably only a few hundred user licenses sold each year. The software essentially looks and runs like a ~1999 Windows 98 program, although it is continually updated to comply with the constantly changing US tax code and state-level trust laws (which is really what you are paying for). As someone else suggested, I could "stream" this software, but at a certain point, it's just easier to switch back to Lenovo laptops and be rid of all of this OS/processor complexity.
I may be in the minority, but I was really hoping that Apple's pro line stayed intel, and the consumer line migrated to ARM processors.
Absent something really amazing happening, I will need to shift my small firm back to Lenovo laptops in a couple of years. We currently use MacBook Pros with parallels and windows to run legacy windows software, etc., where the developer has not yet made a MacOS version, and is certainly not going to make a MacOs version for ARM processors. So I (and my business) am one of the small percentage of Mac users who relied on the Intel processors and is going to get burned by this.
That said, I am warming to the idea of Apple Silicon for my personal laptop, etc. I will miss the option of using Bootcamp to game on my MacBook Pro with its discrete graphics card, but streamed gaming services like Nvidia Now are slowly obviating the need to game on your local machine at all.
Well, another way to look at it is that Boot Camp and Parallels, et al. enabled these developers to be lazy and point users to this kind of solution, rather than doing what they should have and providing native support. With that option going away, at least some of them may need to rethink that strategy.
I agree with you there. But for what I do (I am a tax lawyer who specializes in a nuance-within-a-nuance of the tax code), the software I use MIGHT be licensed to 150-200 other firms in the entire country. And it's not hugely expensive software. So the company that makes it already has virtually zero incentive to make a MacOS version. Now that I (presumably) won't have parallels x86 support, it will just be simpler to switch back to PCs. And that isn't really a bad thing, necessarily. But the fact is that there are "pro" users out there who are not in the creative/graphics/video production fields who may have to migrate away from Apple hardware because of this. Again, though, Apple knows this. It's not the end of the world.
It’s always more complex. How many seats does that software have in these firms? It could be 1,000, and depending on the size of the firms, it could be 50,000. You say it’s not that expensive. What pricing do you consider to be not that expensive? $50 a seat, $75, $100, more? Is this subscription software? And finally, what other software that’s Mac exclusive, if any, do you use?
Without getting too specific, I deal with transfer taxes (estate, gift, and GST taxes) for ultra high net worth individuals. Given that the unified estate and gift tax credit is now over $25M for a married couple, the entire universe of people in the US subject to these taxes is extremely small. As a result, most practitioners like me have very small firms, and the software is licensed on a per-user basis, at a cost of about $4,000 per user, per year. But, as stated, there are probably only a few hundred user licenses sold each year. The software essentially looks and runs like a ~1999 Windows 98 program, although it is continually updated to comply with the constantly changing US tax code and state-level trust laws (which is really what you are paying for). As someone else suggested, I could "stream" this software, but at a certain point, it's just easier to switch back to Lenovo laptops and be rid of all of this OS/processor complexity.
I’m amazed they demoed Maya (and gaming) using Rosetta 2. I’m going to guess that 3D/animation apps are all going to be needing to be on Metal already in order to work in Rosetta (or at least work well?) but I’m beyond excited for this!
Guess we’ll be waiting to see the new iMac, wonder when that’ll launch.
They demoed 1080p 60fps low settings and most of the acceleration was coming from the Afterburner integrated components they failed to mention on that motherboard. They mentioned no specs, completely unlike Apple. They showed the barest of stuff working, including that pathetic Maya demo of a wireframe and low graphic non-textured edit view.
Just take a look at what is on the upcoming Motherboard. Most of the heavy lifting will come from the Afterburner parts and not the CPU/GPU SoC.
All those specific processors/accelerators are FPGA based. High efficiency audio processor, Cryptography Acceleration, High-performance video editing, Machine Learning accelerators, High quality camera processor, Neural Engine. These are parts of the SoC. These are add-ons that you can't put in a smartphone or an iPad due to the massive batteries in the way. This stuff is bits and pieces on the Motherboard that compensate for the SoC being weak overall.
You put each one of those in an Intel or especially an AMD system with the Zen 3 and it's 64 core/128 thread max for consumers and you have something that nothing Apple does will ever compete. Apple is doing this to increase their profit margins and further stream line contractual agreements with third parties by no longer being contractually obligated for x amount of years with this or that vendor.
Apple will save the fully loaded system specs shown below for their most expensive variety of system and reduce the components down to their entry level machines. Profit margins will increase along with prices.
The most annoying oblique reference is `Advanced silicon packaging.' The industry leader in advanced Silicon Packaging is the Zen line. The Zen 4 is introducing X3D packaging (2.5D & 3D packaging] for their SoC APUs and CPUs. It's obvious that AMD will be soon move to APUs only with Infinity Architecture shared backplane allowing for GPUs to share the same bandwidth/memory. Zen 2 APUs already have lower power design than Intel.
Zen 3 drops down considerably further. AMD and Apple will be on 5nm and below at the same time.
Nothing Apple is doing is for lack of options.
Oh yes, they had options, and they went for the most difficult one because it was the one that best allowed them to secure their future, streamline their own development and that of their developer base. Why would you go with a company that relies on the technology of another company for its existence? What happens when AMD hits the same wall as Intel? How does Apple know they’ll put Apple’s requirements above others when things get tricky.
Apple hit problems with 68K Apple hit problems with PowerPC Apple hit problems with Intel
At some point you have realise that only you care enough about what you’re trying to do to make sure you have all the pieces in place to do it.
Apple didn’t go with AMD because they knew that five years from now they’d be in exactly the same position they always end up in when relying on someone else to build their silicon.
You can bleat on about AMD as much as you like, but it’s done. It’s over. The ship has sailed. The plane has taken off. The fat lady has sung the washing is dry and the pasta is cooked.
This has never been just about speed, so throwing in comparisons against a processor you haven’t seen is rather pointless.
That’s a good point. I gave a lot of thought about it and my answer is you need to plan for the long-term. While the last batch of x86 Macs may “lose out” to AMD, that’s only a short pain compare to the future.
Another note, AMD can’t be adding cores forever. The focus will be back on the architecture itself eventually.
Comments
Keyboards, Pro, and mini are all solved problems, so this has nothing to do with any of that.
"iOS is stronger than ever and the use of AI to organize stuff is great." — you realize you just answered your own question about how Apple Silicon will benefit the Mac, right? Not sure how you can possibly miss that.
They literally demoed an Apple Silicon build of Parallels running a VM on Monday. Maybe go back and rewatch the videos?
For plug-ins, Apple's presentation on porting to Apple Silicon made it very clear that there are two types of plug-ins. One type is plug-ins loaded into the applications process. This type of plug-in will not work with Apple Silicon native code and where the plug-in is x86_64. Any thing in-process will have to be either Rosetta 2 or native. You can force a universal binary to run under Rosetta 2 by selecting a checkbox under Get Info. The other type of plug-in runs in its own process. Those plug-ins will work under Rosetta 2 even if the application is Apple Silicon native code.
As for Virtual Machines, there are several solutions that use Apple's hypervisor framework, including apparently Parallels. Others are the open source VirtualBox and XHyve. Someone will be able to take the open source VMs and add x86_64 emulation or transpiling and support Windows 10 on x86. And maybe Microsoft will decide to allow Windows on ARM to run under a VM. A lot of this stuff is still up in the air. The announcement was only a couple of days ago. It will take a while to find out what various companies strategies will be.
PS. One thing that hinders taking your arguments seriously is that you keep using the word Silicone for Silicon. These are distinct materials. Silicone is a rubber like polymer that is used as a sealant. Silicon is an atomic element that is used as a semiconductor to make integrated circuit chips. It is Apple Silicon not Silicone.
Firstly someone did state it would be a simple click, you’d do well to see the comments I’m replying to.
Secondly did you read article and statement? According to some, I can’t validate this, emulation is not as good performance wise as virtualisation, and considering most people use virtualisation to Windows to run Windows programmes, those programmes will also be X86 based, but the performance (might) suffer and not be as good IF any kind of VM emulator is built.
When Apple moved to Intel Macs this limitation was removed. Windows runs on an Intel Mac much more directly without any overhead that the app EMULATING x86 instruction set. Most the chips Apple used from Intel included VIRTUALIZATION built in. This doesn't mean that it's not possible to VIRTUALIZE on Intel chips that don't have this feature—it most certainly is—but it increases the performance so the overhead is less effected when using VIRTUALIZATION.
https://wccftech.com/intel-xe-graphics-xe-hp-hpc-gpu-teaser/
That could be a route for Apple to go. Stacking chips is another option. The highest-end CPUs and GPUs are typically around 3-4x the performance of the mainstream equivalents. The important metric is performance-per-watt. Not all tasks can split across hardware easily but pretty much all the high-end stuff can like video encoding, CPU/GPU rendering.
They can fit tiles like that in an iMac with the performance of a Mac Pro at the price of a standard iMac. Consider an iPad Pro chip that is running at 7W today. Double the clock speeds and run it at 15W in standard actively-cooled Mac hardware. Lets say this is equivalent to an 8-core MBP Intel CPU. Use 4 stacks and it's equivalent to a 32-core CPU. The GPU would need more to match the highest-end quad Radeon option at 56TFLOPs but 8 stacks of a 4 TFLOP GPU is 32 TFLOPs and fits in an iMac's power profile. Stacking/tiling means they don't have to design significantly different chips across different Mac models.
I could see them making an iMac with those chips and leaving the Mac Pro on Intel. There would be no reason for them to make a PCIe GPU with custom chips. When people see the price/performance advantage of the iMac, they'll migrate to it. Apple can sell their own higher-end chips at a premium but none of the sale will be getting passed onto Intel.
It’s always more complex. How many seats does that software have in these firms? It could be 1,000, and depending on the size of the firms, it could be 50,000. You say it’s not that expensive. What pricing do you consider to be not that expensive? $50 a seat, $75, $100, more? Is this subscription software? And finally, what other software that’s Mac exclusive, if any, do you use?
in any case you mistook two things, what works in rosetta and what can be done in Xcode.
Here is a fairly quick explanation of what has to be done, and for most apps its just a recompile and if you use other libraries, getting them to recompile first. Plugins take a small amount of extra work.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10214/
Remember that Microsoft and Adobe have already done this, it took years in the OS9 - OS10 transition to get this done.