I know Appleinsider is a fairly general user oriented site but could you not have found more production software developers to talk to.
Even if it isn't my field I think the experience of a developer making a big multi-headed piece of business software would be a better indication of how the software we use to generate income might fair in the transistion?
These developers make apps that are useful and interesting but if they don't work it's not going to stop us buying.
I’ve worked on small, medium, and large software projects in aerospace/military and industrial control for over 25 years and have gone through several of these migration and porting exercises due to changes in processors, 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit, from Motorola chips to Intel, moving to different frameworks, using different compilers, changing programming languages, different versions of the same programming language, the sudden emergence of security focus, adoption of new general purpose libraries, changes to architectural focus. Like any developer whose been around for more than a few years, the constant evolution of software design approaches - from structured design to object oriented design to component based design to service oriented architectures to design for security to cloud based applications and restful design, and constantly evolving software development processes from CMMI, to SCRUM, to SAFe, to continuous integration, continuous deployment, and now DevOps. My first exposure to software, if you can call writing machine code software, was on the 6502 and one of my last projects involved machine learning and big data for predicting and prevent machine failures.
The only thing constant in software development is constant change. Software is the closest manifestation of expressing human intellect in a form that can execute outside of the human brain. It constantly changes and morphs because it’s largely unbounded from physical constraints like hardware is, and human imagination is boundless. If you pursue a career in software development you too have to be part of the constant change cycle and be prepared to constantly be learning new technology, new techniques, new languages, new platforms and frameworks, new software processes, etc., and of course always be thoroughly immersed in the intricacies of the problem domain and customers that you are building products and services for.
I don’t have any major concerns about moving to an Apple Silicon based Mac. Apple has plenty of experience with this type of migration, from Motorola to PowerPC and to Intel, they’ve been there and done that. They’ve been cooking iOS and iPadOS versions of a lot of the same code base that Apple Silicon uses on ARM for more than a decade. They published a concise list of breaking changes that developers have to be watch out for. It’s a short list. App makers will undoubtedly encounter a few issues on their own, but they too will figure out how to make their way forward. In my experience the major issues that app developers run into will not be directly tied to the immediate changes related to Apple Silicon, they will be related to unrelated technical debt that their apps have been dragging along for too long. Now they have to go in and make changes for the Apple Silicon transition and the fragility of their current code base may cause overall issues with their app.
My only hesitation about moving to an Apple Silicon Mac now is that it’s a first generation product and I assume that later generations that are designed after getting real world feedback from customers and partners and experience in the field will always be significantly better and further exploit the benefits that Apple Silicon delivers. I expect the first generation of Apple Silicon products will be essentially equivalent to their Intel siblings, perhaps with some key benefits like lower power consumption.
I know Appleinsider is a fairly general user oriented site but could you not have found more production software developers to talk to.
Even if it isn't my field I think the experience of a developer making a big multi-headed piece of business software would be a better indication of how the software we use to generate income might fair in the transistion?
These developers make apps that are useful and interesting but if they don't work it's not going to stop us buying.
OMNI makes a number of products (e.g., OMNI Graffle and their GTD software) that many would consider essential. CCC on the other hand is very niche.
My only hesitation about moving to an Apple Silicon Mac now is that it’s a first generation product and I assume that later generations that are designed after getting real world feedback from customers and partners and experience in the field will always be significantly better and further exploit the benefits that Apple Silicon delivers. I expect the first generation of Apple Silicon products will be essentially equivalent to their Intel siblings, perhaps with some key benefits like lower power consumption.
That will likely always be the case. Products continue to evolve. With many companies, including Apple, they already have second generation products on the drawing board as the first generation are shipping. Real changes often come with the third generation. I agree that 1st generation will likely keep similar form factors and not look all that different. However, the move to Apple Silicon is still a major change and likely means your product will be supported much longer than the Intel based models. Better products are always around the corner, but I'm thinking it will be fine jumping in on the first Silicon Macs. I probably will for at least one of my machines.
As a home consumer, sure, it should be great. As a professional, I have a number of concerns that I suspect will mean we have to move away from Macs in a number of use cases....
You can still use your current Mac if you need x86. Don't see how that prevents you from buying an Apple Silicon Mac?
My web server is running OpenBSD in vmWare on a Mac mini and will continue to do so even if I buy an Apple Silicon Mac.
Yes, because carrying around multiple laptops to maintain a functionality, necessary to do my job, is a practical solution. Especially in the middle of a pandemic, where I'm expected to work remotely whenever possible (so currently about 3 days a week).
And how does that resolve the issue for new people we bring in that need new computers? I'm supposed to buy them an old x86 Mac (from eBay maybe) and a brand new Apple Silicon one too?
I'm hoping that there will be a viable x86 emulation option for Windows, with reasonable performance for non-gpu heavy tasks. Until that's available, I maintain that I have significant concerns about our ability to continue using Macs for a number of our requirements going forward.
The single biggest issue with Apple Silicon is that it does not allow developers and other users to boot into Linux on an external drive. Even though Linux fully supports the ARM CPUs and could run on Apple Silicon, Apple has decided to only allow Mac OS to be run on the system. At some point there will be a version of Windows 10 released that runs natively on ARM with its own Rosetta like Intel compatibility that also will be prevented from running. Dear Apple. These are OUR computers. Let US decide what we can run on them.
I know Appleinsider is a fairly general user oriented site but could you not have found more production software developers to talk to.
Even if it isn't my field I think the experience of a developer making a big multi-headed piece of business software would be a better indication of how the software we use to generate income might fair in the transistion?
These developers make apps that are useful and interesting but if they don't work it's not going to stop us buying.
I’ve worked on small, medium, and large software projects in aerospace/military and industrial control for over 25 years and have gone through several of these migration and porting exercises due to changes in processors, 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit, from Motorola chips to Intel, moving to different frameworks, using different compilers, changing programming languages, different versions of the same programming language, the sudden emergence of security focus, adoption of new general purpose libraries, changes to architectural focus. Like any developer whose been around for more than a few years, the constant evolution of software design approaches - from structured design to object oriented design to component based design to service oriented architectures to design for security to cloud based applications and restful design, and constantly evolving software development processes from CMMI, to SCRUM, to SAFe, to continuous integration, continuous deployment, and now DevOps. My first exposure to software, if you can call writing machine code software, was on the 6502 and one of my last projects involved machine learning and big data for predicting and prevent machine failures.
The only thing constant in software development is constant change. Software is the closest manifestation of expressing human intellect in a form that can execute outside of the human brain. It constantly changes and morphs because it’s largely unbounded from physical constraints like hardware is, and human imagination is boundless. If you pursue a career in software development you too have to be part of the constant change cycle and be prepared to constantly be learning new technology, new techniques, new languages, new platforms and frameworks, new software processes, etc., and of course always be thoroughly immersed in the intricacies of the problem domain and customers that you are building products and services for.
I don’t have any major concerns about moving to an Apple Silicon based Mac. Apple has plenty of experience with this type of migration, from Motorola to PowerPC and to Intel, they’ve been there and done that. They’ve been cooking iOS and iPadOS versions of a lot of the same code base that Apple Silicon uses on ARM for more than a decade. They published a concise list of breaking changes that developers have to be watch out for. It’s a short list. App makers will undoubtedly encounter a few issues on their own, but they too will figure out how to make their way forward. In my experience the major issues that app developers run into will not be directly tied to the immediate changes related to Apple Silicon, they will be related to unrelated technical debt that their apps have been dragging along for too long. Now they have to go in and make changes for the Apple Silicon transition and the fragility of their current code base may cause overall issues with their app.
My only hesitation about moving to an Apple Silicon Mac now is that it’s a first generation product and I assume that later generations that are designed after getting real world feedback from customers and partners and experience in the field will always be significantly better and further exploit the benefits that Apple Silicon delivers. I expect the first generation of Apple Silicon products will be essentially equivalent to their Intel siblings, perhaps with some key benefits like lower power consumption.
Yes, I know the software I'm most interested in and have been using for 20years has seen many of these, plus has gone from Mac only to cross-platform to windows. 68K to PowerPC to Intel now ASi hopeful with them already reporting Big Sur as compatible which is true from what of seen on my own test machine.
As you say these projects are always changing indeed they are in the middle of a multi-year effort that has brought massive but incremental improvement completely overhauling their base graphics engine they use. That is kind of the risk. Apple adds this into the workload and either they have given a heads up years ago and it is a contingency in those other plans already or they didn't know and didn't see it coming and it hasn't been factored in so the software stops being cross-platform or productive features get delayed.
These things are always a mix of excitement, possibility and apprehension much like watching a rocket launch.
I know Appleinsider is a fairly general user oriented site but could you not have found more production software developers to talk to.
Even if it isn't my field I think the experience of a developer making a big multi-headed piece of business software would be a better indication of how the software we use to generate income might fair in the transistion?
These developers make apps that are useful and interesting but if they don't work it's not going to stop us buying.
OMNI makes a number of products (e.g., OMNI Graffle and their GTD software) that many would consider essential. CCC on the other hand is very niche.
OMNI make very nice software for helping you manage your productivity but by definition your productivity is another workflow.
So can we hear from a Developer of a direct workflow app.
I know Appleinsider is a fairly general user oriented site but could you not have found more production software developers to talk to.
Even if it isn't my field I think the experience of a developer making a big multi-headed piece of business software would be a better indication of how the software we use to generate income might fair in the transistion?
These developers make apps that are useful and interesting but if they don't work it's not going to stop us buying.
....
My only hesitation about moving to an Apple Silicon Mac now is that it’s a first generation product and I assume that later generations that are designed after getting real world feedback from customers and partners and experience in the field will always be significantly better and further exploit the benefits that Apple Silicon delivers. I expect the first generation of Apple Silicon products will be essentially equivalent to their Intel siblings, perhaps with some key benefits like lower power consumption.
So what do you have against Bleeding Edge technology?
As a home consumer, sure, it should be great. As a professional, I have a number of concerns that I suspect will mean we have to move away from Macs in a number of use cases....
You can still use your current Mac if you need x86. Don't see how that prevents you from buying an Apple Silicon Mac?
My web server is running OpenBSD in vmWare on a Mac mini and will continue to do so even if I buy an Apple Silicon Mac.
Yes, because carrying around multiple laptops to maintain a functionality, necessary to do my job, is a practical solution. Especially in the middle of a pandemic, where I'm expected to work remotely whenever possible (so currently about 3 days a week).
And how does that resolve the issue for new people we bring in that need new computers? I'm supposed to buy them an old x86 Mac (from eBay maybe) and a brand new Apple Silicon one too?
I'm hoping that there will be a viable x86 emulation option for Windows, with reasonable performance for non-gpu heavy tasks. Until that's available, I maintain that I have significant concerns about our ability to continue using Macs for a number of our requirements going forward.
It would be better, i think, if Apple found a way to retain Bootcamp. That's not as convenient as an emulator, but it's solid as a rock for functionality. But that means running an ARM based version of Windows.
Comments
The only thing constant in software development is constant change. Software is the closest manifestation of expressing human intellect in a form that can execute outside of the human brain. It constantly changes and morphs because it’s largely unbounded from physical constraints like hardware is, and human imagination is boundless. If you pursue a career in software development you too have to be part of the constant change cycle and be prepared to constantly be learning new technology, new techniques, new languages, new platforms and frameworks, new software processes, etc., and of course always be thoroughly immersed in the intricacies of the problem domain and customers that you are building products and services for.
I don’t have any major concerns about moving to an Apple Silicon based Mac. Apple has plenty of experience with this type of migration, from Motorola to PowerPC and to Intel, they’ve been there and done that. They’ve been cooking iOS and iPadOS versions of a lot of the same code base that Apple Silicon uses on ARM for more than a decade. They published a concise list of breaking changes that developers have to be watch out for. It’s a short list. App makers will undoubtedly encounter a few issues on their own, but they too will figure out how to make their way forward. In my experience the major issues that app developers run into will not be directly tied to the immediate changes related to Apple Silicon, they will be related to unrelated technical debt that their apps have been dragging along for too long. Now they have to go in and make changes for the Apple Silicon transition and the fragility of their current code base may cause overall issues with their app.
My only hesitation about moving to an Apple Silicon Mac now is that it’s a first generation product and I assume that later generations that are designed after getting real world feedback from customers and partners and experience in the field will always be significantly better and further exploit the benefits that Apple Silicon delivers. I expect the first generation of Apple Silicon products will be essentially equivalent to their Intel siblings, perhaps with some key benefits like lower power consumption.
And how does that resolve the issue for new people we bring in that need new computers? I'm supposed to buy them an old x86 Mac (from eBay maybe) and a brand new Apple Silicon one too?
I'm hoping that there will be a viable x86 emulation option for Windows, with reasonable performance for non-gpu heavy tasks. Until that's available, I maintain that I have significant concerns about our ability to continue using Macs for a number of our requirements going forward.
Dear Apple. These are OUR computers. Let US decide what we can run on them.
It would be better, i think, if Apple found a way to retain Bootcamp. That's not as convenient as an emulator, but it's solid as a rock for functionality. But that means running an ARM based version of Windows.