Maybe I missed it, but I haven't heard them say ARM once. I wonder if that means anything.
ARM means: Acorn RISC Machine. Acorn was the grand father of the ARM RISC CPU design. They had their own operating system as well as computers. A lot has changed since then and a lot of Apple’s additions and changes aren’t based on that classic ARM architecture anymore. Apple will prefer to use their own brand name compared to regering to a legacy name like ARM.
ARM hasn't meant Acorn RISC Machine for about 30 years. I learnt BBC BASIC on an Acorn Archimedes.
Maybe I missed it, but I haven't heard them say ARM once. I wonder if that means anything.
ARM means: Acorn RISC Machine. Acorn was the grand father of the ARM RISC CPU design. They had their own operating system as well as computers. A lot has changed since then and a lot of Apple’s additions and changes aren’t based on that classic ARM architecture anymore. Apple will prefer to use their own brand name compared to regering to a legacy name like ARM.
It does not mean "Acorn RISC Machine." That's a very, very old meaning for ARM which has gone through a few revisions. The ARM instruction set Apple licenses does not mean "Acorn RISC Machine." It never has for that instruction set. We all understand why Apple isn't mention ARM, but that doesn't make it an interesting observation that it wasn't mentioned by Apple at all.
the corporations might have just said "we buy Windows boxes a dozen a dime, we don't need Windows-compatible Macs, just give us pure native Macs". Obviously a Macbook Pro is too expensive to run Windows. Given the penetration of the iPhone and iPad into the corporate world, the trend may have chosen the second path. Obviously it is Apple who owns the data about that. Considering that Apple sells to the corporate world by ten thousands, it is unlikely that they didn't calculate the corporate sales loss when switching to Apple Silicon.
Indeed - the keynote raised so many questions. Apple showed that old apps can run, but anything else would have been a disaster. There is no "killer feature" with this switch. What does this add that a T2 couldn't? We simply don't know. If Apple cared about Mac then we would have seen more than 2 Mac Pro upgrades in a decade. The keynote didn't address that. Apple lost K-12 in 5 years - dropping from 60% of the market to 20% - Mac+iPad combined. A new skin on the OS won't make the Mac relevant to K-12 or business.
I started on Apple II but is there a path beyond emojis, Pinterest tabs in Safari, and those applications I can get on Windows? Or is the solution to get a iPad Pro at home and Windows at work?
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.
That isn’t how apps are developed. Apple are not changing the silicon so they can write the same apps for both, as was explained in the Keynote. They are doing it for a lot of other reasons. Thinner laptops being one I’d imagine!
Apple already have Safari, Keynote, Photos, Mail, Maps, etc, etc, etc running on both platforms. They are not the same apps and putting the same processors in each won’t change that at all.
It will take effort, money and resources for a developer to make their programme that runs on X86 PCs also run on Mac OS Apple Silicone machines, and when Apple has a single digit market share, how many are going to do that? Even more so if they have an iOS app I think most will just let that be the programme for the new Macs instead, better value for the company and those share holders, Mac users get a lesser experience though.
Oh ffs. It’s a recompile of their existing code they are already building for the Mac. These are existing Mac developers. It will take at most days. Many of the most important apps have been ported already. Did you watch the presentation?
The Mac Pro is PCIe 3.0 - which simply isn't fast enough. Even budget computers from AMD are now running PCIe 4. The Mac Pro 2019 was built using tech that was obsolete on launch. You can get a B550 motherboard with a PCIe 4.0 SSD for 50-100% better performance on storage.
PCIe-4 support depends on Intel, not on Apple. Show us any Xeon that supports PCIe-4 yet. Your point is irrelevant.
Apple could have gone PCIe 4.0 with AMD (which they use exclusively for GPUs) but decided to deliver obsolete technology. Isn't that relevant?
We know one system that will run the Apple Silicon -- Mac Pro. That's what they were demoing the products on.
Why does everyone keep assuming that, just because of the XDR display?
they specifically stated that they were using the Development Platform, a/k/a Mac mini with A12Z, not only for all the “Apple Silicon” demos, but in fact for all the Big Sur demos throughout the Keynote!
in fact, during the Apple Silicon demo, they even showed the “About This Mac” dialog, displaying the A12Z as the “Processor”.
Excellent news and awesome presentation. Tim mentioned new Intel based Macs still being in the release pipeline and a two year transition period. There’s no way I could see myself purchasing a non Apple silicon Mac at this point but I suppose businesses still need to get work done during the transition.
Overall this is an absolutely brilliant move by Apple. I also like the fact that they’re calling it Apple Silicon rather than ARM. They deserve to give credit where it’s due, to Apple’s design team.
Yeah, these look so sweet that I worry a bit about an Osboune Effect with the Intel Macs. Fortunately, Apple already has the ability to retrofit existing Mac case designs with Axx SoCs, at least as soon as they get their USB4 subsystem or chip working.
And I agree on the deemphasis of the Arm brand. The real reason this is going to work is not the Arm cores; but all those juicy Subsystems, all of which were 100% designed in house by Apple’s true geniuses...
They could have touch-based Macs on Intel if they wanted. Whether they add touch or not is not dependent on the processor.
They could have, but it would have been touch like on Windows. On Apple Silicon they can let the iPad apps run at native speed. That wouldn't be possible on Intel.
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.
No, it doesn't mean that. You CAN run iPad apps, or developers CAN more easily develop Mac apps from existing iPad apps, or as was clearly demonstrated, Microsoft and Adobe have developed new A-compatible desktop apps. Any major developer that makes money from the platform will be working to recompile their apps to continue making money from the Mac platform. Stop posting nonsense.
If Messages is the most important Mac app and Safari is mainly for Pinterest... then this marks then end of the Mac for corporate use. Tim said PERSONAL computer. Don't expect docks or any focus on knowledge workers beyond group chat. iOS 14 uses AI to organize apps - but macOS doesn't use AI to organize documents or mix them with side panels showing related mails, chats,... that is super disappointing.
1. The omission of Windows mention was the most eyebrow-raising thing in the demo.
2. The term “Personal Computer” is a generic term. Give it a rest!
This is a transitional version of macOS. They can’t really let macOS shine until it can finally shed the Intel limitations, like no ML Subsystem to do those fancy document organization tricks.
the corporations might have just said "we buy Windows boxes a dozen a dime, we don't need Windows-compatible Macs, just give us pure native Macs". Obviously a Macbook Pro is too expensive to run Windows. Given the penetration of the iPhone and iPad into the corporate world, the trend may have chosen the second path. Obviously it is Apple who owns the data about that. Considering that Apple sells to the corporate world by ten thousands, it is unlikely that they didn't calculate the corporate sales loss when switching to Apple Silicon.
Indeed - the keynote raised so many questions. Apple showed that old apps can run, but anything else would have been a disaster. There is no "killer feature" with this switch. What does this add that a T2 couldn't? We simply don't know. If Apple cared about Mac then we would have seen more than 2 Mac Pro upgrades in a decade. The keynote didn't address that. Apple lost K-12 in 5 years - dropping from 60% of the market to 20% - Mac+iPad combined. A new skin on the OS won't make the Mac relevant to K-12 or business.
I started on Apple II but is there a path beyond emojis, Pinterest tabs in Safari, and those applications I can get on Windows? Or is the solution to get a iPad Pro at home and Windows at work?
Apple may have lost or ignored K12, let's assume it is like you said, but they have conquered homes. K12 was the business of 90s.
What does this add that a T2 couldn't? First of all, power efficiency. That means fanless laptops and desktops with virtually no throttling just like the iPad. Besides, we are not in Y2K, Google has reshaped all the computing paradigms with their web technologies. If you are dependent on a native Windows x86-64 application to browse Pinterest you are very far behind. And on the web we don't need Intel's parallelisms, hyperthreading and alike that much. Of course in productivity apps native code and parallelism are still needed, but the A series are already tried and tested solutions in productivity too. Corporations don't need to build native client applications with Delphi anymore, web interfaces and Java (to be fully replaced by Swift soon) already do the job. Your solution is to get iPad Pro at both home and work.
They showed demos that ran fast with the first Rosetta iteration - the reality was it was a steaming pile of shit that never was fixed. Apple’s solution was to wait for developers to fix the problem by waiting for the native code.
Where it’s going to get sticky is, is Adobe and others going to support intel Mac OS and for how long? Because CC is subscription based, they could overnight force users to buy new Apple Silicon computers.
This is the type of instability that companies hate.
Don’t forget that Apple lost a huge amount of users with the last switch, entire industries even. It was the MacBook Pro that brought them back from near irrelevance and the cheese grater Mac Pro.
With Apples direction of locking everything down for absurd prices, and built in obsolescence - it will be a tough sell to get people to switch - as a 2008 kind of Mac doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
The choice will be fancy and flashy - vs steady and stable.
They showed demos that ran fast with the first Rosetta iteration - the reality was it was a steaming pile of shit that never was fixed. Apple’s solution was to wait for developers to fix the problem by waiting for the native code.
Where it’s going to get sticky is, is Adobe and others going to support intel Mac OS and for how long? Because CC is subscription based, they could overnight force users to buy new Apple Silicon computers.
This is the type of instability that companies hate.
Don’t forget that Apple lost a huge amount of users with the last switch, entire industries even. It was the MacBook Pro that brought them back from near irrelevance and the cheese grater Mac Pro.
With Apples direction of locking everything down for absurd prices, and built in obsolescence - it will be a tough sell to get people to switch - as a 2008 kind of Mac doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
The choice will be fancy and flashy - vs steady and stable.
I'm just going to pretend that I didn't watch the first minute or two of the keynote and ignore any politics.
How horrible that someone considers human rights of others. This wouldn't be political to you if you started believing that people of color deserve equal rights.
It's political crap and I reject it.
Funny how only racists think equal rights for people of color is "political." Everyone else just things it's ethical.
I agree. Racism, and bigotry in general, is so deeply integrated in so many places, it has to be attacked everywhere. It’s not just the right thing to do, diversity of people brings diversity of ideas which leads to strength. Everyone wins.
—this needs to be repeated again and again. Racism is not as prevalent as it were previously (please excuse my Scandinavian naïveté), thanks to all those brave individuals that challenge the status quo and inequality of today. A thousand year history of racism, discrimination and sexism do NOT validate these rigid ideas—demonizing and exclusion of other human beings were ALWAYS wrong in every sense and ultimately self-defeating.
No word on Windows support? That's gonna be a deal breaker for some.
Why do people think that whenever something new comes out, everything old just stops working. Those people can just buy an Intel Mac, which will still be supported for years. If there aren’t any new ones sold, they can always buy a used one cheaper.
Can just keep buying used ones that will run Windows, even long after Apple stops making x86 Macs?
Comments
If Apple cared about Mac then we would have seen more than 2 Mac Pro upgrades in a decade. The keynote didn't address that. Apple lost K-12 in 5 years - dropping from 60% of the market to 20% - Mac+iPad combined. A new skin on the OS won't make the Mac relevant to K-12 or business.
I started on Apple II but is there a path beyond emojis, Pinterest tabs in Safari, and those applications I can get on Windows? Or is the solution to get a iPad Pro at home and Windows at work?
they specifically stated that they were using the Development Platform, a/k/a Mac mini with A12Z, not only for all the “Apple Silicon” demos, but in fact for all the Big Sur demos throughout the Keynote!
in fact, during the Apple Silicon demo, they even showed the “About This Mac” dialog, displaying the A12Z as the “Processor”.
And I agree on the deemphasis of the Arm brand. The real reason this is going to work is not the Arm cores; but all those juicy Subsystems, all of which were 100% designed in house by Apple’s true geniuses...
2. The term “Personal Computer” is a generic term. Give it a rest!
This is a transitional version of macOS. They can’t really let macOS shine until it can finally shed the Intel limitations, like no ML Subsystem to do those fancy document organization tricks.
What does this add that a T2 couldn't? First of all, power efficiency. That means fanless laptops and desktops with virtually no throttling just like the iPad. Besides, we are not in Y2K, Google has reshaped all the computing paradigms with their web technologies. If you are dependent on a native Windows x86-64 application to browse Pinterest you are very far behind. And on the web we don't need Intel's parallelisms, hyperthreading and alike that much. Of course in productivity apps native code and parallelism are still needed, but the A series are already tried and tested solutions in productivity too. Corporations don't need to build native client applications with Delphi anymore, web interfaces and Java (to be fully replaced by Swift soon) already do the job. Your solution is to get iPad Pro at both home and work.
If you are translating, then why can’t you translate x86 opcodes into Arm-64 as easily as you can x64 ones?
Racism is not as prevalent as it were previously (please excuse my Scandinavian naïveté), thanks to all those brave individuals that challenge the status quo and inequality of today.
A thousand year history of racism, discrimination and sexism do NOT validate these rigid ideas—demonizing and exclusion of other human beings were ALWAYS wrong in every sense and ultimately self-defeating.