jharner

Apple has already made it difficult for data scientists by not providing Nvidea drivers supporting cuda. The real problem is not virtualization for Windows. Rather it is virtualization for Docker and and to a lesser extent for VirtualBox. Docker containers herald the wave of the future for STEM, including data science and statistics. It also will be critical for reproducible research. Now the Mac is dominant in STEM---go to any related conference to see what attendees are using. Two factors may change this---ARM Macs and Windows Subsystem for Linux. STEM increasingly is running on Linux-based open-source software using multiple software ecosystems that must work together---R and PostgreSQL, R or Python with Spark and Hadoop, etc. These integrated environments are best containerized and reproducibility of research and collaboration of developers and scientists along with bash and git will make Docker and related infrastructure essential. Currently, the Mac excels in this area, but an ARM Mac may not support Docker, Singularity, Kubernetes, etc., even if it does continue to support open-source UNIX software. But now Windows runs containerized Linux. What faculty and researchers use will filter down to students. We are not talking about a 2% loss---it will be much larger for STEM related disciplines in academia and industry. In principal, Apple could support Docker and related technologies, but will they? They could support cuda, but they don't. Even if computing moves to the cloud, what technologies are behind this? Docker, Kubernetes, open-source software, etc. Everyone will need to develop, test and deploy their code from their local machine. This cannot be done using iPadOS and if cannot be done on macOS, the the Mac is done in STEM.

The problem is that Macs are used extensively in STEM, including data science and statistics. These disciplines depend almost entirely on open source software that runs on UNIX/Linux. Further, increasingly applications are dockerized meaning the development switches to some extent to Docker and Kubernetes. Applications like R are run by millions and of course there is Python. Docker requires root access. Will these environments still be available on ARM Macs. If not, Apple may lose perhaps 10s of millions of potential users including faculty and students at universities. Does anyone have any insight into what could be a disaster for Macs in higher education and industry if these environments are lost?

If macOS for ARM does not support the UNIX side, then the Mac in STEM will be dead. If macOS for ARM does not support a hypervisor for Docker, etc., then the Mac in STEM will be on life support. The data sciences are moving to containerization with Docker, Singularity, etc. and support of these technologies will be critical. Now, lack of support for CUDA is a big problem. In principal, Docker on ARM is supported, but it will be tricky even if Apple supports it. I would hate to think of moving to Windows Subsystem for Linux.