cloudguy

Are you kidding me? You believe that these developers should make native M1 Mac ports their #1 priority when these Macs are like 0.5% of the market at best?

Priority list:
iOS apps (2 billion devices)
Windows apps (1 billion devices)
Intel macOS apps (hundreds of millions of devices)
Android apps (3 billion devices)
ChromeOS platform support (according to the latest Statcounter have 2% market share, Google claims that they are almost 5%)
M1 macOS apps (maybe 5 million devices)

I am dead serious here. Apple sold 6.8 million Macs in 4Q 2020. 
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/11/mac-shipments-up-4q-2020-gartner/

M1 Macs were only available less than half that time, plus people and especially enterprises didn't stop buying Intel Macs either. Add in 1Q 2021 and that is 5-6 million people that have bought M1 MacBook Air, Mac Mini and 13' MBPs. And as these machines are limited to 16 GB of RAM, 2 displays and - the point of this article - has software compatibility/availability issues the early adopters are either people using the M1 Mac as a secondary machine (to their Intel Mac or their iPad Pro) or were entry level device types who relied mostly on first party software and web/browser stuff anyway. 

Honestly, what do you believe the job of a software company should be anyway? To make a platform offered by a $2 trillion company look good by shrinking their "not available on M1" list? Or to make money to pay their employees, pay the bills and stay in business by creating software that people will buy? If you realize that the LATTER is the case then it is in the interests of these companies to prioritize development projects that will actually make enough money to justify the coding effort. Right now the tiny subset of the 5 million M1 Mac users won't do it. 

Next year? Sure. Apple will have transitioned all of their lineup except maybe the 26 core Xeon Mac Pro to M1 by then, and the M1 Mac user base will be 20-25 million. Also, despite your "they had the developer kit and 5 months to buy an M1 Mac!" ... er, no. Large outfits with tens of thousands of programmers like Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Adobe etc. didn't get the developer kit, OK? Those went out to small developers. The bigger software companies are probably still in the process of acquiring M1 Macs to armies of developers that need to port huge software packages with millions of lines of code over. Who knows if they've added these devices to their enterprise acquisitions yet. (I bet most companies haven't.) 

Yes, Apple got this done ... but Apple makes several hundred bucks on each M1 Mac sold. They've probably cleared $1 billion in revenue from the M1 Mac line already assuming a margin of $200 per device. But this does not mean that there is much revenue in this yet for the companies that make the software.

tzeshan said:

Apple Silicon should be booted the same as iPhone and iPad. Any people successfully ported Unix to iPhone? 

While you are not wrong from the perspective of Apple, you are ignoring that a lot of users in the tech arena have been using macOS, Windows and *nux almost interchangeably for 15 years. While before this would have been impossible, the combination of common hardware platforms and multiplatform applications based on open standards made it (almost) easy. Back in the day ... not so much. PC was once exclusively used to refer to "IBM machine that isn't a mainframe, server or minicomputer." Even after the "PC clones" made it a more generic term, until 2005 Apple and Wintel/WinAMD were so divergent that you couldn't use the same peripherals: the ports were different. 

Open standards (like USB for ports!), Java and other multiplatform tools, the web, cloud, SaaS etc. created a situation where "everything is a PC" whether it was running Windows, macOS or even Linux. (ChromeOS is the only outlier.) The current generation of tech workers expects to be able to use pretty much any hardware they buy basically the same way. If you are someone who actually "uses a Mac like a Mac" - meaning that you rely primarily on software written for macOS - then you won't understand how big a chance this is for these people. Some people "get it" ... I saw the first raft of articles stating that Macs should no longer be considered PCs last year. But if you are someone that has made building applications, networks and infrastructure based on open multiplatform standards with hardware as interchangeable parts the basis of your entire career - and if you are under 40 you have done exactly that - then this is a major change.

Enough to take your rack-mounted Mac Minis and your Xeon Mac Pros out of your infrastructure? Well if you were responsible for 500 devices, would you still use 75 of them if they didn't boot the same way? Or would you go for uniformity? Exactly. It wasn't a problem for iPhones and iPads because no one deploys the Apache applications on iPhones and iPads that are used to encrypt outbound web traffic. Instead, they deployed it on rack-mounted Mac Minis running Linux that were used to encrypt web traffic that originated on the iPhones and iPads. These folks would prefer to continue to use the Mac Minis for this because they perform well, are extremely reliable and have small footprints. But if problems like this can't be solved, they won't be able to. They will likely switch to Intel Nucs or small form factor Dells instead, even if a single M1 Mac is capable of handling the load of 2 Dells. 

anonconformist said:

Weird headline indicates operating systems aren’t software, which is nonsensical on its face: operating systems are the quintessential software, upon which separate user space applications depend on to exist, as abstract libraries full of functions that allow users to interface between the physical hardware interfaces and the user space applications. 

So, if you have more to worry about than adapting compiler toolchains, boot code, a little abstraction code for certain optimized APIs in the OS, and the HAL and device drivers, you’re doing it wrong.

The rest is mechanical in nature.

Point 1: good grief. People who have, you know, actually studied computer architecture and organization please speak up. In the meantime ... it has been common parlance for decades to refer to application software as software and systems software as the OS. And also to refer to both the kernel and the software that runs on top of the kernel but below the application software (conceptually) like the GUI as "the OS" when you really shouldn't, especially when it comes to Linux. So ... I don't get where you are going with this?

Point 2: "You're doing it wrong ... the rest is mechanical in nature." Ah. That is where you are going with this. The first is FALSE and the second is VERY FALSE. Clearly you haven't done this before. Let the people who have be the ones to talk about this because they are the ones who are actually qualified to do so. Go try to port a major application from x86 to ARM on the same OS (i.e. Linux or Android) and see how "mechanical" it is. Not even that ... merely port a 32 bit application to a 64 bit one. Done it before? It is neither easy or fun. But I guess it should have been "mechanical" and it was "being done wrong" eh? Goodness where do people like this come from?

lkrupp said:

netrox said:

That's why I cannot use M1 Macs for work. I must have Intel compatibility to run VMs at near native speed. Unfortunately, I will have to buy Intel laptop. 

So you’ve made the assumption that this will never happen. Why?

If you are a pro user, NEVER buy hardware - or software - today in anticipation of functionality to be added tomorrow. And this is even with functionality that a major entity like Apple says is "coming soon." But in this case, Apple hasn't promised these features - Intel compatibility to run x86 VMs at near native speed - soon or even ever. The reason is that your job is, well just that. If he could find equivalent paying work using and promoting Apple hardware I am certain that he would take it. But since that isn't his job then he needs hardware that allows him to do it, whether Apple makes it or not.

Good grief, it isn't that big a deal. He can still buy HomePod Minis, AirPods, Apple TVs, Apple Watches, iPhones, iPads and an M1 MacBook Air for personal use. But for his job he needs capable hardware. Now were this 2019 or even 2020 you would be able to honestly tell him "just get an Intel-based MacBook Pro, iMac or Mac Mini." But now you really can't. No Mac has anything newer than a 10th gen Intel CPU. Some of them even have 9th gen. But Windows and Linux machines with 11th gen Intel inside have better CPU performance and MUCH better GPU performance. Not only that but 12th gen Intel machines launch later this year, as do next-gen AMD machines. Those are all going to have 30%-50% better performance than any Intel Mac.

Of course the M1X and M2 Macs are going to blast away anything that x86 will be capable of for some time beyond a top end Xeon or Threadripper CPU meant for servers. But that won't mean anything if those Macs can't run the software that you need for your job. He should wait until it can before he buys it no matter how fast it runs. I am someone who had the same experience. I badly wanted the Mac Mini, but my job required a machine with A. VMWare and B. 32 GB of RAM so that I could run at least 3 VMs simultaneously. So, I had to get an HP desktop - with the same hexacore Intel i5 that is in the Mac Mini - and a pair of RAM sticks. (The combined cost was what I would have paid for the $699 M1 Mac Mini with 8 GB RAM and less than the Intel Mac Mini. Yes, the Apple tax is real.) Later I needed another PC ... but needed to be able to virtualize Windows Server. So I got an 16 GB Intel NUC (again for significantly less than a Mac Mini). I may FINALLY be able to get an M1 Mac Mini later this year if the old Intel Mac Mini that I am currently using as an HTPC kicks the bucket, but that would be a personal device, not a work one. 

Want and need are two different things and for work the latter has to be the driver. Had I gotten a Mac Mini instead of the HP or Intel NUC, I wouldn't be able to use either for work. And ultimately guys, yes the switch from x86 to ARM is going to cost Apple some pro users. It is no big deal as Apple will replace them with the iPhone and iPad casual users who now use Windows PCs.

darkvader said:

starof80 said:

What about the rumors of the second HomePod? I was going to buy that when it came out.

Maybe you can buy the first one at fire sale prices.  It would be worth buying for $50.

(And by that I mean $50 for a pair.  $50 for one is far too much.)

I am hoping that you are joking. In case you aren't, the discontinued Google Home Max costs $160 refurbished. No way the HomePod is going to be anywhere near that cheap.