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rob53 said:

That statement doesn't show everything Apple said, only some excerpts. It would have been better for The Verge to publish the actual statement so we know exactly what Apple said. This is the difference between USB and Thunderbolt, something many people who only see numbers refuse to acknowledge:

Both Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 offer higher hardware requirements compared to the standard USB 3 and USB4 standards that they’re built off of, and offer a consistency that regular USB-C standards can often be sorely lacking in.

Thunderbolt 4, in particular, offers the same 40 Gbps speeds that Thunderbolt 3 had offered, but adds even stricter hardware requirements: devices will have to be able to support either two 4K displays or one 8K display, and allow for PCIe data transfer speeds of up to 32 Gbps.

Everything in TB4 is something Apple already supports in their TB3 implementations. There is nothing new for Apple in the TB4 specification. Some peripheral designs might be impacted but nothing from Apple. Apple already supports 2 4K monitors. I'm not sure about 8K but they do support 6K which is more realistic for a few years and 4K + 4K is likely the same as 8K. Apple already supports full 40 Gb/s data.

Thunderbolt 4 is just Intel's requirement for PC makers to force them to be competitive with Apple. Intel does this all the time with limited success.

Edit: Doh! Two 4K displays is only 1/2 of an 8K display. Sorry for the bad math. I don't know if Apple's current Thunderbolt 3 implementation supports 8K.

indiekiduk said:

In danger? It's gone completely. ARM Macs don't even have PCIe

There are no ARM Macs yet. Apple has released a very limited Developer Transition Kit that is minimally useful by developers for testing their macOS software on the new Apple Silicon. It is impossible to reliably infer anything about upcoming Apple Silicon Macs based on the DTK. Apple has been very clear on this. The DTK does not represent new Apple hardware in any way. It is based on a CPU from the iPad Pro where the SoC was first released in 2018 with a minor adjustment to enable an additional GPU core in 2020.

And point of fact, Apple SoCs have used PCIe to interface with NVMe flash since the iPhone 6s.

cpsro said:

Has anyone gotten the beta 2 update on their DTK? Since setup, my DTK has always reported "Unable to check for updates," which makes me think something is wrong, that the system can't even check for an update.

I'm pretty sure that discussing anything DTK related here is breaking an NDA. You should have access and use the Developer Forums Universal App Quick Start for DTK discussions. Despite how awful the new developers forums work.

I’m pretty sure Rosetta only uses the “big” cores which is why these results show up as a 4 core CPU and not 8. You also can’t rely on the reported clock speed. These results are from a kit that isn’t supposed to be benchmarked running an x86-64 translation to Aarch64. They shouldn’t be used to infer anything about native ARM performance. 

Peza said:

asdasd said:

Peza said:

mjtomlin said:

Peza said:

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:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/10/mac-shipments-grow-slightly-but-apple-pc-market-share-shrinks/amp/

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:

- Kernel extensions
- Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms”

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.