mr. h

When I saw the headline, I thought yours was going to be the first review to point out that this phone isn't actually all that small, it's just that these modern behemoths that all the professional reviewers are used to, make it look small. Alas, I was mistaken.

I've got an iPhone 12 mini and to me, it doesn't really feel any smaller than the iPhone 6 it replaced. I'm happy that Apple have provided this "smaller" phone, but I'm disappointed it's not smaller. I don't have tiny hands, but for the way I like to hold my phone, I do have to stretch uncomfortably to reach the top quarter of the display with my thumb, and have had to enable reachability on the phone. I guess I have to keep dreaming of an iPhone 4-sized device with full-face display.

jdb8167 said:

chadbag said:

@rob53 where does Apple say they won’t “allow” x86 emulation?

Apple has said that Rosetta 2 is not appropriate for emulating a full OS under a VM. I think that is what was being interpreted. It makes sense. I doubt that Rosetta 2 is designed to work with anything that isn't in the user privilege ring. If someone wants to emulate a complete os under a VM, they will have to do the emulation/translation work themselves.

Correct

melgross said:

Not thrilled about Windows on ARM coming to the Mac, assuming it does. It offers nothing. It’s not Windows in that it doesn’t run any Windows software that isn’t recompiled for it.

My understanding is that this isn't true - it has a translation layer just like Rosetta 2, so you can run x86 apps without a recompile. At least, that's what the Ars article I linked to above states.

rob53 said:

I thought Apple said they will not support any x86 emulation on the M1 chip.

Once you've booted into Windows for ARM via a virtualisation app, there's nothing macOS can do to prevent Windows for ARM then running an emulation layer in order to run Windows apps compiled for x86 and x64. And in any case, why would you even want to prevent that?

From reading their page about it, it seems like this new version is going to still be a purely virtualisation software, with no emulation. So if you want to run Windows with it, it'll have to be the ARM version of Windows. However, apparently Microsoft have announced a "Rosetta"-type layer for Windows for ARM, that will allow you to run x64 code in Windows for ARM.