While I do believe the arm chip in Macs will bring an improvement in efficiency, I have doubts it will be as significant as you and many people are predicting based on the iPads efficiency. ipadOS is a completely different beast from macOS so it’s not straightforward extrapolation. To get that kind of efficiency I think Apple would have to make macOS more ipadOS-like. I think the main reason for Macs going arm is for Apple’s benefit, but I do think that independence from Intel could allow Apple to innovate in this space, and benefits could spill over to us consumers, depending on what they’re able to do. We’ll see soon!
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ARM based MacBook Pro discussion [merged]
- Thread starter Omega Mac
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Who's going to buy an Intel Mac in this environment? Maybe a used one I guess.
Well if you 'need' a new Mac but for those whose machines are fine for now, this is certainly incentive to wait.
A wide variety of consumers, just like who would buy previous generation iPhones when newer ones , exists.
This is really 2020 Apple now, a very wide gamut of users and very large market. If you fancy yourself on the 'cutting edge' of Apple fandom (and have the budget to match) you would be served to wait now that the big A has given us guidance on what to expect hardware wise. However if you are for example an IT dept looking to outfit a recent round of working from home's you will not hesitate to jump on the bulk deals there are no doubt occurring right now.
Its all about which way you look at it...
THIS - This is the reason I switched to Mac, because I can easily run Linux, Windows, and Windows Server on the same machine.
I think I’m quite looking forward to having an Arm Mac, not so much for performance but we might finally have a laptop which isn’t a hot noisy mess in a thin form factor. I’ll use my Desktop PC for anything that needs pure performance, non Xcode dev work, gaming and anything that doesn’t quite work well on the Arm platform.
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Yes, Arm based.
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Yes, Arm based.
Apple called it the same architecture as the iOS devices, and it runs iOS apps without recompilation.
So...100 percent ARM64e.
ARM is the architecture, like x86 is an architecture or PowerPC. There is an organization that controls the architecture and companies buy licenses for the rights to produce their own chips based off of it. Apple is one of them and their chips are based on the arch with many of their own enhancements.
Apple silicon is probably just their generic name for it until they come up with something nicer.
What I'm curious about is if there is any background stuff going on between Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft made it clear that they want to start pushing more in ARM-based Windows computers with the Surface Pro X.
If there is a two-front push for ARM from the two PC-giants, then it might get developers far and wide to start making macOS and Windows ARM stuff.
If there is a two-front push for ARM from the two PC-giants, then it might get developers far and wide to start making macOS and Windows ARM stuff.
It will happen in some form, Mac has always been an Apple thing and on their terms and platform so alternate OSes haven't been a priority. Personally I'd reather not bootcamp if at all possible and run the prefered enviorment. If that mean I don't game on it so be it I'll do something else as, for me, macOS is my needed environment. Just my humble two cents.
Yes and it's becuase this is a more effecient platform for the more and more mobile world. Intel made a comment a while back about not being interested in the consumer space any more so it's no supprise. It's not the 90s with the dancing bunny-suited engineers. So many features are well suited for Arm such as low porwer-cores for background activieties and sleep mode/powernap apps. Such an exciting time.
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Yes and it's becuase this is a more effecient platform for the more and more mobile world. Intel made a comment a while back about not being interested in the consumer space any more so it's no supprise. It's not the 90s with the dancing bunny-suited engineers. So many features are well suited for Arm such as low porwer-cores for background activieties and sleep mode/powernap apps. Such an exciting time.
Even if we don’t get boot camp I’d be happy with windows in parallels. They used Linux as their parallels example though, which doesn’t fill me with much hope for windows.
Might not been fully working or working well enough to show. Ubuntu (what they showed) already works in Arm pretty well.
Now the wait is on to see what Apple releases by the end of the year! I’m guessing Apple will use ARM to update the smaller MacBook Pro to 14”.
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Perhaps. It is interesting that they showed it running in Parallels rather than a custom Apple solution. Perhaps they are working with them (and presumably VMWare) to keep the Mac viable for virtual platforms for the time being.
I really happy with the ARM transition. There were rumours that this would mean a "walled garden" App Store for Mac. Another Rumor was that iPadOS added trackpad support because it IS the new Mac OS. None of this is true which is great. And Rosetta 2 seems really good considering Shadow of the Tomb Raider was been emulated on an A12Z.
Apple silicon simply means chips designed by Apple - its not a product
Apple silicon just means silicon chips designed by Apple, no more than that. You could equally say an i9 is intel silicon or a Ryzen chip is AMD silicon.
Comments by Intel executives were one of the first really solid hints the transition was definitely happening, so yeah they’ve known for quite a while!
The fact Craig mentioned a few times being able to run Linux VM's but made no mention of Windows VM is a little odd no?
They did say they plan to still support Intel machines with OS updates "for years to come", however many years that exactly that means is the question though. It didn't come off like they intend to drop support anytime soon. So i don't think it's that silly of an idea to entertain. Apple has the money/resources to support these last Intel machines for the usual 7ish years that they normally would. So if they decide (and confirm to people how long the support window will be) to do that, i don't think it'd necessarily be a bad decision if someone bought one now. It's not like soon as the ARM models come out the Intel ones shut off permanently. They all will still work and be completely useable. Devs will still be updating the Intel versions of their apps anyway, particularly in the case of apps that are on both Mac and Windows.
They've definitely known. Even if Apple didn't tell them directly, Intel would notice Apple not putting in a massive new order of Intel chips (which they do quite a while in advance).
This is kind of picky, but Apple is making it sound like they are manufacturing their own CPUs just like Intel, however this isn't true. Intel designs and manufactures CPUs. Apple is only designing CPUs and contracting TSMC to manufacture them. This means they could still hit performance road blocks in the future. For example TSMC could say, hey we're are having a lot of problems with our 5 nanometer wafer manufacturing and Apple would be screwed and it would take years to change suppliers.
