Running Windows on the new M1 Chip?

[Stridr69]

True curiosity, why one needs to run Windows on a Mac?

Kazillions of apps that ONLY run on windows. And I mean apps going back 20 years or more...

 

[Luposian]

..then Apple computers will go back to be completely irelevant as they were in the '90's. Just glorfied iPads with a built-in keyboard.

Steve Jobs is dead and he ain’t coming back. Seems like Apple is doing alright without him this time around, thankfully!

 

[1240766]

Kazillions of apps that ONLY run on windows. And I mean apps going back 20 years or more...

I can see that...thank you.

I really never cared for Windows, only reason I use is because it is my only VDI choice for connecting to work...but even then running on Citrix workspace from Ubuntu....that was til I got my first Mac few weeks ago...

I hope the WSL support will keep getting traction.

 

[GiantKiwi]

And I mean apps going back 20 years or more...

Anything older than ~10 years shouldn't be being used anyway as the associated runtime's will have been put into retirement by Microsoft long ago, so that theory is essentially moot.

 

[Stridr69]

Anything older than ~10 years shouldn't be being used anyway as the associated runtime's will have been put into retirement by Microsoft long ago, so that theory is essentially moot.

Wrong! What about folks that know it's obsolete but want to use said app anyway?

 

[Stridr69]

Unless the price of M1 machines drops dramatically, Intel and AMD have absolutely nothing to worry about because the only people who are going to purchase M1 machines at the current prices they are, are existing mac owners.

I look for value for money and I do not see it with the M1 machines compared to what you can get from Intel and AMD machines for the same price or lower price. I went onto Apples website to checking the pricing of the new M1 13inch mac pro, 16GB with 1TB of hard disk space and it came to $1899. I then looked around on the net for competing laptops of very similar specs or ones that had very close hardware specs but with a bigger screen and I found at least over 70 Intel and AMD laptops that all offer more than what the M1 has to offer. They were all dedicated gaming laptops that had either Nvidia's 1660 Ti or RTX 2070. Many had 1080p webcams and were also capable of handling VR devices.

If I selected 13inch screen only, nearly every machine in it's class came under $1200 and again that is with a 1080p webcam, a 1660 Ti GPU and capable of handling VR.

Now if someone said 'in front of you is the latest Apple M1 and next to it is it's competing equivalent in price AMD and Intel machine' and they run off the specs and what each machine is capable of doing, a huge majority of people would buy the Intel or AMD because for the price, they offer so so much more.

When Apple moved to Intel CPU's, it did not dent the Windows market and the same will happen with the M1's. The M1's are showing how good they are BUT you give people $1800, take them to a dedicated computer store where they are selling both M1 macs and Intel and AMD laptops (hypothetical at the moment because I think only Apple store is selling the M1's), the majority of people will spend that $1800 on a gaming laptop. That is the real world we live in and people in this forum need to understand that. As I said, the M1's are good, they are proving just how good they are BUT they will not put a dent into Intel or AMD

Nice take. Unfortunately the new Mac's will just be glorfied iPads until they can run other OS's like the current intel systems

 

[MevetS]

Nice take. Unfortunately the new Mac's will just be glorfied iPads until they can run other OS's like the current intel systems

This is the funniest thing I read all day. Thanks for making me laugh!

 

[tdar]

Disagree. Redmond will take a look down the road to Cupertino and just flip'em the bird.

There is information from credible sources that says that Microsoft has already sent emissaries down to Cupertino to talk about getting support for windows on apple silicon. Microsoft is a software company. They don’t play the fanboy game that many of us here play. If a platform can run their software and run it well they really could care less about who makes it.

TL-DR

All users money is green.

 

[pshufd]

True curiosity, why one needs to run Windows on a Mac?

I used to run Medved Trader several years ago. The program cost me $800/year and only runs on Windows. So I ran it on Parallels on one of my MacBook Pros. I liked the program as it was lightweight and would work with a bunch of brokerages. I ran into a bug with the program which only seemed to affect me. I worked with the developer but we could not get it resolved. The bug was such that I had to restart the program every few hours.

So I decided to switch to Think or Swim by TD Ameritrade. The thing about trading platforms is that there's a steep learning curve to using them if you use complex trading strategies. Think or Swim is Java-based and runs off Linux, Windows and macOS so I would have portability. Think or Swim is also free. The Medved Trader solution also has the subscription cost of Parallels.

So you can run Medved Trader on an Intel Mac through Parallels (or VirtualBox or VMWare). But I doubt that you can get it to run on the Apple Silicon Macs. There is a forum for Medved Trader and, to my knowledge, it doesn't run on WINE because of some .NET dependency. The author states that it only runs on Windows.

That's one example. I moved on. I had to spend a decent bit of time to learn the new program but, now that I have, I am not tied down to one platform.

 

[Sydde]

... please explain why Apple did not write an x86 port to work on the M1?

M1 is closely related to the A-series chips used in the phones, tablets and watches. iPadOS is very, very closely related to macOS. So is iOS. The foundation layer is all but identical, and always has been. Apple did not port macOS from x86 to ARM, they just finished up the UI parts that iOS was missing. They wrote macOS for ARMv7 (as 32 bit iOS) and then transitioned it to ARMv8 (64-bit) about five or six years ago. A few years back, they dropped 32-bit support from iOS, allowing them to greatly simplify their CPU logic. All they had to do to get macOS running on ARM was to add some AppKit classes and support some other features (like bindings, IIUC). Making the M1 Macs function like the x86 models was fairly trivial in terms of building the OS.

 

[pshufd]

M1 is closely related to the A-series chips used in the phones, tablets and watches. iPadOS is very, very closely related to macOS. So is iOS. The foundation layer is all but identical, and always has been. Apple did not port macOS from x86 to ARM, they just finished up the UI parts that iOS was missing. They wrote macOS for ARMv7 (as 32 bit iOS) and then transitioned it to ARMv8 (64-bit) about five or six years ago. A few years back, they dropped 32-bit support from iOS, allowing them to greatly simplify their CPU logic. All they had to do to get macOS running on ARM was to add some AppKit classes and support some other features (like bindings, IIUC). Making the M1 Macs function like the x86 models was fairly trivial in terms of building the OS.

This is not how ports work.

 

[Sydde]

This is not how ports work.

Because it was not a port.

 

[nnoob]

Because it was not a port.

Wrong, They did not have rewrite anything. It is a port from x86 to ARM, They just have to write SoC code that makes the ARM processor boot up from bootloader in the kernel, they wrote drivers and then they compiled the source code -> LLVM frontend-> LLVM backend for ARM -> native code.. They did not rewrite any code, just that they optimized it to run ARM which mean they found some weak spot for ARM processor and rewrote that portion of the code.

 

[nnoob]

One thing is that optimization probably benefited intel mac because it has the same codebase.

 

[pshufd]

Because it was not a port.

How many ports have you done?

 

[pshufd]

One thing is that optimization probably benefited intel mac because it has the same codebase.

There's probably conditional code with Intel optimizations given that they've been on Intel for quite some time. That may give them some room to do similar things for ARM down the road. Though the ARM architecture might make the compiler's job easier. ARM is a bit more generous with registers.

 

[GiantKiwi]

Wrong! What about folks that know it's obsolete but want to use said app anyway?

I would hope that those kinds of people would also have sufficient common sense to not be connecting to the internet as well, however given my own experiences professionally, I doubt it.

 

[Sydde]

How many ports have you done?

I am saying that it was not a port. If anything, OS X was a port from 68K->x86->PPC (NeXTStep), so it was never really ported from PPC to x86 because all they did was keep the existing x86 codebase in sync with progressive versions of the PPC version. iPhoneOS was built out of Darwin and the OS X frameworks into a lightweight version of OS X, way back around the same time that iPhoneOS was first being put together.

Over time, iOS has advanced to near parity with OS X. Converting it from AArch32 to AArch64 was only slightly more complicated than a simple instruction-code-to-instruction-code translation. So almost all of OS X has existed on ARMv8 for more than six years, including Safari and Apple's key productivity apps. The work of moving to M1 was trivial. Nearly everything was already there.

"Port" is really not the right word to use.

 

[pshufd]

I am saying that it was not a port. If anything, OS X was a port from 68K->x86->PPC (NeXTStep), so it was never really ported from PPC to x86 because all they did was keep the existing x86 codebase in sync with progressive versions of the PPC version. iPhoneOS was built out of Darwin and the OS X frameworks into a lightweight version of OS X, way back around the same time that iPhoneOS was first being put together.

Over time, iOS has advanced to near parity with OS X. Converting it from AArch32 to AArch64 was only slightly more complicated than a simple instruction-code-to-instruction-code translation. So almost all of OS X has existed on ARMv8 for more than six years, including Safari and Apple's key productivity apps. The work of moving to M1 was trivial. Nearly everything was already there.

"Port" is really not the right word to use.

You don't know what you're talking about.

How many ports have you done?

 

[Joe Dohn]

I am saying that it was not a port. If anything, OS X was a port from 68K->x86->PPC (NeXTStep), so it was never really ported from PPC to x86 because all they did was keep the existing x86 codebase in sync with progressive versions of the PPC version. iPhoneOS was built out of Darwin and the OS X frameworks into a lightweight version of OS X, way back around the same time that iPhoneOS was first being put together.

Over time, iOS has advanced to near parity with OS X. Converting it from AArch32 to AArch64 was only slightly more complicated than a simple instruction-code-to-instruction-code translation. So almost all of OS X has existed on ARMv8 for more than six years, including Safari and Apple's key productivity apps. The work of moving to M1 was trivial. Nearly everything was already there.

"Port" is really not the right word to use.

Huh... what?

OS X was a completely new OS derived from BSD Lite and FreeBSD. They decided to do that precisely because they were changing architectures. OS X's command prompt is a direct result of that.

 

[Sydde]

OS X was a completely new OS

No, OS X was a reworking of NeXTStep, using the team and IP Apple acquired in purchasing NeXT. It was a very long way from "completely new", other than that it was new to Mac.

 

[pshufd]

No, OS X was a reworking of NeXTStep, using the team and IP Apple acquired in purchasing NeXT. It was a very long way from "completely new", other than that it was new to Mac.

In the modern age, you use the same tool to build on multiple platforms. So the most reasonable thing would be that macOS Intel and ARM have the same code base. That's how ports are done.

 

[tdar]

In the modern age, you use the same tool to build on multiple platforms. So the most reasonable thing would be that macOS Intel and ARM have the same code base. That's how ports are done.

Yes, same code base. If you look in utility’s you will see boot camp assistant. It runs!! And tells you that it can’t work on this type of Mac.

 

[poorcody]

and Microsoft Edge and Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Teams and ...

and Visual Studio (distinct from VS Code), and Microsoft Remote Desktop, and .NET 5, and ...

 

[jido]

In the modern age, you use the same tool to build on multiple platforms. So the most reasonable thing would be that macOS Intel and ARM have the same code base. That's how ports are done.

It's one release behind, but here is the source code if you are curious.

For the kernel that is.

Apple Open Source

opensource.apple.com