The "I want a Apple Silicon Mac" but need virtualisation waiting thread

[gumbaloom]

OK so Virtualisation right now on the Apple Silicon Mac does not work.

Docker - They're working on it - Investigation phase
Parallels - Technical Preview due shortly
VM Ware - Being looked in to ?
Virtual Box - ????

I personally need virtualisation because I do linux based development so a lot of my stuff uses virtualbox with vagrant or docker images. None of those is supported right now.

I really want an Apple Silicon mac for the battery life and performance but till I know I can develop on it I can't buy one.

As it's a pretty big under the hood lift I'm going to stick my neck out and say it will be mid to late Spring before everything is out / stable ad tested ?

What do other people think ?

 

[Internaut]

My bar to entry is probably:

• Native open JDK and development tools (pretty agnostic, but recently been playing with VS code).
• Native Chrome, Firefox, Chromedriver and Geckodriver for my web test automation code.
• Native Adobe tools (coming by the looks of it) and some indication that things like Photoshop are perfectly fine enough under Rosetta while we wait (I would hope better than my 2015 MacBook Pro).
• Ditto for MS Office.

Virtualisation? That can be filed under nice to have in the near term. The corporate Dell (quad core i7, 32GB, 512MB SSD) runs various machines under Virtualbox while the older Thinkpad Carbon happily hosts a couple of Ubuntu VMs under Hyper-V. Apple and its partners still have a lot of questions to answer regarding virtualisation, I think. If they get this right, I could imagine a meaningful return of a Mac Server product (i.e. the economic business case will be there given a lower BOM than HP or Dell can achieve).

 

[gumbaloom]

My bar to entry is probably:

• Native open JDK and development tools (pretty agnostic, but recently been playing with VS code).
• Native Chrome, Firefox, Chromedriver and Geckodriver for my web test automation code.
• Native Adobe tools (coming by the looks of it) and some indication that things like Photoshop are perfectly fine enough under Rosetta while we wait (I would hope better than my 2015 MacBook Pro).
• Ditto for MS Office.

Virtualisation? That can be filed under nice to have in the near term. The corporate Dell (quad core i7, 32GB, 512MB SSD) runs various machines under Virtualbox while the older Thinkpad Carbon happily hosts a couple of Ubuntu VMs under Hyper-V. Apple and its partners still have a lot of questions to answer regarding virtualisation, I think. If they get this right, I could imagine a meaningful return of a Mac Server product (i.e. the economic business case will be there given a lower BOM than HP or Dell can achieve).

You don't use virtualisation for web testing ?

I do a lot of Linux based PHP development and virtualbox / vagrant or Docker is my bread and butter.

I'm totally Mac so don't have a PC to fall back on bar a cheapo gaming laptop that's not meant for dev.

 

[Xack]

Qemu is another option that is open source.

 

[Internaut]

You don't use virtualisation for web testing ?

I do a lot of Linux based PHP development and virtualbox / vagrant or Docker is my bread and butter.

I'm totally Mac so don't have a PC to fall back on bar a cheapo gaming laptop that's not meant for dev.

I do, mostly (and, fortunately, have PCs to fall back on). At the moment the bulk of my development is done right inside Ubuntu Virtual Machines (and the preferred IDE at work is the rather sluggish Eclipse). I never develop directly in Windows. What I'm looking for in a new Mac is a native *nix development environment. The alternative would be native Ubuntu box.

 

[gumbaloom]

I do, mostly (and, fortunately, have PCs to fall back on). At the moment the bulk of my development is done right inside Ubuntu Virtual Machines (and the preferred IDE at work is the rather sluggish Eclipse). I never develop directly in Windows. What I'm looking for in a new Mac is a native *nix development environment. The alternative would be native Ubuntu box.

Have you tried PHP Storm / Web Storm ?

It has some issues but better than Eclipse by a country mile

 

[icymountain]

What do other people think ?

I think that you summarised the situation pretty well, and am in almost the same situation, except that I did put myself in a situation where it is less urgent to buy an Apple Silicon Mac. I am watching the situation closely.

One line you may want to feel is the virtualbox one. I came across the thread below, which is not official communication but makes it look unlikely that support will come soon:

M1 ARM Macs: Will Virtualbox be ported ? - virtualbox.org

 

[Internaut]

Have you tried PHP Storm / Web Storm ?

It has some issues but better than Eclipse by a country mile

I haven't, but a quick Google reveals it's by JetBrains - I do like IntelliJ (a couple of the full developers use it in defiance of corporate strictures).

I think that you summarised the situation pretty well, and am in almost the same situation, except that I did put myself in a situation where it is less urgent to buy an Apple Silicon Mac. I am watching the situation closely.

One line you may want to feel is the virtualbox one. I came across the thread below, which is not official communication but makes it look unlikely that support will come soon:

M1 ARM Macs: Will Virtualbox be ported ? - virtualbox.org

I agree, VirtualBox looked like a distant hope from the start. I hope both Parallels and VMWare will both be with us soon.

 

[theluggage]

OK so Virtualisation right now on the Apple Silicon Mac does not work.

Apple demonstrated Parallels running on Apple Silicon at WWDC. It's most likely happening, so it is just a case of patience.

There's a bunch of other "essentials" mentioned at WWDC that haven't been released yet - including Photoshop and MS Office - and for web development/testing you'll probably want Chrome, Firefox and Edge, too. I'd want VS Code (which depends on Electron, which depends on Chromium, which...)

The coming weeks will tell if/how well those work via Rosetta 2 - we know Parallels/Docker won't but things browsers that use JIT compilation to run javascript efficiently will also be an interesting test case...

OTOH, Parallels/Docker is the easiest thing to work around: just get a $50 headless Raspberry Pi to run the ARM Linux backend and SSH into it - or pay Linode $5/month for a basic virtual Linux machine somewhere in the cloud (check out the remote development features in VS Code). But there's no point in that until all the browsers and frontends run on ASi Mac.

If you actually need to do "heavy lifting" with Linux VMs I'd wait for the M2 (or M1 pro or whatever it is going to be called) anyway because that 16GB RAM limit is going to be tight if you want to run multiple VMs with more than the bare minimum RAM allocation. This first batch of ASi Macs may re-define what "consumer" ultra-portable/ultra-low-power machines can do, but the RAM and i/o bandwidth doesn't cut it for pro machines.

 

[pshufd]

I have a new Windows box (10700, 64 GB, 3 TB, etc.) and it's a great desktop. I use that for work stuff. An AS would be for media consumption, development (on AS only), and writing and composing charts. I may buy one now if there's a project for it.

 

[ADGrant]

OK so Virtualisation right now on the Apple Silicon Mac does not work.

Docker - They're working on it - Investigation phase
Parallels - Technical Preview due shortly
VM Ware - Being looked in to ?
Virtual Box - ????

I personally need virtualisation because I do linux based development so a lot of my stuff uses virtualbox with vagrant or docker images. None of those is supported right now.

I really want an Apple Silicon mac for the battery life and performance but till I know I can develop on it I can't buy one.

As it's a pretty big under the hood lift I'm going to stick my neck out and say it will be mid to late Spring before everything is out / stable ad tested ?

What do other people think ?

I think you are being a bit optimistic. Also, when docker is supported it will probably only support ARM docker images, not the X86 images you are working with now.

 

[ADGrant]

I think that you summarised the situation pretty well, and am in almost the same situation, except that I did put myself in a situation where it is less urgent to buy an Apple Silicon Mac. I am watching the situation closely.

How is anyone in a situation where it is "urgent" to buy an AS Mac? All the Macs suitable for development work and running VMs are still available and can support more than 16GB of RAM.

 

[gumbaloom]

I think you are being a bit optimistic. Also, when docker is supported it will probably only support ARM docker images, not the X86 images you are working with now.

So all the Apache and MySQL are likely to need arm builds to work?

Sounds like it will take time for the community to get that instead.

Spring optimistic? OK we’ll see how it goes it must be a heavy lift - depends on if docker has had secret access to m1 chips but obviously NDA’s will mean they can’t say as such

Different subject - what do people think the chances are of Parallles getting Windows 10 working?

I also use SDL Trados which will never be Mac native

 

[pshufd]

So all the Apache and MySQL are likely to need arm builds to work?

Sounds like it will take time for the community to get that instead.

Spring optimistic? OK we’ll see how it goes it must be a heavy lift - depends on if docker has had secret access to m1 chips but obviously NDA’s will mean they can’t say as such

Different subject - what do people think the chances are of Parallles getting Windows 10 working?

I also use SDL Trados which will never be Mac native

I'm considering buying an AS to do the Firefox port. I've sent email to someone working on it to see whether or not they need help.

 

[dogslobber]

Your best bet is probably qemu. It will work from Day One with ARM Macs to do emulation of anything you throw at it. qemu also supports the HV FW so the extensions for ARM chips will be patched shortly to allow virtualization of Apple Silicon Linux builds.

It's almost certain VirtualBox will EOL on Intel Macs as they're not interested in ARM virtualization.

 

[ADGrant]

So all the Apache and MySQL are likely to need arm builds to work?

Sounds like it will take time for the community to get that instead.

Spring optimistic? OK we’ll see how it goes it must be a heavy lift - depends on if docker has had secret access to m1 chips but obviously NDA’s will mean they can’t say as such

Different subject - what do people think the chances are of Parallles getting Windows 10 working?

I also use SDL Trados which will never be Mac native

Parallels can't get Windows 10 working without Microsoft's help. I think that right now there are two types of people who should be looking at the ARM Macs, casual users for whom a MacBook Air has been sufficient in the past and developers who write software for MacOS and iOS. Developers using Macs to write software should probably hold off for now and even MacOS developers will want to keep an Intel Mac around.

"Creative" types using Apple Software are probably ok to start looking at ARM Macs too but if you use Adobe's software, I would wait a bit too.

 

[pshufd]

Parallels can't get Windows 10 working without Microsoft's help. I think that right now there are two types of people who should be looking at the ARM Macs, casual users for whom a MacBook Air has been sufficient in the past and developers who write software for MacOS and iOS. Developers using Macs to write software should probably hold off for now and even MacOS developers will want to keep an Intel Mac around.

"Creative" types using Apple Software are probably ok to start looking at ARM Macs too but if you use Adobe's software, I would wait a bit too.

I think that you should be able to build on macOS Intel for an AS target, right?

 

[ADGrant]

I think that you should be able to build on macOS Intel for an AS target, right?

Yes but you can't then test what you just built. Releasing untested software is a very bad idea.

 

[pshufd]

Yes but you can't then test what you just built. Releasing untested software is a very bad idea.

My idea would be to get one of the current machines for testing but doing the building on a big machine. I could always be surprised that these AS models are great for development but I'd want something bigger for real use.

 

[ADGrant]

My idea would be to get one of the current machines for testing but doing the building on a big machine. I could always be surprised that these AS models are great for development but I'd want something bigger for real use.

I think I would use the AS Mini as a CI build agent and do my development on an Intel Mac.

 

[ght56]

If you need virtualization, especially for Windows, now is a really great time to buy an Intel Mac because there is no indication whether or not we will ever be able to virtualize Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac. And, if we can, that doesn't necessarily mean we would be able to virtualize older x86 operating systems like say 32-bit Windows 7, but rather we might need to specifically be limited to newer versions of Windows.

I am hopeful that we will eventually get some level of Windows support given Microsoft is developing Windows for ARM and actively working on x64 emulation capabilities, and at least one company (Parallels) seems to have active interest in continuing to support AS Macs, but there are so many ifs and buts (everything from technical to logistical, such as how Microsoft only licenses Windows for ARM to OEMs) that we cannot even begin to speak of a timeline because it is completely hypothetical.

 

[icymountain]

I just came across this:

Parallels, VMWare confirm Apple M1 support amid silence from other virtualization companies | AppleInsider

Parallels is actively working on a new version of its virtualization software that will be compatible with Apple Silicon and M1 machines, the company said on Tuesday.

appleinsider.com

So, it seems VMWare is only committed to delivering something though cannot give a timeline. Still, good news.

 

[Mord]

Pretty much in this boat.

For my personal mac, I'm waiting until 15/16" with 32-64GB ram is available, for my work mac I'll need to be able to run VMs, ideally x86. Some level of performance hit would be ok.

I guess I'll use the time between now and arm macs having a decent amount of ram to try and make the codebase work with arm. It'd certainly save some AWS costs to be able to target Graviton.

 

[pshufd]

I found the Mozilla Firefox project bug and they have a build but a lack of machines to test and work so I'm thinking of ordering a MBP 13 (16) to do testing and debugging and maybe development. I would hope that the machine has enough horsepower and resources for development.

 

[Serban55]

Remember Apple talked about this transition ?
Apple did mention for entire mac line up to go arm, but i think they think this long will take for everybody be on board
So 2 years from now i think it would be a safer bet,not in spring or summer next year, but fall of 2022
No wonder Rosetta 1 was kept by Apple for 3 years