What Intel software will you miss after the Arm transition?

[Erehy Dobon]

I’m hoping Microsoft can work out the office 365 bundle to work on Arm based macs.

In a different moment in Monday's keynote, Apple people also demoed Adobe Photoshop running natively on Apple Silicon. They also showed off both Autodesk Maya and Tomb Raider running in Rosetta 2 on an Apple Silicon powered machine.
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Who cares about MS Office while Office will be available only in cloud sooner or later. There will be no sense to install it and run on specific architecture.

That's all very fine and nice when you have access to the Internet, but sometimes you don't. I assume you haven't travelled much. Try a transoceanic flight on an American flag airline. Go ahead and try to edit a complex spreadsheet using a cloud service.

Accessing full blown MS Office via the Internet is not news. I installed it five years ago on a Windows instance on Amazon EC2, used Remote Desktop to connect before my one-year trial was over.

 

[nudgeee]

It kills half my workflow unfortunately. I’m a bit of an oddball in that my day job consists of web and iOS development, but I do freelance work as a hardware engineer. My workhorse CAD tool is Altium CircuitStudio/Designer which I run under Parallels in a Windows 10 VM.

In fact, a lot of professional engineering CAD tools are Windows x86 only: SolidWorks, Catia, Altium, Allegro, OrCAD, etc; or x86/non-ARM (runs on Linux) Xilinx Vivado, Quartus, ANSYS, etc. The exception here is AutoCAD which runs on Mac, although it is a cut down version so a lot of people run the Windows version instead.

Generally I would say the intersection between Engineers and Mac users is small, but a shame that this market won’t have a workflow on Mac.

Luckily things are better on the embedded software IDE/toolchain side, a lot run on top of Eclipse/GCC so are pretty much portable.

 

[johngwheeler]

Every day I come up with another way to get windows apps (and windows itself) “running “ on Apple Silicon Macs.
Today’s is this: Microsoft has a Mac version of Remote Desktop Client. I am sure that they will port it. I expect that they’re going to port all of their Mac software.
So one gets a low cost windows computer
( we bought my girlfriends grandson a Acer laptop for Christmas for $129 ) and set it up connected to the network and now with RDC you can run windows and any windows program on your new Mac.
There are going to be lots of answers to the windows issue. That’s just not going to be a problem.

This is certainly one option, although maybe not a great one for graphically intensive work (depending on the power of the cheap Windows laptop and your network speed). The same applies to cloud instances - although there are services (e.g. Shadow) that offer remote gaming VMs with apparently good performance.

As you say, there are ways round it, and network perfomance of remote machines makes it far less of an issue than it used to be.

 

[pldelisle]

It kills half my workflow unfortunately. I’m a bit of an oddball in that my day job consists of web and iOS development, but I do freelance work as a hardware engineer. My workhorse CAD tool is Altium CircuitStudio/Designer which I run under Parallels in a Windows 10 VM.

In fact, a lot of professional engineering CAD tools are Windows x86 only: SolidWorks, Catia, Altium, Allegro, OrCAD, etc; or x86/non-ARM (runs on Linux) Xilinx Vivado, Quartus, ANSYS, etc. The exception here is AutoCAD which runs on Mac, although it is a cut down version so a lot of people run the Windows version instead.

Generally I would say the intersection between Engineers and Mac users is small, but a shame that this market won’t have a workflow on Mac.

Luckily things are better on the embedded software IDE/toolchain side, a lot run on top of Eclipse/GCC so are pretty much portable.

Maybe when they gonna see the performance of the GPU at rendering even faster than on a full fledging Quadro or Radeon Pro, it’s going to change. These apps can benefit from an all integrated architecture.

 

[Saturn007]

“Im curious to know what software are you afraid to lose?”

Word 2011 and Excel 2011.

Of course, that ship has already sailed with the 2020 Intel-based Macs.

So, I’ll probably just wait for ARM Macs and go with Libre or Open Office and miss all my customizations and Word, Excel shortcuts.

 

[pldelisle]

None for me.

I do parallelization, but nothing what Windows ARM would not have.

Java and Python will likely be on macOS ARM too, so my Jetbrains IDEs will work without problem.

There is the 3D Slider app I use, which use OpenGL, and will soon not work anymore. But devs might upgrade the VTK to Metal, which will result in better performance.

 

[AJ_MR]

Can anyone work out the logic here?

Apple used to use Motorola to make proprietary chips, then to Intel and now back to another proprietary chip, this time with Arm?

As far as I can see, the only logic is that they want iOS apps to run on Macs. And all of the other, potentially mission-critical, 3rd party software for professional use on Macs can take off if they don't like it.

 

[Nugget]

As far as I can see, the only logic is that they want iOS apps to run on Macs. And all of the other, potentially mission-critical, 3rd party software for professional use on Macs can take off if they don't like it.

They didn’t need to migrate to ARM if this was the goal. Every single iOS app ever written is able to run on Intel macs. That’s how Xcode works. Nothing about catalyst requires ARM on the macOS side.

Whatever apple’s reasons for switching are, this is not one of them.

 

[ww1971]

Blender? Will blender for Mac work on mac arm?

 

[audiomatt]

Blender! Oh that'd be brutal.

 

[pshufd]

I need Fidelity Active Trader Pro and TD Ameritrade Think or Swim. If it can run those two and could support three 4K monitors, I'd be good.

 

[Ritsuka]

Blender already works on arm Macs. 99.99% of 64bit Mac apps will work anyway.

 

[pshufd]

Blender already works on arm Macs. 99.99% of 64bit Mac apps will work anyway.

Active Trader Pro runs on Wine. So that just needs Wine and I assume it's there. ToS runs on Java and I'm sure that's already there.

I don't see any problems with using it. I just need a box where I can get a lot of cooling and a lot of RAM, unless it runs so cool that a laptop will do.

 

[Nugget]

Active Trader Pro runs on Wine. So that just needs Wine and I assume it's there.

Wine will not be able to emulate x86 which would be necessary to run an x86 Windows app on an Apple Silicon machine. You'd have to run a full emulator like QEMU which will presumably be dog slow. See https://wiki.winehq.org/Emulation

 

[pshufd]

Wine will not be able to emulate x86 which would be necessary to run an x86 Windows app on an Apple Silicon machine. You'd have to run a full emulator like QEMU which will presumably be dog slow. See https://wiki.winehq.org/Emulation

That may be a deal-breaker for me. I don't think that Fidelity is going to do a macOS port of their software - they're too lazy.

 

[Nugget]

That may be a deal-breaker for me. I don't think that Fidelity is going to do a macOS port of their software - they're too lazy.

Looks like they already did, although they misspelled macOS as "MAC" and the installer is a .pkg file, so... I wouldn't have high hopes that it's any good. Might be worth looking at, at least.

Nevermind, I see now that the "MAC" version is just using Wine/Crossover underneath the covers. Yeah, that won't help. I agree it seems unlikely that Fidelity will ever do a proper macOS port. iPadOS seems more likely, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

"This version of Active Trader Pro for the Mac does not require a Windows operating system. This solution leverages CrossOver, a compatibility layer software, which allows applications designed for Windows to run on other operating systems."

 

[pshufd]

Looks like they already did, although they misspelled macOS as "MAC" and the installer is a .pkg file, so... I wouldn't have high hopes that it's any good. Might be worth looking at, at least.

Portfolio Management and Online Trading: Active Trader Pro - Fidelity

No matter how often you trade, Fidelity has the trading tools and features you need to help uncover and act on new opportunities.

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The package file is a Wine installer. My recollection when I installed it on five systems. If they had ported it, they would have sent me an email on the new software.

 

[Jimmy James]

There’s some vendor software for two-way radios that is Windows only. I’d like to run Windows even if it’s terribly laggy in a virtualized environment. That would be enough.

 

[MacDaddyPanda]

I won't miss any because I use my Windows PC mainly. My MacMini is a glorified stereo system.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

Right now I’m worried about Homebrew... And I still don’t know what SSH will I use to work with Azure Cli

 

[ssmed]

Don't worry Dave, Apple will bring out their own version of Fusion called "Fusions". The first version will be kinda of buggy, later versions will be really great. Then it will go into decline. And then it will be uncermoniously abandoned by Apple...

Are you a touch bitter?
Aperture - much missed!

 

[Nugget]

I still don’t know what SSH will I use to work with Azure Cli

What's wrong with.... ssh?

 

[Gerdi]

Yeah, Windows for ARM is the only feasible approach to virtualizing Windows. If you're not familiar with Windows for ARM, though, it's not really very useful. It's a languishing and stagnant platform that isn't seeing much love or attention from Microsoft currently.

Seems you are not familiar. Windows ARM is developed in lockstep with the x86-64 version. If you are on the insider fast channels you are getting every 2 weeks! a new Windows version with new features. Both version x86-64 and ARM64 are released the same day with precisely the same features.

That could change, depending on Microsoft's future platform strategies, but for now it's not likely to be a satisfying or performant solution for Mac...

This is blatantly wrong as well. Windows for ARM is the only option of getting performant x86 emulation. QEMU is much! slower than the emulation provided by Windows ARM - and i mean order of magnitude..

 

[max.1974]

All that im could said is Apple will became monopoly for your charge in your hardwares, many people you love it or hate that!! Its not good for costumers, day by day on Apple's hands. One day they will suffering the consequences to make a system and hardware controlled 90% by system, and not for users. We need accept that, or change for a other options. Macos has to much glamour, but with this new processors controller the users will be angry to see your old hardwares obsolete.

 

[pshufd]

All that im could said is Apple will became monopoly for your charge in your hardwares, many people you love it or hate that!! Its not good for costumers, day by day on Apple's hands. One day they will suffering the consequences to make a system and hardware controlled 90% by system, and not for users. We need accept that, or change for a other options. Macos has to much glamour, but with this new processors controller the users will be angry to see your old hardwares obsolete.

There are a lot of people here that buy hardware to get a job done and they upgrade yearly, every two years, every three years, etc. Then there are others that like the operating system and hardware and buy used and keep them for a long time. I'm currently using a 2014 and 2015 15s and they are adequate for what I do. If they came up with AS that could do what I want done in a laptop, then I would take a hard look at them. I'm sure that I could sell my old laptops or keep one as a backup. A 2015 MacBook Pro is still quite usable in 2020 or 2021.

If expandability is a big problem; if they make it a real pain to add RAM or storage, then it would give me pause. It really depends on the pain points. I can always go Windows. Maybe a server system - my goals are strong compute at low power consumption and I may have to go with Intel or AMD for that solution. But that's just a special application. For everyday stuff, an old MacBook Pro will suffice. I'm sure a new AS MBP would be fine too. I am now willing to mix and match hardware and operating systems because of Apple's pain points and current thermal issues.