A lot of people are concerned about losing Intel software support on Mac after the Arm transition.
As a developer, Im curious to know what software are you afraid to lose?
Any games that barely survived The Culling of Catalina(TM). There are not too many of those, but there are still a healthy amount. Any game regularly patched by Blizzard is probably safe. Worst case scenario, any game that uses Metal will likely run fine under Rosetta 2 until Apple removes it for no apparent reason like they did its PowerPC-to-Intel predecessor suddenly in Mac OS X Lion. Literally everything else that I use that is compatible with macOS Catalina will very likely be updated to be native on Apple Silicon based versions of macOS.
They didn't talk about this during the announcement, but I am worried that transition to Arm will lead to the MacOS becoming more locked down like the iOS.
More specifically, the ability to use software that didn't come form the App Store. Most of the software I use did not come from the Mac App Store.
I am unsure if that will happen, or maybe happen down the road, but hopefully never.
I had this concern pretty much up until the Apple Silicon transition announcement given how poorly the Mac App Store has always performed. However, the announcement, coupled with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak's interview on the Daring Fireball podcast calmed those fears for me. Apple isn't going to lock things down like they do on iOS save for the option of being able to boot any other ARM64 native OS. But they're even going to allow the Secure Boot settings to be modifiable per OS such that older OSes still supported by a given Apple Silicon Mac can be run while Secure Boot is set for another OS environment on the same system that is being kept current. That's a welcome change over the seemingly draconian setup of the T2 Macs.
Apple knows that people do things with their Macs. I don't think they're about to hamper that. So long as you're only running their OSes, that is.
The other concern I have is with software that is no longer updated by the developer.
Maybe with Rosetta II this won't be a big deal, but Apple dropped support for the original Rosetta relatively quickly, so this might happen with Rosetta II also.
That's a big concern. However, if your software developer didn't update your app to 64-bit Intel, then you can't even run it on Catalina, let alone Macs that can only run Catalina, let alone Apple Silicon Macs. If your developer recently made a 64-bit Intel version, then it's up to them to not be too fatigued from that to port the app again to make a Universal Binary that contains both x86-64 and ARM64 binaries. I do fear developers having that fatigue. Games, indie apps, and high-end professional grade software will be a concern. The Adobes and Microsofts of the world will be fine and likely ready alongside Apple's own apps come day one.
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?
Motorola's chips weren't designed by Apple. Same for the IBM chips. Apple just built systems around those chips and around that architecture. Here, Apple is designing the chip from top to bottom using instruction sets from ARM as needed. It's not your standard ARM64 chip either. It's heavily customized to Apple's specifications (and is, again, designed by Apple). That's why the "Apple Silicon" name is more specific than ARM64. Yes, the binaries will have to conform to ARM64; but Apple is choosing what elements to implement or not implement from ARM64.
It seems obvious to me (not a developer) that Apple moved everyone to x64 because they didn’t want to translate all the legacy x86 instruction set with crud all the way back from the early 1980s. They wanted to focus on x64.
Since Codeweavers already wrote the 32-to-64 bit translator, hopefully the port to Rosetta 2 still works for a few more years. Maybe then Quicken can write a Mac app with feature parity and I can stop using Windows apps entirely.
The narrative I'm getting is that Apple wanted to remove 32-bit instruction sets from their own SoCs circa iOS 11 and starting with the A11. So, the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and original iPhone X shipped with iOS 11 (which dropped support for 32-bit apps) and with an SoC that couldn't run a 32-bit app even if it wanted to. Apple saw this transition coming miles away and it knew that it wouldn't be able to emulate 32-bit Intel code with Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs because the iteration of Apple Silicon in those Macs would, common to the rest of the current Apple Silicon microarchitectures, also not have 32-bit instruction sets. So, Apple removed 32-bit app support from Catalina in preparation to the switch to their architecture where 32-bit apps wouldn't run at all, in Rosetta 2 or not. There's nothing in hardware preventing an Intel Mac from running 32-bit code. The T2 chip is A10 based, so there's nothing lacking in 32-bit support on current Intel Macs even from that angle. It was all to prepare for this transition. At least, that's the narrative I get from all of this.
MacTheRipper
I wonder how long it will take for Handbrake to go Arm.
Handbrake didn't take too long to go from PowerPC to Intel. My guess is that it won't be too long before there's an Apple Silicon native version of it out. MacTheRipper is a whole different story altogether. I would expect that one to either take a metric crap-ton of time or just not happen altogether.
For those worried about loosing Windows support, there is still another shoe to drop. Microsoft has developed an Arm version of Windows 10. It's not completely done yet but the roadmap to completion is not that long. Let's see what they do. In the meantime, It looks like Parallels is working with Apple. Let's see what that brings. VM Ware is not a stupid company, they might have something up their sleeve yet to come.
Windows 10 for ARM64 is completely done. It exists. Devices are out there in the wild and running it. If Apple Silicon doesn't support the execution of any 32-bit code, that means that Microsoft needs to create a custom release of Windows 10 for ARM64 that removes the execution of 32-bit code. Native virtualization in Parallels might fix that, but it'd be a much more uphill battle. Then again, Apple could always reverse course and give us the ability to run 32-bit code in future Apple Silicon SoC releases, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it. They'll more likely get Microsoft to release a special version that disallows 32-bit code. But even that seems a bit unlikely.
The lead for VMware Fusion at VMware tweeted asking Fusion users what they'd use it for in Apple Silicon (as though the business case to produce a version of Fusion for Apple Silicon Macs was even in question). I wouldn't be so sure that they're coming along on the Apple Silicon ride for anything other than native Mac software to integrate with ESXi/vCenter for IT admins.
That's the only option. It's not virtualization if the code is not native. You're just creating a virtual space inside your existing environment for the original code to run, nothing needs to be translated.
For existing x86 Virtual Machines, the hardware will have to be emulated instead which has a performance impact due to translation required. ARM Windows can run x86 apps with Microsoft's own translation technology that works like Rosetta, so that would provide the best performance because the entire OS won't need to be emulated. But that doesn't support 64-bit x86 apps yet, just 32-bit. 64-bit x86 translation is rumored to be coming to ARM Windows in the first half of 2021. Yet Microsoft does not sell ARM Windows licenses directly, nor do they offer the installers to developers over the service formerly known as MSDN. The only way to get ARM Windows as of this post is to buy a device like the Surface Pro X where it is pre-installed.
Microsoft did release a scaled down version of ARM Windows for the Raspberry Pi back in 2015. That only runs ARM apps ported to it (no x86) and was made specifically for that hardware. I'm only mentioning this because I think it's the only release of ARM Windows that was easily to get ahold of. There would be no real benefit to virtualizing that version.
Again, the bigger question is whether Apple Silicon SoCs can even execute 32-bit ARM instruction sets. If not, then the hurdles for Windows 10 on ARM to even run on Apple Silicon Macs are exponentially increased. Microsoft would, in that case, have to engineer a special variant of Windows 10 for ARM64 that doesn't support 32-bit ARM or 32-bit x86. I think it would STILL be worth it for them to do such a thing as ARM64 apps for Windows 10 would work on Apple Silicon Macs and ARM64 PCs alike and bolster the strength of Windows 10 on ARM64 itself. But those wouldn't be easy business decisions for Microsoft to make and Apple isn't about to go out of their way to make it easy for Microsoft.
There are only a few games I play. But some blizzard games are among them.
I think Hearthstone should be easy, since there is an iOS version but I am concerned about WoW.
Blizzard is great about keeping their Mac games up to date. I wouldn't count on original StarCraft, original (pre-Reforged) Warcraft III, or Diablo II getting ported to 64-bit Intel, let alone Apple Silicon. But, they are very likely updating every macOS game currently serviced by the Blizzard launcher (WoW, Hearthstone, Diablo III, Hearthstone, StarCraft II, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft Remastered, Warcraft III Reforged) to be Apple Silicon native. And yes, Hearthstone being a Unity Engine game will make it easy to port, considering it already exists for iOS, iPadOS, and Android. That said, I think, as far as Blizzard games running in Rosetta 2 are concerned, most of them (if not all of them) have been updated to use Metal, which should mean that even prior to a native Apple Silicon/Universal binary release, the games should all perform reasonably well given that Metal calls are still made natively.
I’m hoping Microsoft can work out the office 365 bundle to work on Arm based macs.
Microsoft has already produced Apple Silicon Mac native versions of the Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) apps. If you are a subscriber, my guess is that this really won't be an issue for you. What's uncertain is whether Office 2019 for Mac is going to get an update to make it compatible or whether Microsoft will, as they did during the PowerPC-to-Intel transition, just wait for the next standalone release to bake in native Apple Silicon support. That said, even if you're in this boat, I can't imagine Rosetta 2 won't make it so that an Intel only version of Office 2019 doesn't still run seamlessly on an Apple Silicon Mac the way that Office 2004 (a PowerPC only version of Office) did on Intel Macs under the original Rosetta. It honestly shouldn't be an issue.
