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Apple Expected To Move Mac Line To Custom ARM-Based Chips Starting Next Year, Says Report (axios.com)
Developers and Intel officials have told Axios that Apple is expected to move its Mac line to custom ARM-based chips as soon as next year. "Bloomberg offered a bit more specificity on things in a report on Wednesday, saying that the first ARM-based Macs could come in 2020, with plans to offer developers a way to write a single app that can run across iPhones, iPads and Macs by 2021," reports Axios. "The first hints of the effort came last year when Apple offered a sneak peek at its plan to make it easier for developers to bring iPad apps to the Mac." From the report: If anything, the Bloomberg timeline suggests that Intel might actually have more Mac business in 2020 than some had been expecting. The key question is not the timeline but just how smoothly Apple is able to make the shift. For developers, it will likely mean an awkward period of time supporting new and classic Macs as well as new and old-style Mac apps. The move could give developers a way to reach a bigger market with a single app, although the transition could be bumpy. For Intel, of course, it would mean the loss of a significant customer, albeit probably not a huge hit to its bottom line.
I'm in the same boat. I used to love Mac hardware from ~2004 (PowerPC) until around ~2010. Then it started to get really bad. MacOS went from a UNIX workstation OS to some sort of media consumer / music player thing (useless to me as I can't stand music) and it's clear Apple wants to make their products fancy televisions.
So I bought a Thinkpad (meh hardware quality, but better than anything Apple has made recently); filled it with tons of RAM (which a MBP can't do) and I'm running Linux with Xfce on it. It's not ideal and it seems to die coming out of sleep 5% of the time (thanks worthless Nvidia hardware).
I really wish there was a better professional laptop available these days. I do ASIC design and I run simulations that need ~64GB of RAM to complete in a reasonable amount of time. There aren't lots of options for me to do my job on the go (which I sometimes have to). Sadly, since some stuff I do needs to be done without an Internet connection (ugh) I can't just toss these big jobs on a server somewhere.
I've just been delaying trying to switch to KDE to see if it's better, but I need to suck it up and just do it.
I've been running KDE Neon for more than a year now and I think it's great.
Kubuntu which I used before that I found to be crappy because it wasn't a "clean" KDE desktop, there were GNOME/Unity things here and there, two or three places to change the same settings, really confusing. Neon is a 100% KDE experience and in my experience it works very well. They've abandoned experimenting with the desktop, and you have a classic desktop experience on top of which you can place widgets if you like (but you don't have to).
While I worry about artificial constraints as well... if you’d ever worked with a jail broken iPhone or iPad, you’d know there’s basically a standard bash shell under there. You can ssh into the things by installing the openssh daemon. Heck, people have even run apache and nginx on them.
#DeleteChrome
So this means no more boot camp as well?
Sure, but who wants that
Apple's market share literally doubled after switching to Intel and allowing Windows to dual boot. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to get people to switch to Mac was their need to use Windows (and before that MS-DOS) software. Once you could dual boot MacOS or Windows you no longer had to choose PC or Mac, you could have one computer that could run either software family.
... bad news for Apple.
Regarding emulation, it worked but was not practical. It barely works today where it does *not* have to emulate the CPU architecture. A switch to ARM would impose a huge burden on emulators and seriously and negatively impact performance.
While Microsoft might offer Windows on ARM you would have a lot of PC software that will not be recompiled for ARM. So dual booting ARM MacOS or ARM Windows gets you back to the bad old days of having the choose PC (ie x86) or something-not-PC. Good news for Dell, HP, etc