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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.
If they're going to make new laptops, maybe the freaking morans will fix the keyboards at the same time.
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Gnome 3 is an abomination
Newsflash: in Debian alone there's 57 different window managers (counting packages that declare Provides: x-window-manager). They vary wildly in functionality, but you get both fully-featured/bloated ones and 1990-era alikes.
it has killed my productivity because window management is a pain and inconsistent, and features that used to work no longer do (it's now impossible to suspend while in a docking station, and this is apparently by design according to the bug report).
Aye, Gnome 3 is insane -- even Microsoft has backed out of Metro.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Apple has stated repeatedly they want nothing like the singularity, that desktops are inherently different than tablets or mobile devices.
All that is happening here is a processor switch, because Intel has dropped so many balls they are more balls than company now. Apple wants to be able to control the processor so they can actually realize some gains, and avoid some of the shoddy design issues that have come to light in intel processors recently...
I for one am fine with the change, these days adding support for another architecture is not THAT bad and Apple pulled it off really well before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Grey-beard here. Over the years I have used *A lot* of window managers / desktop environments. The worst I have used recently is by far Gnome. I updated an Ubuntu machine to 18.04 and said "what the hell", and let it default the window manager to the preferred new one. Gnome was the worst piece of junk I've ever used. All the other desktops I've been able to figure out how to suspend without too much difficulty. Gnome - NOPE. I look at the shutdown menu and can't find anything related to suspend. I see shutdown but no suspend. After a few minutes of googling I discover that someone decided that to suspend you should hit SHIFT or CONTROL or something similar while hitting shutdown. I could live with that, EXCEPT the idiots who designed it didn't change the icon. I TRIED pushing shift and control and alt and other things and there's ZERO feedback. There is PLENTY of space for a suspend icon, but some idiot decided that putting a suspend icon was a bad idea. At that point I seriously questioned the sanity of anyone involved. I couldn't believe they would take away a standard feature like that and hide it.
When Apple did the huge transition over from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, it was near the height of Apple's success selling OS X based computers. Even then, there was a big fear it would hurt certain markets, like native OS X game development, as it would make an excuse to "just write a Windows only version and let the Mac users boot into Windows to play it". And that, in fact, DID happen. But by and large, Mac users accepted it as a "win" because Intel CPU development was so much further ahead and drove more competitive Macs with their Windows counterparts. Plus, it wasn't half bad being able to run Windows in virtual environments - where a bunch of processor instruction conversion between x86 and PPC didn't have to happen in the background to make it work.
This time around? It's far less clear.... Intel still cranks out great CPUs and nobody I know is complaining that their Mac is under-powered, CPU-wise. The big push seems to be Apple's continual insistence that "most people can just use an iPad and iPhone instead of a computer", and an interest in selling their own CPUs instead of giving all that money to Intel.
I think we're going to see a lot of "dumbing down" of OS X apps if they all start getting coded to run universally on iOS and OS X with ARM. If features in software don't translate well to a touch-screen UI, they'll rip them out instead of keeping "Mac only" versions with more capabilities.
It may be popular but it doesn't mean it doesn't suck. Torvalds was right. But maybe for different reasons, many of which probably don't apply to Apple.
The main problem with ARM, at least as I as a Linux user am concerned, is the lack of any standardized, open, boot system like the much-maligned BIOS, or EFI, and the lack of a standardized, minimal device tree. There are literally dozens of of cheap single board computers you can get to run linux on. But how many of them can boot a standard distro off of a hard drive or usb stick you just plugged in? How many can run a standard, generic, Linux kernel and a standard, generic, Linux distro? I don't know of any. And it's very frustrating. Those boards that can run android can run a particular version of android, obtained from the manufacturer, limited to their whims to update it.
The promise of ARM is awesome. But so far I remain disappointed. I've got a drawer full of ARM devices that I used for short periods of time. Sheeva Plugs, a GuruPlug, several raspberry pis, and various random chinese boards. All powerful machines in their own right, but not as useful as I thought. Mostly due to the proprietary (or at least esoteric) boot systems, custom kernels, special device trees, proprietary graphics cores, etc. I just don't really want to mess with U-Boot and flashing special images to partitions just to get the latest version of Debian up and running, or install a 5.0 kernel.
If intel produced a board at the price point as these ARM boards, but could boot regular old Debian with a generic x86 kernel, supporting the GPIO that makes Pis so popular, I'd ditch ARM in a heartbeat (SBCs, not phones).
Again, none of this applies to Apple necessarily, though. They control and access every bit of the hardware to make it sing their song, so I'm sure many users won't know or care, as long as they keep buying from the Apple Store. But it's a definite step towards a completely locked-down appliance. Might take another decade, but that's where Apple seems to be heading.