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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.
#DeleteFacebook
... this keyboard is a bad joke.
and nothing is going to fucking work. guaranteed
Haha we're back to thin clients again. I love it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I was looking at picking up a new Mac when they do the refresh for video editing, digital artwork and animation. Mac is supposed to be better for that type of work. But if they're switching to ARM, I think I'll pass. I'll just look at something like an i9 and programs that can use multiple cores for the rendering the final output of videos and animations.
While the Intel chips are crufty with all the stuff built up over the years, ARM is not going to be able to replace it for the work I do and plan on doing. I may pick up a Mac mini in the future to cross platform test my games, but its not going to be for any of the major work I do.
I need a powerhouse for what I do, not a phone with a keyboard.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
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.
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.
One of the last things people still use Macs for are development machines. And the only reason they can do that is because of the x86-64 chips in them.
Remove that, and you kill that market. And the Mac along with it. Developers are NOT going to move to ARM on Mac.
If this change happens, I won't be buying any Macs any more (and, yes, I have one) because I literally won't be able to use them. And I know I'm not alone.
Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up to witness another technology train wreck where they try to achieve the illusive singularity. Apple is going to merge iPhone, iPad, and MacOS into a single platform. Other greats like Microsoft tried to achieve the singularity between mobile and and the desktop, but they failed. Their Windows Phone is just a memory and but the strange tiles on Windows 10 still remain and, Windows 10 tablet mode is still unusable.
Now, a company which doesn't have a touch screen computer, but only a lousy keyboard that everyone hates, is going to try this amazing feat again. Using a mobile ARM processor with a touch screen UI/UX/OS called IOS, they are going to merge it with another mouse driven UI/UX called MacOS. Can they pull it off without a touch screen? How will users dual boot to Windows 10 to run their CAD software? And will it have a headphone jack? So many questions, so few answers. Without the reality distortion field of Steve Jobs this could be a headless company recycling failed ideas from other companies. Did anyone from Microsoft recently take on a leadership role at Apple?
Not matter how you slice it, it will be painful drama for users. You won't be able to look away, it will be like watching a car crash in slow motion, you know you should look away, but you just can't.
The singularity, can it be achieved? Stay tuned..
With Xeon-based iMac Pros and the upcoming Mac Pro, I doubt that Apple will move to ARM entirely at any point in the next 5 years.
There will be Intel-based Macs for some time, at least at the high end. And support will continue as well.
I think this news means we will see an ARM-based Mac Mini model and something like a Macbook Air running on ARM. The more expensive Macs will stick around for a while. I doubt we'll see the current iMacs or MacBook Pros switch to ARM any time soon.
Chances are the software transition will go smoothly. Apple has a lot of expertise in switching CPU families and their Xcode is very advanced.
I do wonder if these will be full MacOS machines. Will Apple really recompile their entire certified BSD UNIX for ARM? You have to wonder if these ARM machines might be a lot more like iOS than MacOS when you look under the hood.
But it is Sunday and a fine time to bash away on Macs. And Trump. It would be great if Trump bought a Mac so we could have some one-stop shopping for /. trolls.
Recently Linus ranted about how server class ARM development was a deadend because of the lack of sufficient "home" computers for normal use (he didn't literally mean home, but rather personal-computers). The answers that! On the otherhand for those of us who rely on libraries like say TensorFLow that doesn't look too good since a lot of that is X86.
It will be interesting to see if Developers will flock to this as the optimum ARM development platform or flee from apple due to lack of x86 in their primary laptop.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They're turning Macs into phones with keyboards and bigger screens, because everything is a terminal for the cloud now, right?
Fortunately some folks are going the other way. 100% free software (modem being isolated) Pinephone is coming, so is some Purism stuff -- no need to use Android nor iOS spyware.
Or Gemini for that matter -- it has nasty non-free drivers, but is pretty functional. Just this Friday I spent a long bus ride hacking on a work project -- as the problem I'm working on involves something multithreaded not scaling well, a 10-core phone is actually better than the 4*2 dev machine. There are folks who use a phone without basics like compiler or valgrind, but I'm not one of them.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I'm pretty sure, this is how Apple killed the Mac the first time... History repeats itself?
I can't see this being a very happy transition, especially for developers and product support.
Looking back, it took 5+ years to end support for PowerPC Macs, I can't see it being any less and I would expect it to be twice that especially for Mac Servers.
Maybe this is why Linus made his comments about ARMs a couple of days ago: https://slashdot.org/story/19/...
If this is all a reason for having apps that work on iPhone, iPad & Macs, I again point to HTML5 and WPA. I can see that their growth could result in a downfall of Apple specific hardware and apps.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Why are you on Gnome if you do not like it? I use a decades old fvwm config that works exactly as I like. This is not windows where you have no or very little control over how your desktop looks.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I am not tied to AMD64 if I can get the same or better performance elsewhere at the same or better price. However, I expect that single-core performance will be pretty lacking and that would be a show-stopper.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Apple's own CPUs are not strictly "ARM-based", as they do not have cores developed by ARM itself.
They have their own cores that are merely using ARM's ISA.
Apple's CPU designs are likely to have lineage to P.A. Semi which Apple acquired in 2008.
Before then, P.A. Semi had made processors running the PowerPC ISA. Apple had previously been interested in using those, but opted not to in favour of x86.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
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).
Linus Torvalds has stated that ARM won't win the server space because developers want to run their apps on the architecture it has been developed on and almost all are developing on x86. Many application bugs are still architecture specific. Application performance optimization is also highly architecture specific, especially for database applications.
Given the Mac's popularity among developers, this argument should apply to the Macs too when looked at from the opposite angle. The vast majority of servers are x86, and developers want to run their apps on the architecture they are developing for. Running in an emulator is nowhere near the same experience. I would think a switch from x86 to ARM would decimate the number of developers calling the Mac home.
Separately, I don't see the appeal of running phone apps on my laptop or desktop. Smartphone apps do not have the feature density that I'm looking for with a desktop app and desktop apps are not generally appropriate for smartphones. On my desktop, I don't want simplicity. I want to see everything I can at once and to be able to do almost everything with my keyboard.
They're turning Macs into phones with keyboards and bigger screens
Yeah well, who didn't see that coming 10 years ago? It's logical for their business model. The Mac is a ball and chain.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If Apple is making their own ARM chips, presumably they can put them in at-cost as a co-processor along with an Intel chip on their home computer line.
Benefits of the Hybrid:
* Increase adoption of ARM as you deprecate Intel chips over a few generations
* Run iOS apps at full speed while the Intel processor handles i86 tasks
* Not be shackled by poor performance of ARM on desktop for individuals running apps that are processor-dependent and slow an Intel chip to a crawl.
* (if you choose to make hybrid a long term solution) Have apps that run in multiprocessor mode with some processes running on each chip, making your home computer faster than all other manufacturers who are not selling multi-processor solutions.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
If you want to do anything with pictures or video you're better off with a Windows machine. Especially if you need 3D accelleration MacOS is utter crap. It just doesn't work.
-- Cheers!
but apple is moving to app store only so this will not help any other ARM dev's
with ATT 5G only $10/GB after your 15GB cap.
I'm sorry but I can't take anything they say seriously since they claimed that SuperMicro servers were compromised. It's been months since that claim was made and we still haven't seen any proof.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
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
switch from x86 to ARM would decimate the number of developers calling the Mac home.
On the other hand, moving developers' home/office platforms to ARM might decimate Intel in the data center. Linus' argument was that the availability of the x86 to developers was what pulled Intel into the data center.
From that summary:
Without a development platform, ARM in the server space is never going to make it.
Maybe Apple is out to provide that platform... Pure speculation, of course, but why not?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I have to give props to Google for what they did with ChromeOS in the past couple of years.
While I still have a "regular" Windows 10 PC mostly for games and odd app or two, everything else is done on Asus CN60 chromebox (Haswell i3, upgraded to 16GB RAM and 128 GB m.2 SATA HD). While this model is too old to support Crostini or virtualization (pushing 5 years now), it satisfies pretty much my every need - and as you said: it runs the OS that not actively working against me.
If only Pixel Chromebooks were not $1300, I would probably buy one tomorrow.
Basically I expect them to be laptops/desktops with the iPhone/iPad/iWatch business model and an i-name like iBook or iNote or whatever. Runs a version of iOS that's adopted Mac interfaces but is locked down with no dual boot to anything else. All applications come from the store so no backwards compatibility with Mac apps, just windowed iOS apps until developers make a store version. The question is just if Apple can resist the temptation to price it crazy, I mean their latest phones are really getting out of hand.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I personally look forward to this. I like the ARM ISA. I thought Torvalds was being short-sighted. For starters, it's a more popular platform by number of chips in the wild. These Intel and AMD CISC designs are all RISC under the hood now, anyway.
We're just doing away with the cruft of a legacy architecture that grew off track.
So everything Apple does, did, or will do is doomed to failure,
but we loves us some x86 architecture from 1979 and can't imagine an alternative.
The future has spoken.
ARM classic or ARM64? (Of course anything is better than x86 family, but that's a low bar to clear.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
They already have it, and have for years. Developing for iOS means code is first compiled for x86/x64 to test on the desktop, and then its recompiled with the ARM toolchain when you deploy to a device. Their development pipeline is relatively platform agnostic. Xcode kind of sucks as an IDE though.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
No you can override the signed app protections easily, especially if you are a developer.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Numerous of my customers use Mac on Intel as development machines for Linux on Intel servers, to provide mass-market GUI tools and target-specific development tools.
Apple is about to make that unpopular.
This will put a push on Linux distros like Fedora and hardware companies offerings like Dell's XPS 13 Developer Edition, to finally deliver the year of the Linux Desktop. Well, for developers, at least (:-))
davecb@spamcop.net
Please, enough about bitching about the butterfly keyboard, $1000 phones, and the RDF.
Tell us again about how Jobs ripped off Xerox PARC. That's always a hoot.
The "cruft" barely matters any more. On super low end chips, sure the instruction decoder matters. On laptops, it really doesn't. The out of order and wide floating point units and wide, fast memory bus are far far more expensive than three decoder.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Everything from Microsoft ends in heartbreak.
I think the chicken and egg issue will dominate though. Until a large portion of the datacenter systems are ARM, there would be no compelling reason for a developer to switch their development platform and many compelling reasons not too. And until a large number of developers are on ARM, the datacenters would be fighting the developer's platform if they switch.
Why would I buy a development system as premiumly-priced as the Macs to target a platform that might be successful in a few years? These things don't happen overnight.
I CAN play devil's advocate with myself here. I do realize that this will help front end developers, and that is almost certainly in Apple's thoughts. But, in my experience, the back end is where the real tech is. If front end developers jump to ARM-based Macs because it makes their jobs easier, we'll see the already damaging gulf between front and back end development widen. That would be a bad result for the industry. Of course, I say this as more of a full-stack guy that believes it is much harder to develop a quality product when nobody on the team fully understands both worlds.
But at least it started.
-- Cheers!
Not exactly true. Some of us *like* the desktop user experience we get with Mac OS. I could use Linux, but I like Macs better. I also understand that Linux can be mapped to look like Mac, but with an actual Mac, I don't need to bother. And kindly don't confuse "I prefer Macs" with "I am a rabid Mac fanboy." There are degrees of difference between the two.
Apple has done transitions before: classic MacOS to MacOS X, Motorola 68000 to PowerPC, and PowerPC to Intel. They survived all three. Given their history, they're obviously capable of handling transitions well enough.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
> (he didn't literally mean home, but rather personal-computers)
Thanks for the clarification!!!
If you're still inside warranty, then at least that'll be free but from what I saw from the warranty process on a colleagues Macbook, that's gonna be a pain. And if your hardware is older than a year, you're SOOL?
Move to Europe, EU law guarantees 2 years of warranty.
No way Mac goes app store only. Maybe in 10 years, but not today.
Good-bye
ARM is utter shit for actual computing. Its a fucking toy. You under appreciate the inertia and gravitas x86 has. ARM is wonderful for the low end, but for development, you can fuck right off with that noise.
Good-bye
TensorFlow is free software (Apache License 2.0) and it is not written in assembler, you can build it for (mostly) any arch. Google distributes x86_64 binaries but that is just to save people from building it.
What was the ARM's floating point coprocessor again? what chip competes against the intel 8th gen?
I'm leaning toward this future. I've switched to using a Galaxy S9+ as my daily computing device, and the Thinkpad is reserved for longer coding sessions.
But, more and more, I just use a bluetooth keyboard from Omoton and use Termius to SSH in to my servers and the laptop from my phone. File Manager+ has SFTP support, among many features. I have browsers, VNC, DroidVIM (really an excellent port), etc.. Do I need a monitor? I cast the screen to a ChromeCast.
I write code primarily. If I need horsepower, I spin up a VM from my phone and use SFTP/Git to load up some code, and SSH in to administer it. The phone fits in my pocket while I'm running around between the machines at work, too. Nice bonus there, not lugging the laptop itself.
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.
RISC has been alive longer than the x86. It's nice to see a company going back to its roots. That said, I think the idea here is to synergize all platforms.
It all went to hell after [i]screen[/i]
So you're going to stop buying a current machine, which apparently meets your needs, based on a rumor about a future Mac which may or may not happen and may actually meet your needs - since you don't know what the specs of this imaginary machine might will be. Did I get that right?
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.
Huh? As a dev my use case primarily involves zsh, Emacs, Erlang, and PostgreSQL and all that's running just fine on MacOS thanks. I'm really curious what your use case is? I mean, you make it sound like you've maximized the iTunes window and don't know how to quit the application.
I'm looking a two Mac Pros in front of me with seven drives shoehorned into the nearest one and nearly all of the PCI cards used. I've changed so many parts in it the thing has become the Ship of Theseus. They promised a new pro machine and nary a peep so far other than they've got 'top men' working on it. Well, where is it already?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
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.
Their next computers will absolutely stink at designing the ones after. They will also stink at working on the advertising video and renderings.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
TL;DR https://www.youtube.com/watch?... will be horrible for users, as no bootcamp nor virtual machine for Windows and Linux anymore
I'm not saying it's NOT happening, but everybody should remember that we've been seeing similar reports to this every year since at least 2011, when it was reported that Apple had internal prototypes of ARM-based MacBooks running OS X. All of the current talk about a 2020 shift to ARM can be traced back to this single unverified Axios article.
What we have to remember is that this is not the first time apple has done this, and each time they have done it well with good results and benefits. Obviously the last time we got boot camp which at the time was a huge gain. We will see what is up thier sleeve this time. Likely integration across all the product lines.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
Please pry those out of storage, and sell them to some geeks who can use them, for a reasonable price. People could use them. Unless you're keeping them for posterity?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Agreed. I'm pretty much 100% Linux, and the state of desktop Linux is atrocious. Gnome 3 is an abomination, it has killed my productivity
What's preventing you from going back to Gnome 2 via MATE?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Their development pipeline is relatively platform agnostic. Xcode kind of sucks as an IDE though.
Then use Eclipse or IDEA Intelli J
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Linus Torvalds has stated that ARM won't win the server space because developers want to run their apps on the architecture it has been developed on and almost all are developing on x86.
Almost all are developing in Java, so the actual hardware does not matter. (*facepalm*)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Why would I buy a development system as premiumly-priced as the Macs to target a platform that might be successful in a few years?
Because Macs run OS X or macOS. It is even preinstalled. A random hardware does not.
Why Mac haters don't shut up is beyond me. If you have no use/need for macOS, fine. then simply shut up, idiots.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I swear by Mate.
RISC has been alive longer than the x86.
How d'ya reckon that? The 8086's design started in early 1976, and it became available commercially in 1979. The first two major RISC projects (Standford's MIPS and Berkeley RISC, who evolved into the SPARC architecture) both started in the 1980s and became available commercially years later.
Some people point to the IBM 801 as a forerunner of the RISC concepts, but even this only became available commercially in 1980, and, as a single chip, only in 1981. It wasn't successful, but it was used as a base for the development of the RS/6000 - who, however was launched in 1990, 11 years after the x86
You know, usually you just "close" the laptop and it suspends ... unless it is a weird "brand" of linux, though.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Looking back, it took 5+ years to end support for PowerPC Macs, I can't see it being any less and I would expect it to be twice that especially for Mac Servers.
Apple doesn't have servers any more. "macOS Server" is an app in their desktop app store which costs twenty bucks, and provides some of the functionality which comes with NT server. The last time Apple had a server hardware product was 2011.
If this is all a reason for having apps that work on iPhone, iPad & Macs, I again point to HTML5 and WPA.
Ugh. What a PITA. If that's the best Apple can do, their best isn't very good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You don't have to use GNOME. I use XFCE4 on all my machines; it's just enough of a desktop to be usable without getting in your way.
What if it's not a laptop, or you don't want to flip it shut? I mean, on a Mac you can tap the power button and there's a Sleep button there, Windows can do it from the keyboard or in the menu that appears when you hit the power/standby icon in the start menu, why did the Gnome people decide to make it so unfriendly?
Move from NeXT Obj-C to Apple MacOS was brutal code thrash. Three rewrites to the API's in a single year was a coup de grås. Best move ever. We shutdown development until Apple stabilized MacOS X revs. Bought AAPL stock at $17 and dumped the remaining funds in @ $12. AAPL surging stock price ended development.
AAPL have been here before and have the architecture, abstraction and now new silicon under it. What could go wrong? Tim Cook for one. Tim is not a bit twister (little nor big endian) and it all looks like supply pipeline in Tim's eyes.
Personally, Gung-ho for AAPL abstracting the codebase over ARM (MOTO, INTEL, et. al.). QUALCOMM taught Tim the meaning of ' detrimental reliance' as INTEL did SteveJobs. Some lessons don't slot into institutional memory banks. ARM looks like a pivot for Apple down market.
Newsflash: in Debian alone there's 57 different window managers
So just take a month off to try them all, and hopefully one of them works for you.
So this would be the end of the Hackintosh, no? That sucks. While I spend most of my time on my MacBook Pro, I like having my Hackintosh for really heavy lifting.
The blind-census argument is itself extremely popular based on its relentless occurrence in the wild, at least that part of the wild with limited binocular vision.
———
Sage: You can't judge a book by its cover.
Simpleton: Uh, what else is there?
Sage: The pages inside.
Simpleton: You mean all those repetitive black marks, the ones that resemble a box of Fruit Loop alphaghetti filmed in black and white?
Sage: Their arrangement matters.
Simpleton: You mean like tea leaves?
Sage: [Takes a slow sip from his steaming mug.] Exactly right—like tea leaves filtered through a brain worth having.
Simpleton: [Thinks really hard.] Are you dissing mathematicians?
Sage: Not at all. Leaves produce more symbols at lower intensity, beans produce fewer symbols at higher intensity. You can't judge a theorem by its cover, because there's never enough pages to bind.
Simpleton: I see what you mean about not judging a book by its cover: some books don't even have covers. Very subtle, but I'm onto your koan. For example, I can still judge a theorem by it's lack of cover. That would still work out just fine.
Sage: Sure—suit yourself. Looks good on you. Now if you will please excuse me for five minutes, I need to hit the head.
———
[*] Alfred Renyi to Paul Erdos: "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
For obvious reasons, this quip probably originated in Hungarian, not German, even thought the Satz pun is pretty good.
Companies like Adobe will have to support updates for Adobe CC (LR/PS etc) for Intel CPU's for a while, while developing ARM (or whatever Apple is actually doing) versions as well (meanwhile trying to lock out Adobe PS CC etc from being run on some idiots iPhone (not the mobile version, the full version... some smuck is going to try to use the full version on their phone)
I also think Apples sour grapes with nVidia needs to end, im not an nVidia fanboy but think Apple looses a lot of potential locking out nVidia but thats my 10c
...but take lessons from the warts in the runtime.
Moving their macs off of Intel is a terrible idea as people will then only be purchasing the cheapest possible mac as a compiler host for iOS (if they need to do so.)
I have a MacBook Pro right now because I can triple boot it between Linux, macOS, and Windows - they do this and I'd rather just have one of the new minis sitting on the corner of my test for iOS builds...
Unless that ARM chipset will support x64/x86 instructions (which is technically possible but would be weird.)
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And sealing the entrance shut with successive layers of concrete and steel plating.
Eventually, the Apple ecosphere will be COMPLETELY irrelevant.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Let me try to restate my understanding of the engine/frame analogy more rigorously:
Even if ARM cores are powerful engines, the I/O and operating system wrapped around them in virtually all such ARM CPUs and SOCs make them unfriendly to serious productive computing.
It will kill more than just boot camp. When Apple went from powerpc to x86, they didn't hesitate to break compatibility with everything that came before (great way to get everyone to buy new hardware). I have no doubt they will use this opportunity to do it again.
I'm helping others declutter by storing them.
In terms of time (mainly) and money it would be cheaper for someone to buy one new than for me to wrap one up and ship it to a fellow geek.
Its back to PPC like code.
Time to learn to code again.
Ready for hours of code optimization all over again?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Take that Hackintoshians!
Apple's been preparing for this for several years already. iOS deployment to iTunes has included the IL output from LLVM (although Apple variously calls it Intermediate Representation or Bitcode) that Apple can recompile for new CPU targets at their end as and when they arrive. I wouldn't be surprised if that's been happening for MacOS apps as well.
In terms of time (mainly) and money it would be cheaper for someone to buy one new than for me to wrap one up and ship it to a fellow geek.
Sell them as a bundle, and/or sell them to a local. If you leave them lying, they're just going to turn into landfill sooner or later. Many people are actively using devices like those today.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes indeedy --in theory-- but the optimizations are everything that makes tensorflow useful. Like SIMD or the pinning of memory for GPU transfers. So no, in reality. You might as well say that one could just compile Linux or Windows or Mac OSX for any cpu architecture just by flipping a command line arg.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What if it's not a laptop, or you don't want to flip it shut? I mean, on a Mac you can tap the power button and there's a Sleep button there
What you do is open the gnome-power-manager preferences, select the "general" tab, and then select what you'd like to happen when you press the suspend button, and the power button. This is essentially the same as on Windows. If I want to reboot Windows, I pick reboot out from the menu; if I press my power button, the machine goes to sleep. I have a hard reset button if I need it; macs used to, if you snapped the programmer's key into place. When I boot into Linux, the buttons work just the same, even though I am using gnome3. I don't spend much time in Linux these days, or I would probably install MATE.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If someone had told you in 1978 that in 30 years you would be able to run your Unix programs on a device that fits in your pocket, would you have dismissed it as a fucking toy?
No we would have complained that it can't possibly take 30 years.
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
Torvalds is mistaken, price dictated x86 Linux replacing traditional *nix RISC vendors. The argument regarding developers wanting the same hardware in the field as in their desktop PC is erroneous. Most *nix software does not care what the underlying hardware is. They may want the same operating system and software stack but that is something quite different than the underlying hardware. If RedHat and Ubuntu offered their respective Linux distributions on ARM and the ARM servers were less expensive to buy and operate they would be used by many and their server side software would not know or care if its Intel or ARM under the hood.
Similar background :-)
... switching to a non-x86 CPU would be a return to the bad old days where people had to chooser Mac or PC. Presumably bringing back that choice would cut Apple's sales in half.
In theory apps will need to be recompiled by the developers. That is probably the best solution.
However another solution is to have software translate an x86 binary into an ARM binary. You still get native architecture speed but perhaps there is inefficiency since you started with an x86 binary, Source code would have provided more information and more opportunities to optimize the code. I'd lean towards this binary translation solution. Universal and likely good enough. To be clear I expect macOS, its bundled application and Apple's productivity applications will be recompiled and fully native. This binary translation is more for the 3rd party mac apps.
Then there is emulation. Doable but there is a big performance hit when you have to emulate the CPU architecture. When Apple switched to Intel and PC emulators no longer had to emulate the x86 architecture emulation the Windows environment became practical for some users.
The folks suggesting that iOS will replace macOS are almost certainly guessing wrong. macOS and iOS share some core operating system code and various APIs, but where their respective libraries and APIs begin to differ tends to be related to the user experience and the mobile user experience isn't going to work on a laptop or desktop. I think Apple has already made comments along these lines.
Additionally, until MS Windows on ARM is a common office and household operating system I doubt Apple will completely abandon Intel. Apple's marketshare doubled when users no longer had to choose PC or Mac, when they could run both macOS and MS Windows on the same computer. Boot into either operating system as required by the software they needed to run. Since Windows on ARM is not a common operating system, since Windows on x86 is what people overwhelmingly have and will need to be able to run
What people *might* be grossly exaggerating is a chromebook competitor. An ARM based Mac where macOS and its bundled applications and Apple's productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet, slideshow, etc) have all been recompiled for ARM. There are many users who would use nothing beyond these apps and a web browser. For them MS Windows and 3rd party Mac software are irrelevant and an ARM based Mac that has much better battery endurance would be great. Think of something like the MacBook Air moving to the ARM CPU but the MacBook Pro staying Intel.
What about Boot Camp? Presumably it goes away. I wonder how many people will find running Windows in a VM (especially one that has to emulate the CPU) will find have problems with that solution?
Look to the PowerPC era, emulation worked but it was not really practical to use. When Apple switched to Intel their marketshare doubled. With Boot Camp people no longer had to chooser Mac or PC, they could have both on the same computer. Switch to ARM and we are back having to make that choice.
Dang, I thought maybe you made the Linux version because I asked you to?!
Considering ALL of cloud is x86, i am not compelled by your argument.
Good-bye
Bullshit and i7s are DESKTOP SKUS
Good-bye
The news that Apple is dumping Intel has been there periodically about every 3-5 years,... Without any doubt every time they are negotiation a new deal with Intel... Sad!
GeekBench says otherwise.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The poor OS is not real, though. iOS is OSX, with different libraries for making GUI applications, but with the same underpinnings.
One critical piece of the underpinnings differs: it's impossible for iOS applications to flip a page from writable to executable. Only the system executable loader can do that. The strict W^X policy on iOS makes it impossible to run a compiler like that included with Xcode or a JIT like PyPy. Any tool for programming on a device must be a full interpreter, like CPython or Swift Playgrounds, and a user ends up wasting most of the performance of a powerful ARM CPU on the overhead of this interpreter. This is what I meant by the usefulness of the iPad product being hamstrung by Apple's policies embodied in the OS.
The only good bug is a DEAD bug. /Starship Troopers
#DeleteFacebook
Wait, so the i7 in this Precision 5520 is a desktop SKU?
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
No, they aren't. They officially claimed OpenGL had been replaced by Metal for more than 5 years, and no Metal-enabled app can run on x86/64 macOS.
Great point. ARM doesn't have a basic system specification like x86 PC's do. While its all kind of adhoc and a mess PC side, it does work. Originally the PC spec was just the IBM 5150 and as time went on it extended incrementally. But at least it has one. IMO the push to mass adopt ARM is not a good thing for the Linux world. Its not an open architecture and as you pointed out, the transition is fraught with technical issues. We would be much better off going to RISCV. Nobody "owns" it and the community can develop and agree upon a basic system platform spec. There is still a risk (heh) of fragmentation, one of FOSS' biggest weaknesses, but is the RISCV foundation can agree on a basic general purpose platform spec in the next few years then we can start making truly open PC's.
Apple has a very old ARM license which allows them to make their own custom cores, which they do for iPhone/iPad. Most modern licensing requires using official ARM cores, to which custom SoC bits are added.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Stayed with what? Motorola wanted to make low-power embedded CPUs with 32-bit cores and pathetic front-side buses, and IBM wanted to make super-powered server CPUs that required liquid cooling. Nobody was making consumer desktop/laptop CPUs, so all Apple could do was put the toy CPUs into laptops and the monster CPUs into desktops.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
They are not going to turn computers into giant iOS devices.
They are not going to lock out 3rd party software distribution for computers.
They are probably not going to to switch all Macs to ARM.
What they are probably going to do is launch a MacBook Air that is ARM. macOS, its built-in applications and Apple's optional apps on the Mac App Store will be recompiled for ARM. Some people need nothing more than a mail client, a browser and a productivity suite like Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Such people will get along quite nicely on such a system. The MacBook Pro will remain Intel based for Windows support and legacy software support with full performance. Apple will encourage 3rd party developers to recompile for ARM but they will also probably offer an x86 binary to ARM binary conversion tool for legacy software that is not recompiled. This converted code will run better than x86 in an emulator but not as well as recompiled, in short it will probably be "good enough". Over time an ARM based Mac will become more capable for people that do not need Windows. However for the huge segment of Mac users that do need Windows some Macs will remain Intel based. Again, when Apple went Intel their marketshare doubled as people no longer had to choose PC or Mac, when people could get both on the same machine. Apple will continue to offer such machines however perhaps not at the entry level, MacBook Air, etc.
ARM is wonderful for the low end, but for development, you can fuck right off with that noise.
Development is generally highly parallelizable, so throwing more cores at it is a viable strategy. The big problem with current ARM computers when it comes to development is (yep it's that time again) not enough RAM. And, of course, not enough I/O. Both are highly solvable problems.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Apple hasn't made servers in a very very long time.
Nifty board! As a matter of fact, I just bought 2 OrangePi PC2's with the Allwinner H5 onboard (quad-core A53). 43$ shipped for the both of them, though less powerful than this board or my phone by far.
However, I want to try them out instead of the RK3999 chipset because there's indications of OpenBSD support in addition to Armbian and Lubuntu, and I think it'd be fun to play with some ideas I have at a bare metal level. If someone got the RK3999 running OpenBSD, I'd be much more interested, because there's more powerful boards available--like the one you showed.
If you're using them to do real, professional, paid work, Apple computers are reasonably cheap. If you're using them at home for things that won't make a profit, they're expensive.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's actually not quite right - at the time they said that web apps were a "sweet" solution - but they never claimed native apps were a bad idea.
In contract, has has said a number of times they think combining iOS and macOS is a bad idea. They can and will bring elements from one to the other that make sense, but they've always maintained keeping a difference is a good idea.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
At least Apple's own engineers will be using Mac for their own work, unlike Microsoft engineers using Dell.
If you're in an area with high geek density, posting to Craigslist and just leaving them on your front porch or equivalent may be a good way to get them in the hands of people who'd make better use of them, if that's a goal of yours.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
But, more and more, I just use a bluetooth keyboard from Omoton and use Termius to SSH in to my servers and the laptop from my phone.
That's fine if you already have a cellular data plan for other reasons or transit in your city has Wi-Fi. It's not so fine if, like me, you would have to upgrade from no data plan to a data plan in order to use the SSH client during the commute to and from the office. That's why I still carry a compact laptop for coding on transit.
Sure, that's a valid use case. The big thing I miss about current generation unrooted devices is the lack of ability to compile (to machine code) and execute directly on the hardware. That's the big showstopper, and the reason I still have a laptop and server dedicated to providing "backend" support for the phone's role as primary device/smart terminal.
The range of coding that can be done with an Android device, unrooted, right now, is in pretty rough shape. I might use QPython and QPython3 to do a few small things directly on the phone, but I run into limits pretty quick. If it's useful, that code is moved into a remote git repo and expanded with usage on a laptop, where I can more easily make use of various libraries and system resources. That's how the latest project got its start: I needed some answers on a project, and all I had handy was my phone. Later, it got a frontend for desktop usage.
But, it's rare that I don't have connectivity. I'm happy to pay for the "unlimited" data plan. Between my wife and I, we blow through 60+ GB of traffic a month on two phones alone (we both have laptops, but both use a smartphone as a primary device). And frequently, the phone *is* the WiFi for my laptop. A more typical scenario is editing directly in Vim over an SSH connection, or, less commonly, grabbing a copy of the code to to work on locally in DroidVim via SFTP/git.
As to tooling, I'm not an IDE person. I really like Vim, and that makes it very easy to be happy *and* productive on minimal systems--basically anywhere I can get a halfway decent terminal. (I'm a keyboard person all day long, so anything to avoid the mouse.) My concession to IDEs is NERDTree and a few bits of shell script. That also makes it trivial to dump my usual setup in a brand new machine, VM, headless, or otherwise, and have it be set up to do useful work.
A little off-topic, but tl;dr: We need low-level hardware access on mobile platforms to make them really viable without having to screw around trying to root phones we should own in the first place. (I've said I like ARM, but I'd also really like to see a halfway decent, $30 RISC-V board.) And... to really make them useful, they still need fast cellular radios. My primary ISP, from a usage standpoint, is my phone provider, not my home ISP.
This model isn't for everyone, but, I always remember wanting more out of my PDAs and calculators. I wanted a full-blown desktop replacement. We are nearly there, but low-level access is the big killer.
The range of coding that can be done with an Android device, unrooted, right now, is in pretty rough shape.
Did rootless GNU environments, such as Termux and GNURoot, stop working in recent versions of Android? Some Slashdot users seem to swear by GNURoot combined with XSDL.
But, it's rare that I don't have connectivity. I'm happy to pay for the "unlimited" data plan. Between my wife and I, we blow through 60+ GB of traffic a month on two phones alone (we both have laptops, but both use a smartphone as a primary device). And frequently, the phone *is* the WiFi for my laptop.
Last I checked, carriers limited "unlimited" data plans' hotspot use (what you call "the phone *is* the WiFi for my laptop") to 10 GB per month. This means that for people who cancel home Internet in order to afford a cellular data plan, semiannual feature updates in Ubuntu or Windows might have to happen at a public library.
Termux works, and I do use it, but it has weird issues with accessing parts of the filesystem and convincing tools to work right due to Android's limitations. I haven't looked at GNURoot. As to the 10 GB limit--that part is real and frustrating and stupidly artificial. I'm already using the transfer! I tried doing without the home connection, but I caved in after maybe 3 months. It does mean that any heavy duty network traffic for the laptop needs to be at home, work, or somewhere like a library, as you said.
There are real issues with the setup, but the only way I see them getting addressed is with individual effort. I find the services of many large corporations extremely convenient, and really don't want to void the warranty on the newest device I use (afterwards, who cares? I've got an original T-Mobile G1, rooted, still works just fine, if horribly out of date), but I would also prefer to see computing devices owned by the people holding them.
ARM is good for consolidating on a low-power many-core platform. Big iron, as mentioned elsewhere, still has real value. It just doesn't need to be in everything. Going forward, I'd really love to see ARM replaced with RISC-V, so that open hardware might actually be a useful thing.
Yes and there's no such thing as x86-64 either, Intel marketing decided it was to be called "IA32-T" or some other nonsense. It's best to ignore the vendor's PR names in such things, particularly when they're as inane as "AArch64".
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com