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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
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.
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..
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
what chip competes against the intel 8th gen?
None, you need Genuine Intel for a flawless Meltdown experience.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
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
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.'"
So everything Apple does, did, or will do is doomed to failure, but we loves us some x86 architecture from 1979
Nonsense. All common x86 processors have been internally RISCy since AMD introduced their Am586 chip, and Intel its Pentium. The only thing they shared with x86 processors from 1979 was an instruction set, with its primitive use of a limited number of registers — literally none of which were "general purpose", as various instructions required operands to be placed in specific registers, and results to be delivered to others. These failings were addressed by the amd64 instruction set, which largely permits use of registers as general-purpose, and which provided for four times as many registers in the bargain. The x86 decoder is a minuscule portion of the silicon in a modern processor.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
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.
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.'"
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
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.