I agree. I know they&#x27;re currently using AMD GPUs, but how much longer will they keep using AMD if they believe that their own in house chips can do a better job? Also, I&#x27;m curious as to whether they would try to sell their GPUs (iGPU?) to gamers who traditionally don&#x27;t stay within the Mac ecosystem at all. Having a 3rd major player in the GPU space would be wild.

Whether or not they think that or they can, they have been developing GPUs for iOS devices. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see what they do for their desktops.

I don&#x27;t expect Apple to sell the hardware for cost.  They are quite adept at selling products with a hefty profit margin.

The advantage Apple has is that Nvidia and AMD and Intel have to actually make money from their chips. Apple can break even or make a loss on the chips themselves.So maybe, they certainly have the budget to try.

I think it&#x27;s their modified PowerVR cores they&#x27;ve been using.Probably only focused on the iGPU segment.

Nearly the entire demo set was about GPU performance by demoing graphic responsiveness. Almost a bigger deal than the processor itself it seemed like.

Given the lackluster support Apple has for the AMD GPUs they currently ship I bet it will feel like an upgrade.  Plus a lot of the product line uses the integrated Intel graphics so beating that isn&#x27;t much of a challenge.

I was interested by the GPU that was mentioned in the slide, does this mean that Apple is thinking that they have the expertise to take on Nvidia and AMD in that space?

But now games like Fortnite, Minecraft, PUBG etc. that already exist on iOS can natively run on the Mac. So I think that&#x27;s a pretty big thing

Note: the gaming industry is not actually standardizing around Vulkan. It is still DX on Windows, Metal on Mac&#x2F;iOS, and then Vulkan on Android

macOS&#x27;s gaming story has always been pretty abysmal. They nuked a ton of games when they dropped 32-bit support, and they refuse to implement the graphics API that the gaming industry is standardizing around. I don&#x27;t foresee any improvements in Mac gaming from this announcement.

edit: why the downvotes? legit curiousI&#x27;m curious about the future, especially games, if they want to take on consoles.PS4 and XboxOne are 7 years old and while the next gen looks really good Apple can refresh the productline much quicker (on the other hand it&#x27;s a good question if people really would want to buy a new console say every year because Apple sure will be aggressive pushing out new models much more frequently)

To be clear, it&#x27;s not a virtual machine. Rosetta translates x86 instructions to ARM instructions on the fly.

Rosetta. Apple knows processors, ARM is just a licensed instruction set.

Are they, or is it an aarch64 build of Linux they showed?

The same way they ran m68k code on PowerPC CPUs and PowerPC code on x86 CPUs.

Emulation? I assume using the same kind of tech that let x86 run old PowerPC apps

am I stupid? how are they running a x86 vm on ARM...

It may be to avoid appearing to be misleading. They&#x27;ll almost certainly be able to virtualize ARM-based Windows, but that&#x27;s not what normal users are looking for when they want to virtualize Windows.

Indeed - only talked about Linux, of which there are of course ARM versions available.

That’s got to be coming, but maybe just wasn’t ready to demo today.

I noticed that too. Might have trademark or legal reasons though. Technically, if they&#x27;re able to dynamically translate x86 to ARM as they&#x27;ve explicitly stated (with JIT of JS and the JVM as the example) they should be able to dynamically translate x86 VMs regardless of what OS they contain, which would allow x86 Windows to be virtualized with better-than-interpreted performance.Or at least that&#x27;s what I hope ;-) I&#x27;m relying on running x86 Windows and Linux within Parallels in addition to native MacOS Apps to do my daily work, which involves compiling and testing x86 binaries for these platforms, so whether this virtualization thing actually runs x86 OSes transparently is an absolute make-or-break feature for me to continue my usage of the MacOS platform for work.

Curious that they said nothing about virtualizing Windows. That can’t be a mistake or oversight. Odd.

It&#x27;s interesting that their official virtualization support (in the demo) is Parallels.

It’s going both ways - iPadOS now has drop down menus at the top, etc.

What they did to Finder is just...unacceptable.

It seems to be going the other way actually. MacOS Big Sur looks like iPadOS with a menu bar tacked on.

yeah all the UI updates this year seem to be on the theme of stitching up the gaps between macOS and iPadOS.I&#x27;m guessing that when the &quot;two year&quot; transition to all-ARM arch on the mac is complete, they&#x27;ll merge them.

Oh, 1,000%. Even basic tasks like working on a file, then pasting said file to a cloud storage app and then to an email&#x2F;slack channel take an order of magnitude longer than it would on a computer. Long way to go before the iPad becomes a true Pro machine, but for some fields, it&#x27;s basically there. Still, such simple quality of life improves that are mainstay&#x2F;muscle memory on computers essentially take time and animations and taps to execute.

Also interesting that the dev kits use the same chip as the latest iPad Pros (A12Z). I’d love to see the two OSes merge to some extent because I love writing on the tablet but find iPadOS not the best for general dev work.

Already Apple is making it a headache to run non-signed apps on the Mac.  I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re going to slow down the &quot;convergence&quot; of iOS and MacOS at this point.

I really wonder if this will result in the Mac-ification of iPad. Would love to finally run a MacOS environment on a tablet.

Not even running it very well. All the graphics settings were turned down, the framerate looked choppy and it was only running in 1080p.

It’s not about the game, it’s about running performance-dependent code written for x86 on an ARM chip. A lot harder to fake a stable frame rate in a game than in Photoshop.

I think your expectations for what emulation is capable of are set a bit high. The fact that it is able to emulate a game that&#x27;s a few years old at decent frame rate is more than acceptable. You didn&#x27;t see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason.

If the Tomb Raider game was actually running on a A12Z system (without any external GPU - note that this is the same CPU&#x2F;GPU on the iPad Pro!), then that demo is actually really impressive, even if the game settings are set to low-quality and the framerate is a bit choppy.

I would have been more impressed with them accessing an game service like Steam and launching random games from there.Plus they insinuated they were running on the A12 but later demos including the game did not state exactly the hardware being used.If they are limited to games support Metal then that is jettisoning a large number of games. Granted Catalina already did a of that work for them.Are they going to support non Apple video cards? The skipped right over that but I suspect they don&#x27;t think they need to*edit on that last note it would be a good reason they never brought nvidia chips back as they would know they would not need them

On the other hand, it probably doesn&#x27;t use much CPU just because it&#x27;s single threaded. No game ever uses more than 10% of my 16-thread CPU. But that also means that emulation could seriously tank single-thread performance and ruin the game.

IDK, &quot;look how good our CPU support is by running a several year old GPU limited game&quot; fell a bit flat for me.

This is a demo so take with huge grain of salt, but the x86 performance looks solid... better than I expected considering it&#x27;s based on an iPad CPU.

Curious how this will effect &quot;the developer experience&quot; considering that cloud instances are also transforming to ARM based processors.

One of the About This Mac dialogs showed an A12Z with 16 GB, which is consistent with the developer transition kit, basically an iPad Pro in a Mac mini case: A12Z, 16 GB, 512 GB SSD.

It said A12Z. Mac Minis with A12 available next week to devs.

It was stated the demo hardware is the DTK (available this week), which includes an A12Z processor from the latest iPad Pro coupled with 16 GB RAM.

I was curious about the hardware they used for the demo.

Besides native apps from Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe (Universal 2), the demo included Maya and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Rosetta 2), and Parallels Desktop (unspecified virtualization improvements).  I couldn&#x27;t tell if the guest O&#x2F;S was Debian for x84-64 or Aarch64.

That&#x27;s exactly right.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StevenLevy&#x2F;status&#x2F;1275138212516765697" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StevenLevy&#x2F;status&#x2F;1275138212516765697</a>

Nope; the vast majority of consumers have no idea who makes the processor in their Macs.This is a developer-only concern.

Seems like they’ve just Osborned half the machines for the next 2 years.

Remember the MacBook Pro with a DVD drive lived on for years after all its siblings were discontinued. We can expect some x86 support to remain available for years after the last new ARM machine is launched.

The last Macs that will support Boot Camp will be the best selling Macs for years.Much like the 2015 Macbook Pro I expect you&#x27;ll be able sell it for more than you paid for it years later.

I was thinking the same, but I always avoid gen1 Apple gear anyway, so it’d basically be another 2 years before it’d have been time to upgrade.

Nah, I&#x27;d have to wait until early next year to buy an ARM Mac, and mine will be fine for a long time to come.I am pleased I didn&#x27;t splurge for the 32GB of RAM, however. I&#x27;ll do that with my next one.

Typing this on a 2010 MBP, bought a new MBP this weekend (was later canceled by the seller b&#x2F;c of inventory issues) and thinking about waiting another year

Buying a Mac right now, need to replace my EOL Mac Pro.  I definitely won&#x27;t be getting a Pro now.  Probably just an iMac with more RAM and SSD instead of Fusion.  I really wish I knew when they were updating their iMac and Mac Pro lines.

And I reckon those of us who just bought a shiny new Intel Mac in the past few months might be questioning our decision. Should have held on to that 2010 MBP one more year?

If those devices will have 4-5 years worth of use, then I think most people would be fine with the purchase. 4-5 years already does require upgrading for either performance or quality of life features.

They won&#x27;t, necessarily. Fat binaries worked ok the last time around. Sure, Apple could stop making updates available for Intel Macs, but they can stop making updates available for any older model of Mac if they want to.

Their lifespans will be no different than any other Apple hardware, which typically has very long usable lifespans.

&gt; […] not realizing they have a very limited lifespan.It may depend on one&#x27;s definition of &quot;limited&quot;: the Rosetta was first released with Mac OS 10.4 in 2005, [1][2] and was last available in Mac OS 10.6, which first released in 2010, [3] but whose last update was in 2011.Six years of transitional support is not unreasonable.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rosetta_(software)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rosetta_(software)</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mac_OS_X_Tiger" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mac_OS_X_Tiger</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard</a>

What is really sad is that I don&#x27;t think the majority of Apple consumers really understand what this means for the Intel macs in the long run.  I fear a number of people will buy them not realizing they have a very limited lifespan.

Linux and Windows have both supported ARM for a while now.

Did they say the Linux VMs in the demo were x86?  They said &quot;virtualization&quot;, which to me, implies ARM Linux.

&gt;how impressive x86 VMs lookedYou mean that they opened and could run a command line app? I&#x27;m not actually sure they implied it was x86.

I could see the &quot;final Intel Macs&quot; having a value to folks; somewhat similar to the 2015 Macbook Pros which many considered the &quot;last good Macbooks&quot; before Apple fumbled things with the 2016-onward Macs and their gimpy keyboards.In this case, I don&#x27;t think the first ARM Macs will have undesirable hardware ala the first few years of Touchbar Macs, but there will be some straggler software whose ARM ports will be delayed or will never happen. For those who depend upon that software, the final Intel Macs will be invaluable.

I wouldn&#x27;t be so sure, there are a fair number of people who want a machine that will run x86 for various reasons. Windows support&#x2F; Linux support. Even considering how impressive x86 VMs looked in the demo, lots of people will prefer using intel silicon for guaranteed compatibility.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Osborne_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Osborne_effect</a>

They said the transition should take 2 years. I wouldn&#x27;t expect much more than that.

Standard Apple support is 7 years from last date of sale. 2 years for transition, so seems reasonable to expect support most of the way to 2030.

I&#x27;m in the market for a new laptop, and if I knew how long the Intel macs would be supported, I could see myself picking one up. Unfortunately, nothing was said about that so I guess I&#x27;m holding off.

Those are the rumored &quot;iPad Pro&quot; aesthetic Macs which were initially rumored to be released today.

The T-series CPUs are a bit weak, to be honest…

I was waiting for Craig to say that every Mac with a T-series chip could be used as a dev platform, since they&#x27;re pretty strong on their own. Oh well. Maybe to smooth things over they&#x27;ll ship an A-series co-processor with those Macs.Apple released a bunch of PPC Macs after they announced the switch to Intel, so this isn&#x27;t unprecedented.

Personally I&#x27;d rather grab one of those as my daily driver, and wait a few years for all the issues to get worked out during the transition.

It was a backup plan if the Apple Silicon was delayed.  Might as well still execute on it.

Its total transition to Arm in 2 years. Likely they will build different SoCs performance&#x2F;power for desktop and notebook.

I wonder if these intel based ones are going to be on the high end of the Macbook Pro lineup or iMac.

Do you think most people know who makes the CPU inside their Apple machine? Go into an Apple store and take a survey. I almost guarantee no one will know.

That is so people don’t stop buying Macs into end of year

Apple announced the Mac in 1984 and sold Apple &#x2F;&#x2F; based computers until 1993.Apple announced the PPC in 1994 and sold new 68K Macs for 3 years at least.

With the powerpc to x86 transition Apple was moving towards where everyone else already was. It was one less thing developers had to worry about when supporting Mac. With this migration it&#x27;s the opposite, and MacOS is still a very small slice of the desktop&#x2F;laptop market.

If the PowerPC to Intel transition was any indication, they&#x27;ll do just fine. Most consumers won&#x27;t care, or will want to wait until Apple works out the kinks.To put it a different way: the initial sales of the ARM-based chips won&#x27;t be as strong as you think they might be, or as wide spread.Having both Intel and ARM based systems in the market will even out the sales.History is repeating itself, it&#x27;s worth reviewing the previous transitions before making assumptions.- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;everymac.com&#x2F;mac-answers&#x2F;macintel-faq&#x2F;why-did-apple-switch-to-intel.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;everymac.com&#x2F;mac-answers&#x2F;macintel-faq&#x2F;why-did-apple-...</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_processors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_...</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tedium.co&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;apple-powerpc-intel-transition-history&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tedium.co&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;apple-powerpc-intel-transition-...</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mashable.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;29&#x2F;intel-macs-at-10&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mashable.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;29&#x2F;intel-macs-at-10&#x2F;</a>

Apple has a strong story for x64, going forward, which I think will ease fears.They aren’t rushing x64 out the door.

Maybe it depends on the pricing for the x86 vs. ARM macs.  If the ARM machines are significantly cheaper the x86 sales will probably suffer quite a bit.  As someone else in this thread said, most people have no idea what processor is in their computer.  They just care that it&#x27;s cheaper and runs all of their stuff (browsers, photos, messages, etc.)

Apple released new mac minis and powermacs when they announced the intel transition.

The Mac Pro (and possibly the iMac Pro) will still be Intel for a while. I expect the portable lineups to get the ARM treatment first (as they are the most similar with the iPhone&#x2F;iPad in terms of power requirements), and then scale it up for actual high-power desktop CPUs.

Apple could continue to ship arm&#x2F;x86 machines in parallel for years if the fat binaries+emulation work well. If say the desktop mac pro maintains an edge somehow, or Intel comes back from their current slump in 5 years this could go on indefinitely.(that probably totally depends on whether Intel actually designs a desktop chip for the first time in nearly two decades, rather than continuing with their current sell server chips as poorly designed desktops path)

On the contrary, I&#x27;m tempted to buy the latest Intel Macbook Pro so I can stick with Intel for a few more years. Whether or not I&#x27;ll end up doing so depends a lot on how good the new ARM-based laptops are in terms of performance (esp. wrt virtualizing x86&#x2F;x64 VMs). But the current lineup, however imperfect, is mature and a known quantity, in contrast to the unknowns surrounding the first generation of machines with the new architecture.

PPC was complicated by coming after years of failing to have decent chips actually ship. In this case, Intel and AMD are both still heavily invested in pushing x86 forward and Apple doesn’t have to do all of the work maintaining things like compilers or the JVM so it’d be a lot easier to keep that option alive if there was a good enough reason.

They said the same with the Intel transition, and also projected a two year timeline. The transition was over much sooner than that and there weren&#x27;t any new PPC products to speak of, as far as I remember. And of course, PPC Macs only got one more version of OS X before support for them was dropped.They&#x27;re just trying not to Osbourne themselves too badly. They want you to keep buying Intel Macs, but who&#x27;s to say how long they&#x27;ll keep support.

Tim Cook just said they have new intel macs in the pipeline. Those will go over like a lead balloon.

They did not seem to care for the past years either so what does this change

Different segmentation - Qualcomm powered laptops are the weakest ultrabooks, compared to Macbook Pros. I really wish Qualcomm chips were better though.

&gt; As long as Apple doesn&#x27;t start selling A* chips to Samsung or other Android OEMs Qualcomm isn&#x27;t going to worryEven if Apple did sell their chips to other parties, Qualcomm will be still collecting its sweet patent royalty from both parties, so it couldn&#x27;t care less.

Nobody gives a crap about the Qualcomm powered notebooks.  They&#x27;re a joke market segment.  As long as Apple doesn&#x27;t start selling A* chips to Samsung or other Android OEMs Qualcomm isn&#x27;t going to worry.

Now will Qualcomm feel a little more competition or not? There chips are slow in mobiles and they are slow in PCs, compared to Apple&#x27;s processors.

“We&#x27;ve been down this road before”Yes, and then you ‘upgraded’ the OS and gratuitously stopped running older software. My final Mac Pro — yes, I was a buyer of Mac Pro grade hardware — still runs 10.6.8 for that reason.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UDfAdHBtK_Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UDfAdHBtK_Q</a>

The last time Apple transitioned to a new architecture, the dev kits were loaners you had to give back.

If it&#x27;s like the switch to Intel then it will be $999 and you have to return it when the real versions come out but you&#x27;ll get a replacement with one of those real versions.  Except with the Intel switch you were shipped a slightly repackaged beige box... and that was 15 years ago so my guess is $1499.

Based on the Newsroom release [1], cost is $500 and the hardware is a loan.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;apple-announces-mac-transition-to-apple-silicon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;apple-announces-mac-t...</a>

It&#x27;s $500. See the press release: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;apple-announces-mac-transition-to-apple-silicon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;apple-announces-mac-t...</a>

It is $500 and you have to return it at some point.

I wonder what the cost of the transition mini is.

If they keep the desktop thermal budget I have no doubt they could scale up the A series to be just as powerful as any intel chip.

And a two year transition period.That sounds ambitious as the bigger Apple desktop machines are quite powerful. But suppose you could just fit them with multiple chips.

I wonder if they could release something to turn iPad Pros into development kits. Would be readily available for a lot of devs.

MacMini with an A12 chip. Available now as a part of a developer kit. Will be fun to see what that can do.

There was an article posted here on HN yesterday speculating that the first ARM Mac will be a new 13” MacBook Pro.

I just got a 16&quot; MBP...
Still, the waiting game sucks too. Apple said their first Arm mac will come out at the end of the year, but that could well be a very low end Mac mini, or Macbook Air. It&#x27;s unknown when the pro line will come out.

Which track record are you talking about? Apple discontinued OS support for PPC only 3 years after intel was announced. That means no more support for xcode and new commandline tools after 3.5 years.

Given Apple&#x27;s track record of supporting older Mac hardware, I would expect Intel Mac hardware to be supported for many years and many OS versions after the last Intel Mac has been produced.Also given Apple&#x27;s recent MacBook track record, the first version of ARM Macs may not be as much of a slam dunk as people hope.

I think we’ve got some time. I’m on the last leg of a 2012 too. Just like the sibling comment said, since we don’t know if the pro line will get a refresh there could possibly be a longer runway.

My personal philosophy is to buy the third gen of every new type of product. The second gen tends to fix al big issues in the first. The third irons out all the small issues left. After that there probably won&#x27;t be many changes except for some performance bumps.

I was seriously considering upgrading my 2012 MacBook to the new 16&quot; model soon, but now I wonder what kind of longevity or support I can expect from that hardware...

It already has. I&#x27;ll Def try to get my hands on the A12Z Mac Mini. The GPU performance should be vastly better than existing Mac Mini options.

Isn&#x27;t this already the case?iOS apps can be built, for Intel, using Catalyst, with very trivial changes in code, but we still see Electron hanging around today like a bad smell.I can&#x27;t imagine this will change anything.

Mac and iOS aren&#x27;t the only two platforms.

But if you&#x27;re developing with Electron, the purpose is typically cross platform desktop support. This won&#x27;t change that?

Hrmn.  Wouldn&#x27;t this be leaving out android and windows?  It might be practical for some apps, but that&#x27;s an awful lot of users.

Electron already has support for ARM64, but no official releases yet. But it needs to be build from x86 machine. No native compilation on ARM64 yet. I think with apple moving to ARM, google will add native ARM64 compilation for chromium. This in turn will be picked by electron. Chromium has been running on ARM for a long time with Android and Chrome OS so it has all the optimizations.

Is there anyone building on Electron and only targeting the Mac desktop environment? Windows is still the king there.

Apple had a list at the State of the Union of open source technology projects they had built pull requests for to add ARM support. Electron was up there, as was Python 3, OpenJDK and Go, notably.

The processor architecture is not that relevant if you are working at the abstraction level that electron or swift-ui or similar provides.

I am soo much looking forward to using native Slack and Teams instead of their horrendous electron apps, that even don&#x27;t use GPU acceleration on iGPU Macbooks!

I wonder what this will do to Electron. If the iOS apps are really 1:1 on macOS, then the need to maintain an electron app will probably diminish. As long as they both support the same OS APIs I can see devs that can learn a new language (Swift) ditch Electron.

And that may be the moment that ARM servers start picking up steam.

There&#x27;s gonna be a weird moment soon where developing docker images for Armbian hardware (Pi and friends) is going to be more straightforward on a Mac than developing docker images for Intel servers.

Docker and Linux virtualization. Fat binaries to make it easy to update Mac apps. iPhone and iPad apps. Rosetta to run Intel apps that aren’t updated.Apple is gonna knock this out if the park.

If the performance in the demo is accurate, and considering that the actual Mac chips will have a lot bigger power headroom, silicon die size and more thermal headrooms than the A12Z, Intel will be swatted out.

First mac with Apple chip by the end of the year.Also Apple is committing to a long term pipeline of Intel chips. This makes sense since so many apps will take years to transition. At the same time, they&#x27;re willing to put their own chips side by side with Intel and they believe people will voluntarily switch. I&#x27;m looking forward to the benchmarks.

An app the vender thought not worth updating to 64 bit isn’t worth saving.

Here is a though how about making Rosetta run those 32 bit applications you dropped on the floor with Catalina.

This isn&#x27;t just about hardware. It&#x27;s about software, and an investment in making libraries that are fully optimized for the hardware. The problem here is the long tail of needs is very, very long.

ARM Neon instructions are pretty fast for math, but I haven&#x27;t looked for benchmarks:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netlib.org&#x2F;utk&#x2F;people&#x2F;JackDongarra&#x2F;WEB-PAGES&#x2F;Batched-BLAS-2017&#x2F;talk18-goodyer.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netlib.org&#x2F;utk&#x2F;people&#x2F;JackDongarra&#x2F;WEB-PAGES&#x2F;Batc...</a>

I bet that they already have some low-level math library that uses ARM NEON intrinsics; you would definitely need them to port performance-demanding apps like Final Cut Pro &#x2F; Maya &#x2F; Photoshop &#x2F; etc.

And about 30% of software devs, according to Stack Overflow.

Right, apparently only a quarter of all developers uses them (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insights.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;survey&#x2F;2019#technology-_-developers-primary-operating-systems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insights.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;survey&#x2F;2019#technology-_-...</a>).

PCs are for gaming. PCs are for work. Macs are for... students and middle managers apparently.

They claimed they would &quot;complete this transition&quot; in 2 years.

I think for this reason they are not going to discontinue intel based macs as x86 is the default for many high performance software.

Isn&#x27;t that what VecLib is for? Also there are other math libraries to use on ARM. I think we use EigenBLAS in our products.

numpy is backed by BLAS and LAPACK. It just happens that on your system on macOS those libraries are provided my MKL. There are other implementations of BLAS and LAPACK out there.

SciPy did support Accelerate, but they dropped it in 2018 because Apple’s implementation of LAPACK was so out of date. Apple have been crap at updating this stuff which is why people don’t use it.

numpy&#x2F;scipy&#x2F;etc will have to support Accelerate instead of MKL.

Rosetta 2 will take care of translation and JITing

There are many implementations of this for ARM.In fact, the fastest (#1 Top500 as of June 2020 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.top500.org&#x2F;lists&#x2F;top500&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.top500.org&#x2F;lists&#x2F;top500&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;</a>) super computer in the world, and one of the most efficient (#9 Green500 as of June 2020 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.top500.org&#x2F;lists&#x2F;green500&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.top500.org&#x2F;lists&#x2F;green500&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;</a>), uses ARM CPUs and has an implementation of these for them.

Interesting - could you share a link to the video?

In the Platforms State of the Union, they specifically listed Numpy as one of the open source projects that they built for Apple Silicon (along with Python 3 and others). Go to 20 minutes and 35 seconds on that video.

So, if I install numpy via conda on a Mac now, it&#x27;s backed by Intel MKL and is thus amazingly fast. What will it be replaced with? Has anyone at Apple thought about use cases like this?..

This if anything makes Catalyst more important.

I&#x27;m sure there will be emulators.  But I&#x27;m also fairly confident that they&#x27;ll be relatively slow.  Emulating across architectures is rarely performant, and if Apple had solved the problem they would be talking a lot about it right now.  In the past they&#x27;ve gotten away with this because the architecture they&#x27;re moving to was so much faster than the previous architecture that even with a 50% or 75% performance penalty the apps would run faster than they did on the old hardware.  With this new hardware it is likely only going to be marginally faster than the old Intel chips since the focus is more on power efficiency, so emulated apps are probably going to feel sluggish.

The difference is that the entire (64bit?) iOS App Store back catalogue would likely be available to run as unmodified binaries without developers having to lift a finger.

I&#x27;d be surprised if the iOS apps did not work on Intel based macOS. Project Catalyst already works on Intel macs and my guess is many iOS apps have been migrated already.

I think we’ll know more after the Platform State of the Union

SwiftUI and Catalyst are not mutually exclusive.I started a new iOS app recently, and there was essentially no cost to building for catalyst.I am using SwiftUI and I considered targetting MacOS directly, but the extra work wasn’t worth it at this stage.I think catalyst is the new Cocoa - it will grow to consume all of MacOS.

Well, that new MBP I bought 4 weeks ago and planned to keep for 5 years just got a muuuuch shorter life span if I can run iOS apps on an Arm Mac, my wife is going to be livid.I guess this also means Catalyst’s life span is pretty short and SwiftUI will becomes the focus?

They are repeating PowerPC -&gt; Intel transition timeline: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macstories.net&#x2F;stories&#x2F;this-is-not-a-product-the-apple-developer-transition-kit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macstories.net&#x2F;stories&#x2F;this-is-not-a-product-the...</a>

What? It&#x27;s exactly the same thing they did last time, except the dev kit was in a Power Mac G5 case.

They do their hardware releases in the other conferences at predictable times of the year

Is it just me or did apple just bungle this entire announcement by not announcing a consumer facing ARM MacOS device, only a hot-rodded Mac Mini with an iPad Pro chip inside.How many devs actually have the setup in place to use a non mobile device?I also wonder if the current+last gen iPad Pro that has the new keyboard + trackpad case will gain the ability to run Xcode and native macOS apps in the near future.

Native virtualization and the ability to run iPhone and iPad apps directly on the Mac. This could unlock a whole new level of focus and optimizations for Apple.

What do you mean by &quot;continue to be supported&quot;? Your 2019 MBP will only need new drivers for Windows if Microsoft decides to change things. Otherwise, Apple doesn&#x27;t have to do anything at all for your current MBP to continue to be able to run Windows. While Windows may be something of a moving target, your particular machine isn&#x27;t.

I mean, there&#x27;s nothing too magical about boot camp—even if apple removed all support for it from macOS, you can probably install windows on a partition the normal way without too much trouble. I think the only thing that might break is if Windows stopped being compatible with the Mac hardware drivers, and Apple didn&#x27;t update them.

Will BootCamp continue to be supported for the next ten years on my June 2019 MacBook Pro so I can install an operating system that continues to develop new features with the assumption I&#x27;m running on x86-64?

It is a lot of work and now you have to buy two CPUs. No cost savings, possibly more power usage in worst case, and maybe even thicker computers.It would restrict it so you can never remove the Intel CPU. It is best to just emulate the Intel CPU for a while until everyone ports their code across.

Did I misinterpret today? Didn&#x27;t Apple just release a machine with ARM and Intel?

Dual CPUs never made any sense. That’s why they are doing emulation and binary conversion.Maybe Apple adds the i86 instruction set as a module in their SOCs, but they aren’t paying intel CPU prices on their ARM Macs.

Which was why I thought Apple might blow everyone away by doing it. But I was obviously wrong.

This level of asymmetric processing is very difficult to achieve, at nearly every possible level, from part sourcing, through hardware design, firmware, software to user experience.

Well, in theory both AMD and ARM use MOESI so it&#x27;s not as crazy as it would be with Intel&#x27;s MESIF. But that&#x27;s a really scary rabbit hole to be going down and I&#x27;d be terrified of memory permissions attacks striking at the boundary there. So probably not worth the risk unless each processor gets its own pool of RAM.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MOESI_protocol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MOESI_protocol</a>

My comment from a week ago:&quot;What would keep Apple from shipping machines with both ARM and Intel CPUs in them? The ARM CPU would run the OS and decide when to ship jobs over to the Intel CPU. I can’t imagine that the home-grown ARM CPU would add much to the total price of the computer.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23530084" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23530084</a>

The emulation thing seemed to me to be Hypervisor.framework for ARM, as they showed Linux and Docker running (which both run on ARM), but not Windows (which an average user may be more interested in).

It&#x27;s doing both AOT and also hooks JIT compilers. They mentioned JS engines as an example for the latter.

The same slide also mentioned supporting JIT translation (for x86 web browsers and Java), so Rosetta doesn&#x27;t run only at installation time.

My brain skipped over that part apparently. It is interesting that they are calling out virtualization improvements separately though.

&gt; They explicitly said that it can perform both static and dynamic translation for JITsCan a JIT be static? Isn&#x27;t that not possible by definition?

They explicitly said that it can perform both static and dynamic translation for JITs. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if there is substantial hardware support too.

Did they show the architecture at any point? I didn&#x27;t see the architecture shown in the VM at all, but could have missed it.

Yes, but probably a native ARM version of Ubuntu rather than an emulated x86 version.

It was debian, and in the state of the union talk, they called it out as an ARM build of debian.

&gt; Rosetta won&#x27;t work for run time environments like OS emulationThey literally showed a demo of Parallels with Ubuntu for Intel running inside it.

Rosetta 2 - the interesting bit was that it was going to pre-translate binaries instead of at runtime. The implications for actual VM emulation is that Rosetta won&#x27;t work for run time environments like OS emulation. They touched on it briefly with the emulation technologies bit, but it looks like it will be separate from, and likely much less performant than Rosetta.

Lenovo Thinkpad laptops are pretty good, and in my experience run Linux very well. Get something with AMD APU (there should be new models coming out soon with Zen 2 + Vega).The only annoyance is their refusal to refund Windows tax. But now Lenovo partnered with RedHat&#x2F;IBM and started selling some laptops with Linux pre-installed (Fedora), so you can avoid Windows tax there, even if you don&#x27;t plan to use Fedora. I hope that will eventually extend to all their models.

I started using MacBooks when they switched to Intel around 2008. Maybe this is a sign to move on. Currently using a mid 2014 model, I like the slim form factor, but I don&#x27;t like the absence of an ethernet port. I don&#x27;t care much for the retina display, my 2008 matte model was better. Been looking at the Lenovo T470. I need something that would be easy to replace quickly anywhere in the world. What should I get?

Good time for anyone who was using macOS for gaming or anything else for that matter to switch to Linux. OpenGL bit rot, refusal to support Vulkan, dropping of 32-bit, dropping of x86_64 architecture - all that should have been a hint. Backwards compatibility is not even an option there (besides for emulation).

Well, it appeared to be a developer version of the chip and not the final customer  copy.

Possibly. The developer kit is using an A12z chip. It’s possibly more for proof of concept than tech demo of what’s possible.

I wonder if they&#x27;re holding them for the actual hardware release in Fall? They could still be deciding the tradeoff between battery life and raw power.

They said the first ARM macs are coming at the end of this year, so even if there&#x27;s an NDA it won&#x27;t be long until we&#x27;ll see the real numbers.

It&#x27;s an integrated GPU so it isn&#x27;t going to compete against serious dedicated GPUs, and no one should expect that. I imagine much like existing Apple devices (and Windows laptops) with dedicated GPUs it will switch as necessary. But at least the integrated GPU will be better.

Not divulging their hand may be a thing. But they could at least have said something (rehashed) about the A12Z: &quot;it performs better than the CPUs currently shipping in the Mac mini by X% in Y benchmark&quot;.I&#x27;m not intrisically excited for a new Apple product, but if they could have told me, we can deliver 50% extra battery life in your new MacBook at comparable performance, that would build up some hype and maybe mindshare.&gt; not helpful to [...] their ability to keep selling Intel stuff.I hope that that&#x27;s it. If we&#x27;re going through the pains of a platform transition, I&#x27;d like to get something out of it.

I can assure you that performance will not come anywhere close to an RX580, much less to a more modern Radeon 5700.

I think the lack of hardware and lack of benchmarks are related.  Apple doesn&#x27;t know yet what the thermal throttle will be on an A12Z MacBook until they start testing the cooling system.

&gt; there were no actual products announced.Correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but I think they also didn&#x27;t announce any actual hardware when they introduced Intel Macs.Interestingly, for the PowerPC-&gt;Intel transition, they also had an Developer Transition Kit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macstories.net&#x2F;stories&#x2F;this-is-not-a-product-the-apple-developer-transition-kit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macstories.net&#x2F;stories&#x2F;this-is-not-a-product-the...</a>

There is no reason why rx580 would not be supported on ARM or why there would be any meaningful performance delta. AMD does not have any kind of “secret-sauce” driver for that, it is simply LLVM targeted to that architecture that converts HLSL&#x2F;GLSL&#x2F;SPIR-V into the architecture specific code.

It wasn&#x27;t just lack of performance numbers, there were no actual products announced. They would have had to tip their hand on a lot of info that is not helpful to customers or their ability to keep selling Intel stuff.One big question though will be how this devkit benchmarks against the current maxed Intel mac mini. I&#x27;m curious if GPU performance beats the current BlackMagic eGPU. (rx 580)

I believe Apple can make processors for laptop and normal desktop in A-series way but I&#x27;m curious how they make for Mac Pro. Adopting architecture like chiplet?

I am interested in seeing real world performance. I agree that there isn&#x27;t a lot that Apple needs to do here; the most curious bit will be how much they&#x27;re able to automate behind the scenes with Rosetta to help out the development community. For most of my workload I am sure that it&#x27;ll be completely transparent. The only bits that&#x27;ll likely be less performance will be testing in virtual machines for x86, but it isn&#x27;t like I care too much about that performance. I&#x27;d take the 3+ hours on battery.

The A12Z is already faster than every tablet and phone in existence. Depending on the benchmark, it smokes about 80% of off the shelf PC hardware.They really don&#x27;t need to do that much.

No it&#x27;s not less dependency on 3rd parties, it&#x27;s more dependency on TSMC. Before they were able to play Intel vs TSMC, it&#x27;s not the case anymore. Then you add the geopolitical issue of Taiwan vs China and the risks level keep increasing.

From what I understood the transition is of strategic nature. Less dependency on third party suppliers for vital components.The performance and&#x2F;or battery gains is almost incidental.

I&#x27;m surprised we didn&#x27;t get any performance numbers. Either raw power or at least power efficiency and projected battery life improvements. Seeing as this is a major reason for the transition (according to them), it feels very weird.They&#x27;re shipping a &#x27;Development Transition Kit&#x27; Mac mini with an A12Z this week, so it&#x27;s not like the numbers are going to stay private for a long time. Even if there&#x27;s an NDA, someone&#x27;s bound to break it.

Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs