[HN Gopher] ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer
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ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer
Author : twsted
Score : 19 points
Date : 2020-03-22 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mondaynote.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mondaynote.com)
| bnj wrote:
| Settles on a proposition that the iPad will consume and replace
| the Mac.
|
| I don't agree with that position; I think the form factor of the
| Mac and the capabilities of MacOS are going to continue to be
| relevant, even in a world where a fully featured Xcode can be run
| from an iPad Pro.
|
| It seems more realistic to me that apples' efforts to get
| catalyst to a point of usability is about enabling software to
| make a seamless transition to the arm architecture.
| m463 wrote:
| They're already on the path to do that by making the Mac
| unusable. I tried getting Little Snitch installed on Catalina
| and it has to contact apple before it can be enabled.
|
| This whole "ask apple's permission" thing really annoys me.
| skohan wrote:
| Honestly it's hard to imagine. Laptops are an incredibly
| important form factor.
|
| I actually suspect the move to/inclusion of ARM in the macOS
| lines of product is part of the motivation behind dumping
| support for 32-bit apps in Catalina. By preemtively removing
| support for a large amount of legacy software, which will
| likely never be recompiled for ARM, they avoid the situation
| where their new machines appear much less capable than the old
| ones.
| DagAgren wrote:
| He does not propose that. He is merely saying that they are
| going to move SOME users from Mac to iPad. Not all, just some.
| ken wrote:
| His (roundabout) answer is to point to the new iPad Pro and
| cursor support, i.e., Apple is moving everybody to the iPad so it
| doesn't matter what the Mac does.
|
| Of course, as always, whether this is "an answer" or not depends
| on whether you happen to believe in this particular branch of
| Apple Kremlinology.
| chongli wrote:
| _Apple Kremlinology_ [1]
|
| I love this term. What a fantastic way to look at this story
| and take a step back so that we recognize what we're doing
| here. Maybe Apple, like the Soviet Union, doesn't have it all
| figured out? Maybe they're just trying stuff to see what
| sticks?
|
| I think, deep down, there are a bunch of people at Apple that
| know they'd have to pry the Terminal, vim/emacs, and command
| line tools out of macOS developers' cold, dead hands before
| they'd ever switch to iOS full-time.
|
| [1] https://www.itworld.com/article/2782495/apple-
| kremlinology.h...
| nicoburns wrote:
| Presumably not least the Apple engineering department
| themselves!
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| This is actually an interesting question for any company
| that makes operating systems.
|
| * I'm sure Microsoft's Windows developers all work on
| Windows.
|
| * I assume Apple uses Macs for all development right now.
|
| * If memory serves, Google uses a lot of Macs themselves,
| but did at least make an effort to make it possible to do
| development on Chromebooks.
|
| * Oracle... it's not clear to me that Oracle actually has
| anybody working on Solaris, but if they do then they have
| to use Solaris to work on Solaris unless they've managed to
| completely overhaul the build system. For everything else,
| OEL should at least theoretically be completely adequate.
|
| * I'd be interested to know what IBM uses internally; AIX
| _was_ a workstation OS but I have no idea if they 've
| maintained that capability, and they own RH now so that's
| an option if they wanted to stay "in-house"
|
| * I don't have any specific knowledge about it, but Red Hat
| absolutely could use Fedora and/or RHEL for most
| everything.
|
| * Canonical is almost certainly running Ubuntu everywhere.
| frandroid wrote:
| > Maybe Apple, like the Soviet Union, doesn't have it all
| figured out?
|
| I wish I had a super-like for this answer.
| tasogare wrote:
| They sure can't move ipadOS devs to iPad since XCode is not
| supported on it.
| freehunter wrote:
| That's the case right this minute, but thanks to Apple's
| famous secrecy, all that could change five minutes from now.
| Much in the way people say "I'm certain there are ARM-based
| Macs running inside Apple", I'd be pretty certain that there
| is at least one iPad running XCode inside of Apple.
| skohan wrote:
| XCode or no, I can't imagine doing serious software
| development without a terminal and all the common *nix
| utilities.
| blkhp19 wrote:
| The year we get Xcode on iPad is likely the same year
| that we get a general sandboxed terminal / developer
| environment IMO.
| Hamuko wrote:
| And after that you just need iPad ports of all other Mac
| software that Apple uses internally. What do they use to do
| their graphics, video, CAD, etc?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Xcode will probably run on iPad soon. I still won't care.
| As a developer, I need two kinds of freedom: The freedom to
| choose or build my own language and IDE, and the freedom of
| my customers to install my software without paying a tax to
| or needing approval from $FAANG.
|
| Apple has made it quite clear that neither of those is ever
| going to happen on IOS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet. It is only a matter of time.
| DagAgren wrote:
| His answer is not that Apple is moving "everybody" to the iPad.
| Just some.
|
| It won't split the Mac lineup into ARM and x86, it will split
| it into iPad and Mac.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I am not convinced although I will admit this is the first iPad
| I am considering buying in a long time.
|
| Unless an iPad can compile code at speeds equivalent of C / C++
| I cannot see it happening. I could see some programming on the
| new iPad though. Would be nice if Apple opened it up for
| trivial scripting though.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > Unless an iPad can compile code at speeds equivalent of C /
| C++ I cannot see it happening.
|
| Have you used Swift Playgrounds?
| ex3ndr wrote:
| I bet i can do it faster.
| scarface74 wrote:
| In the grand scheme of things, do you realize how niche
| software development is?
|
| Besides that, why do you think that the current ARM chips
| aren't already faster than most x86 chips that people use?
|
| _Would be nice if Apple opened it up for trivial scripting
| though._
|
| You can already do that using Shortcuts and various third
| party apps..
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188
| Audiophilip wrote:
| If anything, in the future I see iOS (or iPadOS) getting more and
| more 'MacOS-ified' and not the other way round. As the HW inside
| iPads get more and more powerful, I could imagine Apple
| eventually porting MacOS to iPads (and therefore to ARM); not to
| replace the Intel-based Macs with ARM-powered ones, but to
| empower iPad users with a much more productive OS. Sure, iPad
| users wouldn't be able to run x86 binaries, but with Apple
| incentivizing developers to build x86+ARM fat binaries, the
| software library available for 'MacOS iPad' users would keep
| growing over time.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I could imagine Apple eventually porting MacOS to iPads (and
| therefore to ARM)
|
| There's not much to port. The underlying Darwin operating
| system is shared by all Apple products (AFAIK, excepting
| Airports for some weird reason). They would have to do a
| recompile and maybe make sure that nobody accidentally put
| architecture specific bugs into the finder or something stupid,
| but the grand difference between Apple's different operating
| systems is which graphical interface they put on and some
| amount of user space tooling. And honestly, I would be
| absolutely shocked if Apple doesn't have internal builds of the
| desktop-oriented "Mac OS" for ARM, probably as part of the
| usual CI pipeline.
| burlesona wrote:
| What I see as more likely is that Apple is hedging it's bets. On
| the iPhone / iPad side, they continue to develop better and
| better processors. One day they _may_ be sufficiently better than
| Intel that Apple could pull a "Rosetta" a second time on the Mac,
| translating apps from x86 to ARM at the software level.
|
| But that's still a tall ask at the high end, and splitting the
| Mac lineup into models that can't all run the same software isn't
| appealing.
|
| So in the meantime, it makes sense to push the iPad toward being
| a stronger and stronger computing platform with things like the
| recently added trackpad, better multi tasking, etc. They've got a
| way to go, but given a few more years of iteration, who knows how
| many more of the "real computer" niches the iPad can fill.
|
| If the processor advantage never reaches the point that it can
| emulate x86 at full speed, then the Mac line probably won't
| transition, and Apple will probably shift it farther upmarket as
| the iPad cannibalizes every use case that doesn't need x86. And
| if the processors do get that much better, then ARM comes to the
| Mac.
|
| Either way, Apple is in a good place to leverage the iPad as
| their vision of what the next generation of the personal computer
| looks like.
| scarface74 wrote:
| _But that's still a tall ask at the high end, and splitting the
| Mac lineup into models that can't all run the same software
| isn't appealing._
|
| Apple has already done this. The 68K to PPC transition wasn't
| nearly as quick as the PPC to x86 transition. They released new
| 68K Macs after releasing PPC Macs. The apps were "fat binary".
|
| When I bought my first PPC Mac, all of my apps were on an
| external SCSI drive. I attached the drive to PPC Mac and it ran
| native software.
|
| _If the processor advantage never reaches the point that it
| can emulate x86 at full speed, then the Mac line probably won't
| transition,_
|
| Again it doesn't have to. I had a first generation PPC Mac
| 6100/60 that ran emulated code slightly slower than my
| accelerated 68030-40Mhz LCII. My 68K Mac was about half the
| speed of the high end 68040-40Mhz Macs. It couldn't emulate
| programs that used the 68040's FPU at all. There were third
| party hacks that you could run like SoftwareFPU (a 68K program
| nonetheless) that could emulate an FPU.
|
| The high end programs are always the first to be ported. The
| other apps are "good enough" and depending on how much time an
| emulated app spends running native operating system code, it
| won't be all emulated.
| roblabla wrote:
| > Apple could pull a "Rosetta" a second time on the Mac
|
| You mean a third time though! The mac went through three
| architecture transition, and each came with an emulator to keep
| compatibility for a while. The first one was when they went
| from Motorolla 68000 to PPC, and they built the Mac 68k
| Emulator[0] to keep software going.
|
| I also think they could pull it off again. Microsoft has shown
| us that it's possible to run a lot of x86 software on ARM64
| with little noticeable impact[1]. It would, however, require
| immense engineering effort.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator
|
| [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-
| on...
| wolfgke wrote:
| > One day they _may_ be sufficiently better than Intel that
| Apple could pull a "Rosetta" a second time on the Mac,
| translating apps from x86 to ARM at the software level.
|
| Emulating x86 on ARM is very hard because x86 has a strong
| memory model while ARM has a weak one. This either makes
| emulation _very_ slow or will break lots of multithreaded
| applications.
|
| The other direction (emulating ARM on x86) works much better.
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