5 ms·

That'll mean a whole new set of softwares. The current software (think photoshop) won't work on ARM processor

fzzzy 10y ago
Apple's done two architecture changes already. Both 68k backwards compatibility on PowerPC and Rosetta PPC backwards compatibility on Intel worked well.
- w4 10y ago
  > Rosetta PPC backwards compatibility on Intel worked well Rosetta worked, but I don't know if I'd say it worked well. It was brutally slow to the point of being unusable with some apps on mid/low end Macs.
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  Don't forget the architecture change from the 6502 to the 68000!
  - petecox 10y ago
    They never provided CPU emulation for that. Their solution for Mac LC was effectively an Apple IIe shrunk down to a PDS expansion card.
    - DonHopkins 10y ago
      There were some good third party Apple ][ emulators for the Mac!
npunt 10y ago
You can bet Apple would work with select third parties like Adobe to port their software to be ready at launch if they were moving to ARM. They just did with touchbar.
askvictor 10y ago
They've done this transition before (ppc->x86->x64) so they have the experience and tooling.
- npunt 10y ago
  Don't forget 68k :)
to3m 10y ago
You'd have an emulator, same as the 680x0->PPC and PPC->x86 transitions. I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. The reasons for the previous changes were that performance of the existing line had reached a dead end, and the new line was noticeably better right from the get-go. Not the case for an Intel->ARM switch. Though - whether this would be a problem in practice, I couldn't say. Most software probably doesn't demand much. GPU-heavy stuff wouldn't be much affected. Emulated Photoshop would probably be terrible, but major vendors would get advance warning, I'm sure, so you'd have ARM-friendly Photoshop as a launch title. And, better still, AArch64 is little-endian, and I think it handles misaligned data transparently (and if not, Apple could presumably fix that?) - so for 90+% of software, "porting" to this hypothetical future ARM OS X would require little more than a rebuild. This wouldn't help Boot Camp much, though... I use Boot Camp quite a lot. Windows compatibility played a large part in my decision to buy a Macbook Pro in the first place! But I wonder how common that is?

fzzzy 10y ago

Apple's done two architecture changes already. Both 68k backwards compatibility on PowerPC and Rosetta PPC backwards compatibility on Intel worked well.

w4 10y ago
> Rosetta PPC backwards compatibility on Intel worked well Rosetta worked, but I don't know if I'd say it worked well. It was brutally slow to the point of being unusable with some apps on mid/low end Macs.
DonHopkins 10y ago
Don't forget the architecture change from the 6502 to the 68000!
- petecox 10y ago
  They never provided CPU emulation for that. Their solution for Mac LC was effectively an Apple IIe shrunk down to a PDS expansion card.
  - DonHopkins 10y ago
    There were some good third party Apple ][ emulators for the Mac!

npunt 10y ago

You can bet Apple would work with select third parties like Adobe to port their software to be ready at launch if they were moving to ARM. They just did with touchbar.

askvictor 10y ago

They've done this transition before (ppc->x86->x64) so they have the experience and tooling.

npunt 10y ago
Don't forget 68k :)

to3m 10y ago

You'd have an emulator, same as the 680x0->PPC and PPC->x86 transitions. I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. The reasons for the previous changes were that performance of the existing line had reached a dead end, and the new line was noticeably better right from the get-go. Not the case for an Intel->ARM switch. Though - whether this would be a problem in practice, I couldn't say. Most software probably doesn't demand much. GPU-heavy stuff wouldn't be much affected. Emulated Photoshop would probably be terrible, but major vendors would get advance warning, I'm sure, so you'd have ARM-friendly Photoshop as a launch title. And, better still, AArch64 is little-endian, and I think it handles misaligned data transparently (and if not, Apple could presumably fix that?) - so for 90+% of software, "porting" to this hypothetical future ARM OS X would require little more than a rebuild. This wouldn't help Boot Camp much, though... I use Boot Camp quite a lot. Windows compatibility played a large part in my decision to buy a Macbook Pro in the first place! But I wonder how common that is?