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It will most likely kill apple laptops as a developer platform. Unless you are deeply disconnected from the hardware, CPU architecture does matter. Most develo
by kakwa_ 8y ago
It will most likely kill apple laptops as a developer platform.
Unless you are deeply disconnected from the hardware, CPU architecture does matter. Most developers using macbooks I know have VMs for either Windows or Linux works.
It might be conceivable to use the ARM port of <Insert your Linux distribution here>, or the ARM version of Windows 10. But it would also require a good desktop virtualization solution for ARM. If Apple release its own solution or creates a partnership with let's say VMWare to release something at the same time an ARM macbook comes out, it might work, but barely, and I'm not sure if developers are at the top of Apple's priority list. In the end, with the Linux subsystem in Windows, choosing Windows as a development platform might make more sense.
As a side note, if Apple switches to ARM, I foresee a lot of cringing. The switch from ppc to intel was annoying for a lot of Apple users at the time, but there were a lot of goodies (bootcamp, better autonomy, better performance, VMs) that kind of made it up for it, basically, nothing was lost in term of possibilities, a few were actually gained, and only the transition was a bit painful. With a switch to ARM, you may gain a little in term of autonomy, but with macbook pro already at +8 hours (~a work day), not sure it's a game changer, at best you will stay the same in term of performance, and you will lose in compatibility with other OSes.
- manicdee 8y agoI can imagine a neat divide here between “MacBook” (based on ARM, 15 hour battery life) and MacBook Pro (based on Intel i7, 6 hour battery life, optimised for VMs).
- Moto7451 8y agoI think kill is too strong. Certainly some developers will need to be on an Intel chip, but not all. How many developers use their laptops as a dumb SSH terminal? While some C extensions to scripting languages will need some love, the majority of major interpreted or VM driven languages work already. My feeling is it will be net zero as far as ARM servers are concerned until the hardware is made and is viable. Perhaps Apple ARM laptops will help with marketing ARM as a viable option, but we already develop on OS X in order to deploy to Linux without any great calling for OS X servers. Cloud server “hardware” has also drifted from what you see in real hardware. There are numerous times in my career I’ve had to explain to deveopers of all experience levels that their SSD is several orders of magnitude faster than the tiny EBS volume they’re reading from and writing to. In short, I think architecture mismatch just isn’t that important to most Web App oriented companies. My girlfriend works at a travel industry giant and they’re at the opposite end, putting IBM mainframes to good use. They don’t have much use for Macs and most of their developers seem to be on Windows instead of anything resembling what they’re deploying on. For the segment of our industry that does care, they’ll have options and will choose them regardless of what Apple, Google, and Microsoft do with ARM, Intel, Power, MIPS and other architectures.
- tracker1 8y agoSorry, but in Windows, Mac and Linux x86 docker is a huge part of my workflow... I'm having enough trouble guiding people out of windows only as it stands, ARM is too big a pill to swallow in teh near future. There's still enough bad parts in scripting environments at the edges (I'm a heavy node user, scss and sqlite being a big two touch points).
- kakwa_ 8y agoMaybe it would be interesting to look at the past. Was the PowerBook as heavily used as a developer laptop as the MacBook is today? (or Power Mac vs desktop PC as desktops were more common at the time). I was not in the industry at the time (2000 - 2006) so I don't know the answer.
- cschep 8y agoWhile the Intel switched helped, at least I thought it was great, the big deal was that OS X was a tremendously usable Unix on amazing laptop hardware. I'm not sure the architecture mattered as much as that did.
- mbreese 8y agoAgreed. I switched when there were still G4 PPC laptops just because OS X was a usable Unix with good hardware. The switch to Intel was good, but it wasn’t because I struggled with the architecture. It was for the more powerful CPUs and battery life.
- sixothree 8y agoMaybe WOA will be a thing then too....