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I really enjoy working with the Mac and am very productive with it, but this would most likely represent the end of the road for me to use it in a professional
by Mister_Snuggles 7y ago
I really enjoy working with the Mac and am very productive with it, but this would most likely represent the end of the road for me to use it in a professional capacity.
One of the tools that I require to do my job, a development environment for an ERP system, is a Windows application. It's a closed-source commercial application. The likelihood of it getting ported to MacOS is zero, so it's always going to require me to run Windows in some capacity in order to use it.
There are three ways I see this tool working on an ARM-based Mac:
* MacOS emulates enough of the Intel instruction set that VMware still runs. And doesn't kill it in the next version like they did the PowerPC emulation after the Intel switch.
* VMware runs but gives me a virtual ARM CPU which runs an ARM version of Windows which emulates an Intel CPU. I'm not sure what the ARM virtualization story is, so this may not even be a thing,
* I keep an Intel machine under my desk and use RDP. This is somewhat cheating and it's unlikely that work would be willing to pay for two machines.
On the flip side, Windows 10 seems to be getting really good, so switching actually wouldn't be that bad. WSL will basically give me all of the command-line tools that I need, Hyper-V can meet my virtualization needs (though I won't require it like I do on the Mac), and all of my other tools are available on Windows.
- XMPPwocky 7y agoI think you're missing a fourth option: VMware or some open-source tool doing dynamic binary translation to run Windows on an ARM CPU. As far as I know, qemu can do this today.
- saagarjha 7y agoNote that this is somewhat slow.
- chongli 7y agoI doubt performance is a major factor for an ERP. Emulation should work just fine.
- Mister_Snuggles 7y agoYeah, and this is just the IDE for writing code for said ERP and some other development tools. If anything network performance is more important than CPU performance - the IDE is very chatty when it talks to the server.
- Lammy 7y agoI'm sure it won't be as slow as SoftWindows95 was on my 66MHz PPC601 around the first time I lived through predictions of the Mac's death due to an architecture change :)
- cosmotic 7y agoThere were a handful of emulators that did this for windows back in the days of powerpc Macs. Softwindows and virtual pc come to mind; virtual pc IP is now owned by Microsoft and theoretically part of hyper v.
- Mister_Snuggles 7y agoIf this worked as well as the PowerPC emulation in MacOS did then this wouldn't be a bad option. The Windows-only tools that I need aren't terribly CPU-intensive, so even a modest performance hit would be tolerable.
- api 7y agoWindows 10 is adware unless you pay a lot for enterprise or constantly disable and uninstall all the garbage MS pushes down on you.
- r1nkgrl 7y agoThis is such a cynical viewpoint. I could frame most corporate software this way.
- api 7y agoReally? My Mac doesn't show ads in the dock for Candy Crush and Minecraft and Netflix and whatever else, and I dont have to spend hours cleaning trash off a new Mac install. MS is branding themselves as "low end" junk by doing that kind of thing.
- Mister_Snuggles 7y agoRegardless, one of the tools that I require to do my job is Windows-only and will always be Windows-only, so I will need to use Windows in some capacity.
- doctoboggan 7y agoThis article is mostly speculation (although based on rumors from reliable sources), but they do speculate that the "pro" level machines will stay intel for a long while.
- stanley 7y agoHow would that work in practice?
- plorkyeran 7y agoFat binaries with slices for each architecture, much as was done for 32+64 bit x86 and is still done for iOS. Porting x86-only code to arm can sometimes be a lot of work, but supporting both x86 and arm at the same time isn't any more work.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- greenknight 7y agoThere is a fourth... but thats even more speculation. AMD, which also is x86 compatible, had a division a while back to produce ARM/x86 processors in one chip... maybe this could be a solution to running both systems at once?
- saagarjha 7y agoNew Macs already have powerful ARM and Intel processors together, though not on one chip…
- Mister_Snuggles 7y agoThat's an interesting option indeed! Definitely even more speculative than the original article though.
- alwillis 7y agoIt’s not like you won’t be able to buy an Intel Mac after the first ARM MacBook is released. I was helping a friend with her 2014 MacBook Air, which can still run macOS 10.15 Catalina, which was released a few months ago. Keep it mind it shipped with macOS 10.9.2—that’s six major releases ago. Macs tend to last a long time; I think it’ll be quite a few years before the lack of serviceable Intel Macs will be a problem for users who need to run something that’s Intel-only.
- TimTheTinker 7y agoActually, I think the best option would come from Microsoft. This is only speculation, but they could release an ARM version of Windows 10 with a built-in x86 translation layer.
- phren0logy 7y agoThey already have! The Surface Pro X is the most recent one.
- dillonmckay 7y agoSo, do you remember when Apple had a PowerPC that also had an accessory card with an Intel CPU? https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powermac_6100_66.html https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powermac_6... With USB-C and these external GPU chassis, why not have a CPU chassis for your i3?
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- blissofbeing 7y agoSo you won't use a Mac because you need it to run a Windows app?