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Interesting. I imagine they'll have to provide some sort of x86/amd64 compat layer as otherwise this kills every application available for macos right now. I

Interesting. I imagine they'll have to provide some sort of x86/amd64 compat layer as otherwise this kills every application available for macos right now. I hope they don't also continue to lock down macos (though I imagine they intend to) by restricting applications to only being available from the app store. That would set a terrible precedent for personal computing.

zapzupnz 6y ago
> I imagine they'll have to provide some sort of x86/amd64 compat layer Just like they did with the mk86->ppc transition, just like they did with the ppc->x86 transition. > I hope they don't also continue to lock down macos Let's not confuse moving Macs to ARM processors with turning Macs into iOS devices. Apple has always treated the OS families differently and will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs.
- darrmit 6y ago
  > will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs Will they, though? Because Catalina seems like a giant step in the wrong direction if you’re thinking they’re acknowledging the developer - or even power user - need. Seems to me they’ve doubled down on the iOS approach to macOS.
  - antipaul 6y ago
    In Catalina, I see the move towards these macOS & iOS compatible apps ("Catalyst") as making it easier to develop apps for both. It's a service for developers, if you will (I am not an app developer!) I don't necessarily see it as trying to create a single OS for both desktop and mobile.
    - darrmit 6y ago
      To be clear: I’m not saying they’re trying to create a single OS. I’m saying the “Apple knows best” concepts they’re applying to macOS that are seemingly inspired by iOS are very hostile to a large part of their user base.
      - antipaul 6y ago
        Fair, thanks for clarifying! I, in fact, find the catalyst apps on macOS still needing work. And I’m talking the Apple ones: Music, News
        salutis 6y ago
        Music is not a Catalyst app. Did you mean the new Podcasts app? Music is a trimmed down version of iTunes which is a Cocoa app.
        zapzupnz 6y ago
        Trimmed down in some respects, buggier and slower in others. It may seem to be a Catalyst to some because many aspects of the UI severely regressed to custom implementations of standard Cocoa controls that iTunes 12 used.
- john_alan 6y ago
  Exactly. The exec team have confirmed that including Schiller in recent interviews. macOS is for everything, including Dev. They need that for the ecosystem. Look at the new Mac Pro ffs. Can’t most apps just recompile to support new chip? We don’t need fat binaries right?
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    And they'll continue to say that right until the moment they yank the rug out from under you when all the pieces are in place.
    - macintux 6y ago
      The trop that your logic falls into is there's no way to disprove Apple will ever do this. 10 years from now, we'll probably be having the same argument, and people will be pointing to the latest release of macOS and complaining that surely this one means the end is nigh.
      - zapzupnz 6y ago
        Indeed. I've been hearing people crow on about this since Lion. That was 10 years ago. OS X might be macOS now, but it's still fundamentally the same OS.
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        But there is an easy way to prove that they will and that 10 year horizon is short enough that I believe it will happen. Apple never cared about developers, they care about moving units and profits. Right now they are not getting a slice of the action of all software sales for the Mac and that must be a temptation they find hard to resist. Remember how they turned their backs on the creative people that kept them alive for over a decade when everybody else had switched to windows? Similar story, similar ending.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure. Apple was happy to leave behind "pro" customers who needed floppy drives (1998), optical drives and ethernet (2013), and USB ports (2017). Sure, the industry ended up following them on a lot of this, but that should be as much a cause for concern as the rest of it. An awful lot of the pro audio / video work that happens on high end Apple hardware could absolutely happen on a machine where the only software comes in via an app store.
  - loktarogar 6y ago
    > Apple was happy to leave behind "pro" customers who needed floppy drives (1998), optical drives and ethernet (2013), and USB ports (2017). sure, but all that functionality remained externally - just not as part of the laptop. locking down the laptop is fundamentally different.
  - bonestamp2 6y ago
    I don't know if those are the best examples. You can still plug a floppy drive or an ethernet adapter into a 2020 macbook pro's usb port. I think what they did was they changed what it looks like to be a pro user. The average user gets a sleak experience while a "pro" user is going to have a docking station. I actually like that they transitioned to the docking station approach. It means two things: 1. I have a lighter macbook pro for work travel 2. At my desk, one single cable: charges the computer; connects two additional monitors, ethernet, keyboard, mouse, sd card reader, high speed storage, and a scanner. I much prefer that one single cable vs the bundle of cables I used to have to plug/unplug each time I wanted to take or return my computer.
- jl6 6y ago
  How would we expect a amd64->ARM compatibility layer to work? Emulation? Do we have any reason to think that would achieve acceptable performance?
  - martinald 6y ago
    Windows already does x86 to arm (not 64bit yet) in Windows on ARM and it works fine. Can play games and stuff ok on it, so definitely "acceptable". Not sure if great, but it's definitely usable.
- dathinab 6y ago
  > Let's not confuse moving Macs to ARM processors with turning Macs into iOS devices. I wouldn't be surprised if they just do that. Ship the lower end laptops with ARM and either an extended iOS or a constrained MacOS. > Apple has always treated the OS families differently and will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs. But the different needs part only really applies for the high end Mac Books and from apples POV might no longer be a think if you can develop Swift/Objective-C and similar on iOS.
gh02t 6y ago
They did it before with Rosetta when they switched to Intel. Times and uses are different, but it'd be hard to imagine otherwise.
Kovah 6y ago
On the one side, locking down the Mac even more would be the worst idea Apple could have because this would push even more users out of their system. On the other side, looking back at the past few years, it is quite possible that they do so. The recent changes in both their OS and hardware indicate that they absolutely don't care about their pro users. Hard to predict which path they choose, but I try to stay positive and assume that they have at least one manager capable of thinking rational and in favor of the pro users.
slantyyz 6y ago
I would guess that they'd target these to light usage consumers first, i.e., the people who are somewhere in that weird place between ipads (but not pro) and macbook airs. I tend to think that Safari, iPhoto, iMovie iWork, Mail, Calendar and maybe Office support (initially) would be more than enough for that segment of users.
- lumost 6y ago
  Shipping for the high end first may also be a statement. It would motivate flagship app developers to invest in arm optimizations.
trthomps 6y ago
Honestly as a dev, this would make life a lot easier for a lot of engineers. People who care about openness will still have Linux and it's variants. The general population does not need that level of flexibility and just adds to the cost of developing / managing software. Web browsers wouldn't have taken off if writing thick apps and distributing them for Windows/MacOS was as easy to support as writing an iOS/Android app is today.
efficax 6y ago
Likely you'll just be able to ship fat applications that have binaries for x86 and ARM code with one click in Xcode
- dathinab 6y ago
  That is if you have a Apple only application using Swift/Objectiv-C maybe C/C++. Also don't forget that ARM has weaker memory ordering, so expect to see some fallout from not completely correctly written atomics/lock-free code.
jacquesm 6y ago
> That would set a terrible precedent for personal computing. That precedent was set about a decade ago, and even here on HN there is a vast crowd of people who happily support(ed) that.
jws 6y ago
It kills every application whose developer doesn't issue an update in the next 12 months. If you buy an ARM based Mac and your favorite app doesn't work it was abandoned by the developer. As a developer there is a nuisance of one more damn thing to test, but compared to the nuisance iOS developers go through to make sure it looks nice on all the different sized devices, testing on an ARM before release isn't bad. Having developed through the 68k-to-PPC and the PPC-to-x86 and the x86-to-amd64 days I think I can safely say I never had a problem with any code in a transition¹². There are developers that will, if you have written optimized vector code or some such and you care to also be highly performant on the ARM you will be spending resources to make sure you map onto whatever the hardware provides, but you've been doing that for the various Intel instruction set changes anyway. ␄ ¹ I'm not saying architecture doesn't matter, doing early ARM porting for Debian I can tell you having C "char" be unsigned was a huge pain in the codebase. But Apple has control top to bottom and has every incentive to make it easy for developers, if only for themselves. ²At least not any problems bad enough to leave a mark on my memory. I'm sure I had to learn about intptr_t sometime after it was invented and probably learned a lesson about size_t at some point.
- int_19h 6y ago
  An app that isn't updated in 12 months isn't necessarily "abandoned". It can also be complete.
  - snazz 6y ago
    Yes, but recompiling it for a new processor architecture shouldn't be a huge energy expenditure. For better or worse, applications meant to run on "moving target" operating systems like macOS need to be updated.
    - anonymoushn 6y ago
      I think the first two steps of this process are to pay Apple $100 and try to build the software under a newer version of XCode. Based on my experience trying to build XLD under any version of XCode this seems like it will probably take a person-week or so.

zapzupnz 6y ago

> I imagine they'll have to provide some sort of x86/amd64 compat layer Just like they did with the mk86->ppc transition, just like they did with the ppc->x86 transition. > I hope they don't also continue to lock down macos Let's not confuse moving Macs to ARM processors with turning Macs into iOS devices. Apple has always treated the OS families differently and will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs.

darrmit 6y ago
> will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs Will they, though? Because Catalina seems like a giant step in the wrong direction if you’re thinking they’re acknowledging the developer - or even power user - need. Seems to me they’ve doubled down on the iOS approach to macOS.
- antipaul 6y ago
  In Catalina, I see the move towards these macOS & iOS compatible apps ("Catalyst") as making it easier to develop apps for both. It's a service for developers, if you will (I am not an app developer!) I don't necessarily see it as trying to create a single OS for both desktop and mobile.
  - darrmit 6y ago
    To be clear: I’m not saying they’re trying to create a single OS. I’m saying the “Apple knows best” concepts they’re applying to macOS that are seemingly inspired by iOS are very hostile to a large part of their user base.
    - antipaul 6y ago
      Fair, thanks for clarifying! I, in fact, find the catalyst apps on macOS still needing work. And I’m talking the Apple ones: Music, News
      - salutis 6y ago
        Music is not a Catalyst app. Did you mean the new Podcasts app? Music is a trimmed down version of iTunes which is a Cocoa app.
        zapzupnz 6y ago
        Trimmed down in some respects, buggier and slower in others. It may seem to be a Catalyst to some because many aspects of the UI severely regressed to custom implementations of standard Cocoa controls that iTunes 12 used.
john_alan 6y ago
Exactly. The exec team have confirmed that including Schiller in recent interviews. macOS is for everything, including Dev. They need that for the ecosystem. Look at the new Mac Pro ffs. Can’t most apps just recompile to support new chip? We don’t need fat binaries right?
- jacquesm 6y ago
  And they'll continue to say that right until the moment they yank the rug out from under you when all the pieces are in place.
  - macintux 6y ago
    The trop that your logic falls into is there's no way to disprove Apple will ever do this. 10 years from now, we'll probably be having the same argument, and people will be pointing to the latest release of macOS and complaining that surely this one means the end is nigh.
    - zapzupnz 6y ago
      Indeed. I've been hearing people crow on about this since Lion. That was 10 years ago. OS X might be macOS now, but it's still fundamentally the same OS.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      But there is an easy way to prove that they will and that 10 year horizon is short enough that I believe it will happen. Apple never cared about developers, they care about moving units and profits. Right now they are not getting a slice of the action of all software sales for the Mac and that must be a temptation they find hard to resist. Remember how they turned their backs on the creative people that kept them alive for over a decade when everybody else had switched to windows? Similar story, similar ending.
mikepurvis 6y ago
I wouldn't be so sure. Apple was happy to leave behind "pro" customers who needed floppy drives (1998), optical drives and ethernet (2013), and USB ports (2017). Sure, the industry ended up following them on a lot of this, but that should be as much a cause for concern as the rest of it. An awful lot of the pro audio / video work that happens on high end Apple hardware could absolutely happen on a machine where the only software comes in via an app store.
- loktarogar 6y ago
  > Apple was happy to leave behind "pro" customers who needed floppy drives (1998), optical drives and ethernet (2013), and USB ports (2017). sure, but all that functionality remained externally - just not as part of the laptop. locking down the laptop is fundamentally different.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  I don't know if those are the best examples. You can still plug a floppy drive or an ethernet adapter into a 2020 macbook pro's usb port. I think what they did was they changed what it looks like to be a pro user. The average user gets a sleak experience while a "pro" user is going to have a docking station. I actually like that they transitioned to the docking station approach. It means two things: 1. I have a lighter macbook pro for work travel 2. At my desk, one single cable: charges the computer; connects two additional monitors, ethernet, keyboard, mouse, sd card reader, high speed storage, and a scanner. I much prefer that one single cable vs the bundle of cables I used to have to plug/unplug each time I wanted to take or return my computer.
jl6 6y ago
How would we expect a amd64->ARM compatibility layer to work? Emulation? Do we have any reason to think that would achieve acceptable performance?
- martinald 6y ago
  Windows already does x86 to arm (not 64bit yet) in Windows on ARM and it works fine. Can play games and stuff ok on it, so definitely "acceptable". Not sure if great, but it's definitely usable.
dathinab 6y ago
> Let's not confuse moving Macs to ARM processors with turning Macs into iOS devices. I wouldn't be surprised if they just do that. Ship the lower end laptops with ARM and either an extended iOS or a constrained MacOS. > Apple has always treated the OS families differently and will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs. But the different needs part only really applies for the high end Mac Books and from apples POV might no longer be a think if you can develop Swift/Objective-C and similar on iOS.

gh02t 6y ago

They did it before with Rosetta when they switched to Intel. Times and uses are different, but it'd be hard to imagine otherwise.

Kovah 6y ago

On the one side, locking down the Mac even more would be the worst idea Apple could have because this would push even more users out of their system. On the other side, looking back at the past few years, it is quite possible that they do so. The recent changes in both their OS and hardware indicate that they absolutely don't care about their pro users. Hard to predict which path they choose, but I try to stay positive and assume that they have at least one manager capable of thinking rational and in favor of the pro users.

slantyyz 6y ago

I would guess that they'd target these to light usage consumers first, i.e., the people who are somewhere in that weird place between ipads (but not pro) and macbook airs. I tend to think that Safari, iPhoto, iMovie iWork, Mail, Calendar and maybe Office support (initially) would be more than enough for that segment of users.

lumost 6y ago
Shipping for the high end first may also be a statement. It would motivate flagship app developers to invest in arm optimizations.

trthomps 6y ago

Honestly as a dev, this would make life a lot easier for a lot of engineers. People who care about openness will still have Linux and it's variants. The general population does not need that level of flexibility and just adds to the cost of developing / managing software. Web browsers wouldn't have taken off if writing thick apps and distributing them for Windows/MacOS was as easy to support as writing an iOS/Android app is today.

efficax 6y ago

Likely you'll just be able to ship fat applications that have binaries for x86 and ARM code with one click in Xcode

dathinab 6y ago
That is if you have a Apple only application using Swift/Objectiv-C maybe C/C++. Also don't forget that ARM has weaker memory ordering, so expect to see some fallout from not completely correctly written atomics/lock-free code.

jacquesm 6y ago

> That would set a terrible precedent for personal computing. That precedent was set about a decade ago, and even here on HN there is a vast crowd of people who happily support(ed) that.

jws 6y ago

It kills every application whose developer doesn't issue an update in the next 12 months. If you buy an ARM based Mac and your favorite app doesn't work it was abandoned by the developer. As a developer there is a nuisance of one more damn thing to test, but compared to the nuisance iOS developers go through to make sure it looks nice on all the different sized devices, testing on an ARM before release isn't bad. Having developed through the 68k-to-PPC and the PPC-to-x86 and the x86-to-amd64 days I think I can safely say I never had a problem with any code in a transition¹². There are developers that will, if you have written optimized vector code or some such and you care to also be highly performant on the ARM you will be spending resources to make sure you map onto whatever the hardware provides, but you've been doing that for the various Intel instruction set changes anyway. ␄ ¹ I'm not saying architecture doesn't matter, doing early ARM porting for Debian I can tell you having C "char" be unsigned was a huge pain in the codebase. But Apple has control top to bottom and has every incentive to make it easy for developers, if only for themselves. ²At least not any problems bad enough to leave a mark on my memory. I'm sure I had to learn about intptr_t sometime after it was invented and probably learned a lesson about size_t at some point.

int_19h 6y ago
An app that isn't updated in 12 months isn't necessarily "abandoned". It can also be complete.
- snazz 6y ago
  Yes, but recompiling it for a new processor architecture shouldn't be a huge energy expenditure. For better or worse, applications meant to run on "moving target" operating systems like macOS need to be updated.
  - anonymoushn 6y ago
    I think the first two steps of this process are to pay Apple $100 and try to build the software under a newer version of XCode. Based on my experience trying to build XLD under any version of XCode this seems like it will probably take a person-week or so.