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I remember Apple's m68k to PowerPC transition. Platform changes were a much bigger deal back then because it determined what kinds of apps you could run, but ev
by wenc 6y ago
I remember Apple's m68k to PowerPC transition. Platform changes were a much bigger deal back then because it determined what kinds of apps you could run, but even so it went without a hitch. We lived with fat binaries for a while but otherwise it wasn't a big deal.
Apple's focus has always been the consumer market, and for most consumers, they're not likely to notice the platform change.
One might say, Apple gained a huge developer demographic when it moved to x64 from PowerPC, won't this matter to them? But most of those developers were creative types that don't work at the binary level anyway. If you're doing front-end web dev on VS Code and almost never fire up gcc/clang, your life isn't going to be impacted significantly.
Those whose lives were impacted (e.g. scientific computing folks who struggled to get certain Linux-specific software to compile on what was a BSD-ish platform) have probably moved off the Apple platform and on to Intel Linux years ago or at least they're likely to be running a Linux VM on their Macbook Pros. (homebrew doesn't really cut it)
Also unlike back in the day when most people were still running desktop apps, so much of what we do on a daily basis is on the browser nowadays. Calendar? Cloud-based. Email? Cloud-based. Word processor/spreadsheet/presentation? Cloud-based -- and Microsoft Office is being ported to ARM. We're living in much more platform-agnostic world than we were even 10 years ago.
I expect the x64 to ARM transition to be seamless to most people who are currently on the macOS platform.
A bunch of Python wheels might need to be recompiled though.
- kllrnohj 6y ago> I expect the x64 to ARM transition to be seamless to most people who are currently on the macOS platform. I completely agree with you IF Apple contains this to just the Macbook market. If they push this to iMac Pro / Mac Pro, too, though? Or even Macbook Pro? That's a different story. For developers it probably won't matter much, but for users currently relying on things like Protools to make a living? There's a good chance this won't be a friendly transition to them in the short term.
- wenc 6y agoThe pro tools (like Pro Tools) are usually the tools that are being ported first. It was the same with all the other transitions. If not, there will be Universal 2 binaries with both x64/Intel binaries for a while and an emulation mode for legacy binaries. Underoptimized at first? Maybe, but they work well enough and performance catches up eventually -- the transition is over 2 years. Same situation as before. Software that work will continue to work on existing and new hardware for a while. Nothing is going to stop working the moment the new processors come out. We've seen all this happen before (m68k - PowerPC - Intel). And it's really not a problem.
- beervirus 6y agoDid the keynote give any indication that some machines would stay on Intel?
- wenc 6y agoYes, at the 1:46:10 mark. Tim Cook says they have some Intel based Macs in the pipeline.