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One thing people prophetizing about Apple ARM transition changing the industry tend to forget about: Apple is not a leader, but actually a latecomer in the ARM
by shantara 6y ago
One thing people prophetizing about Apple ARM transition changing the industry tend to forget about: Apple is not a leader, but actually a latecomer in the ARM space.
macOS is the last major OS getting ARM support. iOS and Android have been built with ARM support from the very beginning. The first commits working on ARM support for Linux have been made more than a decade ago. The first publicly released Windows on ARM hardware came out in 2012, and MS has undoubtedly have been working on it for years before the commercial release.
If anything would trigger an ARM transition on a massive scale, it would likely be the work invested in the high performance ARM hardware by the companies such as Amazon and Fujitsu.
- formerly_proven 6y agoLinux has supported ARM since the late 90s, actually. edit, source: https://github.com/mpe/linux-fullhistory/commit/3c2a0eb7ba89feae72613951f98baf5a48b156c3 https://github.com/mpe/linux-fullhistory/commit/3c2a0eb7ba89... ("initial ARM support", Linux 2.1.80, 20.1.1998)
- mjw1007 6y agoAs far as I know, the first commits working on ARM support for Linux were in 1994, which is quite a lot more than a decade ago. Debian has had an ARM port since 2000.
- empath75 6y agoiOS is Apple, too, you know.
- cwp 6y agoUh, you know that Apple makes iOS too, right?
- tpxl 6y agoWindows has and will run on x86/ARM Linux has and will run on x86/ARM MacOS has run on x86, and will run on ARM. People have a choice with the first two, not the third. This is why Apple going forward with this is a big deal.
- scarface74 6y agoARM was initially created as a joint venture between Apple and Acorn in the late 80s....
- rblatz 6y agoMacOS is built on Darwin, just like iOS.
- rdsnsca 6y agoApple first shipped an ARM device in 1993, the Newton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
- eyelidlessness 6y agoBesides the various mentions of iOS being on ARM, it's also worth mentioning iOS is a fork of macOS (née Mac OS X), and was explicitly branded as the same OS when the iPhone launched. In other words, macOS has been capable of running on ARM—at least internally at Apple—for 13 years. It's highly likely that Apple has maintained internal macOS ARM builds for every successive release since, if not since before the Intel transition. They had similarly maintained x86 builds of macOS from the time they began its development after the NeXT acquisition.
- philistine 6y agoKnowing how Apple had OS X running on Intel for years before they announced the switch, it wouldn’t surprise me if macOS has been running on ARM since Apple started making 64-bit chips all the way back to the A8.
- 0x0 6y agoApple was the first to release a mainstream computer device on the arm64 platform with its chips on the iPhone5s, and I believe this took the rest of the computing world by surprise, perhaps 1-2 years ahead of anyone else.