7 ms·
It just feels wrong to buy anything new from Apple with "Intel Inside" - when they're clearly going to dump it soon, in favor of ARM (excuse me for not using th
by asadkn 6y ago
It just feels wrong to buy anything new from Apple with "Intel Inside" - when they're clearly going to dump it soon, in favor of ARM (excuse me for not using the cringey term Apple Silicon).
- dijit 6y agoWhy does it matter? There will be a period where the Intel Macs are still supported and probably more stable, and it could be ~2y before your upgrade is available if it's ARM based. If you have a retina macbook pro from 2014~ it definitely makes sense to upgrade to a macbook pro 16" today. The thing will see you through another 5-6y easy.
- ddavis 6y agoYeah I agree. Since this is an iMac thread.. I think notebooks will definitely be first to go ARM, and I wouldn't be surprised if the iMac user base would prefer that native x86 based processor for at least the next 5 years or so.
- asadkn 6y agoFair point. It does make sense if you really need to upgrade a very dated machine. However, I am assuming since the Macbooks are rumored to get ARM as early as late this year, it is likely iMac would follow next year too. The Developer Transition Kit has a Mac Mini with ARM already.
- freehunter 6y agoMy fear isn’t around Apple and OS-level support. My fear is around smaller or indie developers who are already being asked to support macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android and now have to support another target. It’s not uncommon to see these devs not supporting Android or Windows because they can’t keep up. So how long before those devs drop support for Intel Macs (or don’t support ARM Macs for several years)? For most apps it’ll be fine, emulation and cross compiling will be enough. There will be some apps where this isn’t enough though. When the App Store switched to 64-bit, how many apps just disappeared, never to be seen again? I fully support the transition and I think it’s a logical step for Apple, but it’s going to be one more thing that indie or smaller devs have to worry about. Which means it’s one more thing everyone on this forum has to worry about.
- josho 6y agoThe market size for intel mac users is far larger than arm on mac, and will be for the next several years.
- sukilot 6y agoEh, Rosetta.
- rbanffy 6y agoIt's trivially easy to build software for both ISAs from within Xcode, unless, of course, you are playing with Intel or ARM intrinsics or other pathologically non-portable thing, in which case it's anything but trivial. It's not much harder than supporting Linux on x86 and ARM.
- freehunter 6y agoAnd yet with the Raspberry Pi being so popular and being on the market for so long, there are still a lot of packages that don’t support ARM. It’s trivially easy to compile your iOS app for 64-bit as well, but like I mentioned... that transition left a lot of dead apps in its wake.
- rbanffy 6y agoSome packages don't support ARM because there is little demand for that. People won't use RPis for heavy number crunching or any demanding application. Until recently, you could barely go beyond 2 GB of RAM on any ARM platform and still very few ARM boards will support more RAM than that. Another issue is that most ARM hardware is underpowered and it takes a long time to build and test software on it. Not everyone is willing to do that. Apple is going to change the landscape with a mainstream ARM platform that can compete in specs with Intel desktops and laptops. Let's see what happens then. The dynamics of proprietary software are somewhat different from open source - unless you make a steady revenue from an app you launched some time ago, there is little incentive to dedicate resources to port it to a new platform (even if it's from 32 to 64 bits) unless you expect it to drive new sales. There is no penalty apart from lost potential revenue and a huge incentive to focus on the next product.
- rgbrenner 6y agoApple only supported PPC for about 3 years after the Intel transition... what are you basing 5-6 years of support on? Apple hasn't made that promise. And what user that is ok with a 6 year old computer is interested in spending several thousand on a new macbook that they're going to have to throw out in 3 years? The only user I can imagine that would be ok with the 16" macbook are the users that upgrade every 2-3 years... they can risk it and likely won't lose out on anything except maybe the resale value.
- radley 6y ago> If you have a retina macbook pro from 2014~ it definitely makes sense to upgrade to a macbook pro 16" today. Not really. Pre-2015 Retina MBP are just as efficient and far more flexible than later models. Wait for ARM.
- dawnerd 6y agoI’m guessing intel will be supported much longer than we think. They just (relatively speaking) launched the new Mac pros and I don’t see them switching that over to ARM quite as quickly.
- kossTKR 6y agoI still run my 2014 MBP model because it still seems better to me than the newer models. No touchbar instead classic function keys, HDMI output, 2 displayports + 2 usb3 ports, magsafe!, and most importantly a MicroSD drive i have put a Nifty 512GB card into, so i have 768GB of space of which 256 is from the SSD, - works perfectly. Having a small SD drive is so incredibly useful when you can buy half a terabyte of extra space for $100, granted not that fast but still useful as storage. The newer models are so incredibly expensive they make no sense to me when they remove features. ... so waiting for the ARM version.
- fluffy87 6y agoApple stopped shipping updates to PPC systems after the 2 year transition was over last time. So if you buy today, you’ll need a new system in less than 3 years
- ogre_codes 6y agoThis (and the 16" MacBook) are well timed upgrades. Apple is giving their more conservative/ cautious users a good upgrade choice right before they launch their new line. So if you want to stick with Intel, you can buy a system now and put off making the riskier move to ARM for a few years.
- johncalvinyoung 6y agoI'm sitting around waiting on the 2020 CPU revision of the 16" MBP. Will be getting that top GPU too. Just don't want to buy right now if we might get that CPU upgrade in the next 1-3 months.
- jetpackjoe 6y agoSame. Expecting 1 more iteration of the intel 16"
- sukilot 6y agoWhat's the point of maxing out CPU/GPU on a form factor that can't manage thermals?
- perfmode 6y agoowner of a 16” a question i ask myself video rendering throttles to 30% at steady state the top end CPU perf only lasts a minute or so before it throttles
- yborg 6y agoI think this is every Apple Intel platform. My i7 6-core Mini can manage about 30 seconds at full clock if they're all lit. One problem seems to be that the fan hysteresis is too long, it spins up the fan too slowly and the CPU is already throttling down before it reaches full airflow.
- noahtallen 6y agoTo be fair, it stops throttling when I hold it over the A/C unit. ;) /s
- kgwgk 6y agoOn the "advantages" side, buying intel now you get a powerful iMac that runs existing software, including Windows, and will be supported for years.
- naravara 6y ago>It just feels wrong to buy anything new from Apple with "Intel Inside" - when they're clearly going to dump it soon, I'd be very surprised if Apple Silicon is going to be competitive against the Xeons in their highest end machines any time soon, so they'll be bound to supporting Intel at the OS level for the foreseeable future. They've basically said as much. I suspect you should be able to get about 5 years, at least, before they start phasing things out.
- Veedrac 6y agoI don't think it'll be close to that long. Rumours are that they'll release an 8+4 core this year, which is enough for everything bar the top-end iMac Pro and Mac Pros, and I'm sure they can get out a 16+N core by 2021 or early 2022. That would be as fast as any Intel CPU on those models. And heck, the margins on those models are so large (they sell a $3000 Xeon W for $7000) that they could comfortably push past yield issues to throw out a larger die than that.
- naravara 6y agoGood point. I still think 5 years is a realistic time-horizon for how long before they start phasing Intel stuff out, but that could just be like that Bill Gates quote about how people tend to way overestimate how much progress will be made a year from now and way underestimate how much things will change 10 years from now.
- EricE 6y ago>I'd be very surprised if Apple Silicon is going to be competitive against the Xeons in their highest end machines any time soon I'll take that action :) I think it's going to be pretty dramatic. Or they wouldn't have bothered.
- coldtea 6y agoWhen buying a Mac one should factor in that they'll get a new one in 5-6 years (or earlier). In which case, buying an Intel now is fine -- there will be too many Intel Mac in 2-3-4-5-6 years for it not to be supported, and when it's near its last legs, it would be time to buy a new laptop anyway...
- s1t5 6y agoIsn't it way more risky to buy their first gen ARM computer than to buy something that will definitely work reliably (Intel)?
- owenwil 6y agoYes – anyone saying otherwise is an early adopter (so most of this site), but for the average user, an ARM-based device won't be perfect at launch. Plenty of apps (and games in particular) will outright not work; buying an Intel device now will mean support for 3+ years and avoiding transition pain, even if you miss out on 'new shiny' for a while.
- harrygeez 6y agoI guess people who buy Intel Macs now, they know what they're getting into. Plus, Intel Macs will still hold strong for at least another 3-4 years minimum, and it's definitely gonna live a lot longer
- rbanffy 6y agoI hope Apple makes it easy to install Linux when they withdraw OS support.
- stu2b50 6y ago>ARM (excuse me for not using the cringey term Apple Silicon). That makes less sense, though. Apple isn't using Arm's cpu architecture, just the ISC. Apple is switching from Intel chips with x86 to Apple chips with ARM. You should, when comparing, use one pair or the other. From x86 to arm Or From Intel to Apple
- Hackbraten 6y agoThe chip also contains a bunch of coprocessors which have little or nothing to do with ARM, e. g. the GPU. That’s one more reason to call the chips Apple chips, not ARM chips.
- rimjongun 6y agoBut your use of ARM is not encompassing of the entire change here. Apple Silicon is the whole SoC environment. All the custom cores, power management, specialized hardware decoding parts.. etc... This is far more than an instruction set change.
- skohan 6y agoIs it different from a developer prospective though? All those SOC changes will be handled inside whatever Apple API’s you’re using
- dcchambers 6y agoNah I think it's good news that apple is continuing to release Intel-based devices. It means all of us with existing Intel macs will get support for years and years to come.
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoAnyone in music should stick to Intel, maybe for as much as three years. The whole industry of music software is kind of weird… their products tend to be somewhat “closer to the metal” than typical software, even a bit more than video, graphics, CAD and 3D… improvements and bug fixes are few and far between. Also, like most artists (in my experience), musicians tend to learn one way of doing things very very well and getting them to try anything new is next to impossible.