10 ms·

I'm getting closer and closer to that Linux transition I've been putting off for years.

by unicornporn 6y ago

mlindner 6y ago
Because Apple is switching to Arm for better performance?
- 1_player 6y ago
  [benchmarks needed]
  - jbverschoor 6y ago
    Look at the transition dev kit. Also, look at the intel’s iris vs apple’s gpu
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Look at what from the transition kit? The only thing available show it having single-core performance that would have been state-of-the-art ten years ago. Is there something newer and more impressive?
    - neogodless 6y ago
      Shouldn't you compare to Intel Xe for integrated graphics performance?
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        No, when you're trying to disrespect Intel it's customary to compare announced imaginary parts to obsolete Intel parts.
  - mlindner 6y ago
    They will come, when the computers are available. But Apple wouldn't invest in doing it at great expensive if it didn't produce a better more competitive product.
- redvenom 6y ago
  Well, Apple is moving towards increasingly locked down systems. For example, it is very difficult if not impossible to install Linux on the most recent Macbooks. Previously when Apple stopped supporting a Mac, you could install Linux on it. I suspect with the ARM systems going forward, that will become even more difficult. In other words, it is not just about better performance. It is also about Apple removing your freedoms with your own hardware in the name of 'security'. (I am not saying that there isn't increased security, but at what price?)
  - jbverschoor 6y ago
    At around $25 a month if your laptop lasts for 6 years
    - qz2 6y ago
      I think I got 18 months out of my last two MacBooks before they gave out. Moved to windows desktops now. Much better value propositions, especially now as we don’t have to go out any more! :)
      - jbverschoor 6y ago
        Ouch.. I guess I was lucky.
        ownagefool 6y ago
        I'm on a late 2013 which I've only actually paid for a battery replacement on, so I can anecdote believe you. I'm not in love with macos though and there's more good options nowadays than there was in 2013.
        coldtea 6y ago
        Or the parent was unlucky - with some faulty production units, and the general case for most people, with hundreds of millions of units sold and the highest customer satisfaction ratings, is not that.
        6y ago
- Shivetya 6y ago
  better performance only if your desired software runs on the new processor. if not then what do you have? I am a light weight user in the Mac world, browsing and some games. However the few games left after the Catalina change to drop 32 bit support are still important to me. One of the publishers has preemptively dropped support for Mac and its near impossible to tell if others will continue support into AS. I know, there is a crowd out there that loves to declare "you should not use your Mac for games" along with "Buy a system for games then". Well let me be blunt, if it cannot serve both purposes then it serves none which means leaving the platform behind. So I look at AS with excitement and trepidation all at the same time with the realization my current Mac may well be my last.
  - gumby 6y ago
    Didn’t Wendker demo a video game running under emulation? That should work fine for your 64 bit games. And it’s not like your old hardware will suddenly stop working. If you want to place PS2 games you need an old PS2, and this is the same. Also, along the line of your old hardware still working: no need to upgrade any time soon.
    - yurishimo 6y ago
      I’m hopeful we’ll see something similar to the move Steam has made for old Pc games. With a little love, devs can usually get an old Windows 95 game running as we’ve seen in the past few years. If the Apple silicon is powerful enough, it might not matter if there is a huge performance hit for the emulation. It’ll be an interesting next 5 years for sure.
  - socialdemocrat 6y ago
    Rosetta 2 translates x86 instructions to ARM and cache result. That translation seems quite good given that they demonstrated a complex 3D game running translated code on ARM hardware much weaker than what Apple will deliver in laptops. Honestly I think x86 games will run better on these ARM laptops. Keep in mind x86 on laptops don’t work great. Apple could outperform most of their x86 laptops with a passively cooled ARM tablet. An ARM laptop with active cooling will destroy their x86 lineup. Besides you also get the whole iOS games catalog now which is much larger than the macOS game selection.
- unicornporn 6y ago
  > Because Apple is switching to Arm for better performance? Because I wont be able to run Windows in Fusion without a very big performance hit.
chelovek89 6y ago
If you value the attention to aesthetics and UX Apple has you might want to give Pop! OS a try. It's based on Ubuntu.
- acidbaseextract 6y ago
  Cool — one of the major blockers on moving to Linux for me was fractional scaling support. I have 4K monitors but can't use them with tiny text. I like PopOS a lot, but they didn't have fractional scaling support. It looks like they do now as of Oct 5!
  - singlow 6y ago
    I've been using 4k with linux for years. On large desktop screens I don't find fractional scaling to be necessary. The important text in apps that matter like terminals, text editors and browsers, chat clients, etc, has always supported scaling well. The only thing that lacked support were system dialogs and title bars. 2x was fine for those until fractional support came out in gnome recently.
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Ubuntu is a pretty good substitute for macOS. My key issue with Linux is the small selection of productivity apps: markdown editors, code editors, drawing packages, password managers like 1Password. Feature rich terminal apps like iTerm2. Well designed Git UI clients like Tower etc. The rest is pretty good. Like the core UI, file manager, virtual desktop management, configuration etc works very well. Much nicer than the Windows mess.
- unicornporn 6y ago
  I'm already trying out Manjaro XFCE and I'm liking it a lot.
snazz 6y ago
If anything, Arm MacBooks have a huge advantage over my current (old) ThinkPad—battery life and performance per watt will be significantly better. I haven't read much more about the new virtualization tech that was announced at WWDC, but that's also exciting for running Linux on the Mac. What about Arm Macs pushes you away from the platform?
- andrekandre 6y ago
  not the op, but for me... 1. the big sur ui is not very attractive (i know it sounds arbitrary, but big sur just looks very non-desktop, very fischer price, and i have no alterantive since catalina wont be supported) 2. virtualization for x86_64 apps, that wont last forever, and at some point those x86 binaries wont work anymore (i already lost a ton of apps with catalina...) 3. for my work i already need vmware alot, and the idea of running even half-speed at best is a non-starter -- that being said, as a consummer oriented device, or an iphone/ipad app developer machine i think its defintely going to do well
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Also, Apple services in Big Sur circumventing VPNs and Little Snitch is a complete nonstarter for me. I’m staying on Catalina with an Intel Mac for the foreseeable future.
  - ricketycricket 6y ago
    VMWare won't run x86 Windows or Linux at all, much less at half speed: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/about_the_rosetta_translation_environment https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >1. the big sur ui is not very attractive (i know it sounds arbitrary, but big sur just looks very non-desktop, very fischer price, and i have no alterantive since catalina wont be supported) I find these "this look fischer price/non-desktop" like hearing goth teenagers wanting something darker and more edgy -- well, the "pro" mentality equivalent, where if it doesn't look boring and beize it's not good. It's a mighty fine look, nothing fischer prize about it, and hardly that different from the previous iteration. If anything it much less fischer prize than the original Aqua interface and its 4-5 next iterations, which was praised as a great looking ("lickable") UI.
na85 6y ago
Moving from Intel to ARM is a reason to stay with Mac if you ask me. Intel has been holding computing back with their inefficient architecture, and anything that drives innovation away from x86 is a good thing in my mind. Much as I dislike some of Apple's practices I think making ARM more mainstream is a trend I want to see continue.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  Exactly, and maybe arm clouds will be more popular
- api 6y ago
  No idea why this is being downvoted. Does anyone here like the X86 ISA? Sure its been made fast, but that's been quite an uphill battle against things like its complex instruction decoders and limited decoder parallelism. If the same engineering had been put into making ARM fast, ARM would be far faster than X86 is today.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    The fact is that x86 has 4 decades of backwards compatibility which along with the PC architecture means a reasonably open and documented platform. Every ARM system is different and they are all lacking the heritage of public documentation that the PC has. In other words, it's not about performance but freedom. I doubt Apple will ever release as much detailed information on its own chips as Intel and AMD have. x86 is plenty fast anyway, and still wins on code density in single-threaded scalar (i.e. NOT using the vector units) branchy code of the sort commonly found in average applications.
    - klelatti 6y ago
      Genuine question - what is lacking in Arm documentation that Intel provides?
      - gumby 6y ago
        Essentially all the supposedly merchant SoCs are proprietary. Instead of shipping data sheets, winbond or mediatek want to ship you a reference design with reference linux or android build that only works because of a huge binary blob. There’s a small hardware consulting company in Palo Alto whose main differentiator is that they have a bunch of folks in China who manage to generate docs they can use. I’m guessing this involves a lot of under the table leaks and late night alcohol-fueled discussions.
coolspot 6y ago
Speaking from experience, just do not try any fringe distro. Pick one of the top 3 popular ones - they are much better in little things that you will appreciate.
- klodolph 6y ago
  It’s good advice but I’m not sure how you count “top 3 popular distros” these days. A lot of people into Linux seem to go through a phase where they try out a rolling release distro like Arch or Gentoo, and then after a couple years get sick of dealing with broken systems & switch to something more stable like Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint/etc. As I get older, the amount of system administration and customization of my system that I want to do is dropping rapidly. I barely even change the desktop wallpaper any more.
  - coolspot 6y ago
    Community size is good approximation and that is what drives features and your ability to find solution to a problem quckly. I would say top desktop distros (from most popular to least) are: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mint. Anything outside of this list is for tinkers who are not easily frustrated with issues.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      Yes, and I’d say more than that—tinkers who are specifically interested in tinkering with Linux desktop administration. I’ll do a ridiculous amount of work on some hobby project, but if a system update breaks my WiFi adapter, then I’m tinkering around and facing frustrating issues with WiFi drivers, which sucks, when I really want to be tinkering around and facing frustrating issues with my hobby project, which is awesome. It’s like: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/asfgcj/bad_screen/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/asfgcj/bad_screen... Same reason I switched to AMD GPUs. Getting the Nvidia cards working on Linux is just a distraction from whatever I really want to do.
john_alan 6y ago
Yeah. I’m a long time Mac user. Like 17 years, I’m keen on it because UNIX and pretty. I was looking at Arch + KDE plasma and it’s really tempting. I returned a 16inch MBP recently as it kept crashing on shutdown. macOS on intel is a mess and so is the T2. And I’m a fanboy. I’ve made a deal with myself. If these new Apple Si machines are blow away I’ll try again. Else I’m buying a Lenovo Legion and moving to Arch. Not sure what to do for a phone but probably stay with iOS.
- eecc 6y ago
  I'm currently waiting (and cursing) Lenovo for delaying delivery of the AMD T14 I paid for in September. I'm a bit worried for my precious free time that will be wasted on fending off the thousand-cuts onslaught of bugs, but I'm willing to try. It's gotten to this Tim (and Jony). After ~15 uninterrupted years.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >I returned a 16inch MBP recently as it kept crashing on shutdown. macOS on intel is a mess and so is the T2. And I’m a fanboy. macOS on Intel is a mess because a particular 16inch MBP "kept crashing on shutdown"? As if Windows and Linux running machines don't have cases where they keep running on shutdown? macOS/T2 has bugs like all software, but this is not some general state of macOS/T2, which runs fine without "crashing on shutdown" for hundreds of millions of other people (including those with MBP16). How about it's some particular production run / unit, and or some particular app? (Which can happen for any vendor / OS)
  - john_alan 6y ago
    Clearly I understand that. I had 3 replacements. Each one I could reproduce a hard crash on reboot. There are many many kps. It’s widespread.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      That's fair, that's a lot of replacements.
coldtea 6y ago
Don't let the door hit you on your way out...
Austin_Conlon 6y ago
Will 2021 be the year of desktop ARM?
- klelatti 6y ago
  Could be. Pi and Mac announcements on the same day!
sys_64738 6y ago
I couldn't transition to a Linux laptop as I don't think it has optimal battery life nor does the trackpad feel as Mac-like as I need it to be. But I could see ARM Mac laptops being used by a lot of people for connecting to real systems that are still x86. In other words, the Mac laptop is a browser machine or a display to a real work VM. I think ARM is the nail in the coffin of the non-laptop Mac brand though.
- john_alan 6y ago
  Why you don’t think arm can function on iMac scale? https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/02/apple-smaller-mac-pro-apple-silicon/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/02/apple-smaller-mac-pro-a...
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  You say that because you think ARM gives toy performance when everything actually points to Apple Silicon will be a performance beast. It may not beat the big x86 gaming rigs but I am quite confident that the highest performance laptops of any kind in the next few year will all be ARM based. iMac and Mac Mini are also small enclosures which will benefit from ARM performance wise. All that matters is really watt per performance and dollars relative to performance and there ARM already beats intel. To beat an x86 intel is just a matter of throwing in enough cores. AMD will be harder as their performance relative to cost is better than ARM and intel. But there is nothing special about beating intel at this point.
midrus 6y ago
I already did. Couldn't be happier.

I'm getting closer and closer to that Linux transition I've been putting off for years.

mlindner 6y ago

Because Apple is switching to Arm for better performance?

1_player 6y ago
[benchmarks needed]
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  Look at the transition dev kit. Also, look at the intel’s iris vs apple’s gpu
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Look at what from the transition kit? The only thing available show it having single-core performance that would have been state-of-the-art ten years ago. Is there something newer and more impressive?
  - neogodless 6y ago
    Shouldn't you compare to Intel Xe for integrated graphics performance?
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      No, when you're trying to disrespect Intel it's customary to compare announced imaginary parts to obsolete Intel parts.
- mlindner 6y ago
  They will come, when the computers are available. But Apple wouldn't invest in doing it at great expensive if it didn't produce a better more competitive product.
redvenom 6y ago
Well, Apple is moving towards increasingly locked down systems. For example, it is very difficult if not impossible to install Linux on the most recent Macbooks. Previously when Apple stopped supporting a Mac, you could install Linux on it. I suspect with the ARM systems going forward, that will become even more difficult. In other words, it is not just about better performance. It is also about Apple removing your freedoms with your own hardware in the name of 'security'. (I am not saying that there isn't increased security, but at what price?)
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  At around $25 a month if your laptop lasts for 6 years
  - qz2 6y ago
    I think I got 18 months out of my last two MacBooks before they gave out. Moved to windows desktops now. Much better value propositions, especially now as we don’t have to go out any more! :)
    - jbverschoor 6y ago
      Ouch.. I guess I was lucky.
      - ownagefool 6y ago
        I'm on a late 2013 which I've only actually paid for a battery replacement on, so I can anecdote believe you. I'm not in love with macos though and there's more good options nowadays than there was in 2013.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        Or the parent was unlucky - with some faulty production units, and the general case for most people, with hundreds of millions of units sold and the highest customer satisfaction ratings, is not that.
      - 6y ago
Shivetya 6y ago
better performance only if your desired software runs on the new processor. if not then what do you have? I am a light weight user in the Mac world, browsing and some games. However the few games left after the Catalina change to drop 32 bit support are still important to me. One of the publishers has preemptively dropped support for Mac and its near impossible to tell if others will continue support into AS. I know, there is a crowd out there that loves to declare "you should not use your Mac for games" along with "Buy a system for games then". Well let me be blunt, if it cannot serve both purposes then it serves none which means leaving the platform behind. So I look at AS with excitement and trepidation all at the same time with the realization my current Mac may well be my last.
- gumby 6y ago
  Didn’t Wendker demo a video game running under emulation? That should work fine for your 64 bit games. And it’s not like your old hardware will suddenly stop working. If you want to place PS2 games you need an old PS2, and this is the same. Also, along the line of your old hardware still working: no need to upgrade any time soon.
  - yurishimo 6y ago
    I’m hopeful we’ll see something similar to the move Steam has made for old Pc games. With a little love, devs can usually get an old Windows 95 game running as we’ve seen in the past few years. If the Apple silicon is powerful enough, it might not matter if there is a huge performance hit for the emulation. It’ll be an interesting next 5 years for sure.
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Rosetta 2 translates x86 instructions to ARM and cache result. That translation seems quite good given that they demonstrated a complex 3D game running translated code on ARM hardware much weaker than what Apple will deliver in laptops. Honestly I think x86 games will run better on these ARM laptops. Keep in mind x86 on laptops don’t work great. Apple could outperform most of their x86 laptops with a passively cooled ARM tablet. An ARM laptop with active cooling will destroy their x86 lineup. Besides you also get the whole iOS games catalog now which is much larger than the macOS game selection.
unicornporn 6y ago
> Because Apple is switching to Arm for better performance? Because I wont be able to run Windows in Fusion without a very big performance hit.

chelovek89 6y ago

If you value the attention to aesthetics and UX Apple has you might want to give Pop! OS a try. It's based on Ubuntu.

acidbaseextract 6y ago
Cool — one of the major blockers on moving to Linux for me was fractional scaling support. I have 4K monitors but can't use them with tiny text. I like PopOS a lot, but they didn't have fractional scaling support. It looks like they do now as of Oct 5!
- singlow 6y ago
  I've been using 4k with linux for years. On large desktop screens I don't find fractional scaling to be necessary. The important text in apps that matter like terminals, text editors and browsers, chat clients, etc, has always supported scaling well. The only thing that lacked support were system dialogs and title bars. 2x was fine for those until fractional support came out in gnome recently.
socialdemocrat 6y ago
Ubuntu is a pretty good substitute for macOS. My key issue with Linux is the small selection of productivity apps: markdown editors, code editors, drawing packages, password managers like 1Password. Feature rich terminal apps like iTerm2. Well designed Git UI clients like Tower etc. The rest is pretty good. Like the core UI, file manager, virtual desktop management, configuration etc works very well. Much nicer than the Windows mess.
unicornporn 6y ago
I'm already trying out Manjaro XFCE and I'm liking it a lot.

snazz 6y ago

If anything, Arm MacBooks have a huge advantage over my current (old) ThinkPad—battery life and performance per watt will be significantly better. I haven't read much more about the new virtualization tech that was announced at WWDC, but that's also exciting for running Linux on the Mac. What about Arm Macs pushes you away from the platform?

andrekandre 6y ago
not the op, but for me... 1. the big sur ui is not very attractive (i know it sounds arbitrary, but big sur just looks very non-desktop, very fischer price, and i have no alterantive since catalina wont be supported) 2. virtualization for x86_64 apps, that wont last forever, and at some point those x86 binaries wont work anymore (i already lost a ton of apps with catalina...) 3. for my work i already need vmware alot, and the idea of running even half-speed at best is a non-starter -- that being said, as a consummer oriented device, or an iphone/ipad app developer machine i think its defintely going to do well
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Also, Apple services in Big Sur circumventing VPNs and Little Snitch is a complete nonstarter for me. I’m staying on Catalina with an Intel Mac for the foreseeable future.
- ricketycricket 6y ago
  VMWare won't run x86 Windows or Linux at all, much less at half speed: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/about_the_rosetta_translation_environment https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...
- coldtea 6y ago
  >1. the big sur ui is not very attractive (i know it sounds arbitrary, but big sur just looks very non-desktop, very fischer price, and i have no alterantive since catalina wont be supported) I find these "this look fischer price/non-desktop" like hearing goth teenagers wanting something darker and more edgy -- well, the "pro" mentality equivalent, where if it doesn't look boring and beize it's not good. It's a mighty fine look, nothing fischer prize about it, and hardly that different from the previous iteration. If anything it much less fischer prize than the original Aqua interface and its 4-5 next iterations, which was praised as a great looking ("lickable") UI.

na85 6y ago

Moving from Intel to ARM is a reason to stay with Mac if you ask me. Intel has been holding computing back with their inefficient architecture, and anything that drives innovation away from x86 is a good thing in my mind. Much as I dislike some of Apple's practices I think making ARM more mainstream is a trend I want to see continue.

jbverschoor 6y ago
Exactly, and maybe arm clouds will be more popular
api 6y ago
No idea why this is being downvoted. Does anyone here like the X86 ISA? Sure its been made fast, but that's been quite an uphill battle against things like its complex instruction decoders and limited decoder parallelism. If the same engineering had been put into making ARM fast, ARM would be far faster than X86 is today.
- userbinator 6y ago
  The fact is that x86 has 4 decades of backwards compatibility which along with the PC architecture means a reasonably open and documented platform. Every ARM system is different and they are all lacking the heritage of public documentation that the PC has. In other words, it's not about performance but freedom. I doubt Apple will ever release as much detailed information on its own chips as Intel and AMD have. x86 is plenty fast anyway, and still wins on code density in single-threaded scalar (i.e. NOT using the vector units) branchy code of the sort commonly found in average applications.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    Genuine question - what is lacking in Arm documentation that Intel provides?
    - gumby 6y ago
      Essentially all the supposedly merchant SoCs are proprietary. Instead of shipping data sheets, winbond or mediatek want to ship you a reference design with reference linux or android build that only works because of a huge binary blob. There’s a small hardware consulting company in Palo Alto whose main differentiator is that they have a bunch of folks in China who manage to generate docs they can use. I’m guessing this involves a lot of under the table leaks and late night alcohol-fueled discussions.

coolspot 6y ago

Speaking from experience, just do not try any fringe distro. Pick one of the top 3 popular ones - they are much better in little things that you will appreciate.

klodolph 6y ago
It’s good advice but I’m not sure how you count “top 3 popular distros” these days. A lot of people into Linux seem to go through a phase where they try out a rolling release distro like Arch or Gentoo, and then after a couple years get sick of dealing with broken systems & switch to something more stable like Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint/etc. As I get older, the amount of system administration and customization of my system that I want to do is dropping rapidly. I barely even change the desktop wallpaper any more.
- coolspot 6y ago
  Community size is good approximation and that is what drives features and your ability to find solution to a problem quckly. I would say top desktop distros (from most popular to least) are: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mint. Anything outside of this list is for tinkers who are not easily frustrated with issues.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Yes, and I’d say more than that—tinkers who are specifically interested in tinkering with Linux desktop administration. I’ll do a ridiculous amount of work on some hobby project, but if a system update breaks my WiFi adapter, then I’m tinkering around and facing frustrating issues with WiFi drivers, which sucks, when I really want to be tinkering around and facing frustrating issues with my hobby project, which is awesome. It’s like: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/asfgcj/bad_screen/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/asfgcj/bad_screen... Same reason I switched to AMD GPUs. Getting the Nvidia cards working on Linux is just a distraction from whatever I really want to do.

john_alan 6y ago

Yeah. I’m a long time Mac user. Like 17 years, I’m keen on it because UNIX and pretty. I was looking at Arch + KDE plasma and it’s really tempting. I returned a 16inch MBP recently as it kept crashing on shutdown. macOS on intel is a mess and so is the T2. And I’m a fanboy. I’ve made a deal with myself. If these new Apple Si machines are blow away I’ll try again. Else I’m buying a Lenovo Legion and moving to Arch. Not sure what to do for a phone but probably stay with iOS.

eecc 6y ago
I'm currently waiting (and cursing) Lenovo for delaying delivery of the AMD T14 I paid for in September. I'm a bit worried for my precious free time that will be wasted on fending off the thousand-cuts onslaught of bugs, but I'm willing to try. It's gotten to this Tim (and Jony). After ~15 uninterrupted years.
coldtea 6y ago
>I returned a 16inch MBP recently as it kept crashing on shutdown. macOS on intel is a mess and so is the T2. And I’m a fanboy. macOS on Intel is a mess because a particular 16inch MBP "kept crashing on shutdown"? As if Windows and Linux running machines don't have cases where they keep running on shutdown? macOS/T2 has bugs like all software, but this is not some general state of macOS/T2, which runs fine without "crashing on shutdown" for hundreds of millions of other people (including those with MBP16). How about it's some particular production run / unit, and or some particular app? (Which can happen for any vendor / OS)
- john_alan 6y ago
  Clearly I understand that. I had 3 replacements. Each one I could reproduce a hard crash on reboot. There are many many kps. It’s widespread.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    That's fair, that's a lot of replacements.

coldtea 6y ago

Don't let the door hit you on your way out...

Austin_Conlon 6y ago

Will 2021 be the year of desktop ARM?

klelatti 6y ago
Could be. Pi and Mac announcements on the same day!

sys_64738 6y ago

I couldn't transition to a Linux laptop as I don't think it has optimal battery life nor does the trackpad feel as Mac-like as I need it to be. But I could see ARM Mac laptops being used by a lot of people for connecting to real systems that are still x86. In other words, the Mac laptop is a browser machine or a display to a real work VM. I think ARM is the nail in the coffin of the non-laptop Mac brand though.

john_alan 6y ago
Why you don’t think arm can function on iMac scale? https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/02/apple-smaller-mac-pro-apple-silicon/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/02/apple-smaller-mac-pro-a...
socialdemocrat 6y ago
You say that because you think ARM gives toy performance when everything actually points to Apple Silicon will be a performance beast. It may not beat the big x86 gaming rigs but I am quite confident that the highest performance laptops of any kind in the next few year will all be ARM based. iMac and Mac Mini are also small enclosures which will benefit from ARM performance wise. All that matters is really watt per performance and dollars relative to performance and there ARM already beats intel. To beat an x86 intel is just a matter of throwing in enough cores. AMD will be harder as their performance relative to cost is better than ARM and intel. But there is nothing special about beating intel at this point.

midrus 6y ago

I already did. Couldn't be happier.