3 ms·

All those thinking of buying the new MBA, are you not concerned about availability of applications? Not all x86 applications will have an ARM alternative, yet.

jackvalentine 6y ago
There are a few exceptions but... https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/about_the_rosetta_translation_environment https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...
minxomat 6y ago
Had access to a DTK, and know even more devs who have one. Even that machine could run essentially all x86 software just fine with Rosetta (including things like dynamically loaded plugins). Only thing missing is virtualization, but that's coming soon (Docker & Parallels are working with Apple).
tambourine_man 6y ago
Nope. This transition will be fast. Not like PPC -> Intel at all. Everyone is on Xcode these days and using much higher level frameworks. Adobe and Microsoft already announced early 2021 availability of native binaries. Besides, Rosetta 2 is even more impressive than the original was. I’m betting it will be a breeze. 6 months in and almost everything will be native.
sharkjacobs 6y ago
Rosetta 2 sounds pretty good > fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1 > …and ~14 nanoseconds on an M1 emulating an Intel https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238434235568128 https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262384342355... I won't be replacing my workstation this weekend but then, I won't be updating it to Big Sur just yet either. I am getting a new personal machine sometime in the next year though I don't imagine I'll be buying an Intel Mac.
plorkyeran 6y ago
I haven't encountered any problems running x86 programs on the DTK. Performance is fine (with a slower CPU than the MBA) and everything I tried running worked. I'm sure someone will hit problems once a few orders of magnitude more people are using it, but most people won't.
jb1991 6y ago
Several benchmarks have shown that popular x86 apps running in Rosetta on the M1 still run faster than running on native x86 on other machines, so it's probably not going to be an issue.

jackvalentine 6y ago

There are a few exceptions but... https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/about_the_rosetta_translation_environment https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...

minxomat 6y ago

Had access to a DTK, and know even more devs who have one. Even that machine could run essentially all x86 software just fine with Rosetta (including things like dynamically loaded plugins). Only thing missing is virtualization, but that's coming soon (Docker & Parallels are working with Apple).

tambourine_man 6y ago

Nope. This transition will be fast. Not like PPC -> Intel at all. Everyone is on Xcode these days and using much higher level frameworks. Adobe and Microsoft already announced early 2021 availability of native binaries. Besides, Rosetta 2 is even more impressive than the original was. I’m betting it will be a breeze. 6 months in and almost everything will be native.

sharkjacobs 6y ago

Rosetta 2 sounds pretty good > fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1 > …and ~14 nanoseconds on an M1 emulating an Intel https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238434235568128 https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262384342355... I won't be replacing my workstation this weekend but then, I won't be updating it to Big Sur just yet either. I am getting a new personal machine sometime in the next year though I don't imagine I'll be buying an Intel Mac.

plorkyeran 6y ago

I haven't encountered any problems running x86 programs on the DTK. Performance is fine (with a slower CPU than the MBA) and everything I tried running worked. I'm sure someone will hit problems once a few orders of magnitude more people are using it, but most people won't.

jb1991 6y ago

Several benchmarks have shown that popular x86 apps running in Rosetta on the M1 still run faster than running on native x86 on other machines, so it's probably not going to be an issue.