Apple Mac computers make jump to its own chips

[ChamomileShark]

This might give some of you who were to buy an Apple computer pause for thought, ie wait until the new machines are out.

I wonder what this will do to the plugin developers. Seems like Logic Pro has already been prepared for the change.

From the BBC

Apple has confirmed it will transition its Mac laptop and desktop computers to its own ARM-based processors.

The move means that Macs will run on the same type of chips as the firm's iPhones and iPads, rather than Intel's.

Intel had faced problems manufacturing its own designs, leading it to issue a public apology to computer-makers.

Apple's challenge will be to carry off the transition smoothly and convince third-party developers to update their apps accordingly.

"We expect to ship our first Mac with Apple silicon by the end of the year," said chief executive Tim Cook, adding that it would likely be two years before its full product line had made the jump.

The firm said the move would allow it to offer new features and improved performance as well as making it easier for developers to "write and optimise software for the entire Apple ecosystem".

"Apple's motivations for doing this include reducing its dependence on Intel, cutting the cost and boosting the performance of its silicon, and giving itself more flexibility and agility when it comes to future products," commented Geoff Blaber from the consultancy CCS Insight.

"Embracing ARM and making its hardware more consistent across the iPhone, iPad and Mac ranges is a strategic necessity, but there will be inevitable bumps along the road."

Apple said it had already developed native versions of several of its own apps, including Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro. iPhone and iPad apps will also be able to be run on the computers.

Apple said that Microsoft was working on an optimised version of Office, and Adobe was developing a version of Photoshop.

Other developers should be able to recompile their apps to get a version running "in just a matter of days," said the company's software chief Craig Federighi. He added that old apps would automatically be translated at point of installation to run, although they would not work as well.

To mark the significance of the move, MacOS will move to version 11. Since 2001, it had only moved from 10.0 to 10.15.
Apple silicon

Apple successfully made the switch from IBM-Motorola's PowerPC processors to Intel's x86 family in 2006.

However, some software was never updated and cannot easily be run on today's Mac computers. Apple dropped support for running older software under emulation in the 2011 release of its Mac operating system.

Microsoft already allows Windows 10 to be run on both Intel and ARM-based processors and looks set to continue supporting both chip architectures.

Apple has not stated how long it will do the same.

As a result, some people considering buying one of its laptop or desktop computers may decide to postpone a purchase until its first ARM-based computers go on sale.

This could hit sales both at Apple and the development studios that make software for the platform.

ARM-based chips are based on the designs of the UK-based company, which is headquartered in Cambridge. Other companies then adapt these to add capabilities of their own.

Samsung, Qualcomm and Huawei are among the many other companies to do so.

Apple is the fourth-largest PC vendor, according to market research firm Gartner, coming behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

The company has said that it has more than 100 million active Mac users. Back in June 2005, when it first announced the move to Intel chips, the figure was about 12.5 million.

"Apple is approximately 4.5% of the laptop market and 2.6% of the desktop market, so the financial impact to Intel will not be significant," commented Gartner's Jon Erensen.

"However, this transition... could give momentum to Microsoft's current efforts to run Windows on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors."

Edit: adding this

I came accross the possibility of this on Sonic Talk a week or so back. Yoad Nevo talked about it, he's one of the developers for Waves. I tried to copy the link for the correct time point in the video but it doesn't seem to work, so go to 34mins 57sec if you are interested.

[dayjob]

Rossetta2! i'm sure devs can't wait. i hope it's as painless as can be for devs.

[frizzbee]

Rossetta2! i'm sure devs can't wait. i hope it's as painless as can be for devs.

unfortunately Apple doesn't yet and never has cared to make it painless for devs

[agharta]

Why didn't they just buy McDonalds!

[RugerioDelStereo]

I am not worried. I was a mac user when Macs went from PPC to intel and that switch was quite seamless, from a user experience standpoint. As a developer you might have to invest about 2-5 days, depending on the complexity of your application, to get it all working on ARM.

From what I understand, there will be the same set of developer tools as when the Mac switched to Intel: Xcode, Rosetta 2, Universal Binary 2 and developer machines with ARM processors. Rosetta 2 is apparantly a lot faster than 15 years ago.

This IS a very considered and quite well set up transition to a different architecture. My guess is Apple will support MacOS on Intel for years to come. There's 100 million current (mostly intel) Mac users. You don't leave them in the cold.

[dayjob]

I am not worried. I was a mac user when Macs went from PPC to intel and that switch was quite seamless, from a user experience standpoint. As a developer you might have to invest about 2-5 days, depending on the complexity of your application, to get it all working on ARM.

From what I understand, there will be the same set of developer tools as when the Mac switched to Intel: Xcode, Rosetta 2, Universal Binary 2 and developer machines with ARM processors. Rosetta 2 is apparantly a lot faster than 15 years ago.

This IS a very considered and quite well set up transition to a different architecture. My guess is Apple will support MacOS on Intel for years to come. There's 100 million current (mostly intel) Mac users. You don't leave them in the cold.

fingers crossed.

it is what it is.

[FarleyCZ]

As a developer you might have to invest about 2-5 days, depending on the complexity of your application, to get it all working on ARM.

I would love to hear for example U-he's or any other devs opinion on this. I highly doubt it's gonna be seamless. ARM is a RISC processor. That means that there are instructions in x86 set that aren't available on ARM. Sometimes for one x86 instruction ARM has to do a several instructions on it's own. That's why Microsoft's attempts to run Windows on ARM failed miserably. The translator was just too slow. Even for the best Snapdragons. And if you build another layers of software and API's over it, it's gonna cost you even more CPU cycles. Yeah, your code will technically run on ARM, but at what CPU cost? That will make presure on devs to re-write the code completely straight for ARM platform. And I'm not really sure all of them have time and resources to do that. Big ones may be. But plugin devs? Dunno.

[rezoneight]

As a developer you might have to invest about 2-5 days, depending on the complexity of your application, to get it all working on ARM.

I would love to hear for example U-he's or any other devs opinion on this. I highly doubt it's gonna be seamless. ARM is a RISC processor. That means that there are instructions in x86 set that aren't available on ARM. Sometimes for one x86 instruction ARM has to do a several instructions on it's own. That's why Microsoft's attempts to run Windows on ARM failed miserably. The translator was just too slow. Even for the best Snapdragons. And if you build another layers of software and API's over it, it's gonna cost you even more CPU cycles. Yeah, your code will technically run on ARM, but at what CPU cost? That will make presure on devs to re-write the code completely straight for ARM platform. And I'm not really sure all of them have time and resources to do that. Big ones may be. But plugin devs? Dunno.

Except you're talking almost a decade ago and in the meantime Windows 10 runs pretty well on new ARM chips (Surface Pro X). And frankly nobody comes close to Apple in this space. The power is there already.

[revvy]

Ultimately I'm sure all will be fine. But it does make me pause about buying a Mac at the moment. My MacBook got trashed in a flood at work. Was simply going to replace it once the cash comes in but as it's basically my work laptop I'm probably not going to now do so. There's a Lenovo I can use, I'll stick with that until ARM machines are out.

[george]

New ARM chips may be more powerful but if assembly SSE x86 optimisations aren't properly translated to NEON it will result in a big performance hit. I can see a lot of work for specialised ARM coders on this switch.

[FarleyCZ]

Except you're talking almost a decade ago and in the meantime Windows 10 runs pretty well on new ARM chips (Surface Pro X). And frankly nobody comes close to Apple in this space. The power is there already.

...you mean the one that doesn't support 64bit instructions?

[Markus Krause]

We devs currently do not even know if our frameworks like vst or AU do still compile on the new Macs. There are a massive number of dependencies and most likely it will not be easy at all. Many old plugins will not be ported to ARM.

You can expect that the performance of Rosetta2 for emulating the Intel will be very slow. IntelX64 is very difficult to emulate, since it is a very complex processor.

I also doubt that the new machines will support OpenGL, which is deprecated by Apple. Seems quite a desaster, since a massive number of the recent plugins use it.

The ARM Macs are not only bad news if you want to do audio. It is also bad news if you play games. In the future less games will be ported to the Mac, since the the architecture is a lot more different than PC now. This means higher development costs for ports.

If you are a customer who is doing music I recommend to you to stick with the Intel as long as possible

[sacer]

a lot of plugin developer lost much time to make them catalina compatible. So it would be best decision to leave apple, and to focus on new plugins, such as zebra 3.

[RugerioDelStereo]

As a developer you might have to invest about 2-5 days, depending on the complexity of your application, to get it all working on ARM.

I would love to hear for example U-he's or any other devs opinion on this. I highly doubt it's gonna be seamless. ARM is a RISC processor. That means that there are instructions in x86 set that aren't available on ARM. Sometimes for one x86 instruction ARM has to do a several instructions on it's own. That's why Microsoft's attempts to run Windows on ARM failed miserably. The translator was just too slow. Even for the best Snapdragons. And if you build another layers of software and API's over it, it's gonna cost you even more CPU cycles. Yeah, your code will technically run on ARM, but at what CPU cost? That will make presure on devs to re-write the code completely straight for ARM platform. And I'm not really sure all of them have time and resources to do that. Big ones may be. But plugin devs? Dunno.

Excellent point. But there are already apps written for Windows, Intel Macs and ARM, like Syntronik. I can not imagine engineers have to completely develop these for three platforms all in seperate processes. The programming languages are probably architecture-independent and software is recompiled for different processors....I think. NOT an angineer here (as you might have guessed)

[auricle]

This is just speculation, but as the operating systems of Apple desktops and mobile devices begin to merge, Apple may force all developers to sell on the App store only thus having to pay 30%. A lot of independent developers new and experienced may look at the cost/return ratio and decide it's just not worth it.

This has been speculated before since the App store debuted on OSX, but as time goes on it does seem more and more likely. With desktop and mobile devices now using the same processor architecture, it makes more sense for Apple to use the same OS for everything.