Apple Announces "3rd Transition" for macOS: From Intel CPUs to Apple Silicon

[pastrychef]

The future looks quite bad for anyone using a Mac as a workhorse. (I'm not even talking about a Hackintosh)

It's foolish to believe that they will continue to split development between Intel and ARM. The transition and the wind down for Intel support has begun.

 

[pastrychef]

Well I can't say I'm at all surprised. I'm used to ARM chips from running Raspberry Pis, which are now getting good enough to run as desktop machines, and the RISC instruction set has been proven to be far better for performance and power consumption in the long term. So from a technical standpoint, it makes sense.

The obvious difference is that a Pi costs next to nothing, and you can buy bundles of them. The obvious drawback is it doesn't run old Windows software that you don't have the source code for, and I suspect a lot of people who got Macs because they could also function as PCs, and Unix boxes and hence "do it all" are going to be stuck for this. Apple may think that 20-year old software is obsolete, but many people in the corporate world rely on this sort of stuff, and will be far more cautious about moving to MacOS if backwards compatibility completely flies out of the window.

As a longtime Windows critic, I've got to say Windows 10 is pretty good these days, and I think only hardened Apple fanboys would disagree. It's the complete opposite to MacOS - anything that ran the first build of Windows 10 will run the current build 5 years later without any issues whatsoever. The hardware is orders of magnitude cheaper, there's a better variety of components, and stuff just works these days. Sure, you don't get a Unix command prompt out of the box and I've never quite found the time to learn Powershell and Mingw is not quite the same ... but most people don't care about that. I'm already starting to look at alternative DAWs to Logic, such as Bitwig. I'm not really bothered which OS it runs at this stage, except that I am pretty confident that both Windows and Linux will support the system for years to come.

It's been a good 10 years with Apple, but I can now picture myself jumping ship at some point. As someone who tinkers around with hardware and software quite a bit (kind of the reason I ended up here), I really want to see Linux pick up a bunch of ex-Mac users so it can have a better desktop experience. It's already getting much more support for games, and unlike MacOS your not-so-ancient NVidia card will still work!

As for Big Sur's attempt to look more like IOS - jeez, is this the new Windows 8?

Windows 10 now runs on the Raspberry Pi 4 and 3

Developers have finally installed ARM-optimized version of Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi 4 after some people managed to get it running on the Raspberry Pi 3 in the first half of 2019. Raspberry Pi 4 and Pi 3 officially support the IoT Core version of Windows 10, which is not same as the version […]

www.windowslatest.com

 

[Ritchie333]

I would be surprised if a hacked version of Windows 10 on ARM could run x86 code through wine. My litmus test is this game, a closed-source x86 32-bit port of a DOS app released in 1999.

 

[jjminds]

Apple is notoriously famous for their "planned obsolescence" policy. They just want the average Joe to buy their overpriced computers in every other year. It's not that they have issues with Intel or they love ARM chips. They just need more money. They don't care about the end user. I'm done with Hackintosh. My Catalina build was pretty good except few glitches in here and there. But, I felt like I'm in the mercy of their hand and I have no control over the OS. Even, windows gives you more control unless you are on home version. And, on linux, you own the machine, you can do whatever you want to do with the distro. I just installed KDE desktop environment on my arch machine, installed mac os themes, installed global menu, moved the windows controls to left, installed all the Apple fonts from AUR, installed latte dock and voila... I can say that the desktop look like mac os for the most part(I would say 98%). The whole process took less than couple of hours. No messing with kexts, clover conf..
I would like to say thanks to tonymacx86 for all the hardwork..

 

[pastrychef]

I would be surprised if a hacked version of Windows 10 on ARM could run x86 code through wine. My litmus test is this game, a closed-source x86 32-bit port of a DOS app released in 1999.

I don't even know if WINE exists for Windows. It doesn't make any sense to develop a JIT interpreter to run Windows apps on Windows...

Windows 10 ARM supports Win32 apps through emulation.

 

[pastrychef]

Apple is notoriously famous for their "planned obsolescence" policy. They just want the average Joe to buy their overpriced computers in every other year. It's not that they have issues with Intel or they love ARM chips. They just need more money. They don't care about the end user. I'm done with Hackintosh. My Catalina build was pretty good expect few glitches in here and there. But, I felt like I'm in the mercy of their hand and I have no control over the OS. Even, windows gives you more control unless you are on home version. And, on linux, you own the machine, you can do whatever you want to do with the distro. I just installed KDE desktop environment on my arch machine, installed mac os themes, installed global menu, moved the windows controls to left, installed all the Apple fonts from AUR, installed latte dock and voila... I can say that the desktop look like mac os for the most part(I would say 98%). The whole process took less than couple of hours. No messing with kexts, clover conf..
I would like to say thanks to tonymacx86 for all the hardwork..

Even Windows users "have issues" with the stagnation from Intel. I'm sure it's challenging trying to cool and power an i9-10900K within the confines of the iMac enclosure.

 

[Lotlorien]

I just installed KDE desktop environment on my arch machine, installed mac os themes, installed global menu, moved the windows controls to left, installed all the Apple fonts from AUR, installed latte dock and voila... I can say that the desktop look like mac os for the most part(I would say 98%). The whole process took less than couple of hours. No messing with kexts, clover conf..
I would like to say thanks to tonymacx86 for all the hardwork..

KDE! I have used Linux and KDE for many years until around 2012 when I really got fed up with this endless buggy trashy software. They had a "nice" mail app, KMail. Akonadi was the backend cache server, that just didn't work and lost mails again and again and again. The copy of Spotlight search was also a disaster, couldn't follow any mv, rm etc. The whole KDE infrastructure used to be a big mess, and I guess it still is. Developing a good desktop is really hard and needs a very strong guidance because it involves a lot of boring coding work. And when I say desktop I don't just mean a window manager, I refer to the whole infrastructure and the applications that go with it: mail, calendar, messaging, office suite, etc. For very specific use cases like a developer there might be some Linux desktops around that are fit for purpose, for any kind of general desktop usage simply forget about Linux in my opinion. Also there is nowhere near the software around like for macOS. That is why I like macOS so much: excellent desktop, excellent applications, underlying UNIX, care to details etc. Good luck with KDE!

 

[Simon70]

.... I'm sure it's challenging trying to cool and power an i9-10900K within the confines of the iMac enclosure.

I think this is very true, especially because the new iMac will be designed to be even more slim and fascinating.
It seems strange to me that the leakers give the possible presentation, although of course I hope so.
In my opinion it would be easier to foresee an Apple silicon iMac and a new Intel iMacPRO that we must remember cannot be commercially killed by a new iMac with the same performance, whatever Apple processor chooses to mount.

Edit:
However, it must be said that liquid cooling can work wonders in performance and design. Who knows if Apple decides to use it only where it is really needed (to underline the choice made with the MacPRO). In any case, given the constantly constant increase in power and the increasingly stringent design needs, it is a way that Apple cannot escape forever if it wants to continue to upgrade performance.

 

[Ritchie333]

It wasn't KDE for me, but Unity on Ubuntu (released pretty much exactly 10 years ago if memory serves) that brought my main desktop / development machine to its knees with crashes that made me look elsewhere, and I picked up a Mac Mini 2,1 for not very much. I'd already got an iPhone 3G by that point, so a Mac made sense.

 

[jjminds]

This is 2020 Bruh.. Lot's of things have changed. If you don't like KDE you can choose a different DE. Or even a different distro. If you don't like Arch, switch to debian or Ubuntu or fedora, Gentoo. The options are endless. Since most of the stuff are moving towards online in these days, all you need internet access and a browser. I get the fact that Mac shines in video editing and music production area and windows in games. But, Linux is all about freedom. I use my linux machine for my work. I do all my python stuff in linux and Libreoffice and rest are based on online. So, For me, Linux is almost perfect as a daily driver.