New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

[pastrychef]

Now, even Microsoft is going to start making their own Arm CPUs...

Microsoft may be developing its own in-house ARM CPU designs

Bloomberg's unconfirmed report relies on confidential sources within Microsoft.

arstechnica.com

So, now the three largest tech companies in the world will be using Arm CPUs... Two of them in servers for AWS and Azure.

Where's that guy who kept saying Arm CPUs are weak and only good for phones?

 

[Gigamaxx]

M1-iMacs on the way?

 

[nicksoph]

Sent my M1 MBPr back yesterday. Couldn't live with having a super duper machine and never using even a tenth of its power. Awaiting MacSE or similar.

 

[OrbitalForge]

I'm really in two minds about this. Professionally I have too much software that only works on windows (engineering software). I was finally going to take the plunge on a 16" MBP, but if I'm going to go have to buy a Windows laptop again in 2 or 3 years anyway I'm not going to bother. It seems my window of opportunity has definitively closed.

 

[nicksoph]

I started looking for a windows laptop and found myself thinking how poorly they compared to the M1's so ordered the lowest spec Air (Cheapest I could find in UK was BT - £920).

 

[Bliepjes]

Some of us can’t afford seperate hackintosh/Mac and Windows PC “powerhouse”. Still need to see how the Apple Chip and software talks together.

I say we have a few years ahead where modern Mac hardware and PC hardware must be supported for a few years. But the point is simple; if they own the hardware manufacturing, a hackintosh is simply pointless in the future unless there is some smarty-pants that can reverse-engineer their hardware.

 

[nicksoph]

I say we have a few years ahead where modern Mac hardware and PC hardware must be supported for a few years. But the point is simple; if they own the hardware manufacturing, a hackintosh is simply pointless in the future unless there is some smarty-pants that can reverse-engineer their hardware.

Yes. Apple silicon is miles ahead of any PC based hardware - I do wonder how Windows machines will get the R&D and support from MSoft that would be needed to integrate the hardware/software as Apple have done.

The chances of anybody making unlicensed hardware that can run MacOS in the future is virtually zero and suggest getting Windows to run well on Apple hardware is a more likely hobby. The rise of the Wintoshers has begun.

 

[janthonys20]

I highly doubt any Mac Pro that's running ARM chips would be at all attractive to the content creators that rely on the software and hardware that exists and would need a complete dedicated portion of each individual makers time and effort to go out of there way to port over software designed to run on a well supported and easy to maintain architecture in favor of one which has very little practical need within most desktops. Arm is a low power efficiency upgrade that gives apples profit margins a boost along with the ability to further control even more aspects of its users ability to use only what it wants them using because of the revenue stream they get in their ecosystem and the ability to attach drm controls across anything and everything. So the idea of apple dropping Intel in favor of its own silicone within devices such as its iMacs and Pros when the benefits are almost none compared with movings its portable hardware over should result in the use of both platforms with the with to AMD being way more of a reasonable way to go as opposed to completely forcing the entire software and hardware industry to spend a lot of money and time developing things that Apple can still offer themselves unless they just plan on developing software hardware and everything in between.

And furthermore, Apple didn't make their own silicone with the M1 nor do the produce any silicone chips in house because they don't have a foundry and they get each of the chips from TSMC and possibly Samsung in the future since those two companies are capable of producing massive quantities of ARM silicone. The M1 chip is a modified version of ARM silicone which apple pays a licensing fee for the ability to use and has the right to modify the registers within the design but that's all. They didn't just all of a sudden design and produce quality processors that are smaller and more energy efficient than a company like ARM which is where all arm silicone comes from

 

[pastrychef]

I highly doubt any Mac Pro that's running ARM chips would be at all attractive to the content creators that rely on the software and hardware that exists and would need a complete dedicated portion of each individual makers time and effort to go out of there way to port over software designed to run on a well supported and easy to maintain architecture in favor of one which has very little practical need within most desktops.

Why would content creators care about how much time and/or effort it will take developers to port their software to Arm?

Arm is a low power efficiency upgrade that gives apples profit margins a boost along with the ability to further control even more aspects of its users ability to use only what it wants them using because of the revenue stream they get in their ecosystem and the ability to attach drm controls across anything and everything. So the idea of apple dropping Intel in favor of its own silicone within devices such as its iMacs and Pros when the benefits are almost none compared with movings its portable hardware over should result in the use of both platforms with the with to AMD being way more of a reasonable way to go as opposed to completely forcing the entire software and hardware industry to spend a lot of money and time developing things that Apple can still offer themselves unless they just plan on developing software hardware and everything in between.

You must not have seen how the M1 Macs kick Intel Macs butts.

Are you saying that Intel Macs don't have DRM?

Software and hardware developers who don't want to develop for Apple Silicon don't have to.

And furthermore, Apple didn't make their own silicone with the M1 nor do the produce any silicone chips in house because they don't have a foundry and they get each of the chips from TSMC and possibly Samsung in the future since those two companies are capable of producing massive quantities of ARM silicone. The M1 chip is a modified version of ARM silicone which apple pays a licensing fee for the ability to use and has the right to modify the registers within the design but that's all. They didn't just all of a sudden design and produce quality processors that are smaller and more energy efficient than a company like ARM which is where all arm silicone comes from

The M1 is designed by Apple. It's the same as AMD designing Ryzen CPUs and having TSMC manufacture them.

Yes, the M1 is based on the Arm architecture but is also highly customized. Try running Big Sur on a Raspberry Pi.

Also, the GPU is not part of the Arm architecture. That's all Apple.

 

[scottkendall]

So the idea of apple dropping Intel in favor of its own silicone within devices such as its iMacs and Pros when the benefits are almost none compared with movings its portable hardware over should result in the use of both platforms with the with to AMD being way more of a reasonable way to go as opposed to completely forcing the entire software and hardware industry to spend a lot of money and time developing things that Apple can still offer themselves unless they just plan on developing software hardware and everything in between.

If you are already an Apple developer using Xcode you simply have to click a few buttons and Xcode will compile your code to work on both intel and apple silicon. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft, have already converted or are in the process. Avid normally takes a full year till their software supports the new OS/updates be it windows or mac. Of course, all the programs people use from apple already work. From the reviews Rosetta 2 makes apps work better on the M1 than they worked on the intel counterpart.