For some context: the author of this article, Jean-Louis Gassée, was a former director at Apple, founded Be, Inc. and was chairman at PalmSource for a while.
His background may help or hurt his viewpoint, depending on how you see things.
I will say that I disagree with his points. And I'll also point out that the Mac ARM transition is happening right before our eyes with the T2 chip, which replaces a bunch of system components (memory, i/o, disk controllers, etc) with an ARM-based platform.
Practically, the only thing that hasn't been replaced are the main CPU and the GPU, but it's only a matter of time.
I can't help but feel T2 chip is just another cynical ploy to gradually kill off third party repairs by baking software functions into proprietary hardware that only the manufacturer have access to. It may be a sound security decision, but I have doubts whether it's worth it for the end user. It also goes against a wider industrial trend of moving from ARM to RISCV and other architectures.
On the other hand, do all these things matter to users and developers as long as external components are hidden behind buses and abstractions?
Sorry, what do you mean? On a current MacBook Pro the memory is controlled by the CPU and the disk is attached to a PCIe root port also on the CPU. The "disk controller" as such has moved into the disk.
Is the struggle for microprocessor supremacy still even relevant? I'd ask, "who's going to build the best quantum processor?" rather than, "who's going to dethrone x86?"
I don’t think the argument holds very well. Apple has made three processor architectural changes including one on the current OS. “Too complicated” doesn’t really align with the execution history Apple has. The fat binary support Apple has is a huge tool and the ability to add instructions and optimizations to their chips to help with x86 emulation is a big deal.
I don’t know if Apple will ever actually do this, but it seems odd to suggest it’s not feasible given past performance and their current technology holdings.
My take on the iPad form-factor hasn't really changed since the introduction. Its really great for certain casual use cases, but as soon as you sit down at a desk to get some work done, oh god does this fucking suck. And the keyboard cases actually make it worse because you delude yourself into thinking it makes it better, when it does not.
So an iOS/iPadOS laptop with full KVM support always seemed like a no-brainer in my mind. Or at least a much more obvious move than MacOS/ARM (which would split a small ecosystem behind the only logic that "they did it before and it worked out".) Plus 'the future' is obviously iOS.
I love my iPad with the keyboard case. When I hook it up to an external monitor and my Kinesis keyboard, it’s even better. I’m looking forward to mouse support in iOS 13.
One of my favorite apps when it comes to the keyboard is Blink. It’s an SSH/Mosh client with a limited local shell. I use it to build a Jekyll site on an EC2 instance. Blink supports multi-monitor, so I can have different shells on different screens.
Multi-window in iOS 13 is going to be another game changer. This is the best device I’ve owned and I’m excited about what’s to come.
And the keyboard cases actually make it worse because you delude yourself into thinking it makes it better, when it does not.
When I was given my iPad I didn't want to buy a keyboard case. But sometimes I need a keyboard. I happened to have an extra Apple Wireless Keyboard, and it works fantastically. Wireless. Full-sized. And it's only slightly larger than the 9" iPad. I just throw them both in my bag.
Every analysis I've read, including this one, assumes that Apple would start at the bottom rather than the top, as they have with every other CPU transition in the history of the company.
Is there something especially difficult about making a high-core-count CPU? The A-series is already crushing single-threaded performance and they're competitive with Intel desktop CPUs for some applications. Once you have a high-performance CPU with multi-core capabilities, is there any reason you can't just copy/paste cores?
It isn't especially difficult, but is is expensive. The big challenge with CPU design is to make up for the costs and for that you need numbers. In the 90ies, there were plenty of high-performance CPU designs, Alpha, Sparc, Mips. They were alle killed by two mechanisms, that Intel had a lead in fab technology and that Intel had much higher numbers, consequentely could gain back much higher investments as the competitors could afford.
The big question wouldn't be whether Apple could make a high-performance ARM, but if the financials play out for it. The Mac Pro numbers certainly wouldn't pay for such a CPU development. This could change of course, if they would bring back the Xserve in a modern incarnation or find some other uses for a high-performance ARM cpu.
ARM on the Macbook Pro would put a lot of software shops (I'm guessing tech and design firms are the main purchasers of Macs) using Docker in an awkward spot with their containers not running on dev machines.
The containers don't run on macOS as such, they run on linux inside a VM. You could spin up that linux inside an x86_64 emulator such as qemu instead. The emulation would be slower, but it would be a serious problem for most use cases.
Do these shops have to use the exact same container on their dev machine as elsewhere? Can they not build an ARM flavor of their container? Same Dockerfile but with an ARM base image instead of an x86_64 base image?
Those shops are deploying into Linux servers anyway, so they would be better off supporting an Linux OEM.
We use our Macs for Design (Sketch, Zepplin, Adobe), Web (via Java) and native iOS/macOS development, I am yet to hear anyone caring about docker beyond conference talks.
I see a lot of Surface Pro in the iPad[1]. That isn't a bad thing, it is great to have two design studios trying to out do each other. If you agree that these devices should work better on ARM chips rather than x86 chips, then the iPad has an advantage with an already ARM based ecosystem. Of course the Surface R/T tried that too, and stumbled. But I wonder if Apple saw that as a hint of where Microsoft might go.
I find it particularly interesting that at both companies these are the products that have a license to kill sacred cows[2]. The Surface R/T was "Windows on NOT Intel", the iPad has "stylus improved UI". Both of these were antithetic to Gates and Jobs way of thinking.
Both products (and I've got several different generations of both) feel to me like the "post PC" product. An application focused, battery operated, network aware device. I am a bit surprised that Surface hasn't embraced cellular connectivity as strongly as the iPad has, that is a key feature of "on the go" computing.[3]
[1] And chuckled when the new ones had the pen attach with magnets.
[2] The colloquialism, "that is a sacred cow." meaning a feature or rule that cannot be broken.
[3] Yeah, I know the 'tether it to your phone' mantra, I get that a lot, but it simpler (lower friction) to have it built in.
He made fun of the idea of putting a color screen on the iPod and a year or so later presented the iPod color.
Of course apple was gonna put a stylus on the iPad, with or without Jobs.
Apple might be content with asking users to buy third party hardware to draw on Mac, but they aren’t stupid enough to say you need to buy a Citrix to draw on your iPad.
I strongly prefer tethering to network awareness. Every computer I've had with a WWAN card has thought it would be terribly clever if all the sockets get reset every time the air interface flaps. It's network aware! Tethering is far superior because your laptop never learns that the mobile link was down for a moment.
Re. [3], there’s often a significant cost to maintaining a separate data plan for each device. I was recently quoted $15/mo to connect an $18/mo iPad. That’s a lot to pay for the privilege of not turning your wifi hotspot on.
Every feature on the macOS sales page today is something that macOS shipped without for almost 20 years (and Mac OS for almost 20 years before that). That's what sales pages are for: they show off the new features.
Apple didn't withhold copy/paste out of spite. They were shipping a completely new platform, and you can't do everything in 1.0.
Perhaps like the "Math co-processor" in the 386 days?
Imagine a future generation T-series chip with the neural cores that the A-series chips have. Accessible using the existing frameworks that you are already using. Or adding GPU cores to the MacBook Pro lineup as a replacement for the AMD GPUs that they have now.
And while they are doing that, they can release a Smart Keyboard for a future iPad Pro that has a trackpad. That's got to be one of the least risky ways to try out the iPad as a laptop replacement. If it's a flop, you're out the $150 or whatever it would cost but still have a perfectly good iPad that you keep using as an iPad.
Apple is in the position to take a "lets see where this takes us" approach. As long as they keep the OS and Frameworks from drifting apart, there are a lot of nice things that could happen.
Apple would like to be less reliant on both Qualcomm (radio/modem) and Intel (CPU). Qualcomm is ahead on 5G and Intel was behind on 5G and 10nm. Apple needs TSMC's 5nm performance-per-watt for AR glasses and moving MacOS from x86 to Arm, and it carries keyboard debt into the post-Ive era.
- Qualcomm settlement bridges the 5G modem gap
- Intel modem acquihire rekindles dream of radio autonomy
- Did Intel modem deal delay "x86-Arm" mobile Mac transition?
- Can 16" Macbook + 2015 keyboard buy time for new designs?
He is right for right now, but the long game is the axx chip in most apple products. The MacPro won’t have one, if it’s still around then. ipad pros will get a dock much like today’s dell usb type c docks. you will connect up to your screen while at your desk. do what you need to do with the keyboard and mouse. Even have a vdi app for access to some corp windows only apps. Then unplug it for meetings with note taking etc. It sounds like an interesting future.
I agree that Apple would prefer to use the ipad pro as a way to migrate users from their intel machines. I bet there's more margin in an ipad pro than a macbook pro.
I have realised a long ago that Apple has for a long time now been working towards steering the Macintosh way from its open, Unix-based foundation.
I used to work with the old MacOS, long before OSX, and it was just the way they wanted it: a closed platform with a nice (for the time) user interface and giving Apple full control over what is being developed on it and how.
Dropping this platform for NeXTSTEP-based OS X was the right choice at the time it was made, when they needed a more advanced platform, and they needed it immediately. But the side effect was that it opened the Mac as a development platform, and Apple has since been trying to close it back, without affecting the existing users too hard.
The success of mobile/tablet market allowed them to build a new, closed platform, with precisely the features described above. After MacBook Air was first released I expected them to soon release an OSX-based tablet, but I have soon realised that it is not going to happen: instead of pushing Mac to the tablets, they will more and more push iOS to the Mac, until they have one uniform platform that will make it nearly impossible to develop on except if sanctioned by Apple.
Anyone could develop software for the Macintosh prior to the release of OS X. There were third-party tools to do so. You could extend the system software. You could distribute your software as you pleased. Depending upon how you look at it, it was actually more open than OS X development since modern releases of OS X lock certain things down in the name of security. Both are a far cry from iOS development.
The UNIX foundation of NeXTSTEP was there only to help bring software into the platform and having a foot on workstation market.
NeXTSTEP application development in Objective-C, or for that matter Mac OS X in Objective-C/Swift, has anything to do with its UNIX based foundation.
The fact that many have bought Apple devices just as convenience to not have to bother setting up X properly or dealing with power configuration on Linux laptops is no longer relevant for Apple sales department.
They care about the developers that buy Apple devices to actually target Apple devices with their software, none of which uses frameworks that depend on the OS being UNIX.
Apple full control over what is being developed on it and how.
What “control” did Apple have on what was developed on classic MacOS? Famously, the only decent compiler during the early PPC years was made by a third party.
We’re the only people who know what a T2 is too. I doubt that had big marketing implications like they are trying to spin ‘Axx’. Absent some geopolitical/supply chain risk.
I don’t believe Apple will transition away from x86 anytime soon but for different reasons. They would abandon the pro market if it moved to arm. Most x86 pro applications would have to be rewritten. What would be the incentive for software makers?
Apple might very will be able to bring out a arm stack for consumer market but there is no indication that they can compete with x86 pro or server market.
- Apple is about to ship a new mac os that comes with improved support for running ios/ipados applications as well as using an ipad as an extension of your screen.
- The reason for the Mac Pro and the Mac Book Pro to exist is to enable professional artists, developers, and other people that need this kind of hardware to do their thing. Mostly they use tools not developed by Apple. E.g. Adobe is king for anything related to graphics. There are a bunch of third party 3D tools out there. Same for video. Same for Audio. Porting all of that to a new processor architecture will take a lot of time. It also has a severe risk of alienating developers and users during the transition. E.g. Adobe took their sweet time launching optimized versions of their tools for Intel ten years ago and meanwhile some users moved to Windows.
- Mac developers targeting intel macs (i.e. all existing macs), would probably want to develop and test on the machines they are actually targeting. Building cpu/gpu intensive x86 software on an ARM architecture with an X86 emulator makes no sense. You'd want the real thing. Xcode on arm would be a hard sell (except for IOS developers).
- A key money maker on IOS/IpadOS is the app store and the whole point of an ipad is that all the software comes from there. The whole point of Mac OS is that pro users get a lot of their software outside the app store.
- VR/AR is slowly starting to happen and Apple has mostly ignored this on mac os and only done a little bit on IOS (AR mostly). Any hardware that Apple is going to launch here is extremely unlikely to involve Intel or AMD hardware. In fact I suspect this is the primary reason Apple has not pushed hard on this on mac OS: they are looking to disrupt this space with an Apple product that consists 100% of Apple hardware and software and are not interested in filling the gap short term by depending on third party hardware.
So, a processor architecture change on mac os would be short term disruptive and risky. They have a coherent strategy for getting mac users to buy an ipad and double dip in revenue and it seems they are pushing a lot of users toward that platform. Also the pro market is comparatively small but extremely lucrative in its current form.
Apple product ecosystem has fast become a solution looking for problem combined with touchy feely hokus pokus aided by synthetic exclusivity and nonsensical differentiation.
Why the hell do we need the iPad to take over the PCs? Why the hell do we need ARM CPUs in Macs? Nobody is solving any real problems with those things - it's only purpose is to make Apple's margins and control even greater. And we as consumers are supposed to pay attention to the news outlets droning on about it for no benefit!
I think Apple will do well going back to the basics - simplifying the product lines, selling what matters and focusing on increasing the reach of its products to price conscious buyers. I don't think the market has a big enough appetite for more BS however well marketed it may be.
I really hope there is a hybrid MBP with an Apple chip running mac OS and first party apps along with an intel chip that runs on demand for third party apps that need x86.
In those cases, the switched-to architecture could emulate the previous one with acceptable performance. For the hypothetical amd64 -> aarch64 transition, I'm unaware of the existence of software, silicon or the combination of the two which could emulate the former on the latter while staying in a reasonable power envelope.
Emulation is non-optional if one wants to avoid splitting the ecosystem.
Does anyone find the use of the word "fork" outside of open-source projects a bit annoying? BMW forked their 3-series coupe and called it 4-series. Ugh...
The word fork has been used for various things in computing long before Github was around. I agree it's a bit overused in this article, but you have the Unix fork command, which creates a copy of the current process and effectively forks the execution. Older Macs of the 80's and 90's used a filesystem that allowed files to have both a data fork and a resource fork; they worked like independent streams to separate program data and embedded resources like images, sounds, etc.
Will you also complain about Yogi Bera's "When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It! Inspiration and Wisdom from One of Baseball's Greatest Heroes", published in 2001?
[+] [-] runjake|6 years ago|reply
His background may help or hurt his viewpoint, depending on how you see things.
I will say that I disagree with his points. And I'll also point out that the Mac ARM transition is happening right before our eyes with the T2 chip, which replaces a bunch of system components (memory, i/o, disk controllers, etc) with an ARM-based platform.
Practically, the only thing that hasn't been replaced are the main CPU and the GPU, but it's only a matter of time.
[+] [-] Laforet|6 years ago|reply
On the other hand, do all these things matter to users and developers as long as external components are hidden behind buses and abstractions?
[+] [-] mktmkr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robdachshund|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jart|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Moto7451|6 years ago|reply
I don’t know if Apple will ever actually do this, but it seems odd to suggest it’s not feasible given past performance and their current technology holdings.
[+] [-] flomo|6 years ago|reply
So an iOS/iPadOS laptop with full KVM support always seemed like a no-brainer in my mind. Or at least a much more obvious move than MacOS/ARM (which would split a small ecosystem behind the only logic that "they did it before and it worked out".) Plus 'the future' is obviously iOS.
[+] [-] brantonb|6 years ago|reply
One of my favorite apps when it comes to the keyboard is Blink. It’s an SSH/Mosh client with a limited local shell. I use it to build a Jekyll site on an EC2 instance. Blink supports multi-monitor, so I can have different shells on different screens.
Multi-window in iOS 13 is going to be another game changer. This is the best device I’ve owned and I’m excited about what’s to come.
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
When I was given my iPad I didn't want to buy a keyboard case. But sometimes I need a keyboard. I happened to have an extra Apple Wireless Keyboard, and it works fantastically. Wireless. Full-sized. And it's only slightly larger than the 9" iPad. I just throw them both in my bag.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
Is there something especially difficult about making a high-core-count CPU? The A-series is already crushing single-threaded performance and they're competitive with Intel desktop CPUs for some applications. Once you have a high-performance CPU with multi-core capabilities, is there any reason you can't just copy/paste cores?
[+] [-] _ph_|6 years ago|reply
The big question wouldn't be whether Apple could make a high-performance ARM, but if the financials play out for it. The Mac Pro numbers certainly wouldn't pay for such a CPU development. This could change of course, if they would bring back the Xserve in a modern incarnation or find some other uses for a high-performance ARM cpu.
[+] [-] dehrmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steeleduncan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eridius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|6 years ago|reply
We use our Macs for Design (Sketch, Zepplin, Adobe), Web (via Java) and native iOS/macOS development, I am yet to hear anyone caring about docker beyond conference talks.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|6 years ago|reply
I find it particularly interesting that at both companies these are the products that have a license to kill sacred cows[2]. The Surface R/T was "Windows on NOT Intel", the iPad has "stylus improved UI". Both of these were antithetic to Gates and Jobs way of thinking.
Both products (and I've got several different generations of both) feel to me like the "post PC" product. An application focused, battery operated, network aware device. I am a bit surprised that Surface hasn't embraced cellular connectivity as strongly as the iPad has, that is a key feature of "on the go" computing.[3]
[1] And chuckled when the new ones had the pen attach with magnets.
[2] The colloquialism, "that is a sacred cow." meaning a feature or rule that cannot be broken.
[3] Yeah, I know the 'tether it to your phone' mantra, I get that a lot, but it simpler (lower friction) to have it built in.
[+] [-] mepian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|6 years ago|reply
He made fun of the idea of putting a color screen on the iPod and a year or so later presented the iPod color.
Of course apple was gonna put a stylus on the iPad, with or without Jobs.
Apple might be content with asking users to buy third party hardware to draw on Mac, but they aren’t stupid enough to say you need to buy a Citrix to draw on your iPad.
[+] [-] mktmkr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
I’m a bit happy we’re movinf back to just letting people do stuff and let the developers figure out how to make it work.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
Apple didn't withhold copy/paste out of spite. They were shipping a completely new platform, and you can't do everything in 1.0.
For comparison, with the first version of the Macintosh system software, copy/paste crashed 50% of the time: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
[+] [-] jackvalentine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OldHand2018|6 years ago|reply
Imagine a future generation T-series chip with the neural cores that the A-series chips have. Accessible using the existing frameworks that you are already using. Or adding GPU cores to the MacBook Pro lineup as a replacement for the AMD GPUs that they have now.
And while they are doing that, they can release a Smart Keyboard for a future iPad Pro that has a trackpad. That's got to be one of the least risky ways to try out the iPad as a laptop replacement. If it's a flop, you're out the $150 or whatever it would cost but still have a perfectly good iPad that you keep using as an iPad.
Apple is in the position to take a "lets see where this takes us" approach. As long as they keep the OS and Frameworks from drifting apart, there are a lot of nice things that could happen.
[+] [-] walterbell|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techrich|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristianp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BerislavLopac|6 years ago|reply
I used to work with the old MacOS, long before OSX, and it was just the way they wanted it: a closed platform with a nice (for the time) user interface and giving Apple full control over what is being developed on it and how.
Dropping this platform for NeXTSTEP-based OS X was the right choice at the time it was made, when they needed a more advanced platform, and they needed it immediately. But the side effect was that it opened the Mac as a development platform, and Apple has since been trying to close it back, without affecting the existing users too hard.
The success of mobile/tablet market allowed them to build a new, closed platform, with precisely the features described above. After MacBook Air was first released I expected them to soon release an OSX-based tablet, but I have soon realised that it is not going to happen: instead of pushing Mac to the tablets, they will more and more push iOS to the Mac, until they have one uniform platform that will make it nearly impossible to develop on except if sanctioned by Apple.
[+] [-] II2II|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|6 years ago|reply
NeXTSTEP application development in Objective-C, or for that matter Mac OS X in Objective-C/Swift, has anything to do with its UNIX based foundation.
The fact that many have bought Apple devices just as convenience to not have to bother setting up X properly or dealing with power configuration on Linux laptops is no longer relevant for Apple sales department.
They care about the developers that buy Apple devices to actually target Apple devices with their software, none of which uses frameworks that depend on the OS being UNIX.
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
What “control” did Apple have on what was developed on classic MacOS? Famously, the only decent compiler during the early PPC years was made by a third party.
[+] [-] jfkwingmsk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kccqzy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lyime|6 years ago|reply
Apple might very will be able to bring out a arm stack for consumer market but there is no indication that they can compete with x86 pro or server market.
[+] [-] eridius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatshisface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|6 years ago|reply
- Apple is about to ship a new mac os that comes with improved support for running ios/ipados applications as well as using an ipad as an extension of your screen.
- The reason for the Mac Pro and the Mac Book Pro to exist is to enable professional artists, developers, and other people that need this kind of hardware to do their thing. Mostly they use tools not developed by Apple. E.g. Adobe is king for anything related to graphics. There are a bunch of third party 3D tools out there. Same for video. Same for Audio. Porting all of that to a new processor architecture will take a lot of time. It also has a severe risk of alienating developers and users during the transition. E.g. Adobe took their sweet time launching optimized versions of their tools for Intel ten years ago and meanwhile some users moved to Windows.
- Mac developers targeting intel macs (i.e. all existing macs), would probably want to develop and test on the machines they are actually targeting. Building cpu/gpu intensive x86 software on an ARM architecture with an X86 emulator makes no sense. You'd want the real thing. Xcode on arm would be a hard sell (except for IOS developers).
- A key money maker on IOS/IpadOS is the app store and the whole point of an ipad is that all the software comes from there. The whole point of Mac OS is that pro users get a lot of their software outside the app store.
- VR/AR is slowly starting to happen and Apple has mostly ignored this on mac os and only done a little bit on IOS (AR mostly). Any hardware that Apple is going to launch here is extremely unlikely to involve Intel or AMD hardware. In fact I suspect this is the primary reason Apple has not pushed hard on this on mac OS: they are looking to disrupt this space with an Apple product that consists 100% of Apple hardware and software and are not interested in filling the gap short term by depending on third party hardware.
So, a processor architecture change on mac os would be short term disruptive and risky. They have a coherent strategy for getting mac users to buy an ipad and double dip in revenue and it seems they are pushing a lot of users toward that platform. Also the pro market is comparatively small but extremely lucrative in its current form.
[+] [-] blinkingled|6 years ago|reply
Why the hell do we need the iPad to take over the PCs? Why the hell do we need ARM CPUs in Macs? Nobody is solving any real problems with those things - it's only purpose is to make Apple's margins and control even greater. And we as consumers are supposed to pay attention to the news outlets droning on about it for no benefit!
I think Apple will do well going back to the basics - simplifying the product lines, selling what matters and focusing on increasing the reach of its products to price conscious buyers. I don't think the market has a big enough appetite for more BS however well marketed it may be.
[+] [-] bluthru|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hartator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_se099|6 years ago|reply
Emulation is non-optional if one wants to avoid splitting the ecosystem.
[+] [-] NikkiA|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vermontdevil|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spectramax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zcrackerz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonzo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dfee|6 years ago|reply