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There are two key questions about Apple’s new direction with the Mac family, both based on the switch from Intel-based processors to Apple’s ARM-based processors.
Philip “Phil” Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Apple Inc., shows the … [+]
One of them is the relative performance of the two chipsets. If ARM is the future, then the future must carry the same weight as the past. The leaked benchmarks suggest this will be the case, at least in gross terms.
The second is that of backward compatibility. The move to ARM has the potential to break compatibility with the application library trusted by countless millions of Mac users. Ensuring a smooth transition and allowing ARM-powered Macs to invisibly recover where an older Mac was replaced old with Intel technology will go a long way in rejuvenating the Mac platform.
The switch to ARM should be, for the consumer at least, something that (ahem) just works.
Generally speaking, there are three sections of applications that must be considered.
The first is the easiest for Apple to handle … its own applications. The full range of applications that come as part of a new Mac machine should be readily available. They will take full advantage of power savings, have deep integration with hardware, and will likely show the speed and power benefits that ARM offers.
The second tranche consists of existing third-party applications that are currently under active development. Apple will undoubtedly work hard with many of the key developers to ensure that specific applications have native ARM versions out of the box when the MacBook and MacBook Pro machines go on sale. Thanks to developer transition kits, there will be an army of smaller developers who will also have apps ready. To be sure, Apple will have a host of applications that “are already running on our new platform.”
The third section are those applications that have not yet been ported. For these applications, users will rely on Apple’s Rosetta 2 emulation layer. Not every developer will have a transition kit, not every developer will have the ability to build native code versions, and some apps will have been dropped, but they could still be in active use in the community.
Will Apple seek to support all applications that can run on macOS Catalina? Will you limit emulation to the latest tools? How much performance will be lost when using emulated applications compared to native applications? The goal will be a totally invisible process where the user does not need to know the complexities of ARM and Intel at the heart of their applications.
Apple only needs them to function. Even Apple Tuesday will show us how Apple intends to meet that expectation.
Now read more about the potential performance of ARM powered Mac laptops…
