On a daring yet sort of expected move, Apple will move all its Mac product line to the company's own cpu by the end of the year. A new version of Rosetta will provide compatibility with Intel Macs, translating code realtime and providing emulation for games etc.
I estimate that this, along with the company's own T2 chip will provide Apple the means for total control of its ecosystem. Which also may (or may not) mean goodye to Hackintosh.
Read all about it here :
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-arm-intel-transition

 

Bye Bye Apple, Hello Intel.

 

Well, one of my clients says he's going to use the Hackintosh with High Sierra I assembled until it rots. It's not the end of the world, but I wonder what's going to happen to Cubase and all the nice audio apps and plugins, because they should be translated for ARM architecture to work optimally, and that's not exactly trivial. Working under emulator? That's going to suck, I mean literally suck the CPU more. Oh well, we'll see how it's gonna pan out.

 

As a long time Apple customer (if you include mobile devices bought for my parents under my account, 12 iphones, 3 ipads, 2 mbp, 2 imacs, 2 apple tvs, TONS of official accessorizes) I fully support the move to internal designed CPUs. I don't care what internet critics who have never used a MacOS computer have to say, this is Apple putting their money where their mouth is and finally moving away from trying to please tech reviewer dweebs and "muh specs" concern trolls. Price isn't important to me as I don't have time or desire to troubleshoot issues in my machine anymore (Actually of all the MacOS devices I've owned I only had to go to apple store once because I spilled a big can of juice directly onto a macbook back in 2012) and I value stability over raw specs. Gaming is a largely irrelevant criteria but my machine still handles everything I want to play with ease, currently playing Divinity OS2 with max settings so I'm not sure what the point of getting a dedicated $500 GPU is if I'm not doing 3D modeling or high level video production work.
Maybe I am a blind Mac fanboy but I don't care about the custom computer scene and my machine is only a means to create my art, time is more valuable than money and in the long run the extra $ spent on the front end of buying a Mac will save you infinite amounts of frustration and hidden costs of constant part upgrades.
I think the hardest thing to come to terms with as a music production nerd was that I'm not a computer nerd and I really didn't care about the machine itself past whether it functioned the way I needed it to; sadly theres a lot of social pressure in tech circles to fall in line with the "apple = gay hipster" mentality and for those who just want to make music and live life it only holds you back. You don't have to be stuck in the paradigm of computers being a perpetual race for the "latest and greatest" parts to impress a bunch of virgins on discord. This isn't an apple vs microsoft thing either as I used PCs from 2001 to 2010 and made a lot of music on those machines but after using imacs and macbooks at my university's library rental program I realized it suited my needs far better than the high spec PC machines I had at home. By this point I trust Apple's development/press releases as they haven't let me down yet I can't say the same for companies I have monetarily supported in the past. So if they say the new CPUs are better then I will believe it until using them and learning otherwise, I have a million other things to care about and as I get older I need to value my time better. Go ahead and pretend I'm less intelligent than you for making different consumer choices though, it's a big world out there outside of petty computer arguments.

 

Why so angry?

 

Until now ARM processors can not reach as high clock rates as Intel's CPUs. While ARM chips achieve a basic clock rate between 2 and 3 GHz, Intel manages over 4 GHz, with TurboBoost over 5 GHz. And when working with audio this is still one of the most important things. Additionally, many x86 CPUs with Hyper-Threading can virtually double the number of cores. Dunno if ARM has Technology like HT ..

I'm afraid that people who work with audio will have the biggest disadvantages with this change.

 

agreed. we all aited for Apple's downfall for a long time!

 

Bye bye Hackintosh, byebye warez, for now. Kinda sucks..

 

As they said on the stream, and on tom's site...

'CEO Tim Cook said the company will launch the first Mac with an Apple CPU by the end of the year, while there are still more Intel Macs in the pipeline. He suggested the entire transition will take roughly two years.'

it's not going to be an overnight thing, but yes, it's concerning for many ... None of us should be surprised. OSX was built upon NeXTStep OS, the predecessor Steve had running on his combustible cubes and slabs. It was compiled to run on Motorola 68000 series, Intel x86, SPARC, PA-RISC. It will likely do well for the generic computers they really care about supporting. Students, grandma's, average users to connect to the world...

It will be interesting to see what they plan for the Pros - the artists, the musicians... Can they continue to have a Pro laptop line at all, or just call them all Macs and be done with it.

If you work mostly with built in synths and effects in most daws and print to wav/aiff having these slightly lower powered machines it probably won't matter much. If you try to keep all your plugs live, this sort of machine won't fit the bill. Now, we don't really know what they'll end up shipping for imacs, etc. Most likely it won't be the chip they demo'd today, which is the one found in the ipad pro 2020.

Interesting times to be sure, and I'm pleased it'll push competition... but it's definitely not for me.

 

Last edited: Jun 22, 2020

Great. Best step ever!

 

even steezo is sick of apple builds now...not MAC OS for the rec
--
they looking at amd ryzen and think they can do the same....we see

 

Well, the new iPads have better efficiency and is faster than MacBook Pros. So that should tell you how great of a step this is for Apple.

 

I went through this when I got the 1st gen macbook pro in 2006. I still have 2008 Macbook running leopard that can boot up Logic Pro 6. Third party hardware dependent software is the REAL problem.

 

They're bringing "High-efficiency audio processor" looks promising but let's wait and see.

 

Closing off their "walled garden" a bit more. I still have my MBP Mid 2012 doing its thing nicely. I bought a more recent model, but this is the same playbook they used when they switched from PowerPC to Intel. Their new version of Rosetta will do the trick until 2022-2023 and then full ARM afterwards. I'll keep my MACmachines working running Mojave until they can't.

Good thing I never quit using Windows and stuff. Still, we'll see.

In the meantime, use whatever fits your needs and your budget. The MAC vs. PC wars are an absolute waste of time.

As far as warez go, the street always finds a way to circumvent any roadblocks they throw at it. Spoken.

 

I don't see ANY positive side with this AT ALL. It's just a Mac with the performance of a PC from 10 years ago at the price of 10 PCs from 10 years ago. It will be sluggish and buggy at least in the transition period. First gen hardware from Apple was never reliable. Neither will the software be flawless. Many smaller developers will struggle to support Intel & ARM at the same time and quality will decrease. Some may even stop Mac support completely. We can't boot into Windows for some gaming anymore. If it will support some decent GPUs in hard- and software has to be seen anyway. And we may probably need to jailbreak it, to do some stuff Apple doesn't want us to do for the little money we paid them.

On the plus side... uhm... Angry Birds will run natively?

No idea why anyone would want an ARM Mac. I will likely go back to Windows. I hate Windows. And I hate Apple even more for forcing me to go back to Windows.

 

...and there it is!

 

it probably just means low power hi res DAC

 

which explains why you might be their customer for so long...
By the way, you are not an exception: it has been going on like this since the Apple IIe in the 80s. They were already aiming for the upper middle class back then.

 

and all the hypocrites will get angry .. use it or leave it! make music not WAR