At Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, the WWDC yesterday Apple announced that they will be moving all of their processors from Intel to Apple Silicon ARM processors in 2 years.
Rumors of this switch have been going on for years now, since Apple has been creating it’s own ARM processors for iPhones and iPads for the last 20 years. And it makes sense for their laptops for sure, since they use less power, and have better graphics than Intel’s low and mid range processors. It will mean more speed and more battery life for most laptops.
And they have brought back Rosetta which was used in the Power PC to Intel transition and showed it using Maya in their keynote. And Universal 2 will allow developers to compile versions for both Intel and Apple Silicon in a single binary. And they said Adobe is working on the transition already, so some software will certainly work, but what about other pro software, like AVID and DaVinci and all the plug ins.
My question has always been what will it mean for the high end pro market. And their are currently no high end ARM processors that match Xeon processors. And can they even support PCI cards? Hell the Dev box they are letting developers buy doesn’t even have Thunderbolt, which is an Intel technology and that all pros have moved to including me. Will none of my hard drives work on new Mac hardware ever again? That will be a huge fuck you to Pros. Was the new MacPro a hoodwink to bring pros back and then it is the last truly pro machine that Apple every releases? And all it’s vaunted upgradeability is useless because Apple will never release any new hardware for it. If so what a fucking waste. It does look like Intel is open sourcing Thunderbolt, but not having it on the first hardware is scary.
Sure it is possible that Apple plans a MacPro with Apple Silicon, but it seems unlikely, especially since they never mentioned it when they could have. Sure it would stop or slow down current sales, but it would give some assurance.
I mean it took AVID this long to get a version that works for Catalina, and it is basically a re-write that breaks all compatibility with past versions. Hopefully this switch won’t be as drastic, but who the fuck knows?
Will all plug ins need to be re-written, that is very likely, which means years for Apple to catch up again with where it is, and a huge expense as you know most will involve a cost to the end user.
And so if it turns out the high end can’t compete with Intel, and not even AMD graphics cards, Pros will be done with Apple for good. And maybe iPad’s with Keyboards will end up as the high end of macs, as it is likely that more high end software will be more easily ported since it will be on the same silicon.
So once again I come away from a WWDC more scared for Apple’s future than I was before it. Maybe Apple has solutions or maybe they will just be going for the low end portable market and dropping the high end, but that is a question I would love answered.
Sure Intel will remain supported for years, but not forever.