Apple Confirms Their Future Desktops + Laptops Will Use In-House CPUs

[kpedersen]

Anyway, I do wonder what happens to all the Steam games for MacOS...

They will have a half-arsed translation layer called Rosetta for a couple of macOS releases until they will drop that too and refer to the original Steam titles as legacy.

But yes good point on the existing titles. Steam will drop macOS Intel meaning that you cannot activate the DRM in your existing macOS games. Similar to how you are unable to run your Windows XP Steam games. The games themselves are fine but the Steam DRM launcher is defective (by design).

[Guest]

Guessing the performance should be good... This is probably the reason why Apple offered to pay me two years ago for a non-GPL version of PTS (but ultimately they did some other licensing workaround or something instead).

Well, as long as Apple doesn't distribute binaries, they don't need to publish sources for their modifications or derived solutions. And, with signed NDA(s), nobody internal can get it out.

[ElectricPrism]

Apple has gone full bondage [NSFW-ish] (There are more fitting images to depict the insanity of this additional garden lock-down.)

I guess if I wanna play devils advocate hopefully this will lead to the end of x86 and the rise of POWER9 or other open architectures -- but more than likely it will lead to a expansion on the clusterfuck that is ARM.

Apple users can kiss their x86 games goodbye to have ARM-iOS mobile trash shoved down their throats.

The only good thing I see coming of this is making a example of WHY open-source is so necessary to preserve tools and content in the future and why everything in the future should be built to be platform-agnostic if possible.

It's a good time to be a Gentoo user.

[dxin]

Microsoft already tried it and it works as a technology but isn't successful as a product. I hope apple can do better but it doesn't seem promising. It feels more like it's competing with Chromebook rather than laptops

[Snaipersky]

To pile on about concerns with ARM, I've yet to see an ARM chip hit 3GHz. They're more than happy to keep slapping more cores in a chip, but there's little attention paid to single core performance.

[ssokolow]

Bye bye Boot Camp. I wonder how many people will see this as anything other than an expensive Chromebook.

[andyprough]

$2500 dollar pinebooks. How exciting.

[cl333r]

Apple moving to ARM is a really big thing but for some reason I don't care. Likely because I've never owned anything Apple.

[chuckula]

For all the people talking about performance here... step back and remember that performance is NOT the primary reason for Apple to do this.

Control is.

Apple can make ARM chips that work good enough for consumer uses while leaving out all the hardware that Intel puts in to run things like supercomputers and datacenters. They can get acceptable performance for the basic stuff, farm out a few heavy duty items like video encoding / decoding for FinalCut to the GPUs, and get by since their products are not really intended to be general-purpose devices for a wide range of markets.

They don't care that they aren't going to win benchmarks in CFD simulations vs AVX-512 processors because that's not their market.

They do care that they get to lock you into their ecosystem with all the control they get over the iPhone users brought to notebooks and desktops.

[gtgt]

Don't fell into this. It's not about you getting better stuff. It's about more profit. ARM is a significantly cheaper architecture.