This might be OK for consumers and it might be OK for the small business home/lone-wolf developers targeting B2C and small business but it seems like it will be the death knell of Macs/Macbooks being used for a lot of big commerical & enterprise software.
A lot of the Mac popularity got a boost by developers loving Macs in the early/mid-2000s because you could target unix so easily compared to a Windows machine and you didn't have to deal with the pain of playing systems integrator to run linux.
Today it's a lot worse cause most of us are targeting container technologies on linux. So even if we can compile on the Mac fine we're running a VM (Hyperkit) and taking a performance & memory hit from that compared to a native linux system.
If they make the whole lineup ARM and we're now going to be stuck doing an X86 VM on Arm + containers it's going to be even more painful. Given the premium pricing this would probably force a lot of companies to get serious about native linux machines. Painful at first but it'd save a lot of money in the long run. Where I work we already have tried this a little cause the performance on the Mac was starting to suck, you can get stuff like the System76 laptops and get more hardware for less money, there was still just quite a bit of integration pain to use those laptops last time we tried.
Yah you can deploy everything from Mac -> cloud when you actually want to run your software but that does make the develop -> build -> deploy -> test cycle take even longer. That aspect is no different whether the mac is x86 or ARM.
I'd argue if Apple had stayed PPC all this time and was just transitioning to ARM practically no enterprise shops or startups targeting linux in the cloud would ever be using MBPs, everyone would have found a different solution over the last 20 years. Macs were always just cool curiosities for a lot of software dev until they got to x86.
Your fear assumes they're going to transition their whole lineup. I suspect ARM based Macs will be sluggish just like the new Windows ARM based machines. So they'll only switch over at the low-end with LTE built in. Who knows though, maybe everyone will buy them up and developers will port their software and Docker will figure out how to make it work.
If the arm based Macs are anything like the iPad Pro they will be the opposite of sluggish. Apple will likely keep Intel based machines around for software compatibility reasons, but that has nothing to do with performance.
On that note, with the iPad Pro becoming more like a laptop (mouse support, external drive support, rumors of XCode coming to the iPad soon, etc) why would they bother moving Macs to ARM rather than expanding the iPad lineup and phasing out Macs?
It seems pretty clear that Apple doesn’t care about the Mac market anymore, and they already have a version of OSX running on ARM in the hands of millions of end users: the iPhone and iPad.
As an enteprise and private user of mac, I think there's one thing that you didn't touch.
Mac no longer serve as a 'development machine'. For instance, in my line of work I have a 64 core cloud dev box that I use, my mac are used to connect to that box and serve as a frontend. Granted, there are still workflows that happen on the mac (i.e. IDEs for language that can't really work without one), but more and more things happen directly in the dev box, somewhere far away from home.
And I think that will be the future - that's why I think the air is a great machine. Top out the user experience and design at the cost of performance, which even the enteprise customers are starting to need less.
The air is a great machine if you don't need performance, until you suddenly do. I have a user with the top of the line air from like 2 years ago, and it won't run Zoom virtual desktops. Zoom just says the cpu is too slow. So people can think things are okay, but when they aren't, you're stuck.
>For instance, in my line of work I have a 64 core cloud dev box that I use
I prefer to use a local box for faster feedback. But even if someone would prefer using a remote box, they can also use a Windows laptop to do the same thing.
That's where all the bad things come in. I can use all the normal commands in mac or at remote, with almost no change. The aliases work on both machines (I use .. 2 to go up 2 parent dirs, etc). I usually don't use UI with the exception of the browser, and I can't see how that can work in Windows.
What you're saying makes sense, but I think you're underestimating two huge factors:
1. Brand loyalty of Apple users (especially developers)
2. Willingness to "make it work"
It would take an outright explicit declaration of pure hostility from APple to damage that loyalty, and even then I don't know if it would (and of course Apple won't do that). There are also a lot of very clever people that will hack on the system until they get it working, and as long as something works, even with horrendous under-the-hood complexity and terrible performance, that will be enough to keep those people on the platform.
There will be some people (like me) who don't put up with that, but all of those people that I know left for Linux (or WSL on Windows) a long time ago.
A lot of the Mac popularity got a boost by developers loving Macs in the early/mid-2000s because you could target unix so easily compared to a Windows machine and you didn't have to deal with the pain of playing systems integrator to run linux.
Today it's a lot worse cause most of us are targeting container technologies on linux. So even if we can compile on the Mac fine we're running a VM (Hyperkit) and taking a performance & memory hit from that compared to a native linux system.
If they make the whole lineup ARM and we're now going to be stuck doing an X86 VM on Arm + containers it's going to be even more painful. Given the premium pricing this would probably force a lot of companies to get serious about native linux machines. Painful at first but it'd save a lot of money in the long run. Where I work we already have tried this a little cause the performance on the Mac was starting to suck, you can get stuff like the System76 laptops and get more hardware for less money, there was still just quite a bit of integration pain to use those laptops last time we tried.
Yah you can deploy everything from Mac -> cloud when you actually want to run your software but that does make the develop -> build -> deploy -> test cycle take even longer. That aspect is no different whether the mac is x86 or ARM.
I'd argue if Apple had stayed PPC all this time and was just transitioning to ARM practically no enterprise shops or startups targeting linux in the cloud would ever be using MBPs, everyone would have found a different solution over the last 20 years. Macs were always just cool curiosities for a lot of software dev until they got to x86.