The JavaScript engines have been doing quite well on ARM for a while now, so I guess someone will just need to put in some love to bring the JVM up to par as well. I doubt it will be Apple, but perhaps we'll see one of the other major companies do it once ARM servers become mainstream.
I think the ARM-based Macs are inevitable, although it might be called "iPad Pro Developer Edition".
This is Jeff Atwood's argument: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-tablet-turning-point/ ; Apple tablet performance at Javascript is now catching up to and exceeding desktop performance. Apple have also sunk a lot of money into developing their own processor line, and they have experience in force-migrating all their customers between architectures. At some point you might not be able to buy an Intel-based Apple laptop any more. Given the immense brand loyalty among web developers, they are likely to shrug and carry on .. and start demanding ARM servers with high Javascript performance.
Yes, but there have been instances of Apple (and in general, ARM as well, though not as much) adding special instructions to the A series chips to make JS execution faster.
They can make web apps run better than other platforms. And then they can make native apps run even faster.
Both are a advantage which the competing ecosystem doesn't have.
I just read something this morning that Apple is looking at switching Macs to ARM. So, if that happens, an ARM server will match what at least some developers are using.
Probably not worth it to add dedicated cores for web processing, but iPhone already takes advantage of special ARM instructions for faster JavaScript execution [0]. That will almost certain be used on the new ARM Macs.
I have a feeling that if Apple wants to get back into servers they'll do it with an ARM-based product sometime in the next two or three years. There's not much room for them in x86, and they've clearly abandoned existing customers. But with ARM they can start fresh and leverage a lot of what they've put behind iOS devices.
When that happens we’ll also see a big push to add ARM support to all the native nodejs modules that are out there. (And I assume Ruby, Python, Go, etc packages).
Linus’s prediction is based on the premise that everyone will continue to use x86 for development. But that’s probably not going to be the case for long. Multiple sources have leaked the rumour that Apple will release an arm MacBook next year. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft has an arm surface book in the wings too.
Plus having ARM widely deployed on the desktop via Apple may start to incentivise developers to fill in the remaining gaps where native code libraries are used?
You know one of the great things about VMs? They're cross-platform. I'm guessing once the same amount of optimization is put into arm has has been put into x86, the performance ought to be comparable. I'm also about 99% sure docker can be run on arm (RPIs support it, right?).
With that said, I sincerely doubt Apple will kill x86 wholesale overnight. I'm guessing there will be a transitional period of quite some time.
Also, windows has been doing a ton of work around getting onto arm. I managed to test on my rpi 3, and it was pretty good. it would probably be very doable.
To be fair, how many developers with Macbooks are actually writing platform-specific code? I'm under the impression that most Macbook-wielding developers are web developers and work mostly with JavaScript, Python, Ruby etc. which all have ARM runtimes available. Even the "IDEs" (Atom, VS Code) are written in JavaScript nowadays or at least in Java with minor C parts (Jetbrains), which is also available for ARM platforms. Also, none of the web stuff is ever running on Mac OS, it's almost always Linux, maybe some Windows IIS.
There are also a lot of people only using their Macbook for presentations, text writing, or even only surfing the web. Apple's own office suit will be ported to ARM when they change their CPU architecture, Microsoft has Office for ARM available (or at least in the pipeline for 2019), and LibreOffice is available for ARM as well.
If Apple really wanted to do this, they would release their small Macbook (non-Pro) with ARM first and then describe a plan to change to ARM for the Macbook Pro line within a few years. No need for a transition period where emulation takes place, everything important is already ARM-ready. The iMac Pro is another thing, that might actually be harder but I imagine manageable if Adobe etc. are willing to invest/to be paid to support ARM.
that seems a little simplistic. It isn't just the runtimes, but also all the tooling that goes with it. There would be a lot of work involved with recompiling all tooling and runtimes to work on ARM, and would probably alienate a large portion of developers currently using Apple products as a result.
What makes you think that the server-side components are going to be incompatible with Ax MBPs? Most open-source software runs just fine on ARM, and I would expect proprietary developers to quickly follow suit if Apple pushes Ax MBPs.
They already have pretty significant investment in their own ARM-based chips for servers. Given Apple's recent success in x86 emulation on ARM, I doubt it's worth the trouble of directly competing in the x86 arena.
64-bit ARMs are around the corner; I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has a cooperation agreement with ARM that gives them access to the not-yet-finalized but good-enough-to-work-with 64-bit ARM architecture.
Apple has the expertise to be such a client. They're a very significant customer of ARM, and also (unless things changed when I wasn't looking) a major shareholder.
Emulating intel code on the ARM is feasible, though going to be 5x-10x slower for high performance compute code. However: most apps are not high performance compute code; and given that native ARM for most apps is not a lot more than a recompile away, that might not be a problem.
(With notable exceptions like Adobe - I'm sure Apple can solve these individual problems well enough to make that into a non-deal-breaker)
This is a lot of really well expressed information that completely fails to grapple with the fact that most developers write code for the web and apple computers are extremely popular among web developers.
All of the things you mentioned are also true of intel macs, which again are wildly popular among web devs of all kinds.
If you can't explain the popularity of those machines in spite of those limitations, I don't see why I should accept those as reasons why apple arm computers won't be popular.
I think this is an important one to keep in mind. I'm sure most native Mac apps will be compiled to ARM, but a lot of existing apps won't.
Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps.
I for one really wouldn't mind if Apple would build a native app to replace Electron apps, e.g. a chat app that works as a good client for (what I have open right now in Rambox) Discord, FB Messenger, Whatsapp and multiple Slack channels. Or their own Spotify client. Or a big update to XCode so it can use language servers for VS Code and it's viable to use for (what I do right now) Typescript, PHP and Go development.
They have more than enough money to invest in dozens of development teams or startups to push out new native apps.
One day I'll switch away from Chrome in favor of Safari as well. Maybe.
(I am taking recommendations for native alternatives to apps)
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