FUTURE OF APPLE Silicon and WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU! Bye INTEL.

Apple has dumped Intel and are making their own Silicon CPUs, this announcement at WWDC 2020 is a bigger change than people think. Colin Smith discusses what to expect going forward with hardware, software and the future of computing. Having gone through the previous 3 apple transitions, it's actually easier to predict than you think. But how will it effect you as an end user / creator and should you buy a new computer or not?

#WWDC2020 #appleSilicon

[edit_by_tony]

I'm a windows user & have no desire to enter the Apple orchard

[rml]

I’m gonna jump to Silicon. I’m learning to code in swift and the addition of the Mac only increases potential market share of swift developers without needing to recompile.

[waldoh]

As an artist on a Mac, I will be looking forward to your reviews of Silicon particularly how it works with Photoshop, Topaz, NIk and etc.

[aargh]

I am a Windows user and intend to stay there. How does this Apple thing affect me?

[PumperWolf]

I'm excited with the transition, a full working version of Photoshop for Mac ARM, gonna perform very smooth.

[lylestavast]

Anyone who has to have a new machine in the next 2 years should find someone who will lease them one, with an exit clause where you just give it back at end of lease. By then, things will be shaken out well enough to know what path to take on a longer term purchase you intend to keep. Again with Adobe et al, half their licenses are on Windows platforms - I doubt they're going to orphan off PC users anyway. What I'm interested in is if Apple will try to package their GPU equivalents so it can slot in onto a Windows box and smoke out some of those GPU vendors who specialize in gaming and video rendering etc.

[briandodds]

The T2 chip is a nightmare. If Apple says your hardware can't be fixed then your hardware becomes useless because the 3rd party repair shops can't fix it ether. I'm going to stick with my CS6 on older intel hardware and Mojave for as long as possible... Need to find real replacements for Photoshop, Lightrooom and Illustrator before moving on.

[Sunshineleroy]

Perhaps this is a good thing. But Intel is the world leader with massive experience... it could be that this will be much more difficult for Apple than they imagine. I see lots of bugs and hick-ups coming.

[Photographer]

Trendsetter = reinventing the wheel ≠ the best option. Ever since I broke away from the Dell proprietary computers I've loved building computers or modifying my builds to suit my current workflow. Oh, at a much lower price point.

[sadwax]

I believe that the main reason for this switch is that Apple wants to make all their previous hardware obsolete, maybe forcing customers to upgrade. Chrome OS vs MacOS seems to be the new thing because Mac and PC are very different platforms now.

[metaryder]

Upgradability on my computers has been my thing for the last 25+ years. By being able to spend a small amount to get my pc to a satisfactory level instead of having to buy a whole new system, I've been able to invest much more in traveling. I'm not the type that has to be on the bleeding edge and then be forced to sacrifice in other areas. I'm the same with my camera equipment. I'm not a professional so I don't need to upgrade my 5D mark3 or my X-Pro2. They do the job very well. The money I don't spend on the tools means we can travel three or four times a year which for us, is a much better use of our funds. If computers stop being able to be upgradable, I'll just stick to the hardware and software I've got since it does the job until the computer dies which should be longer than 5 years. The laptop I travel with is about 8 years old and it does what I need it to do so until it stops working, I'll continue to use it for our trips.

[deltadanman]

And - before Intel, there was Power PC (aka IBM) and - before Power PC, there was Motorola; Obladi, Oblada, Life goes on...

[vperalta]

What do you think will happen to Photoshop applications with this transition away from Intel? How will this, in the long run, affect those using Photoshop on Windows equipment?

[MichaelWDietrich]

You missout the security issues of SOC. Hint: Watch "your baseband is watching you" to see what I mean.

[vernearase]

Even on Intel there is no such thing as a "universal architecture" - plug-ins and applications for each had to be compiled for that platform, though porting assembly language bits of code might be easier.

Nowadays, no one uses assembly language except possibly for some time critical pieces of drivers.

The only compatibility using Intel offered was the ability to boot into windows, or run a native windows hypervisor (like Parallels or VMWare Fusion).

People who don't understand software should not make generalizations about software architecture or function.

For the Intel to ARM (actually AArch64) transition, things will have to be recompiled and edge cases debugged just as they had to be for the PowerPC to Intel transition. _ALL_ platforms are walled gardens. Windows is a walled garden. Linux is a walled garden. Solaris is a walled garden. It's all just a matter of perception.

You're assuming - incorrectly I believe - that a Mac SoC will be the same as an iPhone/iPadOS SoC - which is ludicrous.

Apple's already announced that they'll be supporting Thunderbolt which implies the Mac SoCs will have PCIe support. There no reason to suspect that it won't support standard DIMMs and PCIe as well - all Apple silicon is custom, and they can design in anything they want.

iPhones and iPads use NVMe storage - no other phones do to my knowledge. It's certainly not part of the ARM designs - Apple just added the logic block when they decided to use NVMe storage.

Apple's silicon team is one of the best in the world, and certainly rival that of Intel or the other CPU designers. Their SoCs are not standard ARM designs - they've been designing their own silicon for the last decade: you must've been snoozing during each keynote when they'd come out and detail what they've done each year.

lt's practically certain that Apple _won't_ be designing a separate SoC for each storage tier - such a strategy would be economically unfeasible. Silicon design is much more expensive than designing simple circuitry, and the steps you have to go through with high frequency lithography with the chip fab much more complicated, and the QA much more difficult. Graphics for high end machine will probably be much like it is today - onboard graphics for less demanding tasks, discrete graphics for heavier duty tasks. Intel CPUs with integrated graphics are actually mini-SoCs (though they don't call them that).

If you compile your code using Xcode, and your app isn't written in assembly - and I know of none that are with current gen powerful procesors - creating a universal binary may be as simple as turning on a toggle in Xcode. Of course there may be edge cases where you have to do some conditional compilation depending on platform, but the vast majority of the work has been done by Apple channeling developers to use Metal and 64 bit mode.

My next Mac will probably be the rumored 2020 iMac 5K with a core-i9 and a Radeon 5xxx GPU. When that gets old, I'll switch to an Apple silicon Mac after early adopters have smoothed out all the bumps in the road. By then (hopefully) there will be software x86 hypervisors like SoftPC or VirtualPC.

[sallyjberry]

Great explanation of the new mac system. I'm a Mac user and will hold on to my 2018 MB Pro until the newer system comes out. Thank you for all the details - I will stayed tuned and look forward to your future review.

[alandyer]

We have versions of Photoshop and Lightroom running now on Apple’s own chips, on the iPad. The difference in the iPad apps is the need to engineer them to run on a touch interface. But surely at some point Lightroom Classic, at the very least, will disappear from the Mac once the transition to Apple Silicon is complete, to be replaced by a new more capable version of Lightroom running on all Apple hardware, something that was likely to be in the offing anyway.

Who knows about Photoshop? Will the Mac version eventually get replaced with an all new Photoshop with a completely redesigned interface garnered from the iPad version? But perhaps with the old Photoshop surviving for a while as Photoshop Classic?! Until, as you say, we hit the brick wall.

If there’s a lot of effort needed on the part of Adobe to port all their apps to keep them running on Macs I fear a situation as we had in the past where the Windows versions of apps got the new features and less popular Mac versions lagged behind.

But I suppose with Creative Cloud that’s not as likely — all subscribers will expect to get — and should get the same level of features and upgrades, which wasn’t always the case with boxed software. As you say, interesting times ahead! Thanks!

[mrrjstudios]

Thanks for the heads up. Nice technical explanation. Time will tell.

[hicact]

Thanks Colin...I did watch (twice) the Keynote speech, but it is great to hear what was said from someone who doesn't work for Apple. You have giving me lots of food for thought but my general hunch was (and still is) wait and see for at least a year. Thanks again!

[TuckerPearce]

If people are still holding on to CS6 they are missing out... Good video! I’m not buying a Mac until they switch now, unless they drastically dropped the price.