Comments on: Apple, Arm and Intel – Devilish legacy. https://www.radiofreemobile.com/apple-arm-and-intel-devilish-legacy/ To entertain as well as inform Fri, 18 Apr 2025 06:25:09 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.26 By: Colin https://www.radiofreemobile.com/apple-arm-and-intel-devilish-legacy/#comment-4159 Wed, 10 Jun 2020 14:10:03 +0000 http://radiofreemobile.com/?p=7732#comment-4159 Apple has done this transition twice before. From 1994 to 98, Motorola 68000 to PowerPC; and from 2005 to 2011, PowerPC to Intel. During these periods the hardware ran apps for both environments, first by emulation and second by the remarkable Rosetta instructions translation.

Developers had years to transition their apps and many Mac users didn’t notice seismic system changes taking place. This time, Apple starts a similar transition with many advantages it didn’t have earlier.

Apps that follow the developer guidelines use the Xcode environment. If it transitions to ARM, many apps will largely transition with it. Similarly for Metal graphics. Catalyst has been out for about a year, providing a common code base for different apps that are native to either iOS/iPadOS or macOS. Swift programming has been around since 2014. Apple also has the possibility of developing its own custom silicon to run whatever the transition is.

No other company has ever done this at scale and Apple seems to be about to embark on it for the third time. I don’t think we need to worry too much about how it will work out.

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