Apple byter från Intel till Apple Silicon

Posting as AC for a damned good reason.

Apple already has several ARM powered laptops drifting around internally. I've seen several of them with my own eyes. There's at least five different prototypes, all constructed in plastic cases with varying degrees of complexity (some are literally just a clear acrylic box, others look more like 3D printed or milled parts designed to look like a chunky MBA or iBook). There's a few that literally recycled the chassis and case from an MBA, just with a different logic board (which was coloured red for some reason), and others sporting a radically different design than anything Apple currently sells (not going anywhere near the details on those because of NDA).

All of them boot encrypted and signed OS images, which are fully recoverable over the internet so long as you've got WiFi access (similar to how their Intel powered systems do it). You cannot chose a version of the OS to load, you get whatever the latest greatest one is and that's it. They've completely ported OS X to ARM (including all of Cocoa and Aqua), however a ton of utilities that normally come with OS X are missing (there's no Disk Utility, Terminal, ColorSync, Grapher, X11, Audio/MIDI setup, etc). A lot of that functionality has been merged into a new app called "Settings" (presumably to match the iOS counterpart), which takes the place of System Preferences.

Likewise, App Store distribution appeared to be mandatory. I didn't see any mention of Gatekeeper or any way to side load (unsigned) binaries, presumably because Gatekeeper is simply part of the system now. The systems I saw could all access an internal version of the MAS that was specifically designed for the ARM systems (and under heavy WIP, judging by the broken page formatting and placeholder elements). The filesystem seemed a bit... peculiar, to say the least. Everything was stored in the root of the disk drive- that is to say, the OS didn't support multiple users at all, and everything that you'd normally see in your home directory was presented as / instead. I don't think the physical filesystem was actually laid out like this, it's just that the Finder and everything else had been modified to make you believe that's the way the computer worked. There was no /Applications folder anymore, your only option for launching and deleting apps was through Launchpad. Drivers (now called "System Extensions") were handled 100% automatically by the OS. If you plugged anything into the computer that it didn't support, it would automatically launch the MAS and take you to a page where you could download and install the relevant stuff. Those things would show up in Settings.app where you could manage them by way of customized preference panels or uninstall them completely. The rest of it more or less looked like a modern day version of 10.12 without some of the historical features accumulated over the years (for example, Dashboard was nowhere to be found).

From what I was told, there's a huge push to get this stuff out the door as soon as they think the market will accept it. That might be in a year, or two years, or three or four, but that's where Apple is inevitably heading. Custom hardware, custom software, total vendor and user lock in. They want to own everything, everywhere, at all times, and ARM is going to let them do exactly that. They're not stupid though and they're not going to commit suicide by releasing this stuff tomorrow, but they will sometime in the future. I guess in that regard the summary is correct- they don't have any "near term" plans to abandon Apple, but they've sure as shit got some long term ones, and I'm assuming Intel knows about it since a lot of the chips on the transparent prototypes had Intel marketings on them.

Rent tekniskt så föredrar jag Arm före X86