Today at the fully online WWDC 2020 keynote address, Apple has announced that the Mac range is transitioning to their own Apple silicon, bringing all their experience that they have developed with the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, by designing a Mac with better performance whilst consuming less power. We have all the detail available at the moment.
Apple has announced a dedicated range of Apple Silicon for a New Mac range of computers. Not unsurprisingly Apple was making claims about the benefits of being able to integrate their own software with their own silicon.
Throughout the entire presentation, there was no mention of ARM Processors, it was all about Apple Silicon.
Apple discussed how the new macOS Big Sur has been designed to “make this transition smooth and seamless”.
Apple announced that when they updated all their own apps for macOS Big Sur, they also developed them to all run on Apple Silicon and this includes Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro too.
They will have all their apps running natively on day 1 (although we don’t know when day 1 is yet). To achieve this Apple will use Xcode. They are saying that the'“vast majority of their developers” will be able to open their existing applications in Xcode “and recompile” and get their applications “up and running in just a matter of days”.
To deliver these new applications, Apple has developed Universal 2, which will support both Intel and Apple Silicon processors. The aim is to enable developers “to tap into the native power” of the Apple Silicon, whilst still being able to support Intel Chips “all with a single binary for all of their users”. Sound familiar? Apple has done this before.
Some of Apple’s larger 3rd party developers are already hard at work at developing Microsoft Office for the Mac running natively on Apple Silicon. In PowerPoint Apple even showed the power of their Metal Graphics to display all the layers of an animation smoothly.
Apple has also been working with Adobe on their Creative Cloud and Apple say that most of them are already “up and running great”. Apple demonstrated Lightroom running natively on the Apple Silicon. Apple showed a 5GB Photoshop file.
Apple then demonstrated their own Final Cut Pro application running 4K video. They showed applying filters in real-time to a 4K video as well as animated titles and lens flare all during live playback of the 4K video.
The new native Final Cut Pro can take advantage of Apple’s Neural Engine to use machine learning to crop a video for Portrait smartphone playback, keeping the most important action in the frame. Not content with one 4K steam, Apple Final Cut Pro will be able to playback three 4K ProRes streams simultaneously all on an Apple Silicon A12Z processor. The chip is the same chip that is currently running in the iPad Pro.
To make the transition as seamless as possible for their users Apple wants them all to be able to use all of their apps on the new Apple Silicon on day 1, even if some apps won’t have been updated at that point. Of course, Apple has been here before. When they transitioned from PowerPC to Intel processors they had a tool called Rosetta, that enabled users to be able to run PowerPC apps on Intel-based Macs.
macOS Big Sur will include Rosetta 2, which will automatically translate Intel apps to run on Apple Silicon. It’s designed to support complex apps and their plugins, but there was no mention if that referred to DAWs like Pro Tools or Studio One. Rosetta 2 will do the translation on installation. However, when necessary Rosetta 2 will also be able to translate code on the fly when using Just In Time and JAVA code.
Apple demonstrated an Intel version of Maya that appeared to be working smoothly even when the rendering layers were added just by using Rosetta 2.
Apple iPhone and iPad apps were also shown running completely natively on the new Macs using Apple Silicon.
Apple is promising that most Mac applications will run straight away. They are claiming that using Universal 2 recompiling applications in a couple of days so “users can have fast native apps”. We will have to wait and see if that will actually work in reality.
We asked a developer building software for the Intel-based Mac platform what they made of this. They told us…
“The migration process for developers using all the latest tools and techniques sanctioned by Apple will likely have a smooth transition. Any still using deprecated technologies such as OpenGL, Intel specific optimisations and libraries, or build-chain dependent tools that may include protection technologies may have rather more work to do than Apple’s best-case estimate.”
Apple’s aim is that macOS Big Sur will pave the way for the transition to Mac computers with Apple Silicon by being able to run both native and Intel-based applications.
What Is The Timeline For The Transition To Apple Silicon?
Developer kits using a Mac mini with an A12Z SoC, 16GB memory, 512GB SSD, and the macOS Big Sur developer beta will be available later this week.
The first Apple Silicon-based Mac is due to be released before the end of 2020 with the complete transition expected to take 2 years. They are planning to continue to support and release new versions of the macOS for Intel-based Mac computers for “years to come”. In fact, they have some new Intel-based Macs “in the pipeline”.