Apple to switch Mac lineup to its own chips

boing
#61

You have my sympathy. I bought the Power Mac G4 Cube literally less than a month before it was dropped from the product line. I liked it, but what can you do? Be pissed, I suppose, and I was for a long time.

Before I upgraded the OS in my iMac to Catalina, every Steam game I had was giving a warning that it would no longer work under that OS. That prompted me to fix my daughter’s old Windows computer and that’s dedicated solely to gaming and I use my iMac for work, media server, and general goofery.

Has that changed? Is Steam releasing Catalina capable games now?

1 Like
#62

My Powermac clone still runs on OS 9.2.2 and connects to AOL thru my US Robotics 56K-X2 dial-up modem with no issues. Still haven’t used all my free minutes. Take that, Apple!

3 Likes
#63

That was a 32bit vs 64bit issue, so some folks (including steam) updated, but the reality of most games is that they don’t get updated after the first year or so unless they are AAA titles.

So, to answer your question more completely, yes, there are plenty of mac games on steam that work with Catalina, but I wouldn’t expect your older library to update. This will be even more true with the arch shift to ARM, but at least there you’ll have emulation for likely the next half-decade or so.

We already went through this on mobile, where I ended up losing a bunch of my fave ipad games, which reminds me:

It depends. Civ 6 for example is there and I routinely cloud-save and move my savegame from imac -> ipad (or well, I did when the world wasn’t exploding and I travelled). there are great AAA ports for ipad games, but it really depends on what you can play with a touch interface, same issue with the console -> PC translation for many games as well.

2 Likes
#64

Yep. Me too, and this news also reminded me of that. And a good chunk of my Steam library is “older.” Ah well.

2 Likes
#65

I’d definitely agree that that’s the plan; I’m just not sure how it will pan out. Initial reports on the native-ness provided by catalyst have not been terribly heartening; and we’ve had the opportunity to watch how UWP was supposed to seamlessly enable adaptive interfaces across all platforms something something on the Windows side; and it has since crashed, burned, been watered down almost to nothing, continued to smolder, been rebranded a few times; largely relegated to some pack-in apps that are mostly a pretty lousy fit for the desktop/laptop. And all that is in a case where there is now zero momentum on the mobile side. WM/WP bled out years ago; and UWP is still either a lousy fit or just win32 rebranded because you distributed it through the microsoft store.

Maybe Apple will do better, it’s certainly possible; but making an interface feel right in two or more radically different contexts is a hard problem; and phones and iPads are definitely where the volume is, so we’ll see how much love OSX gets.

1 Like
#66

Steam is buggy on Catalina, and incorrectly reports MANY 64-bit games as incompatible. It’s an ongoing issue.

2 Likes
#67

Well, at least one person who used Catalyst to port an app last year feels like the improvement in Big Sur goes a long way: https://twitter.com/jamesthomson/status/1275421071219601408?s=21. Frankly, I just feel like Apple is better at this stuff. I think they’ll get there, but only time will tell.

#68

That’s true and even if they have the source code of the older version it may not be so easy to compile on new toolchain.

#69

For reference, Big Sur supports Macs going back to mid-2013, and Apple generally has a 7-year support window for its Mac product line. Even with yesterday’s announcements, an Intel Mac that you bought last week will almost certainly be supported with OS updates through 2027, and if they continue to sell Intel Macs in some capacity through the next 2 years of the planned transition period, they’ll likely be supporting Intel through 2029.

I haven’t yet upgraded to Catalina because I have a handful of apps that would fall afoul of the 32-bit apocalypse, and my MacBook Pro has officially aged out of software updates as of big Sur since it’s from mid-2012. I’ll probably hang onto it for older apps and look to replace it with a new machine at some point in the near future.

2 Likes
#70

z888
z888640×1620 287 KB

4 Likes
#71

PowerPC macs used OpenFirmware for their boot environment which is Forth based.

4 Likes
#72

: state-truth ( – )
." You are correct." cr
;

ok> state-truth

2 Likes
#73

Yeah, Catalina kind of screwed all that up for me anyway by breaking a ton of games. :pensive: At least I can dual boot into Windows.

1 Like
#74

“Since when has Apple ever given a flying chip about backward compatibility?”
Yeah, you tell’em .That’s why my 8 y.o. iMac, 6 y.o. Mini, 9 y.o. iPhone and halfl a dozen other older Apple things can’t still work. Oh, wait.
Rosetta 2 will handle pretty much any old x86. Any even faintly sensible software will be a simple recompile. Really only code generators (something I make a living from) will have any problems and most of us have been doing ARM for ages - 35 years in my case.

2 Likes
#75

That would be funny if it were actually, y’know, funny.

#76

And then someone will do a clever hack to allow a Raspberry Pi 4 8G to run Mac Arm stuff native.

1 Like
#77

I hear you my friend! As a graphic designer and fledgling app designer with occasional video projects, I need more grunt than most current day ARM processors/devices for prosumers. I mean I love my 3 year old 12.9" iPad Pro (never stutters, never slow, only gets warm playing World of Tanks on gonzo quality). But games are already getting fewer and farther between for MacOS… otoh I played the iPad demo of CivVI and was surprised at how well the whole thing ran (but the UI wasn’t as fun and I’m already tooled up on mac Civ on Steam). It’ll be a rocky transition but maybe parallel Intel/ARM macs will be the best of both worlds? mb light a fire under Intel’s posterior…

Where I see this taking things to a whole new level is the iPhone becomes your Mac when you come home and plug it into your giant screen (which may have a slot for a co-processor?) Joe/Jane Shmoe’s average workload is surfing the web, email and some light video editing or social blah blah. I noticed the dev kit did NOT have Thunderbolt3 or USB4 listed… think what a monster of a product that would make: a phablet that you just plug in to your 4k or 8k giant format USB4 screen/hub and it all just works. Not sure wireless could compare to TB3, but some functions could be wirelessly enabled (ie you come home, the NFC unlocks your door, BT pings your screen to wake up and connect to the phone via Wi-Fi and start handshaking.) Your iPad is a phone and mac and pen enabled tablet… throw in AppleTV and make it just one more HomePod node. I’m getting tingly.

#78

When Apple switched to Intel, and to OSX, we lost a lot of great software. But the computers and the OS were so much better it was almost worth it in a lot of cases. (The bigger loss was the change in general aesthetic and culture of independently developed Mac software. But that kind of change is also inevitable over time regardless.) Will we see that here? Will there eventually be compatibility tools? Will we be stuck settling for a lot of ported iOS Apps on Macs? Will it not matter because so much stuff will be browser/HTML based?

#79

You need more performance than you think the cpu in a modern iPad can provide? No problem.
Look up Graviton2 and ThunderX3. Note that Fujitsu just took the fastest computer slot with an ARM machine.
Consider that, sure, maybe 4 cores of A12 isn’t enough but how about 384 cores of ThunderX3? Or perhaps more realistically, 32 cores at 3GHz for less energy cost than a 4 core i9.
Performance is not a problem.

1 Like
#80

Core counts are pretty much useless when discussing most computing, frankly. Unless you are running VERY intense, very “atomizable” problems (atmospheric models, say) massive parallelism can only do you so much good. No, your word processor isn’t likely to run better with 384 slower cores, sadly, rather then 4 significantly faster cores; that’s not how it works. While multiple cores do have some real benefit, for most common tasks this plateaus very quickly past 2 cores.

Any given ARM SoC may or may not be sufficient for gaming, especially; most modern games are pretty heavily dependent on single-core performance. That – along with better thermal “headroom” – is exactly why (for x86 machines) a fast, 4-core i5 is quite often a much better gaming CPU than a slower i7 with 6 or more cores.