Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer
by yjftsjthsd-h on Sunday March 22, 2020 @06:57PM
(#22659548)
> I could imagine Apple eventually porting MacOS to iPads (and therefore to ARM)
There's not much to port. The underlying Darwin operating system is shared by all Apple products (AFAIK, excepting Airports for some weird reason). They would have to do a recompile and maybe make sure that nobody accidentally put architecture specific bugs into the finder or something stupid, but the grand difference between Apple's different operating systems is which graphical interface they put on and some amount of user space tooling. And honestly, I would be absolutely shocked if Apple doesn't have internal builds of the desktop-oriented "Mac OS" for ARM, probably as part of the usual CI pipeline.
There's not much to port. The underlying Darwin operating system is shared by all Apple products (AFAIK, excepting Airports for some weird reason). They would have to do a recompile and maybe make sure that nobody accidentally put architecture specific bugs into the finder or something stupid, but the grand difference between Apple's different operating systems is which graphical interface they put on and some amount of user space tooling. And honestly, I would be absolutely shocked if Apple doesn't have internal builds of the desktop-oriented "Mac OS" for ARM, probably as part of the usual CI pipeline.