Of course this is anecdotal, but my macbook (made solely from Apple-supplied parts) seems to crash 3x as often as my cobbled-together-from-spare-parts Windows 10 desktop.
> Otherwise, they simply won't release it at all.
Do you think post-Jobs Apple retains that discipline? I'm not sure.
Apple, of all companies, is not a monolith. There are parts of the company who've been just killing it from a software perspective (Swift, SwiftUI, XCode preview for SwiftUI, etc.) Where they've had severe issues has effectively been quality management across the broader OS.
Also, I'll be very interested to watch what happens over the next couple of major release cycles. I think Apple got a major wake-up call with the shitstorm that was the iOS 13 / Catalina release cycle. I'm hoping that they'll be putting in place an outright culture shift to fix that long-term, vs. a one-off "Snow Leopard" tech debt paydown release.
Time will tell, but right now I think Swift isn't the languages that I once hoped for. And objective-C, despite all of its problem, is still doing well.
Apple didn't bother with 32-bit compatibility for Catalina which would have been much easier to implement. You're being way too optimistic. Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility.
If the ARM macs can run Intel 64 bit software, but not 32 bit, then removing it in Catalina makes perfect sense
Nah. It won't be seamless at all. It will be like touchbar macs - you buy it because last 3 generations were stuck in place with little improvement and you are forced artificialy to upgrade.
I wonder whether they’ve got any special killer apps in mind for the desktop and MacBook ARM machines. They could theoretically customize them greatly since they’re designing the architecture. Also wonder whether they view keeping the unix developer pipeline.
But of course, Apple does often surprise us all, maybe this could be something cool after all.
People asked the same question during both previous transitions.
But during the PPC transition, you could buy a PPC daughter card for 68040 Macs to run PPC software but you couldn’t use them simultaneously.
ARM macbooks will be for youtube influencers. Sure they’ll be able to edit 8K (and when uploaded to youtube they can’t even view it themselves). Devs need AMD.
On the other side, such a transition always is painfull. A lot of software needs to be rebuilt, and even more legacy software gets killed, as it is not ported to the new platform. Though Catalina already did a lot of that, and that might not be a coincidence, if you think about it. Catalina might be intentionally restrictive to ease the transition to another architecture.
Also, a lot of Mac users are running VMs on their machines. Running Windows and Linux VMs on your Mac was one big benefit of the switch to Intel. I myself use a Linux VM for my professional work on a MB Pro. And that VM needs to be able to run x86 software. So it remains to be seen, how Apple deals with the MB Pro (and of course the Mac Pro).