The big question: How well will touch-optimized apps written for iPad run on Mac systems that may not have touch support when these systems ship in 2021 As with Catalyst apps, and also with the Rosetta 2 environment, Apple is going to make use of containerization technology (so far, the company has not detailed how this is accomplished) to isolate the iPad apps from each other, using a new security model.How quickly will Apple seize complete control of its ecosystem Big Sur is not locked down -- yet.I got a few things right -- like the perfect iPad compatibility and the use of containerization for security and app isolation -- but there were a few things I missed.What did I get wrong Well, for starters, I was not expecting the development path of this new generation of Macs to be as open or as flexible as the company appears to have pursued.
Office Has Determined That Your Mac Systems ThatApple Silicon is a complete port, in the Option 1: Re-engine sense -- but there are some Re-imagine aspects as well. The route Apple decided upon is to re-engine and partially revamp the entire Mac platform. Its a bold, aggressive move that will transform the entire technology industry. Apple Silicon at WWDC 2020: Everything you need to know What is it For the future Mac -- the transition that is expected to take about two years -- Apple has decided to switch from Intel x86 chips to its own Apple Silicon, which has been powering its iPhone and iPad mobile products for the last 13 years. These will be 64-bit chips that use the Arm processor architecture of Apples design. For the developer transition, the company will be supplying a limited number of special Mac mini systems powered by the Apple A12Z Bionic chip. Thats the very same chip used in the 2020 version of the iPad Pro, a 4X4 (asymmetric) system on a chip, boosted with 16GB of RAM from the standard 6GB of RAM that ships on the iPad Pro. But it is unlikely that the initial shipping Apple Silicon Macs, expected in 2021, will use the same chips powering the next generation of iPhones and iPads. Apple will almost certainly design much more powerful processors, which can address much larger amounts of RAM, with higher numbers of high-performance p-cores (as well as lower-power e-cores), and possibly even discrete GPUs. What do we know about apps and challenges ahead for both Apple and developers Apple decided, for this transition, to provide developers with as many options as possible for moving to the new Mac platform -- with what can only be called a no app left behind strategy. In order of development effort required -- from easiest to most difficult -- these options are: Run traditional apps unmodified from x86 using Rosetta 2, a 64-bit Intel emulator that presumably uses Just In Time compilation, similar to how Microsoft runs Intel apps on its Arm-based Surface Pro X laptop. How well legacy apps will run in this platform will be very difficult to say. Office Has Determined That Your Professional Photo EditingApple showed a few 3D games and large professional photo editing applications running smoothly, but we all know that demos are tightly controlled, and we dont know which apps may misbehave. I was not expecting Apple to provide this as a method for running apps. With the removal of the 32-bit app and Carbon support in Catalina, many legacy apps were already thrown out with the bathwater. I have to think that this is mostly to appease large developers like Microsoft and Adobe while they port their most significant projects over to the new platform. It should be added that these traditional apps running in emulation can be user-installed; they wont need to be distributed on the Mac App Store. Run iPad and iPhone apps unmodified provided the developer allows the apps to be listed on the App Store for Mac -- the least effort solution with the best performance. This is one wild prediction from my previous piece I got correct, but quite frankly, it wasnt much of a prediction. No emulation is necessary; Apple simply moved all the correct software parts over so the apps would run, at native speeds, and adding some software magic that creates the needed Mac UX on the fly to support menus, dialogs, and windowing.
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