Mac Transition to Apple Chips

[puredesign]

Will the Affinity apps be ready for the transition to Big Sur and the Apple chips when new hardware ships?

[ashf]

iPad version is already matured and it's got almost the same functionality with Mac's
So I'm not surprised even if Serif is already building Arm version.

Also since there's no Arm Mac yet, there's plenty of time to prepare for it.

[chwebb1]

I came here to ask a similar question.

And while we're on the topic, how long does Affinity plan to continue supporting Intel based Macs? I currently have a 2014 MacBook Pro and a 2017 iMac. The MacBook Pro will probably be upgraded before the iMac, and I will probably upgrade the MacBook Pro on the second revision of the new ARM based MacBook Pro (or whatever they end up calling them, they changed the name from PowerBook to MacBook Pro in the PPC -> Intel transition; might be showing my age a bit).

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, puredesign said:

Will the Affinity apps be ready for the transition to Big Sur and the Apple chips when new hardware ships?

Why not, they just need some Mac Mini based "Developer Transition Kit" boxes ...

... and let's say one week for recompilation and testing.

 

59 minutes ago, chwebb1 said:

And while we're on the topic, how long does Affinity plan to continue supporting Intel based Macs?

How long will Apple? - I'm sure Affinity will do equally. Beside all that, there is then also Rosetta 2 for a transition period of probably 2 or more years, until all will then have a Google/Android based looking UI running on a new named macOS child. (LOL)

 

[JGD]

On 6/23/2020 at 2:02 AM, v_kyr said:

Why not, they just need some Mac Mini based "Developer Transition Kit" boxes ...

... and let's say one week for recompilation and testing.

 

How long will Apple? - I'm sure Affinity will do equally. Beside all that, there is then also Rosetta 2 for a transition period of probably 2 or more years, until all will then have a Google/Android based looking UI running on a new named macOS child. (LOL)

 

I agree on the timing, it should be quick. Maybe Apple didn't give Serif advance warning precisely because they trusted them enough to basically know that Affinity will be ported well in advance of Big Sur GM and the first “Apple Silicon” Mac release (I'd rather call it still “ARM-based Mac”… That's how Apple VPs refer to it, to the ISA, when they get technical about it, so… while not the official marketing name, it's still accurate). So, sure, it made for a great demo for Rosetta 2, but the point is moot as Affinity apps will be Universal 2 in time anyway.

As for Big Sur's UI and Apple… as I've said in the other thread, you're being too harsh on them. Some UI elements look positively horrid, and as a relatively old-timey Mac OS X/OS X/macOS 10 user, I do agree that it feels a bit foreign… but look like Android it does not. If anything, it looks like iOS/iPadOS and that is kind of the entire point. I wouldn't mind having all those Control Centre and transparent Notification shelf shenanigans and get either the original icons, something flatter and closer to iOS/iPadOS, or at least something equally in-between except non-hideous. And I've seen and test-driven enough beta builds of macOS to know that quirky stuff like that is fairly common and eventually gets ironed out by the GM releases.

[Cecil]

I guess I just too old to be concerned that I or my 2019 iMac will become obsolete for Affinity, especially with the price point I paid for Affinity Photo.

[v_kyr]

37 minutes ago, JGD said:

...you're being too harsh on them. Some UI elements look positively horrid, and as a relatively old-timey Mac OS X/OS X/macOS 10 user, I do agree that it feels a bit foreign… but look like Android it does not. ...

My point is more that everything looks rather copied over from others now. I miss a bunch of let's call it Apple's own innovations and unique selling points here. Most of the UI based changes and stuff they now introduce is something others had long time before. Same for maps, translate and speech services etc. - Further due to that UI device platform unifying, macOS will look in future like iOS/iPadOS, be equally restricted and thus probably will  also loose a bunch of things developers would usually expect to be supported on a Unix development OS & platform.

[JGD]

On 6/25/2020 at 11:09 PM, v_kyr said:

My point is more that everything looks rather copied over from others now. I miss a bunch of let's call it Apple's own innovations and unique selling points here. Most of the UI based changes and stuff they now introduce is something others had long time before. Same for maps, translate and speech services etc. - Further due to that UI device platform unifying, macOS will look in future like iOS/iPadOS, be equally restricted and thus probably will  also loose a bunch of things developers would usually expect to be supported on a Unix development OS & platform.

Well, I see where you're coming from with that. But let's face it, not even System/Mac OS 1.0 was entirely original, it was a wholesale copy of Xerox's Star with a lick of Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, Susan Kare et al.'s paint on top of it. And Xerox Star was a platform which, in turn and mind you, probably wouldn't even exist – or at least definitely not in that particular form – if it wasn't for Douglas Engelbart's “mother of all demos”.

As for more recent times… could you seriously live productively without Notification Centre on iOS/iPadOS? That's also an Android innovation right there. Resizing from all corners and sizes on macOS? A belated addition to then-called OS X, lifted wholesale from Windows. And the same goes for the current fullscreen and split screen implementation… As for Maps' features? Well, since Apple ditched Google as a default provider many years ago and, as Marques Brownlee keenly pointed out, still don't allow you to set a different mapping app as the default, they'd better copy them ASAP globally (I live in a small country in Europe where Apple has always lagged behind, and it kind of pisses me off that the world's biggest company still hasn't properly caught up with Google)…

And the iPod? Was it the first pocket, mass storage-based music player? Was Apple Watch the first modern smartwatch? Nope, they were just the best at their game from day one. Time and time again you see Apple playing out that MO: occasionally they come up with an explosive innovation which quickly propagates across the entire industry (say, the PowerBook 100, which was one of the first such products on the market with the pointing device closer to the user and the keyboard farther, the PowerBook 500 and its seminal trackpad, multi-touch gestures on the 2004 PowerBook and iBook G4 trackpads, or the entire touchscreen phone and tablet paradigm… the latter of which, as you very well know, also originated and were demoed outside of Apple well in advance of their conversion into workable products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89sz8ExZndc) or ballsy, pioneering move (ditching the floppy, serial, parallel and SCSI ports in one go, then the optical drive, then their own FireWire and shortly after USB-A and all other I/O), but they mostly copy others with a twist or a flair. Steve Jobs himself put it out on display, shamelessly, with his apocryphal quote “Good artists copy, great artists steal”: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/

I don't mind copying in principle. Everyone does it, and I stand by it even on creative fields like my own (remix culture, as defined by Lawrence Lessig, comes immediately to mind) and am deeply skeptical of the current climate of copyrighted *everything*. Heck, I work in type design, an area where we've been copying Roman artisans and Irish scribes for around 2000+ and 700+ years respectively. I'm fine with it, as long as a modicum of ethics is maintained in said copying – namely, by giving some form of credit and/or compensation – and some common advance of the human species is achieved – that should go without saying… If you're bringing nothing new to the table, you are indeed only taking advantage of others for immediate personal gain. I won't make any excuses for Apple when they weren't on the right side of history (can you say “Sherlocking”? Konfabulator? Growl?), but other than those few examples they did get better at it once they had the resources to outright acquire good ideas and properly compensate their originators whenever possible. For every of those bad moments, there are many more when they did things right (for instance, SoundJam MP, Coverflow, Beats, Workflow or Shazam come to mind). As for two behemoths (historically Microsoft and Apple, now mostly Google and Apple and sometimes Samsung and Apple) constantly copying one another? I couldn't care less, as long as end users collectively benefit from it.

[JGD]

5 minutes ago, BofG said:

What is this "testing" of which you speak?

Firing it up on a DTK Mac Mini (my guess is it'll run just fine, as most of the code was already ported to iPadOS), about which they won't be able to talk because they'll be under a heavy NDA.

[R C-R]

On 6/25/2020 at 5:09 PM, v_kyr said:

My point is more that everything looks rather copied over from others now.

Not everything but to the extent that it is, what's wrong with that? After all, to the extent possible the Affinity apps try to offer the same "look" across all three supported platforms, which I think is generally regarded as a good thing.

[v_kyr]

22 hours ago, BofG said:

What is this "testing" of which you speak?

Probably something you would also have to do then.

[v_kyr]

23 hours ago, JGD said:

Well, I see where you're coming from with that ...

I come more from NeXTstep/OpenStep times, where people like Bud Tribble, Jean-Marie Hullot and Co. tended to do software based things more their individual way. - Hardware transition wasn't a theme OS wise in the past, since the whole software was already build and compiled the way to support different CPU architectures (those days Motorolla and Intel CPUs and also Sun and HP RISC CPUs).

Let’s hope that macOS doesn’t deteriorate too much to the iPad operating system at some point, i.e. to a simple decrippled and sandboxed thing with Touch & Click and not many other interoperating third-party development opportunities at all.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Let’s hope that macOS doesn’t deteriorate too much to the iPad operating system at some point, i.e. to a simple decrippled and sandboxed thing with Touch & Click and not many other interoperating third-party development opportunities at all.

From what little I have read about it on the web, I think Apple is not trying to 'merge' the two operating systems into a single unified one. Rather, they are primarily trying to make it easier for developers to build apps that will run on either of them.

But I doubt they will force third party developers to do that, so they will still have the option to build apps specifically for one or the other of them.

[JGD]

5 hours ago, v_kyr said:

I come more from NeXTstep/OpenStep times, where people like Bud Tribble, Jean-Marie Hullot and Co. tended to do software based things more their individual way. - Hardware transition wasn't a theme OS wise in the past, since the whole software was already build and compiled the way to support different CPU architectures (those days Motorolla and Intel CPUs and also Sun and HP RISC CPUs).

Let’s hope that macOS doesn’t deteriorate too much to the iPad operating system at some point, i.e. to a simple decrippled and sandboxed thing with Touch & Click and not many other interoperating third-party development opportunities at all.

Massive respect! I am aware NeXTSTEP was built with the entire ISA-agnostic philosophy from te get-go, to the point that there was actually an x86 version, am I right?

As for macOS devolving into a souped-up iPadOS, I'm siding with @R C-R on this one. They actually seem to be making the whole “security level” thing more transparent and easy to toggle on a per-volume basis, which is just great. And they were pretty vocal about allowing one to install and run outdated, unsigned versions of macOS… To do a 180° on that would be mindbogglingly stupid, represent a massive breach of trust towards their loyal power users and be completely out of character especially after releasing the beast that is the new Mac Pro. I'm not buying that, and the ARM-based replacements to the Xeon-powered machines are actually the ones I'm more curious about; think Afterburner card, but on massive amounts of steroids.

As a matter of fact, I'm going one step further in my speculation: I can even envision people hacking Windows ARM-64 (whenever that comes to pass and evolves out of OEM-only status) onto A-series Macs using custom boot loaders and Apple eventually caving in and reviving Boot Camp, in pretty much the same way they created it in the first place only after Windows x86 installations were hacked on top of a kludgy BIOS emulation thing on the very first Intel Macs. And even if that doesn't happen, we'll see at least Windows ARM hacked onto virtualisation software (legally or otherwise), mark my words.

[v_kyr]

50 minutes ago, JGD said:

I am aware NeXTSTEP was built with the entire ISA-agnostic philosophy from te get-go, to the point that there was actually an x86 version, am I right?

Yes it was initially developed on other CPUs than the one used by black hardware (Motorolla CPU). Later the NS/OS was adapted/ported over to other CPU platforms, among those the Intel x86 CPUs (used by IBM & Clone PCs aka Dos/Win machines those days) and Sun and HP RISC Workstations. Development and porting over of apps etc. was pretty easy and almost just a project recompile with enabled settings for code generation for all four architectures, which resulted into fat binary (universal binaries) executables.

1 hour ago, JGD said:

As a matter of fact, I'm going one step further in my speculation: ...

I think the main point for Apple is here instead, to be independent from other chip manufactors (Intel) and so to have the whole control of chip manufactioring, it's capabilities and availability in their own hands. And as one can see from the chips they used in former times (Newton devices) and nowadays iPhones/iPads or their T2 and other custom chips, they are long time able to do so. They have long time experiences with the ARM CPU architecture and also the tools to make use out of those equally good.

[AffinityMakesMeSad]

If you really wants an deep insight on this topic, read what Steven Sinofsky had to say about this...

Steven Sinofsky has a lot of Superlatives about Apple!

Do an search on Steven and you may see that this guy knows the industry very well!

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1275311056672325633.html

[v_kyr]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

From what little I have read about it on the web, I think Apple is not trying to 'merge' the two operating systems into a single unified one. Rather, they are primarily trying to make it easier for developers to build apps that will run on either of them.

I believe the tendency they will go to offer in the future is a compile once then run everywhere inside the Apple ecosystem way. Since that's what I partly see by their latest API and CPU unifications.

 

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

But I doubt they will force third party developers to do that, so they will still have the option to build apps specifically for one or the other of them.

Don't forget that they also have to support their long time Intel based hardware then now, until they will one day in future officially discontinue support for that. So the question for macOS developers actually is more, do I always have to build two CPU based different macOS versions, or will there be support for generating instead one universal binaries through Apple's dev tools, which will then run on either CPU platform.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

I believe the tendency they will go to offer in the future is a compile once then run everywhere inside the Apple ecosystem way.

I think so too. But I don't think that means that everything will look or function the same way throughout the ecosystem. I think each Apple OS will retain (for lack of a better word) its own distinct personality, one that is best suited for its intended purpose & whatever user interface(s) it supports.

[v_kyr]

We will see, the future will tell.

[R C-R]

11 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

We will see, the future will tell.

Indeed it will ... but somehow I don't think the interfaces of Apple TV's, Watches, or iPads will ever look or function the same way as they would on Macs, even if future versions of all of them are running on Apple Silicon.

[v_kyr]

11 hours ago, R C-R said:

...even if future versions of all of them are running on Apple Silicon.

Well the CPU doesn't play any role here, L&F is more a matter of software and UI handling instead. Size wise there will be possibly small differences, but overall things may look equal then, similar in behavior to bootstrap driven web content in browsers and the like.

[R C-R]

"Apple Silicon" includes more than just the CPU....

[v_kyr]

22 minutes ago, R C-R said:

"Apple Silicon" includes more than just the CPU....

In regards to the WWDC announcements, namely?

Other than that many people have different feelings for the software UI changes ...

• Hey designers I made a tutorial for migrating your icons to Big Sur

Quote

... how to imitate the big sur icon look. Chamfering & embossing, contour and drop shadow are enough. (LOL)

 

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

In regards to the WWDC announcements, namely?

"Apple Silicon" isn't about anything specific to the WWDC announcement. It is about the entire family of Apple-designed chips, including the "A" series family of SoCs that include both CPU & GPU cores; the "T" series that include among other things audio, video, & touch sensor support; & so on.

Basically it is about everything listed in Wikipedia's Apple Silicon article, plus whatever variants they develop in the years to come, how they are used in future Apple products, & how those products will be able to interact.

The possibilities are almost endless (& some of them are maybe more than a little frightening) but I still believe that for many years to come Macs will look much like they do now, & regardless of how many amazing new features they acquire we will still be able to use them like we do now ... if we want to.

[v_kyr]

14 minutes ago, R C-R said:

"Apple Silicon" isn't about anything specific to the WWDC announcement. It is about the entire family of Apple-designed chips, including the "A" series family of SoCs that include both CPU & GPU cores; the "T" series that include among other things audio, video, & touch sensor support; & so on.

That's what we already said before in this and the other related threads, so you are just repeating things here that we all already know and had discussed long before.