Apple silicon or not?

[Dave Tuck]

I'm about to buy a new Mac (changing jobs and losing my MacBook Pro) and can't wait for the new Apple Silicon.  My question is if I buy an Intel Mac how long will you support Intel users and will new versions be built for both architectures?

My second question is if I hold out for an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro (unlikely but a possibility) I believe the Affinity suite will work but under emulation but will it be slow as some of the blog sites are saying apps will run very slowly under Rosetta 2?

 

[Alfred]

Welcome back to the Serif Affinity Forums, Dave!

14 minutes ago, Dave Tuck said:

I'm about to buy a new Mac (changing jobs and losing my MacBook Pro) and can't wait for the new Apple Silicon.  My question is if I buy an Intel Mac how long will you support Intel users and will new versions be built for both architectures?

Please this post made by the lead developer for Affinity Photo:

I’ll leave it to someone else to answer your second question.

[enginpost]

Apple Silicon is going to be an ARM-powered processor. Being that the incredibly popular snapdragon qualcomm 855 processors are also ARM, does this mean that we are likely to see Affinity finally embrace a segment of the Android tablet and large format smartphone market (like Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra with Dex)? I realize that the new benchmarks for the A14 ARM chips targeted for the coming macbooks out-performs qualcomms equivalent, but I would think that architecturally, we are getting closer everyday!

[firstdefence]

An interesting read: https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac/apple-silicon-vs-intel-3793039/

[v_kyr]

57 minutes ago, enginpost said:

Apple Silicon is going to be an ARM-powered processor. Being that the incredibly popular snapdragon qualcomm 855 processors are also ARM, does this mean that we are likely to see Affinity finally embrace a segment of the Android tablet and large format smartphone market (like Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra with Dex)?

First of all there are quite differences between ARM based CPUs and secondly iOS is under the hood pretty much different from Android in terms of native OS supporting libs and frameworks etc. So just using a similar ground CPU base alone doesn't mean here, that things can be easily run or be ported over, if everything else on the OS software base is different.

[firstdefence]

Personally I’d hold off, give it a few years to see how Apple Silicon (AS) develops and, if you are in a better place financially, and, you like what you see and read about (AS) make the change.

Ultimately, Apple Silicon will mean far more product control for Apple and even bigger profit because I doubt their prices will drop. 

 

[R C-R]

22 hours ago, firstdefence said:

An interesting read: https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac/apple-silicon-vs-intel-3793039/

The short version is "Apple Silicon" includes considerably more than just an ARM based CPU.

As for concerns about product control, while I think it is too early to tell, the inclusion of Rosetta 2 suggests that Apple is not planning on 'locking out' developers who are not interested in developing, or for one reason or another cannot develop, Apple Silicon versions of their apps.

What this will mean for prices is harder to predict. At least for its iOS/iPadOS stuff, Apple seems quite willing to cannibalize itself by offering lower cost versions of its high end models that perform almost as well for most tasks. If they do the same for Macs, & particularly if the lower cost models have the same neural engine/machine learning capabilities, this could skew the cost/performance equation in ways beneficial both to Apple's bottom line & to users.

Even harder to predict is what this means for Affinity. Serif has committed to maintaining as much feature parity as is practical for the Mac & Windows versions of the apps, so it will be interesting to see what they would do if for example the Apple Silicon versions of the apps could leverage of some of the new whizzbang neural stuff without significant changes to the code, if it would be impossible or impractical to implement that on Mac Intel or Windows hardware.

Edited September 28, 2020 by R C-R
minor change to wording