ARMed Macs

Fri 2020-06-19 06:18:19 –0400

Prepare for your Macs to be ARMed. It looks like an announcement will be made at the World Wide Developer’s Conference (virtual, on-line) that Macs based on a custom Apple ARM processor will be coming. This will certainly be the notice to developers on how to write for it.

It will be interesting to see what the hardware will be and when. Some are predicting it will be a new 12-in Macbook or maybe a new Macbook Air. I agree with the logic there, and I’d like to see a new 12-in thin laptop. I really, really like mine.

I’m anticipating the biggest and most interesting surprises to be around how they provide support for Intel processors. It could be that they simply don’t but I’m wondering if we might see, maybe in later models, an internal Intel processor in the same way that a graphics processor, or even the ARM T2 chip now resides in some Macs. There are very small, low power Intel processors so there’s almost no reason not to have one there so, say, run VirtualBox or something like that. A plug-in external Intel is another possibility. That may or may not come from Apple.