At the developer conference, the company usually reports on the expected new features of Mac OS, iOS and iPadOS and on the longer-term hardware development plans; this time we learned about a very important future change in the latter category. Namely, that Apple, after using chips of its own development in mobile gadgets for as long as can be remembered, is also switching to its own chips for Macintosh machines.
This essentially means that Macintosh machines will also run on the ARM architecture, so software written for Apple products will be compatible with all devices. Apple will not switch immediately, but gradually: in 2021 and 2022, it will even launch machines with Intel processors; so that from 2023 it will be based only and exclusively on processors of its own design.
For the time being, Apple has “given” a Mac mini to developers, which contains the A12Z chip. According to the demo, the chip is powerful enough to handle any software: including video editing applications or games. Apple also announced that Microsoft’s office suite as well as Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom are already ready for Mac OS running on ARM – which, of course, is not surprising when you look at the fact that these applications have been running on ARM chips for a long time. version as well.
The transition is likely to be smooth; there was never a problem with Apple’s software support in this area, and in the next version of Mac OS there will also be a virtualization software that will allow programs written for the x86 architecture to run without problems on ARM chips.
Source: geeks.hu
