Mac moves to ARM, makes laptops obsolete?

[Blumf]

This is the video I have seen so far:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM7eSuSQiLc

Replacing the RAM in the 2012 iMac is a far more complicated process than replacing its drive:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H3ns8bOZKc

Good luck!

The HDD is the worst, as those things do fail, so locking them away behind glued in sealing strips is unforgivable.

[Replies From View]

Ohhhhh, I didn't know they got rid of the RAM door on the 21.5". What a bastard thing to do.

Yours is the first of the laminated screen models too, so you can disregard my advice about the spray duster as dust can't get between the panel and the glass.

This is good to know.  I'm expecting some dust to get inside the computer and the back of the glass, and I do intend to use a spray duster just to minimise the dust I am sealing back inside.  But it's great to know it's not going to be an enormous issue, as it's exactly the kind of detail that would make me anxious.

[Replies From View]

Good luck!

Thanks!

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

I'm a computadummy and am considering buying a new laptop - is this announcement and the likely transition a reason not to buy a new MacBook anytime soon?

[Cloud]

See response on page 2 ;)

I'd hold off if at all possible, personally, if you intend to keep it for a while.  The last of a generation is likely show its age a little quicker.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Interesting article mostly speculating on how MS might react to this. More things running in Azure and reducing hardware to arm-based terminals.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/hello-azurebook-why-microsofts-windows-future-is-intel-free-and-cloudy/

[Blumf]

Interesting article mostly speculating on how MS might react to this. More things running in Azure and reducing hardware to arm-based terminals.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/hello-azurebook-why-microsofts-windows-future-is-intel-free-and-cloudy/

Which only works so far in businesses, as there's always that one legacy app that needs a Wintel system, often with finicky hardware, to run on. Big corps may be able to bully their suppliers or just pay for new kit, but small/medium ones have their hands tied.

I'm always surprised MS never went full in with it's 'Home' branded OSes. Tie it into the whole XBox side of things as a consumer/gamer system, lock it down and ditch the Windows branding, along with the legacy support. Kinda similar to what Apple did with iOS vs MacOS.

As it stands, all they've been doing is pissing people off by selling them 'Windows', but gimped in various ways that stop them being used as expected.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I think office 365 has forced the hand of legacy a bit. The job I left in 2017 had some really old bits of legacy kicking around for some customers. Reports in Excel that used the Oracle client to get data directly from the database and rejig it around in hidden sheets. Not long before I was leaving we were looking to rewrite one of them because it allowed users to edit data and send it back to the system by making a SOAP request and the underlying Microsoft SOAP library was meant for Office 2003 and wasn't supported for several previous versions, but it just happened to work. O365 has cloudised some of that now.

And a lot of the bespoke desktop apps (some of ours used Centura applications, which oddly seemed to work on windows but the IDE/Compiler was win/16 and refused to work any more) were getting deployed via Citrix.

I think smaller companies can move to saas solutions for a lot of this stuff and most of the time they're a lot better. I was so much happier when I moved out of a Microsoft shop, and a lot of it wasn't Microsoft's fault so much as all the other people who come riding into town along with it.

[Blumf]

Not every app is just software, lots of hardware devices out there that need specialist software/drivers to use. These things tend to be crippling expensive to upgrade/replace (or just plain can't be replaced)

Even on the pure software side, there's a reason COBOL is still a thing (and Java, and Windows)

[Sebastian Cobb]

It's a shame about Java. I don't miss writing it but seeing it getting suffocated by Oracle licensing is sad. I imagine most COBOL stuff is now ran in  emulated/virtual mainframes.

[buzby]

It's a shame about Java. I don't miss writing it but seeing it getting suffocated by Oracle licensing is sad. I imagine most COBOL stuff is now ran in  emulated/virtual mainframes.

We still have a cluster of DEC/Compaq AlphaServers running VMS that run a suite of COBOL programmes. As you say it's a shame that cunt Ellison fucked over Sun's legacy. Oracle even went as far as going after the websites that mirrored the manuals and patch archives for long obsolete and out-of-support Sun hardware and Solaris versions. it's very difficult to find out anything without an Oracle support contract now.

[Blumf]

Oracle is another good one. Who the fuck would use an Oracle database these days except for legacy?

[Sebastian Cobb]

People who buy 'solutions' from the likes of CGI, Capita and Accenture I imagine.

My old work got Oracle licences free with an Azure partnership but then Microsoft and Oracle predictably fell out and Oracle wanted big money again. They seemed terrified of actually having to shift stuff out of PL/SQL even though it seemed Postgres and SQL Server (?) could do that although why you would when you could use a decent ORM library and maintain a degree of portability these days is anyone's guess.

[peanutbutter]

I assume macOS 11 is gonna be Intel/ARM and the long term goal is to have iOS and macOS much more closely aligned at their core for whatever an ARM exclusive macOS 12 would be

[Huxleys Babkins]

I think they are pretty much already there with 11, what with iPad apps being available on the Mac app store. Any Macs not capable of running the core iOS/MacOS featureset have already been excluded from upgrading to Big Sur.

I don't see Intel support going away for a long time, mainly because of the Mac Pro, but they'll drop models one by one because they are either not powerful enough or missing features. My iMac went into semi-supported status after five years because it doesn't have a Bluetooth 4.2 card and was properly dropped after 8 because the GPU doesn't support Metal.