Apple has made it very clear that ARM Macs will continue to be Macs in that the safeties (SIP, read only system partition, etc) can be disabled and that the App Store will not be the only way to distribute apps. In fact Big Sur’s rescue partition even adds a brand new UI for switching off the protections — up until now that required a terminal command.
I think they’re quite aware that locking down macOS the same way iOS is would be the platform’s death knell.
Except they’ve realistically already done that for the most part and have been going that way for awhile. Once MS agrees to the app store you can pretty much kiss side loading goodbye. AFAIK the only reason they allow it now is MS has thus far refused to use the Apple store.
I dunno, I’m not convinced. Most of the things they’ve done in macOS has been to try to keep the average non-technical user from shooting themselves in the foot.
Almost everything that has been locked down is having more secure alternatives being developed… for example, Apple is working with the developer of Little Snitch to add the necessary userspace APIs required for it to work without being a kernel extension. There’s also new things like userspace driver APIs which allow everything that current drivers do without the negative security and stability impact, and Big Sur even adds built-in virtualization — not just a hypervisor framework, but full on virtualization. You can spin up a Linux VM with just a few lines of code, no third party app required. Those aren’t things that line up with lockdown plans.
As for MS being on the Mac App Store, they’ve been on there with the full Office suite (along with a few other things) already for about a year and a half.
Interesting well then I wouldn’t give it long before they lock it down mostly completely. Apple has long shown they don’t care for users or ISVs.
If they were going to do this, they would have done it when Microsoft came to the store (as you said). Or they would have done it with the switch to their own processors (they didn’t).
They actually went out of their way at WWDC to directly say that macOS will continue to allow apps to be installed from outside of the macOS App Store. Nothing is changing.
Well they haven’t released this hardware yet. So they still could before launch.
They’ve explicitly said that this won’t be happening (at WWDC when it was announced).
Yeah… I’ll wait on buying that. I’ve been to WWDC, it’s just as much a marketing event as it is a developer event. Don’t believe everything you read.
No, the keynote is a marketing event. The developer sessions that follow are not.
And besides. You don’t need to wait to find out. macOS 11 is already in beta. That’s what the first lot of Macs running Apple silicon will be running.
Nothing has changed with running apps outside of the App Store.
As pointed elsewhere Microsoft has already doing Windows on ARM (has been for two years). Note that I said they have an x86 emulator so it is not like Microsoft is going to drop x86 support and given their huge legacy back load makes such a move at best long term (one article points to them having to use emulators into the late 2020s)
As for the “critical software they need to run is still on that architecture” thing that is likely due to the software being so nitch that the company that made it doesn’t exist anymore or it wasn’t worth the trouble to to an update. I saw that in a museum I worked in where they are running a DOS climate monitoring program because a Windows version did not exist. Heck, the place I worked at in the early to mid 2010s used a form of Unix older then DOS because there were issues in retrieving the database in the program they used (when the software company fixed the issue we switched over to Windows 10 fast)
And about that “where your customers are” and “for the less than 10% of customers that will actually be on ARM by 2030” bits:
“The volume of Arm-based processors shipped is 10 times greater than x86 processors. This fact, together with the disaggregation of Arm-based processor production from design, (…) Arm-based processors now have 10 times the shipments of x86 chips and have now overtaken Intel in performance. Previous Wikibon research shows that Arm is about 25% of the cost and 25% of the power requirements of x86 processors, for about the same performance.”
That means ARM is already cleaning the x86’s clock in terms of marketshare and as you said any intelligent developer goes where the market is…and the market right now is ARM. Heck, the Nintendo Switch (2nd most popular console) uses an ARM chip. More over PC sales of the x86 computer market are in clear decline (see charts in the Exiting x86: Why Apple and Microsoft are embracing the Arm-based PC article) with a projected 57% drop (ouch) in x86 PC sales over the next decade.
Any developer continuing to dismiss ARM is going to be hurting - their overall market share is already in decline and it is only inertia that will keep the x86 limping along. Apple has shown that a sane emulator for x86 code on ARM is viable and while slightly behind Microsoft should be producing something on par with that in 2021. The 2018 youtube video, Intel is in serious trouble. ARM is the Future, went into why Microsoft is going to ARM - the margins are so thin that many PCs come with buckets worth of ad ware and even miners.
As for having to exclusively go though Apple’s store. I have no idea where that idea is coming from (likely the same place the claim that Microsoft is not on the Apple store) but it is untrue. Microsoft 365 is there (though why you would mess with that over Libreoffice I have no idea- and Libreoffice has had an ARM version for a while)
Apple with its decent emulator and sole controller of hardware is going to have a better time of it then Microsoft who has found out that trying to direct the PC market is like herding cats…while hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.
(Looks at G4 Cube on shelf)
(Looks at pile of Newton MessagePads)
You just described how I get my thrills!
If there are still any on eBay by then, whenever it ends up being that I buy a house and have room for that kind of thing, I want to buy a G4 cube. I wanted one back when they came out in 2000 but it was way beyond what I could afford, so I got a 400Mhz iMac DV instead.
Yeah, there are a number of Apple devices I keep around just as decorative pieces. The Cube, a MessagePad 100, a QuickTake 100. I’ve got a PowerMac G5 that I’d love to find a companion for to build a coffee table, but of course you don’t want to ship those suckers, so I keep an eye out close to home.
One machine I sold back in the 90s that I wish I’d held onto was a PowerBook Duo 210. It wasn’t a great machine…the battery’s connection wasn’t reliable, the trackball clogged easily. But it was awfully cool in concept and design. I watch eBay for those, but the ones that appear tend to be beat up pretty badly.
Stop! You’re scaring the children! 
FWIW, the latest rumors are that the Sept. 15 event will include the announcement of an Apple Silicon-powered 14” MacBook with performance comparable to the 16” MBP. Claim is that the on-board GPU delivers similar performance to the Radeon 5500M.
The big point of skepticism for me is that this particular leaker has, up to this point, talked mainly about Apple’s “glasses” and “folding phone” projects, and the folding phone at least has mainly struck me as gimmicky nonsense that Apple wouldn’t be interested in making. But of course I could be wrong.
I can’t link to it, but the article’s at Apple insider, among other places.
Depends who’s saying it. if it’s Mark, it’s 100% true, if it’s not mark, it’s 100% not true. Mark Gurman is pretty much the only reliable apple insider. He’s so accurate that if he even tweets something it immediately appears on every rumors site as just law.
I recall him saying macs won’t be featured at september event at all. He said it said it was ipad and apple watch and iphone and mac were a separate october event. I’d take that as law.
Not Mark. Jon Prosser says the guy’s not legit, but given how certain Prosser was that announcements were coming this past Tuesday, people are (sarcastically) suggesting that this serves as confirmation.
The more I see, though, the fishier these claims seem. I would like it to be true, because I’m waiting to make a purchase decision, but October or November seems more likely.
Apple absolutely has an AR glasses project in advanced stages. They’ve bought several companies that posses relevant technologies, and bits and pieces of its software have slipped out here and there — most notably, one build of iOS 13 accidentally included an entire functional AR headset framework which referenced prototype headset hardware.
The past few WWDC’s have had a heavy focus on AR too, despite there not being any public Apple hardware that can meaningfully leverage it, which points to them trying to cultivate a library of AR apps that will be available on day one of the glasses’ release.
Precise details are in the air but Apple Glasses are definitely a thing.
I don’t doubt the glasses project. The folding phone strikes me as improbable. Not that it couldn’t be done, of course, but it strikes me as requiring more design compromises than Apple would find acceptable. (I know they’ve acquired some relevant tech, but I suspect it’s for some other purpose.)
Prior to August 2019 Mark Gurman’s record was only about 60% accurate, which is still not bad in the business of making predictions. Since then he’s made only 4 outright mistakes but a few of his predictions can never be wrong because it’s vague things like “Apple is working on something.” Actually, Gurman said there would be a 16 inch MacBook on Nov 10, so we can count this as a 5th mistake.