Apple officially announced the new product launch event again, confirming that it will be held at Apple Park. According to current the revelations, there will be Mac with Apple Silicon chips, AirPods Studio, and bluetooth trackers, the AirTags and so on.The invitations looked colorful, with a theme of " Here comes the encore " , it may be a hint of the many new products to come.
It is reported that Mac devices will be powered by processors base on ARM, but it will maintain the current look. The ARM architecture is produced by TSMC's 5nm process and may have two processors, A14X and A14T. The battery life of the new one is much better than that of the Mac powered by Intel. The battery life of the new one is reportedly 15 to 20 hours.
On the eve of WWDC, there has been a lot of news about Mac switching to ARM processors. But It's not an official announcement, and we don't know when the true one will come.
We can see the switch from PowerPC to Intel in 2006, the adaptation of Mac OS system has been in the works for a long time. Before consumers saw the Mac with Intel CPU, the operating system has being developed in parallel for both CPU versions. If Apple does announce that they will use the ARM chip, the operating system must be ready, and we don't have to worry about that.
Once the operating system has been adapted, the APIS exposed to developers won't change much. The unprofessional apps we use daily can be smoothly compatible with the system, only if they don't have too many functions which will directly dealing with the hardware.
While some professional apps will optimize for hardware to pursuit efficiency, and a lot of code can’t be so simple as calling system API. So some native code based on hardware platforms needs to be reconstructed. When the Mac switched from PowerPC to Intel, Adobe's family of software came out which supported both processor architectures. It took several years before abandoning the PowerPC CPU. The later versions developed specifically for Intel processors were certainly more efficient than the Universal Binary version. It’s also a reluctant action to take care of the previous users.
In the same way, some specialty software with high performance requirements may experience pain, if making the transition to ARM really done. But some software of Apple, such as Final Cut Pro X, must have been prepared well in advance.
If the day comes when Apple leaves the Mac that powered by ARM, we won't have to worry about software compatibility. The Mac accounts for a tenth of the U.S. PC market. The Intel chips today are not as miserable as the PowerPC. Apple won't suddenly have a hard landing, and it will be ready when it does.