Mac OS Big Sur logbook (intro)

August 14, 2020
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Before I start this, I think a brief recap is in order. 

In recent years, I’ve become increasingly wary about installing a new Mac OS release right away. Persistent bugs, new features that haven’t been particularly compelling to convince me to leave behind what is not broken, things that used to ‘just work’ becoming more like ‘it should work, hopefully’ have all contributed to significantly cool my enthusiasm when it comes to Mac OS. 

After many years with a 2009 15-inch MacBook Pro as my main machine, running all supported Mac OS versions from 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.11 El Capitan without issues (I skipped 10.10 Yosemite entirely, however), now my two main Macs are a 2017 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac and a 2013 11-inch MacBook Air. The iMac was purchased new, the Air second-hand. I got both Macs in 2018, and they’ve been running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra without a problem.

When Mac OS 10.14 Mojave was released in September 2018, I honestly didn’t find anything in it that was worth leaving the stable environment of High Sierra behind. Also my iMac, unfortunately, still has a traditional hard drive, and Mojave would have upgraded the filesystem to APFS — and this, in turn, would have meant a noticeable performance loss, as APFS notoriously works much better with SSDs. So I stayed on High Sierra.

Then came Mac OS 10.15 Catalina, and after learning about the level of bugs and disruption it would bring to my workflow, I was even less eager to upgrade. I heavily rely on Mail. I have email archives that go back 20 years which I was able to preserve Mac after Mac, and Mac OS X version after Mac OS X version. Believe it or not, I haven’t had an issue with Apple’s Mail app since I started using it in Mac OS X 10.1. After hearing about Catalina’s Mail-related bugs, I didn’t want to take the risk. Also, I still use some 32-bit apps and games, and Catalina dropped support for 32-bit apps completely. So nah, Catalina was more trouble than it’s worth, and I was not alone in thinking that. 

But still I was in a bit of a predicament. A part of me would just curmudgeonly be happy to stay on High Sierra, or maybe update the 11-inch MacBook Air to Mojave at least, and that would be that. End of the story of Mac OS for me. But what if one day some specialised application I use for work updates and starts requiring Catalina? What if some Mac app I need to test or localise has Catalina as minimum requirement?

I don’t believe in upgrading your devices for the sake of upgrading, but I believe that in this day and age one has to be technologically flexible. So I started to consider the idea of acquiring a used Mac that is recent enough to run Catalina but at the same time doesn’t break the bank. An ideal candidate could be a 2014 Mac mini, a model that on the used market is less sought-after than the 2012 models due to its limited upgradability and more intricate disassembly. I could perform a clean install of Catalina on it, and use such a machine as guinea pig, for app testing purposes, and the like.

With the help of a couple of splendid fellows, I was able to acquire a much better candidate — a 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro — for probably less money than a 2014 Mac mini. Having a newer machine is always a plus, and a laptop is overall much better because it’s more manageable. You don’t have to hook it to an external display, keyboard and mouse every time you need to use it.

So I installed Catalina on it, had my share of issues (though somewhat fewer than expected), and at this point — I thought — why not wait for the public beta of Mac OS Big Sur, install it, and share my notes as I go along? (Where possible, of course.)

Here we are, then. Over the next days I plan to do just that in the form of short-to-medium ‘logbook entries’, just as I did with Snow Leopard eleven years ago. This is Entry Zero because I needed an introduction, and because for now I still haven’t installed the Big Sur beta. My plan was slightly delayed by the temporary unavailability of this and another website of mine. The hosting company apparently did a server migration and there were some DNS issues along the way. As I was waiting for the records to update and propagate, whenever I loaded my website another one appeared. This went on for about 24 hours and gave me a bit of a scare. My mind was elsewhere as I waited for things to get back to normal. 

First step: enroll my Mac in the Apple Beta Software Program

That went rather smoothly: you basically do it using your Apple ID and accepting Apple’s Terms and Conditions. During the Sign-up process, though, I was forced to enable two-factor authentication, and I just don’t like it. I know, two-factor authentication is an added layer of security, how can I not like it? Oh, I don’t have an entirely rational explanation. Some friends of mine ran into issues and were locked out of their accounts after enabling Apple’s 2FA, so there’s that. But mostly it’s just that I don’t entirely trust the method, preferring to rely on stupidly strong passwords, and I don’t like giving my phone number to tech companies. 

I also don’t like to be forced into doing something without having a choice. Another example: I can’t access the iCloud Web interface anymore because Apple thinks my password is not strong enough and doesn’t fit their password criteria, so if I want to access my iCloud account from a browser, I must update my Apple ID password. I have that password stored on so many devices that it would be a huge hassle to update it everywhere; but more importantly, I just don’t like Apple’s patronising attitude here. So I won’t budge. 

Anyway, tomorrow I’m downloading the Big Sur beta on the MacBook Pro — let’s see how it goes.

Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 4)

July 30, 2020
by Riccardo Mori
Software

I am the first to wonder whether it makes sense to write yet another part of this little saga, when Catalina is basically entering its last two months of active duty. But Catalina remains, I think, one of the most (if not the most) controversial Mac OS X releases, and now that I have finally had direct experience with it on a new machine I’m using just for testing, I can confirm. But first things first.

Feedback update

When I wrote Part 3 back in February, the feedback amounted to 107 emails. Of those, 96 were negative, 7 neutral, and only 4 positive. As a reminder, by ‘neutral’ I mean emails from people who wrote to tell me that they updated to Catalina and things kept going on in a business-as-usual fashion. ‘Positive’ feedback means emails from people explicitly telling me their experience since updating was better than before, for a reason or another (performance; a new feature of Catalina they found especially useful; etc.).

As of this morning, the email count is at 370. The negative-neutral-positive ratio has essentially remained the same, with 309 negative-feedback emails, 29 neutral, and 32 positive. And once again let me stress the fact that I’m not trying to use this data to prove anything — it’s all very anecdotal. 

At the same time, I can’t but remark that it’s all very suggestive, too. Back in October 2019, when I wrote Part 1 of this accidental series of posts, I never expressly solicited readers to send me emails and tell me their tales, whether of woe or joy. And yet, I’ve never received such amount of feedback about any other Mac OS X release, or any other topic I’ve ever written about in the 15 years I’ve kept a tech blog. And while there is the occasional terse email, and the occasional message that goes off-topic and simply criticises my articles (I’ve left these emails outside the Catalina-feedback pile, of course), most emails are detailed accounts of what went wrong since updating to Catalina — or what Catalina does right in the case of positive feedback messages.

When a couple of articles from this series on Catalina reached Hacker News in the past months, a lot of quips I got as response were from people who dismissed the problem altogether with remarks along the lines of These nerds must always find something to complain/whine about. There’s nothing wrong with Catalina. Well, that’s simply not the impression I’ve had and continue to have. And not because I have 309 emails of negative feedback and horror stories to prove it, but because this volume of feedback itself is an indicator, in my private sphere, of a larger discussion that has been going on publicly (in online forums and specialised mailing lists) since Catalina was released last autumn.

Finally updating to Catalina: my first impressions

I closed Part 1 by writing:

So, to conclude, do I plan to stay on High Sierra or Mojave indefinitely? It’s hard to say and too soon to tell. Both my main Macs are really working flawlessly at the moment, and Catalina is beta-quality software that’s likely to give me headaches I don’t need right now. Who knows, maybe down the road I could acquire a cheap used Mac that can run Catalina (something like a 2014 Mac mini) and use it as a test machine. As things are now, I absolutely do not want Catalina to mess with my current setups and data. The cost for me would be higher than getting a second-hand Mac mini. 

Recently, a very kind soul from the UK gave me the opportunity to acquire such a test machine, but it ended up being a far better deal than a 2014 Mac mini. For a really low price given its specs, I was sent an Early 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of flash storage. The Mac is in overall very good condition, save for a blemish on the display (which can be ignored in normal use, fortunately), and a well-used battery with more than 1,250 cycles (but still working well and giving me plenty of hours of use). 

The machine arrived completely wiped and reset, with a clean install of OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan. My plan was to perform a clean install of Catalina, take a look at it for a while, then move on to the Big Sur betas.

What I was eager to test was something I’d been thinking about while reading all the feedback emails on Catalina. My simple hypothesis was that clean installs of Catalina tended to be less problematic than mere updates from High Sierra or Mojave. I know, nothing particularly original or astute. But even in my limited sample I could see a pattern forming:

  • Many negative emails were from people who were attempting to upgrade, and Catalina gave them trouble both during the update process and afterwards;
  • Very few negative emails complained about having issues with Catalina after a clean install (currently only 8 emails out of 309);
  • About half of the positive emails were from people who, after I enquired, told me they had performed a clean install of Catalina.

These points strongly suggested that the less the system was cluttered with preexistent crap, the better Catalina would behave.

And so, after a few days spent on El Capitan to see if everything was working fine on this ‘new’ MacBook Pro — and it was — I downloaded and installed Catalina. Unfortunately, as I wrote on Twitter, I haven’t had much time to tinker with it or to inspect it more closely due to a very high workload I was subjected to for the past three weeks. The only things I’ve noticed so far are these:

  • After installation, there were a few constantly-running processes that kept the CPU busy all the time. This seriously impacted the MacBook Pro’s battery life, and its general performance. I found a solution to the problem by searching online, and it probably wasn’t something a regular user would know how to apply.
  • After installation, and recalling other people’s accounts, I expected a barrage of security and permission-related dialog boxes. I haven’t really seen one so far. Probably because it was a fresh install and not an update?
  • I can’t say anything about data loss because it’s a fresh install on a new machine for me, so I had no data to lose in the first place. But there were things that didn’t download/update after installation (Dictionary app without dictionaries, App Store app without updates, etc.)
  • Just out of curiosity, I installed the Steam client and took a look at my games’ library. Less than one third of them are Catalina-ready. I know games aren’t critical apps, but I would have been really bummed to discover this if I had rushed to update my main Macs. I’ve been told that, a lot of times, despite the warning that a certain game is not compatible with Catalina, it turns out that it’s not the case, and the game runs fine. But in my case I have verified that most of the games in my library really won’t run in Catalina.
  • On a slightly less serious note, by installing Catalina on this MacBook Pro, I finally had the opportunity to try Dark Mode for the UI (remember, my main Macs are still on High Sierra, so I hadn’t experienced it yet), and I immediately reverted to Light Mode. Dark Mode feels like possibly the most overhyped feature in the history of Mac OS X. I think the traditional light UI with Night Shift or f.lux is much easier on the eyes when working at night.
  • Another issue that seems to plague this MacBook Pro since installing Catalina is related to sleep. In a nutshell, sleep has become unreliable. I put the MacBook to sleep either by selecting Apple menu → Sleep, or by just closing the lid, and sometimes the Mac goes to sleep correctly and stays hibernated, but sometimes it does not. You get the bitter surprise the day after you fully charged the MacBook before putting it to sleep, when you wake it up and discover the battery charge has fallen to 65–70%. I have tried several solutions and workarounds but nothing definitive so far. I’ll have to thoroughly check the sleep/wake logs to find which process(es) interfere with the MacBook’s sleep[1].
  • Finally, Time Machine backups keep failing. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

After these preliminary findings, I can say that even with the cleanest of installs Mac OS Catalina can be problematic. This is disappointing, but a part of me is somewhat not surprised.

All in all, I’m glad I have this new MacBook Pro to use as guinea pig, because I still don’t feel comfortable updating my production Macs. I haven’t even logged into iCloud in this Catalina installation, for fear it might mess things up. But again, as I said, I haven’t had the time to explore Catalina properly yet, and at this point I don’t even know if I will, because as soon as I’ve dealt with this demanding workload, I will install the Big Sur betas.

Previously:

 

  • 1. The pulsating sleep light was such a nifty visual clue that your Mac was effectively sleeping when you told it to. Now it’s a guessing game. ↩︎

 

On the possibility of touchscreen Macs

July 12, 2020
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

In this video, Quinn Nelson points out something I, too, had noticed when taking a look at the user interface of the first beta of Mac OS Big Sur. That is, many controls and UI elements appear to have odd spacing for a traditional desktop user interface. It seems as if they were prepared to accept touch input. So now of course the next wave of speculation, post-WWDC, is that touchscreen-enabled Macs may appear in the not-so-distant future.

The biggest piece of evidence to support this theory seems to be what Craig Federighi himself announced during the WWDC 2020 keynote:

As you saw, Macs built with Apple Silicon will be able to run iPhone and iPad apps directly. Starting day one, users can download these apps right from the Mac App Store, and most apps will just work, with no changes from the developer.

Quinn Nelson adds:

The implications of this are huge, but it goes even a step further than that, because during the State of the Union address after the keynote, Apple announced that all iOS apps, both iPhone and iPad, would be available for Apple Silicon Macs in the Mac App Store by default, and the developers, if they didn’t want their apps available for ARM Macs, would have to actively opt out. From the outset this might sound like a good idea: if your desktop and your laptop and your mobile operating devices all run the same instruction set and codebase, well, why wouldn’t you allow for cross-compatibility to bolster these newfangled ARM Macs with the largest software catalogue possible?

But here’s the thing. I don’t peg Apple as a company that would fill their App Store with a bunch of broken, crappy apps that would significantly diminish the experience for these new ARM Mac users. And without a touchscreen, that’s what it would be for a lot of apps — crappy. Most games (which, remember, will be made available by default on day one) require Multi-Touch, and the last time I checked a mouse cursor could really only replicate one finger […]. Come on, you really think that that’s what Apple’s gonna do for consumers? This is Apple: a company that is obsessed with image and visual polish to a fault; and that’s why I was a bit confused by the announcement at all. Because think about it: without a touchscreen, the experience of using iPad and iPhone apps on a Mac will be pretty terrible — even worse than the really really bad Catalyst apps that Apple has been fervently trying to prove can be good.

It’s a solid argument. But on the other hand, consider the following: if making iPad and iPhone apps available for Apple Silicon Macs from the start is the primary reason that signals the impending arrival of touchscreen-enabled Macs, then, by this very reasoning (a Mac with a touchscreen would help achieve the most seamless experience when using iOS apps directly), all Apple Silicon Macs would need to have a touchscreen. Is Apple going to introduce an external touchscreen display for Mac mini users? Is Apple really going to equip all laptops and iMac-like Apple Silicon Macs with a touchscreen? I may be wrong about this, but to me it looks like a terribly expensive solution for Apple and for the consumers. Can you imagine a 27-inch iMac with a good quality touchscreen display?

My theory can be roughly summarised in two main points.

1. There is going to be a Mac model with a touchscreen display

Whether I agree or not with Nelson’s overall take, his observations regarding the increased space in several UI elements within Mac OS Big Sur’s interface have merit. That spacing could very well be simply a cosmetic feature, just to bring more homogeneousness between Mac OS and iPadOS’s interface; or it could indicate that Big Sur is going to support touchscreen Macs. I think Apple is maintaining this sort of ambiguity to have more freedom of movement, to keep their options open just in case. I think they could be planning to release an Apple Silicon Mac that works like a 2‑in‑1 laptop/tablet hybrid, a sort of portable professional/business machine with advanced tablet functions. Apple’s version of a Microsoft Surface, in a nutshell.

It makes sense that they would prepare Big Sur from the start to have a touch-friendly interface. And this wouldn’t even contradict Apple’s long-time stance that touchscreen Macs make little sense. They could say, This class of device can be used just like a traditional Mac with full support of traditional input methods, but it can also become a powerful pen- and touch-based device when needed. Of course, like other 2‑in‑1 devices, it would be more focused on portability and long battery life than sheer performance (though a considerable level of performance would be guaranteed anyway due to it being equipped with an Apple custom SoC). This way, it wouldn’t interfere too much with the sales of ‘regular’ Mac laptops and iPads.

2. Another way to interpret Apple’s announcement

While it’s great that Apple Silicon Macs will be able to run iPad and iPhone apps directly, and that “Starting day one, users can download these apps right from the Mac App Store, and most apps will just work, with no changes from the developer”, it’s also obvious that developers will have to implement a few changes in their apps if they want to offer a good experience to those who want to use them on their Macs. So, what do you think is more likely?

  • (a) That Apple goes the extra mile and starts equipping all new Apple Silicon Macs with a touchscreen display; or
  • (b) that Apple is giving a not-so-subtle hint to iOS developers that goes like this: With full cross-platform compatibility, your apps will run on Macs directly and we will make them available from the Mac App Store from day one, so if you want the opportunity to extend your apps to Mac users as well, you should start working on optimising them for the Mac and its user interface right now, because the clock is ticking.

I’m thinking (b). With a bit of optimisation (how hard this is going to be depends on the type of apps they offer), an iOS developer can provide a separate Mac OS and iOS app with a seamless experience across the platforms (visually and functionally), instead of just having an iPad app that can run on a Mac, but poorly. It’s also more lucrative for a developer, who can effectively charge for two distinct versions of the same app, instead of offering just a one-size-fits-all app at a single price. Who knows, maybe Apple will also let developers offer Mac OS/iOS bundle pricing, so if you have a Mac and an iPhone, or a Mac and an iPad, or the three devices, instead of purchasing Cool App for iOS/iPadOS at $3.99 and Cool App for Mac OS at $6.99, you could get a bundle with the two apps for, say, $8.99. Or maybe it could be a higher subscription tier, for those developers who favour such an approach. What is more lucrative for a developer is also more lucrative for Apple, ultimately.

 

Again, I may be completely wrong about this, but it’s a bit hard for me to see Apple just start making Macs with a touchscreen display so that they all can run whatever app you throw at them, as is. If all new Macs with Apple Silicon could be used this way — especially laptops — then the only reason to get an iPad would be its lightness and compactness. There would be more overlap between classes of devices.

As I said above, Apple could offer one class of device with Surface-like functionality. But Apple isn’t Microsoft. They don’t need to offer such a device: they already have good tablets and good desktop/laptop computers; it’s probably in Apple’s best interest to keep the two lines separate. A Surface-like Apple convertible, however, could function as bait for people outside the Apple ecosystem — people who today are using Surface devices because they love and take full advantage of the laptop/tablet hybrid formula.

After WWDC 2020: bittersweet Mac

July 2, 2020
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

I won’t be going through everything that was announced at the WWDC 2020. There have been so many other sources writing very comprehensive overviews already; and I’m terrible at overviews anyway — I always end up forgetting something. 

I must also confess that when I started watching the WWDC keynote, I was anxiously waiting for the Mac segment and the talk about the transition from Intel architecture to ARM (which Apple calls Apple Silicon, at least for now, in their characteristically generic nomenclature). So I paid very little attention to the Apple Watch news, and enough attention to the iOS/iPadOS part to be at least aware of the main changes.

Oh, and speaking of iOS, I’ve been a bit amused by how a lot of pundits and commentators have talked about Widgets in iOS 14 as being this huge deal. Granted, it’s the first major change in iOS’s Springboard since Folders in iOS 4 ten years ago. And granted, the widgets they showed look cool and their implementation appears to be well executed. But to my eyes the mix of widgets and regular apps gives the Springboard a busier look and feel. On Android, widgets can be positioned on the screen with less constraints and can be kept visually separated from app icons. And despite the behaviour of iOS’s widgets has been considered more akin to Windows Phone’s Live Tiles, Windows Phone still manages to look more elegant because in that operating system there’s virtually no distinction between ‘app icon’ and ‘widget’ — everything that is displayed on the main screen is, well, a tile, with customisable sizes. 

The transition to ARM: unexpected magnanimity

As you know, I was very worried about how Apple would handle the Intel-to-ARM transition. In my pre-WWDC post, I wrote:

The previous transition, from PowerPC to Intel chips, gave users an inordinately long grace period when it comes to software and backward compatibility. […] If you consider that the last minor release of Snow Leopard (10.6.8) was released in June 2011, this means that you could still run a PowerPC app on an Intel Mac as late as five years after the transition was complete, hardware-wise. 

That long grace period was in large part made possible by Apple releasing Rosetta, a dynamic binary translator included in the Intel versions of Mac OS X, allowing people to run PowerPC apps at almost native speeds.

For this next transition, I speculated that Apple wouldn’t bother investing time and resources in developing a similar software tool. I predicted more pragmatism on Apple’s part and said that the company would require developers to rewrite their apps to run under ARM Macs, and if you still needed to run Intel apps, well, you could keep your Intel Mac around until you would be ready to make the jump to ARM. In other words, I predicted that Apple would largely place the burden of transitioning to developers and users, in an Either you follow us or you’ll be left behind fashion.

I was genuinely surprised, and relieved, when I saw the Universal 2 and Rosetta 2 icons appear on the screen. It seems that Apple is willing to stick to the same approach they chose for the PowerPC-to-Intel transition, and that’s a good thing in my book. They said it will take them two years to complete the transition, and that Macs with Apple Silicon will start to appear later this year. I particularly appreciated the way they’ve delivered the message about leaving Intel behind: while internally they probably cannot wait to get rid of Intel chips inside Macs, their public-facing stance is much more nuanced: we’re not dropping Intel support overnight, there are still new Intel Macs in production, and, in Cook’s own words, We plan to continue to support and release new versions of Mac OS for Intel-based Macs for years to come. Again, this feels quite relieving. 

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I’ve spent these past years worrying about how much Apple really cares about the Mac, and those periods in the recent past with lack of meaningful updates, the degrading software quality, and the way Apple handled the butterfly keyboard fiasco, didn’t exactly give me hope. But I’ll be honest: after hearing how Apple plans to handle this next Mac transition, and especially after watching John Gruber’s discussion with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak, I feel more reassured about the future of the Mac.

Mac OS Big Sur

The snag is Mac OS’s new look. I’m not a fan. But you knew that. I’ve already mentioned this on Twitter: if you want to have a good review/recap of iOS 14 and Mac OS, watch this video by Quinn Nelson. When you get to the part where he criticises Mac OS Big Sur’s user interface, pay attention to his commentary, as we’re pretty much on the same page. He makes some funny remarks like, System Preferences look like Apple paid a guy on Dribbble $30 to make it in 2 days. Or, This looks like something that Xiaomi would call MiMac. Or, Looks like Apple tried to knock off their own OS.

I get that the major force driving this visual change is to make Mac OS look and feel more similar to iOS and especially iPadOS. Apple is decidedly marching towards a homogeneousness across its major platforms that soon will embrace both software and hardware. But in everything I’ve seen of the user interface of Mac OS Big Sur so far, I’ve noticed how Apple seems to prioritise looks over function. In his video, Quinn Nelson also makes a more serious remark about the UI: It just seems too simple and yet too cluttered; which was exactly my very first impression as soon as I saw the demos.

In the WWDC keynote, there’s this bit from the short video with Alan Dye (Apple’s VP of Human Interface) where he says:

We’ve reduced visual complexity to keep the focus on users’ content. Buttons and controls appear when you need them, and they recede when you don’t.

And that’s one of the main things that bother me about Big Sur’s UI. I’m not a VP of Human Interface, but I’d say that a desktop operating system you interact with using complex and precise input methods and devices, can in fact afford a certain visual complexity without getting in the user’s way. Which is what I (and I suspect many other people) have always loved about Mac OS. An operating system characterised by a user-friendly, easy-to-use, but not-dumbed-down interface. I’d hate to see a progressive oversimplification of the Mac’s UI that could potentially introduce the same discoverability issues that are still present in iPadOS.

I’ve always considered the look of an operating system to be a by-product of how it works, rather than a goal to achieve, if you know what I mean. If something is well-designed in the sense that it works well, provides little to no friction during use, and makes you work better, it’s very rare that it also ends up being something ugly or inelegant from a visual standpoint. How it works shapes how it looks. If you put the look before the how-it-works, you may end up with a gorgeous-looking interface that doesn’t work as well as it looks.

The renewed insistence on transparency and the alarming amount of reduced contrast present in many places of the UI makes the experience look as if it was designed by twenty-somethings with perfect vision for twenty-somethings with perfect vision. The Accessibility preference pane looks more and more like a place that is not devoted to people with physical impairments, but to people who are not on Apple’s design team or who are not within the trendiest segment of the intended target audience.

It’s just the first beta, though. I hope things will improve as betas progress. I hadn’t felt this kind of visual-change shock since the introduction of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, with all that UI flattening, bold colours, and poorly-chosen Helvetica Neue as system font.

Quietly optimistic

I usually avoid posting my impressions right after a big Apple event, especially one as filled with new stuff as this WWDC 2020. This time I’ve purposefully forced myself to wait, and take in other people’s impressions and observations first. My first reaction to Mac OS’s new look was of shocked incredulity, some of my comments were bitter and destructive, and while it’s still hard to look at Big Sur without wincing, rage-quitting a platform after using it for 31 years isn’t really a thoughtful alternative. I’ve decided, now more than ever, for a wait-and-see approach. I’m still not upgrading my current Macs, but I’m considering getting another Mac that is modern enough to run Catalina and the Big Sur betas, and use it as a disposable test machine. I prefer sharing any detailed criticism about Big Sur’s UI after I’ve used it myself on a Mac, in real-life, real-production conditions.

The hardware part of this transition is admittedly what’s keeping me interested and downright excited at the moment. I’m very curious to see how having powerful and power-efficient processors will affect hardware design in future Macs. While I bet that Apple can’t wait to get back at designing thinner and thinner laptops, it would be interesting to see whether they release even slimmer desktop machines as well. I just hope ports won’t also keep disappearing as devices get thinner. Anyway, it’s clear that Apple has plans for the Mac, and while I may not fully agree with the direction they want to push it or how they want to transform it, it’s still better than not having the Mac around at all. 

I think.

A few thoughts before WWDC 2020 on the next Mac transition to the ARM architecture

June 19, 2020
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Like many, I have the feeling that this year’s WWDC is going to be a particularly meaty one. But frankly, of all the things Apple’s doing now, what concerns me the most is the rumoured Mac transition from Intel to ARM chips.

Looking back on my very blog, I’ve realised that it’s been at least two years since the tech world has been musing on it. But in 2018 it was mostly a ‘what if’ scenario. Today we know that something is really about to happen, one way or another.

Since the publication of Mark Gurman’s article, I’ve been reading a fair amount of commentary about this next transition. Most of the more balanced takes seem to share some optimism about how Apple will handle the transition. Since the company has already handled two chip architecture transitions in the past (Motorola 68K CISC → PowerPC RISC in 1994, and PowerPC → Intel in 2005–2006) — and things went rather smoothly in both cases — they guess that this third transition will play out just as smoothly. 

I don’t entirely share this confidence. The past two transitions were handled by two very different Apples, and this next one will be handled by yet another different Apple. Same company, but different times, different people, different leadership, different priorities.

Back in 2018, in Speculation and dread for the next transition, I wrote:

All these major transitions [In the article I also included the major operating system software transition, from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, that took place in 2001–2002] have common characteristics:

  • They were all rather user-friendly and customer-friendly.
  • They weren’t particularly rushed: there was both preparation and confidence on Apple’s part, and they unfolded over a long period of time and at an acceptable pace. Users had to update eventually, but they were given plenty of time to do so.
  • All these transitions were for the better. […]

Like others, I’m sure that the ARM architecture, coupled with Apple-designed custom chips, will certainly benefit the Mac from a performance/consumption standpoint. But what still makes me apprehensive about the whole thing is how Apple — this Apple — will handle the software transition.

The previous transition, from PowerPC to Intel chips, gave users an inordinately long grace period when it comes to software and backward compatibility. Shortly after Jobs announced Apple’s plans at WWDC 2005, many developers started converting their PowerPC-only apps into Universal Binaries (apps that could run on both architectures). And for all those older PowerPC apps that were not converted into Universal Binaries or recompiled to run exclusively on Intel Macs, a dynamic binary translator called Rosetta — included in the Intel versions of Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, and optionally available under Snow Leopard — allowed people to run PowerPC apps at almost native speeds. If you consider that the last minor release of Snow Leopard (10.6.8) was released in June 2011, this means that you could still run a PowerPC app on an Intel Mac as late as five years after the transition was complete, hardware-wise.

For this next transition, I really don’t expect such a generous grace period. When it comes to Mac OS, in recent years Apple’s attitude has been like, Let’s try and get rid of whatever we don’t have the time or the manpower to fix. To be fair, Apple’s willingness to drop as much baggage as possible whenever possible has always been one of its most characteristic traits for the past 20 years, but Cook’s Apple seems particularly interested in doing so considering just how many platforms they’ve chosen to juggle.

From what I understood, on a technical level, there’s this:

  • Recompiling an Intel app to work under the ARM architecture should be a relatively easier task (with exceptions) compared to what was recompiling a PowerPC app to work under the Intel architecture 15 years ago. Given the appropriate tools, of course.
  • Emulating an Intel app so that it runs in an ARM-based Mac, while possible, doesn’t offer adequate or usable performance. One should not expect Rosetta-like results, in other words.

Some have speculated that Apple, to ease the transition, could initially ship Macs that contain both an ARM processor and an Intel processor, the latter taking care of running x86 code at native speeds. Sort of a hardware Rosetta, if you like.

The scenario I’m fearing, however, sees a more pragmatic stance on Apple’s part, and it would play out like this:

  • Apple announces their transition plans at WWDC 2020, previewing the tools the company will make available to developers so that they can recompile/rework their apps to run under the new architecture.
  • Apple will offer new ARM-based Macs gradually, so that if you still need to run Intel-based apps that are either not updated anymore or whose redevelopment needs time, you can keep using your Intel Macs to run them; and if you still need such apps after the hardware transition is complete, well, you better keep that old Intel Mac close to your chest, because ARM-based Macs will only run ARM apps.

In other words I think that Apple, once the wheels of this next transition are set in motion, will do the bare minimum to make this transition smooth for developers or end users. The music will be: Developers, here’s what’s new. Get to work, the sooner the better.

If this happens, it’ll certainly result in even more pruning of all the software that, for a reason or another, won’t be ported to the ARM architecture. And this, after the already bitter pill of Mac OS Catalina dropping support of 32-bit apps (a vast catalogue of perfectly good software), will be another hard pill to swallow. 

The excuse will be that ARM Macs are going to be more efficient, more powerful, more secure, and with a fresh catalogue of optimised apps to run under the ARM architecture. Apps notarised by Apple, with the company’s seal of approval. Everyone wins! Well, everyone except those who would like for the Mac to keep being a versatile and ‘open’ platform, where you can install apps developed by anyone if you want; where you can use Boot Camp to reboot your Mac into Windows if you want (or — gasp — need to); where you can maybe enjoy all those nice vintage 32-bit Intel games every now and then.

Apple can put in place a lot of solutions for developers and users to ease the hassle of this new transition, and I really really hope they’ll be gracious enough to do so. But when we start looking at what can possibly be the incentive to do so, I can only think of “To avoid further alienating Mac developers and users”, and I can’t help thinking that Apple is quite ready to take such risk. 

This is, in a nutshell, the main reason of my current apprehension. I’m waiting for Monday with trepidation, hoping to be wrong — or to have been too pessimistic — about this.