Soon there will be a new feature called Universal Purchase on the App Store.
When you buy an app for your iPhone/iPad, the free of charge companion app will be available for download on your Mac. Thank you Apple.
That will help a lot toward speeding up the adoption and development of Catalyst apps.
The Xcode beta was released today. Feature will be available in March, just before the Spring Apple event. Coincidence? I think not.
Also some supposed benchmarks for a Apple 12-core clocked at 3.1GHz ARM processor has leaked, and they look incredible. So either the MacBooks are getting ARM processors very soon, or they’ll be releasing one hell of a powerful iPad Pro soon
Seeing how the first Apple ARM laptop is supposed to be the MacBook Air, if the benchmarks above are correct then it would have a more powerful single core benchmark than the current 27" 5K iMac Mind blown …
…and there’s a second 10-core processor that can reach speeds of up to 3.4GHz which scored even better in single-core tests (7335). Looks like I’m getting a new Mac soon.
Well, for sure ARM will come. Just wondering which Programms will be supported.
Could imagine the ones currently running with Intel will not be supported.
That is my main concern and the reason I started the thread. Over the long term it should be better on the new processors, however there is potential for considerable disruption over the first year.
No doubt Apple will have worked on this for some time, however I want to know that Blocs and other key apps will not be adversely effected.
My father was using a horribly slow 2012 Mac mini, however he hit the panic button with the corona virus thinking it might break down and he’d be left without a working machine, so he ordered the entry level i3 with 8 gigs of ram last Sunday and I ended up installing it for him, while wearing gloves and a face mask on Tuesday.
As an i3 processor I was expecting it to be pretty rubbish, but I was quite shocked by how fast it is in practice, which was highlighted when I checked out the benchmark scores later on. The single core performance is almost twice as fast as my Mac Pro and multicore performance is only about 5% slower, assuming you have an app that takes advantage of all the cores.
To bring this back on topic with the Arm processors, if they are faster and run cooler than these intel processors they’ll be mighty performers, even at entry level prices. I guess I’ll just keep going with the old beast for the moment and hope the new processors come out before Apple stop producing security updates for Mojave, which is likely around September of next year.
My old iMac that would only run El Capitan was prepared for burial earlier this week. There have been no security updates for a couple years and it’s not really tenable for use on the internet.
The way they make processors these days the i3 is basically the i5 from a year or so ago. Same with the i5’s being older i7’s. It’s much cheaper for the companies to just update a chip instead of creating one from the ground up. I was told by TurboTax that this is the last year my Mac will be supported, so now I need to decide what form of action to take. I want a Mac mini with ARM but that probably won’t happen for at least a year or two, seeing how the Mac mini was just updated last week. The 2018’s will be going on sale now so I’ll probably get a i3 and put 16 gigs RAM in it, and use that until the ARM minis come out.
If your iMac is not the base model then you are able to put a new processor in it.
The iMac is ancient and was purchased back in 2007. It still had a SATA drive in there and I hadn’t used it seriously for years. It had no resale value but I kept it around because I like having a backup and it was compatible with Blocs 3 until a few months ago. The display was a bit of a disaster with weird stain marks from where the drive had run too hot. Those old iMacs were prone to that.
I am in the same boat holding out for the ARM processor, because I think it will have a longer useful lifespan when Apple goes in that direction. There are lots of ifs and maybes in all of this though and it might not work out as planned. I have the old 2012 Mac mini here now that actually runs Catalina and I toyed with the idea of sticking in an SSD for about £40 purely as a backup for Blocs, but I reckon there will be other bottlenecks with the performance.
I am sure it would make a substantial difference, however that computer only has 4 gigs of ram and no dedicated graphics card, so there might still be a lot of spinning ball as I imagine the OS alone is fairly demanding.
I don’t actually know what Blocs leverages in the way of multicore performance. When I used Rapidweaver I could practically make a coffee while waiting for page previews amid spinning ball on my Mac Pro that has 32 gigs of Ram and I’d watch the activity monitor where it was clear that only a fraction of the available CPU was being used. This was what initially pushed me to look at Blocs.
Time will tell if I made a mistake, especially with everything going on in the world, but I just ordered an i7 Mac mini with 32 gigs of ram. My hope is that it will still be good for roughly 4 years with any transition needing time and some likely teething problems with early Arm based software.
The Mac Pro can stick around as a backup for a while and be used as a production machine for mainly offline activities.
It should feel very fast and responsive compared to the Mac Pro. I know someone who has a 2018 i3 Mac mini. It is faster than his 2016 i7 MacBook Pro for most tasks.
I don’t do a lot of video editing at the moment, though the plan is to change that sooner or later. Most seem to think the graphics side is the weak link on the mini, but only a problem with complex 4K editing.
In the short term I am hoping it won’t be necessary to add an eGPU. They are quite expensive and I gather some of the graphic performance is still lost through the thunderbolt connection, so that is one area where the Mac Pro should still be better, having upgraded the graphics card last year to install Mojave.
The i3 mini is surprisingly fast judging by the short time I spent on it and should be more than enough for most web design use or graphic related tasks. I seriously considered just buying that one as a stop gap machine. You would probably want more than the base 8 gigs of ram though.
The most painful part of this purchase was paying an extortionate £600 for the 32 gigs or ram. That could have been purchased through Crucial or OWC for about roughly £150, however I discovered a few days ago that some Macs were failing to restart after the latest update in Catalina if they had 3rd party ram fitted.
Apple are becoming really tricky on this sort of thing and updates have been pretty scary for quite a while on the Mac Pro where I have upgraded the ram, graphics card and drive with 3rd party parts. That’s why I never seriously contemplated installing Catalina, since it would require a patch and who knows when Apple might decide to close the loophole.
Now I have to buy some more external drives so all of this becomes pretty expensive at a time like this.
Mind blown …
Last year but that worked out great.