How Rough will the Apple Silicon Transition be?<br /><br />When Apple announced the move from IBM PowerPC and their G Series processors to Intel in 2005 Steve Jobs mentioned that OS X had been leading a secret double life, and that every version of OSX for the last 5 years had been coded in parallel for Power PC and Intel chips.<br /><br />Now we’re on the brink of another huge transition, this time to Apple’s own silicon, and it could be a much bigger deal.<br /><br />When Steve Jobs took to the stage at WWDC 2005, he said that Apple had great products now, but they didn’t know how to make the great products that they wanted to in future with the PowerPC roadmap. He also said that the performance per watt was an important factor, because of heat and battery life concerns. Sound familiar?<br /><br />WWDC gave us one of the first glimpses inside Apple’s development labs, and you can be sure that they’ll have been working on what Apple Silicon could do in a notebook or desktop for a long time. While Intel has struggled to make their chips perform better without a lot of heat being given off, Apple’s own SOCs have become more and more powerful year over year.<br /><br />Catalyst<br />Native Mac apps built with Mac Catalyst can share code with your iPad apps, and you can add more features just for Mac. In macOS Big Sur, you can create even more powerful versions of your apps and take advantage of every pixel on the screen by running them at native Mac resolution. Apps built with Mac Catalyst can now be fully controlled using just the keyboard, access more iOS frameworks, and take advantage of the all-new look of macOS Big Sur. There’s never been a better time to turn your iPad app into a powerful Mac app.<br /><br />Even without Catalyst, iOS Apps will be able to run unmodified on an Apple Silicon Mac with Big Sur. The iOS App Store currently has around 2.2million Apps. The Mac App Store has around 28k. Thats a HUGE difference.<br />Will everything work awesome or be in any way useful on a Mac? No. But there will be a huge amount of great, usable apps that we’ve never seen before<br /><br />Rosetta 2<br />Following up from what Apple introduced back in the PowerPC to Intel Transition, Rosetta 2 takes this to the next level. With Rosetta 2, Apple has combined just in time translation at runtime with translation on install, which uses Rosetta’s technology to convert the app’s code when it is installed on the Mac instead of when it is run. In terms of performance, Apple demonstrated Legend of the Tomb Raider running via Rosetta 2 on their Developer Transition Kit at 1080p very smoothly. The Developer Transition Kit for Apple Silicon consists a Mac mini chassis with an iPad Pro’s A12Z Bionic processor, 16GB of Ram and a 512GB SSD inside, though this does not reflect the performance that will be far far better <br />...<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bspeHg6Fzdw" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bspeHg6Fzdw</a>