How Does Apple Plan To Migrate macOS Apps To ARM?

Time To Get To Know Universal 2 And Rosetta 2

The 14 year long partnership between Apple and Intel is coming to an end, with a migration to ARM hardware which Cupertino has been quietly working on for a few years now.  This change will have several consequences, the first of which is a prediction that Intel could see a drop in income of $3bn annually or ~4% of its revenue.  Developers will also have a big decision to make. 

It will take a lot of work to implement the changes required for apps to run natively on the new hardware, while still continuing to update and create apps compatible with the current Intel hardware.  The same applied to Apple itself as they will still need to update two branches of their operating system as well. 

Patrick Moorhead replied to a inquiry from The Register to express his disappointment in the lack of technical details forthcoming from Apple now that the change is less than a year off.  Currently there are a limited amount of developers who are eligible to give Apple $500 for a membership in the Universal App Quick Start Program.  That will give them usage of a Mac mini with an A12Z Bionic SoC, equipped with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD as well as beta versions of Big Sur and other resources.

If you are curious about the details of the second coming of Rosetta and other questions about how this change will work and how it might differ from the change from IBM to Intel, check out The Register’s full article here.