The great advantage with Intel Macs was that the processor was the same architecture as on Windows machines. So it really wasn’t that hard to have a great Windows virtual machine as no CPU emulation was really needed as direct calls could be made to the same CPU that is used on an actual Windows machine (overly simplified I know but still it makes a point). Now, it’s a different architecture altogether and unless you are running Windows for ARM, you would have to emulate the Intel architecture. So it becomes a much more challenging situation and possibly slower…
You could also natively run Windows on your Mac using Bootcamp. All that is now gone…
When Apple used PowerPC, IBM had a series of PC using the same processor to run Intel apps.
It should be relatively easy to leverage the same kind of technology to provide Intel emulation.
That said, I seldom use Windows on Mac, since I have a real PC in my office. I also believe nothing quite replaces developing at least the last mile on a true PC.
Up until 2017, one could develop on Mac and compile for Windows with a relatively consistent UI. Today, Xojo Windows does not provide transparency, but pseudo transparency, meaning labels, canvas, container controls take the color of the parent. Any app relying on transparent control may be unusable once blindly built for Windows.
Ah yes, but at that time Windows NT had a PowerPC version. Once Microsoft dropped PPC versions from Windows, IBM quickly dropped support of its own chip.
The PPC was actually a great architecture and it’s sad that IBM and Motorola decided to abandon it. But it’s hard to have a processor that doesn’t have support from a major OS. Funny how Apple went to the RISC architecture with PPC, then went back to CISC with the X86 family. Now we are back to RISC CPUs…
As for developing on Windows on a Mac - You think you can compile blindly. I tried it. Doesn’t work - not for Window and not for Linux either. Using a VM is pretty dang close though. It gets you 99% of the way there maybe even closer than that to 100%. There is nothing like running on actual hardware though.
The major difference is that on a Mac you get double buffered display, which effectively hides all flickering, which is the major plague of the WinTel platform.
So an app may look pretty nice on Mac, and poor on a true PC. In my experience, nothing replaces doing at the minimum the last mile on a real PC.
I even had an app (Watermark) which looks and performs quite nicely on Mac.
Once compiled for PC it became darn unusable: flicker, and even some controls did not show.
I had to completely refactor the app for it to work on Windows.
A few comments here that might be generally helpful. (I’ve just spent the past few days carefully going through and setting up an M1 MacBook Pro 13" 16GB/1TB to use in addition to an older 2017 15" MBP. (Still going to need the 2017 for Windows VMs and certain other things that won’t run on the M1… but the goal being, to move as much active development for various projects onto the M1, and to retain the 2017 as a working backup).
“Why”? The 13" M1 is much faster and better than the 2017 15" (which cost twice as much as this did) in every way. (Other than: can’t run Windows Intel VMs; 2 ports instead of 4 (can be worked around with a dock); only 1 external display (annoying); and can’t run any older 32-bit applications). Perfectly silent. Instant. Also twice as much space (the 2017 only has 512GB instead of 1TB, and did I say that it cost twice as much as the M1? )
For anyone getting a new M1 system, some recommendations:
Before doing anything else, start it up and update to Big Sur 11.1 from the 11.0.1 it shipped with. Create a new user account matching the long username and home folder short name of the system you’re going to migrate things from. Then after you’re up and running fully with 11.1, use Migration Assistant to copy over everything from the user account of your previous system (whether you’re going to continue to use that, as I am, or not). This is a little non-obvious if you haven’t done it before.
Have both Macs on the same WiFi network (but they’ll connect peer-to-peer for the actual transfer, and higher speed than going indirectly through your router). Run Utilities:Migration Assistant on the M1, tell it you’re going to copy from another Mac. Then it starts searching for sources. Run Utilities:Migration Assistant on the “source” Mac and then it’ll show up in Migration Assistant on the M1. Pick and choose what you want to copy (can be multiple user accounts) and let it go. In the end, you’ll have everything you need as a starting point on the M1, including the contents of your keychain, signing certificates, etc.
Log into the M1 when its done, Most/nearly everything you have in the source Mac will now be hooked into on the M1 - Mail accounts, logins, etc. You’ll have to sign back into iCloud, the App Store, etc. and jump through a few hopes. Get everything running, piece by piece. (This approach is much faster and easier than starting “plain vanilla” and reinstalling every single thing manually.
Go through things in the Applications folder, update App Store things, etc. Parallels will copy over but your Intel VMs won’t work, so unless you’re going to try the M1 preview, leave it alone. You can use the extremely useful Archichect application from https://eclecticlight.co to drag-and-drop applications onto it and check to see if they contain Apple Silicon code or are just Intel. (it’ll also check code signatures at the same time).
Get Xojo and all of your development tools up and running. Use 2020r2.1 and the latest Universal plugins from various sources. Should be able to build and debug either Intel under emulation or Apple Silicon natively, depending on how you set the build target. (that’s where I am now).
The M1 laptop is hugely fast, perfectly quiet, barely gets warm, and it’s by far the best Mac I’ve used in 35+ years of development.The small “early” hardware limitations (2 ports and only 1 external display) are a tiny disadvantage compared to the benefits.
Lots of useful info in this thread.
It looks as if I’ll be getting an M1 Mini before too long, since my present Mac is starting to act up.
Does anyone have any info on migrating from a Time Machine backup that was done on an Intel Mac?
I’ve only needed one external 4K off my mini M1, but I have seen things that say you can actually do over one external display. What combination(s) are you wanting to handle?
Have you seen things like this hub? New orders won’t ship until “early February” though.
There are other cheaper ways depending on what configurations you want, but this dock in particular looks to be a great way to expand USB-C ports.
You can use a Startech Displayport adapter to create virtual additional external displays over USB. It’s “workable” at the cost of the additional device hardware. Read reviews from people who’ve already set this up and run it on M1 systems (it depends on stability and updates to its driver software). I suspect it may not be possible to calibrate a display this way for use with photography but that still means it could be used as a secondary, non-color-critical display.
For a hub, I’m already using a Caldigit TS3 Plus Thunderbolt 3 dock. The OWC also looks excellent.
MacBook Pro vs Air - depends on needs and uses. The Pro’s display is brighter at max; it has the Touch Bar; slightly/somewhat better battery life; and the fans can keep it running full bore without slowing down under heavy/extended loads. For additional uses beyond development (photography/video editing), the Pro would be arguably better.
For migrating: same procedure I described for doing it peer-to-peer wirelessly, except: plug the Time Machine backup drive into the M1 system and select it as the source (Migration Assistant lets you choose either another Mac or a TM backup drive). In this case, you only have to run Migration Assistant on the M1 since there’s no other Mac involved.
For using Time Machine to back up the M1, you may want to start a new one with a different backup drive on the M1 system if you’re going to keep using the older one for the older Mac. Otherwise, you’ll still want to start over with the old backup drive, but reformat it as APFS first (realizing that in doing so, you’re discarding the entire backup of the old system!). Big Sur uses APFS formatted volumes for Time Machine backups and this is both a functional improvement and also (from what I’m reading) faster than TM backups with older versions of MacOS that were limited to HFS+ volumes (and wouldn’t work with APFS).
Running Xojo 2020r2.1 (this may sound obvious but may as well describe it). Xojo itself, the IDE, is still Intel only but runs well and quickly under emulation. Set the MacOS target to x86 to run/debug under Rosetta2 emulation as Intel, or to ARM 64 to run/debug natively. (Don’t set to Universal unless you’re going to Build a Universal application to contain both Intel and Apple Silicon code) So you can nicely run/debug your application either/both ways for testing.
Should still be able to build Windows and cross debug to a Windows system on the same network using the Remote debugger. (haven’t tried this yet but expect it to “just work”). (“Windows system” could be a real PC, or it could be a Parallels VM running on an Intel Mac on the same network).
For an app launcher, for anyone who likes such things: I’d been looking for a replacement for DragThing, which has been on the Mac forever but which never went to 64-bit (so stopped being an option with Catalina). This morning, I found iCollections on the Mac App Store, and it’s giving me back the functionality that I wanted on a Big Sur system, M1 or Intel. (Ability to organize a large set of Xojo and Xcode project shortcuts, from various folders on the Mac, into one or more tabs that auto-expand from the bottom of the screen, so that project can be double-clicked and instantly opened).
I used Migration Assistant but didn’t create any accounts on the new M1 mini before the migration and it just imported my existing ones. I didn’t let it copy Applications and reinstalled those from scratch to get the latest M1 versions.
I also connected the new and old Macs with an ethernet cable and turned on ethernet on both and Migration Assistant saw that connection and it went much faster than WiFi.
If you want to expand to more displays, you could get an eGPU. They are pricey and I’m not sure if any are truly set up yet to work with Apple Silicon, but I would imagine it is coming.
As for migrating, at my church we just upgrade from an old 2011 MacMini that was running HighSierra to an M1. We did it over the network. Didn’t set up any accounts on the M1. Just went through startup and ran the migration when we got to it. Worked smoothly and everything transferred without a hitch. No problems at all. I was actually surprised how smoothly it went.
I would advise anyone considering this to do some research before hand. I’ve seen a couple of reviews where they say that current eGPUs are not compatible. I’ve heard (but not confirmed) that this is not just a driver issue, the M1 Macs have less bandwidth available than Intel Macs.
Interesting, Sam. It’s clear that the display capabilities are lacking in the M1s. The last generation Intel units can support 3 displays. The M1s just two.
It’s shocking that they don’t have the bandwidth available for an eGPU.
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