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[David593]

Hi

I was alarmed to see what I thought was a comment that you might ‘never’ support the new Apple chips. Surely that can’t be right?

I mean Apple is transitioning over the next two years and one would be pretty much advised not to buy a legacy intel at this point. So are you discontinuing your support of the entire platform and all your loyal customers? This new chip isn’t unexpected news and I would have thought you would have a timeline to implement and test like other developers? And reassure your users.

People with apple computers aren’t going to have a choice if their computer is too old or breaks but to source a replacement and I would appreciate some clarification here.

[Awesome Donkey]

Disclaimer: I don't work for JRiver and I have no idea what they're going to do. I'm just going to make some educated guesses.

I'll start off by saying that I honestly wouldn't be surprised if JRiver dumped Mac support after the last Intel Mac's support ends with Apple. Which is about 7 years from when the last Intel-based Mac will be released. Or it could be much sooner, depending on a couple factors/reasons.

One factor/reason being, I don't think Media Center could be simply re-compiled to run on Apple Silicon and would likely need an app rewrite (partial rewrite if not a complete rewrite) to even support them. They might take into consideration how much revenue MC for Mac brings in, and if it isn't enough to justify the development they could just decide to discontinue Mac support.

My guess for the immediate future is, they're going to wait and see what happens. See if MC for Mac even runs on Apple Silicon Macs (once users get them and try it and report back) with Rosetta 2 and see how the performance is. Then likely go from there.

[bob]

Well, we already run on ARM.
Apple's silicon is just their version of ARM.

I'd assume that that XCode will build things that aren't Intel assembly without a lot of change. It'd be asking way too much from their developers to rewrite everything.

Not like I'm a huge fan of Intel but I'd be skeptical of buying a first gen silicon Mac.

[glynor]

Not like I'm a huge fan of Intel but I'd be skeptical of buying a first gen silicon Mac.

I'd agree with you except it is really their 11th generation silicon (the A4 was the first in-house design), and they sell more high-performance ARM computers than anyone else on Earth. I'm still waiting, of course, but only because I want more RAM and I want vmware Fusion support to be ready. So I'm waiting for the M1X-supporting Mac Mini to come out (I hope not 2 years).

In other news, some new early benches came out today, this time on the GPU front:
https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/16/apples-m1-chip-outperforms-geforce-gtx-1050-ti-in-graphics-benchmark/

This thing is a beast.

[David593]

Thanks for the replies guys.

The apple chip does appear pretty special! I have windows gaming laptop, a music server Antipodes with Roon on Linux and a 2014 MacBook Pro, so it’s not like I’m wedded to Apple. But at nearly 7 years old the MacBook runs super well and quietly.

Part of my job is around cyber so I’m not a complete IT numpty (just mostly 😆)

I appreciate the difficulties involved with new silicon, but as someone who regularly buys a master license every year or so (on J26) it’s worrying that there is a lack of clear commitment. Obviously I can’t spend money upgrading with no certainty of continuing support, others may feel the same, revenue from Mac licenses will decline - which is a pretty self-fulfilling prophecy and business model! Changing software is a big deal for me as I run nearly 8tb of media files, but it seems I’m going to have to investigate other options. Which as my library is clean, the remote is great and everything plays really well following your media engine reconfiguration is really sad. I’m hoping everything works on Rosetta 2......

Thanks to Glynor as the ‘beta tester’! Given the ‘vast’ investment, will jriver be getting a test-resource? If not why? There are developer resources to test your software on. It’s a little frustrating that it appears no one has even thought of testing!

[glynor]

AnandTech posted some benchmarks! Real ones.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested

There's some glorious nerdy detail in there.

[blgentry]

MC for Mac is likely to run flawlessly under Rosetta2 with the new Macs and the Apple Silicon chips (starting with M1).  Rosetta2 has only one job:  Translate Intel (x86) binary code into Apple ARM code.  It's an emulator.  They built it specifically so Mac customers that own x86 (Intel) binaries will be able to run almost everything from day 1.  if something like Photoshop works with Rosetta2, you can darn sure bet that MC will run under it just fine. 

Remember that Apple is a very large well thought out hardware and software producer.  This isn't their first rodeo.  They changed CPU technologies twice before with the Mac.  The latest one, from PowerPC to Intel caused them to write Rosetta.  Rosetta2 is probably a bit better and of course it goes from Intel to AARM.

As for changing to a native AARM version of MC, I think Bob has it right:  Just recompile with XCode and it should produce new binaries that are AARM and the world will be good.  There's probably a bit more to it, but it's not like any of MC is written in assembly or anything.  It uses XCode already and should be pretty straight forward to port/recompile.

I'm excited to see what comes with the M1 and other AARM chips.

Brian.

[bob]

The math co-processor routines in various libraries need to be compiled to ARM but since we've already done something similar with the ARM linux build it's not a new thing to us.

[David593]

Thanks for all the comments. To be nerdy for a moment, the benchmarks and hands on testing of the review units has many people very excited. The cpu nerds are very impressed.... and they are platform agnostic 👍