I'm not going to discuss the lack of Windows support or Boot Camp on the new Macs since that's only tangentially related, but I do think there's one very positive implication: as Apple moves off of the X86 platform to 64-bit ARM, more and more organizations and developers will see the importance of building multi-arch Docker images, and also making sure their software compiles on ARM processors like the ones in the Pi. He even explicitly called out Docker containers being built for ARM, and being able to run them on ARM instances in AWS. And listening to Daring Fireball's podcast interview with Craig Federighi, there was even more interesting news:Ĭraig mentioned that the virtualization on the new Macs won't support X86 at all. What does this mean for the Pi and other inexpensive single-board computers? I think this is great news. I could run the LAMP stack, Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab, Drupal, Wordpress, Minecraft, and almost all the Docker images I normally run on my Mac and in production.įor some things, I had to recompile or build my own Docker image, but most things are actually already built for ARM64, and I noticed I didn't have to spend as much time compiling things myself.Įarlier this week, Apple announced 'Apple Silicon', which is marketing speak for 'Apple's ditching Intel x86 CPUs and will use 64-bit ARM processors in Macs'.Īnd they dedicated a whopping 17 seconds (sarcasm: noted) of the WWDC 2020 keynote highlighting "new virtualization technologies" on the Mac. In my testing, I used the latest 64-bit Pi OS beta, and I think the Pi Foundation had excellent timing releasing it this year, since many more applications can run on a 64-bit architecture nowadays, and because the newest Pi 4 models have much more RAM to take advantage of the architecture.
Note: There's a video version of this blog post available here: What does Apple Silicon mean for the Raspberry Pi and ARM64?Ī couple weeks ago I tried using the latest Raspberry Pi 4 8 gig model as my main computer for a day, and I posted a video about my experience.īesides many diehard Linux fans complaining in the comments about my apparent idiocy caused by being a Mac user, the experience taught me one thing: A lot of software still isn't built for 64-bit ARM processors, or even for Linux in general.īut there's one trend that I'm seeing: most of the open source software I use already works great on a Pi 4 running on its 64-bit ARM processor.