In a series of tweets sent out last night, and now in an interview with The Verge, developer Steven Troughton-Smith has detailed the inner workings of the MacBook Pro’s new retina Touch Bar, describing its T1 chip as “a variant of the system-on-a-chip used in the Apple Watch.” This means that the Touch Bar is essentially running watchOS on the T1 chip, which macOS then communicates with through an interconnected USB bridge that “relays multitouch events back to macOS.”
The developer described this software setup as advantageous for the MacBook Pro’s security, since the T1 chip also acts as a layer of protection and “gates access” to the laptop’s FaceTime camera and Touch ID sensor. In the series of Tweets he sent out last night, Troughton-Smith also theorized that watchOS could power the Touch Bar alone without relying on macOS to be running on the MacBook Pro, which Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi has now confirmed.
You can theorise about the future here. Now that Apple has put an ARM iOS-like device inside every MacBook Pro, you can imagine a future wherein said iOS device takes over more and more functionality from the traditional x86 macOS device, up to a point where macOS only gets called upon when needed.
We may actually have just been given a hint of Apple’s transition-to-ARM strategy.
I think Apple’s ultimate strategy will be to sell only iOS devices, so you program via a touch screen and make iOS apps via the iPad itself through some kind of new Xcode.
We’ve already seen their Swift playground, which I think is meant to test out those grounds and see how popular that approach will be among kids, so that they will be used to the idea of programming directly on the iPad, when it matures enough for that.
Then all software developed for Apple devices will have to go through Apple and the App Store.
From their perspective, they can really lean on producing only iPhones and iPads up to desktop size with one single CPU/GPU architecture, and that can become quite elegant, if they so choose.
This will make Apple pretty much irrelevant as a developer/creative platform for the rest of us, so I just hope someone else will pick up the mantle of making solid hardware and OS combinations for us to replace the Macbook, the Mac Pro and the Macbook Pro.
They are way into “sugared water” territory now.
It is anyway time for me to start looking at how to dismantle a decade of using OSX and lots of paid OSX only apps and move elsewhere.
This might help: https://alternativeto.net/
You’ll come across some things that just don’t have equivalents though, like Delicious Library and Omni Graffle. Sure there are apps that do similar things, but they don’t really measure up.
A few years ago I noticed that almost all of the apps I use daily are available on various platforms, and that I could live without the ones that weren’t.
Slowly converting regular MacBook internals into phone-like hardware with huge batteries is more of a hint of Apple’s future than the Touch Bar.
I consider the Touch Bar to be just one more peripheral that talks to the main OS like their phones and watches do. Apple’s earlier work towards integrating mobile devices with the desktop OS probably made this Touch Bar concept possible in the first place.
This is to me a clearly multi-tenant strategy. iPhone moved in this direction too, following Moto X’s lead, where they start adding in additional specialized coprocessors and subsystems. I can’t see this as a transition to ARM. That may be coming but this isn’t that. What it is instead is a clear move to incorporate more specialized and independent hardware, and that is exciting.
A transition to ARM would probably look like (if not simply like the transition to Intel looked), Apple would introduce a competing workstation platform, with clamshell/desktop OS based on iOS. I’m thinking app centric Apple Chromebooks running an iOS derivative on custom ARM silicon.
iOS interface and access paradigms don’t work on a workstations regardless of form factor, at least for developers – maybe there’s an office worker for who this would work? They’d have to change some things substantially enough that it wouldn’t really look like iOS anymore. It’s also not a great place for Apple to put themselves, to sell two different products into the same market, and essentially compete with itself. Though with the incredible price of Apple’s x86 offerings now, maybe there’s space?
This seems like mixing apples and oranges. Switching the hardware platform from Intel x86 to ARM is one thing, abandoning MacOS for iOS is another.
Microsoft already (claims to have) achieved a shared architecture where the core OS is the same for all phones, tablets and desktop machines. Apple could very well do the same, and the starting point for them could even be easier than it was for Microsoft, given that from the get-go iOS was based on the MacOS technology to some extent. (Although the most important part, the UI libraries used to build user apps, seem to be different and incompatible.)
iOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS – they are already a shared OS – they just tailor the UI differently for each platform.
The switch to ARM from x86 doesn’t to me mean anything other than a CPU arch switch – that could be done on macOS, or it could involve a switch to another OS, the underlying architecture is not as important as many think it is – it’s all commodity hardware.
The question is really, what will this post Jobs Apple do? Will they take the opportunity of a switch from x86 to ARM to transition to a new OS? I think they would. They have the product mantra built into their operating procedure, so they’re likely to seek new product opportunities, and they have a crazy adaptable OS to try it with.
My money is on a new platform of some kind, maybe a Chromebook like thing running on ARM. They’ve carved out space in the price stack. It’s just a matter now of filling it with something based on their ARM (and GPU) chips. They might even deliver a good product. Something I like to reiterate – many folks can’t keep her PC running, and won’t spend for a mac. Regular users like the walled garden of Android and iOS better than the free for all Windows they are used to. There is a market out there for an Apple Chromebook, and why not run it on ARM?
Note: Motorola only did that for the first generation of Moto X.
They were unable to update it to the next version of Android without updates for the chip. THe chip supplier didn’t update the driver/interface for the next version of Android, and with only one user of it, didn’t see the financial motivation of doing so.
That’s true for Motorola, but Apple doesn’t have the same constraints
I think this has nothing to do with a transition to ARM.
It may be as simple as wanting a very low-power, always on, processor to handle some stuff. Remember that even the power button is handled but the touch strip, so there needs to be something checking the strip even if it is powered off. And I guess that the T1 fitted the purpose quite well.
I guess that the T1 also has the means to drive a display. I don’t know if that’s the case, but would make sense to display something on that display even when the computer is shut down. For example, touching it could just power the display to show the power button symbol. There could be some extras, like battery charge also rendered in. They also talk about security.
Oh… there are some extra possibilities, like requiring a given finger print to boot up the machine. If the camera is also attached to it, being able to use some image recognition to check if it is you who is powering it. If it is also controlling the keyboard you could be even be able to protect *booting up* by password. Boot selectors enabled on power on handled by that strip. It may even be a really nice innovation (not the strip per-se, but having such a chip to handle that kind of stuff).
Hopefully I never get one of these new Macbook Pros pushed on me from work. Getting Linuc to support all the Touch Bar would most likely either never happen, or will take many years.
That remains to be seen. The fact that it is a separate CPU running a separate OS, connected via “USB”, might actually make it easier to support in alternate OSes than if it were just an oddball peripheral. This, of course, still requires Apple releasing documentation for the communication interface.
I doubt the T1 chip running the touchbar has anything to do with a main CPU transition. What the T1 chip does is allow a keyboard to be a very smart keyboard that connects via USB to a host. This architecture is all about providing a standalone keyboard (wired or not) that has the touchbar and that works with a new Mac Mini and/or Mac Pro, likely sometime in 2017.
As far as running LINUX on a touchbar keyboard is concerned – it works just fine. By default the keyboard shows the ESC and Fnc keys so LINUX users can operate with their 1970’s style keyboard as they always have.
Interesting idea aside, I’m definitely not the target market.
I value tactile feedback so much that my primary keyboard is an “Old Classic 104” Unicomp keyboard I tracked down on eBay (since buckling spring switches are the only kind which guarantee that the feedback will exactly match the signal sent to the PC, but Unicomp stopped selling un-mangled right modifier blocks in 2013) and my backup uses Cherry MX Blue keyswitches.
Edited 2016-10-29 21:43 UTC
First of all, welcome to OSNews!
That’s awesome! I’m glad that Apple decided to default to the Esc/Fn keys to cater to the Linux crowd who will undoubtedly still be using their “1970’s style” keyboard layouts long after macOS is gone.
Apparently Apple missed this review: http://arstechnica.com/staff/2014/01/stop-trying-to-innovate-keyboa…
“Pros” no longer include developers, I guess. I could’ve sworn that niche was buying more MacBook Pros than anyone else for the last ~8 years, but hey, I don’t have access to Apple’s sales numbers.
Haha, you’re so right! It’s about time that Apple dumped that useless Escape key from their keyboards. Nobody has used it for decades, except those UNIX users with their 1970’s keyboards. Even then, it’s only developers using stuff like vi who even use it, and why should Apple ever care about those people?
Wait what’s that; macOS is UNIX and a significant minority of Macbook sales have been to developers using them precisely for software development, many of them using tools like vi? Oh no, what a mistake!
I’m pretty sure they mentioned during the Keynote there is a specific touch bar mode for Terminal.app, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Esc key is included.
Alternatively, you can easily map Caps Lock to Esc in macOS
That thin (thin!) entirely non-haptic virtual button will sure be easy to hit when I’m trying to use something like vi, no doubt.
At least it’s in the upper left corner. That aside, the touch bar could really use haptic feedback like Microsoft’s Surface Dial
I’ve had an Apple employee verify that there’s no haptic in the Touch Bar. It’s just a flat piece of glass that shows things, no touchy feely despite the name.
someone,
Personally, I’m not a fan of remapping keys, I can’t stand the situation with the mac backspace key already as is.
Instead of a flat touch strip, I’d prefer something like this:
http://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/popularis/
Amazing, right? The problem is the outrageous price, which ensures that nobody gets one and that very little software is going to take advantage of it either.
I don’t know. There’s a good chance the T1 chip powering the touch bar isn’t the only ARM core in the MacBook . Flash controllers, disk controllers, even WiFi controllers often have ARM cores of some level of complexity embedded in chips. There’s probably one or two of them in your own non-Mac computer.
In the case of the T1. It runs an offshoot of WatchOS, probably just so they don’t have to re-invent and re-implement TouchID and other software that runs on it.
Beyond that, if they were planning on transitioning to ARM in the way you described, I don’t think they’d start with an ARMv7-based core, and software that is even further removed from macOS or even iOS than the WatchOS is. This hardware/software combo is starting in the wrong direction to be part of a transition.
Yeah I don’t know what the surprise is. Your average NIC controller has multiple cores in it these days. Intel have been using variants of their i860 & i960 cores in all sorts of disk controllers for decades. Hell the keyboard controller in an IBM Model M is a Programmable IC.
It’s far, far easier to drop a general purpose core in and then design a few interfaces around it, than to design an entire ASIC from scratch for every component in your system, and designers have been doing it for a very long time.
I would not expect all devices to be everything for everyone. Each device should have its target audience, and specific function.
Trying to be everything and the kitchen sink introduces a world of problems. And very little actual value to the end user.
Expecting some actual engineering from Apple’s end in both their software and hardware. I assume that something useful might come out of this though.
Jaguars have electric windshield wiper motors. Is this a sign that Jaguar is transitioning to an all-electric line of cars?
People are reading way too much into the OS and CPU that Apple put into a small, embedded device that’s part of a keyboard. In doing so, they overlook the obvious: Apple has an embedded OS for low-power devices with small color displays: watchOS. It should not be a surprise that Apple designed the Touch Bar with one of the worle’s most popular CPU architectures (ARM) that is compatible with a watchOS variant. What else would they do? Run Android? Put in a Core i3 so that it could run a version of MacOS?
Macs have had embedded system CPUs for a decade in the form of System Management Controllers (SMCs). These monitor temperature, control fan speeds, control battery charging, control LED indicators, and so forth. This hasn’t led to an SMC-powered Mac that does away with the x86 CPU, so I doubt that the Touch Bar is a harbinger of a Mac powered solely by an ARM CPU.
Errrr….. You realise that ARM processors are also used as Micro controllers, right? So, this is like saying “Apple used an ATMEL chip to control function XXXX… the future of the Mac is based on ATMEL Micro controllers!!”
Seriously dud[e], sometimes a chip is used because it is easy, well known and the hardware team is already intimately familiar with the architecture. I’m pretty sure that they could have used a different Micro controller, but then the team involved would have needed to learn a new platform and Apple would have needed to source that chip design and manufacture it. This way, they are completely in control of the package they are using.
Stop trying to find something that has yet to play out in something that can easily be explained away if you had even the slightest awareness of electronic engineering.
Some things are obvious.
Apple wants to control the entire product stack, from silicon to retail via software and services. Its well on its way to achieving that. The most significant component not yet under Apple’s control are the Mac CPUs which are tied to the ever slowing Intel roadmap.
Apple has demonstrated a very high ability to deliver high end and cutting edge bespoke silicon.
Although it can and does design best of class general purpose ARM chips Apple also has repeatedly pulled out key functions away from the cpu and into specialised silicon.
Now that bespoke ARM chips have appeared in its Mac range I would strongly expect the trend to incorporate more specialist non-intel silicon in Macs to continue. This is just the start of things
The most significant thing that the ARM chip brought to the Mac was the secure enclave which underpins Touch ID security. This takes Mac security into another zone and opens the door to a lot of interesting developments.
BTW I came across this comment from the tech commentator Benedict Evans that I thought was perceptive (as his analyses often are).
“Microsoft updated its Surface line of tablet PCs and added a desktop version, the ‘Surface Studio’, with a 28″ touch screen that can pivot to become a drawing board with Microsoft’s pen, starting at $3,000. The pen gives great demo on a screen this size, and looks really cool. However, the only demos Microsoft has that use this are professional artists actually drawing – apart from writing a comment on a Word document, there was no vision (shown this week, at least) for how a pen changes computing for the rest of us (data point – Adobe Creative Cloud has 7m subscribers, but there are 1.5bn PCs). And Microsoft has been pushing touch since the original Surface, but how many PC applications have even been rewritten away from the mouse? More importantly, with all the innovation and investment now going to mobile, how many ever will? I have a horrible feeling that I’d buy this gorgeous thing, forget the pen in a drawer and waggle the mouse every morning to find the cursor… Meanwhile one has to wonder how Microsoft’s PC partners feel about Microsoft aiming at another part of the high-end, high-margin part of their business”
Very old argument that could have held ground perhaps before the first Surface in 2012.
I think the only ones who are going to care about this are at Wacom, even though their pro products have even better specs than the Surface Studio digitizer.
“describing its T1 chip as “a variant of the system-on-a-chip used in the Apple Watch.” This means that the Touch Bar is essentially running watchOS on the T1 chip”
That doesn’t mean that to me at all. It just means they reused some of the hardware design.