At WWDC last month, Apple officially detailed its plans to transition the Mac line to custom Apple Silicon processors. As part of this, Apple launched a developer transition kit, offering a Mac mini powered by the A12Z processor.
New details were released today, offering a closer look at how the Developer Transition Kit performs, as well as new details on how the iOS and iPadOS apps look on the Mac.
Benchmarks d’Apple Developer Transition Kit
The first benchmarks appeared from the Developer Transition Kit Mac mini last month, but these benchmarks were performed under virtualization, using Apple’s Rosetta technology. Going through Rosetta will hurt performance, even though Apple claims it performs much better than previous virtualization technology.
New benchmarks leaked today that show the Developer Transition Kit running Geekbench 5 Pro natively on the Mac mini – meaning performance shouldn’t be affected by virtualization. This would have been done by starting recovery, disabling security features, and coding apps.
The results show a single-core score of 1098 and a multi-core score of 4555. This compares to the non-native of 800 on the single-core test and 2600 on the multi-core test. For comparison, the entry-level 2020 MacBook Air at $ 999 achieves a Geekbench score of 1,005 in single-core and 2,000 in multi-core.
Again, what’s important to remember here is that the Developer Transition Kit is only for developers to port their apps. The hardware Apple ships to customers will certainly feature even more powerful processors – and we expect the first Apple Silicon Mac later this year.
–
––
–
–
IPhone and iPad apps on Mac
On Twitter, Steve Troughton-Smith also offered some details on how the iOS and iPadOS apps work on Apple Silicon Macs. Smith explains that there is a “set of compatibility behaviors applied to iOS apps running unchanged on macOS.”
Smith explains that these compatibility behaviors make iPhone and iPad apps “more likely to work” as soon as a developer simply checks the Mac box without performing any further optimizations. Smith writes:
There is a series of compatibility behaviors applied to iOS apps running unchanged on macOS, which makes them much more likely to work right away than if the developer had just checked the Mac box and nothing else. They are told they also work on an iPad running iOS 14.
With previously missing obsolete frameworks, like OpenGLES, and classes, like UIWebView, now back in macOS, a lot of apps should “just work”. These things weren’t relevant to the Catalyst SDK before, but they are relevant now.
Smith uses Overcast and Procreate as two examples of iPad and iPhone apps running on Mac:
––
––
–
–
You can read more details in Steve Troughton-Smith’s full thread here.
FTC: We use automatic income generating affiliate links. Plus.
–
Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more information on Apple:
–
:format(png):focal(650x563:660x553)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gfrmedia/ARWW7YBHGRAFDNJNKMDRYN2NPE.jpg "The famous television presenter Regis Philbin dies")