[makeitdouble]

> If you were initially fine with software emulation (i.e. Rosetta 2)

You'd need a DTK to know if you're fine with emulation or not.

If you cared at all about your app running, you wouldn't just assume that it magically runs fine on an emulation layer you never touched, and that at speeds that are reasonable.

For a reference point, Rosetta was far from being great, and while some apps could run against it, it was most of the time an ultra painful experience. That pain helped devs to put the effort into making native versions, but it also means you couldn't expect Rosetta 2 to give acceptable performances from Apple's track record.

[xvector]

Are you talking about Rosetta 1 or 2? Because Rosetta 2 was not an "ultra painful experience" in any sense of the phrase.

Rosetta 2 was straightforward and surprisingly fast, requiring zero tweaking or user interaction. Most people never even noticed.

[alxlaz]

> Rosetta 2 was straightforward and surprisingly fast, requiring zero tweaking or user interaction. Most people never even noticed.

Yes, but if you were a developer who had to make sure your application worked on the upcoming M1 models, there was no way to know that without getting the DTK.

At the time when Apple announced their transition to their own silicon and that there would be a Rosetta 2, the only thing you had to go on other than the DTK was the precedent of the first Rosetta. It was a major feat back in its day (god I feel old just writing that...) but it was nowhere near Rosetta 2's compatibility and speed. Armed with nothing but the first Rosetta's precedent, it was a somewhat risky outlook.

[Narishma]

They are saying that given Apple's track record with Rosetta 1, developers had no reason to trust Rosetta 2 would be sufficient to test their applications with, and would thus need to buy the expensive DTK.

[eliasmacpherson]

On Rosetta 2, from the horses mouth:

Rosetta translates all x86_64 instructions, but it doesn't support the execution of some newer instruction sets and processor features, such as AVX, AVX2, and AVX512 vector instructions.

I can imagine quite a number of users running into the above situation in multimedia related code.

[afavour]

That’s still a small minority of all the apps out there, though.

[thereddaikon]

But we're talking about Macs. That's a huge chunk of their userbase. For the people who use Macs for actual work you can broadly classify them in two groups, Devs who need Xcode and media. Yes there are exceptions but that's the majority. For one of those groups AVX is pretty important.

[izacus]

And those apps had to be ready too. You don't build a reliable platform by randomly breaking "a small minority of apps". You yourself are certanly in "small minority" of at least a few features you rely on.

[afavour]

This is just an endless logic circle.

“Not all apps needed to worry about the CPU change”

“But some did!”

“And Apple made test hardware available for those people”

“But not enough for all apps to be tested”

“Not all apps needed to worry about the CPU change”

[eliasmacpherson]

To clarify:

The initial claim was, lxgr: "If you were initially fine with software emulation (i.e. Rosetta 2), as were many small and large software projects for macOS or Unix, you had no need whatsoever to get a DTK."

The subsequent claim was, xvector: "Rosetta 2 was straightforward and surprisingly fast, requiring zero tweaking or user interaction. Most people never even noticed."

Posters, myself included, are reacting against these claims, as they both put the cart before the horse, and the second gives only an end user perspective.

Devs had verified with a DTK that Rosetta2 ran their programs acceptably. Keep in mind patches had to be issued for programs which did not check for the presence of AVX, AVX2 or AVX512, else they would crash. This invalidates the first claim. It shows why the second claim is only the second half of the story.

So the logic follows a line rather than a circle.

Also nobody made the claim that: “And Apple made test hardware available for those people, But not enough for all apps to be tested”

[makeitdouble]

The "ultra painful experience" part is about Rosetta 1.

For Rosetta 2, I agree Apple made a much better translation layer. There were still swaths of software that couldn't run on Rosetta 2, but the previous generation of Intel machine was still there kicking and alive, so people who didn't feel like taking the risk didn't need to.