[OS X TeX] TeX and Apple's possible transition to RISC

[Sangwine, Stephen J]

What makes Macs so appealing to many, especially for technical computing,
is that the underlying OS is UNIX. Lots of software ported to MacOS depends
on this, I guess a lot of TeX related software included.

An iOS system would not offer this, and the advantage of Macs over Linux
boxes would be lost.

I also doubt whether Apple could design and produce RISC processors with
the same performance as Intel’s established lines, especially in terms of
vectorised and floating-point performance. Maybe that doesn’t matter for
TeXers but it sure does for those who want to run technical software that
does serious number crunching and data manipulation, and many of the people
who use TeX and variants are mathematical and scientific people.

Steve Sangwine 

> Le 5 avr. 2018 à 18:54, Richard Seguin <riseguin at earthlink.net> a écrit :
> 
> There are rumors that Apple may be transitioning from Intel to its own RISC processors beginning as early as 2020. There are speculations that Apple will also attempt to merge MacOS with or into iOS, and some people are even applauding this last possibility. Would either of these pose potential problems for TeX software and the front end software that we use with TeX? I know that iOS is much more locked down than the current MacOS, and, for example, the TeXShop install seems to put something into the root drive since it always asks me for my password. I usually use BBEdit and Skim together with some “TeX integration scripts” that could conceivably be forbidden in an iOS version. It seems recently that Apple has no qualms about giving developers and users big headaches in advancing its vision.
> 
> Richard Séguin
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